Posts by Julian 8

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

Re: Defragging isn't a big deal anymore

I still "tape" the programmes on the TV

Re: Defragging isn't a big deal anymore

have had to defrag a disk recently as I wanted to add over provisioning and even though the disk had plenty of space, windows had decided to write at the end of the partiton so the inevetiable shrink command would not run.

Thank fully I had an old version of o&o defrag and license I could use.

Other than that, let trim and windows optimise do its job

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: How to teach people the wrong thing

On our kit here, we are all pleb users. There is an admin account and I will install software as needed.

Going back a few years, the little shite here found a vpn that would install and run via his %appdata% account.

I must check, where does Opera's inbuilt VPN have its endpoints ?

Re: bloody clueless, and think of Tom Cruise / Michael J Fox

Indeed for those that do not have other options (Driving license, passport), but you can guarantee that some of those will look at this type of photo ID and determine if it only means they can vote in an election, then they will not bother - which is the point I was making.

After all, we are not like Australia where you can get fined, and most the elections the turn out is not great

bloody clueless, and think of Tom Cruise / Michael J Fox

Open Banking - if you knew the tech that a lot of banks have, you would not go down this route. I am staggered that there are not more bank breaches. Any look at how many outages there are these days.

MNO - nope, phones I know fhat under 18s have do not have this as parents have bought and do not bother with it

Photo ID - a lot do not have this yet as seen by the drive to get photo ID for up coming elections, and some won't care about that and not bother at all

Credit Cards - I know a number of people who have never had, or have for one reason or another, got rid of credit cards Also not hard for a kid to get a CC and get the number quickly

Digital Wallets - seeing how often crypto ones are cracked - no thanks

Face ID - sure there is a disability issue here with some illnesses, and how would Tom Cruise or Michael J Fox use this ?

Intel scores a reprieve in $2.18B VLSI patent case after court orders retrial

dunno about intel being able to outspend aother litigant in the future

Rackspace runs short of Cloud Files storage in LON region

Do a google

Should be able to get tonnes of disk space back

Honda cooks up an electric motorbike menu, with sides of connectivity

NC range

Kind of started this modular era with the NC range - same chassis, 3 bikes (well, 2 bikes and 1 large scooter), and basically half a Honda jazz engine. - just like cars do with a chassis and across all their brands / ranges.

Like the concept of getting the bits you want to build your bike, but connectivity. The last thing I really want on a bike. I rarely use a tomtom/garmin unless I am not sure where I am going. The headset in my helmet is only on when the sat nav is on - no calls, no radio, no music.

I am already exposed, so want all my senses operating as well as they can be to hear the vehicle near me doing something wrong - or to hear a honda triple engine

Oh, connectivity back to Honda so not even the remotely useful kind - err why, go and shove it up your exhaust - which my first electric bike won't have, so they;ll have plenty to choose from

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

MCSE isn't hardware though

But, yes, after a while I treated MCSE as meaningless as so many interviewees were MCSE but knew nothing

Zuckerberg accused of OK'ing Insta plastic surgery filters despite fears of harm to kids

What do you expect from a robot

afterall, look at his expressions - pure plastic.

Of course he cannot see the issue

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

Re: Xitter monthly users reach new high in 2023 says Elon.

bet they are all bots

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Government / NHS ditch Plantair

over usages of PII data

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

As all my data is held locally, it is a full copy of the data and the disk is protected.

My understanding (and I now need to check), is that if you were to do a copy of some sort, your copy is the downloaded data from the cloud storage and not a link - however, I maybe wrong and happy for someone to confirm

Re: Take responsibility

My "server" also has BackBlaze running on most drives as another addition too.

Re: Take responsibility

I have found that Windows and Android are pretty reliable, but the default is set to leave the data on the cloud (grrr).

The people here who have iphones often find that they need to go into oneDrive to wake it up and at one point I had to archive off a lot of older pictures from the camera roll folder as it just sulked.

I have tried everything that I can find for fix the need to wake oneDrive up.

Regularly log into the laptops here as all users to keep them in sync, the NAS just does its thing and is a great quick way to see if someone needs to wake oneDrive up by checking its history

Re: Rather the other way round

if you are not a techy, how many people are doing any kind of backup ?

The cloud isn't perfect - as this shows, but for most it is far superior than what they had before - aka nothing

Re: Fireproof

external hdd's are cheap, or if like me, you have a few spare after ssd upgrades just get some cheap caddies.

