Posts by Not Terry Wogan

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Man makes idiotic statement on a mailing list...

... and does Torvalds simply tell him the list is an inappropriate venue for the discussion and to take it elsewhere, and be done with it? No. He seizes upon the opportunity to indulge in his new hobby of virtue signalling and writes a competing 633-word rant of his own (in contrast to the meagre 66 words of the offending original), creating an effect somewhat reminiscent of a chimpanzee in a zoo furiously masturbating in front of a group of unhappy schoolchildren.

Wonderful. Just wonderful. It's a race to the bottom, ladies and gentlemen, and we're all invited.

I don't want to go on the cart! Windows 10 Mobile hauls itself from the grave one last time

For what it's worth...

They appeared to give this month's 'final' Windows 10 Mobile update a deliberately round build number - 15254.600 - so I don't think there'll be a January update coming.

Lenovo ThinkPad P1: Sumptuous pro PC that gets a tad warm

Re: Terrible customer service

Here's a good one: A couple of years ago I had to rush order some parts from Lenovo, which had to be sent from Asia. This was 'rush' as in 'money not an issue, we need it straight away'.

The Lenovo staff were very professional, accommodating and efficient, and went out of their way to get it all ready to despatch in double-quick time...

... And then sent it all by sea freight.

Accused hacker Lauri Love to sue National Crime Agency to retrieve confiscated computing kit

Don't know whether he's guity or not...

... but since it's been going on since 2013 and he's not heard from them for a year, it seems to me that someone's decided the chance of a conviction is unlikely and they're punishing him with the process itself. I've heard about this an unsettling number of times over the last decade or so.

Google sued by Gab over Play Store booting

Ha! Well, speak for yourself, Shifty!

Seriously, though - Gab is an excellent platform. It's better than Twitter, if only because it's ad-free and has a free speech ethos, and it really deserves to succeed.

If only a) more people would use it; and b) it would stop being smeared with accusations of being a haven for neo-Nazis and nutters.

Gizmodo can get stuffed. I use Gab, and I'm not a troll, a racist, a snowflake or a conservative.

Red alert! Intel patches remote execution hole that's been hidden in chips since 2010

Re: PANIC!!!!!!!!!! :-)

No need for all this. If AMT is provisioned it will set up a web server that listens on port 16992 or 16993, so either a browser or telnet will do to see if it's listening.

Bear in mind that it will often have an IP address (IPv4, IPv6 or both, allocated statically or through DHCP) *different* from the OS that's running on the machine. In fact it's considered best practice for AMT to have a different IP address.

For sysadmins who've lost the plot and need to do an audit, it would probably be best to scan the entire subnet to see if anything is listening on 16992 or 16993.

I hope this issue gets widely publicised. It could be one of the major IT security failures we've seen to date, and we all know that most systems won't be patched but will remain in service for many years to come. In my wildest fantasies I'd love the industry to use this as impetus to totally reassess how buggy / flawed firmware is dealt with after the manufacturers have walked away.

DDR5 to jump off the drawing board in 2018

Re: June 2018 is not far off

You're right, but if it's released in 2018 DDR5 could well not see widespread deployment until 2020 or 2021.

We may well have bigger things to worry about then: 2020 is officially the year when all hell breaks loose - it's when Windows 7 falls out of extended support.

After 20 years of Visual Studio, Microsoft unfurls its 2017 edition

Installed it today in a VM...

... and encountered two obvious and careless bugs in the IDE within five minutes. I'll be waiting until the first update until I try again.

Is! Yahoo! dead?! Why! web! biz! will! rename! to! Altaba! – the! truth!

Let's hope...

... that Mayer's $55m golden parachute is generously studded with lead as well as rubies and emeralds.

Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs

Re: (untitled)

Bring back the Asus Eee girl!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/16/asus_launches_eee_pc/

(Bloody hell - was that really nearly ten years ago?)

