Posts by DuncanLarge

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

Re: But remember folks...

No, recycle those too.

The DRAM has no storage ability after the power has been removed for long enough. Test it and if its working sell or reuse it.

HDD's (if working) can be wiped securely using the ATA secure erase command. This will wipe all areas of the disc, even blocks marked bad. If the drive isnt working then use the drill. If you cant use secure erase for some reason you can just wipe it with zeros. Modern drives have such a high density that simply overwriting a file once makes it basically impossible to get the data back unless you really really want it and have the time and money (the drill wont stop them in that case).

SSD's, modern ones (some time after this report https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_peril/), should implement the secure erase command properly. Old ones were found to not do so and even lie about it. Overwriting the drive however is a different beast. Due to the self destructive nature of SSD's they usually come with a significant amount of extra space reserved for use automatically for replacing bad blocks or wear leveling. The secure erase command SHOULD wipe these areas too but again YMMV depending on the age of the drive. If the SSD is not fairly recent and did not have FDE enabled you may wish to drill through each chip.

USB flashdrives should be shredded. Unless you encrypted them too.

TBH if you are going to the length of drilling through the drives then that data thats so sensitive should have been encrypted in the first place. Read up on it and implement proper file or filesystem encryption so next time you can recucle the drive responsibaly and remain secure (to a reasonable extent).

If you need to hide data from evil governments or men in back destroy the drives, or use paper next time, it burns extremily well.

Recycle?

Wait, I can recycle this sh*t?

Lol I keep loads of stuff (and buy more off ebay) due to my in-built collector (hoarder) instinct for keeping hold of old tech "just in case" and as part of a retro collection.

I also hoarded some scsi hdd's and server VRU's as they could be sold on ebay to those poor souls trying to keep aging hardware running in a business that has no care about whats in the server room or how old it is (I've been there). Never did get around to selling much of anything so its all just dumped into drawers in my house.

I would have taken the stuff to the local tip but I was reluctant as I did not think that I could trust it all to go into the recycling process and not just end up in landfill with ET carts.

Perhaps its time I have a bit of a clear out. Just the useless stuff mind you, the HP DL380 PSU's and VRU's. The floppy disc drives that came out of servers that I cant remember, the scsi HDD's that had a questionable life span remaining when I salvaged them. I'm keeping my 486 and other old PC bits, I have uses for those.

I tend to use my mobiles till they start falling apart. My laptops mostly hail from 2012 or 2013. I keep hold of many things that still work till they just die, for example, if I want to record some birdsong or other outdoors sound I will likely just use one of my working minidisc recorders as they record audio and I have them so why buy a flash based one?

I hate e-waste. I've never been keen on simply going with the flow and grabbing the latest tech just because it has a different colour option and larger screen than last years model.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Aww

> CEO Tim Cook said that revenue would be lower for several reasons, one of which was that some customers were "taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements."

Aww diddums is unable to overcharge, mislead and upsell when its not needed?

Diddums

Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software

Focusing on the use case of the OS is looking at the wrong place

It doesnt matter about GNU/Linux being in the background, or in a VM.

GNU/Linux is just one OS that makes use of FLOSS software. There are others.

The important thing is to talk and advocate about the licensing and ideas about FLOSS. Focusing on just the OS is falling into the same mistake the Open Source group did where they removed all talk about protecting rights and freedom and only talked about being open in the respect of improving code quality. Now look where we are, with the Linux Journal suddenly realising that things are getting locked up and we are lacking freedom. They blame how GNU/Linux is used rather than blaming the real issue, that nobody is properly making efforts to talk about that freedom. Well Richard Stallman and the FSF is, but thanks to the efforts of the open source movement he finds he has to constantly remind those he talks to that he has nothing to do with open source at all.

Free Software incorporates the benefits of open source, while focusing on protecting it. It s a political idea. Open Source tried to avoid all that, now we have this situation where companies grab our code and use it as a platform to create proprietary systems.