If you have a locker at work, that is great, use that. I used to store a couple of disks in the glove box of the car.

NAS down at my sisters is my main backup

Re: Take responsibility

Don't use drive, but do use Onedrive (cos the 6 user deal is brilliant value for money)

Always store locally, and preferably on multiple computers

A NAS sitting at a remote site download to that (Synology has an app for this)

Use RSync to copy that data back to a server sitting at home.

The NAS and my local server all have versions - I don't trust cloud data storage, but I do like its idea and simplicity when it works

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

runs on old kit

So my x230 and x240's can run win10 happily, and win11, but if there is a cut down version that removes all the bloat that is not needed, could give those little things a nice boost.

Faffing with Mint on one at the moment and trying to work out if it is practical with the other half. Most things are OK, but still not sure and do I want the headache of not using Windows ?

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

No the same, but I uate that a lot of modern keyboards have a power button added. I have a couple where extra functions (That I never use) are just above the function keys, and are where are many years of muscle memory I grab when moving said keyboard around.

Even the keyboards software has no way to stop them from doing things, so a few bits of paper are deployed to stop them being pressed

Palantir bags £330M NHS data bonanza despite privacy fears

Re: About this no data sharing without explicit permission thing

Isn't it an American motto "Its easier to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission"

Re: Follow the money

my local ones use "dotpost" for all communications now. Not even a version for phones / tablets - oh, no logon to a crap website

Re: Follow the money

more surprised there is no mention of infosys

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

Re: UK workarounds ?

I do, and msedgeredirect.

I have no reason or want for the bloatware (xbox, cortana, edge, and then the silly apps it thinks I may want), so just do not want them even installed, but the fact they cannot be removed really pisses me off

What is the brexit bonus ?

I don't see one as we need to be in the EU to remove the bloatware and being outside the EU means we can get some crap AI foisted upon us.

*Miust admit, I am surprised MS have not been sued to using CoPilot. I hear that name and think of a routing application I used to use"

Re: Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA

Sweden here I come

Re: UK workarounds ?

That does not work. Been trying for years to remove most of their crap.

And the bits it may work on, are only for that user - why not off the whole OS

Royal Mail’s recovery from ransomware attack will cost business at least $12M

should have stuck to pen and paper

No electronic ransomware then. Maybe the odd train robbery, but hey ho

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

Teams

Wish they would fix teams, remove the kddie gimmicks and make it a usable product before attempting to bloat it with even more rubbish

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Re: Other folks' DIY

Not gas, but water. I was converting a room from a small bathroom into a cupboard and was removing all the old pipe work and going to cap it off. I got my circular saw and adjusted so it was just about able to cut through the floor boards and nothing more. Cut along and then heard pssssssss and got wet. Ran and shut off the water that was now going everywhere. After I got the boards out, I looked at the pipe. It was notched into a joist OK, but they had not put a metal blanking plate over the top (as regulations said they should). so my saw blade had just nicked the copper pipe with the smallest of nicks, producing a really fine spray. A bugger to fix as it was so close to a joist that using a yorkshire joint was fun (no room for compression). I left that floorboard open for a day with an extinguisher next to it

Never trust anything

We moved nearly 2 years ago, and we were not anticipating have a re-wire of the house, but when the electricians came to do a "simple 2 bathrooms and kitchen of downlighters", it soon became apparant that the old owners bodged it badly.

When I got to the outbuilding, that is a mess wiring wise - what I thought was a main is a spur, how they have run the lights is odd, but from seeing how a light socket was partly embedded into a wall, I guess at one stage it was a single room and then split.

I started to call the old owner "mr mastic" as if there was a job (so reattaching blown plaster to the walls), then mastic was used

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

arnie

I'll be pack

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

Re: Won't work.

you can still get Avocado's ?

our local supermakrets seem be getting low on stap[le fruits and some more non standard British veg

Re: Won't work.

Sign of how far we have fallen.

Bing Chat so hungry for GPUs, Microsoft will rent them from Oracle

Forget speed of searching, improve accuracy first

I think they need to improve the accuracy of their searching before speed. I'd rather good search results in 2/3 seconds, than the current crap in 1 second

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Professional incompetence. Or was that incompetents?

look at our policians.,

Or, even better, the Covid enquiry where it was pointed out that a lot of those who were dealing with covid had degrees in History - and they were involved in making decisions.

