Posts by Jim Willsher

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Sorry, Jim. You don't get two up-votes by posting duplicates.

Yeah, the El Reg comments features is a bit 19th century, and can't handle logging in and commenting on the same submit - or so it told me. Hence the dup.

Yes, yes, and more yes. Copilot can Foxtrot Oscar and join Clippy...they're one and the same anyway.

Yes, yes and yes. Copilot can Foxtrot Oscar and go the same way Clippy went. they're one and the same anyway.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

So sick of AI already. That horrid Copilot icon has become a horrid thing that I will go to great lengths to euthanise. I don't want it, and I definitely don't want it thrust in my face.

Latest patch leaves some Windows 10 machines stuck in recovery loops

Quality all round

MS quality was always bad, but it has become shockingly terrible in the last 12 months. And not just Windows, but also Dynamics 365, the area I work in as a partner. It really is bad at present.

Don't delete that mystery empty folder. Windows put it there as a security fix

"No one uses IIS these days"

I have the displeasure of maintaining a classic .ASP intranet application for a local business. Written in 2001/2002 "it does what they need" and therefore they resist all efforts to put something better in. And being .ASP, it sits under IIS.

I recently upgraded their kit to Windows Server 2025 and SQL 2022; oh what fun was in store getting that lot to work!!!

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

New Outlook is shockingly shit, everyone in our org has reverted back.

Heart surgery device maker's security bypassed, data encrypted and stolen

As the proud owner/recipient of a new aortic valve last year, I can vouch for how good they are, and to hear about a company that's providing healthcare getting attacked makes my blood boil, it's totally heartless.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

It's too early in the morning, but I'm wondering how many /12 blocks there are? e.g. if Huawei have been given a /12 then how many other orgs could be given a /12? Thinking back to when IBM etc had a /8 on IPv4.

I'm guessing 65520? Based on /12 being 1111111111110000

Or does it work differently?

Lame question, but it's 7-ish at the end of a long week so it's easier to ask the experts here than hurt my brain.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Plesae don't run competitions like this, Microsoft needs no encouragment.

That said, I'd suggest the next place Copilot shoud visit is Dignitas.

Clues to Windows Intelligence found in Windows 11 builds

Re: Angry ladies with sponge cakes and scones.

Two minutes too slow, apparently.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

Tabs. Always tabs. It's very easy to see indentation differences when it's 1 tab, 2 tabs or 3 tabs. But when you use spaces, the intention to use 4 spaces, 8 spaces or 12 spaces invariably ends up being 3, 5, 9, 11, 13 etc.

Also, if you then want to add another IF condition within a while loop within another while loop, what's quicker - tab tab tab or space space space space space space space space space space space space?

Tabs all the way.

This isn't about storage any more, however code readability shouldn't suffer.

NB I'm assuming four spaces is the chosen number; any less and it's hard to work out what's what.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

Love my two Intel NUCs in my home lab running ESXi (let's not got there). Hope to see some innovation around 2.5Gbe Ethernet and > 64GB RAM (they may be available now, it's a while since I have looked). Form factor doesn't bother me, they're headless in the loft.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

I used to have a static IP when I used ADSL. About 5 years ago I swapped to 4G (I can get 180Mb versus the 11Mb I get on ADSL). I thought I would badly miss that static. I didn’t.

Yes, it’s annoying to have to keep updating firewall rules on customer sites etc, but I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would, CGNAT has worked out okay.

I’m due to get FTTP in three years, and will look forward to having a static again. But I’ll be happy to keep using NAT though, there’s nothing in IPv6 that’s a must-have for me, and I certainly don’t need the headaches that v6 would surely bring.

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

Re: Another one?

Agreed. I live in Scotland and it pisses down. A lot. Plenty of water here. Oh, and it’s windy.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Our car is 8 years old so we're considering changing it. EV doesn't even enter the equation. We live in rural Scotland, with no charging infrastructure nearby, our house roof is unsuitable for panels due to dormers, and we tow both trailer (2200KG) and caravan (1800KG).

There's nothing on the market, EV wise, that can tow the above AND that we can afford.

Meanwhile, we can choose from hundreds of 2nd-hand diesels.

Don't get me wrong, getting away from oil is the right thing to do, but EV just isn't the solution, at least not yet.