If we apply this to cars: We need to find ways to push people to not think about the car, but how they are restricted or not with what they can do with the car or where they can go.

Funnily enough this is precisely what Richard Stallman and the FSF have been talking about over the last several years. The GPL version 3 tries to address this, yet there are those who try and stick to the GPL v2 thinking thats all they need, or they dont like GPL v3 because they secretly want to be a bit more proprietary, or they sell out and pander to big corps because they want to mentally come because big corp uses their code. The GPL v2 does what it says in the license text however clever people are leveraging ways to subvert and work around it in ways that got us into this situation, adoption of GPL v3 would (should) have fought against this.

There are also the other Free Software users/developers who prefer total freedom. They develop and use software under MIT licenses, which is a Free Software license, but does nothing to protect you from bad actors. They are so into freedom that they believe there should be no restrictions at all. That sounds great, but that includes the bad actor that wants to lock you up in their code / protocol. With the car analogy this would be like having a car that you are totally free to do anything to, anything with and take anywhere. Then you leave it in a car park where the car park owner takes a liking to it and legally transfers control to him. You come back to find you must pay to access your car and that the car will now only start on a sunday just because the new owner thinks it should. A GPS has been fitted, tied into the ECU so when he sees that you are driving to Coventry, he can kill your car because he for some reason hates Coventry and thinks you should pay more to go there.

The Open Source movement got the ideas and licenses into business by dumping the political arguments of freedom. This worked but it now looks to have worked too well. Now its time to unify the Free Software and Open Source movements so we can start working on getting control of the car back.

Sony, Fujifilm storage patent lawsuit is all taped up: Better LTO-8 than never, right?

> it'll finally kill off tape

Yeah and pigs will fly.

Chimps will recreate romeo and Juliet.

Aliens will land at the whitehouse and apologise for pranging earth in the 40's near Roswell and for being so late due to "family matters", ask where their craft is, visit Area 51 and see what happened to the occupants and then file a lawsuit with our legal system, sell their story to the papers...

Yeah, we are really going to give up a standard open format that is LTO that stores tebibytes in a resilient, proven, transportable, light weight package.

What are we to use instead?

Spinning rust platters that require clean room environments to fix issues with their EMBEDDED electronics that cant store data without having to automatically correct multiple errors all the time and cant be shouted at and if they are badly made will sandpaper the platters while they spin (ahem samsung, IBM).

What about expensive electron buckets on a chip called an SSD, no moving parts sure but it degrades every time its written to as we must literally force electrons through a quantum barrier, degrading it as we do so. Oh but the trapped electrons are like prisoners finding a way to escape, constantly reducing the stored charge till it gets to only a few years later when the flash controller cant determine if the bit is a one or a zero and reads it differently each time. Now we are not talking about just one bit here, due to the amount of data we can assume that there will be multiple bits affected by the ravages of only a few years, some will not be detected or corrected and some of those may corrupt the filesystem metadata needed to get the file.

As for the embedded electronics. We live in a world that has heat and gravity. These very annoying facts of nature can destroy your drive simply because a BGA chips solder balls get cracked or maybe a bad capacitor spews its load all over the board. Having a drive fall can crack these solder joints or flex the PCB cracking the tracks. This would kill your drive dead and need a clean room to repair, unless you are lucky enough they can just swap the PCB.

Yet if you drop an LTO tape its just fine. Oh, the plastic case broke? Move the tape to a new one. Thats why they have screws.

TLDR:

WIth the amount of data we have to preserve these days I really doubt that LTO will give way to more expensive, yet convenient alternatives such as HDD and SSD. These are too error prone and subject to damage that tape is practically immune from. A successful backup system would combine both. Different media = eggs not in one basket.

Tape is far from going anywhere. Maybe if we all stop needing storage. Get rid of the photos etc. But I doubt many will be wanting to part with that.

Ouch. Reinstalling Windows 10 again? By 2020, a 'cloud download' may be all you need

Re: Stupid Idea

I once (ok three times) installed win 10 from scratch.

