Posts by simonlb

Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

Re: I never thought I'd say this but...

You're RSS feeding it wrong!

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Digital transmission?

The myth of vinyl sounding better than digital is bizarre.

That depends entirely on your budget, as any real audiophile can testify. I went to an audio demonstration back in the 90's for Rega turntables and heard both the vinyl and CD versions of Crowded House's Weather With You played back to back - the vinyl copy sounded much better. Mind you, the setup of amplifier, turntable, cartridge, speakers and speaker cable was approaching £5k.

Another demonstration I attended was comparing the improvement in sound quality with the corresponding upgrade in components and complexity of the setup - adding pre-amps, changing to bi-wired speakers, upgrading the cartridge etc. All told, when the total cost of the setup - and this is for a setup comprising essentially an amplifier and turntable, not a CD player - reached £23,500 I couldn't perceive any improvement in sound quality after that. But it did sound bloody good.

I do agree with your conclusion about homeopathics though.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

and *at least* half the parking spaces at every motorway services needs to have a charger

Unless the manufacturers sort out a basic EV range of 500 miles and a 50%-75% recharge done in less than a couple of hours they'll also have to build some pretty fucking big hotels at those services for all the people having to stay overnight every day.

If I'm being forced to change from using IC to EV in my car then what replaces it must at least be as good as what it's replacing so it if can't even get from say, London to Edinburgh, 400-odd miles which the vast majority of IC cars can do on one tank of juice in one go then I personally do not consider it fit for purpose. Hopefully these issues will be addressed before we get to these cut-off dates, but I'm not holding my breath.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

How long is it supported for? Does it Phone Home?

As per the title, how long will Samsung support these 'Smart' TV's with software and security updates? 1-year? 2-years? 5-years?

Also, how much telemetry is this 'gaming hub' sending back to Samsung and other partner companies? Do you have any option to opt-out of that?

These features add no value to me as they just add more complexity to an appliance which will render it obsolete sooner rather than later. I mean, they won't want you to be able to update the gaming hub app to the latest version in five years because they'll want you to upgrade to the latest and greatest, even it it still works fine.

For me personally, there is no compelling reason to consider buying one of these. YMMV though.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

It's a shameful waste of good building land.

SEC probes Musk for not properly disclosing Twitter stake

Re: my 10K€ bank account seems worthless now

how can i live with less then 1B$ per year?

I've lived my whole life so far with less than 1B$ per year.

As for living on less than 1B$ a year, well that is a bit trickier.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

its codebase is complex, ever changing, and monolithic

Just like the steaming pile of shit which is Windows.

Microsoft patches the patch that broke Windows authentication

then in one year the registry key stops working and we force the new functionality.

Just like they did with Windows 7 when 10 came out. Release an update to remove the option inside Windows Update to review and choose which updates to install so you then have no choice but to accept all available updates. Then release another update to force GWX on your machine which then tries to force download Win10 ready for installation, your machines performance being crippled during download so you think you have a virus or malware. But removing GWX needed registry tweaks as well as removal of the relevant update, so it looked more like malware than an official MS update. And if you managed to avoid that shitshow, for the next year or so there were 2 to 3 times the number of 'updates' to Win7 then there ever had been before, but after each round of updates something else stopped working or the functionality was slightly different. It was almost as if MS were slowly, but deliberately breaking installations of Win7 to force people to move to the abortion which is Win10.

I really do feel sorry for the sysadmins who have to put up with the regular firefight to keep their Windows based systems up and running.

Infusion of $3.5bn not enough to revive Terra's 'stablecoin'

And People Still Fall For This?

"...a savings protocol that at one point paid participants close to 20 percent interest on their investment."

Everything about that statement screams ponzi scheme to be avoided at all costs. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever stable or trustworthy about any cryptocurrency.

NASA's modified Boeing 747 SP SOFIA to be grounded for good

Re: Shame, but understandable

It is a shame, but you have to stand back and marvel at what the Boeing engineers achieved with the 747 some 50+ years ago. If you had said back in 1969 that these would still be flying in the year 2020 people would have scoffed at you.

