Posts by frankyunderwood123

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Re: Microsoft to blame, surely?

> No, I don't know why a virus definition file would need to be embedded in the kernel.

Well, exactly, Microsoft allow this kind of insanity.

So many people are coming to the defence of microsoft with this excuse.

"But yeah, it failed because it's a kernel driver"

As if it is somehow a good idea to allow a third party to add and update a driver in the frikkin kernel on your operating system without you actually bothering to add systems which check it's not going to screw everything up. I don't care how damn complicated or expensive or time consuming it may be to have end-to-end tests checking this shit, even if it takes 24 hours to run them.

It's better than a global outage that will result in billions of lost revenue.

This is ABSOLUTELY the fault of Microsoft, because it's a design flaw in the OS, or rather, it's a design decision that is bat shit crazy.

"Oh, sure, yeah, we trust loads of third party companies to shove kernel driver updates into automatic windows updates, without us checking. What could possibly go wrong?"

"Uh, end to end tests for any updated kernel drivers? No, we can't do that, we have thousands of vendors pushing code. What could possibly go wrong?"

I'm not saying other OS's are immune to this - of course they aren't - but you sure hope there's a level of sanity that prevents a third party from updating your OS at a kernel level without you having any oversight of it.

FFS!

Re: Microsoft to blame, surely?

And a thumbs-down.

Seriously?

Having watched all of the media showing BSOD all over the world and you thumbs-down a post saying Microsoft are to blame?

Of course they are, an entire Operating system tanked because a souped up Anti-Virus service released some bad code.

Microsoft to blame, surely?

How are Microsoft seemingly getting off scott-free here?

The BSOD issue is _obviously_ shonky coding - seriously it is.

To take down an entire OS due to a 3rd party service failing is cowboy coding circus clown territory.

"It's fine, CrowdStrike _never_ fail, we don't need no graceful failure checks, screw error handling"

Perhaps I'm failing to understand the issue here, or perhaps the world has gone mad.

If you cannot code defensively to ensure third party services don't take down your product when they fail, you have no place as a software engineer or a software company.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Astounding lack of finger pointing at Microsoft - the real news story

It seems that nobody in the wider media is apportioning a lot of blame on Microsoft.

They've been, obviously, very quiet about all of this. The media focus is all on CrowdStrike.

It should be noted that falcon hasn't impacted macOS or Linux users.

The corporate I work for uses Crowdstrike across all operating systems - my work issued mac has falcond running.

I can still use my mac to do my day job.

The fact that Windows BSOD's due to a third party service failure is the real news story here.

Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to NOT bother to code in a failsafe scenario to cover a third party AV service provider failure?

It's coding 101 - or it should be.

One of the defining laws of software is Fail Gracefully.

A complete failure of the OS to boot and for the workaround to be manual intervention on a machine by machine basis?

That beggars belief.

Why are so few people mentioning this glaringly obvious issue?

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

A creature of habit, I tried and failed

Once upon a time, I used Slackware - from 2001 to 2004, it was my primary desktop ... apart from gaming.

I'd previously been through RedHat rpm horrors, I absolutely loved win2k as a Desktop (I still rate it as my favourite)

Bottom line, I've got a bunch of t-shirts where I claim I've been there and done that.

But Manjaro? Arch?

I've been a Debian lad since 2005, so stepping into this world was hard. Really hard.

I can't do it - it's almost like trying to move to iOS from Android.

Maybe I'll try again one day, but for now - I'm a lazy ass old computer nerd.

I've kinda got bored of trying Linux distributions for the sake of it.

I switched to macOS a decade back for my primary "get work done" driver.

I switched to Linux two years back for my primary "play some games" driver - but Debian flavoured.

I just can't be arsed fighting with operating systems anymore...

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Jokes about paying attention...

There's a lot of comments here along the lines of pedestrians should be paying more attention.

I'm absolutely inclined to agree with that, but we all know that humans in general are often rubbish at paying attention.

Even those who think they are amazingly attentive are often suffering from a Dunning–Kruger effect.

The fact remains that at low speeds, some EV's are near silent and humans use both vision and hearing to safely navigate around their environment.

I can imagine all sorts of scenarios where even very attentive people are at risk.

Right now, the amount of EV's on the road is still relatively low, it'll be interesting to see how this safety concern pans out.

Probably the most worrying are SUV's, hybrid or full electric, due to their height and mass.

Getting hit by one of those at even 20mph is going to seriously damage you - and they really are almost silent at that speed.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Not enforceable

There's no way this is going to be able to be enforced.

Sure, the big brands will play along, but there's hundreds of manufacturers, most in Asia - China - just flooding the market with products.