To save having to wait for it to update itself, I triggered the update manually. I only triggered it, I wasnt picking and choosing what to install.

It broke itself each time, needing a fresh reinstall to try again. I was really pissed off when I found that if I just waited hours for it to do it automatically it had no issue.

How the hell is waiting for updates to install any different than clicking "check for updates"?

Re: sounds very convenient

> Microsoft is a very different company now than it was under Bill Gates.

You really believe that?

How do you turn off data harvesting again?

Re: sounds very convenient

1. They will need it because: They can get it, you agreed to it and it makes them money. Also licensing and activation counting.

2. The old methods will eventually become unsupported, be laughed at in reviews and blogs as "crazy things we used to do". Then they will drop support, it will be announced here where we will all try and convince the world how dumb its being in blindly accepting its loss.

3. Yep proprietary shit. > That partition is trivial to nuke if one wants Linux instead, so it would have zero impact on non-windows OSes.

Really? You really think they will let you do that when they could use it to lock the device to windows and maybe to yourself, thus stopping you from selling it (licenses cant be transferred). "Nuking" it will end up breaking secure boot which could brick the machine if they implement a TPM in such a way to do it.

Dont put t past them. You are a product, your data is a product and it pays to find ways to tie you into the devices and systems used to harvest you.

> I do not understand all the negativity in this thread.

Basically its the UAT (User Acceptance Testing) struggling to get out.

> and a USB 3.0 memory stick around 100MBps

That looks to be a slow stick as USB 3.0 supplies up to 5Gbps (600MB/s)

Re: "download a pristine copy of the OS from Microsoft's cloud servers"

> if you are getting lots of windows crash and burns then you are doing something wrong.

Like running what is considered by some to be a toy operating system?

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-298.htm

- Steve: I like Windows.

- Leo: Oh.

- Steve: I don't like Windows 7. I like XP. Maybe someday I'll like Windows 7.

- Leo: But Steve, it's a toy operating system. You said it.

- Steve: It is a toy. And, I mean, it really is.

Sure Steve Gibson was talking about XP but, here is the epiphany, windows hasn't changed much at all underneath. Its the same code with a different UI slapped on it every few years with only a few parts being changed or replaced, which turn out to be broken or not fit for purpose while they slowly re-introduce the original feature set of the original code. Now that Win 10 is a constant beta they can change loads, and test it on you.

Windows 10: Stable as a rock, till it rolls off the edge.

Windows 10: Stable as a rock, till the forced major update re-maps all your drives because the developer didn't perform a regression test thinking it should be YOUR job.

Windows 10: Stable as a rock till the next forced update is recalled several times as it keeps wiping user data.

Windows 10: Stable as a rock, when it works yes, but provides you with several inconsistent UI design elements that change depending which program you are using, two control panels, fast start up mode that means shutdown IS NO LONGER SHUTDOWN and gets turned back on EVERY TIME AN UPDATE GETS INSTALLED, a talking AI thing called cortana that everyone rushes to turn off when setting up a new machine, and you used to like creating your own custom theme/look? Well sorry but you cant do that anymore. You cant chose the f*cking title bar colour to fix the stupid UI choice of making the active and background title bars THE SAME COLOUR SO I CANT TELL WHAT APPLICATION HAS FOCUS.

WIndows 10 best feature? The right click menu on the start menu. Ok, its been there since 8.1 but I love it.

Re: Um, just NO!

> so you do need a relatively fast internet connection, preferably unmetered

If I had to do this on a metered connection I'd think it would be cheaper to buy a flash drive from somewhere and write a recovery image to it and keep it in my "important stuff" box where I also keep the spare car keys and whatever else I think I might not do without.

Of course, if that image ages too much I may have to pay for more data anyway to get the updates, so maybe the OS can help me keep the flash drive up to date by reminding me to consider plugging it in so already downloaded updates can be slipstreamed in?

I may be on a houseboat using a 4G router that gets me about 10meg at best in the middle of a canal!

This feature makes sense if you are using a device hampered by not having sufficient ports etc.

