Posts by Philip Storry

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Enjoy your retirement Jeffrey

I remember well the Monad Manifesto coming out in 2002. It caused quite a stir on a little website called Slashdot, which had some mild popularity at the time...

And coincidentally in 2002 Microsoft was busy trying to migrate Hotmail - which it had bought a few years earlier - from its legacy platform of Solaris/FreeBSD to Windows 2000. It did not go well initially, partly because if you need to make a change to Apache on change 500 machines running Solaris/FreeBSD it can be easily scripted. Whereas to change the IIS configuration on 500 Windows machines you had to manually log on to 500 machines... Your only other option would be to write a script for WSH that connected and changed registry entries remotely. Which isn't very appealing.

The with the next release IIS suddenly gained the ability to use a config file, which was quite the coincidence...

So when Microsoft execs were saying "Admins don't want command line interfaces", I suspect that they simply weren't yet hearing what their own admins in the Hotmail division were saying whenever they tried to manage the test Windows environments.

PowerShell isn't without its flaws, but it is far better than what we had before. Thanks Jeffrey - if you're in London and want a pint (or a dram), I'll stand you one. Cheers!

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

I loved the Opera mail client

But that horse has long gone, and the stable door can't be closed because the stable has fallen into disuses and since fallen down.

Now I do most of my email via apps on tablets and phones, or via webmail. I do fire up Thunderbird at least once a week - but only to then back up my emails. Frankly I need to set up some kind of script to do that instead sometime...

A binary email client in 2022 just feels like a throwback. I wish them well, but I can't see myself switching unless this mail client is so good that it outweighs the convenience of apps & webmail.

Microsoft delays next Exchange Server release to 2025

Three years?

Surely all they need to do is make the installer run the uninstaller for the old version of Exchange, then display a message thanking you for "upgrading" to Office 365?

I suppose they'll also need to produce a second version titled "Exchange for Governments, Banks and Pharma" which is four times more expensive and is just the current product with the version number incremented, but those customers won't mind a delay so there's no rush.

Three years does seem rather a long time to accomplish these simple changes...

Lawyers say changes to UK data law will make life harder for international businesses

And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

GDPR doesn't apply to territories. It applies to EU citizens.

Given that we have Northern Ireland as part of the UK, no company can operate there as an employer without having to adopt GDPR as their minimum standard for data processing.

And given that the Common Travel Area allows Irish citizens - who are also EU citizens - to work in the UK, this then extends to the rest of Great Britain.

The only way to avoid GDPR in the UK is to simply not trade with, employ, or provide services to anyone Irish. Which is hardly practical.

Of course, the hardcore Brexit supporters may see this as part of the return to the Glorious Past. No doubt they're eager to break out their old "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" signs and are eagerly awaiting legislation on the latter two groups to follow.

Meanwhile everyone looking to the future will just follow GDPR because anything else would be a waste of time.

This is the most prominent example of how we'll be rule takers, not rule makers - until we rejoin the EU. Quite ironic really.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

I'm not convinced

I'm not convinced that Microsoft could - or should - do this. My reasoning requires a little knowledge of filesystems to understand...

Filesystems are composed of two things - the filesystem layout; and the software stack.

The filesystem layout is the actual bit written to persistent storage - everything from header blocks to identify versions and features, disk maps (if used), directories/inodes and so forth.

The software stack is the actual code. And it's complicated. It's not just a bit of code that reads and writes the filesystem layout, it also has to interact with a variety of other operating subsystems. Memory management, buffered I/O, block storage drivers, caching systems... Security can be handled at a higher level, so I'm not adding it to that list, but it's also a possible complication.

Open-sourcing the current stack would be pretty useless, as it's Windows-specific. Who knows what oddities lie within its internal APIs to handle file locking or caching systems that are Windows specific?

Because of this, it would be a fairly major job to write and then release an open-source driver.

Hence me not being convinced.

What they could do, though, is release two documents that would help immensely. Documentation for the filesystem layout, and a technical note confirming the order of operations would both be very helpful to those in the Linux community who want to write and maintain an NTFS driver.

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Wow

Well this just has to be them chancing their arm...

Here are some other ways that they could use this logic to chance their arm:

"I don't see why I'm to blame, the car manufacturer made the car. I just drove it through the crowd because I was late for a meeting!"

"I'm pretty sure it's the chemical company's fault, I just thought arsenic would bring a nice almond taste to my bakery's bread!"

"Hey, don't blame me - it's the knife manufacturer that's responsible for the stabbings!"

Fancy a remix? Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have also hit 22.04

I have to agree with the author on Unity being a superb desktop environment, so I will be trying this out very soon.

I'm currently using Ubuntu MATE, with the Mutiny panel configuration. It's fine, but not as good as actual Unity. In particular I miss the searching...

I had figured I'd simply move to something else when Unity was left for dead, hence moving to MATE as a least-worst option. But it seems that Unity is forming - or has formed - its own community and momentum, and I'd like to add some more to those user numbers.

Here's hoping that there's a long future for this particular remix!

Apple has missed the video revolution

Re: Microsoft Teams as it's about the most crappy bit of software Microsoft have ever flung together

An excellent call.

Don't forget SQL Server 4.2 and Exchange Server 4.0. Both from a similar era, where it felt like if it compiled and worked on Microsoft's network then it was shipped...

Re: Apple had spectacularly bad timing

My company is part of a larger Group, which is itself part owned by a multinational. So I don't choose Teams. It's part of a set of standards that I have to deploy.

Beyond that, I don't actually think it's that bad. Compared with the many previous attempts from Microsoft at messaging, it's pretty good. If you tried to drag me back to Skype for Business (no persistent chat history, FFS?) then I'd definitely tell you where to go...