Some cheap and nasty, others cheap and not that bad.

To enforce this, means getting Amazon to enforce the new laws on sellers.

Given Amazon barely even pay tax and get away with it, good luck getting them involved.

Also, AliExpress continues to gain popularity in the UK - despite slow shipping times and often exceptionally questionable goods - the crazy low prices attract people.

We're no longer in a world of Curry's or Maplin (no longer exist) or Argos dominance of tech products - that ended well over a decade back.

We're in a world where you can get product shipped from anywhere on the planet.

Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible

Nokia 3310?

If simple and boring and retro is what you are after, cheap as chips!

October 2025 will be a support massacre for a bunch of Microsoft products

Win 10 will surely get an extension

Unless Microsoft go on an all out blitz to push users to 11 (and let's face it, not like they haven't been trying), they will surely be forced to extend the EOL date.

At the time of writing, 11 only has around 25 percent adoption!

I don't know what the minimum adoption rate Microsoft would consider when pulling the plug on win10 support, but if 50 percent of users are still on it by October 2025, that's a HUGE headache for Microsoft.

Tech titans assemble to decide which jobs AI should cut first

C-Suite first makes sense

The C-Suite in the majority of tech companies are prone to hallucinations just like AI.

This means AI is most suited to replace upper management.

The question then will be whether anyone will be able to tell the difference.

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

An Artifactory is mandatory for big teams

If you aren't using one yet, you probably should be.

And if you are on the JavaScript bucking bronco, where there's a new re-invented lib or framework every other week, you may want to be locking version numbers in your package.json files.

Sure, automated checks (you have got those, right?), do a damn good job of alerting you to security threats, but they'll only catch what is known about, and release updates happen in seconds.

Nominet to restructure, slash jobs after losing 'major deal'

I'm sure at one time, the companies coffers were considerably stocked...

... perhaps all of that silly "playing at being a big tech company" whilst the former CEO was onboard and driving the fat bonuses for the C-Suite gravy train emptied those coffers?

It really did seem there was a rather large start-up style play area for the top brass to muck about with, where every single venture failed, other than the core business.

That core business being the unsexy but incredibly important infrastructure that kept the companies lights on whilst the the money was frittered away on all sorts of daftness.

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

...not intended to appeal to existing Linux users?

"Zorin OS, like its Irish cousin Linux Mint, is not a distro intended to appeal to existing Linux users."

Wow, now just hold on a minute there El Reg!

I've been using Linux since '95 in various flavours, I used to spend hours trying to get devices drivers working by kernel hacking.

I ran slackware as my primary Desktop OS for 2 years, long before Ubuntu appeared and the days of easy installs and configuration.

I've used Linux in all manner of areas - very familiar with what is under the hood.

Guess what, I use Linux Mint for my Gaming needs. (replacing Pop_OS! because I found it to be better)

Why?

Because it's super easy and I don't waste my time on any setup - it just works.

Yeah, I could install a totally minimal distro, heck maybe antiX Linux and then manually setup everything I need, creating a minimalistic system that'll run all my games with zero bloat.

But that'll take a few more hours and really, I've got terrabytes of disk space ... and I just want to play some games dammit.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: It's garbage

"Thanks for the thumbs downs though."

No worries, have one from me, Mr. "Doesn't work on my machine"

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

All aboard the Hype Train!

<blockquote>AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell.</blockquote>

There isn't even any attempt to hide the fact that Dell intend to clamber onto the AI hype train in order to shift product.

You can almost see what will happen next.

Dell will start marketing new lineups of notebooks, where they hype AI capabilities due to "new" chip models - mentioning all the right buzzwords.

Forget the fact that ANY computer that can get onto the internet and use services like ChatGPT can already access AI services.

Forget the fact that even the most powerful notebook GPu/CPu combo won't even come close to matching cloud based services, assuming software on it leverages some form of LLM functionality.

They'll just be slapping stickers on the box "New and improved AI capability!"

It's bullshit.

IBM said to be binning off more staff as 'workforce rebalance' continues

IBM was upskilling all its employees on AI

"IBM was upskilling all its employees on AI"

So those employees can expedite their eventual replacement?

It makes sense, right?

Who better to train the AI to do their job?

The employees start leveraging AI, which improves LLM's and slowly makes those employees redundant.

----------

I'm fairly confident that I've got maybe 5 years before I get made redundant, but that's fine, as I'm only 10 years off from retirement age anyway.

I'm a software engineer with 35 years of experience, yet 25 years of that experience is mostly useless, such is the pace of change.

You can already see, as an engineer, where this is headed. When experienced engineers are impressed with what something like co-pilot can already do, that says a lot.

