Posts by Wayland

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: It's not the language, it's just the way it's "talking"

RUST is WOKE.

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Re: A great idea

Strong in this one, the sarcasm.

Re: "run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker."

Brave is so good I never realised YouTube played ads until I used FireFox.

Obviously you need more than one browser because Brave does not work for everything.

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

Re: VAT was removed from eBooks

I agree, making repairs more profitable with a small saving to the consumer will grow this business sector and reduce e-waste. A larger repair sector will increase competition improving both the repairs and the savings to the consumer.

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

Re: Paying the criminals is idiotic and high risk

Paid a million dollars for a bunch of messed up routers? Just wipe the system and set it up again! HAM people would enjoy having to do that.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

I remember in the '90's I was writing library code in C and they wanted us to write documentation for each function as we went.

The project leader had set up a word perfect template in the text version of the WP. Simply by using the correct paragraph tags perfectly structured manual pages could be printed on the laser printer. I've never worked on such a well set up WP system before or since.

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

Submerge it in seawater.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: BSOD

Radio 4 are one of the causes of dementia. Try to ween yourself off their brain rot.

Re: CrowdStrike

Switch on the reel to reel tape loop machine that tells you to switch it off and on again.

Re: I don't mind people blaming Windows..

No, Windows cannot be expected to cope with a badly written security patch. For CrowdStrike to do it's job it has to be deep into the sensitive part of Windows.

The problem is still Windows however because such services as CrowdStrike should not be required if Windows was safe and reliable.

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

To be fair, Microsoft achieved this with Windows 7.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

I've always had ESP in cars. If you don't then you could slam your mini into a tractor hauling grain on a C road during harvest season.

Re: Get a horse

Now that ABS and ESP are mature technologies they work unobtrusively. However in my Supra MKIII the ABS was worse than useless so I did pull out the fuse. The car's limited slip diff made ESP unnecessary.

Cars already have a system to prevent accidental speeding, cruise control. Drive up to the speed limit then switch it on and the car stays at that speed until you touch the brakes or accelerator.

If cruise control were to have a button that sets speed to the speed limit then that maybe a welcome enhancement.

A nagging bleeping system that wrestles with your right foot for control is not how I want my machine to function. If I wanted to have a battle of wills with my ride I'd get a horse.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

They had to abandon the Apple car because they could not afford to build the Apple roads to run it on.

Apple make personal appliances. If you want a general purpose computer there are plenty to chose from. No one wants to have a general purpose operating system on their fridge or washing machine. iPhones are sophisticated Etch-a-Sketch devices designed to do a set of simple tasks.

Re: Cunning move?

Green bubbles, yeah Apple's attempt to 'other' people who are not one of the Apple Family in the messaging.

Re: How does Apple determine location ?

It used to be called Wombling after the Orinoco WiFi card. You gather WiFi MAC addresses whilst running GPS. It was once used as a poor man's GPS. Obviously Access Points go missing or get moved but you triangulate between the ones you can see. You young'uns don't remember the dayz....

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

Re: Microsoft

Microsoft backups have always been terrible. I'd never use a backup by Microsoft.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

The Government liked Fujitsu but now prefers Microsoft

You need your IT run by a large company who you can blame when it goes wrong. You need to be fairly sure it will go wrong or else you won't have anyone to blame.

Re: Lessons Learnt

We never used to use MS for email but they have proved themselves to be the very best.

Re: Uhhh, wha'?

Microsoft has a pretty good Out Of Office feature in their email plus people know that Microsoft invented the Internet and are the only company who can provide email.

Re: do they?

I thought MS DOS 3.20 was pretty good.

Re: "Microsoft makes a good operating system"

Why delay rollout of features for security when you can fix it later with an update. 98% of people love updates so the bigger and more frequent the updates the happier people are.

No one ever got fired...

...because they put the company's email on Microsoft and it was hacked.

It's all part and parcel of living in the Internet. At least you're not alone when the hackers are reading your emails, other people made the same mistake.

Nearly a million non-profit donors' details left exposed in unsecured database

Re: US based,,, Or only operating in the US?

The Big Issue sellers take card payments.

FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'

Re: Warrant?

In the UK they will take your computers and not give them back for months. If you won't unlock them they will simply assume you're a terrorist and prosecute you on that basis.

Is it left or right wing?

If they are spying on Far Right Extremists and White Supremacists then that's fine. If they are spying on LGBT Woke Progressives then it's a bad thing and should be stopped.

