Posts by quartzz

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

I should water my router, right? Water (impure) conducts electricity, so a pool of it under the router will act as an aerial for emitting the signal, yes? Like a dish.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

I have four laptops running Windows 7 (3 laptops one box), and one running Windows 10. The Win 10 laptop is the only one that crashes fairly regularly

ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

I have to admit, recently due to a few (reasonably good) circumstances I've got back into book reading (Ben Elton currently if you're interested). I was reasonably pleased to find I can still manage several pages of a book before needing a pause. Online, my attention span is much le-hey, look, a shiny thing. the thing for me is, so much of what's online is either not worth reading, or you can just never be sure of "how rubbish" the content is

So you're reading a BBC news website, and after 3 paragraphs you realise you aren't interested in the story, you close. or you're reading another article on another website, and you realise it's just garbage, and give up after a page

A book......has been quality controlled

el Reg - superb, but I still have 20 alternate sources of info sitting there in tabs, and the old FOMO regular micro-dopamine hit required from Xitter etc

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

I have 3 x Windows 7 laptops and 1 x Windows 10 laptops. The Windows 10 laptop is the only one which crashes regularly, if it wasn't UEFI BIOS only I'd be running 4 x Windows 7 laptops

Your call is very important to us – which is why we're connecting you to a human

something in the back of my mind says the label "AI" is the same as the label "Turbo" in the 80's - as in, you had "Turbo" sunglasses. It says AI, but it's just one of those adventure books with a "If option A, turn to page 50"

But the turn to page 50 book is priced the same as.....an AI book

Could someone start a database to count how many first-inputs for all chatbots in the world, are the word "human", and how many first mouse clicks for all cute chatbot bouncy icons are the X just above it

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

I don't know if this is at all related....but I could swear products are just getting "worse"

aside from all the crap sold on ebay, supposedly recent products just aren't as well designed, and sometimes it's not a cost thing

I bought a soundbar + sub woofer (£90). on about 1 of every 10 switch ons, it goes pop and switches off. whether or not it's missing a £2 cap(acitor) which would.....stop it doing that

I've also recently bought an Acer monitor. occasionally, when the central heating switches, the monitor goes dark for 2 seconds. again whether it's missing a £2 cap which would regulate things

I have another cheap peripheral. it's got the right number of LED's, but they do the wrong thing. rather than indicate what function is active, they do....."something else"

I've also bought some cheap bluetooth speakers. they MAKE NOISES when you switch them on. they shouldn't make noises. the manufacturers seem to be thinking "this is cheap crap so we have to put on some unwantde gimmick to make you htink you're getting more"

Cybercriminals quickly exploit CrowdStrike chaos

Re: Cyber Pass

There is the BBC, but the majority of the content on their website has been Skynet references. The first 1,000,000 or so were amusing.

Re: "Criminals didn't waste any time"

Who is the criminal, the person who steals £150 trainers, or the brand name that charges £150 for the trainers #edgycomment ...

CrowdStrike Windows patchpocalypse could take weeks to fix, IT admins fear

if I said in this house we have four computers running Windows 7 without any issues. would that be a good or a bad thing

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

look on the bright side - Musk chickened out of the cage fight, at least Zuck is hammering something

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

maybe that forgotten about cage fight will happen after all

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

gets paid

Re: Why so much Musk hate?

a world without the companies he owns, not a world without Musk

you never drive a car and think "if the Arabs had more personality, this would be better to drive"

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

what's wrong with a usb drive?

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

broadband is the enabler for software then you don't own, you rent (Office 365)

Re: "Our Creators"

"creators" is a term invented by the tiktok generation who think that having an upload button = should get paid for it

the BBC uploads content to youtube

should the BBC get ad revenue to help them grow their business?

the world of "having an upload button = should get paid for it"

can someone please tell youtube that the most contribution to a sub optimal viewing experience, is 50% of the cr** posted to youtube

UK won't rush to regulate AI, says first-ever minister for digital brainboxes

Re: UK won't rush to regulate AI

because the government doesn't know what it is, so having a minister for it allows them to pretend that they do

when was the last time a politician had no idea what they were doing?

apart form Boris. Nadine. Barclay. etc. of course

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

Re: Narcissism wins

if he was running x in a civil manner, it wouldn't be called x

this makes me want to buy IBM

and the same might apply to other companies

that's a hint

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

Re: He's hopeful

what a rosy, retarded and realistic future

Re: He's hopeful

the one thing I want from a financial company, is a telephone number with a human on the end

cannot seee that ever happening from tw tter

Meta's fix for teen online mental health? Hold Apple and Google responsible

the BBC have an article about this - non commentable

my first thought "Meta decides to hold someone else responsible for stuff"

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

really efficient innovative vacuum cleaners from Dyson?