We know right now it's not capable of designing entire systems, yet it's only a matter of time before, with some experienced proompters, it can do just that.

It's echoing the industrial revolution, when machinery replaced man power.

Human intervention will still be required, but if 90% of the grunt work can be automated and be 1000x faster, a team of 20 can be replaced by a single person.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

Remember, with Windows, this is not your computer...

Microsoft seem hellbent on destroying Windows, don't they?

There doesn't seem to be any joined up thinking in terms of what they ship to the Desktop or how they change the Desktop, just a series of experiments.

It seems to be one massive playground involving billions of Desktops, but the end-user makes none of the rules up and half the time, isn't sure what the games are.

Everything is "opt-out", except for things which you can't "opt-out" of.

Even the "opt-out" things can often mysteriously "opt-in" again after an update.

Talking about updates, it feels like every update is a roll of the dice - you never quite know what you'll get, never exactly know when it'll hit - aside from a few paltry options to skip for a while - and never know whether it's going to break something.

In short, if you use Windows 11 as your personal Desktop Operating system, your computer is no longer yours - it isn't under your control.

Windows 10? Not much better.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

felt the same about the Quest 3

VP - niche product in a niche market.

I sold my Quest 3 on eBay after 2 months - and that has an absolute TON of content available.

VR gaming is still fairly niche, but heck, the Vision Pro effectively becomes a niche product within a niche market - it's only the Apple Hype Machine that is driving sales, which will soon dwindle.

For my tuppence, the Quest gave me rapid headaches until I got my "VR Legs", but sadly often resulted in all-day headaches the next day - classic eye-strain.

Tried everything - four different straps, different glasses prescriptions etc.

But heck, I got my fun out of it - once I'd played Half-Life Alyx, every other game I tried paled by comparison, so there was no point keeping the device.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

heavily customized ...

This screams out in the story, right?

"heavily customized version of Oracle for finance"

You can read that in a number of ways,

"Hacked on core functionality, can no longer upgrade"

"Didn't understand how to develop properly, so customized (hacked), now in world of hurt"

"Oracle was the wrong solution in the first place"

Either way, whenever you read a term like that, "customized", as opposed to "extended" or "framework", it sounds very much like a cluster f0rk.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Kill-switch the internet?

I would imagine by the time the idea of regulation of AI via kill switches becomes actionable it will be far too late.

If we end up with AGI, much like AI now, as well as being in the hands of the top tech companies, it will also be open sourced - it will absolutely find its way out into "the wild".

At that point, game over - an AGI more intelligent, sophisticated and thousands of times faster than the human mind, will just hide in plain sight all over the internet.

We won't even know it's there.

If we do happen to discover it before an impending human extinction event, the only possible salvation will be pretty much turning off the entire internet - globally.

In that worst case fictional scenario, "turning of the entire internet" will probably require destruction of physical infrastructure - and thus the war between man and machine starts...

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Open a second bank account...

This type of data theft due to lax security is so common these days, you pretty much have to take some matters into your own hands.

I pay all my utilities by standing order, from a secondary bank account.

So sure, my address details and whatever can be leaked online, but at least I have some security with my banking options.

If my bank account is compromised due to leaked data, the loss will be minimal, as it only ever contains the amount of money I pay for utilities.

The same secondary bank account is also used for services where I am forced to use direct debit - e.g. internet provider.

I time the payments into that secondary bank account to ensure they arrive at the right time - and these payments are staggered, so there's never a larger lump sum available.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Memory "sticks"? - stopped using them almost a decade back

My goto is simply SD Cards - decent quality high speed ones.

And the only thing I use them for, unless they are in a device like a camera or smartphone? - writing an ISO to them.

I'm struggling to recall the last time someone gave me a memory stick with something on it, or I gave one to someone - probably the same as my title, easily a decade ago.

I do have a few knocking about in drawers, but always reach for an SD Card instead.

When it comes to working from home, Register readers are bucking national trends

I've got a bit lazy and put on a few pounds...

I last went into the office, for about 2 hours, over a year ago.

There's plans to meetup with colleagues at our new offices at the end of the month.

I work for a huge corporate with offices all over the world. The office I work from - or more accurately, where I had the option to work from, was sold.

It belonged to the company. They've recently leased a space 25 percent of the size, with a maximum of 140 seats.

The usual modern mix of meeting rooms, quiet spaces and all that guff.

I may start going in more often, because I really have got lazy over the last almost 4 years now!

I never realised just how much I walked when I was at the office!

The commute, however ... that always holds me back. It's a minimum of 45 minutes drive one-way, which isn't terrible - or wasn't considered terrible 4 years back.

