Posts by royprime

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Noise cancelling?

Only thing I'll be doing is cancelling my order.

If you're going to exploit work's infrastructure to torrent, you better damn well know how to hide it

Re: "he didn't dare put anything into a company calendar"

Yup, I'm sure his cons will have certainly improved over the years.

Thought you were good at StarCraft? DeepMind's AI bot proves better than 99.8% of fleshy humans

Want to play a game?

Question is, does DeepMind also have the thermonuclear war simulator game at it's disposal?

Back to school with El Reg - how about a chunky Lenovo for the student in your life?

Re: 627-249 ?

We could make this a drinking game - yell Brexit in a forum and then run and watch the carnage.

Samsung Note10+ torn apart to expose three 5G antennas: One has to pick up something

Re: Typical Corporate Greed

Yup, but now your icrap device will tell now moan at you if you replace the battery yourself.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-battery-service-alerts/

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Missed a trick there

Well, he certainly missed a trick. Bodge up a quick money pot on the side of it, he'd be quids in.

Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.

Re: Quoteable

I'll be impressed if they sell a few, let alone a few million.

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

Re: SD cards

Ah, the days when imacs had DVD drives. I spent hours often striping down imacs and macbook pros to remove the incredibly flimsy promo CD / DVD's you used to get with some papers & magazines, easy enough to insert, but the mechanism was never able to spit the bloody things out again.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Re: A total failure

Well, you could get this from China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Om1_I09ow

Re: Who Wants It In The First Place?

Acer, an ok spec laptop back in the day, loaded with XP x64 of all things the version I ended up with,. Nothing worth writing home about, but came with a quite nice bluetooth mouse which I've still got & works. The laptop lasted as long as most Acers do, so long since recycled.

Re: Who Wants It In The First Place?

I could just imagine about 10 minutes later on the street and then it's nabbed by a moped rider that's just got his Christmas sorted.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

I've a facebook account that I probably check once a month or so for updates from old friends, but apart from that don't bother with. I've never put any address details or phone details in, so every time I do bother to look it always reminds me to "add a phone number etc". Fat chance Zuck, if they close it without having any details on me I don't exactly lose anything.

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

Re: Another Robin in the 'Hood

Yes, had to do that myself away on site as the trial licence had expired and no one would give me the nod to purchase it.

Grabbed a licence from the web and just hoped that no one checked the about / registered tab as it was registered to a user name along the lines of idontpayfor**[e-mail] (or something very similar).

Racing at the speed of light, Sage superhero bursts through the door...

Meh, at least it was his shirt and not his pants.

Surface Book 2 afflicted by mystery Blue Screen Of Death errors

Good old MS.

Must remember to send them an Xmas card this year. If it wasn't for all the naff updates, duff 2FA on Office 360 and lots of other issues I would have probably been bored sitting at home earning very little money.

We all fall together. Azure MFA takes a tumble for the second week running

Enough of the Microsoft Fail Again.

So, the site I'm working with are not huge, they only spend just over £1275 pm on Office 365, however now it's been up and down over three days. Either the MFA isn't working or outlook isn't connecting or both. Ironically I was told by Microsoft to remove the MFA from the admin account so I could reset the other accounts, which I couldn't anyway as I couldn't login.

Main reason we went for the MFA was because some bot guessed some user passwords and their accounts were sending out some lovely bit mining software. In this day and age of GDPR where you need everything as secure as possible I don't want to keep telling our GDPR officer, oh yes one of our accounts was compromised again.

I've emailed Microsoft too, as surely by now us poor saps that are stuck on their products deserve some kind of compensation for this grief.

Office 365 Exchange enjoys a less than manic Monday. Users? Not so much

Re: At last! I can get some work done...

I would be getting some work done, but my clients keep moaning that their emails still aren't working.

Guess I chose the wrong day to stop sniffing glue...

Azure, Office 365 go super-secure: Multi-factor auth borked in Europe, Asia, USA

IT Support said move everything - glad I said no.

Well, our external IT support suggested we move everything to the cloud, to which I said no, but hey this 2 factor authentication seems like a really good idea as someone brute forced a bunch of our 365 passwords and sent half a ton of spam.

Now sitting here hitting the refresh as I cannot change any email accounts or login to the portal to set up anyone.

Great job Microsoft, my F5 key is getting a workout. Still at least I can sit and read El Reg, gives me something to do.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Stuck keys?

Looks like laggy software to me, CTRL + C and then CTRL + V hammered a few hundred times.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Heatsink modifcations here we come.

So, they really think that you would want to run high end Adobe apps on ipads? 5 mins in it will be red hot and run at a snails pace. Already have problems with our ipads out in the field, so have resorted to these at a mere £200 each ipad. https://www.gps.co.uk/x-naut-active-cooling-mount-for-ipad/p-0-3177/?gclid=google&utm_medium

Apple in XS new sensation: Latest iPhone carries XS-sive price tag

Ah. So Apple's HQ makes sense now.

So, I'm guessing they were using the new HQ & staff to test the fall function of the Apple Watch then?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/apple-park-workers-hurt-glass-walls-norman-foster-steve-jobs

Do I hear two million dollars? Apple-1 fossil goes on the block, cassettes included

I'd stick with the classic car.

$2m? I'll stick with a classic Ferrari, at least when that breaks it's something beautiful to look at rather than some scrap old circuit boards.

What's in a name? For Cambridge Analytica, about a quid apparently

£1 for the name - bargain.

