Posts by 43300

See through local AI lies with Irish eyes

I see my downvote stalker is still active (I've tried posting the same non-controversial thing with my username and anonymously a few times, and only the one with my username gets the downvote - and in the case of this thread I think references to Taking Heads songs, in response to the first paragraph of the article, are pretty non-controversial!). I think of him as 'Onny' (I'm sure you can all work out what this is short for), and imagine him as a frustrated bloke still living with his mum, hunched over a computer in the corner of his bedroom setting up scripts to downvote all posts by anyone who has dared to disagree with him over something on an online forum. The speed with which the downvotes appear does indicate a script, as nobody could be so obsessed that they are checking Reg comments all the time.

I'm sure I'm not the only one on his 'enemy' list for disagreeing with something (I've no idea what) - and I expect this explains why many non-controversial posts by various posters get an automatic downvote...

Downvote coming soon!

3... 2... 1...

On the road to nowhere, surely?

"The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Enforce project has a suggestion"

Is this a once in a lifetime suggestion?

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Slight tangent here, but do others agree that Onenote is utterly shit? It didn't ought to be difficult to design an onscreen notebook (and many have managed it quite competently), but Onenote feel like it was designed by someone not familiar with the concept of a notebook.

Plus its random lengthy syncing delays make it very frustrating if trying to use on more than one device.

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

Re: hooray

And some of those "free" museums put considerable pressure on everyone to give a "suggested donation" anyway...

"So you have to go during work hours and undoubtedly have to travel to London or close by and it's voluntary so anyone who can't afford to travel or take time off is basically automatically excluded. Talk about selection bias."

And even if you are prepared to do all that, your views will be completely ignored if they don't agree with the pre-determined outcome.

Does anyone still believe that these government whitewashing exercises actually achieve anything?

UK manufacturers under cyber fire with 80% reporting attacks

Re: Tis a Puzzlement

That risk is often going to exist though, so better to keep it physically disconnected. Any firmware updates can be done via USB.

Re: Tis a Puzzlement

Rather missing the point! The standard office systems will obviously exist, but there is no need for production-line equipment to be connected to the open internet.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: Apples and Oranges

Depends on your use cases.

Software is of course the big one - lots simply not available for anything apart from Windows. Another is that Apple doesn't do ruggedised devices at all, so if you need any of those, you are out of luck (and ruggedised cases are never as effective as devices which are actually ruggedlised).

And you would need to look at what the support tickets are actually about - if they are for software rather than hardware / OS, you might be getting them irrespective of platform.

As regards speed of patching of iOS versus Android, it's worth pointing out that updates to iOS devices are available as soon as Apple releases them, whereas Android updates go through the phone manufacturers who may or may not release them in a timely manner.

And as regards ARM, I can't see how use of Macs demonstrates that business customers are keen on ARM chips, given that Macs are now only available with ARM chips! It's far more likely that they just want Macs and aren't interested in the CPU. This is borne out by the fact that ARM Windows machines are still niche and most businesses avoid them.

Time to end the 'uncontrolled experiment' of social media on kids, scientists say

Re: Think of the Children!!!!!!

The difference is that those things you mention were realistically only something which a small minority engaged with - social media is the opposite where it's only the minority which doesn't engage with it. It's also far more pervasive as it's on people's phones wherever they are and whatever they are doing.

Atomic Britain: UK plans regulatory reset to boost nuclear power

Re: "Planning"

"Just look for anything made of granite."

A lot of Cornwall...

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

The average salary might well be lower - data input and call centre-type roles wouldn't pay close to £33k.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Re: Microsoft's response?

You cannot run any recent versions of MS Office under Wine, so far as I am aware (with the caveat that I've not tested with the most recent version of Wine)..

The web versions of Office are shit compared to the installed ones, and the files need to be saved to Microsoft's cloudy storage.

It's really bizarre the way the Linux faithful seem to almost take offence that anyone might need to run MS Office, and downvote anyone pointing this out. Will they ever come to understand that not everyone lives in their bubble and business realities dictate what software some people need to run?

And Libre Office is not an adequate substitute if sharing complex documents / spreadsheets - there are too many circumstances where full compatibility cannot be guaranteed. The post to which the one above was responding even specifically pointed this out but was clearly ignored.

Can it run recent versions of Office though? That is what would make it useful for many people, but previous versions have never been able to (I have tried!). It's the Office click-to-run installer, which has been around since Office 2016 and the only installation method since 2019, which was the problem.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Gold rush

Most more modern-ish stuff is a web UI now, though.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: There is no requirement for a specific make of pen

The computers could be set up as a standalone network, physically disconnected from the internet (or at least disconnected from it while exams are taking place).

Machine learning saves £4.4M in UK.gov work and pensions fraud detection

"Nah, who am I'm kidding?! Of course they will accuse legitimate users of fraud."

And meanwhile, how many actual fraudsters will they miss?

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Re: Launch admin MMC's, you get blinded by the white

They no longer have any interest in on-prem server admin tools!

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Re: Question

I assumed that most were offloaded to discount bookshops who sell them at 99p (or rather, try to sell them at 99p)?

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: My nerdy formner CEO offered me a choice ...

