Posts by LenG

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier.... but slightly worse

Re: Continuing the trend

Come on, there is no way that windows 8 can be described as "slightly worse" than windows 7.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

In fact, this sort of triviality creates more than angst - it generates antagonism to the whole concept of diversity by trivializing genuine problems amongst a prethoria of garbage.

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

Deferring Upgrades

My Win10 system automatically defers function upgrades by 12 months (I bet that is not possible in Win 11)

I will start thinking about a Win11 upgrade in 2025 when win 10 support terminates. Or maybe 2030 ...

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

Windows 11 brings more into the modern UI but it remains a hybrid.

This is supposed to be a benefit? I very much prefer the old look & feel of windows ... Win2000 would suit me.

Does anyone know if Classic Start Menu runs on this abberation?

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

The new Win 7

Windows 10 will be supported until sometime in 2025 and I am betting that at that stage there will still be more Win 10 users than Win 11. Win 7 reached EOL at the beginning of 2020 and in August this year still had 16% of the Windows users. On that basis I figure I am good on Win 10 until the end of the decade.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Re: No MS account

Last time I installed a fresh WIn 10 (pro), last year, it was easy enough to bypass the M$ account restriction by disconnecting from the internet at the right point. When it cannot reach the M$ servers it allows you to continue with a local account and doesn't demand any change after you reconnect.

No MS account

Are we approaching a point where I will have to have a M$ account just to log into my Windoze desktop machine? Time to start migrating my games to linux ... after all, games are the only good reason to have windoze to start with.

Microsoft does and doesn't want you to know it won't stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Prehaps, but not what M$ want it to mean

"It'll help software vendors as well: "This game requires Windows 11" will actually mean something."

Yup. It will mean "play a different game". Besides, no game developer (except perhaps M$ in house) would issue a game with that restriction unless Win 11 already had a massive user base.

Restrictions

I have no intention of upgrading in the forseeable future but the first hurdle were I to relent is the requirement for a M$ account. I don't have one and never will.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

Windows 10 to be the new Win XP?

Certainly I will not be upgrading for a variety of reasons and I suspect many others will stay with the devil we know,

So, in 10 years time M$ will still be trying to move people off Win 10 in the same way that they are still trying to persuade some users that Win XP is not a good idea.

A bunch of apps will be able to bypass Microsoft's new store and use own update methods

Why bother?

I've never used the MS Store. I doubt I ever will.

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Old old timer here

I don't think I was aware of the context menu as such - the only time I rightt-click on the desktop is when I want to open the display settings/personalise items. I was genuinely unaware of the "New" option. I am marginally impressed that it offers me OpenDocument instead of MSOffice formats, though.

Snail mail would be a fool-proof way to inform patients about plans to slurp GP data, but UK govt won't commit

Consent should be opt-in.

The title says it all. Data should only be shared with positive permission from the subject of that data. If the government wants to share it has the responsibility to ensure that every participant is fully informed, which can only be the case if explicit permission has been given.

The likelihood that the number of people who would give permission would probably be so small as to make the whole excercise worthless says something about the trust people have in the apes in parliament.

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Remove a few things - the useful ones.

Oh, goody. I can get the start button back in the left hand corner. Unfortunately I can't put the task bar up the side of the screen where I like it (with the start bar at the top). On an ultrawide monitor I have horizontal space to spare but vertical is at a premium. Has anyone tested classic shell on this abberation?

As for file manager improvements, it is another piece of software I have basically abandoned. The multicommander two panel arrangement suits me far better. Bulk rename is a good addition as well.

I suspect the holdouts using win 10 for the forseeable future will outnumber the WinXP enthusiasts significantly.

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Re: I Have A Lane Awareness System

My car has a form of haptic feedback - if I drift into the lane marking it pulls the steering wheel in the appropriate direction unless I am indicating a lane change. I really don't know if it would actually stay in lane reliably if I took my hands off the wheel - I'm too much of a coward to try that - but it will certainly alert me if my attention (and direction) wanders. It is also clever enough to engage only on major roads so I regard it as akin to anti-lock breaking ... driver safety assist not self-drive.