Teams is big, heavy and occasionally unstable because it's effectively a giant website wrapped in Electron. But that means that Teams is also easy to support because you just delete the user's cache/profile and it gets downloaded again. Swings and roundabouts, really.

Where Teams has really been great for my company is its integration with OneDrive/SharePoint. There is no way in hell that I could have gotten my colleagues to use SharePoint to store files without Teams. I could have read my colleagues the mandate from Our Glorious Owners all day long, and I'd have been ignored. But putting stuff in the Files area of Teams? Sure thing! And then they can sync them locally with OneDrive? Well they love that!

Nothing is perfect, but I've found Teams to be quite adequate, even advantageous at times.

I'm all for using free software, but sadly I need more than just videoconferencing and I have corporate standards to adhere to.

As to the worst software Microsoft has ever flung together... No.

Someone else suggested Proxy Server 2.0, which is a great candidate. I'd throw in Windows 8/Server 2012, for forcing a touch interface on desktops and servers. But my real candidates are Exchange Server 4.0 and SQL Server 4.2.

Exchange Server 4.0 had stability issues and talked to practically nothing, so we nicknamed it "Estranged Server". And SQL Server 4.2 had a habit of not returning data on queries even though you could prove it was in the table/view. We nicknamed that "Squirrel Server" because in winter it spent all its time failing to dig up data it had stored in the autumn...

And, of course SharePoint. SharePoint has its own special place on any list of bad software from Microsoft, simply because it tries to do so many things and manages to do them all badly...

Re: Apple had spectacularly bad timing

Yeah, the move to SOCs is one that troubles me.

My current home machine is a decade old, but it's the classic Trigger's Broom. Only the CPU, motherboard and case/cabling is unchanged, everything else is upgraded or changed.

Given how long I've made it last I reckon that my next new machine - to be bought either this year or next - might well be the last where I can upgrade the RAM without also throwing out the processor.

Both Intel and AMD are going to be happy to move towards SOCs as it's still money in the bank for them, so unless the professional Mac community revolts against SOCs in their desktops everyone will have to do it just to compete with Apple's products.

It feels like we're in a moment of transition that I simply must seize, lest I be left unsatisfied in the brave new world...

Re: Apple had spectacularly bad timing

Oh, I really wouldn't feel too bad about this.

I'm no expert myself - I only knew because of my experience with Teams. Let's face it, graphics card manufacturers have entire departments funded with millions of dollars to convince us that it all just gets offloaded to their product! So it's a perfectly reasonable understanding to have.

And it's not like Apple would be shouting about it, is it?

This is one of those "it's more complicated" situations where we all get to learn. And El Reg readers are decent enough to want to learn. Frankly, this is one of only two communities on the internet where I'd bother to post this kind of thing, as everywhere else I'd just get shouted down by graphics card fanbois...

Re: Apple had spectacularly bad timing

They're typically Sales, Media or Management.

We've been moving most people away from Macs simply because of the cost - and because of edge cases over M1 chips. We'll never have none though, and for some people they are still a status symbol. So we have to deal with them as a reality of life...

They really do make compliance with security difficult though - which is quite ironic give the mid-2000's advertising that Apple had!

Apple had spectacularly bad timing

The problem modern video - and many multimedia pipelines - is that it's much more CPU specific than you'd think.

People assume that the work is just offloaded to a GPU, and for much of the video encoding/decoding that's correct. But for things like audio processing and some graphical effects, the CPU multimedia extensions are used. Stuff like MMX (remember that?), 3DNow!, SSE, AVX.

In my own experience we've been avoiding deploying any M1 Macs at my workplace because the noise cancellation in Microsoft Teams relies on Intel CPU instructions - so the option just wasn't there on M1 Macs at first. The x86 instruction set emulation is great, but only covers the core features of the CPU.

(Native noise cancellation on M1 Macs is now in testing from Microsoft, but we'll hold off until it's stable. We don't need Teams crashing on Macs due to this, especially as those with Macs are more likely to be in a position where their meetings are a bit more important.)

None of this is unsurmountable. It's also completely understandable - I'm not blaming or slating Apple for this. I'm just saying that it is, in many ways, the worst timing that they could possibly have had. The M1 Mac that couldn't cut it for our correspondent wasn't a bad machine, it was just that the software isn't yet optimised to use it. In a way, Apple's excellent work at compatibility gave him unrealistic expectations.

Further to that, on Windows you can definitely expect those multimedia extensions to be on any modern CPU, so all the software is using it. It's not so much that it comes from a gaming background (which it does), more that there are very safe assumptions you can make about what hardware features will be available to any PC running gaming software. Ironically, the same software ported to an old x86 mac might have done much better.

Apple - and the ecosystem of software for their computers - will no doubt get there. But a CPU change right before a pandemic really hasn't helped in this particular use case, and serves as a reminder of just how complex computing is these days, and how many edge cases there can be.

(Note: I am not a huge Apple fan. They have their strengths and weaknesses, but I don't personally use their kit and I find them more problematic to support in a business environment than Windows machines. Please don't assume I'm a fanboi, I'm just trying to point out that Apple's compatibility efforts can only go so far, and that is probably why Mark's attempts failed. I shall make my true loyalties clear with my choice of icon...)

UK's antitrust watchdog is very angry and has written a letter telling Apple and Google how angry it is with them

Re: I kind of stopped reading...

What you've missed is that all browsers on iOS are just skins over the Apple Webkit rendering engine.

Apple does not allow third party rendering engines on their non-desktop platforms. Alternative web browsers are just skins with a little functionality (synchronisation, other features) added.

