Posts by Julian 8

Chinese space company accidentally launches rocket in test gone wrong

Are Boeing involved ?

Maybe the odd bolt or two was missing from the work bench

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: Happily switch to Linux, but.....

Because I need to backup pictures, and the agro of getting pictures off an iPhone on windows is not worth it, and OneDrive, for all its faults does just work.

Shit, one of the people who uses the family license struggles to get into their windows laptop (glad the Synology does also download)

All our laptops sync and download all files which is also a useful when laptops are not on a network

Happily switch to Linux, but.....

I have a person at home who, the possible cross training would be a nightmare

OneDrive for all its hates works for me with all our laptops, different phone os's and a remote nas (not sure which owncloud or fork works well on the phones and a Synology nas)

I do use sky sports quite a bit in the evening ( I guess it work in a VM)

Owncloud/nextcloud is the most important thing. OneDrive is seamless at backing up the all important selfies^h^h pictures

Chinese electric car brands zapped by price surge as EU cranks tariffs

Buses

I wonder if that applies to buses. All the electric buses where I am are all BYD

London taxi's are Geely.

Interesting that some manufacturers have spoken out about it as not being a good idea.

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

All my machines at home are in use, so would be no good here

Re: Time for a class action lawsuit

Dunno, I expect to have to download a bios update from whatever site it tool, not windows update

Drivers are one thing, bios is another

So do they blame Microsoft ?

If it comes down via windows update, it's not as if the user has hunted down a bios update and applied

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

Re: It's going to be approved

What they say about fools and money

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

Most useful thing for AI

Design an AI robot that can be installed at a rubbish tip/depot.

All the rubbish onto a conveyor belt and it moves each item into the relevant pot and only items that cannot be recycled go to landfil.

Good use, make help the save the planet, but clearly no one is interested in that side of it

PayPal is planning an ad network built off your purchase history

Re: UKDK

Surely that is ebay who do that. They are aware of what was bought and sold so can let HMRC know that

All Paypal NEED to know is that I (customer) and paying the supplier x amount and for a particular reference code - beit order, ebay transaction code. and return a success/fail and transaction code

There is no reason why Paypal should know any more than that.

Oh Sonos! App update borks users' favorite features and worse

Logitech finally turned off the mysqueezebox a little while ago, however, open and as you now note, renamed and still working perfectly well (for me on an internal only network)

Global EV sales continue to increase, but Plug-in Hybrid momentum is growing

Re: no one needs a car to live

And where I used to live in Kent, there was a bus that stopped at the hamlet. Left at 11:30 and back by 14:30. - Mon - sat

no use if you needed to get to work or anything else. And I know they were looking to stop that and being just a couple of days a week.

No Uber or such like there either

Depends on your driving.

I have achieved your MPG when i travelled to my employers office, and the lower mileage when around town after I left them. Indeed, if going into London itself, even worse.

For long motorway journeys, hard pressed to beat diesel, for in town, BEV are a great idea. in between, maybe a longer range BEV, I can see why people choose PHEV because it is a kind of mix of 2 worlds - though not sure if it is really better than either or just straight petrol.

I get a car for what is best suited at the time for my needs, or as my current choice is, does the company offer a salary sacrifice scheme ?

Depends on the flats

Where I used to live, 42 flat, 5 spaces allocated for the block and then it was the road.

It was bad enough when I lived there and whenever I go back, just trying to park is bad enough, let alone near any kind of charging (blocks build in 60's, limited car ownership. Even when I did get my car in the mid/late 80's, I could always park down the road with no issues what so ever. When I left that area in the late 90's, it was becoming a struggle to park then)

Latest figures show AMD chipping away at Intel's CPU dominance

Re: Intel vs AMD

For my own use I tend to buy 2nd hand Lenovo's (sucker for the trackpoint).

My last 2 were similar spec and price - 32GB ram, and both upgraded to the same Crucial SSD. The difference is that one is an i7 (10610) and the other is a Ryzen (4650).

The Ryzen is now my main workhorse as it feels faster, probably runs cooler and does last longer on the battery.

Valve vexation: Boeing's Starliner grounded again

That is sorted by the spontaneous unexpected crew evacuation

around 35,000 feet as soon as the 1 poor m1 bolt gives way

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

Re: Can see how this will go

Probably the same twat who thinks the "callouts" in Office which you cannot disable are a good thing

(yes, I have a list of a number to add to the registry, but they keep adding new ones)

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Used to have that with keyboards - a lot. The caller was always surprised with the question "did it have sugar in it ?" before telling them to go and rinse it while we got a spare out.

most spares had been through the rinse and dry many times.