Public transport? Forget it - over 2 hours each way.

I still struggle to comprehend how I managed to put up with over two decades of commuting in my career - having to be in the office every day, 9 to 5.

I couldn't do it anymore, no chance... well, ok, if push came to shove and being noticed at the office made the difference between having a job and not having one?

Things are looking interesting in not such a good way in the IT sector right about now...

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Is ordering workers back to the office just a ruse?

Ok, so maybe not a ruse, but certainly a decision that has other potential benefits ...

If you want to "thin" your workforce in a fairly painless way, both reputationally and cost effectively, it does seem to be a useful way to go about doing it.

I'm sure this "thinning" of the workforce doesn't cut a workforce in the same manner as layoffs, but it's certainly less brutal.

Quite how this impacts talent in your organisation and holding onto it, is probably hard to measure.

It seems that those not interested in career progression are likely to be older workers - people in their 50's and 60's.

They should have an incredibly useful depth of knowledge to draw upon, so just let them work remotely and don't rock that boat.

Those willing to go into the office are clearly going to leap ahead of their peers - it's a no-brainer. No need to explain further.

Those unwilling will either go in begrudgingly or hand in notice.

Congratulations, corporate entity, you have weeded out completely unscientifically, a small portion of your workforce, with hardly any effort.

You just have to hope you haven't lost some of your best workers - and you have to hope losing people doesn't start a donimo effect with the rest of your workforce!

That's a VERY real problem that many of us have seen or been involved with.

-------

As a complete aside, this does open up another area of investigation when researching a new position.

Investigate the office space of companies you get offered interviews at.

If they've recently downsized office space, but still kept the same amount of employees, chances are they are into proper hybrid working for the long term.

The reverse may also apply ;)

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Sadly, there's not much choice out there for printers...

... at least not affordable choices.

Many years back, probably decades now, consumers "fell" for what seemed like incredible printer deals.

Even though they knew, or most did, it was the consumables which made the top consumer manufacturers money, the deals were still fairly good.

However the likes of HP have become more and more agressive in pursuing the crazy idea of subscription purchases and clearly want to lock down printers even more.

Surely at some point consumers are going to just stop buying their products?

If you have yourself an old printer that is still running and you can still get third party inks for it, keep that sucker running as long as you can.

I recently bought a kit for my wife's epson for cleaning the ink overflow tank and doing a firmware reset with a code - it cost me £10.

The firmware reset "tells" the printer that the overflow tank is empty - without that reset, no amount of cleaning the tank and replacing the sponges will work.

That was a year back, the printer is still running - I think it must be 7 years old now.

Given the fact that its a model where the print heads are on the cartridges, I'll be able to keep it ticking over until you can no longer get the catridges.

One thing is for sure, I would NEVER buy a new cheap consumer grade printer now - so I have NO idea what my wife will use when the Epson she has finally bites the dust...

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Hopefully we'll have over 95% Linux gaming compatability before Win 10 EOL

My last hold-out with Windows 10 is gaming.

I haven't used it for anything else for over a decade.

Yep, I'm aware that Linux gaming has come a long way - I have a dual boot on my gaming rig.

About 80% of games I own work flawlessley in Linux, for the others and in particular, for VR gaming, sadly windows is the only option.

I can "trick" my "incompatible" gaming rig to install windows 11, but why?

It brings absolutely nothing to the table for me personally - nothing at all. There is Zero compelling reason to upgrade. Nada. Zilch. The Big Fat Zero.

If I could get 10 percent game performance improvement ? Yeah, maybe.

If the OS was super silent and let me control how I used it, perhaps.

Perhaps the reality for Microsoft is that people really don't like Windows at all.

The shift away from Personal Computers at home, to mobile devices has revealed just how annoying windows is.

Usage of PC's in the home is way down - something to get the homework done on, or to type up a quick word document. Everything is going to be done on a fondle slab.

My guess - Microsoft will be forced to extend Windows 10 support for at least another 2 years beyond the current support end date.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Without knowing how the project was run??

I don't know.

We can make lots of assumptions based on experience and people already have in the comments here.

What those of us with the experience do know, is the following:

* Failure to scope the project correctly in the first instance = impossible to build a good product

* Failure to engage with the client during all phases of development = impossible to build a good product

* Continually changing specifications or very loose specifications = impossible to build a good product

* A waterfall development pattern = impossible to build a good product.

* Poor (no) unit test coverage, poor (no) end-to-end test coverage and poor (no) integration tests = impossible to build a reliable product

* Lack of planned rolling releases, from the very first MVP (minimal viable product), through to the first 1.0.0 release and onward - continuous development.

