* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Facebook debuts WhatsApp desktop apps as Slack adds SSO

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The Mac OS version of the WhatsApp desktop app assumes you're already a user

If it's like WhatsApp for the web, your phone is in charge and the app connects to your phone via the Internet.

A UK-wide fibre broadband investment plan? Don't ask awkward questions

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: it amazes me..

Why should it amaze you? They've got half the population and hardly any legacy network.

Marc Benioff apologizes as Salesforce NA14 instance goes TITSUP

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Gotta love Cloud...

Shit as a Service?

Google asks Unicode to look over 13 new emoji showing professional women

Dan 55 Silver badge

Was this what Unicode was for?

With all the combinations of emoji there'll be no codepoints left for characters. Perhaps they should forget sticking role models into fonts and use Miis/Xbox avatars instead.

At the BBC, Agile means 'making it up as we go along'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Agile f**king rocks! It

It is if you like being drip-fed tasks and ripping out/refactoring old stuff you did three weeks before so you can do this task now. Repeatedly over months.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: At the BBC, Agile means 'making it up as we go along'

I was going to say exactly the same thing. Give me a waterfall any day, at least it makes people admit when they're going off track.

Tabby's Star's twinkle probably the boring business of calibration

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: And this is why there is no global warming

Global warming is brought about by the heat generated from TV licence deniers.

Privacy warriors take legal action over UK gov's right to hack

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: What expansion of capabilities?

Are hacking powers really curtailed to comply with the HRA? "All your computers are belong to us" doesn't suggest so.

Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "you are bombarded with motorbike insurance advertising on every platform you go to"

Are you suggesting you are fine with companies aggregating your private info as long as they sell it to whoever is willing to pay?

Not particularly, but I was talking about the being bombarded by advertising bit and stopping it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "decisioning"

Gerunding nouns is the new verbing.

Dan 55 Silver badge

"you are bombarded with motorbike insurance advertising on every platform you go to"

Not really, just sign up to the mail and telephone preference services and don't log into Google while you browse. If advertisers are legit enough to be buying this info from Experian, they're legit enough to play by the rules.

When we get tailored adverts just for us on cable or broadband TV, then we might have to think again, until then...

French maverick sniffs around O2

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Did you hear the one about the man from Telefonica who complained about unfair competition?

"We did an analysis of all the countries Telefonica operates in and the only one that compares for spectrum dominance is Venezuela."

Did he really look at Telefonica's home market? BT would be a plucky newcomer disrupting the market compared with how Telefonica have got things sewn up.

UK.biz is still clueless at fending off malware attacks, says survey

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Down

"the government is making a record £1.9bn investment in cyber security over the next five years"

Fines with teeth, liability if you don't follow best practice. Then the investment will magically happen on its own.

Small broadband firms aren't fussed about getting access to BT's ducts and poles

Dan 55 Silver badge

Router autoconfig is a solved problem.

Dan 55 Silver badge

If Openreach and BT were seperated...

Then small broadband providers might suddenly be interested in working with Openreach, because Openreach would actually be interested in working with them.

Debian farewells Pentium

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Time moves on...

What about Debian compiling packages for older CPUs using an older GCC and making a new CPU class in the package manager? Not difficult to script.

Official: Microsoft's 'Get Windows 10' nagware to vanish from PCs in July

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Why July

MS aren't selling it, they're giving it away for free until the end of July.

I'm sure enterprises and OEMs will be glad to hear that.

Apple needs silver bullet to slay App Store's escaped undead – study

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Should be a cardinal rule...

There should be a difference between malware being pulled and the developer deciding to pull the app.

You should be notified beforehand and be given chance to download and make a backup which later works on any device you own, present and future. But it doesn't work out like that, you're not notified so you may delete your own copy thinking you can get it from the store later and/or you don't get backups of app code made from your own phone and it's not on the store any more.

Of course the best solution would be that the last version is held on the app store for those who have already bought or downloaded it. Don't know how legal that is though.

Google: Trust us with NHS AI

Dan 55 Silver badge

Look, it's deleted

We've set the deleted flag and everything.

MS to kill GWX nagware

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Telemetry?

I notice they've not said anything about removing that...