The fact the I can stand in my back yard and watch Lufthansa, Cargolux and other carriers cargo 747's still flying is a testament to how well designed and built this aircraft was. Ok, they may be just the cargo versions, but that was what it was originally designed to do, and there is nothing which still comes close even now. The 747 was truly the Queen of the Skies.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

I've said it before and will keep on saying it: Until there is a properly designed and inherently secure specific IoT protocol which had been properly tested, is fully certified and has been adopted by the entire industry as the default standard then I'm not interested in this shit.That way, at least you should be device agnostic and it shouldn't matter if a vendor goes bust as you should still be able to use anything you've bought from them.

Raspberry Pi OS update beefs up security

If you want the 8Gb model, place your order back in December last year and expect one to land around the end of November this year, like I did. YMMV, like that delivery date almost certainly will.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

What people need to remember in situations like this is that they are not just paying you for what you do, they are paying you for using your knowledge to work out what needs to be done to fix the issue.

I'd have taken the guys money and then told him to never contact me for help again in the future for being such a dick.

OVHcloud datacenter 'lacked' automatic fire extinguishers, electrical cutoff

Re: Strasbourg, France

France? I thought it was in Belgium. Are you telling me Wikipedia is wrong???

Win 11 adds 'requirements not met' nag for unsupported hardware

Dear Microsoft

"Operating System usability and functionality requirements not met. Must try a lot harder."

Now piss off and try again.

Ford to sell unfinished Explorers as chip shortage bites

Re: Thank god for small favors

Yeah. Stop-Start, rear seat heating & air-con controls and heated seats are three things I've never once missed in over 30-years of car ownership.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Re: The honeymoon is over

It also doesn't help when the cost of even a relatively low-end GPU is half the cost of all the other components combined.

Dell opts out of Microsoft's Pluton security for Windows

Re: What a coincidence...

Microsoft is to security what flame throwers are to icecream cones.

When the slighest 'update' to a component, or the turning on or off of a feature within the OS requires you to perform a full reboot then the fundamental design of the OS is critically flawed.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: Atari ST ?

Or even ZX Spectrum +2, Amstrad CPC 464, Acorn Electron, Oric 1, Oric Atmos...

As usual with the US Patent Service, common sense prior art will almost certainly be ignored and it will be granted

January edition of Azure Sphere OS cancelled after Microsoft actually listens to customer's complaint

Overkill?

"because, frankly, Windows was (and is) a bit lardy and overkill for such purposes"

because, frankly, Windows was (and is) a bit lardy and overkill utter shit for such purposes.

FTFY

Nationwide Building Society's Faster Payments turn into Slower Payments for 2022

Re: Third time in two weeks

I was aware of the issues on the 21st December and into the 22nd, but not the other ones. Very unusual for Nationwide.

And they are a building society, not a bank, so their requirements are different.

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: millipede

What have the bloody Greeks or Romans ever done for us?

Microsoft: What's that? A patch for make-me-admin vuln? Sorry – can't hear you. Have a new jumper instead

Re: Would you rather...

I'd happily horse whip the UI designers until they start doing their fucking job properly.

Re: There was a good Windows once........

Windows 7 was the only version of Windows I ever willingly bought. Sadly though, the frequency of the updates got very tedious so that is when I also started playing around with Linux. When MS eventually started pushing updates to remove options from the update manager before putting out GWX to force feed you Win 10 that was the final straw and I ditched Windows completely.

Apple, Amazon fined to the tune of €200m for colluding over Beats headphones sales

That's Terrible

Not being able to buy overpriced Apple and Beats branded tat online.

It's a disgrace.

Apple says it will no longer punish those daring to repair their iPhone 13 screens

Re: Cf. Renault

Renaults are not known to be stolen for their fancy mediocre electronics.

FTFY

Re: make 3rd party repairs impossible

Perhaps the reason people are stealing BMW's for parts is because their reliability these days - especially on certain models - is piss-poor and genuine parts are expensive, so it's cheaper and easier to get parts from one which has been broken up for spares.

