Posts by ITMA

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

"..and Steve's most astonishing invention - the colour black."

I think the Martin Marietta Corp might have a word or two to say about that.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4111762A/en

And those of a monotheistic religious persuasion might also wish to quarrel with Steve Jobs about it:

Book of Genesis

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Darkness=black ergo prior art.

Re: Acorn electron, Sinclair QL, various pre-built Raspberry Pies...

If this is a serious application, then I think Apple need new patent lawyers as the ones they currently must be utterly crap.

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

Re: Dissect mispronunciation.

"I have over 20 years experience in proofreading and publishing, and there are many instances of the truth being corrupted by illiterate busybodies for various nefarious (or even innocent) reasons"

Like the word "hologram".

The "Tupac Hologram" - NO IT IS NOT!

The election campaign of Narendra Modi by "hologram" - NO IT BLOODY WASN'T!!!!

Just because something appears 3D does NOT, repeat NOT make it a hologram.

And as it happens neither the Narendra Modi "hologram" nor Tupac "hologram" even did that (appear 3D). People standing to the left of each of those see EXACTLY the same view as people in the centre and people off the far right. IF they were holograms they should see different views. BUT THEY DO NOT.

Likewise, projecting an image that appears to hang or "float" in mid-air does NOT make it a hologram.

Of course most know why they try to label such images as "holograms". It makes them sound (and thus sell) far better than if they called them what they actually are - plain old 3D or video versions of ye old "Pepper's Ghost" illusion.

Ukraine seeks volunteers to defend networks as Russian troops menace Kyiv

Re: Sink 'em

Very true.

But I can have a good guess what US subs are doing right now - and it won't be just cruising around like nothing was going on.

And between the US and Russia - I know who I'd bet on to know where the other side's subs are. Even the ones not sitting in ports rotting.

Re: No help required!

And Putin has now made his threat of nuclear retaliation overtly.

If Putin for one second thinks there will be anything left alive in what is now called Russia if he makes good on that threat, I think he is seriously mentally ill.

There won't be.

The utterly insance tragedy of this man's delusion is that there is likely to be not much left alive anywhere else on this planet either.

Dobby needs to go.

Re: No help required!

Putin probably thinks he is demonstrating that he is the "strong iron man of Russia".

Sorry mate - you just look like a Soviet era dinosaur with archaic Soviet era dinosaur thinking.

And as for that thinly veiled threat of nuclear retaliation if anyone "interferes" - What you think MAD has gone way?

Think again matey....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X236AeHt5RY

Substitute "Putin" for "Snow"

I wonder if the Russian people really understand where this dinosaur is taking them.

Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

Re: Compare cars and computers

Henry? What happened to Oliver? LOL

A guy I used to know way back swore blind by old type Landies and said he "didn't trust any vehicle I couldn't fix with some screw drivers, spanners, a lump hammer and a blow torch".

Re: Compare cars and computers

You must have an old car....

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

And for everything else use Anusol.

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

Especially as Mickysoft keep trying to force people to save things where Mickysoft say to - increasingly some Mickysoft online crap line OneDrive

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

I know users who have yet to grasp the concept that you can create folders and subfolders to store and organise emails in....

European Union takes China to WTO over smartphone patents

Re: Appears Apple don't give a shit about their phones being ripped off

We have an IP lawyer at work....

I'll get him on the case....

Re: Appears Apple don't give a shit about their phones being ripped off

"If you put a rounded corner on a phone and Apple has done the same"

Define "Rounded"...

Since making a truly "square" corner is very, very, very hard it comes to "how rounded"?

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

Back in my younger days - some time in the precambrian - those two basitans of Government were know by their "alternate" names:

Job Centre - The Joke Shop. Need I say more....

Local DHSS Office - The "Fun" Factory, as it was always such fun everytime one had to go there about your benefits claim (like it not being paid)

Experiments and hidden features: Microsoft plans Windows Insiders shakeup

Why bother???

Why are Microsoft even bothering with the "Insiders Programme" since they seem to have adopted the policy of using paying customers to do almost all of their testing anyway - whether customers want to be used as guinea pigs or not?

As a paying customer one could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft do sod all testing themselves.

Their own QC and change management appear to be garbage verging non-existent.

Update 'designed to improve user experience' takes down the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal

Oh what a f**k up....

Now here is a question - how the hell did this "update" get through Change Management?

Any answers from your side Microsoft?

You DO do proper change management.... DON'T YOU???

I'm afraid there is one thing I can say about this....

WHAT A FUCK UP!!!!!

Still down with:

Service Unavailable

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

OS/2

Does anybody know who/where the definition of "OS/2" standing for "Oh Shit/2" came from?

LOL

Re: Windows 95 was more masterful marketing

Has it been officially denied?

If it has, then it must be true... LOL

EC president promises European Chips Act to quadruple homegrown production by 2030

Re: Hmmmm

The booze I've drunk or the booze she has?

Hmmmm

Is it me or does the positioning of the mic and the blue background make her look like some Pythonesque cartoon cutout?