When careers don't last much longer than primary school, play is the new training

Dan 55 Silver badge

One would hope that both theory and practical experience is taught, but it seems that the pendulum never quite sits in the middle...

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Where once we tried to cram kids heads full of facts"

Not to disparage an otherwise fine article, but weren't kids just pulled out of school over a testing regime that makes 1950’s rote learning look progressive?

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on July 29th

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: End of the "Nag"

No, the nagger will need an update to accept credit cards, and then the malware which looks exactly the same will start.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

GWX Control Panel or Never10

Get one of these now before they push out the update which takes care of the other 700 million devices they thought they were going to have by this time but don't.

Have Microsoft-hosted email? Love using Live Mail 2012? Bad news

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Modern synchronization technologies?

All this is guessing, nevertheless...

The protocols might be WebDAV and DeltaSync which were only ever used by Windows Live Mail and Hotmail together. Given that MS say you should switch over to Outlook-the-client, those two protocols are probably going to dropped and ActiveSync used in its place.

However MS would be mad to drop POP3 and IMAP from Hotmail so other clients apart from Outlook-the-client would carry on working, except for WLM which sees a @hotmail.com or @outlook.com address and automatically configures itself for a nonexistent protocol. Perhaps there's some way to trick it into configuring manually for IMAP.

I've deliberately used Hotmail instead of Outlook.com to make it clearer, otherwise everything would be called Outlook.

Reduced roaming charges, net neutrality come into force in EU

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Bloody EU!

Outside Europe? If people vote Brexit will wind turbines down the East Cost propel the UK to another continent?

Anyway, 3's already done it so I'm not sure that being inside Europe is strictly necessary.

ZX Printer's American cousin still in use, 34 years after purchase

Dan 55 Silver badge

You're right, the paper was different, I forgot that.

The Alphacom was a driven by the edge connector, like the Timex Sinclair. Nothing fancy like RS232.

IIRC whole lines were sent by an OUT to some port (forget which one, but there weren't many). Each line was 256 pixels long, the Spectrum sent the bitmap for the first row of pixels (32 bytes), then the second row of pixels, and so on down to the eighth. I can't remember if a linefeed was a code or just 8 empty rows.

If you can get hold of The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly that will show you the printer driver code.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I think the Timex Sinclair 2040 found its way back across the pond to the UK as the Alphacom 32, they look suspiciously similar.

The print didn't take long to fade and red pen ink written on top came out black, which the Chemistry teacher found interesting.

iOS apps must do IPv6

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So much for Internet of Things

Yes they can. They just have to do IP4 as well as IP6 even though it would make no sense if the device doesn't do IP6, but anyway.

Microsoft: Why we tore handy Store block out of Windows 10 Pro PCs

Dan 55 Silver badge

But before you could sort of prepare for the change. Now they get to pull the rug out from underneath your feet.

I wonder if you could get a discount on licence fees for features that are removed...

EU set to bin €500 note

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: ...exceedingly pleasing brick of €500 notes

If you're going to be walking round with more than 100,000 euros in Spain the bank has to give you a special form when you withdraw the money, so if Lewis has still got the form on his bedroom wall...

Although the form is rather academic now because as of a few years back as if you pay a company or someone who's self-employed the cash limit is 2,500.

According to statistics, which are never wrong, 500 euro notes now make up 75% of the money in circulation in Spain, twice the eurozone average.

The Lonely Pirate MEP's Holocaust copyright stunt backfires

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "when actually allowed to say anything at all by the mods"

It's earlier than the filesharing story and it's about something completely different.

Just as RIPA was used by councils to spy on people over stuff like rubbish collection and school catchment areas, it will be argued that P2P sharing over thousands of nodes is industrial scale. Not everybody who agrees with that is angry or persecuted.

Dan 55 Silver badge

In another post grey areas were mentioned. They're already here, they're called life + x years. Instead of the money going to the creator in those x years, more often than not it goes to a corporate behemoth such as Disney (bingo!) than anyone else.

Any copyright after death doesn't strengthen the rights of the individual. Whilst Google and Facebook don't strengthen the rights of the individual, neither does Disney. If you want to be a creator and Disney is publishing, you'd better create something that the princess factory can make or your work won't be published and you'd better sign over your rights to Disney.