This would be less of an issue if Apple were still leading with their webkit engine. In the early days of the iPhone they definitely were, but since then they seem to have de-prioritised webkit development. New features are slow to arrive and often incomplete or buggy. Bugs linger for far too long. And Apple have a few standard excuses for this which people are tired of hearing.

Here are two decent summaries I found with a quick search:

https://httptoolkit.tech/blog/safari-is-killing-the-web/

https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

Both of them make reference to the Web Platform Tests dashboard. I checked that to ensure that their arguments were still valid, and was surprised to see it now looks pretty good for Safari:

https://wpt.fyi/compat2021?feature=summary&stable

It's on 90, 1 point behind Firefox and 5 behind Chrome - not bad, eh? So surely those earlier links are outdated?

But look at the graph below the figures. That sudden huge lurch forwards! Webkit had languished in the high 60s/low 70s for ages, and has suddenly jumped up - can anyone really think that there aren't bugs in those newly implemented features? Does anyone really want to make an argument that this is a sign of healthy, safe development for webkit?

The sudden recent improvement doesn't negate the points web developers have been making about webkit holding them back. Indeed, it bolsters them - now they have a large number of features that they may need to look at implementing, whilst knowing that they're new enough that they may be too buggy to implement. Not an enviable position. So most won't bother, and webkit will continue to hold back web development.

And that's why Apple's webkit-only position worries so many people. It's not healthy, and there's no good reason for the restriction. If Chrome or Firefox could use their own engines on Apple's devices, things would be much better.

(Disclaimer: I am not a web developer, I just know/work with web developers and am reflecting their views.)

Ironic?

Page 21 of the interim report [PDF] details how Apple ensures non-Safari browsers on iOS must use its WebKit engine, and even then are disadvantaged by the operating system. The overall goal seems to be to make web apps less attractive to use, and native apps obtained from Apple's app store more appealing.

Huh. I find that quite ironic, given that the original iPhone had no app store and we were told that everything would be delivered via the web...

It's almost like the sudden influx of a 15% cut of all sales when they released an SDK and app store (alongside the iPhone 3G) was addictive for Apple.

The "web first iPhone" definitely didn't last very long, did it? One model and OS version. Was the original iPhone a rush job and shipped incomplete knowingly? Or was the success of the app store a genuine surprise that required a change of history for Apple?

As for the finding of the report - surely the Holiest of Holies and Purest of the Pure couldn't possibly be putting preserving its profits ahead of providing practical productivity for its customers?

(I shall no doubt now be corrected by those who bask in the Reality Distortion Field...)

Data transfers between the EU and the US: Still unclear on what you're supposed to do? Here's an explainer

Pointless

I genuinely don't see the point in lowering standards or deviating from them.

GDPR applies worldwide. If my employer works with a company that's doing business in the EU, then GDPR kicks in. From a practical point of view, that means that all the work I do assumes GDPR is in force.

All of the tools and services that my employer buys have to be GDPR compliant. We work to the highest standard, not the lowest - so that if a client suddenly expands into the EU, we're ready for it. If we switch to a new "GB-DPR" standard, it won't save any money or time - we'll still work to GDPR because it'll cost us more in time and effort setting up/working with multiple standards than we could possibly save through lower standards. Worse, not working to GDPR has significant potential opportunity costs in that we we could end up losing new or existing business due to not being GDPR compliant.

So what is the point?

Perhaps if all I'm doing is selling manure to the locals in Crawley, I might find my life ever so slightly easier. But if I grow that business to the point where I'm selling my agricultural supplies into NI or anywhere else in the Single Market I suddenly have to overhaul my business to be GDPR compliant anyway.

Any business with ambition and drive is going to ignore this. They have to if they want to grow. GDPR compliance is just part of being a business these days.

Obligatory political comment: This is a microcosm of why Brexit is a failure. The people behind it don't understand how the world works. They think that they are now rule makers, but in actual fact the rules they make matter very little because it's not 1951 anymore. Meanwhile we've lost our seat at the European Council and our MEPs so can't change GDPR any more. People are slowly discovering that they still have to work to EU rules in many areas anyway, so we are now a nation of rule takers! And this was done to satisfy a tiny number of people - most of whom are retired or work in politics/journalism and don't know what they're talking about.

(No offence meant to the fine scribblers at El Reg, naturally. Not all journalists, etc. etc...)

Twitter's machine learning algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians over those on the left

Alternatively, it could be the opposite - that right wing politics has deviated from the centre too far, and is not representative at all.

It depends on how the algorithm was trained.

If it's just looking at the numbers of likes, replies and retweets - without context - then it's easy to see how more controversial and extreme content would get higher numbers. More moderate content just gets a few replies & retweets from those that agree and a small number of extremists replying. Extreme content gets many more replies as mockery and disgust generates replies/retweets too.

Therefore the algorithm would mistake activity for popularity, and provide a boost to content that's further from the true political centre of the country. When it evaluates a tweet from a right wing source it sees markers that it will be "popular" (read: generate activity), and boosts it accordingly.

This might also explain the apparent anomaly of Germany, if their left wing is more proactive and pushing policies which might be more controversial.

If I may done my old man hat and start a quick rant, this is the problem with ML systems. Nobody can read the models that they produce, nobody knows how they work - they're just a black box.

Back in the 90's when "artificial intelligence" meant "expert systems", things were a horrible mess of rules and filtering/bayesian evaluations. But you could at least sit down and trace data's path through those systems and know what each step was doing. By contrast very few people understand the actual ML model sets and how they work, and sitting down and tracing a data point's path through it for evaluation is neither practical nor useful in almost all situations.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens the first time an ML model appears in a court of law. How will a judge take to a company or government department saying "We have no idea why it does that, nor do we know how to stop it from doing that."?

