Posts by Sandtitz 2015 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2010
"Who decides that the OS has reached its end of life ?"
The OS manufacturer of course decides this.
In what manufacturing business are you and do you support your software and hardware to all eternity?
"Microsoft practically prints its money."
Exactly same could be said of Red Hat and other commercial distros who also have EOL dates set. Why aren't you whining about their support policies?
"I used to love it in the late 80's/early 90's when games could be booted directly from the CD without involving DOS:
You seem to be hallucinating - did you ask this from a ChatGPT?
El Torito standard for bootable CD's came out in 1995 and it took some time before computers actually supported it. NT4 installation CD was the first such disc I ever encountered.
I have never seen or heard of a PC game booting directly from CD. If you have more information to share I'd very much like to hear it.
"If the amnesia is sever would they even remember they have some sort of computing device that will respond to being stared at?"
The helpdesk at my workplace is very busy after each holidays because people do not remember their passwords. The same people usually still have their fingertips and or faces left after a reset.
But hey, let's all call biometrics evil, and scare people that their biometric data is transferred out of the computers, phones or tablets at any point!
People are prone to injury which can severely affect biometric parameters. Are they to be locked out of communications because they suffered an accident or burns, for example?
Some people suffer amnesia. Are they to be locked out?
Biometrics in computers and phones are just additional authentication methods and you still have a pin code or password to rely on if biometric login fails.
"I saw a video on youTube, a sort of "How its made" type, that detailed the production of these dolls. I don't think any of them are children, its just that a lot of Chinese and other Asians are very petite."
To everyone, this video has a couple of pictures of the Chinese child sex doll that Shein was selling on their shop.
https://youtu.be/syrRbf1Zdg4?t=57 (SFW)
Hard to understand martinusher defending either Shein or Chinese child sex doll industry except for some reasons only he knows. There's something very wrong in your head if you describe this dolls as "petite adult".
So, just asking a valid question produces more downvotes than upvotes here.
No-one actually seemed to answer the question with anything but loud words.
No-one is putting money where their mouth is regarding of setting coding goals that Claude (or some other 'AI' invention) could actually surpass.
"As if we've not been doing that on Linux for what? 3..4 decades or so?"
4 decades?! Troll harder dear AC.
"Anyway, not as wonderful and new as MS likes to proclaim.."
Why is updating without rebooting "not as wonderful"?
Hot patching is new for Windows. I haven't seen any mention that MS has invented this.
"In other news, Microsoft has continued to load its product lines with AI features, and its flagship operating system, Windows (which has suffered a terrible start to the year with multiple out-of-band fixes), is set to become an agentic OS."
Did Microsoft run over Richard Speed's dog? He seems to write all his Microsoft articles with a negative slant.
This last paragraph has nothing to do with article, so why include it?
I expect better writing here.
"We are not a Nordic country and it’s all very well until they start electing nutters from both ends of the spectrum"
While this is a valid concern, if the nutters manage to take the whole country, they can ram whatever new charter..
The status quo just slowly erodes BBC from the corners with the inspectors and extra bureaucracy and such. The taxation in Nordics is progressive with very low income families paying nothing or very little. Worth considering.
If the BBC is well respected within UK, there will be a higher barrier to dissolve it or turning it into something unwanted.
"The licence fee is not perfect. But it's the least worst option, and that is why we should be persisting with it"
The Nordic countries have moved to taxation instead of TV license in the last several years.
I would say there have been more positive than negative outcomes.
"Microsoft has always been ultra-evil by not making these the top tier protocols."
"Ultra-evil"?
IMAP4 has always been supported by Exchange.
CardDAV and CalDAV are from 2007 and 2011. Had these been available when Exchange was conceived over a decade earlier, they could be in use by every player now. The question of course is: why did it take this long for alternatives?
There's a very short, very funny story by Robert Sheckley, "The Same to You Doubled". The protagonist's three wishes are given in double to his worst enemy.
The solution is one I wouldn't mind either.
"it's on the supplier to block such downloads in the first place once a support license expires. Others manage it fine."
Which is why Broadcom stopped updates year ago. You need to add a customer specific token to the download URLs.
EMC/Dell didn't block VMware updates.
I think some people really thought their perpetual license not only includes software updates but also expected their current version to be under maintenance until heat death of the universe, or to have entitlement to every future version as well.
Wrong.
The perpetual licenses are valid and users can still use them in perpetuum.
