Posts by Danny 14

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: Incompatible because..

I love things and ideas like this. I usually get overruled by the wife who simply buys a foor bell that has a big bright blue light (from the deaf category).

Re: Pine from Ikea?

We have some old ikea 'kids toy room drawers' which were definitely not soft plastic. The have a rubber texture and came with screw in metal runners. I use them in the workshop as they are pretty robust. I see what you mean with the new stuff, a lot softer and flimsier.

Microsoft pokes Cortana's corpse to give her telepathic abilities on Windows 10

The best part about an enterprise build. GPOs to get rid of this sort of thing.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Re: Alpha Micro...

We live in a small village in the lake district. We use a unifi airfibre for a 250/250 internet connection (we run a business from home too), others in the village have lower speeds. The base station is about 10km away. Its great how we managed to avoid the silly BT prices to run fibre to our local cabinet.

Privacy campaigner flags concerns about Microsoft's creepy Productivity Score

Re: Measure what exactly?

Macro it, with pauses.

Re: evaluating "productivity" data can shift power from employees to organisations

Im sorry, I cant do that Dave.

Re: evaluating "productivity" data can shift power from employees to organisations

I rememebr being on a software assistance helpline. We were expected to take 30 calls per day, usual metrics. One lad used to take 70 by basically getting every call to factory reset. He was given bonus after bonus. Then the rest of the team would get sanctioned because our call rate would drop due to us spending an hour getting the shit back together for the customer when they rang back. He got filled in one lunch time, everyone had an alibi.

Watchdog signals Boeing 737 Max jets can return to US skies following software upgrade, pilot training

Re: Dating back to the 1096s

It was because Boeing tied all the fly by wire computer data input to one sensor. One. It did have a second sensor available as an optional extra.

Now have 3 sensors with a discrepancy alarm and the pilots would have had a fighting chance.

Dont make a fuss,

Its an airbus

They’ve only gone and bloody done it – yawn – again! NASA, SpaceX send four to ISS

Re: About time

I planted cress on my mates carpet once. I was quite drunk.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: Easy fixes

1. This wont help. Android phones home with or without root.

2 this will work. Not many apps can be installed without google framework though (not play store, framewoork). Many use the chrome libraries too.

3.doeant matter. A lot of chatter goes to google which if blocked renders point 2 moot.

4. See point 3. These are not adverts endpoints these are google calls.

Re: Yikes!

Those data transmissions will also trigger wakelocks. If google didnt phone home as much then your battery would last longer too.

Its nothing to do with using your phone properly, it does this whether you are using you phone or not.

Its an average. Im paying lebara 7.99 for 10gb a month. Some people are on much higher payg rates.

Spain's highway agency is monitoring speeding hotspots using bulk phone location data

Re: The origin of Field Service Engineers...

I had a similar job in the 90s for a Corporation who supplied Business Machines (International). In my case it was for ports and port authorities. I know that prestwick and stranraer run very well. I was based in Cumbria and fielded Cumbria "up". Our job allocators lived in london. They had fuck all idea that a Scottish A road was ok but a B road was probably part of the local rally course. They were used to londoners taking rucksacks full of spare parts and soldering irons on the tube, not someone avoiding grouse and tractors on a single track road.

They also didnt understand that it is almost impossible to get from Aberdeen port to Silloth RNLI in one day with meaningful work.

Still, my work van was actually a zzr1100 due to me being given area manager role with ability to auth personal vehicles. Summer good, winter bad though....

Re: Railway Lines?

The data available to operators and the emergency services is quite precise. My son is in a mountain rescue team and they get very good data from phone triangulation.

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

Re: Scotland

Good job i dont work in the gretna chase hotel like my mate does. That straddles the border....

Re: Testing?

Testing. Hahahaha, you're funny.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

Datsun was still better than British Leyland.

Braking point: Tesla has had quite enough of Trump's 'unlawful' tariffs on Chinese-made parts, sues Uncle Sam

Re: Good luck with that.

In this case there seems to be weight from more than one automotive company. And there is an election coming up.

In a world where up is down, it's heartwarming to know Internet Explorer still tops list of web dev pain points

Then you get banking software with their two factor cards and certificates that insist on only being supported in IE. Teachers pension TPS disbarred list search would only work in IE until very recently. BACS acountis was the same until recently.

Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business

Re: Great.

toughbooks always had decent screens. Dell used those oil filled ones for years, they bubbled badly if they met sunlight in any capacity so we kept using toughbooks.

We have a few old second gen i5 toshibas. They seem to be flimsy having a lot of flex in the cases but they are fairly bulletproof. They have lasted daily use with kids so cannot be too bad.

An SSD and a few more GB of RAM got them over the 1809 hump, they are running on 1909 at the moment and wont get 2004 rather the next update - that will decide their fate.

Apple: We're defending your privacy by nixing 16 browser APIs. Rivals: You mean defending your bottom line

Re: Internet Explorer reloaded

Is that the new Chinese store?

Re: I am not a fan of Apple ..

A web browser with access to geolocation, Bluetooth and compass direction?

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

Re: What the?

They code safari, they can do as they like. They can drop support for html5 if they want to. It will be the end users who voice their complaints. But if chrome and Firefox do the same then there goes the standard way of doing things.

Re: 2 year cert valid for 390 more days in sep 1st?

Buy a 5 year cert before 1st sept. I imagine the browser looks at both start and end date for cert check.