In any case, unnecessarily restricting a persons options for repairing a car or phone they have paid for and own is highly offensive and should be illegal. If I own something, it's up to me how I get it repaired or serviced, irrespective of whether it's two years old or ten years old. If the manufacturers want you to use their repair services and genuine spare parts, they should ensure their pricing is reasonable rather than downright obscene.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

They already do. Current reactors burn up at most 2% of the fuel leaving 98% as highly radoactive waste which needs reprocessing then disposal. This is the massive long term headache we have today.

Molten salt thorium reactors can be run on existing high level neucear waste and burn up over 98.5% of the fuel leaving very little high-level waste. With the existing stockpiles of waste we've created over the past 60 years it's estimated we can run the whole planet on molten salt reactors for over 25,000 years.

It's not that we don't know how, it's the lack of will to do it. Why build a nuclear plant for an operator which can use existing waste when there's more profit in locking in the operator of that plant to using fuel rods which only you as the manufacturer can supply? An easy 50-year profit cycle, and your grandkids can sort out the mess left behind.

I do hope they make a sensible choice with these reactors.

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Re: Snap!

I've found through experience that if you rename it a 'Tactical Solution' it will linger around and resist all efforts to remove it until the heat death of the universe.

Bad news, AMD fans: This week's Windows 11 update didn't fix your performance woes (they may be worse)

Re: are we getting the picture yet?

I've been looking at the picture now for a good few years and yes, Windows is a great big steaming pile of shit and not fit for purpose, which I why I no longer use it at home. YMMV.

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Windows 11

Intel did the 486DX4-100. I had an AMD 486DX40 which was really quick for the time.

The issue was getting the data bus on the motherboard to run stable at these higher clock speeds and a lot of vendors struggled with this. This is why motherboards with a lower clock speed and using a processor with a higher clock speed became popular.

I worked in a shop building PC's in the earliy 90's and we had someone come in asking for a 486DX50 machine. We built it, but ended up trying motherboards from 4 different vendors before we found one which worked reliably - not an issue in DOS6.x, but at the time critical for Windows 3.1 which would BSOD randomly. Also essential was a good VGA card from a well known vendor so you could get decent drivers.

Ahhh, the good old days.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

True, at that time they could have also been using classic IBM DeathDeskstar disks.

Gartner's Windows 11 adoption advice: Explore but don't rush

Re: Not in any hurry...

Absolutely correct. It's irrelevant what 'improvements' are made in the OS, if the front-end UI is an unusable, unintuitive mess with all commonly used functionality that has been present for the past 20 years either hidden or removed completely, then it is not fit for purpose.

I also notice MS are saying this 'upgrade' is to enable better security. Well if they'd have built it sensibly in the first place instead of pushing out the dogs dinner they did in NT and building on top of that things would probably be a lot better now.

It seriously is no surprise that more home users are moving over to the various flavours of Linux as in most cases there's no major impediment and the hardware specs required don't really matter a jot.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Yes, shortly before releasing MS-DOS 4. It went downhill rapidly after that.

'This is the new normal,' Microsoft tells US workers: Work from home until further notice

Re: Leftanistan

I'd have thought American's would jump at the chance of having something healthcare related completely free. Or is that part of another conspiracy theory?

Engineers work to open Boeing Starliner's valves as schedule pressures mount

Re: "assumed Boeing knew what it was doing."

Companies like Grumman and Rockwell have been doing this kind of work for over 50 years so it can't be that hard. Anyone would think this was rocket science...

Hard drives at Autonomy offices were destroyed the same month CEO Lynch quit, extradition trial was told

"...the significant reputational damage caused to HP"

I think you'll find that of the many complete balls ups HP has made since about the year 2000 that have helped completely ruin it's reputation, this really wasn't that significant.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

"The current regulatory system is broken"

Just like all your promises about autonomous driving cars 'next year' for the past 5 years at least, the hyperloop, electric truck convoys and other somesuch crap.