Wyse terminals were also quite prone as they were small so often buried under crap on the desks and often in the line of fire from liquids. Not quite so well built as keyboards

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: Upgrade? Not me…

bypass those

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

dunno

"Employers who don't want an office filled with miserable drudges should involve everyone affected by new technologies in the implementation process, and ensure they have access to information needed to help them understand the role such technology will play in their work"

Employer: Here is a watch for you to wear

Employee: I stopped wearing a watch during Covid, why would I want a watch ?

Employer: some babble about health or using it instead of simply getting the phone out of your pocket: (It is to track you)

Employee: So what you really mean is that you don't trust me. Right I'm off.

Employer: Can you install Office on your phone so we can contact you 24x7

Employee: Nope

Employer: Here is a phone so we can contact you 24x7

Employee: Here is my desk drawer where this phone will live until you want it back

Employer: what if we need to contact you outside of the office or office hours

Employee: you can't and you won't

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Listen to Microshit

and they will all have us using OSaaS, and then there is no need to have anything decent at the local level

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: Rebranded Mail & Calendar

Is tnat still allowed in the EU if I decide not to have Edge on windows, surely I do not have Edge Webview either

Home Office’s shiny immigration system glitches causing delays

Now we know how Rishi and Dummerly could say the immigration figures were dropping

They are literally dropping out of the system, not the person, just their data

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

Better tell Microshit

"Falling back to the CPU is grotesquely inefficient from a performance and energy efficiency point of view," he told The Register.

And there they are, pushing clippy2 to all machines.

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

Re: Resilio Sync

I like that it is torrent based, so where I have some files scatted across multiple machines, they all pull from each other.

I dont like that it is torrent based as if I go to a client, I can often get a visit from IT asking why I am torrenting on their network

Not checked for a while, but there was not a client for IOS or Android and is why I use OneDrive for backing those devices up (mainly pictures)

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Would love to, but...

I have 2 issues which will keep me tied for now.

First, we have a multi user subscription of M365 and the 1TB of OneDrive, that we all use to auto backup phones (mainly images) and then download to our laptops to have a local copy (other copies take place too). One of said users LIKES going onto their laptop and looking at the images locally as they are constantly clearing space on their phone and well, photo looking is good fun and on a decent size screen is better than the phone..

So no OneDrive is a bit of a pain - and it just needs to work - I have seen options for rSync and other options, but the potential to go wrong is not good - IMHO

2nd, the above user is remote, and even now requires quite a bit of hand holding. Some of that comes from the SWMBO, so needs familiarty with the OS, and then I often get involved. SWMBO is not a real techy and it is often the blind leading the blind when I hear the "support conversation", so that is not an area I want to get into - let alone try to do remote support with an OS that I am not 100% familiar with.

W11 is making me WANT to move over (probably to Mint), but OneDrive is the biggest hurdle

I also recall I was looking at WINE, but seems there are many potential packages and a couple of sites warned about not getting the wrong one as undoing what may have been installed can be painful and sometimes quicker to reinstall.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Re: Who Is Listening In To Cars Phoning Home???......

I wanted a new 4K TV, nothing smart or anything else. Cannot find one and soon expect to see a message or two on the screen of the one I did get as I have not connected it to the wifi for it to phone home

Re: Came to say the same thing

Want a cheap EV in the UK - ie,not pay a 50% premium on a Ford/Vauxhall/Renault/etc that removes the ICU with EV. then the Chinese brands looks really attractive.

Seeing more of their cars in London all the time

UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

HMRC say that CEST is fit for purpose

Don't think anyone else does, even other government agencies who have fallen foul of that pile of shite

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

Amazing what you can find in NHS data for £1

Perhaps they are seeing there is no Aryan race data in the UK NHS data = less facism

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

The thrust of the filing is that Google invested a lot to make its search service excellent,

Now that is funny, but also a damn lie.

Better than Bing etal, but still crap if you want to filter out words, etc, or tell it to ignore specific sites as they seem to appear at the top of the list for no good reason at all (reddit, quora)

Legal campaigners challenge UK.gov decision to redact NHS-Palantir contract

I like the idea of my data being shared between trusts, sheesh, some data cannot easily go between local hospitals / doctors, but I do not want it to go to those fscking parasites

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

And I know people who wonder why on my own laptops I have PIN enabled on bitlocker - I just do not trust things that unlock automatically, just like I cannot fathom how MS think me having a silly little PIN is safer on mine, or a company laptop than me using a passphrase.

Hey ho

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Re: Again?

Go into settings, look for Boost and ensure all those options are off.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

SE Trains

when the were replacing the old slam door trains on Connex, they were a test bed for a lot of the more modern trains you see now. I used to sit at the front due to where the exit was for my station, and they used old Toshiba Satellte laptops for their serial port in them days (about 15/16 yrs ago) which was a surprise then as the laptops I had used for a number of years were serial port lacking. I did joke about trying to sell them my old stock of Satellite pro's. (480/490 CDT IIRC)

Often the techie was "rebooting" the train and doing some code work in those days

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Kerb

Not surprised since there was that clip / image of one struggling with a kerb

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

When it was good, it was very good, but that down to the developers and understanding of the system.

