Posts by envida

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Pedant alert! (2)

The EU isn't all 1 timezone. The Republic of Ireland has GMT/UTC in the winter and Irish Standard Time (UTC+1) in the summer, so its the same as it is the UK. It didn't follow that between 1968 and 1971 where it just adopted UTC+1 all year.

Portugal also has Western European Time (UTC) and Western European Summer Time (UTC+1), again the same as it is in the UK and Ireland. Although between 1992 and 1996 if followed Central European Time.

Also, Central European time, which is what most of the EU follows also has some non-EU states following it as well

Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

Re: But the nightly fixes the "enter does not work" bug!

Initially I tested in in 119, but then went back and tested it in 117 after your post. Same result - 100 out of 100 save attempts were sucessful.

Re: But the nightly fixes the "enter does not work" bug!

Out of interest, and in a moment of boredom, I tried to replicate this by saving 100 files and images the way you suggest is a problem in Firefox and was successful 100% of the time, so I couldn't replicate the issue there. Then I noticed you were using Waterfox in the video, so I tried again in that browser. 8 out of 100 times gave me the issue you described but I'm more certain than not that at 3 of those were because I pressed enter too quickly and the save window hadn't fully loaded. The other times the save window appeared to have fully loaded. The save window on firefox was, subjectively, a bit more snappy at loading than it was in waterfox.

I'm not saying the bug doesn't exist in firefox, but i can't replicate it. Waterfox on the other hand was a different issue.

Using Windows 11 for this and the latest stable release of both browsers. If I can be arsed I may try again on my Fedora and/or Ubuntu machines when I am home next, but it isn't an annoyance to me, so in all honesty I probably won't and will completely forget about it in a few hours.

Microsoft CEO whinges about Google's default search deals

Its worse than that, When you consider that Bing is just a rebrand of Live Search, which was just a rebrand or Windows Live Search, which was just a rebrand of MSN search; it means that Microsoft has been in the search game since 1998 with essentially the same product, just under a different name.

Its telling that even when people were getting online for the first time they still chose not to use Microsoft's search engine - even when Internet explorer was massive (and default, of course), they had just about killed off Netscape and Chrome wasn't even a twinkle in Google's eye.

They had the chance to get market share when the market was still relatively new, and also take advantage of the dotcom bubble bursting and other search engines, such as infoseek/go.com and Altavista either closing or being bought out. They failed to do so.

Microsoft have always sucked (relatively speaking) at search, their solution has never been to make it better than any other search engines. Its always ether been give it a new name, stick a new logo on it, change the homepage layout or moan about how it's unfair everyone uses something else because of practices they themselves are guilty of.

Edit: While on the subject of branding, one name suggested for the rebrand to Bing from live search, was Bang. Apparently it was rejected because using it as a verb like 'I googled it' was problematic. You'd end up with 'I banged Donald Trump' or 'I banged Hewlett Packard'. Not that anyone has ever used Bing as a verb, but there you go.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

I love my brick!

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: everything is junk

I just had the opposite experience. I had to reinstall windows 11 on a friends laptop. In fact he wanted it setup as a dual boot with Ubuntu. For windows I popped in a flash drive for the install and fired it up. Got to the partioning screen - there are no hard drives showing up because it needed intel rapid storage drivers to recognise the hard drive. Of course, Intel no longer upply these as a zip file, only exe which isn't much use when the only windows machine available is the borked one. Once I eventuallyfound the drivers I restarted the install, to be fair it was simple enough, but there was no mouse pointer, so it was keyboard all the way.

Even when it booted into the 'welcome experience' where I normally tell it not to spy on the user as much the screen was low resolution and there was still no working trackpad. I had to navigate past the part where it was connecting to a network using the keyboard so that it could download the correct drivers. Even then I'd finished the whole config and waited about 15 minutes before the mouse pointer and screen set themselves up properly. Then there were the updates. Windows update kept failing at installing updates, because it had already sucessfully installed the updates but for some reason kept thining it didn't. Apps on the MS store wouldn't install initially when it was trying to restore those, I had to go in cancel the restore and manually click install for several of them. For the average user all of that isn'tsimple stuff. My friend had had a go before but gave up and called me.

For the Ubuntu install it was all fine, usb flash drive inserted, hard drives recognised, partioning was as simple as telling it I wanted to dual boot. The screen resolution was right from the get go and I had a working trackpad. A couple of minutes after install I was prompted to reboot and updates just worked. Much easier than Windows for the average user of the system I was using

Keeping this comment kind of on track, I had a play with ChromeOS flex a month or so ago, the install process was on par with Ubuntu bar the dual boot stuff. However with the linux stuff enabled there were a few quirks and issues - particularly in rendering firefox menus and file mangement between the chrome bits and the linux bits. I'm sure I'd have gotten used to it and based on my experience with it I would definitly class it as Linux.

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

Re: So, this webmail thing

If you're just looking for a webmail client that can connect to your existing IMAP servers, Snappymail is my go-to at the moment. It's simple to set up and has the basics right. I have it hosted on a different machine to my IMAP and it just connects into it.

linky -> https://github.com/the-djmaze/snappymail

link to demo version -> https://snappymail.eu/demo/

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

Why does MS (and a lot of other software maker) feel the need to modify the UI every time they bring out a new version?