Machine learning no doubt has its place, but we're still learning what that place is.

What's the top programming language? It's not JavaScript but Python, says IEEE survey

Re: What do electrical engineers

Yeah! You may as well go and ask the guys who defined the standards for wired and wireless networking, floating point arithmetic, software requirements specifications and the software development lifecycle!

Oh, wait, that would be the IEEE.

I'll get my coat, and yours too whilst I'm there...

Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse

Re: Well said

If it wasn't Google, it would be someone else.

Let's go way back to the mid 90s, and what Microsoft was doing. Remember the Active Desktop? And the Channels that you could put on them? They were kind of like RSS feeds, but less well supported.

Let's imagine for a moment a world in which Microsoft got what it wanted. Your phone runs Windows CE/Mobile, just like everyone else in the world's does. Active Desktop and Channels weren't a glorious failure. Web sites all have Channels because that's what you have to do - if you don't, then Bing won't promote your content in its results.

Does anyone here want to say that the Channels spec won't be being fiddled about with by Microsoft in this scenario? That they won't be shipping "improvements" that mean work for everyone else?

I don't think this is anything but capitalism. Swap Google out for some other company, and the same thing would probably be happening.

The names of the players may change, but the play itself remains constant...

Lotus Notes refuses to die, again, as HCL debuts Domino 12

Re: Domino

Out of genuine curiosity - do you really think that this person had a smart host and an Exchange Server in the corner? That they'd deployed Notes to 45,000 people across 80 countries, but that they kept their own little shadow mail service just for themselves?

Whether sysadmins or developers, pretty much everyone I know that worked with Notes also used it themselves. Alternatives were available - DAMO (for the short while it was available), IMAP/POP3, but nobody really used them because there's value in using the same platform that your colleagues outside of IT are using.

You seem to think that the users are poor tortured souls, but that the staff in IT are somehow unaffected by the very same platform.

So the question arises - why do so many in IT have a more positive view of Notes? My belief is that it's training. IT staff are better trained, even if just self-trained. But that's a discussion for some other day. (Short version: Training is key, we stopped doing it around the mid-2000's, it was a huge mistake for our industry. A hammer is easy to use, you still don't let people loose with them without clear directions on what you want them to hit with it...)

Re: Notes was the past.. and the future!

Bloody hell!

Are you telling me that after 26 years Microsoft have finally figured out how to copy files over existing files and how to upgrade a database?

Took them long enough!

Re: Domino

Yep, it's very reliable.

I can't say I've never seen corrupt Notes databases. When you work with a product for over fifteen years you see a lot of things. But the corrupt Notes databases I have seen were usually client-side, and caused by crashes - mostly on laptops, not always even Notes itself crashing.

The server-side corruptions were exceptionally rare - the only ones that spring to mind were mail.box databases. That's the mail queue that the router uses, and as you can imagine with every single email being written into it and then deleted it takes a pounding, especially in larger environments. Even then, these were rare and were usually caused when a third party tool like McAfee crashed.

Our solution was to move them elsewhere and let Domino generate new mail.box file(s) - then to run the database fixup tools and manually copy any unprocessed mails into the new queue DB(s). On at least one memorable occasion that proved that it was indeed McAfee dying whilst scanning something, and I can't blame the Domino database engine for that failure!

(Plurals in parenthesis because most of our servers actually had more than one mailbox queue DB for performance reasons. This doesn't change the story.)

I can honestly say I've lost more work to Word crashing or corrupting its files than I ever lost to Notes doing the same.

Re: Domino

I'd dispute your first statement on a technicality - Domino was an excellent mail server. It was a mediocre mail client, true - but the mail server was excellent. It had good routing controls (including least-cost routing across multiple paths), it was robust, and it was fast.

But the one I want to really take up is that it was a mediocre database. By what measure? What other non-relational database are we comparing it to? Does that database engine have transaction logging for integrity & performance? Does it have a cluster replication engine capable of syncing a database across up to six servers? Does it have 64Gb and later effectively unlimited database sizes? Does it have a replication engine capable of field-level replication? Does it have robust security that allows access control down to the field level? Does it allow encryption of the database? Or field-level encryption? Does it allow single-object storage of attachments across multiple databases? Compression of objects within the database? Honestly, I could go on for quite a while here.

The Domino database engine is far from mediocre. It was one of the first non-relational databases to get widespread deployment, and it did exceptionally well. If there's one thing that Notes should be remembered for getting right, it's that database engine. Modern NoSQL databases are only just beginning to catch up to what it could do.

It wasn't all bad

I do think that Notes' time has passed. Just as Outlook's time is running out.

But sometimes when I'm trying to get things to work in this wonderful web-based world, I realise I could have done whatever it is I'm doing both more easily and faster in Lotus Notes. It was a remarkable platform.

And the knots Microsoft tied itself into to compete with it would have been amusing, if they weren't so damned awful for us all to implement and administer. Even when delivered via Microsoft 365, SharePoint is something of a rushed dog's dinner by comparison. I know which one I'd rather have to use!

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

This is bad typography.

Not the fonts themselves. The very idea - one default font for Office.

You pick the right typeface for the purpose.

Word is likely to be used for longer texts, so something like Skeena would be the best choice, with perhaps Bierstadt for headings & titles.

Excel is likely to have lots of small text that you need to get exactly right, so Bierstadt or Tenorite would be more suitable, but they should consider Consolas as it's very good for numbers and its fixed width nature might help in a sea of numbers...

PowerPoint is about short, clear bits of text - so Bierstadt or Tenorite are suitable.

But this idea that there should be one typeface that's the default across all Office products is just terrible typography. It smacks of marketing taking the lead - "We must have a consistent brand across the products!" - without actually realising what buffoons they're making of themselves.