Microsoft goes back to the drawing board – literally, with 28" tablet and hockey puck knob

Re: Windows 10

"Seems like Microsoft are upping all the hardware requirements to force a hardware refresh/a fundamental gear shift in hardware needed to run Windows."

If some are screaming blue murder about Windows 10 now, just wait to hear the (justified) cacophony if Microsoft really were to increase the minimum hardware requirements for 1703.

People on non-LTSB Windows 10 would find themselves stranded on an old build with approximately a year's support for security updates remaining. In other words, Microsoft would have rendered great swathes of machines effectively obsolete - machines that they themselves made update to Windows 10 from Windows 7/8 - before Windows 7 even leaves extended support!

To my mind, I don't think even Microsoft would dare to increase base hardware requirements for Windows 10 until at least January 2023, which is when extended support for Windows 8.1 ends.

'Oi! El Reg! Stop pretending Microsoft has a BSOD monopoly!'

Re: BBC Master

The Master had ADFS *and* DFS! (Wow!)

It's the 'Acorn MOS' string that gives it away as being a BBC Master.

BBC Master

The photo was taken in 2012, so that poor machine had probably been sitting there in its filthy railway station office doing its duty, day in, day out for about 25 years.

Gather around, children: THAT'S a computer!

Google slammed over its 'free' school service

Good to get further confirmation

I looked into GAFE in some detail when my son started at a school that uses it, and came to similar conclusions as it appears the Swedish report authors did.

Gently and politely flagged it up with the school - just saying that they should consider informing parents that there may be privacy implications for students. It resulted in my being summoned to the principal's office like a naughty schoolboy, and treated like a certified tinfoil-hat wearing nutter. I also appear to have been blackballed from serving on the Board.

As usual with computer security and privacy issues, it's enormously disheartening. Few have any kind of awareness, and even fewer care.

Microsoft shifts Windows 7 and 8.1 fixes to 'rollup' bundles

I... Er... Um... Words fail me!

It it just me, or is this Microsoft doing something *genuinely useful* for their customers?

What's the catch? Sneaky Windows 10 upgrade that they'll 'forget was in there'? No technical description other than "It dun updatez ur cmpootaz LOL!!!!!1"?

That one weird trick fails: Google binned 780 million ads last year

So they're cracking down on some scumbags...

... but actively supporting others.

Apparently Google have given Scientology the equivalent of $5.7 million in free advertising grants:

http://tonyortega.org/2016/01/07/audio-hear-scientology-boast-about-the-5-million-it-got-from-google-in-free-ads/

What's the big deal about that? Well, take a look at HBO's documentary "Going Clear" from last year for starters.

Kids charity hit by server theft

Re: identity theft

Yes - I've had someone set up a fraudulent direct debit before with just my account number and sort code.

Re: Encrypt file systems ?

While this has been brought up, in case anyone might find this useful, I tested Windows Bitlocker personally a couple of years ago and found a similar overhead (actually between 3-5%, IIRC). So: Linux or Windows - it's worth it.

It's also worth checking that any new workstation or server systems being ordered (for business, at least) have TPM chips fitted.

Pen tester sounds alert over 'gaping' flaws in Brit alarm platform

Just read the entire report and his blog entries

It's a nice bit of work.

I wish I could say I was surprised by CSL's incompetence, but I'm not and I presume nobody reading this is either. What a bloody industry we work in.

Anyway - well done, that man!

If MR ROBOT was realistic, he’d be in an Iron Maiden t-shirt and SMELL of WEE

Your dad sounds great!

That's one of the finest excuses for being a lazy bastard I've ever heard in my life.

Leak-shamed Intel finally bares nifty Skylake details to world+dog

Come back and see me...

... when you have mainstream processors with eight cores and sixteen threads, Intel. And when DDR4 has matured. Then we can do some business.

Microsoft dangles $500k cash wad over boffins: Please, pleeease write some HoloLens apps

Just wait...