However, the users are NOT licensed for any updates after their support cut off date. So when your support contract ended, you are not allowed to install any updates dated after that date
VMware (pre-Broadcom) didn't enforce this - vCenter would happily download later versions of hypervisors (of same major version) or you could download the latest ISO and use it with your license key. It's not unheard of IT personnel just updating software accidentally without knowing their support service had ended, because the licenses are handled by other personnel.
In these cases Broadcom noticed the downloads and sent those letters telling users to stop using the updated software and to revert back to versions they were entitled to use.
This hardly is rare in enterprise products - firewalls, storage and other appliances typically restrict the download and installation of software unless your entitlement is valid.
"Because ultimately it's Microsoft who caused this by deciding to have an ecosystem where securely distributing your software costs $300 per year, which was really the root cause of this."
Notepad++ is available through Windows Package Manager - Winget.
AFAIK, publishing software on Microsoft Store is free these days as they waived the $19 fee last year. The installation package is then signed and hosted by Micros~1. You can use either the store, or winget to install these packages. Notepad++ is not in the store.
If you don't want to use MS Store, you can also publish the software only on Windows Package Manager. If you don't sign it or just self-sign it, then the end users get warning messages during installs and updates. Signing with a proper cert of course carries a cost.
"I seem to remember whilst Windows could read “compressed files”, it couldn’t create compressed archive files."
Windows first got official Compressed Folders (zip file) feature first in "Windows 98 Plus!" which was an optional ($) extra feature package, and it did work just like the compressed folders work in later Windows versions. Starting with Windows ME and XP, the feature was built-in without extra cost.
During that time (about) I recall this fancy software called Magic Folders ($) in WinNT/9x, which not only had the same idea, but also extended seamless zip usage to CLI. You could e.g. 'cd' into the zip file "folder" and operate the files like they were just ordinary file system files. The software just did its magic in the background - removing/adding/updating files in the actual zip file. Really cool stuff back then.
.
"Never did myself."
RAR was great, if not the best file archiver in the 90s. Proper splitting to multipart volumes, solid packages, easy sfx archives, and easy to convert to since the command line was almost identical to ARJ.
It also created smaller archives than ZIP or ARJ. This was pretty important when when transferring megabytes of data over a modem connection, or having to use just 10 floppies instead of say, 15.
For me it obsoleted all others.
...funny enough, ARJ and PKZip are still sold and ARJ received updates last year. WTF?
"not much later there was 7Zip"
7-Zip was pretty crude for a long time, and the fancy LZMA algo was implemented around 2007 or so.
Now, is there really any need for WinRAR? What still would set it apart from 7-Zip is the recovery volumes - great back in the day.when you couldn't trust floppies. Another floppy or two in a pack of twenty provided data recovery if a floppy (or two) were faulty. Not dissimilar to Parchives. Nowadays I don't really have data integrity problems.
"TBH I never got why people went for WinZIP either."
I can't remember any other native Windows 3 era archive software, and even with Win95 the selection was limited. WinZIP was already known so people went for it I guess. With Windows ME and XP supporting "compressed folders" natively, there really is no real use for it anymore. The power of marketing, as you say.
"I do expect they insist on a quality product to protect their brand name."
I wouldn't. Techmoan reviewed a CD/Vinyl combo player couple weeks ago and it is hideous plastic garbage.
This was rather mild stuff. My all-time favourite:
Struggling Acer pulls out Wang too late, then calls Wong number"
Somehow many Acer related headlines from 2012-2013 had a similar twang:
"Acer suffers terrible let-down after unexpected withdrawal of Wang"
"Acer kills CEO job before CEO starts: All goes Wong after Wang pull-out"
Yes, they are all softmodems.
"I remember, long long time ago, there were "winmodems"
...I remember, long long time ago, there were "modems"... :-)
I'm glad they're all gone now. I have certain nostalgia for Telix, AT command tinkering, GIFLINK, hideous phone bills - even Zyxel was a reputable brand back then - but it's been at least 15 years since I had to deal with modems or GSM data, and I wonder how long will it take for MS to sunset the modem support anyway. There's zero ISP's with modem banks left where I live and ADSL is also being killed.
I recall the biggest problem with those softmodems more often wasn't the CPU perf hit but the craptastic quality of drivers or actually finding a working driver for the noname PCI modems.
Now, let's not delve into the crappy Winprinters...
"More inputs" is pretty moot, do you need more than three inputs per monitor? My guess is that people who buy these are unlikely to use more than two."