Batterygate bound for Blighty as UK court approves billion-dollar Apple compensation case

Re: make it hurt

Nope, have some Apple kit and in a previous life, supported a lot of users on their kit.

My comments mean any company that flouts the law or does things like this, afterall, in this case some people will think their phone slowing down means they need to get a new one, nope, not really, it is just your supplier screwing you,.

Fines should be a deterrant and to make it one, you need to size things accordingly.

make it hurt

Why do these states, countries impose such small fines. If you are going to fine a couple like that, make it hurt as otherwise they will just write those values off as an expense

Qualcomm in recovery position following annus horribilis

Saturated market, or do we really want it ?

So the mobile market is saturated and unless there is something really impressive to come along, upgrades are only incremental now and not worth the issue. Same as desktops / laptops. A few years ago you always wanted the latest and greatest CPU and RAM with options as there was a real benefit. These days not so. If you had a SATA spinner, an SSD one was worth it, but you could do it. Now, the processors are mainly about power saving and the step from SATA to Nvme is one of the faster upgrades you will get.

Wifi-7. I'd settle for something that is slow, but can go through more obstructions. Who cares if Wifi-7 may offer 1GB (or whatever it can claim to do). I don't use 1GB wired. I'd settle for a Wifi that can get from my office and around my whole house with speeds of 50-100Mbps and not needing me to implement a mesh or powerline to achieve this.

I can see them making inroads into the CPU market and server class, now that can get interesting

IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead

Re: They still do 401(k) matching? How quaint.

and stripped it of all money before that - and gave it to his nodom wife

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Meta Pixel

Does this mean that They have to remove the meta pixel from all sites as I do not consent to facebook ?

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Who cares with a lot of todays usage ?

At home I have a couple of T450's and X240's in different rooms as "the room pc". Only now am I looking to "upgrade" two of those to T14's Gen1 and demote the X240's due to their small screen and 8GB RAM. One T14s an i7 and the other a Ryzen. Why ? because I screwed the keyboard on a T450 and none of the replacements I have managed to find have got a backlight that works (The old one does still light up, but liquids did not go down well, so it is the replacement keyboards that have a problem)

The T450 and x240's are about 8 years old, the T14s are at least 3

I look at the typical usage we have at home outside of my work, and a tablet with maybe a keyboard attached would be sufficient. It is mainly surfing, the odd bit of streaming and that is it. I need a laptop for work, so I prefer to have another available incase of loss or damage.

I can invisiage that the typical non work usage is the same for a lot of households, so if I was Intel (and AMD), I would be afraid.

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

I have visions of people having their robo vac on the phone and running their own robo-wars with additions

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

What he means is.

Your standard 35 hrs of crap work for customer A and we change X

You do an additional 35 hrs of crap work for Customer B and we charge X

We change X x 2 for crap work with 1 x crap resource

Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough

Re: Sort of the same here

Almost the same here, but with Virgin. Though, the bundles are only a few pennies more than just the broadband on its own after my misses tore them one on the last renewal.

Netflix is a freebie for that. Other films / series available by other options ;), oh, and providers

Re: Overpriced shite? Must be Apple

Thinks back to hi-fi wars where different cables, or gold scart vs normal scart. Got even worse when people started to switch to HDMI (mate, it gets there or it does not)

I find that an old Android phone with all its risks works with the banks quite happily.

you try to put a patched later ROM on and they all fail - barclaycard is the worst

Ask them why an old android image, unpatched is fine, but a newer patched rom - albeit rooted is not.

One think I will give Apple is the upgrades. You change phone, it all comes across. Doing that with Android is no fun, even if the phone is from the same supplier

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

Re: Software RAID

Did that in some old MicroServers from HP. Far cheaper to buy those than a NAS, put a boot drive in place of the CD and then configured a software RAID

Took and absolute age to rebuild if a disk failed.

At least someone hacked the bios to support hot swap

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

I can easily imagine that lots of these are not using their own cards, but cloned ones, so once signed up and verified, if the card is cancelled and then account follow, the spam/sms has already gone and they do not care

No deterrent at all really

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

I once said to a bank

You are happy for me to use Android x which is 4/5 years out of date and a major risk, but you detect it is not rooted and is therefore fine, but if I upgrade to a later far more secure Cyanogenmod, you will instantly stop the app from running as you think it is a risk.

Please let me get this in writing so when I lose money I can show it is your negligence.