... until they see my 'Cat Strangler' Hololens app!*

All the fun, none of the mess.

* Please don't strangle cats.

Microsoft: This Windows 10 build has 'NO significant known issues'

Upgraded from 10130 to 10158...

... on a cheapo HP Stream 7 tablet. It's not OK for a build so close to RTM.

An awful lot of bugs and annoyances have been sorted out. But these were my observations within half an hour of use:

* After upgrade none of the bundled Store apps worked, and even the Store itself wouldn't start. I ended up having to delete and recreate my user profile.

* An awful lot of dead files from the previous build were left hanging around, even after running Disk Cleanup.

* By default Windows now seems to think that the first day of the week in New Zealand is Sunday rather than Monday.

* It keeps trying to install English (United States) language resources, even though it's an English (United Kingdom) language installation running with English (New Zealand) region settings.

* I imported bookmarks from Chrome to Edge, and it worked OK, but managed to store them all in reverse alphabetical order with no obvious way of fixing them.

* In touch mode, you can still hear the gears grinding when an app is closed - it still doesn't always take you back to the start screen, and sometimes it does when it should take you back to a parent window / process.

Nothing showstopping in a 'suddenly bluescreen and ruin your day' way, but a mountain of nuisance bugs and fit and finish problems.

You also need to check and change privacy settings in half a dozen different places, Google-style, which is considerably worse than Windows 8.1. Some weren't respected and reset to 'send Microsoft everything' after the upgrade. All this is very concerning. And all that's before we get into the various UX deficiencies that have been discussed ad nauseam both here and elsewhere. Any chance of sanity prevailing now seems slim.

According to some reports, Microsoft will be preparing the RTM build any day now. Build 10158 must be very close to the final version that will be sprayed at millions of unsuspecting users and the mainstream press. It needs to be polished to a brilliant shine if Microsoft want to make a genuine effort to restore their reputation with regular users. (Not that I particularly care about Microsoft's reputation, of course.)

As it stands, it's not good enough.

Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

Re: UNICODE/UTF8

http://stackoverflow.com/a/5808445/465415

Revealed: The AMAZING technology behind Apple's $1299 Retina MacBooks – a lot of glue

Re: Well duh!

"Sure, a PC can be upgraded, but to what extent does this extend the useful life of it ? I haven't owned a PC or a laptop that continued to be useful for more than 3-4 years and which only made it to that age thanks to being able to upgrade/repair it to keep it going."

I principally use a desktop machine for home and work use, but my 'daily driver' Core 2 Duo Vaio laptop is from 2006, and was only mid-range when it was new! It's not that I'm too cheap to replace it - there's just been no need, even though it's taken one hell of a battering through the years. It's not exactly fast any more, but it's not slow either, and can handle everything I need it for, including Visual Studio.

Since it was bought I've upgraded the memory, installed an SSD, upgraded the wifi card (mini pci-e) and replaced the battery twice. That's the point - its upgradability has meant that it's had a long lifespan and has given extremely good value for money. Nine years later, it's still in use and not in landfill.

Oi. APPLE fanboi! You with the $10k and pocket on fire! Fancy a WATCH?

Re: Hmm...$10,000...

My 20-year-old Casio DBC-62 is already a smartwatch!

I can even put my name and phone number in, in case I get so drunk I don't know who I am any more.

Bite my shiny metal Ask: Java for OS X crapware storm brewing

Re: Bloody hell, when will this nonsense ever stop?

"There's only one way, mate: uninstall the whole shite, and tell every single person you meet in the street how it's an awfull pile of dangerous shit."

... and when you've done that, ring everyone in the phone book!

Steve Jobs makes world a better place FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Re: Three Years!!

I don't know, mate. Finding a dolphin who'll let you swim with and bugger him by Sunday is a pretty tall order, and I don't think Grindr caters to aquatic mammals.