Or is Ursula really a cardboard cutout? LOL

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: The "inspector"

TWO TV channels????

How the bloody hell did you get two you rich bugger?

Microsoft brings Jenny, Aria, and more interface tweaks to new Windows 11 Insider build

Re: Microsoft is starting to nag you about your PC bneing too old...

Now here is a thought...

To what degree is this "stagnation" of innovation due to the ability to "patent" software and, more than that, ever more ridiculously vagure concepts?

For example patenting "swipe left to right"

Re: Microsoft is starting to nag you about your PC bneing too old...

I feel a class action being brought against Microsoft - probably in both the US and Europe....

You missed a word out....

"So apparently I'm to be nagged to replace my 1 year and a few months old box so that Microsoft can shill their SHITE software.."

OpenShell has been working on a classic replacement for Windows 11's Start menu

"whereas 11 not only maintains its egotistical belief that it knows better than any of its users do"

That reminds me of the my automatic response everytime I see the Windows 10 "Welcome" shite wizard:

"Leave everything to us...."

NOT A F****** CHANCE MATEY!!!!

Re: Like my wife

Just like supermarkets....

And probably with the same motive.

And while I'm here - which twat at Microsoft thought it a brilliant idea to rollout that predicitive text feature in Outlook and Word TURNED ON!!!!

I fully appreciated some may find it very useful. But they are MY COMPUTERS and MY BLOODY PHONE so stop forcing crap on me. Tell me it is there and let ME decide if I want to use it.

DO NOT turn it on and then leave me having to f**** about wasting time finding out how to turn the stupid thing off..

You may think him a twat - but he's no where near as big a twat as the one who decided:

"I know! Let's put the Windows 8 Metro shite interface on Server 2012!"

Re: Dear Microsoft.....

"> Rule#1: If it ain't broke ...

Not relevant to Microsoft products."

Ah... You mean the Microsoft internal memo:

"If it ain't broke - BREAK IT!! If it is already broken, break it some more!"

Re: "If it ain't broke..."

Sorry - actually no I'm not sorry - but that is a load of dingo's kidneys.

You are confusing "ludites" with those who just don't see the point of change for the sake of it.

Change that produces benefit can be fine, providing the benefits it brings outweigh the downsides - and there are almost always downsides to any change.

Too many of the more recent changes in the Windows GUI, are "New Coke" fiascos.

Nothing wrong with the old one and the bulk of the changes seem to have no real benefit for most - the biggest benefits I can think of being to those who thought up these changes to try to justify their jobs.

Dear Microsoft.....

Rule #1

If it ain't broke - DON'T BLOODY FIX IT!!!!!

Almost there: James Webb Space Telescope frees its mirrors and prepares for insertion

Just think of the cost im guineas! Shocking!

Yes they do.

He sits at the desk next to A. Smidgen......

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Waaat ?

"Not a huge fan of Server Core myself"

I am 100% with you there.

Yes I know PowerShell is very powerful and that virtually all of the server managemenet "applets" are just pretty graphical front ends which effectively "spit out" PowerShell commmanrds.

I also appreciate there is significant overhead to have the WIndows GUI on a server.

But my philisophy is this - I am using and have been using for amany years Windows Server as much because it has the WIndows GUI through which you can do pretty much everything without having to learn a whole load of cryptic commands

If I really wanted to have to learn lots of cryptic commands to do virtually anything, I'd be using bloody Linux and not Windows.

Re: Waaat ?

I'd still like to know which sick **** decided the Metro interface should put on Windows Server 2012 r2.

Find his car on a very hot day and secrete some of smelliest cheese on the planet and let it sit there, baking in the heat.

Payback for the "pleasure" the Metro interface has given on a server.

Re: Dark?

My standard settings for command prompt and powershell are green text on a black background.

Nostalgic perhaps, but I also find green text far more restful toi look at on a black background than white text. White text on black I tend to find harsh.

Re: Dark?

"Don't forget the BBC Micro - white text on a black screen when you powered it on.

Even their word processors used the black background"

Not if you had one of those nice crisp green phosphor monochrome monitors it didn't, such as the Philips BM-7502.

I still have mine. And it still works!

If you were a flash git, you had the amber phosphor version, the BM-7522, just to be different.

And several models of RGB monitor, particularly the later Philips ones, had a "green screen" button - not as crisp text though since you still where reading it on a screen with RGB phosphor triads.

Flash? Nu-uh. Windows 11 users complain of slow NVMe SSD performance

Re: Microsoft, masters of mediocre

I don't know....

They appear to have managed to scale up the philosophy of the "Focused Inbox" (YUK!!!) roll-out debacle and made it the basis for an entire OS - nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it, yet you are having it anyway.

'AV SUM!!

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

Re: I've never worked out why being spied on by a foreign Government is scarier...

Ok - try to do almost anything which does not contain ANYTHING made in China.

You'll find it very hard, especially technology.

What an utter crock.....

Ok, if the route the UK commission wishes to take is "ban HikVision because of the application one of its major customers (the Chinese Government) uses their products for".