Used to for numerous good things at various points, but at one company I worked at, we had Notes installed for a text index search routine, and the company that wrote this was terrible, cost a bomb and was, I'm afraid, the solution that started to kill Notes for that company. The same routine was rewritten in a quick 'n' dirty vb 4 front end and was so much more efficient.

Though from an ex global admin, I do find Notes was dead easy for user admin, replication, recovery of files and so on, especially when trying to restore someones mailbox vs Exchange.

My final view of Notes was when I was tuped over to IBM. I thought, lets see what they have done with the mail template. We got it and it was OOB, not customisation at all. I soon passed around the "company" standard template so we could get that back. And IBM's own "techie" team were dire. A few people had problems post migration and we knew the errors and how to fix. A good few weeks spent with users not working in Notes, IBM saying "no it is not that, you do not know what you are talking about", to only then finally go "OK, so it was <whatever>"

Perfect timing... US Navy throws Boeing $103M to update its sub recon jets

just seeing Ryan Air is enough for me

don't need to see the planes at all

Apple claims top spot in global smartphone market for first time

I like my old Samsung phone, but when I had to upgrade I went to Sony - why, it has a MicroSD card.

Phones are so similar there is hardly any difference, but MicroSD is a seller for me

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Shrink - yeah, right

I have a number of SSD's that I wanted to sort the over provisioning on, so to do that you need to allow said app do a strink (or manually). A new fresh install and for whatever reason, Windoze had put a file or two at the end of said partition. Shrink did not work as there was that file. Optimise does nothing as it is an SSD.

I at least had an old defrag that would move files on an SSD and was able to fix

(moral of the story for me, always create a far smaller windoze partition that you need and then extend once done)

Arm cooking up powerful Cortex-X CPU to beat iPhone performance, says industry watcher

Used to see this on the old gaming consoles. Early games were great to play, but when the model was going to be replaced with the 2/x/one/3, etc, the quality of the games being developed on the older console were so far superiors as the developers had learnt the secrets and tweaks. Took them ages, but they get ther. Apple has that straight away.

As for Windoze. I guess the devs write on the biggest/fastest they can get and then TEST (if they do any) on the same kit.

Years ago at one company we developed on the fastest kit we had, but our test rigs were the slowest out of date piles of crap we had. We got the functionality going and then set about optimising, rewriting - I don't see that happening these days

Re: M

problem for tradtional desktops, but laptops in recent years are non upgradable so depending on your usage, it may be moot

Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Re: Enshittification continues

I have prime for fast delivery, occasionaly prime prices and maybe the prime day or two.

Only thing I have watched via prime video is the football, and got to say, on the laptop is is great as I can have 4/5 games streaming and quickly flick between them. However, they are going to have less football from next season.

The streaming services need to rethink their strategy as there are so many that paying for them all for the odd series/film here and there is too expensive, even more with increases in prices or you'll get adverts otherwise..

I know a few of my sons friends who are now either streaming from dogey sites / IPTV, on usenet (which is fun to watch) or trying to find decent torrent sites.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: A gross understatement?

its a 2 month old plane, so I doubt if there has been an inspection

Maybe they should do what we used to do with cars in the old days. have a run in period of a small amount of miles and go back for a complete re torque

Re: A gross understatement?

There is only 1 shareholder of the Post Office

Wireless priesthood begins blessing Wi-Fi 7 hardware

I'd prefer GTAW - get through any wall

Speed is fine, but if you cannot get it through to where you need it, it is a pain.

the MiL has reinforced concrete in her flat and a signal kind of gets through to one of the rooms, but more luck than anything else - wish it was stronger

in my house, for whatever reason, a couple of rooms suffer with poor signal and the garden is nearly non existent. Only looking at standard walls and flooring - nothing like reinforced concrete or walls made of stone with high metal content (as one of previous houses had)* combination of a Deco and Ethernet over mains help, but MORE kit that needs to be maintained

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

One of my Logi ones has a "power" button that I frequently press. I now have paper wedged under them all to stop them from being pressed

hands off the Ctrl key

Leave the keyboards alone you retards.

If you insist on doing it, do it as an FN function above another key, so I can happily ignore it knowing I will never press the key combo

I wonder how long it will before the likes of Logi come out with a range with the copilot key realise it is not selling as everyone buys the no copilot version and drops it.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

the MiL, their car park for 50 flats, has parking for around 20 cars, no lights and no way to get charging down to it.

The flats where I lived, 42 flats in each block (8 blocks and numerous masionettes), parking was fine when I was a kid (70's), but a joke when I left (early 90's). There are some lights, not enough.

I also see it now the local supermarkets and even hospital parking. There are a few spaces for EV cars. Often see an EV car parked - not plugged in, just parked