Posts by Rezillo

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

Having worked in a local authority, these questionnaires from third parties are hardly ever filled in by someone at a senior level, if they are filled in at all. At best, some poor clerical grade worker will have been given it and a printout or access to the relevant finance codes and told to sort it out and if they're lucky, someone senior might actually read the results before signing and sending it out. Unless it's statutory, these things are at the bottom of the priority heap for most local government managers.

On the junior employee's screen will not be the invoice details but something like "Item quantity: 1, Item description: SD card(s), cost: X pounds" and 1 and X gets put in the boxes. Could have been 1 card or 1 pack of 20 cards or a 100 of them for all we know. Seen too much of this to be surprised and the recipients rarely query obvious errors - they just publish it anyway.

Microsoft won't back down from Windows 10 nagware 'trick'

My partner works for a small charity tied to a IT support team of 2 nerds, part of the office accommodation package that they rent. They were caught out by this yesterday when all their PCs and laptops went through the "upgrade" process, leaving them unable to do anything with them for hours. They then found that ther internet connection was unuseable and they couldn't access any of their files, which turned out to due to their bandwidth being completely overwhelmed by the automatic transfer of several years worth of local files onto Onedrive.

I know this kind of situation can be properly managed to avoid this happening in the right company environment. However, this is a charity run on a shoestring that hasn't got that kind of IT control or resources available to it and it can hardly be alone in this. They had no idea they 'agreed' to the upgrade. All their hassle could have been avoided by a less deceitful dialog box.

Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch

This happened to me with a Z97-A mobo that had been happily working in UEFI mode with Windows 7 for a year. The answer given by Asus seems a bit extreme - to keep UEFI mode but disable secure boot, the Delete PK option deletes the Secure Boot keys - at least, I think that's what I did. The Asus menus didn't have a simple enable or disable secure boot option and it took a bit of digging in key management before I found an option that warned me secure boot would be disabled if I proceeded.

I don't remember ever setting up a secure boot option when I built the PC but as it's not supported in Windows 7 and it booted, I assumed all was ok!

So where has the legal 'right' to 10Mbps broadband gone?

I can assure you that a chunk of that five per cent is, round here, part of a large geographic area, encompassing groups of many parishes who struggle to get 0.5Mbps. This is Suffolk, hardly the back of beyond.

I don't really believe that figure anyway and can't help feeling that it's based on numbers supplied by enabled exchanges. Ours is enabled but the cabinets that serve the bigger villages it supplies are not and have been "under review" for the last two years. The only benefactors are a cluster of houses by the exchange, which is in the middle of nowhere.

No escape: Microsoft injects 'Get Windows 10' nagware into biz PCs

"This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Operating System Council.

As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the replacement of all operating systems within your star system, and regrettably your system configurations are scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than one of your Earth minutes, subject to connection bandwidth for GWX download. Thank you."

(sound of distant sysadmin screams)

"There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the charts and orders have been on display in our EULA in Alpha Centauri for years so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all."

El Reg picked a pack of ace pic-titlers

Elspeth celebrated the dismissal of Seb Blatter from the El Reg team after she found that her joint highest upvoted entry to the last caption competition didn't even make the top six.

No £160m for you: BT to receive termination notice from Cornwall before Christmas

Of course, when Cornwall Council signed up in 2013, there were absolutely no signs of such arrangements becoming a major problem. Er......

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/dec/16/suffolk-council-bt-overspend

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/suffolk_end_of_line_for_controversial_csd_at_county_council_1_1650404

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

I'l nudge this one up - the closing date was yonks ago so when will we know who has won, please?

Deep in the bowels of the colonoscope camera design department, it became clear that something had gone seriously wrong with the imperial to metric conversion process.