* Continually changing teams/squads - over a multi-year project, this can murder the best of projects if not handled effectively

* Project rushed out to meet artificial deadlines - usually imposed by someone high up promising the undeliverable.

Brain boffins think they've found the data format we use to store images as memories

Fascinating stuff - and related to dreams, surely?

One thing I've noticed as I get older, something I didn't really pay much attention to when younger, is the moment you start to awake from a dream.

I now get about 5 to 10 seconds of what to all intents and purposes, is a slide deck of ghostly images just before my eyes open - it's right on the cusp of awakening.

Does this mean that dreams are actually constructed using the same methodology proposed in this research?

That it's a recall of the storage of visual data at retina level - and that the brain interprets a slide deck of this visual memory data into full blown dreams?

That it fills in the blanks?

Dunno.

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Got the job done

To this day, the functionality that Wordpad offered is really all I ever needed.

Sure, I haven't used it for decades, but when it comes to office software, I use the absolute bare bones to get the job done.

If it has paragraphs, bold text, italic text, underlined text, blockquotes and lists then what more do you really need?

It did the job - and you can still use it now to create a perfectly acceptable document.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Like Apple did, in other words?

Love or loathe it, macOS has remained familiar since 2001 - and indeed, some parts since inception. (The top context sensitive menu bar)

The dock has been in place for 23 years. The context sensitive menu bar since 1984, 40 years.

Apple clearly realised that extreme and sudden changes to the GUI of an operating system is not a good idea, but gradual incremental changes are.

Microsoft were very much on the same journey, until Windows 8.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Hardware restrictions? - foot, meet gun.

It seems possible that the hardware restrictions imposed in 11 were an attempt to shift sales of PCs and thus the OEM tie-in = more bucks for micro$oft.

I can't see any other reason for it. It clearly failed. There was no compelling reason to upgrade, plus punters had got burned with the disaster that was Windows 8.

Either way, windows 11 aside from this stupid restriction, seems akin to the likes of Windows ME, Vista and Windows 8.

Almost every other release of windows has been terrible.

Microsoft are still trying to recover from "chasing the market" numerous times and failing dismally.

Windows 8 was a classic example of "Oh shit, this Tablet thing is really taking off, quick, drop the netbooks, make a tablet OS, heck, make the entire OS tablet based, the punters will love it!"

We all know how that one turned out.

In terms of the hardware market and the other reason for Microsoft's woes with windows 11 is that PCs got very powerful, very quickly.

A bit like peak smartphone - the devices shipped were so powerful, nobody needed to upgrade for years, which broke the cycle of upgrading hardware to meet the demands of the OS or software.

"Hey, let's impose some arbitrary hardware restrictions to shift sales."

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Will users go back to torrents?

Not that long ago, before streaming had taken off, I'd argue an exceptionally large percentage of people watched pirated video content.

They may not have downloaded it themselves, but got content from friends or more often than not, work.

I'm sure many of us will remember a sneaky network share or two. Bring along your USB stick, grab a movie.

It was so incredibly normalised - just like in previous decades, mp3s, ripping CD's and DVD's, tape-to-tape VHS, recording vinyl onto tape.

All of these things were done by otherwise completely law abiding citizens.

Piracy got easier and easier, but at the same time, streaming services started to be even easier - I think it was £6 a month when Netflix first came out.

We really believed the hype and the promise that you would soon be able to access any video content, going back decades.

That turned out to be bullshit, but we all rushed into it anyway - mostly because of original content, some of it exceptionally good.

Roll on a decade and we've got streaming services up the wazoo - all competing, all trying to grab eyeballs - and slowly but surely ramping up the monthly fees.

In the meantime torrent sites were hit hard and some of the biggest shut up shop.

I'd argue that the streaming services are on the cusp of reversing the move away from pirated content.

If they keep going on like this, especially in a cost-of-living crisis, pirated video content will once again become dominant and normalised.

No, it never really went away, but it certainly got way less prevalent.

We never did get what we hoped for - a streaming service that had everything you could ever want.

Heck, I'd pay £30 a month for that, so long as there were no ads.

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

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

He's certainly smarter than Trump, but it's exactly the same game plan that you've described.

When all is good - "It was me!"

When all is bad - "It's you!"

Very child like, but unfortunately for the world, it has repercussions.

When these big babies throw their toys, it echoes.

I guess it's always been the same. Perhaps Genghis Khan was just a big man-child, Hitler too.

Putin certainly is.

Maybe it's a trait wedded to that level of greatness or notoriety - that level of drive.

"I'm a gonna show all of them, just watch me!" - like a child chastised who wants to exact revenge.

Monsters, basically. A certain kind of intelligence and drive that propels them to the top, but lacking ... humanity. No empathy. Broken, basically.