I hardly ever need more than one input but if the monitor can be divided into four partitions for different inputs, you can either have several computers or even a set-top-box hooked up.
"Likely better picture" is subjective, but given that they have bigger pixels, and the panels are made by LG, I think you'd have to back that up with some actual facts, because I can counter that with "likely worse picture" with the fact that they have a lower PPI. Facts not opinions, please."
Not knowing your monitors beforehand, I gave that remark, assuming older tech - and it is.. But let's compare properly this Dell to your LG's, listing where the Dell has better specs:
Contrast Ratio - 2000:1 vs 1000:1
Brightness: 400 vs 300 (cd/m2)
Color Gamut: 100% vs 98% (sRGB)
Panel Tech: LG IPS Black vs IPS.
The are facts, not opinions. Your 27 inchers have better PPI and if that is the driving force when selecting monitors, then yes, your current ones have better IQ. Then again, you can just push this 52" a bit further back on the table and get the same visual density. :-)
"As for Thunderbolt, power delivery, LAN, etc., these are not things that really belong in a monitor. If I need a charger, I'll plug the device into a charger, rather than reaching underneath or behind my monitor to find a hidden charging port. These sound like "value added features" used simply to bump up the price, and none of them justifies the high price."
Thunderbolt is the defacto business laptop docking technology. Idea is to plug your laptop to the single TB cable, and you are then not only getting the monitor connected but your laptop is charged, all the USB devices like keyboard+mouse are connected, you're connected to the (home) office LAN and so forth. This monitor allows having one device less in your desktop. Thunderbolt monitors with very similar features are available from most monitor manufacturers, including LG.
You are apparently a desktop user and these features would be wasted on you.
"Moving on to the refresh rate; well, yes a 120Hz rate is higher than the 60Hz my monitors can manage. Again, though, I don't think 120Hz justifies the price, and since nobody in their right mind would be using these for gaming (the only real use case for high refresh rates), 120Hz is really quite unnecessary,"
120Hz itself does not justify the price. The price is partly because of the panel being manufactured in low numbers, this is largest 6K display on market, and yes, part of it is a luxury tax, "Veblen Good".
Of course Excel or anything static doesn't benefit from extra hertzes, nor is the lower input lag (in gaming) meaningful in office work.
"A refresh rate of anything over 20Hz is going to be unnoticeable."
Lower your current monitors to 30Hz mode (or whatever they allow) and move some windows around. Scroll up and down web pages. If you do not see difference in the smoothes and lack of it then it is better to stop discussing refresh rate any further. I have not used 120Hz displays, but a 100Hz display is smoother than 60Hz. It's nice but not necessary.
A low refresh rate (30Hz) is also tiring for eyes.
"So really, what are the "killer features" here? 6K resolution?"
It's a fucking big 6K monitor, with all bells and whistles and go-fast stickers.
With two monitors you always have that central part where the bezels meet. I don't like that.
"when pretty much every networked device on the planet now has wi-fi, neatly rendering it instantly redundant for 99% of users"
Apart from my NAS, my home is fully wireless as well. My workplace network isn't.
"Let's assume that Dell has commissioned LG to manufacture the panels for this monitor; it's a fair assumption,"
It is LG panel since "IPS Black" mentioned in the Dell specs is an LG trademark.
You sound very angry. People lilke to buy nice things once in a while. I drive a Toyota and it's my choice. I don't mind the geezer down the street who drives a Porsche. If my manager offered me either this Dell or 2x 27" monitors at my office desktop, I would gladly take the Dell. Is that a bad thing?
[ This Dell vs unnamed LG monitors ]
Apart from Dell being 10-bit display, much higher resolution, more inputs, likely better picture, Thunderbolt 4, 140W Power Delivery, 120Hz display refresh, 2.5Gbit LAN, Variable Refresh Rate, 7x USB A+C - 10Gbit ports, built-in speakers (of debatable quality I'm sure), and a a sleek package...
...then yeah, what have Romans Dell ever done to us. /s
"This thing also has a lower pixel density, at 129 PPI, compared to the LG's 186 PPI"
You should consider LG's new 32" 6K display with 208 PPI. Makes your current monitors obsolete.
"simply calling it "ultrasharp" doesn't cut the mustard, and sounds like pure marketing guff."
That's because it is marketing guff. It's just a name like Lucky Goldstar.
"All in all, this article reads more like a promotional marketing piece than a serious tech review."
It IS a promotional article. I haven't really seen ElReg do tech reviews for a long time.