This is why we can't have nice things, and why people say Microsoft has no style.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Re: Having been a customer of and worked alongside Fujitsu

I worked for an ICL division back in 1995-1998. I was young and very wet behind the ears, but looking back I can see a very unhealthy management system.

I can fully believe that there would have been massive pressure to get stuff done. The senior management wanted to try to prove to Fujitsu that their purchase of ICL was justified - but they had no clue how to do that.

The management would no doubt blame unions and 1970's working practices. But when I started with them I didn't realise that the empty building over the other side of the car park was also owned by ICL. And that the huge building across the road was - you guessed it - owned by ICL. I was told that the joke in the UK IT industry was that ICL should just quit doing IT and become landlords, as they had so many assets sitting unused. So I think it's fair to say that it couldn't have just been the employees.

Personally nothing demonstrates the dysfunction of ICL like the time I was removed from the org chart for six months and didn't have a manager. Genuinely. I was living the dream! If the dream is having no support and doing everything on a shoestring...

I just kept doing my job, and then one day someone arrived looking for me and my colleagues because they wanted to know what we did and why ICL was paying us. This had happened simply because a manager wanted to cut their costs, and did so by removing us from the paperwork as much as they could...

Sadly this meant I did get a manager. We queried the grapevine, and it turned out he'd been involved in a failing project 200 miles away, and we were very probably his punishment. He seemed to have no intention of moving and was simply driving down and staying in hotels every week. How very cost effective!

Remember, this would all have been at the time that they were doing the early development and test rollouts of Horizon.

I have no idea what ICL/Fujitsu is like now. But I do know that a friend of mine worked at the same site after I left, and the stories he told didn't make me think it got any better.

Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder, sparks chaos for half a million projects

This won't even be the worst of it.

At some point, someone's going to die and their estate will go to a relative that's an arsehole. The kind of arsehole that thinks free software and other community projects are communism.

And that relative will seek to claim the copyright of that person's code, and pull it from all the projects. (Mostly in the mistaken belief that they can and should profit from this.) If it's widely used code, then all hell will break loose.

This is why companies like Canonical had copyright assignment requirements. Many in the open source community don't like them, and think it's some kind of corporate trap. But legally, they're almost certainly the right thing to do. In fact the community should really think about setting up some kind of "clearing house" to process & store copyright assignments for its own protection.

If you do contribute to open source, make sure you put a paragraph in your will about what you want done with your works when you're gone. Just in case...

The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL

Re: Progress

I'm going to throw a counterpoint in here...

The fact is that a lot of companies rarely update their email system. I know - I worked in messaging for over 15 years. Email is a fantastic tool that companies take for granted. But it's also low on the list of budget priorities for most companies.

In that regard, Microsoft's obsession with the cloud is a good thing. Far too many companies have old, unpatched Exchange Servers. They're not interested in keeping them current because the impact of a failure in patching is high and the perceived benefits are low.

Why is this? Well, there are plenty of people out there with Exchange Server on their CV who have never so much as run eseutil, let alone know how Exchange works. All they've done is manage mailboxes and distribution lists, and maybe turn IMAP/POP3 on/off and do some mail relay configuration. This is important because those people will find an Exchange upgrade a major project - one which they may not be prepared for. Worse, with each version of Exchange Microsoft likes to make small changes that mean that experience with a previous upgrade is not necessarily as useful as you might think... Basically, a specific Exchange Server version has a low TCO in the middle of its lifespan but very high overheads at the start/end that most businesses won't want to meet. That encourages a "leave it alone, it's too important to fiddle with" attitude, both in the technical and management staff.

If there's one product that Microsoft has which is perfectly suited to being replaced by the cloud, that product is Microsoft Exchange.

(Or SharePoint. SharePoint has similar problems, now I come to think about it!)

Re: Having used most versions of Exchange since Version 4.0

Thanks!

I should probably note that Notes did do some caching of design elements - the definitions of views and folders mostly, but possibly also some forms. All view/folder data and documents were fetched on demand though.

I'm not going to say that Notes couldn't have trouble with replication, but I never saw much. I worked with it for 15 years, across four employers - one of which was a small consultancy . So I saw a lot of Notes infrastructures, ranging from small standalone servers to multinational behemoths. Just like AD or other systems, a lot of it is down to the planning and topology. Get that wrong and you're going to have issues...

As to the interface, well nothing is perfect. I may prefer composing an email in Outlook, but I prefer working with the calendar in Notes. Both have their pluses and minuses. If Outlook could have a proper tab system, it'd be so much better!

As for "Microsoft standards" - the one that seemed to get the most complaints in Notes was the use of F5 for locking the client. F5 is the refresh key, right? Actually, no. F9 is the refresh key. It recalculates in Excel, refreshes fields in Word, and fetches mail in Outlook. Only in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer was F5 the refresh key. It should have been F9...

Am I saying that anyone who complained about F5 was secretly wasting all their time browsing the web? Well you might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment. ;-)

Re: Wait.... what?

Having used most versions of Exchange since Version 4.0, I'd disagree with you. Exchange has at least one serious architectural issue.

Setup is certainly easy, as is day to day administration due to its integration with (or reliance upon) Active Directory. But Exchange has always had issues with its storage systems. In the early versions they were fragile and slow, and in the current version they're just slow.

The other product I've used for email was Lotus Notes. Which is much maligned, but has an excellent storage system. I've managed servers with over 1200 mailboxes on them and there were no performance issues. We migrated the users from those servers to Exchange, and newer and more powerful hardware managed the same number of mailboxes - but only because of cached mode in Outlook. If we turned that off, it couldn't cope. For reference, Notes does no caching.