A child can be born physically deformed and it's obvious. If they are lucky, they can propel themselves forwards and enjoy a good life.

A child can be born pretty much a moron, same outcome.

But what of children born with a brain deformity that isn't picked up? Super intelligent, but completely lacking some kind of empathy gene?

Nothing holds them back, nothing at all, because they don't actually give a fuck.

They mimic that side of human behaviour - cloak themselves.

That's Musk.

God help us all.

Black Friday? More like Blackout Friday for HSBC's online and mobile banking

I'm sure this is frequent for HSBC

I could be having memory issues, but it seems whenever there's an excessive bank service outage, HSBC always is mentioned.

I can't recall many other banks suffering the same frequency. I can't recall any incidents at my bank of choice in the last decade or more.

Seems that avoiding HSBC is the trick here and if you are a customer, time to switch!

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

Less intrusive ads are the answer

YouTube ads are horribly intrusive.

Waiting a few seconds to watch an ad I don't care about, sure, I can stomach that.

An abrupt advert right in the middle of a video I'm watching? That makes me sick.

I immediately reach for the ad-blocker.

Actually, the real answer is a decentralised solution, where content creators decide on how they want to earn revenue.

Already, many feature sponsors in their videos, which I'm totally fine with.

Usually, these are relevant to the content and more importantly, the creators are able to mesh adverts into their creations.

Obviously this provides no revenue to Google.

Disruption is required - but the level of disruption needs to be so damn huge, so profound, it's hard to see it happening.

Nobody yet has managed to truly challenge Twitter, FaceBook or YouTube.

The 'eyeballs' have it - the sheer volume of "hits".

It's the same reason nobody can challenge eBay - it's almost impossible to upset a Monopoly, unless laws change globally.

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

If it replaces marketing deadwood, I'm all for it...

Seems like a perfect fit for 99% of the marketing crap most companies churn out.

The vast bulk of it reads like AI generated content, even though it's created by humans, so may as well chop all that deadwood away and do the world a favour.

Mac daddy Woz hospitalized in Mexico over mystery malady

Good luck Woz! - no mystery though

The guy is 73, he's overweight. Sad to say, he's probably close to morbidly obese - not exactly uncommon in our modern times.

Yeah, I know photos online of someone don't prove it - but heck, he isn't exactly Mr. Skinny. Modern disease, many have it. Could be diabetes - could be just he's getting old.

Fingers crossed he makes it through this - and hopefully has a diet change and lives decades longer!

He's a legend.

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

Huge experience required...

The cloud may be the marketing buzz-word of the moment and infrastructure as code may be the developer buzz-word, but the bottom line is you need some serious chops to be managing cloud infrastructure at a high level.

The "cloud" and how services are deployed now is more aligned with automation of the grunt work - automation has taken out many jobs in the IT sector.

However, the chops required to understand the interaction of services, to understand how to handle load, how to monitor and how to secure infrastructure is much the same.

The level of knowledge required to excel and command a high salary is ridiculously steep - there's incredible depth required from an experience point of view.

Anyone with a little bit of tinkering nous can deploy services to the cloud - the barriers to that have dropped considerably - but without years of experience, they will never cut it.

You still need all the levels of knowledge that were around before "cloud" and before automation of grunt-work.

Probably more these days.

There's a reason competent devops engineers are in demand - it's a ridiculously difficult job!

Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

Why even bother with a contract for SIM-only?

What is the standard monthly charge on some of these networks?

"Which? calculated that a customer who took out a SIM-only 24-month contract in November 2022 will end up paying £124.21 more than they had initially expected over the life of the contract if they are on Virgin Media O2."

Looks like some punters are paying £13 for 30gb of data, which can be had for £8 elsewhere - and then paying an extra fiver on top - yikes.

Pays to shop around for deals that don't have _any_ contracts at all - just a standard monthly fee.

Dependent on your location, you can choose from a quite a few - location being which network you get the best reception from.

I'm currently on Smarty - £8 for 16gb, but you can get 40gb for £10 - as I rarely use more than 1gb a month, that's enough - it's just "broadband insurance" for me - if my fibre connection goes down, I've got 15gb to play with.

GifGaf have some good deals too.

Why anyone would opt for a contract Sim only, is beyond me - especially 24 months, that's just a bit silly really.

Also phone "voice minutes" and "texts" are becoming increasingly irrelevant, when so many people just use data to make calls on the app of their choosing - e.g. WhatsApp.

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

The Great Firewall of Britain?

Seriously, that's what this ridiculous bill amounts to.

There is only one way to even begin to make this bill and thus online safety possible and that is to employ the same level of blocking and monitoring that China does.

