Posts by David 132 4418 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
I've had several Teams meetings with colleagues so far today (US West Coast). As you can imagine, I am overjoyed to report that Teams worked and the meetings went ahead without issue.
Still, someone at Microsoft should be keel-hauled, if only for their mangling of the defenceless English language. "Problematic"? "Potential cause of impact"? Ugh.
Thanks both of you for the pointers! I am old enough to remember when "Intel Graphics" was a byword for "can just about display a VGA screen at 25fps" so the fact that both of you have mentioned the Intel Arc cards is disquieting...
I shall investigate my options.
Thanks!
As there seem to be a few GPU connisewers on 'ere.
My primary PC currently has a slightly elderly Radeon RX580. I don't play AAA titles much if at all; 99% of my game purchases these days are from GOG.com, and of those, maybe 1 in 3 are double-A titles (if that's not just a term I made up...) like Grim Dawn or Wreckfest - the rest are long-tail things like Monkey Island or Darkside Detective, and I know my 580 isn't a bottleneck for those!
I'd like a little more performance at 1440p; some AI chops would be nice for running local models like Ollama, and ideally, lower power consumption - and on a fairly small budget. Gone are my days of blowing $800+ on a card, and indeed, I looked at the prices on 5070-level cards last week and was startled to see them on sale at $2500+.
Any recommendations for what GPUs I should be looking at? I feel that these days beating the RX580 on performance and power consumption should be within the range of even the wimpiest of budget cards, but I'm so out of the loop I don't know for sure.
Gods, yes. I've lost count of the number of Teams meetings I've been in lately - my employer having standardized on all things Microsoft - where we play the game of "everyone help the meeting host figure out which obscure glyph he/she needs to click on to bring up the 'record meeting' option".
Click the three dots, you say? Would that be the three dots in the window title bar next to the minimize button, or the identical-but-different three dots in the meeting toolbar underneath it and somewhere off to the left?
Anyone else remember when the guiding principles of GUI design were "discoverability" and "ease of use", or* am I just an old fart?
(*NB that was intended as an XOR but feel free to insult me and treat it as an OR.)
You raise a good point - what happens to the unused credit that Skype users have? I believe I still have a dollar or two on my account, although in classic Microsoft fashion it occasionally shows $0.00 for a few days before remembering that there's credit there.
Will credits be migrated across to Teams automatically? Or will Microsoft pull a Post Office*, and sweep up the cash as a nice bonus for themselves?
(*referring to the Horizon scandal and how, the system having posted multiple identical transactions when its error-handling failed, and Postmasters having subsequently made good the supposed "shortfalls" from their own funds, the PO took the extra money as a happy windfall, trebles all round)
I’m sure the cryptobros will shout me down, but is there ANY positive social value to bitcoin and similar co[i]ns?
Ransomware, Trump’s cryptocurrency, almost daily heists and wallet hijackings… is it not time to just ban the whole thing and make any involvement in blockchain cryptocurrency a hanging offence?
Web3IsGoingGreat.com is a rich and satisfying source of schadenfreude but that’s the only positive aspect of the whole fustercluck I can think of.
Interesting that you name-check BoJo when he hasn't been PM for a couple of years. Obviously, Starmer, being a freedom-loving Labour person rather than a nasty evil Tory, cancelled the Online Safety Act and all other restrictions on freedom of speech as the very first thing he did... oh, wait, he didn't.
With stuff like this, I tend to assume that it's what the Deep State (yeah, I know that sounds a bit tinfoil-hattish) wants, regardless of the colour of the government. The Home Secretary, on his/her first day, after being shown where the coathooks & toilets are and how to claim expenses, is ushered into a room for a "cordial chat" with representatives of MI5/GCHQ and is told exactly what the latter want, and oh, incidentally we have all your e-mails and private letters, and we know what you bought from Lovehoney, and wouldn't it be a shame if it were to be splashed all over the Daily Mail....
You're not the only one, but that's very much counter to the direction of travel of this Government, who are mad keen on merging smaller authorities together into monolithic super-/unitary authorities. Smaller, more accountable local-level services are anathema to them - and yes, I acknowledge the counter-argument that merging services reduces duplication and creates economies of scale (even if I don't necessarily agree with it).
That's my understanding too. Whereas an in-browser blocker like UBO can block elements in a granular fashion, and rewrite the CSS/HTML to "close up" the gaps that would otherwise appear in a page, Pi-Hole can't do that because it's just a DNS-level blocker. Which isn't to detract at all from Pi-Hole; it's a great tool, but I think the likes of NoScript and UBO still have their place. I run both PH and UBO on my network & machines, and the belt-and-braces approach gives a remarkably clean internet. Although I did have some difficulties with the Slashdot site last month as their "war" with ad blockers escalated, but either they've backed down or UBO/PH have managed to figure out a set of rules that consistently work. At the end of the day though Slashdot is a site I could happily abandon, if rendered too unpleasant by unblockable ads; these days it just seems to be an aggregator for stories from here on the Register and elsewhere.
Just curious but what do you mean by "plug'n'play version"? Presumably a RaspPi in a case, pre-loaded with Pi-Hole, but any particular vendor/type?
I built my own by putting Pi-Hole x86 on my NAS/Jellyfin box, but I'm always open to new suggestions - especially for my less tech-savvy relatives, for whom "plug it in, turn it on" is about as complex as they can handle.