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

I ended up in hospital last October having suffered endocarditis. It's life-threatening, and it resulted in me having an aortic heart valve replacement, 6 hours of surgery, over 200 IV antibiotics, and 30 days in hospital. My work colleagues bought me this as a gift for when I got home as they knew I was having three months off work and it would keep me occupied.

It was a bloody brilliant decision, and it kept me occupied for about three weeks; I could only manage about 30 minutes each day as I was totally knackered.

It now has pride of place on a cabinet behind our dining table.

Concorde was a princess, and whilst I never flew on her (my parents did) I remember seeing her several times, and also working in the buildings beside Heathrow 27R runway when she thundered past, and she was majestic. I now have my very own Concorde.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Still amazes me that MS allows a third-party driver to simply pull the system down and stop it getting back up, with no soft landing to allow remediation (aside from safe boot etc). Surely Windows should still start but with a huge warning that "service X couldn't start".

Windows is too fragile (no shit, Sherlock) such that it can be crippled by a third party component - although MS are pretty capable of doing that themselves.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

*PRTG, not PTRG.

Veeam adds support for VMware alternative Proxmox to its backup software

We run vSphere and we have Veeam.Looking at Proxmox. This is a positive move for us.

VWware/Broadcom can wither on the vine, after the way they have treated their customers.

VMware's end-user compute products probably have a new brand: Omnissa

Migration from SAP to Oracle, in a short timescale, with a short time window.

What could possibly go wrong?

VMware urges emergency action to blunt hypervisor flaws

Updated my two ESXi hosts this morning. They are standalone, so I normally do esxcli software profile update etc. However this resulted in MemoryError.

Found a blog by the legendary William Lam:

https://williamlam.com/2024/03/quick-tip-using-esxcli-to-upgrade-esxi-8-x-throws-memoryerror-or-got-no-data-from-process.html

Solution is to download the offlne bundle and store in repo, then update from there

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-standard -d /vmfs/volumes/NUC3Primary/ISO/VMware-ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-depot.zip

Posting ths just in case this helps anyone else.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Agreed. Free DElivery was the only thing keeping me there, because Prime Video was rubbish. When the price jumped from £79 to £95 last year, that was the time I bailed and re-evaluated my purchases. After all, there's as much Chinese crap on Amazon as there is on ebay now, so I only buy from Amazon when I'm looking for reputable branded stuff, rather than quirky hard-to-find stuff that I could only ever find on Amazon.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Re: Bye bye ESXi

Me too. I have a NUC at home running ESXi Free and it has been great. When the time comes to buy a new NUC I will look at options, as I doubt my ESXi USB will cater for newer harware when I get it.

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

"I'm not one of the El Reg readers affected by this"

I am, and the CAMC has been shambolic at handling this. The first we knew was the website going down (500), then they put up a holding page. It was ~6 days before they issued their first statement. They claimed they were told not to go public with an announcement, presumably in the hope that their 1M+ members (including myself) simply wouldn't notice.

In January. When most people have a new holiday year. And are starting to book holidays. Like we were trying to.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

The hardware requirements are the only thing stopping us upgrading. Our fleet is W10 and W11 has a few beneficial features, but we're not about to replace good hardware to do it.

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

I suspect classic .ASP will be on death row now too, and there's still a surprising number of sites ouit there still using it.

Azure SQL Database takes Saturday off on US east coast following network power failure

" Subsequently, the remaining SQL DB instances was brought back online got bring survives to full functionality.""

Either Microsoft or El Reg needs to employ a proof-reader. There's also "power power" further up, and another typo.

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

Shame. I run a couple of NUC8i5BEH units in the house, both running ESXi 8 and serving up a mixture of Windows DCs, Windows servers, Linux servers etc. All fun hobby stuff, nothing critical. But they just work, consume only 9 watts each, are silent, and have been bombproof. ANd thye take 64GB RAM, even though the spec says 32GB max. Whilst they are serving me well, at some point I'll need to renew them.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

I have an XS Max. Screen, buttons, mic, speaker, they are all as good as the day I bought it, four years ago. Battery is shite, lasting no more than 6 hours. There is nothing wrong with my phone except the battery, so being able to easily change that would be fantastic.

A good thing. Apple has had this insane obsession with making iPhones as thin as possible, and that has always led to rubbish daily battery life. Given the thickness of an iPhone battery, adding 2mm to the thickness of an iPhone would allow double battery life. If this new EU rule provides the push for Apple to completely rethink the battery approach, I am all for it.