Then the next logical step is ban everything made in the UK because we sell weapons and weapons systems to anyone with the money and the rigtht old boys club connections.

How many such products used for "nefariouos activities" by foreign governments contain ARM technology? BAN ARM!

Utterly childish attitude and pure political posturing to be seen to be doing something when the reality is UK commission can do SFA.

It's the old "what does the killing? - the hammer or the killer weilding it instead of using it to build something?"

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

Re: Oh, about a year should do it

The magic words to deploy in business environments when asked about "when can we get W11"? are...

ROI - Return On Investment.

What planet are Microsoft on if they think a small business with 70+ machines, all of which are perfectly good capable machines running W10, are going to chuck them all and buy new ones just to run W11.

Personally, without a bloody good reason not too, I'm going to do what I did with W7. Wait until EOL approaches and we've had maximum value out of the cash we've spent on machines.

Re: Well...

But here is the real question...

What does W11 do for you that W10 does not?

When considering things such as "starts much faster", how much of that is W11 and how much is really the hardware upgrades just to meet W11's minimum system requirements?

Re: Dear Microsoft

"Dear Microsoft

Reinstate your testing team."

Erm.... We ARE the testing team.....

And the scary bit is Microsoft seems to think there is nothing wrong with that....

Why machine-learning chatbots find it difficult to respond to idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, sarcasm

Temba his arms wide :)

Re: Just one slight problem.... AAA+ Rules in All the Very Best of Almost Perfect AIRoosts

"The ones who are complaining that a machine is not replying to questions equally as well or even better than a smarter human might"

That's not my issue at all.

I don't give a monkeys about the technology or how good (or crap) it is or is not. If I contact any organisation about anything I want to communicate with a HUMAN BEING. I do NOT want to communicate with a F*****G "bot".

Frankly I find being met by/directed to any type of bot as a form of communication personally insulting.

The ONLY thing a bot communicates to me is that the organisation using them doesn't give a sh*t and is not interesting in my business.

The technology will NEVER be good enough becuase it is not nor will it ever be a human being. And I wish to communicate with human beings.

Just one slight problem....

There is just one slight problem with all these chat bots and the time, effort and no doubt money, going into their R&D and it is this...

If ever I'm online or even other situation (such as phone) and want to chat - it is to an EFFING PERSON!!!! Not some bloody piece of software!

If I wanted to "chat" a none human, top of my list is my cat.

Some s**t's bit of software that they think is clever is so far down my list it isn't even in this solar system.

I loathe bloody chat bots.

Product release cycles are killing the environment, techies tell British Computer Society

Re: Complete waste of time.

You can sort of understand this approach when many "unbranded" spares are NOT from the same factory as the branded ones, but are instead cheap, very poor quality rip-offs from a certain part of the world.

You have to see some of the horrors of electrical "cheap knock-offs" on Big Clive's Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA

Or Dave Jones EEVBlog channel, who is even closer to the source:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DjFE7Xf11URZqWBigcVOQ

But that will always be an issue for as long as (say) a printer costs £50 but almost anything for the same printer classed as a "spare" costs more than the bloody printer!

Re: "annual product release cycles"

But the point is we shouldn't HAVE to faff about like this.

What on earth does Windows 10 do that absolutely cannot be printed using PCL4?

Fundamentally printing is making (predominantly black) marks on paper. That hasn't changed for a long time and printers today are still doing the same thing. So what is so earth shatteringly spectacular that Windows 10 can do when it comes to making (predominantly black) marks on sheets of paper that it has to use the latest PCL and can't do it with PCL4?

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

Not to mention the fact that if the "master clock" was controlling the same "heaters with timers", unless they had battery backup every time the master clock switches them off, all the timers go out of sync with the actual time.

That is/was the favourite exploit of the chairman at an outfit I know. He would go around and switch the heaters, each with its own timer and adjustable thermostat, off at the wall if it felt too warm and out went the time settings.

He obviously hadn't heard of a "thermostat" to set the temperature or that "if too warm, turn it down it will go off by itself".

Cisco to face trial over trade secrets theft, NDA breach claims after losing attempt to swat Leadfactors lawsuit

Re: Cisco Webex Hologram

Just becaue something looks 3D deos NOT make it a hologram.

The data content of a true hologram is hugely, staggeringly VAST.

The images Microsoft's Hololens produces are NOT holograms.

Those Tupac on stage things are NOT holograms. Strictly speaking they are video version of Pepper's Ghost, a Victorian optical illusion, with no parallax. A person to the left of the stage sees EXACTLY the same as a person off to the right. With a TRUE hologram they each see a different view.

So even if three people, wearing a headset each, saw the same "projection" from a different viewpoint, that still doesn't make it a hologram, since each would simply be viewing a different projection generated for their viewpoint only by their device.

It would require all three seeing the same "projection" from a SINGLE device but viewing from different places - one on the left, one in the centre and one to the right - and yet EACH seeing a different image with correct view for their position to even get close to a hologram. And if they moved position their viewpoint they see should also change to match - all from the SAME projection.