Defending critical national infrastructure... hmm. Does Zoom count as critical now?

Re: Does Zoom count as critical now?

Some tablet browsers say 'unsupported use the app'. There are ways of fooling this with Firefox and extensions though.

Re: Does Zoom count as critical now?

We have found zoom to be quite reliable. We use teams for our scheduled 'calendar' meetings and zoom for adhoc short meetings. Whilst this seems odd, we have found zoom to be easier to use than teams when the personal zoom rooms are used. Yes they have their security risks (being a known password for the room) but waiting rooms and lockdowns mitigate that.

Gotowebinar is bloody awful though. We get robotic high pitched shifted audio for half our users, zoom and teams work perfectly on the same machines.

If teams had a similar personal room with password approach then we would use teams for everything, as it is it can be quite fiddly inviting 40 people including some who you only just got emails for (so aren't in your distribution lists)

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: Makes you wonder about Dragon.

my kerbals manage it at least twice for every three failures, so it cant be that hard.

Re: I get that the cameras may not have picked out the truck...

take some acid, shine a torch on things, marvel at the different colours reflected in your eye sensors.

eBay users spot the online auction house port-scanning their PCs. Um... is that OK?

Re: My firewall - getting updated

If you read the report by Dan in the article you will see that it wasnt replicated in linux.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Re: Good and bad

Yep, that draft dodging hippy has been playing that crap again. Best call the covid cops.

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Re: Further back than that....

74 is starting to get pricy though. Most people will still need storage and a PSU. Possibly a case. This is starting to get into NUC territory.

Dont get me wrong, I like raspPi, our XIBO clients are rasp pi running from the USB of LG panels, but the next batch of XIBO displays are actually NUCs now.

Linux-loving Windows 10 May 2020 Update squeaks in with days to spare before June

1809 was a solid build for us. We started with 1607, moved to 1809 and are now on 1909 having recently migrated. Will wait a good year now.

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Re: Is it wrong to be in favour of this?

You are dead wrong about the UK. We dont have any companies or manufacturing left for the government to spy with.

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

Re: And this is why I don't do cloud based access.

Ubiquiti do cameras too. Not too bad pricewise.

Re: "ADT failed to monitor consumers’ accounts"

Or perhaps the admin access is logged centrally so that ADT could contact the admins if necessary. Pretty fucking obvious if the same email turns up on many systems. Maybe the principal account holder needs to auth the additional admin manually. Perhaps the system periodically emails the principal with a list of what it has done etc.

Re: "ADT failed to monitor consumers’ accounts"

You dont have scripts or triggers for certain accounts accessing many systems? You dont have audit logs checking multiple account logins to multiple consoles? How about access audit logs for security and admin rights?

How would you spot rogue admin accounts on your systems?

ADT is a security company failing at security. Pretty shit job.

'Non-commercial use only'? Oopsie. You can't get much more commercial than a huge digital billboard over Piccadilly

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

We use dnsmadeeasy. They are great for dns failover too.

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

I remember my handover week. The day i was asking about licenses started along the lines of "so where are is license documentation, you know Adobe and MS renewals? What CALS are you using?

The answer was along the lines of " CALS? What are those? We just used the same key and cloned the drives".

The firm basically had zero licensing. That was a fun first week budget meeting "sign this for licensing or give me written license budget refusal."

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Re: Epic level of nominative determinism here

1st QLR signals detachment commander was captain kirk when i was RSO in the early nineties.

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

Re: The first..

Yup. Zen user here. They gave me a fritz box and didnt mind if I installed openwrt on it.

India says 'Zoom is a not a safe platform' and bans government users

Re: Total Wittle

Perfectly cromulent word.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 line has had a good run with four years of security updates – but you'll want to trade yours in now

Re: I'd love to see a law...

Running lineage on my note 3 with magisk. All apps that complain about root can be added to the root-hide function. Works well.

At the Supreme Court, Morrisons pops data breach liability win into its trolley – but it's not a get-out-of-compo free card for businesses

Re: At Last

The supreme court often gets things right because they are proper judges.

20 years later, Microsoft's still hammerin' Xamarin: Bunch of improvements on the way for cross-platform coding toolset

We have a simple intranet aspx website. We coded an android app built on the same codebase in xamarin. It wasnt too bad. Its still effectively a web core app, just with a portable friendly gui

Finally – news that something is guaranteed to be healthy and well looked-after for the next six months. That something is Windows 10 1709

Re: GRRRRRRR

There are usually about 40 profiles on our machines. Depends how many people have logged on the past week. Group policies do clean old ones but we found the update was stalling on some. Looking in the panther logs pointed me in the direction of some profiles failing the update. No idea on the downvotes or vitriol, it was a fix that worked on our 300 machines.

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Re: or we had a revolution in aircraft propulsion.

Living in the lake district, the traffic was fucking mental yesterday. Seems that everyone thinks that they should all congregate here instead of social distancing. All the lanes were chocablock near us. Madness.

Out with the old and in with the new as Java 14 arrives, bringing with it first Project Panama enhancements

Re: Not as much a bonanza as they may hope

This. We had 2 apps that used java, neither do now. We have a couple of machines with openjava for supporting one last legacy switch in a hard to reach place, that one (covid depending) is pegged to go in August.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Re: Just RDP int your work computer!

Depends, you could be working in the cloud via teams, sharepoint and onedrive. Our sister school is almost entirely cloud based. MIS, LMS and VLE all cloud based with o365 and even google classrooms.