That's been my experience with Exchange at every step of its life - the storage is the weakest point, and is a considerable weakness.

Microsoft have had 25 years of development, and gone through at least one major redesign of the storage system, and yet it's still not good enough. I still have my phone's Outlook app ping to say there's a new email and then the email arrives a short while later in Outlook on the desktop. It's a small and constant reminder that the Exchange storage system is not up to scratch.

In most other respects Exchange is fine. Not brilliant, but fine.

(Oh, and with regards to PowerShell - yeah, administration via PowerShell can be lovely. Though I'd still like to have words with the twit that decided on its typing system. The bane of any work beyond the basics is almost always that you'll end up dealing with loads of data types that should be interoperable but aren't - like AD group members and Exchange Distribution group members. I swear if I took a profiler to some of the scripts I've written they'd spend most of their time storing $_.Name as a string so that I can do a comparison without getting a type error! It's not insufferable, just annoying. And partly a problem because Microsoft's own teams can't agree on some kind of standard object type for users, groups, group members and so forth across their systems. Still, it keeps us all employed!)

Upgrade from .NET Framework to .NET 5 can be hard. New official tool may help... slightly

Remember, no complaining folks!

OK folks, remember the rules.

No complaining.

This is job security. This is what will keep you employed for the next cycle of your career. And the best part is that even if it's not, your employer will have to pick an alternative which you'll reskill into and redevelop everything - which will still keep you employed!

So no complaining. Well, not here, obviously. You can complain to your management. They need to know it's a problem, but not an insurmountable one. A significant change. The kind that can't easily be handled by offshoring either, as knowledge of the existing codebase is critical to the success of the project.

Yes, if you play this well, it's basically an assurance of future beer tokens... and what's not to like about that? ;-)

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

Such bad planning!

Terabytes stored ONLY in cloud backups? That's bad planning.

Sure, you need an off-site backup for the worst possible case. For many large companies, it can be at another site that they own or have long-term secure access to. But for small companies and individuals, the cloud is fine.

However, you should always have a local store as well. Because a large amount of data is going to be faster off local spindles than down through your internet connection. Sure, your worst case is that fire or flood means you have to go with offsite. But onsite is what you should be reaching for in most situations.

To not have that for 36Tb of data is baffling. Is it actually a backup? Or is it an archive? If it's just an archive, then it needs its own backup.

Either way, it's bad planning. Hopefully he's learned a lesson here...

Financial Reporting Council slaps Autonomy auditor Deloitte with £15m fine over audit 'misconduct'

Is this the system working?

It's been so long since I last saw a professionally regulated system working, I'm not sure I recognise it.

But this does seem vaguely familiar...

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

A false equivalence

Google and Apple have something closer to a "natural monopoly", in that they own the platform that their Store grants them a monopoly on.

We don't see Google or Apple entering into licensing agreements saying that they'll demand a license for every phone a manufacturer ships, even if it's shipped without their OS. Microsoft did that.

We don't see Google or Apple extending other company's technologies in incompatible ways to try to extinguish them. Microsoft did that.

We don't see Google embedding functionality into their store that's designed to drive the use of only their technologies, at the expense of competitors. We do see that from Apple (not allowing alternative web renderers, billing) and did see that from Microsoft.

Google is the least offensive in this comparison - they're relatively laissez-faire. Their billing cut of 30% for the Play Store is a monopoly, but their standards are the least rigorous and their enforcement is the loosest. Most complaints from Devs I see whose apps are pulled are either mistakes or they were flouting the rules.

Apple is the new Microsoft. They've only recently allowed the replacement of their own default apps, and exercise tight control of both the platform and what Apps can do on it. Fans who excuse it because "Apple are keeping the platform secure and easy to use" are no better than the Microsoft fans who tried to justify Internet Explorer's deep embedding into Windows.

But Apple still aren't going as far as Microsoft ever did. Microsoft may well be a recovering Monopoly Addict these days, but pointing at new addicts doesn't allow them to pretend that they weren't once high on the power & profits...

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

I use Aquamail.

In the many, many options there's the ability to force plain text format, to force replying at the bottom and to determine your quote prefix.

It may not be entirely what you want, but it's not bad. You can back up the settings to a cloud account so once you've got it configured, which is handy.

Even the scheduled agent OOO went away - I think in Release 7. There had always been a trigger for agents to run "on new mail", but the concern was that an email to everyone would overwhelm the agent manager queuing system, and not all of them would get processed. IBM did a little work so that the Router could run simple agents itself, rather than sending a trigger to the agent manager process.

That meant that OOO became effectively instant without large load on the server.

And the Notes OOO had, since version 4 at least, kept a list of who it had already replied to. By default, it was set to only send one reply during the entire duration. That really helped keep email storms at bay. Of course, there's always someone who'll turn that off, but Notes made it easy enough to spot and react to because you had decent logging and a server console you could look at...

Anyway, enough rambling. I'm showing my age. ;-)

Lotus Notes gave me a career for 15 years, so I'm not usually one to bad mouth it.

That website was out of date even when it was published, as it mostly deals with Lotus Notes 4 - 5 shipped in 1999.

The biggest problem Notes had was just that IBM underinvested in it massively. The backend was superb, and didn't need much more investment. The client needed some improvement, but only got it in fits and starts. Classic IBM management failure, really.

Its day is past now. You don't have to use the same app for mail, calendar, to-do and so forth. Notes as a platform was ultimately killed by what's also slowly killing off Outlook - the web browser. Outlook took some Notes mail seats temporarily, that's all. ;-)

(And we still don't have any great mail clients. My feature list for a mythical "perfect mail client" has features from about five different email clients, and would be hard to build. Especially as I'd like it to be cross platform on desktop, web, Android and iOS. Ultimately, we muddle through with what we've got.)