Of course, there is another way - it's called education.

It's also called parental guidance.

When I was a nipper in the 1970's, our parents hammered home to us to NOT talk to strangers, to understand the warning signs, to be cautious - above all, to be street wise and savvy.

That was enough to keep most of us relatively safe - within reason.

It's a harsh world, bad things happen.

Education is the ONLY way to protect children online - to arm them with the know-how to avoid, as best they can, the bad things.

The moment any government decides they have a better plan, is effectively the end of democracy.

I think we're relatively safe right now though - the government we currently have are all about making noises rather than taking action.

The signing of this bill will be very much "we've done our job".

It will NEVER be enforced - it's just a bunch of hot air so government can say they've fixed it, simply because they say they have.

Actions are not required, just saying you're doing it is good enough.

Phew, for once, government incompetence saves the day...

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

Yep, but the media can't get any decent headlines of of "machine learning" or "large language models", so they purposefully or ignorantly confuse it with Artificial Intelligence.

The reality is what we really have is a super advanced parlour trick - word prediction.

It is incredibly impressive and it is certainly incredibly useful, but it isn't in any way "intelligent".

The rising power of processing has given birth to ML - the concepts have been around for decades, as has much of the math, but it is only relatively recently where we've had the sheer horse power to make ML a viable tool.

I'm not sure of the exact timelines at play here, but roll back a decade and imagine the same LLM's at play, how long would it take to compute a natural language input to GPT-4?

Probably too long to make it a viable "chat like" option - if you ask a question and 20 minutes later, you still haven't got a response, it remains a prototype for research rather than a product ready for mass adoption.

Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids

The Catholic Clergy have always been keen on snakes...

Sometimes even the trouser variety.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Arm has been awesome for mac users

I guess not much to really add other than the title.

Apple Silicon is such a profound improvement over Intel that there's not a single reviewer since release that doubts the move has been incredible.

Sure, we're dealing with Apple and their often utterly awful Intel macBooks with thermal throttling up the wazoo (I'm looking at you, 2018 models) and comparing that to Apple Silicon, but it's a valid enough comparison.

Power consumption to performance is again something that no reviewer could deny has been nothing short of triumphant.

Is it all a bed of roses? Hell no, depends on the use case - the bang for buck, especially in areas such as 3D rendering, isn't all that.

Intel can still wipe the floor with Apple Silicon for many tasks - the difference is it does it with much higher power consumption.

The competition is healthy though. Microsoft seems to be totally onboard - they'd be fools not to be.

Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough

I don't understand this comment

Thanks for the deep and insightful review there, it would be nice if I could say "you nailed it", but sadly your point of view is considerably lacking in both detail and direction.

Hey, I guess there's just millions of really smart people out there using Apple products who love "fancy-looking wrapping" and "lap it up for no sensible reason."

I'm one of them, writing this on my "fancy-looking wrapping" mac Pro M1, I'm lapping it up man!

What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day?

Lotus 1-2-3, 1991

How I loved that! - I was a GOD using that at my company at the time, knowing how to leverage and use it.

I'll fess up, everyone else at my company was computer illiterate - it was an electrical engineering company and I was a draughtsman using pen and ink. No CAD for us at that time.

I managed to leverage it to create printouts which I fed through our huge chemical printer, light + chemicals imprinted it onto film which we could tape onto manually draughted floor layouts also on film - we used pen and ink to draw onto them. This film drawings were then printed onto paper and sent out to site - mostly shopping centre construction sites. It was complicated, hard to describe these days.

It was such a lo-fi and nuts idea, I'd use it to make legends and the update history of electrical drawing plans.

Fond memories. I was completely unaware of what spreadsheet software even was before that. Since then, my skills in spreadsheets have not got any better - hate how they developed after those times.

I'm a software engineer now. I don't need no stinking spreadsheets for my data...

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Stuck with gas way past 2050?

Or are we?

We have to dismiss heat pumps as the overall solution, due to the unbelievable cost associated with retrofitting millions of older homes in a timeframe of two decades.

Heat pumps are part of the solution, but only a relatively small part.

The grander solution is to stop using natural gas to produce electricity, switching completely to renewables.

Older properties unsuited to heat pumps would have gas boilers replaced by electric boilers.

It's a tough ask, but it is the only viable solution to net zero the UK actually has.

It's the most obvious choice - a slow and steady on-streaming of more and more renewable energy, a phasing out of using gas to generate electricity, coupled with a slow and steady replacement of the domestic gas network.

IT networks under attack via critical Confluence zero-day. Patch now

But corporates gonna corporate anyway...

