Posts by Dan 55

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Re: Yes but....,

Passive Voice (consider revising)

For pity's sake, you fool! DON'T UPGRADE it will make it worse

Forget Google Maps and use Here, it's out out of beta and available from the Play store.

Re: Apple builds crap computers designed to fail after just a couple of years

My iMac bought late 2007 begs to differ. This is why the newer Macs which aren't upgradable annoy me.

Re: The solution is easy

Somebody's already done it. You can download the UK Mac keyboard layout for Windows here...

http://www.logikdev.com/2010/02/18/apple-uk-keyboard-layout-for-windows/

Problem solved, wifey happy.

I think there are more suggestions than complaints because there's infinitely more chance of getting it fixed at Dabbsy's end than at the cloudy end.

Odds are that it was something they already had and they wrote the requirements to fit the software rather than the software to fit the requirements.

Of course it's normal - how many shiny piles of shit from Accenture, Crapita, etc... have HM Govt paid for?

Re: progress...

Perhaps it's some kind of torrent download to save them bandwidth, but unless it does UPnP the average user doesn't have a hope in hell's chance of getting it to work.

Re: Lock Apple and MS in a room......

Shouldn't Apple (bootcamp) or Parallels supply the appropriate keyboard layouts?

If Parallels finally do it in Parallels 20 then they will give it a shiny feature name and spend 6 months spamming you about it so I'm rather hoping it's Apple, but I doubt it's very high on Apple's OS development team's priority list, they've been held hostage by Marketing who've decided they need a major OS release every year so we actually have the pleasure of upgrading yet again.

The solution is easy

You need to hand-roll your own Windows keyboard layout to match the Mac's keyboard and install it. Use the Mac's virtual keyboard menu thingy to see all the dead key combinations and put same keys into the Windows keyboard layout.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339

Of course you need .Net 2.0 which if you install in the wrong order with the other .Nets has a funny turn. Oh, and as it was released when Vista was around it might not work with Windows 7 or 8. Who said IT was pointlessly complicated?

Mozilla mulls Superfish torpedo

Re: @Paul crawford - Deeper problem

It does let you disable it, but what it doesn't do and should do is ask you if you're aware this new certificate has been dropped into the certificate store and if you want to keep it or wipe it.

Didn't the Left once want the WORKERS to get all the dosh?

Re: what the hell is this all about

They're trying to publish articles which might interest you even though they're not strictly IT. Like Ars Technica do but unfortunately El Reg are not as good as it.

Man the HARPOONS: YOU can EASILY SLAY ad-scumware Superfish

Re: CEO Addy Piranhas regrets ...

And he continued with "we have been working with Lenovo and Microsoft to create an industry patch to resolve the threat."

Well at least he didn't lie there, Microsoft updated Security Essentials to remove it.

(Re)touching on a quarter-century of Adobe Photoshop

Re: The Register - What happened to "Printable View" for articles?

The PFYs who did the web makeover thought it would be far easier to manually insert "Print/" after the site in the URL than it would be to click on a button, e.g...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2015/02/19/feature_25_years_of_adobe_photoshop/

I'd like to meet that genius and shake him by the neck.

Shodan boss finds 250,000 routers have common keys

Re: @Dan 55

Presumably if the same firmware image is replicated across a batch of 200,000 routers and another OS image is replicated across 150,000 routers, if all routers in each batch have the same public key, then all routers in each batch could also have the same private key.

If this is so then you need to concentrate your efforts on one router from each batch and you will get keys which are good for 350,000 routers.

Re: Linus's public key on 100000 computers!

What's the difference between cracking two private keys and 350,000 (the number of routers in the two batches) private keys? Um, that's a tough one.

Microsoft updates Outlook app security, but haters still gunna hate

I thought the whole point of an Exchange server was it could do push (ActiveSync). Why would credentials still need to be stored in the cloud, be it AWS or Azure?

Hello Barbie: Hang on, this Wi-Fi doll records your child's voice?

Re: But does it support WPA2?

Why on earth would you want to let it connect to your home network if smart TVs have been caught rummaging round network directories?

Put it in the DMZ and see how long it takes to melt down.

The privacy policy says it records video too?

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Apple design don Jony Ive: Build-your-own phone is BOLLOCKS

That's his opinion, here's mine

I think he abdicated his responsibilities as a UI designer with Yosamite. It looks like crap and expand window/full screen was better the way it was in Mavericks.