Bytes? BYTES?

We had bits, and we felt lucky.

Our father woke us up at one o'clock, two hours before we went to sleep, murdered us in cold blood, made us install Computer Associates middleware before eating a breakfast of cold gravel, then sent us t' mine via Lotus Notes. In the hot inky blackness of the netherworld we'd wind individual bytes of memory with razorwire, whilst the Foreman read aloud from a selection of early PHP code. Then at ten o'clock they'd kill us by flooding the mine with SPX packets as the salespeople played illegal copies of DOOM. Our corpses would float up, where they'd revive us and make us fix a field full of HP Laserjets with "PC Load Letter" errors. At the end of week, we'd be expected to pay a shilling for privilege.

And you try telling that to the kids of today. They won't believe you!

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

It won't help.

The universe will just build a better idiot.

It always does.

It's how we got here. :-(

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

"The Monopolist Formerly Known As Evil"?

Extra knobs and dials for Microsoft's Productivity Score while Azure Active Directory lays on the freebies

Oh goody...

A metric that neither Management nor Staff understand - heaven sent for micromanagement morons!

This can surely only end well...

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Re: Er ...

Let's assume that there's some battery-backed RAM or non-volatile SRAM in the device, and it's used to store settings.

Now let's assume that the later version of the software has additional functionality that either:

a) changes the data structure.

-or-

b) stores values that are valid for new or improved features, but would be invalid for old firmware.

When you roll back to a previous firmware, this could cause problems. Well written software will hopefully ignore invalid values and revert to defaults. If data structures are invalid, that may be more serious - it could cause very odd problems.

This is not an insurmountable problem, and good engineering can help mitigate it. But there's always going to be one smartarse who decides to revert from the very latest firmware for a device to the very first - and if the time period for that covers a couple of years, and several versions, is it really so simple to know that it'll work? Especially if a lot of new features have been added and that storage area now looks quite different...

Should Bose (or anyone else) really be testing such extreme downgrades? Testing a rollback by one version makes sense, but multiple versions seems harder to justify...

I doubt they've even bothered doing much testing for reverting firmware. Why should they? It's not a commonly expected user procedure, and the preferred way to fix any issues with a firmware upgrade should be to issue a new version with the fix.

So this statement seems perfectly reasonable to me, despite its somewhat "blanket legal boilerplate" nature.

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

How about a nice long hot summer?

We thought we were fine, because we had decent aircon in the server room and nobody else could control it. But then we had a hot summer.

Very hot. Specifically, the 2006 heatwave hot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_heat_wave#United_Kingdom

And it turns out our aircon had a serious flaw. The exhaust port was in direct sunlight, and at the wrong angle. The warm wind and the warm air rising from the (black, naturally) roof isn't blowing heat away, it's blowing it back down the exhaust pipe...

Yep, our server room aircon kept cutting out due to overheating, despite the room being freezing. It just kept tripping the internal sensors on the units. We were very puzzled. We were also somewhat frazzled as we kept having to come in early, spend long days nursing minimal systems along in a room cooled with one inadequate portable air conditioner. Clusters ran on only one node. Some servers were powered up only on demand.

I've just realised that in some ways we spent that week as a crappy physical version of AWS or Azure. Damn, we should have patented the concepts! ;-)

Each night everything except email and network/AD servers were powered down, to try to cool the room as much as possible for the next day. Staff were advised that systems were strictly 08:00 - 18:00, due to the emergency. I suspect most were grateful for an excuse to leave early and get some sun!

After a little over a week the exhaust port was temporarily fixed, and later in the year a more permanent fix was put in place. But I now have much more respect for HVAC engineers and the work that they do, because it seems that there definitely some cowboys out there!

'Developers have lost hope Microsoft will do the right thing'... Redmond urged to make WinUI cross-platform

I don't see the point.

Most applications I've used that were "cross-platform" felt like a second-class citizen, unless they were web-based.

It's hard to get the chroming and feature integration right across multiple platforms. So I'd rather that Microsoft focused on doing a good job on just one or two.

I'm tempted to say that they could lead a charge for some kind of universal markup. Reach out to Google with Android, and to Apple, and see if they can get something done there. But the big problem is that both of them are now committed to declarative UI systems (Jetpack Compose and Swift UI), so for them a standardised markup might be seen as a step backwards compared to their current efforts.

But without the support of the platform vendors, any cross-platform UI will always be lag behind the platform itself, and risk going against native conventions. Basically, the same problems that Java had with its UI toolkits...

So given that history and current politics suggests any attempt at cross-platform UI is highly likely to fail, I'm rather sceptical. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Language!

You should at least warn us if you're going to use language like P*w*rB**ld*r in an article.

Some healthy robust Anglo-Saxon is of course expected on El Reg, but we surely have SOME standards here? I mean, some people have had to work with P*w*rB**ld*r, and are still scarred.

(And others have had to work with products built by in-house P*w*rB**ld*r developers, and are more broken than scarred...)

Ever had a script you just can't scratch? Excel on the web now has just the thing

Re: ODS Compatibility?

For a while now, I've been saying that they want to kill the offline/local binary versions of Office programs.

These programs have issues. Their codebase is very old - parts date back to the mid-90s. This came out a decade ago during the OOXML specification debacle, when it became clear that Word has compatibility modes with names like "autoSpaceLikeWord95". No explanation was immediately forthcoming on what that meant though.

Which means that somewhere in Word there's an entire code branch for spacing that can be activated, but only exists for compatibility purposes.