Re: Um, just NO!

> MacOS emergency boot facilities contain an option to reload the OS via a WiFi link.

But what happens when the emergency boot has been wiped?

Is it in the UEFI?

How many years too late?

Hmm how long did this take?

For microsoft to look at Debians Netinstall method?

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Re: C64

It was also a status symbol.

If you had a 1541 attached to your C64 when most kids stuck with tapes you were seen as flashing your cash. In the UK at least. I hardly saw C64 disc games in the shops either. I did eventually get a 1541 for my own programs.

Re: Eye protection

I dont think that was good advice. When I saw that ecplise we were specifically advised to only use the official viewing film or to use a telescope projecting onto card.

Its a shame that as usual the oncoming eclipse brought the clouds with it too.

Re: Oh dear...

All kernel versions are available on www.kernel.org and the mirrors.

Re: Its strange to me

I have Elite on cassette.

I even burned the Acorn Electron version to audio CD a couple years back. Works fine.

I was the same with CDROM drives.

Re: It's not too difficult to find new floppy hardware

I would be interested to know if the eventual removal of the floppy driver will prevent floppy images from being mounted on the loop interface.

Re: turned off

> Handy to have a nice friendly $ (or #) prompt when the GUI goes TITSUP

Nice idea. It will save me racking my brain to remember the correct Magic SysRq key combos only to find the default kernel has it all turned off.

Re: Floppies can grow bigger

I love my Risc PC. I even have an Acorn A3020.

Dont worry, soon after I got them I dove in with some side cutters and cut out the battery. One day I will get around to replacing it :D

I also prefer to run RISC OS 5 Open on my Pi's

Very interesting. I wonder if it could work for Acorn floppies.

It looks like it needs a small hardware modification?

Re: Migrate the data??

Well this was set in 2030 in a world where the internet literally was in you brain.

The hacker was clever in that nobody would find it easy to hack his chosen storage method, it was old and simply the last thing anyone would think of using.

You realise I'm talking about an episode of an Anime?

Re: Not the USB kind

You can go on ebay or amazon and buy bags of assorted rubber replacement cassette deck belts. Many youtubers into reviewing old cassette decks etc frequently use such assortments to replace worn out belts.

Make sue the new belt fits and is not too tight and certainly not too lose. Everything should freely rotate.

Re: Not the USB kind

What has the word size got to do with it?

Last time I tried using the latest 64 bit debian install had no issues accessing a floppy.

But I agree, download and maintain an older complete distro for such uses. I'm considering using jigdo to download blu-ray and DVD iso images of the entire debian 7 distro.

I also do this to ensure I can guarantee access to file formats that I'm using that possibly may not be easily accessible in 20 years depending on how things go. I should in 20 years be able to fire up a VM or some kind of emulator used to emulate older machines (like we do today) and install debian 7, move the data into it then see if I can convert it to a format that did survive.

Re: Not the USB kind

> Main problem is these machines have small memories

Add more RAM or put the floppy drive in a computer that has a newer motherboard. I have a 3 core athlon 64 with 8GB of DDR3 ram sitting around with an on board floppy controller and pci/pcie expansion slots that will take a pci controller if I really need one. Its only 10 years old.

Can be a good idea to upgrade "recovery" machines to the latest stuff thats still compatible. I only stopped using the 3 core athlon 64 (its a 4 core phenon with 1 core disabled) a few months ago when I splashed out on a new Ryzen 5.

> but after doing it the 50000th time

Jesus man, why didnt you get a new datasette?

I never ever adjusted mine. In fact I have never needed to adjust any tape deck I have ever used!

Sounds like yours needed a dab of nail polish to keep the azimuth screw in place!

Re: How long has CD got?

Which is why I build all my PC's.

I have two blu-ray drives in my main one. Because I can.

> Binary image them and then use an emulator to read the images.

PC floppy drives cant read the sectors on most non IBM formatted discs. The only way to create a binary image of an Amiga disc is in an Amiga or using a special (more flexible) floppy controller.