If your company's PCs aren't lasting at least five years then they must be buying crap! Business-grade laptops (Dell Latitude, Lenovo Thinpad, etc) easily last longer than that unless severely misused. They are also generally much easier to repair than Macs.

Healthcare lags in Windows 11 upgrades – and lives may depend on it

But are these devices standalone or connected to a network / the internet?

Britain's policing minister punts facial recog nationwide

Re: England & Wales is not Britain

Well, London and the home counties anyway! Wales and The North are only of any interest to them at election time. The South-West is where they have a holiday home, but other than that it's of no interest (again, except for at election time).

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

Re: Pissed

8th and 10th gen are compatible with W11. It's 7th and earlier which isn't (although there are workarounds).

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Indeed. Support normally lasts for a couple of years after a version is replaced, i.e. they support the three most recent versions of MacOS.

Some of them are. Some are more minor (probably equivalent to a service pack). It appears that W11 25H2 will be the latter.

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Message from Elon Musk, CEO Tesla

Possibly a bit like commercially-viable nuclear fusion? always 10 years away!

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

Dell does ARM and X64 versions of their XPS 13, and I notice that the price difference between the two has been getting larger for a while (the ARM one is cheaper). This rather demonstrates the relative popularity!

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Re: What if the SSD or Motherboard has failed?

Only 2.5" ones generally have glass platters, in my experience. 3.5" ones usually have what appears to be some sort of alloy (which can be cut into pieces with a decent pair of bolt cutters!

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Most of the crap can generally be removed with Powershell commands.

Microsoft gives in to Chromebook bullies and drops Windows 11 SE

"Microsoft does not support OS upgrades or switches on the Surface SE."

But can it be done anyway? i.e. clean install of W11 Pro? I've never had cause to play with one of these devices so not clear on how hard they have locked them down.

Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks

... Yet ...

I've not found Server 2025 to be notably more buggy than 2022.

Re: GPO

As regards the home version, the template will set a registry key so if someone knows what that is (anyone?) it should be possible to do it manually on the home version.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

In the case of cars, they are buying a product. If it was the same with computers you would be buying a computer with your OS of choice installed - and most laptop manufacturers offer few or no Linux options, and those which exist are not directed and the non-specialist channel.

An equivalent with cars would be if you were asked what engine management system you wanted on the car, and you would need to install it yourself in many cases.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

So where are they storing all the files used with Libre Office? Local fileservers? Denmark-based (and owned) cloudy services? Or a cloudy offering from Microsoft or one of the other big US cloudy providers?

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Re: So a bit like Vista then?

Only some Intel Macs though - doesn't included the 2020 Macbook Air (which would normally have got at least one more OS upgrade on Apple's usual 6-year cycle).

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

A lot of the nastiest material from Dounreay gets shipped down the coast to Barrow, then taken by train under armed guard up to Sellafield. The same is true of waste from many other nuclear sites (although most of them don't have the sort of material which Dounreay does). Sellafield has the whole of the UK nuclear industry's crap to deal with, not just its own.

Microsoft is opening Windows Update to third-party apps

Re: an interesting shift!

I'm not sure that the current situation is much better, where you might have to use the supersede function in Intune to remove and old version and install a newer one. That has at least as much potential to go badly wrong. Doing it through the Windows Store would be a better idea, although it would probably be sensible to have a pilot ring who get it first before it's rolled out to all users on the tenant.

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

Re: Repairable would help

Dell were the same - the E series docks were very robust. The current USB-C ones have a weakness in the USB-C plug housing - we've had loads which crack down the sides and then the housing falls off.

Dell's new business laptops are also claimed as having stronger USB-C ports, and these are replaceable as they plug in to the motherboard rather than being soldered - still appear to be a pain in the arse to change though as the motherboard will have to come out.

Apple are actually (unusually) among the best on this - recent Macbooks have each USB-C port with a separate connector which plugs into the motherboard. Plus the magnetic power connector makes damage to the USB-C ports much less likely (in my experience, people tripping over charging cables when using the laptop at home is the most common cause of broken ports).

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Only 30%?

Sounds like they want to re-invent Microsoft Works!

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

"ut the public transport system is excellent compared to almost any other city in the UK"

Yep, quite! Try the West Yorkshire conurbation (Leeds / Bradford). No light rail / urban rail, and only limited heavy rail so it very much depends where you are wanting to get from and to - large parts of the urban area are further from a station than most would want to walk every day.

M365 apps on Windows 10 to get security fixes into 2028

Re: Suuport?

Quite. The M365 suppport is probably the worst of those which I have to deal with.

Well, apart from possibly VMware since they've been taken over by Broadcom and farmed a lot of the support out to third parties.

This is not just any 'cyber incident' … this is an M&S 'cyber incident'

But is it a 'generously filled' cyber incident? Or does that only apply to their sandwiches?

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Hmm

"At least Starmer does mean well"

I don't know where on earth you get that idea from!

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: Don't worry

Perhaps M$ wants people to complain to their IT department about Windows Hello being disabled? Can't see that happening, fortunately - the average user doesn't give a toss provided their computer can do what they need to do.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

The server versions have generally been better than the equivalent client ones, and that continues with Server 2025 which is better than W11.