And on the software side it looks like they've allowed it to become a little more sluggish, relying on SSD to pick up the slack.

And don't get me started on their recent fascination with glue guns and unexpandable RAM. Even Jobs didn't put up with that nonsense.

Hoping for spy reforms? Jeb Bush, dangerously close to being the next US prez, backs the NSA

On the bright side at least two good ol' boys haven't managed to totally wreck America, unfortunately if the third one gets in that might be the straw that brakes the camel's back.

It's not easy being Green. But WHY insist we knit our own ties?

Re: So, in other words...

Sucks to be someone who specialises in baking bread, they don't exactly have the salary to spend it on buying in services but it's nice to be at the top of the heap and buy lots of different kinds of bread.

Unfortunately the poorest are generally the least specialised, so they can't buy everything, or they may do a specalised job which isn't very well rewarded (like baking bread). They may have no other resort other than to bake bread themselves so they can make it till the end of the month.

In an economic downturn people often can't get a specalised job, because it's not on offer. They may have to make do with a lower paid non-specalised job, so they will want to cut back on buying-in specalised services too.

Try and tell these people that they should specalise when they're unable to and buy as many services in as they can when they simply don't have the money.

Re: So, in other words...

It doesn't matter if I fix my computer or bake my bread in my own spare time whether I'm good at it or not, it's my own spare time. The only problem is when it isn't my own spare time and I'm forced to fix computers at work (bad use of resources - I'm a programmer) or bake bread to survive (but by that point society has probably collapsed anyway).

So is Tim saying that the economy is worse off because I didn't go down to the pub or to the cinema and spend money in my own spare time? Or the economy is worse off because we should all be obliged to buy bread? If it's the first one it's forced consumerism which is not a free market economy, if it's the second one then that's false too because the market has provided the basic ingredients for people who want to bake their own bread so there is profit in it somewhere.

So, in other words...

Because commentards know how to fix computers ourselves we are poorer as a result. We should take them into PC World who would sell us another one and we would be richer.

Is that right?

Windows 10 for phones: Stepping towards the One True Windows

"If the operating system is being rebuilt though, a shortage of new features is no surprise...

... The priority is to get the platform right."

That´s what they said with Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8... Have we actually got any further in the past two years apart from re-arranging the notification centre while the platform sinks?

Samsung's spying smart TVs don't encrypt voice recordings sent over the internet – new claim

Knox Knox

Samsung may be incompetent at developing everything else but I'm sure their methodology for Knox is completely different.

Game of Moans: Sky coughs to BORKED set top box BALLS-UP

If it starts forgetting stuff or crashing after a while then it's probably got more memory leaks than a sieve so turning it off and on again will temporarily fix the problem, and also why their testing doesn't pick it up because they probably don't test boxes that have been on for weeks.

Apple Watch 'didn't work on HAIRY FANBOIS, was stripped of sensor tech'

Re: People will still buy them

If it's going to have the same functionality as a Pebble but three times the price and a seventh of the battery life you might as well get a Pebble.

The health monitoring feature has been replaced

Instead the watch face has got a rounded icon with beatifully crafted kerned text which switches between the retail price, the text "I'm a", and finally the text "Mug me".

Speak your brains on surveillance, despots. No we don't mean Five Eyes

Relationship between handwringing and action

Inverse corrolation. See also, arms sales.

Torvalds turns to Sir Mix-A-Lot for Linux versioning debate

Message to El Reg

This story is a perfect illustration of why this new page layout is complete arse.

Nearest thing to 'think of the boss' icon --->

Mozilla's Flash-killer 'Shumway' appears in Firefox nightlies

Re: I thought that HTML5

Ancient educational .swfs that aren't going to get rewritten.

DataTables TableTools? (Although why it would need Flash to generate PDFs is beyond me if pdf.js works.)

Um, can't think of anything else.

Windows 10 to give passwords the finger and dangle dongles

Re: This could be a goldmine.

I would hope this is a local account and not a Hotmail/Live/Passport/Outlook/whatever it's called today account so it would just be the same as fingerprint readers for the Windows 7 login screen only following this standard.

If it's for a MS account that's all kinds of scary.

Microsoft's patchwork falls apart … AGAIN!

Re: A patch that breaks powerpoint?

"The idea was that into the first ship, the 'A' ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or 'C' ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B' ship - that's us - would go everyone else, the middlemen you see."

How's that shutting down the Trustworthy Computing group going for you, Nadella?