I guess it's just developers or mostly developers that just know all of the products that Atlassian put out there are ... not exactly a beacon of software engineering skill.

Bloated beyond belief, frustrating to work with, riddled with bugs and upgrades are a bloody nightmare.

It seems the sales power of Atlassian appeals to bean counters and middle management - who are often not the main users of the pile of steaming cruft that Atlassian churn out.

I hate Confluence - bug ridden swamp of impossibility of discovery.

To create a document in Confluence is to pretty much send it into oblivion - good luck ever finding it again, unless you bookmark it.

That's my experience, anyway.

I literally have to make browser bookmarks for documents, because I know actually trying to find them is an exercise in sheer frustration.

Sure, this article is about confluence insecurity - but the two go hand it hand.

The system is so bloated with seldom used features and so popular with corporates, it's a hackers paradise.

As for Jira? I have so many bad words to say about that pile of steaming turd.

Corporates gonna corporate - Atlassian clearly have an aggressive sales team, willing to sell "the shiny" to upper management or middle management that don't really use the software.

I despise confluence and jira with equal measures.

The worst part is a seemingly continuous upgrade / lets change everything thing - not just at Atlassian level, but also at the corporate level. A constant meddling and dabbling with a stupidly large set of bloated features.

So often, data is lost in these kinds of processes, or it becomes a "We're upgrading to this version, but you may lose data, so move it ... somewhere."

Quite where, is never really discussed - "oneDrive!"

ANGRY developer shouting at the sky...

AMD graphics card users report gremlins with Windows 11

Re: Will no one just fess up?

Maybe it is.

When once upon a time, I used windows as my primary OS, it was a well know "joke" that every other windows release was "Beta"

But they surpassed themselves with windows releases by making sweeping changes to the UI not just once, but three times.

Windows 8 was a disaster - it was Microsoft trying to enter the mobile OS game by cobbling together a single unified OS.

It was pants.

They rolled it back a little with Windows 10, then went and threw the baby out with bathwater AGAIN with windows 11.

No lessons learned, continuous dabbling - beta releases all round.

The glory days were win2k, winXP and win7 - everything since has been annoying and awful.

The direction they are headed? Cloud only "headless" PC's with AI built in, whether you like it or not.

It's going to be an operating system as a service eventually - a monthly fee, where microsoft can change _anything_ on your computer _whenever_ they want.

ALL of your data will be in the cloud, you WILL have AI whether you like it or not.

You will get updates, whether you want them or not - but you won't even notice it happening. No warning. No choice.

It isn't your computer, it isn't your operating system, it isn't your data.

If you are a smart computer user and still using windows? - time to get out now - plenty of alternatives out there!

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

Careful with that screen share then...

I was having a chat with a fellow dev about Stable Diffusion and we got talking about a demo to multiple people over Zoom.

The thing is, Stable Diffusion can sometimes randomly result in some very NSFW results.

There's different types of NSFW - not all is pron related.

I can easily see AI suggestions in screen shares during live demo's going all sorts of wrong.

Perhaps the presenter had some chats on Teams about sensitive work related stuff and somehow, that ends up in the mix.

We all have seen gaffs that are just human error - the person sharing the screen forgets to close a private chat window, or doesn't close it down and a message popup appears "Yeah, I agree, Mandy has amazing tits!"

I can see AI causing all sorts of issues like this - bringing up suggestions based on private data that isn't flagged correctly.

"Suggestions based on "everyone knows Eric is a total dickwad:""

"Here's some results for "We all know the boss is shagging his PA, even his wife does:""

And there you are, sharing your screen in a meeting, with that AI generated content just waiting to trip you up.

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

Tried Debian flavour, decided on Ubuntu one

I'm reasonably experienced with Linux, but got tired of spending hours dabbling and setting stuff up, when I just wanted a simple env to "get stuff done"

I do have Bookworm installed on a devops test box I have, which I use ... for devops meddling about.

I've also got a gaming rig, that was running PoPOs.

Recently switched it to Linux Mint, Ubuntu flavour - I love it.

It's slick, keeps out my way and allows me to just "get stuff done"

Recently started dabbling with Stable Diffusion - and I just couldn't be arsed struggling with any dependencies and mucking about with apt sources to get the Nvidia drivers installed etc.

Installed Linux Mint, installed Stable Diffusion, up and running in minutes.

Snap? I really don't care. I understand why Snap exists, I have no dog in the fight - I just want simple.

I cut my teeth on Slackware and RedHat way back in the mid to late 90's - it was fun at the time, but I've got better stuff to do.

The debian flavour is ok - it works.

For me, personally, the Ubuntu flavour is quicker, easier - set and forget, get some work done.