Xiaomi my heart is still beating: Reg hack takes Chinese giant's new fitness band for a spin

Re: The wrist strap ... once fell off in the night.

Dunno, but the step count was monumental!

I've been using a Mi Band 4 for just a year (only cost £25 from Amazon) and have found it great for my daily step count - It's about the only exercise I choose to do so it suits me perfectly. The Mi App on my phone has a lot of customisation so is good if you do a lot of different activities. Obviously the usage is going to be different per individual, but I normally only have to charge it every 4 weeks or so, which makes spending £100 upwards on a FitBit that needs charging every 3-4 days seem pretty excessive.

And yes, the strap broke two weeks ago but replacements are only a fiver for four off eBay!

Papa don't breach: UK data watchdog fines that other pizza place £10,000 over unsolicited marketing blitz

Re: Our intention was to reach only those potentially interested in our offers

I had the misfortune to have to eat one of their pizzas once...

It was honestly the worst pizza I've ever tasted. Absolute garbage.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: You know what

Well for a liquid molten salt reactor the design is inherently stable so a complete failure of all the cooling systems will not result in a meltdown. Also, the fuel burn - the actual amount of fuel which used - for a molten salt reactor is in the region of 98%, compared to at most 3% for every water cooled plutonium fueled reactor ever built.

Added to that the fact the molten salt reactors can use just about any existing nuclear waste with minimal processing so you have a ready made fule source that can be almost completely used up and requires minimal reprocessing when done. Current estimates are that with the existing stockpiles of nuclear waste which will be highly radioactive for thousands of years would provide fuel for molten salt reactors for in excess of 25,000 years.

I'd suggest you do some research as there is plenty of verified information out there to confirm the significant benefits of molten salt reactors over anything else currently in use.

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

And this is why companies that do this without clearly explaining exactly why these changes are being made, how they will provide tangible benefits to the end user and making it optional should have punitive damages levelled against them.

Justifiy it, but make it optional with no penalties for opting out.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Yeah, you've got to hand it to them!

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

I Wish I could Upvote The Whole Article

Dabbsy, I'm probably in a minority here, but if I could upvote the article I would, just on the strength of you having a link to Saints and Liars by Gary Numan. A truly brilliant track from an epic album.

You, Sir, have taste.

LG intranet leaks suggest internal firesale of unsold, unreleased smartphones as biz exits the mobile market

Re: I had one of the HP Touchpads

Had to chuck out my Touchpad a couple of years ago as I did a factory reset which does a 'phone-home' to the HP servers which HP had just happened to turn off a couple of years previously. Because it couldn't connect it completely bricked it.

Eufycam Wi-Fi security cameras streamed video feeds from other people's homes

Re: A spokesperson for Anker told us...

And until you have a specific IoT device protocol which is inherently secure, fully maintained and adopted as the industry standard, all these IoT devices are a complete pile of shit and not worth bothering with.

I just happened to be looking at some WiFi webcams over the weekend and they all seem to want you to download an app, register a new account with the vendor and then set up the camera via their servers. One even sent you a QR code you had to hold up to the camera to get it to register itself and connect. None that I could see had an app you could install on your phone and then connect to the camera locally over your own network and then configure it - you had to have an account and go via the vendors servers. That's a complete fail from my perspective.

Microsoft says Outlook hit by 'email visibility issues' – as in, they're blank

Re: Need for testing

"chunks of data gone" - Is that all the unnecessary HTML crap, just leaving them in plain text? Asking for a friend.

Ofcom says no price controls on full-fibre broadband until 2031, giving BT's Openreach the kick to 'build like fury'

There's no need for this

I'm sure they could scrap HS2 and allocate some £30Billion to Openreach to get the job done. Seriously, after the past 12 months who absolutely needs to get to London 30-minutes earlier just to attend a meeting when you can do it from home?

Pressure builds on Nominet as members demand to know leadership's contingency plans for when they’re fired

If only...

If only they'd acted in the best interests of the organisation, it's members and customers, instead of being a bunch of self-serving, money grubbing twats this wouldn't have happened.