Let's face it get that & the website up and running pointing to your company advising on all things GDPR / Cyber Essentials I imagine that would get a few good hits.

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Ah yes, the good old days before ebay! I bought just over a hundred Toshiba laptops in our local auction from a company that went bust. All were BIOS locked, so as no-one could get in to them I managed to pick them up for peanuts.

This was back in the time though all you had to do is have a spare parallel port connector and solder a couple of wires to the back of the connector. Plug it in to the laptop, turn it on and one wiped bios password.

Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive

Good old double space.

I had a client that around that time found that his RLL controller would format MFM drives to a nice higher capacity. Didn't work properly of course and lost lots, but he was proudly showing me just how much more space he had on his drive.

Apple MacBook butterfly keyboards 'defective', 'prone to fail' – lawsuit

Apple hardware used to be brilliant. One of my clients used to swear by them with Laptops / Desktops and servers. Slowly over the years though the servers have vanished, the desktops (Mac Pro rubbish bin anyone) have become almost designed to fail and now the laptops have rubbish keyboards and you need dongles upon dongles to connect to anything.

Such a shame, but then there's much more money in them shoving out yet another phone every few months that bothering with business clients and their needs. Now most of my clients have moved away from Apple apart from phones and ipads.

PC recycler gets 15 months in the clink for whipping up 28,000 bootleg Windows 7, XP recovery discs

Yup, so many other ways he could have done this. Sysprep with Windows 7 works a treat and then the customer just needs to enter the COA on the side of the machine and job done. Might have taken a bit longer than getting some dodgy "genuine" dvd's produced in China, but I can imagine being stuck in prison he'll have plenty of time to think that through.

At least this is a thing of the past with Windows 8 & 10 as the key is stored in the BIOS, reload Windows 10 and it automatically activates on the internet.

That was fast... unlike old iPhones: Apple sued for slowing down mobes

Re: It would be interesting

Yes, if you check Google stats, a lot more people search why is my iphone running slow around the time of a new release.

I wonder?

Could you imagine if other lithium battery machines throttle in the same way. Hop in your 5 year old Tesla Model S to find ludicrous mode is now limited to 45mph :)

Hot chips crashed servers, but were still delicious

I always love cleaners. I remember going in to an office where everyone was complaining that the displays suddenly were streaky and horrible to look at.

After visiting and having a look it turned out that the cleaner decided to go above and beyond and clean everyone's screen, with abrasive cleaner damaging the screen surface. They didn't look too bad turned off, however as soon as you turned them on they resembled a Pollock painting.

Hey, you know why it's called the iPhone X? When you see Apple's repair bill, your response will be X-rated

Not surprised at all. One of my clients dropped his ipad pro after a mere 6 weeks of use. Repair charge from Apple £469 and nearly 4 weeks wait. It actually worked out cheaper to buy a new ipad pro and flog the damaged one on ebay.

If you are mad enough to spend over a grand on a phone, buy it a decent case. Of course I understand if you do spend a grand on a phone, you want to flash it to everyone so they can see that you have blown a grand on a phone, rather than a phone in a life pro case which then just looks like any other posh phone.

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update tackles IT's true menace: Cheating gamers

Re: W10 fall edition tackles IT's true menace: UPTIME

Probably teaching you to suck eggs. But have you clicked on the Ethernet connection and then you should have the button in there (is in mine, latest W10 Pro).

Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 is hot, but not much more than the S8+

Re: The single failure with all "Flagship" these phones..

I know everyone always moans about the batteries on phones, but do you live in a location with no power or do you just sleep only every other day? I put my phone on charge at night and in the morning I've 100% which happily sees me through the day.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

Re: Lack of end user input.

I have had the other extreme, mostly due to staff turnover we had a project that morphed over the years that is still supposedly on track to succeed. It's had plenty of staff and money thrown at it over the years, however the people that actually use it have had very little say in the design and layout, so it's disliked by most. With just the senior management giving it a big thumbs up

So, there is a new Project Dev starting next month and I'm almost looking forward to the decision soon that we will start from scratch, as had the three previous Project Devs since 2009.

Nvidia's profits so far this year are GPU-ge

Re: Very odd / interesting activity on ebay regards the GPU cards...

No, I've sold a good few Nvidia cards on ebay 1060 / 1070 especially and can safely say they go everywhere. Especially since the £ has had a beating I've even sold one back to China. That's how ebay works though, some people bid early trying to get a bargain everyone else leaves it to the last second.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

I had a fun laptop repair. Back in the day we used to repair laptops for a large department store, so we ended up seeing some pretty horrible machines.

One day I went to collect our usual repairs and I was sent up the manager to collect a special repair.

It puzzled me as it was in a big plastic sealed tub. Manager said, you've just had a baby right? I'm sure you will like this one!

So, got it back to the workshop, opened it up and nearly fell over with the stink.

Turns out, mum was using laptop at the same time as feeding very young baby. Baby threw up all over the laptop and mum did her best to clean it, however the milky sick managed of course to filter through the keyboard and the smell was something all parents will know well, but magnified after a period of a couple of days sitting in a cooked laptop.

Strangely enough, took some pictures and let the store know, yes beyond economical repair.

Managed to rescue all her pictures from the laptop though, so not all bad.

Re: Yeah, that happened.

Nope, can honestly say if you are silly enough to keep a hairdryer on a keyboard for a length of time it will melt the keys. Seen it myself with someone that watched a you tube video on drying out a laptop. It's got to be a good length of time, but most cheap keyboards (and this one was a Toshiba) are very thin and melt pretty easily.