If copyright is to be strengthened, then it can't be just slapping more years on in 2023 when Mickey Mouse falls out of copyright, it's got to be done giving individual creators more legal tools to keep their own copyright and to go after all corporate behemoths, not just Silly Valley ones.

Intel has driven a dagger through Microsoft's mobile strategy

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Linux on Azure, Office for Android, Subsystem for Linux

Every phone and its dog can do remote desktop, there's no need for a Windows Phone for that, unless MS are going to do some RDP lock-in...

OTOH if that is the strategy then having to have a net connection to get to the cloud version of a piece of software to do Continuum is pretty crap.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Windows is Burning Platform 2.0

Sounds like the introductory credits to Deadpool.

Extreme photo-bombing: Bad ImageMagick bug puts countless websites at risk of hijacking

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Death by magic

The way to do that is one process reads the input but does nothing with it and hands it off to another with reduced privileges which processes it. It means stack smashing programs are confined to relatively harmless processes. If combined with BSD's pledge() then even better.

Old, complex code could cause another UK banking TITSUP – study

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Even if something has been written in Java in 90s that is still 20 years ago."

So what if it's documented, tested, and maintained. Java is a current language. Are they supposed to throw it out and go with Rust, Go, or Ruby on Rails?

Microsoft wants devs to take notes on their families

Dan 55 Silver badge

Put down the pitchforks: this is a demonstration and training exercise

That will be copied and pasted to kingdom come...

Security has to be in the examples, not bolted on afterwards.

Azure, la nube segura

Dan 55 Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Security was thoroughly discussed over dinner, then over after-dinner drinks, and finally in the, erm, gentlemen's venue.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: God Bless America!!

Do you think it's not being leveraged for all it's worth in China? When the big bang finally happens it will be big enough to make a new universe.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: five nines...

I think they're still working on one nine.

US data suggests Windows 10 adoption in business is slowing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Windows 10 actually building a head of Steam

MS should have tied DirectX 12 to Vista, just for a laugh.

Who you callin' stoopid? No excuses for biz intelligence's poor stats

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Inspector Nectar

I'd say it's working. Why would they give you a discount on stuff you always buy anyway, that would make them lose money. They want to make you buy much more of the same stuff or new stuff, that's where the money is. And if you were to, say, regularly start buying something they originally offered you a discount on, I bet that offer would disappear fairly soon too.

Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

IIRC, blue screens and IRQ conflicts.

ICANN in a strop that Intel, Netflix, Lego, Nike and others aren't using their dot-brand domains

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Proof that it was a shakedown all along

Depends if they're Catalan cats.

Intel loses its ARM wrestling match, kicks out Atom mobe chips

Dan 55 Silver badge

A phone which does Continuum for ARM universal apps is a pretty meh idea, Nokias in 2010 could be plugged into a HDMI screen and accept mouse and keyboard input. But a phone which does Continuum for x86 Win32 programs would have sold truckloads, even I might have bought one.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Well with this announcement, any chance of a x86 Win32 continuum has been knocked con the head. So WinPho is dead. Or even more so than now.

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Is this a Spanish idea...? Have you seen Spanish bureaucracy...

If anyone has seen the Spanish e-ID card it's the biggest pile of fail that a consultancy has had the pleasure of knocking together. Windows, approved card reader, this version of drivers, that version of Firefox, the other version of Java, download and install the root certificates from the Spanish Mint, a 16-digit PIN to verify it's you (only changeable at a machine down at the police station), and a crappy file signing program. You need the patience of a saint and to be familiar with IT to get the thing working in the first place. If this is the future for YouTube then YouTube will go bankrupt in a week.

Windows 10 handcuffs Cortana web search to Bing and Edge browser

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Proprietary code hardwired to use proprietary APIs to do stuff shock!

1. You can use both iOS and OS X without an Apple ID and Siri and you disable Spotlight Suggestions.

2. Even if you turn on all privacy options in Windows 10, there's a hell of a lot of phoning home still going on.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

3. Voice assistants don't upload anything until the trigger words are heard.

4. You're right about Google, but then again who isn't?

The Devils of DevOps stick it to YOU

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This week's DevOps BS decoded

Does AWS do contract negotiation? I thought it was take it or leave it.