Let's be honest, that's a problem. Ignoring the bloat, there's the security aspect. A bunch of code nobody is touching, fewer people understand as they leave/retire each year, but can still be activated by an OOXML document despite being 25+ year old code...

Word, Excel and PowerPoint are overdue a rewrite. And if you're going to rewrite it, you may as well make it a web based application. Local "cached" versions can still be provided - look at Teams as an example.

Whether we want it or not, this rewrite is happening. And the desktop apps will be matched by the web apps, then left behind. It's a stealth rewrite.

I actually think it's probably a good thing in the long run. And long overdue. But I don't expect it to be popular...

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

Re: Reduce, re-used, recycle

When the graphics card died, I replaced it with a budget job.

The original card was a beast. It was close to top of the line in 2010, requiring two power leads and being double height. I don't recall the cost, but I think it was hundreds of pounds.

The replacement was about £90. Several years had passed, and what I got was basically a revised version of that same beast. Same number of compute units, similar amount of RAM - but half the physical size, only requiring one power lead, and running much cooler.

I was already happy with the graphical performance of my games. I'm struggling to think of any major graphical advance since 2010 that I simply must have. So any non-budget card will probably be fine.

Heck, half the budget cards are probably fine by now too!

Back in the 90's, and around the turn of the millennium, every step forward was huge. Let's put it in terms of games. Command Keen, Wolfenstien 3D, DOOM, Quake, Quake II, Quake III. Each of them is noticeably superior to the previous game in terms of graphics.

Since 2010, it's been incremental. The rate of progress has slowed. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm still playing Borderlands 2, and it still looks great. It was launched in 2012.

Reducing the footprint of software would be nice, but the fact is that the hardware has been sufficient for quite a while now...

Reduce, re-used, recycle

The old adage is to reduce, re-use and recycle - in that order.

In terms of reduce - my desktop machine is an old Core i7-2700K (I think) in a big tower case which still manages just fine. Bought in 2010, and delivery was delayed due to the motherboard being affected by the Sandy Bridge southbridge chipset bug. (Remember that?)

It's a bit of a Trigger's Broom today, having had a new power supply, new graphics card, replacement RAM and an upgrade to an SSD. All except the SSD were replacements due to failures, but the big tower case means maintenance is quick and easy. It might need replacing soon - but it'll have served me for 10 years, which means ten years in which I haven't bought a new PC. Or even felt like I needed to.

For re-use, it's my laptop. It was more for budget reasons than anything else that I bought a second hand Thinkpad. They're reliable and durable, so are excellent candidates for that. Again, performance is just fine and it meets my needs amply. I put Ubuntu on it, all the hardware (except for the fingerprint reader - which I wasn't going to use anyway) was supported without issues.

I'm sure that the Windows 10 Refurb Edition installation that was on it would also have been OK. But I do have more reservations about running Windows as a sustainable OS on older hardware. Linux just works - no need for manufacturer's drivers. And that's where Windows falls down IMO. I remember installing Windows 7 onto my desktop tower 10 years ago. Windows failed to find almost all the hardware - it booted into a low res, had no sound, no network, nothing. Ubuntu found everything but one of the network adapters (the built in one on the motherboard). I didn't even realise that the motherboard had Bluetooth support until I saw the icon next to the clock in Ubuntu! Then I had to reboot into Windows and spend an hour or two installing drivers for the motherboard - most of the time spent rebooting after each driver install, of course.

It's no doubt better now. A decade has passed. But as the Sonos issue shows, companies want to sell you new hardware. So sunsetting driver support for newer versions of Windows is going to continue to be a thing. Ironically, hardware support in Linux is now becoming superior to hardware support for Windows, especially if you want to still use old hardware.

Until we can convince vendors to have longer support periods, anyone attempting to reduce/re-use is probably better off moving to Linux.

Starliner snafu could've been worse: Software errors plague Boeing's Calamity Capsule

How things have changed...

This article has stuck with me since I first read it well over a decade ago:

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

It shows a mature, confident development process that understands the risks and chooses to minimise them.

For example, if they find a bug they don't just fix it. They check what kind of bug it is, and if it's one they've not encountered before (certain types of arithmetic for example) they then check the whole code base for the same issue.

This is why the Shuttle never had a software problem that killed people. Culturally, they took it seriously.

By contrast, the management at Boeing evidently have a different culture. One of cost cutting and what could charitably be called "personal development".

If they encounter a bug, they're probably wondering whether they should fix it or just rewrite in Node.Js. The latter buys time, and looks good on the CV when the inevitable failure happens anyway...

This would be amusing, if people's lives weren't on the line.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: Ex fruity genius...

Back in the 90's, I worked for a company who had a major tobacco seller as a client.

The tobacco company's offices in London simply had packets of free fags lying around. Not packs of 20 - the actual strips of packs of 20. Everyone in that office smoked. And smoked a lot. Because they weren't paying for it (financially, anyway).

We had staff who refused to go back to that site. Everything was covered in a patina of smoke and tar. EVERYTHING. Your fingertips were yellowed after a visit. Your clothes would need a thorough wash. Some people even reported wanting to shower after a visit, so pervasive was the smoke and tar. It was simply disgusting.

We were only supporting the email system, but we spoke to the company who supported the PCs occasionally. Apparently, the PCs had a lifespan of around a year before the tar buildup killed them. They'd given up trying to clean and resurrect them, not because it wasn't possible, but because it was simply too time consuming and too disgusting for the person trying to do it.

I've never smoked, so I'm biased against the habit. But even our MD - who liked a fag and often had a pipe going whilst in the office - thought that their office was a bit too smokey.

It was a site I dreaded. When we got remote support capabilities and I could simply hop onto the server without visiting, I was incredibly happy.