"Oh, and to top it off, who manufactures the panels for Dell? You guessed it: LG."
If LG makes the panel, why doesn't LG also sell 52" 6K displays?
"Yet, we are still stuck with 1080p for many monitors, at 24inches or less."
Stuck, how? 4K monitors have been for sale since 2001. 43 inch monitors sporting 4K came out 10 years ago. Go out there and buy one!
My $workplace has some HP Z43 monitors and for me the lack of curvature made them unpleasant to use from normal monitor distance. You can move it further back the table - but then you could have just bought a smaller monitor in the first place.
The reason why we still have 1080p is because it is cheapest; enough for the most; many people have poor eyesight, not benefiting from higher resolutions.
I remember the first 4K laptops - pricey, usually handed to the CEOs and such - and the first thing they did was complain how small everything is and then slide the resolution back to 1080p. While changing the DPI scaling was a technically better solution, it wasn't supported by many software back then, resulting in small windows rendered in 4K - and another support call.
"So you stop using your computer for a bit and it does power saving things. Didn’t even W95 or earlier do that?"
VESA DPMS came out around that time, and could put the display on standby. And you set HDD spindown timeout. That was it.
"I would put money on the refresh rate never making it into the fast zone on the vast majority of laptops that will ever be sold with this chip family."
Could you elaborate on that?
"Gamers I guess will go buy a decent graphics card."
These Panthers are mobile processors, not socketed or sold in shops. Perhaps budget gaming laptops based on these CPU's with the ARC graphics will come out, but there's not going to be extra GPU slot.
Conversely, if any desktops are made with these CPUs, they will likely be cheap, small, and low power for passive cooling. Not gaming desktops with slot for GPU.
"Intel hasn’t fixed their problem, they’ve rebranded it. Instead of delivering performance, they turned the laptop into a pet you’re meant to care for. Use it too hard and you’re the bad owner."
Many people in ElReg forums have told their 10-year-old computers are fast enough already.
They have not achieved parity with AMD on CPU core numbers and speeds, but implying these CPU's to be slow would is just a hyperbole.
On a mobile platform I'm more interested in a long battery life. Half of that (unachievable) 40 hour claim would still be awesome on PC laptop.
"When a CPU roadmap ends in digital guilt management"
I read that these new power savings technologies are automated, and would expect AMD and others to follow suit with their next chip generations.
Are you against power saving tech or are you just bashing Intel for no reason?
"The ship was seized within Finland’s territorial waters, where Finland has full jurisdiction."
"Not necessarily [...] Hence why Estonia, and some of the other Baltic states have tried to persuade vessels to dock in their ports so they can assert some jurisdiction."
That is exactly how Finland handled the case! The vessel was told to first raise the anchor they had dragged dozens of miles, and then enter Finland's territory. The vessel was then seized.
Caught you lying red handed and now you just resort to calling names instead of a pardon. Pretty sad, really.
"There is no lie, and the only thing being exposed is your ignorance. Unlawful seizure and detention of commercial vessels making innocent passage in international, or even national/EEZ waters is effectively hijacking."
My you are grasping at straws here!
The ship was seized within Finland’s territorial waters, where Finland has full jurisdiction.
Also, the vessel was NOT making an "innocent passage", as you put it, and you know it, rendering your reply a meaningless distraction anyway.
"And of course whoever did it is going to produce evidence of illegality, or assistance."
You claimed that "we" have recently started sinking ships. You produce zero evidence, when you normally put out dozens of links to back your claims. Because of your lack of any evidence, you are just trying to put walls of text out here, trying to muddle the waters when you are caught with a lie. As the saying goes:
It's time to put up or shut up.
"And Trump saying he'd probably sell the oil."
Let me quote you again in case you forgot what you wrote: "ships have been seized and their cargo sold."
You wrote something that has happened. Let me help: It is not the same as future tense. No cargo has been sold.
Let's see how you try to weasel out of this now.
"I won't repeat what VoT posted, it was somewhat controversial but I didn't think it should have been censored."
VoT has repeatedly claimed El Reg author is working for a US based TLA when she has penned China linked hacker news here.
No newspaper would print these kinds of accusations against their their personnel without proof, and from an anonymous pen name to boot.
Why should The Register let them be published either?
"Not me guv, but you do seem rather ignorant of international law"
Yes you guv. You spoke of hijackings and then quickly moved goalposts and still try to steer the discussion elsewhere as your lie was exposed.