Re: Migrate the data??

I remember an episode of Ghost In the Shell 2nd gig that had the team raid a hacker. The hacker was unique/clever in how he stored his data on many many daisy chained floppy discs.

Basically he was almost untouchable because his storage system was unsupported by the hacking techniques the team used, so they had to raid him physically. He got wind of it and ran.

How the hell a I going to set up such a system now??

USB

Yeah, I could use a USB floppy translator, if I wanted to only read DOS or MAC format floppies.

USB floppy drives are actually little "translators" that emulate a USB mass storage device. If order for the floppy to be usable

it must be in a format recognised by the emulation chip. Forget about reading anything other than DOS or MAC floppies.

Chances are your floppy is in one of those formats, so you should be fine.

But it also means that you will be unable to read 2MB floppies, or perform advanced techniques to recover data from them. Much like with HDD's you need low level access to the floppy drive to recover data. YMMV when using a HDD behind a USB interface that supports USB mass storage but not ATAPI.

This will only likely be an issue for a very low number of peeps that know they have floppies or will need to recover data from floppies. Chances are they already have a PC with a floppy controller, just remember to be careful when upgrading the kernel.

This will be annoying in VM's too. I usually set VM's up using bootable iso images, that emulate floppy discs. I wonder if that will affect these?

Can it be put into userspace somehow?

God DRAM you! Prices to slide more than 40% in 2019 because chip makers can't forecast

> (as they source 92% of their photoresist chemicals from Japan).

Link?

Re: Is this the year

I'd rather my data be safer than on an SSD no matter what the speed.

Once SSD start using memristors then I may be interested. Wearing out semiconductor junctions my forcing electrons through (SSD NAND) seems a step backwards for me.

I have an SSD for booting and root partition. Temp files, large files, files that may need wiping when deleted are all on HDD's. I dont even care if the HDD is a 5200rpm or 7200rpm device. Makes little difference although the slower one would run cooler.

Amazon's bugging of homes has German boffins worried that Alexa may be an outlaw

Re: users can delete recordings themselves by accessing recordings through an app or browser.

My parents have one in every room.

They use them for playing music and setting cooking timers.

At my house I use a cd player and a LCD timer I bought from maplin in the 90's that runs on 1 AAA battery for years.

When I'm at my parents I dont talk much :D

Scientist, war hero and gay icon Alan Turing is new face of the £50 note

Re: Soon? End of 2021?

> In what world is 2.5 years "soon"?

As you age you will say that less and less. Easter feels like last week to me and I'm already thinking about Christmas shopping.

I'm only 38 and feel like I'm in a time warp!

Re: I doubt that these big value notes will be around much longer

> computerised encrypted payment systems

Like chip and pin? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No seriously, its a bloody balls up allowing a transaction to be authorised REGARDLESS if the pin is correct or not (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oakland10chipbroken.pdf). What idiot designed this system? Are they the same guys who made WEP?

I try to use cash as much as possible as if they f*cked up this I dont trust them further than I can shove them.

Another reason to use cash is with chip and pin / contactless transactions the store is charged a significant amount of money. I once had good fortune to be lectured by a guy in his fairly independent car parts shop. I asked if I could use contactless and after sighing he said "why not, go ahead". On and on he went about the processing charges and how the banks are "stealing" his money. He goes on to talk about a group of shops (his included) all banding together to try and force the banks to lower charges etc.

To appease him I paid by cash. Basically they really hate us using chip and pin/contact-less. Convenient as it is they make less on each purchase than if you use cash.

Plus you avoid having to give your card details to a till running an ancient operating system. I once saw the staff playing pinball on one!

Virgin Media blocks Imgur, literally tens of people rage at UK ISP

Re: Porn versus abuse

"CP (as legally defined) can and is produced and distributed (legally speaking) consensually by teenagers sexting each other"

Er no. Just plain wrong. They get arrested too and producing such images no matter what age you are is illegal.

Farewell to function keys and swappable SSDs in the new two-port MacBook Pro

Re: Great legacy value

> having to build external keypads.