And it is not always the car's fault

I have the occasional misfortune of having to drive through the roadworks where the M3 and M27 join. New lane markings have been painted over partially scrubbed out old markings and the car fights me over which set of markings we should follow. I figure we both have about 50% accuracy except when the road is wet and the sun is glinting on the puddles, at which point we are both bloody confused.

I've always felt that the standard of driver awareness would be considerably enhanced if the driver side airbag was replaced with a spring loaded spike which shot out of the middle of the steering wheel in the event of a crash.

Black screens in Windows 11? Bork has seen it all before

Useful code?

Many many years ago you could buy(!) a TSR to recolourise the Blue Screen of Death. At the time it superceded the detector of "cat like typing" in my ranking of the most useless piece of software ever written.

Since then I have acquired a couple of cats and realised the cat-like typing detector might have been a good idea.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

Move on folks, nothing of interest here

My brand new home-build (AMD 5950 cpu, 32GB memory, 8TB local SSD storage) failed the compatibility checker because I have not enabled TPM. Hopefully that means the upgrade process will not badger me with advice to switch to Win11. Not that I could anyway as I do not have a M$ account.

Win 10 no longer makes installation without such an account easy, as I discovered when I attempted to install Win 10 pro on my new build recently. However this is easily bypassed by disconnecting from the internet at the appropriate time. I'll be curious to know if this works with Win 11 when it is generally available, but not so curious as to actually attempt the upgrade.

I can see myself like some of the Win7 diehards, still running this OS for the forseeable future. Mind I mostly use it for games - any significant / sensitive work is done on an ancient Intel NUC running linux.

I have to honestly say that of the list of new features there is nothing I want. Of the other changes described I applaud the removal of live tiles but Classic shell does that for me anyway. As for "lively interactive animations", the very thought brings me out in hives.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Oh, yawn

Why the obsession with rounded corners? I vaguely remember they were a thing about 2 decades ago (along with non-rectangular windows) and seem to have quietly disappeared since.

I tried the new sound. Unfortunately I had my speakers turned off. Amusingly just as I clicked on it a police siren went off outside. This was actually far better than the tedious bing-bong which finally managed to hear.

At least they are removing live tiles. Mind, with Classic Shell running I've already done that for myself.

Microsoft hits Alt-F4 on Windows 10X: OS designed for dual-screen PCs axed

There is a huge range of functionality that a genuine multi-display box could offer rather than simply to provide more sceen real estate which you have to arrange manually all the time. There have been some valiant attempts to provide software to offer such features but generally these fail as they cannot keep up with changes in the underlying os.

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

Re: I would rather NOT have support

I've never had a problem caused by an android update. My Pixel 2 has gone from 8 thru to 11 without a hitch. This makes me wonder if the problems you have seen are caused by the added gorp many vendors add to the base OS.

As for windows, I am not a fan or defender of that system but it is easy to set up so that updates do not occur at inconvenient times. TBH, my system also autoblocks OS updates by 1 year and non-security patches by 30 days or thereabouts. If you cannot access these sorts of settings because your provider has locked down the system on a work phone I would suggest you should loudly at your IS support department.

Of course neither of these systems can compete with linux for ease and reliability of upgrades. It is not perfect but certainly it is light-years ahead of android or windoze.

Mayday! Mayday! Microsoft has settled on a build and Windows 10 21H1 is inbound

Windows taskbar

"In case you were in any doubt about who is really in charge of your taskbar, the patch includes News and Interests function on the Windows 10 taskbar."

Does anyone use the windows taskbar?

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

Yup, thanks for the link.

TBH, if someone had changed it without telling me I probably wouldn't have noticed (except for Seaford, which is horrible). Overall I would prefer to stick with Calibri as the default default. But then I generally set the font to Verdana for things I have to look at for any length of time.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

once upon a time

when I was young and the internet was far more open than it is now almost all messages (generally email) were in plain text and it was well known that various government organs from both the east and west were tapping into and monitoring such information. I got into the habit of putting blocks of random numbers at the end of mail labelled "encrypted message follows" or something similar. Hopefully it wasted somebody's time somewhere.