> You don't think that the massive advertising campaign might have had something to do with it?
That, and the propensity a while ago of just about every software download, no matter how unrelated, to bundle a Chrome installation with it, or at least offer to install it in a would-you-like-to-not-decline-to-not-install-this-browser-now-or-later type dark pattern fashion of varying subtlety? For those that have forgotten, Chrome was, for a while, the Bonzi Buddy or Bing Toolbar of PUPs.
Firefox here, and happily so.
>and forcing me to force-shutdown the machine (losing any open files)
Have you tried setting the power button action to Hibernate? Perhaps hibernating the laptop, then waking it up again, would trigger it into detecting the dock-attached monitors? And would prevent data loss.
The ability to configure what the power & sleep buttons do is rather hidden in Windows 10/11; try typing "powercfg.cpl" at a command prompt as the quickest way to get to it.
I've told this anecdote around here in the past, but... in a previous life, my employer had standardised on IBM Thinkpads (yes, IBM, that tells you how long ago it was). Solid, reliable, could be used to stop a parabellum round at point blank range...
One year, the IT department decided to hand out HP Elitebooks, as a pilot, and I was "selected" to receive one.
All seemed to be OK, until I was at a company training conference in Vegas-or-wherever; seated in the front row of the lecture room, I was typing notes as the instructor spoke. Suddenly and without warning the Scroll Lock key (why? it's not even as if I was using it!) popped off the laptop's keyboard, flew through the air, and landed in front of the instructor. Who without breaking his flow picked it up and handed it back to me.
I swapped back to a Thinkpad on my return to the office.
Ah, I feel your pain. Two years ago my nieces came out here to Oregon for a visit; their tickets had been booked through BA. Cutting a long story short, when the time came to check in for their return flight, it was impossible, because they'd been bounced onto a later outbound flight without updating the appropriate record in the airline's systems, so it looked to BA as though they were a no-show - hence, return flight cancelled.
An hour on the phone waiting to speak to a BA agent, and when I did get through, I found all the problems you mentioned. Impenetrable accent, crackly low-quality line, and a side-order of "not my problem" surliness. I eventually winkled out of him that in fact, the flight had been a code-share operated by American Airlines, and that I needed to talk to them. Great, why didn't you tell me at the outset?
So I called AA, and after 3 rings got through to a lovely lady in (judging by her accent) Atlanta GA, who couldn't have been more helpful and friendly. Sorted it all out ("no worries honey, we'll get y'all straightened out") and did more in that 10 minute call to convert me to an AA customer than umpteen advertising campaigns could have done.
Short version: screw BA. They're Spirit/Wizz Air levels of service, with Emirates pricing.
Wow. That's an odd restriction; understandable I suppose in that they don't want employees (inadvertently) installing some cryptomining "extension", but I would have thought that the reduced bandwidth consumption and increased safety of having a reputable ad-blocker would appeal to even the most curmudgeonly of BOFHs.
Can you run Pi-Hole locally and point your DNS to localhost?
Or lobby your IT dept to at least whitelist something like UBlock Origin?
I work for a large international tech company (no, not that one) and we're positively encouraged to use Firefox, with whatever extensions we want.
On that topic, I wrote myself a little Windows applet that registers as a handler for URLs, and gives me a pop-up dialog with the choice to open clicked links with either Edge (Sharepoint, some particularly crusty intranet stuff) or Firefox (everything else). Based on the domain it'll auto-select one browser or the other, e.g. links to (say) whoevermyemployeris.com can be configured to auto-open with Edge.
If anyone here would find such a tool handy, and promises not to laugh at my spaghetti C# code, I'm happy to share it.
I'm waiting for a manufacturer to make a phone based on this form-factor, which seems technologically much more do-able now than it did even a decade ago...
Indeed. I'm surprised this story hasn't been covered by El Reg, but I suppose the editorial staff have other topics they'd rather write about.
Here's an overview. Hey, it's not too bad - it's only showing pop-up ads when the owner of the vehicle has stopped in traffic for any reason (cue Philip J Fry clip about "ads on TV, milk cartons, T-shirts... but never in our dreams, no sirree...").
1) "the attorneys that signed the filing" - what are they signing it for, if not to say "we certify that this is true and accurate and we have verified every word of it"? I suspect that of the three named attorneys who, if I'm interpreting the article correctly, signed it, two of them didn't bother to read what they were rubber-stamping and...
2) ...the third attorney was the most junior of the three, and was "persuaded" to carry the can for the AI oopsie. Hence the groveling and judge-foot-kissing apology.
>"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast."
In my experience of the software industry it’s more like, “Ok, we made it work. We’ve made it right. Now we need to make it fas-OOH SHINY! SQUIRREL! LETS REWRITE THE WHOLE THING IN [RUST/PYTHON/LANGUAGE-DU-JOUR] AND ADD MORE FEATURES! DEBUG AND OPTIMIZATION IS BORING!”
But I respect your optimism.
256 bits? Frankly, he would have a higher chance of gaining access to his wallet if he just started ploughing through the possible 2^256 permutations.
Either is as staggeringly unlikely as the other.
Unless he pulled a President Skroob and set his private key combination to 1-2-3-4-5, of course :)
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