I see a potential market here. I could build and sell USB/bluetooth function key keypads.

Re: Why not remap something else?

You dont need to be using Linux to need the escape key.

Plenty of people here where I work use it with windows to cancel something they have started doing that they want to abort, like accidentally long-clicking on a file name then destroying the original name. They call IT panicking because they dont know what the original name was and they know if they click the wrong thing their mistake becomes permanent. I say "press escape" and bingo, action cancelled.

Oh btw, Macs can run windows and we have a Mac user who must boot windows once in a while.

Thats what escape is for. To cancel or escape stuff. What would you replace it with? A dance? Or claping your hands and saying "i believe in fairies"?

A keyboard has to be flexible providing function keys for mapping to program functions, and other CONTROL keys to provide the user some control over what is happening. If you just want a set of buttons that only let you type words then I suggest your user type is an edge case and perhaps you should just replace the keyboard with a single on off button and dictate to the machine instead.

Re: Function keys are useless, good riddance

Function keys are useless?

Lets see you work in an IT team that administers an AS400. Trust me there are still quite a lot of those things out there, they are even provided in a virtualised way nowadays.

I'd love to see how you do without function keys.

You'd also be lost on my machine as my preferred file manager is midnight commander.

What do we want? Decentralised, non-siloed social media with open standards! When do we want it? Soon!

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

> This is also what things like LibreOffice and most Linux desktops lack: decent design

LibreOffice is complex? Really? Its a word processor that still uses the good old "correct" way of giving users menus. ANY child from the late 90's has used these in IT class and will have no issue with them.

Trust me, I saw the fallout when that damn ribbon came in Word et al. Well we still have issues, even myself in IT is having to spend ages exploring coloured pixels to see if clicking one does something so that I can sort out this users signature.

The you say that the Linux desktop is complex? Again, seriously?

Every one of the 90's kids, i.e the ones earning the money in their households now they have grown up, used Windows XP. Some used Win NT, at school, every day (I started in 1995 with RISC OS on an Acorn). None of them will find any of the Linux desktops (maybe except GNOME) difficult to use. The concept of having a "start" menu is used in these desktops, its the same paradigm as used by every human going to school in the late 90's and 2000's. Microsoft tried to ditch it in windows 8 and look what happened.

Most of the users I deal with have issues using smartphones:

User: "My email isnt working again"

Me: "Did your password get changed?"

User: "Yes I changed it a few days ago, since then I have no emails"

Me: "check the notifications for the one asking for your new password"

User: "What notifications"

Me: "In the notification drawer you can pull down from the top"

User: "Where is the top? I cant see a drawer"

Me: "Swipe down the screen from the top"

User: "Nothing happens, oh facebook has just opened"

Me: "I'll take a look." So I go off, walk all the way to the users desk just to swipe down the notifications drawer and tap the "Outlook needs your password" notification. Once the user enters the password they look at me like I'm Einstein.

Then I frequently get this, again with your "simple to use" smartphones:

User: "My phone is not syncing with my laptop, I cant see my meetings in the calendar when I add them on the phone"

Me: "Thats strange, are you getting emails on the phone?"

User: "Yes and I'm getting reminders about meetings if they are added on the laptop"

Me: "Are you adding your new meetings into the Outlook calendar on your phone, or on the phones calendar? You must add stuff you want to sync to the outlook one."

User: "Theres more than one calendar?"

Me: "Yes take a look at your calendar list and see which one you have open"

User: "Wheres that?"

Me: "Open the menu, you might have to swipe left if you are on the latest Ios"

User: "Nothing happens. Whats an ios? I cant see a menu. Oh wait, I think I found a panel thing that comes in when I swipe like you said"

Me: "Cool, can you see a list of calendars in there?"

User: "In where?"

Me: "The panel."

User: "No, the panel thing has text in it but it keeps moving back to the left, I cant read it as it wont stay there. Oh, the screen has changed. I pressed one of the buttons on the bottom and now I have a lot of pictures that look like apps and they move when I touch the screen."