Once again the tired refrain

"think of the children" - whenever I hear a politician using that appeal (or anything similar) I immediately assume that the proposal is something which would be completely unjustifiable and unacceptable if subject to any rational review. In this case the implication is that if you oppose end-to-end encryption you are clearly a paedophile or some other sort of vile pervert.

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

Make them pay

If companies had unlimited liability for any damage caused to third parties by their failure to apply a patch in a timely manner they might be more responsive to supplied security fixes.

Google's FLoC flies into headwinds as internet ad industry braces for instability

Re: Choice of browser

This is unfortunately true. I stopped using firefox some time ago and shifted to PaleMoon which was forked from the mozilla codebase some time ago but with a lot of the crud cleared out. It adheres to a more traditional appearance (or at least can be configured to do so) . It glitches occasionally but I put that down to my bad habit of generally having 100+ open pages.

Choice of browser

I rarely use chrome and I can see that usage drop to zero. Hopefully there will continue to be other browsers which do not implement this crap.

I am disappointed that mozilla have not rejected it.

Microsoft calls time on Timeline: Don't worry, more features that nobody asked for coming your way

Re: "We can't wait to hear what you think!"

The best OS is the one you are completely unaware of.

Re: "Local activity history will remain on Windows 10"

Hiding file extensions is, even by MS standards, an incomprehensibly stupid thing to do.

Timeline? What the hell is that?

Don't use it. Didn't even know it existed. Possibly the fact that I don't have an MS account shields me slightly from this sort of crud?

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

Performant?

I had to look this word up. Apparently it is an engineering jargon word basically meaning something which works as expected. So how the chip could be the most performant boggles me, but it does seem to imply no previous Xeon worked as well as it should ...

ISP industry blasts UK Telecoms Security Bill for vague requirements, high costs of compliance

Wrong worms

The last thing I read on the register before this article was Dabbs's comments on using the correct words. Then I came across this :

"They're telling businesses what they can and can't buy, intervening in mergers, proscribing how to run operations, ..."

Proscribe means ban or forbid. I know it is a quote but unless it is actually a misquote or a typo it actually makes no real sense. I sympathise with the sentiment expressed but I do wish someone would proof read these sort of utterances rather than just spell-check them

Axe-happy Microsoft halves support for Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel

Up to date experience

M$ SAYS

"With the fast and increasing pace of technological change, it is a challenge to get the up-to-date experience customers expect when using a decade-old product."

Never seems to occur to them that some of us are happy with things as they are ... or rather as they were. I still think the Win2K interface was the cleanest and simplest they ever produced. I stayed with that (with some help from Classic shell) until I had to upgrade to Win10. Even now I am fairly close to it. I can do most tasks on muscle memory without having to figure out what the new glyphs mean (they are not icons as they have no resemblance to the thing they purport to represent).

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

Blue screen?

In the early days of DOS, when TSR programs were a big thing (terminate-and-stay-resident), there was briefly available a blue-screen-of-death recolourizer. I have to say I never used it but a informal local poll of our computer users voted it the most useless software utility ever, edging out the TSR which detected cat-like typing. Over the years I have continued to agree with the winner of the poll but, now having owned cats, I am more sympathetic to the cat-like-typing detector.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

Re: Key word is enterprise

Yeah, I just looked at the current compatibility list, which includes the warning:

Always install enterprise-level drives on the FS/SA/UC/XS+/XS series models.

It is highly recommended to use enterprise-level drives on your enterprise-level servers to ensure optimal performance.

This seems to give some indication of what Seagate consider Enterprise drives. If you look at the DS1621+ (my latest NAS) the drives are ordered by class which appears to be the manufacturer's designation of the drive. Classes include Enterprise/Enterprise NAS/NAS/Surveillance etc. If you look at the DS1621xs+ you see only Enterpise and Enterprise NAS.

I think the warning gives an indication of which models might be subject to this restriction. Of course the critical question is whether the restriction will be enforced by the device or simply by not offering warranty and service support if unblessed drives are used. Explicit rejection would play havoc with a second hand market.