Because, when you actually think about it, that's' all they they have to differentiate versions. It's got to the stage where there aren't really any killer new features they can add to sell licences, bug fixes and patches aren't going to tempt people to upgrade alone but a shiny new UI, no matter how bad, will (in the consumer market at least).

Re: marketing lies

Ah, but they didn't actually say that officially. A line transitioning from one topic to another topic by a single developer in a relatively minor presentation about tiles, notifications and action centre at ignite 2015 was seized on by the media and the context it was said in misrepresented to say the least. Because of the media coverage, this was then interpreted as Microsoft policy.

For a start, a developer presentation about interactive tiles is not the place to announce that this is the last version of Windows, Even MS would know this. The developer was actually talking about how Microsoft's culture had changed, up until windows 10 they wouldn't talk about what they were working on, only what they had worked on, but with Windows moving to a more SaaS model where they would be releasing new features for the current version going forward, from windows 10 they could talk about what was being developed. He definitely could have worded the bit about the 'last' version of Windows better but in the context it is in seems that he meant either 'latest' or was simply referring to a culture shift in the way Microsoft now developed windows. He wouldn't have any say over or foresight into future version numbers or branding after all.

Sure, other than saying that the comments referred to Windows being delivered as a service and that they weren't 'speaking to future branding' at the time; Microsoft never really corrected anyone about it or clarified the comment but why would they? I'm sure future windows branding hadn't been planned out at that stage and it was generating them a fair bit of publicity.

For context, here is Jerry Nixon's quote in full.

"So a lot of developers ask where our interactive tiles are, and they're in development is the answer. And that actually gives me a great opportunity to segueway to say that Microsoft is in a brand new state right now that it's never been in before. Here were are at build and ignite, right, and we're talking about Widndows 10 and all the cool things that are coming in Windows 10. But last year at Tech Ed, whenever we would talk about this, what was really happening behind the scenes is we would be talking about what we had built quite a long time ago but we wouldn't be talking about what we were building, right. All the stuff that's coming, because even though we were announcing Windows 8.1 we were all really working on Windows 10. Its sort of a bummer in its own way. But that's not what's happening today. Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10. And it's really brilliant. So I can say things like, yeah we're working on interactive tiles and it's coming to Windows 10 in one of its future updates, right. That's really exciting for me to be able to say. Because it's new culture at Microsoft, that we are now not always thinking about what's not here today. So now we can talk about things in a really new way, and a much more open way than before."

PS. Windows 11 is, in my opinion, awful and they would have been better sticking with Windows 10 a bit more, or even better 7. Oh, and my main desktop runs Fedora Cinnamon, so defo not a Windows fanboi if anyone came to that conclusion ;).

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

Re: There are burgers?

I've only just noticed it too, clicked it and went 'meh'.

Though in my head El Reg still looks like this

https://web.archive.org/web/20000520090526/http://www.theregister.co.uk/

always will do.

One month after Black Hat disclosure, HP's enterprise kit still unpatched

Re: HP Enterprise.... Not the same as HP

Of course the more consumery business is called hp, not a Hewlett Packard in sight but the more enterprisey business is called Hewlett Packard Enterprise, not HP enterprise. To me anything worded as HP in an article like this will refer to hp inc and anything worded as Hewlett Packard Enterprise or HPE would refer to Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, nothing really to get confused about.

If you follow the links in the article they take you to the consumery hp website

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

-> What exactly do you lose by holding back?

-->There is nothing in Big Sur that I want. It offers me nothing.

...Apart from a secure system?

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Paranoid, moi?

Here in Sunny Northern Ireland, the water company is still owned by the government. We don't even have separate water bills, it's covered in the rates (which are cheaper than England's council tax). Yes it's underfunded and they keep threatening us with water bills, but the water quality, environmental performance and customer service has been improving year on year. Its a situation where a Nationalised business works and in my opinion it does a much better job and produces better tasting water than the alleged criminals at Southen Water ever did when I had to deal with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Water

https://news.sky.com/story/southern-water-face-criminal-probe-after-record-126-fine-and-customers-to-get-rebates-11748468

Unfortunately BT is not a water company, part privatising BT will just lead to even more underinvestment when the government realises it doesn't have enough to pay for broadband and the NHS, remove what little competition BT has, which is actually increasing, but not fast enough. It will lead to the UK falling behind other parts of the world. They would be better off giving OFCOM some teeth and forcing it to address competition concerns, make Virgin open their network. The whole argument that BT didn't have to fund their network and Virgin did holds less truth as time moves on

Some of my family live in Australia and that's exactly what they are seeing there with the NBN, given their successive governments seem a little bit more on the ball than your usual Labour MP (We're lucky if Diane Abbot knows what day it is) I suspect British Broadband* will make NBN look like the holy grail.

*I'm hoping that as Northern Ireland isn't part of Britain, merely in the UK, it won't be covered by this rubbish idea

Mamma Mia! UK film fans forced to Q as Vue's website craps itself

Your numbers are out a bit, your figures for Vue are their worldwide numbers not UK.

Vue has 228 sites spanning 10 countries, in the UK it has a 89 cinema estate has 854 screens. They are the smallest of the biggest 3 cinema chains in the UK.

Odeon cinema group has over 360 cinemas worldwide, in the UK it has 121 cinemas according to their corporate web site and over 900 screens

If you add Cineworld in, they have a massive 793 sites worldwide (9,538 screens), their UK operation has 120 cinemas (including picture house) with 1,081 screens