Microsoft, Meta detail plans to fight election disinformation in 2024

Re: Recommendation algorithms and fake accounts

It's like when no one would turn up to Biden Rallies but Trump Rallies were jam packed. You'd not have known Trump was winning from electronic information.

Re: Definition of Disinformation

Election disinformation?

If Trump wins that means voters were swayed by disinformation.

If Biden wins that means all the talk of election fraud is disinformation.

Simple!

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

The EU muppets are not elected.

To be fair, we talking about banning a Far Right party so that does not count as a ban, just common sense really.

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: The career limiting spreadsheet...

True but then that's the nature of Excel. A database can handle missing or extra columns as long as they are correctly named. If you send out a load of blank Excel files asking people to put their data in them, you'll get them back modified and incompatible with your master spreadsheet.

Re: Sure, you could add AI...

AI is a stupid solution to this problem. I expect that what will happen but it's stupid. The AI may do a better job but no one will really know what it just did.

Re: Lotus

Lotus Notes was the tool that people now use Excel for. If you want to quickly gather and organise data then create a Lotus Notes DB and email the link to your people. They can fill in the form you created and the data is all nicely arranged in your central database. Do that with Excel and you will have big problems.

Excel as a user tool

Most complex business processes done in Excel would be better done in MS Access. However my clients have mostly not been computer literate enough to do these in a database. Excel is quite a good tool for business people to prototype what they want before I come along and turn it into a database.

MS Access is pretty easy to use but there are plenty of hurdles that the Excel user finds too challenging. If MS did some really good development work on the Access user interface Excel users could be creating competent business specific database applications.

I suspect there is a conspiracy against such a thing. Years ago Lotus had Lotus Notes which was a far better database generator that allowed the boss's personal assistant to knock up a database application in the morning and have data coming back by the afternoon from those emailed the link. That was 25 years ago but they killed Notes and replaced it with MS Office.

The contemporary equivalent of that is the secretary creates a spreadsheet template and emails it to people asking them to send it back filled in. She will then use copy and paste to merge these individual sheets into her main one. A time consuming and error prone task when the users can add and delete columns to their liking.

Re: Application abuse

CSV is the simplest and most useful data format for tables. There are text formats like JSON and SQL but these are a little too complex for most people. However if these formats were native to Excel and other apps like CSV is then they'd get used.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: Confused

"it's always good to see legacy tech being retired in favor of something with a bright future ahead of it." - according to the article, so your clients will be overjoyed.

Re: Does that mean...

I remember a client had a year old printer on his Apple then he updated the OS and the printer never worked again. Simply unsupported.

Re: Printer Features

It seems as if they're saying there can be no innovation in the printer market from this point on.

In the graphics card market there are after market drivers to support legacy cards.

Re: Printer Features

You're spot on. There are loads of things a robotic machine should be able to do when connected to your computer. Why is it limited to printing on one side of A4 paper? Why can't it print a brochure or paperback book? Load it up with blank business cards and have it print them, or postcards or a birthday card.

All of these examples are a total pain to do on a printer but at least if they wrote their own drivers there was a chance printers would one day do these tasks easily.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Re: Only where technically feasible

If the government can find a way of accessing the message before encryption or of having a master key then they will bring that into law. They could require that all messages get CC'd to their spy server.

Re: Not sure I understand this.

You mean they could mandate breakable encryption? There was once a drive to have all encryption keys held by the government.

If it does become crackable then they will have to keep it a secret or it will simply be secured again.

Logical fallacy of cracking encryption

Unless there is a mathematical breakthrough (quantum?) then is not possible to crack current encryption. Were it to become possible then that same mathematical breakthrough would again produce uncrackable encryption.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: What killed USENET was ...

Outlook Express took quite an arbitrary decision. They could easily have set it so usenet was in text format by default.

Re: IRC

I left when the spam became greater than the content. Others left too so there really was no reason to stay. With it being a bit technical for normies it could be good again. The Internet on the whole was good because normies had not figured it out. No point in spamming smart people.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

Cats are YouTube. Every video no matter what it's about must have a cat in it or it gets shadow banned.

Re: Good encryption by default

Selective enforcement. They don't just lock people up because they broke a law. They lock people up because they want to and they look for a broken law in order to do so. As long as they like you then you're free to break laws. It's called Abuse of Process and it's an essential and integral feature of our Justice System so don't knock it (or they might lock you up).

Re: Not holding my breath

Look at your down votes! Clearly the lefties are conflicted between what was a leftist idea of freedom with the current leftist belief that freedom is a right wing idea.

Re: Computer MOT

Windows 2000, that's a high number.