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

ACID would be the best way to kill it.

Notes was horrid then and it's probably horrid now. We had it enforced on us around 1999 or so, and a staff revolt saw it replaced with Exchange/Outlook sometime around 2004 I think. I'm genuinely amazed t's even still alive, it should be flogged to the software-graveyard company Infor or simply buried and forgotten forever.

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

And BT still are a bunch of the same body part, whichever arm of “what we think of as BT” is involved.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Re: We have multiple redundant gigabit fibre connections...

Where I live I only* have 4G, via EE. It's pretty good, I can get 250Mb/s overnight, and 100Mb/s daytime.

*technically I could also have ADSL, but I'd need a land line and I'd get a whopping 8Mb/s.

Intel pours Raptor Lake chips into latest NUC Mini PC line

I have a couple of NUC8ieBEH units running in the house, both running VMWare and 8 or 9 VMs. They have been rock solid, set it and forget it hardware.

But they are NUC8, and they can handle 64GB RAM, which is what I have. Shame the new units announced here can also only handle 64GB. I get that they are positioned as smal desktop PCs, but they are great for home servers.

Riding in Sidecar: How to get a Psion online in 2023

Someone with clearly too much time on their hands.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

and so Qualcomm is expected to continue to supply all the 5G chipsets for iPhones in 2022.

2023?

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

As a child at high school, I fell for the long weight thing. I still haven't forgiven my CDT teacher and I think he's dead now.

Vodafone to move SAP S/4HANA ERP system to Google Cloud

Re: They’re HUUUUUGE.

I was going to say the same. Yeah huge! All 300!

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

MS still quotes 4GB as being the minimum required for Win 10/11. We all know that's bollocks but I guess if they launched the lowest spec machine with 8GB or 16GB it would blow a hole in their story.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

I'm willing to bet my house that I'll not see it overtake IPv4 during my lifetime, and I'm only aged 49.999999.

Re: Party Line

And it works, but it's impossibly to host anything. Great for Joe Public, but probably not for most of the readers of this website.

Most carriers support it; backbone providers etc. But most ISPs - in the UK at least - who provide the last mile. BT, Virgin and EE are three, and they probably cover 80% of the domestic endpoints. I know you asked about non-domestic but the reality is that most users and probably most SMEs use domestic-class connections.

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

We can pontificate all we like. The fact that IPv6 adoption is hovering around 37% a full ten years since IPv6 Day tells us that it has been a fundamental flop. We can all speculate on the reasons - firewalls, ability to memorise addresses etc. But TEN YEARS? Really?

Fail.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you.

James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth

Re: thank you

Yeah but Guardian and quality aren't normally used in the same sentence.

It doesn't matter how you look at this, it's a pretty damned good bit of work by some very clever people.

Spend 10 years building something that's several metres tall, sit it on top of a "bomb waiting to happen", sling it into space, let it hurtle along at ~10 KM/s (gradually slowing) for around a million miles, and it arrives on time and is exactly where it's supposed to be. No options to retry it or "have another go", and no-one forgot to remove that last cable-tie.

Good design and proper planning really is worth the effort.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime

I'm also 49, I've worked in IT for 27 years (developer, networking, now a global CTO) and I agree. The IETF needs to fall on its sword and accept that it has failed.

Look at the failings of IPv4, look at the barriers to adoption of IPv6, and find some middle ground. IPv6 throws the baby out wit the bathwater.

Take NAT for example. Yes, people see it as a challenge. But it's great for having simple firewall rules, where the default is to disallow all inbound traffic.

Take addressing. Anyone in IT can easily remember IP addresses as they walk from one end of the office to the other; IPv6 address blocks are longer, with hex, and are just less memorable.

Take the concept of all devices having a public IP address. Maybe I don't want that?

I'm not posting this as an AC, and I'm happy to be shot down. But I don't think I'm wrong. If IPv6 brought enough advantages, the challenges would be overcome, people would find a way. But there are very few advantages at the "IT department level" and the "end user level", so there's simply no appetite for the effort.

VMware recalls full vSphere update over driver dramas

The update to Workstation last month shipped with the VM Compatibility dropdown displaying "Beta" instead of the actual version. So yes, VMWare's QA department seem to have gone AWOL.