WhatDaHell, WhatsApp? Student claims 'stalker' tool shows security flaws

Um, you read the blog post... El Reg?

Last seen, profile photo, and status message can't be read by if privacy is set to nobody or contacts. Only the current online/offline status can be read by everyone regardless of what privacy is set to.

Online retail giant Amazon GOES TITSUP ACROSS EUROPE

Re: Digital snow.

Millions were lost in taxes?

So long, Cyanogen! OnePlus says its future belongs to OxygenOS

Re: Just another Distro

AOSP is updated by Google every Android release and Google says what goes in it. If Google for some reason doesn't want the bug fixed then it's not fixed in AOSP (e.g. IMAP IDLE or ad-hoc wifi support) and everyone has to do their own fixes in their own distros. Often these fixes never happen.

Cyanogen has stopped working on CM11 Milestone 13 so they can start working on getting their Lollipop version out the door and when AOSP is updated mobile manufacturers have to customise it before it goes into their mobiles which takes 3-6 more months. This wait wouldn't happen if AOSP were really developed in the open.

If Android were truely extensible then most of their work could be done by allowing drivers to be added with the minimum of fuss and letting phone customisations and operator customisations be installable as apps (if you uninstall them or they become incompatible with later versions of Android then they would drop back to stock Android).

There is also the elephant in the room which is Play Services which is sucking more and more things out of AOSP and making them proprietry, letting the AOSP versions rot. It's got to the point where there needs to be an open source equivalent of PS.

Gov.UK begs Google 'n' U.S. tech pals: Forget Ireland, come to Blighty

Re: It's not just tax...

Britain is in the same trading zone as the rest of the EU, it's just not got the same currency as most of it.

And that is a really good thing based on how things have gone in the eurozone over the past seven years.

EU parliament bans Outlook app over cloudy security: report

The sound of a pin dropping

Good lord, is that what the cloud really means... sensitive stuff stored half a world away which lots of people can get at?

French minister: Hit Netflix, Google, Apple et al with bandwidth tax

Following on from Hungary's successful bandwidth tax I see (it didn't happen in the end).

France is already taxing ISPs and telecos to subsidise their TV so this'll be their second bandwidth tax.

Didn't EU spokesmouths say they thought bandwidth taxes were a bad idea too?

Never mind Samsung, GOOGLE will EAVESDROP as you browse on Chrome

Re: Hotword

Delete? Do you honestly think it's really deleted? What are the chances it's a flag not to appear listed on the voice search page?

"after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems."

https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

Firefox

makes more and more sense on desktop and on Android, apart from the version number.

Now Samsung's spying smart TVs insert ADS in YOUR OWN movies

Re: How long before Smart TVs

I believe LG was caught reporting filenames from USB sticks and from shared directories on the LAN back to the mothership so they already do.

Surprised they haven't already worked out it's not popular

They should have the data to back it up, it's just sat on three different servers...

- Advert server pushes out advert.

- Analytics picks up viewers pressing the stop button at the time the advert goes out plus a couple of seconds.

- Microphone picks up surprised voices and swear words shortly after that.

Still using the Google Talk app? You've got ONE WEEK to move on

Re: Breaking news

That's probably to do with MS stopping older clients from logging in.

Re: Breaking news

Mine's still the same but then again I ignored the badgering to link accounts.

Breaking news

Google get bored of something, make something else very similar but incompatible which coincidently drops open protocols and borks third-party clients.

BBC bins pricey Windows Media, Audio Factory goes live

Re: Standardised?

They wanted to provide all streaming services by Audio Factory but they say it's too costly to run mp3 and AAC streams at the same time and some devices can't do AAC.

So they've kept some mp3 streams with some Shoutcast servers for those devices.

They also didn't publicise the Audio Factory links so everybody used the Shoutcast links.

Result - Shoutcast servers overloaded and many streams appear missing to many devices.

Bit of a mess.

Patch now: Design flaw in Windows security allows hackers to own corporate laptops, PCs

Because that's not supported any more. Server 2003 still is. Except when it's the last year or so and then, well, we can't be bothered any more.

Luckily the newer guys managed to fix the same bug which affected all the following versions of Windows in exactly the same way. Would you like to upgrade your version of Windows for a nominal fee?

Samsung: Our TVs? Spying on you? Ha Ha! Just a joke of course

Re: Spy TV

The future belongs to cheap no-name Android HDMI sticks flashed with CyanogenMod and loaded with Kodi. They may be smart but they're also deaf, blind, and dumb.