"Obviously I grasp rather more than you seem to because I gave the example of the Ursa Major, attacked and sunk in the Med."
"How much involvement 'We' had in [...] sinking the Ursa Major?
The ship sunk and Russia called it terrorist attack. It wasn't sunk by the "collective west", otherwise you would put up some sort of evidence to defend your ludicrous conjecture.
More likely the crew was drunk on vodka, and their distillery exploded along with some materiel the ship had been used for transporting. It's not like the Russian marines are known to be careful with their anchors either.
You mentioned that "we" had sold Russian cargo from the seized ships. Now's a good time for you to back that claim.
Moi: "There has been no hijacking or sinking of ships."
"The vessel was sailing from St. Petersburg in Russia to the port of Haifa, Israel, when Finnish authorities detained it. According to its IMO number, Fitburg is a general cargo ship and sails under the flag of St. Vincent and the Grenadines."
Once again you seem to have trouble understanding English - or perhaps seizing/detaining is mistranslated to hijacking in whatever your native language is.
List the hijacked ships or just admit your error.
"If it's ruled as accidental, or the Fitburg isn't implicated, then it might get released, but other ships have been seized and their cargo sold."
Yes, ships have been seized for reason - Russia has also seized cargo ships. No cargo has been sold.
...MV Ursa Major...
You wrote: 'We're up to 20(?) rounds of economic warfare against Russia, and recently starting hijacking or sinking ships.'
"We" haven't sunk any ships nor has even Russia claimed so. Please list those ships that "we" have sunk or, you know, stop commenting on things you have no grasp of.
"less than 10 people I think...it certainly wasn't many because we would regularly end up speaking to the same people over and over again..."
I've known fine coding teams where the stereotype introverts with zero people skills would never answer a phone or would never be allowed near a phone or customer. Not everyone can get away with "You're holding it wrong".
I'm rather sure it was easily 100+ rather than 10 people not only because SQL 7 was major rewrite, but also for Enterprise Manager and other accessory software included, support for both Windows 9x and NT/2000 installations and of course testing. Micros~1 even back then had multiple SQL major versions concurrently under support, so bug/security fixes, backporting support for next Windows versions, and of course developing the next version or designing and outlining the versions beyond the next one does take its time. Micros~1 already had tens of thousands of employees back then.
"Time to bring the lean Warp Merlin back?"
No. Unless you like single-user operating systems and with probably zero considerations for securing the thing down.
"Warp v3 was optimized for 4Mb RAM back then, but 6Mb was better."
4MB was the minimum and IBM did some optimisation for it, though I never tested it as such - I had at least 8MB since OS/2 2.1 ("Borg")
I remember a curious case of Microsoft comparing performance of Win95 vs Warp 3 on 8MB system, and IBM then claiming they installed it with 4MB and later upgraded to 8MB which resulted in subpar performance. Ref: comp.os.os2 - around 30 years ago...
"And it's mindboggling to note that we now need 16Gb of RAM for weendooz to run Office365 properly..."
While Linux runs with somewhat smaller memory footprint, the accessory software likely eats about as much memory on every system. If MS Office ran on Linux, the computer would end up requiring about as much memory.
"C'mon guys, 16Gb HDD space for Warp v3 was oodles and oodles of storage space back then..."
Yes, 2GB HDD space was quite reasonable back then...
I don't think 16GB hard drives were available until about year 2000 or so.
"flogging ram compressor tat/utilities for Windows that either do sod-all or are lightly warmed over zram/zswap etc…… $49.99 Limited offer."
Windows has its own implementation of memory compression already. Not that it would prevent selling snake oil software, of course.
"I recall Windows ≥ Vista would attempt to use any inserted USB flash memory stick to improve performance (ReadyBoost)"
No it didn't. The Autoplay dialog had Readyboost optimisation as one option along with the other options.
"so I imagine that little nasty is also being dusted off."
Nasty? At the time when SSD's were generally not available and some hard drives were really slow; 4200 rpm wasn't atypical on laptop, a fast SD card on the internal reader did make meaningful difference, it was just a disk read cache, like the hybrid HDDs of last decade.
"One of the major things keeping me of Linux is the lack - as far as I can see - of any seriously good music typesetting options."
My kids use MuseScore in Windows, they use it for music notation and it talks to their MIDI keyboards, with the Roland USB-MIDI adapter.
Seems to be available for Linux as well. Is it good? IDK. But it's free so the bar is quite low for testing first.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