I think we should make a lot more of the fact that the UK was the first to break Mach 1 on land

Re: Dumb Project

someone mentioned this a few years ago. but all you'd have is the Brits going "but we did 350 mph using the wheels, that's propperr" and the States would go "yeah dude, we used a jet. and we got 700 mph". and the rest of the world would go "700 mph"

you could say the longer the record stands, the better value it is, and that it would be bad value if you had to do it every few years

this would be the best £12 mill ever spent, especially from the government

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

maybe A-list actors aren't really worth what they're currently being paid, and don't need half a dozen houses

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

it's telling that meta is run by such a child, he can't even utilise the chaos at twitter to promote threads. but that's social media (well, meta and twitter). run by children

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

very slighty off topic apologies, but is this a place to say that "ai" could kill the net? false positives kicking people off their social media accounts (instagram), generating useless "for you" feeds

I reckon ai could even generate "pretend" comments, so if no one is seeing your (instagram?) content (now that the search feature has been removed), you'll get pretend comments from ai, so you'll think they are..

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Re: Hope he's bet the company on this idea

buffering...

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

we'll (we have already) only send out paper mail, when we want you to vote for something

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: re: And people say 'there is no justice'....... They're right!

(sarc, not irony)

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

settings menu's seemed to be 2 or 3 columns (grey background, white box), which was fine. chrome and firefox now seem to have a single setting on each row. which to me wastes a lot of horizontal screen space, and the colour scheme is light grey on white. which sort of sux. maybe you're not meant to change the settings

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

trump's gold dust for data harvesting. it's a case of "can we get away with unbanning him"

just a pesky nucular button

it isn't freedom of speech though....it's freedom of broadcast

Re: There are two possibilities on how it turns out.

more Do 'J'ness

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all: El Reg takes Twitter's anti-mean algorithm for a spin

freedom of speech... - - - freedom of broadcast

The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software goes offline for good

Re: One of those programs cast a long shadow

I do know that in about 94 I attempted a backup of some files using MS backup to floppy. they spanned about 14 disks. one of the disk reads failed and I lost the entire lot.

I did learn things from that

a friend also did a hard drive backup in about 2010. he had two identical model and capacity disks, and he picked the wrong one to write to, and lost everything on that disk. X-s. I learnt things from that too - having different manufracturer hard disks can help you choose the right one

maybe slightly relevent, not myself, but s.w.i.m. might have had the *cough* only illegal thing he ever downloaded to his PC, in the form of the t3rr0r1sts h4ndbook, in about '94, from tucows? or somewhere else. s.w.i.m. can't really remember

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

do we want something that is 'world beating' or not?

innovstion. new boundaries. new science. going where no previously-RAF pilot has gone before

hope this can continue

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Re: Damned if they do, damned if they don't

without reading the details, one scan of an up to date malwarebytes?

Re: Rotten at the Core

yeah to all of that.....

I mean also, someone who was 'tech admin staff' in an army barracks once told me officers were proud of not being able to use technology - cos they drive ships and captain planes. that's what they're proud of

I recently had some (totally inneffective) dealings with the police (someone committed something against me). the police were a.b.s.o.l.u.t.e.l.y u.s.e.l.e.s.s. and the officer who was "dealing" (h-a-h) with my case, declared loudly "this isn't my area of expertise" (in response to question about recommended CCTV).

any companies that deal with things that aren't tech-related (which is most of them, because tech is the specialised subject), appear to be loud and proud that technology isn't their subject

does this have to change? (does this have to change?) (does. this. have. to. change?) more, more, more, more subjects, technology is becoming *core and integral* to the job description

the only thing people can really do, is vote. and by vote, I mean spoil their vote, and if the entire country spoils there vote, see what happens.

and if the entire country spoiling their vote means the same political circus party remains in power, that confirms that the voting system is corrupt

and that's great

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Trump ban means the service has failed

Re: Screwed the pooch and knows it

focussing on the comment about the government regulating soc/media

you can guarantee, that the reasons and the outcome that governments want "regulation" to have, are not the same reasons/outcome users want it to be regulated

ah...what's going on here. mho on something which has lots of angles...

soc/media is un policeable....

why was the most powerful man in the world making announcements on twitter anyway (because it's unfiltered thoughts)

is this proof that the big names combined, "are definitely" more powerful than governments. which we sort of knew......

twitter (and fb) was loving it. priceless publicity, priceless attention

if your average user gets banned, they get annoyed

if the guy with his hand on the nuclear button (or a crazed republican following) gets banned, it's 3...2...1...

Re: Non of us get to judge him now

you don't want to upset someone who can blow up the world tho - via nukes, or followers (followers who have guns - not soc/med followers)