The other problem with compatibility lists is that absence from the list does not necessarily mean the drive is incompatible. It could be untested or simply rejected for business reasons or any other excuse. My 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro disks are not on the list for either DS1621+ or DS1621xs+ even though all the smaller Ironwolf Pro disks are ll included. There is a toggle to show incompatible models - a list of two not including the Seagate so I assume it is simply too new to have been tested yet.

Key word is enterprise

A lot of people have referred to DSxxxx units here. I doubt that they are considered enterprise kit. I imagine this restriction only applies to the SA/ES style units. Unfortunately I cannot find the document referred to (but not referenced) in this article.

Reg reader's XXXbox oddity: The BBC4 topless thumbnail trauma whodunnit

Well,

If they left it alone it might have become a selling point ..

LowKey cool: This web app will tweak your photos to flummox facial-recognition systems, apparently

Confused

If the test database is made of genuine images, where do they come from? On the other hand, if it is made of Lowkey'd images can it match those against other Lowkey'd images of the same person? Or does Lowkey apply a different change to an image every time it encounters it. Not that I really care as I never put my image on a profile anyway.

Your 60-second guide to what Intel announced at CES. Or in 5 seconds: New laptop chips

Re: I stopped reading ...

... or forms a union with all the other CPUs in the data centre and goes on strike!

Welcome to the splinternet – where freedom of expression is suppressed and repressed, and Big Brother is watching

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - HORNET or death

Sorry, but when I look at the last US election and the way the system is constructed to centralize power in a few hands I am no longer convinced that the US is even truly a democracy, let alone anything which can be held up as an exemplar to the rest of the world.

Don't give up on Planet Nine yet: Hubble 'scope finds just such a world a mere 336 light-years away

Re: Why planet rather than black hole

A black hole of 11 Jupiter masses would have a radius of about 30 m so I doubt you would detect it by occulusion measurements. Also I am not clear how such an object could form unless it was some wildly improbable fragment left over from the big bang.

UK's 'minimum viable product' for Brexit transit software will not be ready until December, leaving no time for testing

Why does this not surprise me

The current government has a wonderful record for late and buggy. Why expect anything different here?

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

I hate the stinking things

They always seem to ask me for several iterations, possibly because I use an obscure browser. There is one particular site which invariably runs through several challenges, tells me I am not a robot then locks up until the session times out and I have to start again, which doesn't help because the same thing happens every time.

Flash haters, rejoice! Microsoft releases tool to let you nuke Adobe's security horror before support ends

The curse of flash

OK, who's the joker?

I clicked on the link to read the advisory. Then I hit the back button ... again and again and again. Turned out I had 10 backlinks before I reached El Reg.

The MS article was harder to get rid off than Flash!

5 months later, 37.7% of Windows 10 PCs are running the May 2020 Update... Wait, people are still on 1809?

Be fair, there was one update which finally allowed a distinct colour for the window title bar.

As for "However, seeing as 20H2 is little more than a jumped-up cumulative update" this is only the case if you have actually reached 2004, which is a way off for me.

For Foxit's sake: Windows and Mac users alike urged to patch PhantomPDF over use-after-free vulns

Foxit reader

I still use Foxit reader. I don't have any of the phantomPDF suite although if I open the reader from the start menu/icon it does remind me that I can have a 14 free trial. In the simpler case of clicking on a .pdf it still just runs as a standalone reader. There is a security update available for this also so I assume it is simply the reader module from PhantomPDF in standalone guise.

So, what exactly are you planning to do with this new PC? Windows Insiders face new questions during OOBE

Confused

I am not a windows insider. In fact, I am still running 1909 thanks to the ability of windows Pro to defer upgrades. However, I did take a cumulative patch recently and when I rebooted yesterday a blue screen popped up which sounds suspiciously like the OOBE. Mind, most of the things it was pushing at me would probably have failed anyway because I don't have a microsoft account.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Not the same thing

Smallpox and polio vaccines confer permanent immunity. So does catching the disease and recovering from it, but that is a somewhat risky way of immunizing people.

Virus's like those for flu and similar infections convey only short term immunity. Currently it is not clear how long the immunity lasts after exposure to Corvid19 but there is anecdotal evidence that some people have had it twice. Given that has only been active for less than a year this is not good news.