Me: "Hang on" So I go off and switch calendars for the user, again they look at me like I'm Einstein. I'm beginning to feel like Reginald Perrin by now.

I have also had a user who had somehow set her phone to only display contacts that were stored on the phone and not the ones from outlook. She was in quite a state thinking that someone was deleting her business contacts. Till I went over and opened the menu and ticked the outlook address book.

Then I've had people call me up as they somehow triggered a full wipe of the company issued ipad and they use it to play spotify in the pub, to the customers, To have music and happy customers tonight this ipad needs re-configuring, over the phone. Thats not a very easy thing to do when they literally are confused why the ipad says and does stuff as we set it up.

NONE of these issues are had with their win 10 laptops. Any issues with those are due to actual real problems worthy of my time. Maybe its:

- The TPM playing up so bitlocker wont unlock at boot. Easily resolved by giving them the recovery key and scheduling a bit of TLC for the laptop where we update all the firmware that is known to fix the issue.

- Hardware issues, fixed by next day on site repair.

- Software issues that simply need a reboot and possibly a couple of updates to finally resolve them.

- Issues with their internet / router / lan that need resolving or bits replacing.

- They may need us to type in the admin password so the printer driver can install.

None of them have any real silly issues in actually using the machines. Sometimes they call up wondering why their printer looks to be offline and we help debug it or they call up saying their laptop and vpn password are out of sync. None of them ask "whats the start menu" "where do I find word" "how to I restart" "how do I connect to wifi".

All of them can use a traditional desktop environment (as close to traditional win 10 is) and none of them had issues with win 7 and none will have issues with any modern linux desktop besides simply getting familiar with where things may be.

BUT every iphone, ipad or android device causes issues due to insane usability choices. Even some of the younger ones have no clue about how to view the correct contacts or the correct calendar. All they know is how to post and like stuff on facebook.

So you think smartphones are simple to use? If I had my way everyone would be using a cheap feature phone for work.I shouldnt have to be thought of as a reincarnation of Einstein just because I know how to view notifications.

Wondering how to whack Zoom's dodgy hidden web server on your Mac? No worries, Apple's done it for you

> Its to prevent Zoom users receiving a prompt for the website would like to use the microphone and camera.

:-O Those prompts are there for a f*cking reason.

King's College London breached GDPR by sharing list of activist students with cops

Cleaners have access to all manner of household chemicals that can be made into any number of "bad" things. I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of a revolutionary group of cleaners!

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

Re: Impact will vary

> If the stockpiles (for anything) that were built up prior to March

Didnt some idiot in parliament scrap all that?

Drone fliers are either 'clueless, careless or criminal' says air traffic gros fromage

Re: How high?

> 400 feet AGL

Thats above SEA level not ground level. If you are on a hill and fly 400 feet above your head you will suddenly gain height and get in the way of official users the moment you leave the area of the hill.

Re: How high?

The laws apply the moment you leave the ground regardless of what the flying object is. There is no minimum height.

Inside you will be fine but outside you are interfering with the controlled airspace that has been reserved specifically for private use.

If you are not in an area controlled by an airport then you will generally be fine as long as you follow the drone code. If you follow that they will turn a blind eye to your interference but no matter how high or low you are your aircraft must drop to the ground should any manned aircraft enter the area.

Basically you can play on the road till the cars come.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

All batteries I have ever had for my cars have been fully sealed, no way to top them up.

You have an indicator that tells you if the battery is bad but thats it. I have never seen any batteries that can be topped up by I do go for the cheap end of the scale.

We are shocked to learn oppressive authoritarian surveillance state China injects spyware into foreigners' smartphones

> You've been watching too many spy movies.

Spy movies are fiction, this is real life.

> If you going to China really you should expect to need to toss your devices when you get home or at least have them refomatted.

No, chuck them. Never trust the device again. You can "reformat" the main OS but you cant reformat the other OS , the one that handles all the cell connections etc. Those chips are off limits to the likes of most people.