What the BLOCK? Microsoft to gobble Minecraft-maker 'for $2bn'

Absolute stark raving, swivel-eyed, dog fingering insanity

TWO BILLION? Two billion US dollars? Are you sure it's not two billion Zimbabwean dollars or something?

Nadella must be off his chump.

Quick! If we all chip in a fiver we could buy Second Life from whoever owns it, rename it 'Lifecraft' or something crap, and flog it off to Nadella for at least a billion!

Microsoft leaks reveal 'Threshold' projects looming in 2015

This *needs* to be Midori

Whatever these 'major overhauls' to Windows entail, IMHO if Microsoft doesn't take revolutionary advantage of the fruits of their Midori initiative soon, full-fat and undiluted, it'll be too late. It may already be too late.

There are only so many storeys you can build if the foundations are decaying.

Intel to leave desktop motherboard market

What a shame

This really is disappointing news. Like Mondo the Magnificent said, they weren't the most feature-packed boards available, and they certainly weren't the cheapest, but they definitely were absolutely rock-solid reliable.

You could always count on two things with Intel motherboards: 1) They'd work precisely according to their published specifications (which tended to be comprehensive and well written), no more and no less; and 2) They could be relied on to keep ticking, year in and year out. That made them perfect for machines that had to conform to a custom specification and sit in a dusty corner of an office somewhere, reliably chugging along and mainly forgotten about.

This news makes sense, though. My new main work machine has an Intel motherboard and I've come across a few sloppy firmware bugs that would have been unheard of a few years ago. Presumably some staff involved with motherboard development have already moved on.

20 years of GSM digital mobile phones

Nokia 6610 FTW

I bought a posh (and expensive!) new Nokia 6610 in 2003. I'm *still* using it every day to this day - I don't use any other mobile.

Can anyone on here beat this?

Windows 7 service pack 1 set to lift off today

@kissingthecarpet

The 2GB download version includes Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 SP1 offline installers for both x64 and x86, plus the full set of debugging symbols. It's aimed at heavy duty administrators and developers - the regular downloads consumers are exposed to (from Windows Update or otherwise) are much smaller.

New York Times bans 'tweet'

Good for Mr Corbett!

Nice to see your work in the Register again, Kieren!

You might well take the piss out of Corbett, but I think he's absolutely right. There will always be a market among the discerning for quality, paid-for editorial, but current newspaper executives have to wake up and reverse the decline of quality that has been ever-quickening over the last decade or so; or else there'll be no place for them in the new world order at all. Only the strongest will survive, and unless newspapers can show that they can reliably deliver better editorial quality than free media alternatives, they'll continue to haemorrhage readers.

One of the ways of ensuring quality is to restrict the use of language to conservative, accessible English. Many readers don't care about technology, and some will be actively frustrated by its faddish jargon. Describing someone as 'posting on Twitter', particularly with the capital T, helps signify that Twitter is some kind of service that people use. Describing someone as 'tweeting' sounds like gibberish to the uninformed. Notable newspapers like the New York Times also have to consider how articles will read in fifty or a hundred years' time. Twitter will be long forgotten, so what does the future reader make of 'tweet'? Will future history books get the wrong end of the stick entirely and have a sarcastic, wry aside describing how people of our era often affected fey bird mannerisms while we talked? (In case any future historians read this, by the way, let me just say: Fuck you, Futureman!)

You're right about the use of 'e-mail', though. It's ever so terribly old fashioned.

HP agrees to buy Palm for $1.2bn

Overpriced

Whoops! Palm's board and shareholders must be laughing themselves to sleep! HP have vastly overestimated Palm's value.

Unless I've missed something, the major assets Palm holds that anyone would be interested in are webOS and the Palm brand itself. Both valuable in the right hands, but hardly worth $1.2bn. Divide that number by five and they could have got a good deal and a fair price.

I wonder how much Windows Phone 7 has got to do with this? Perhaps HP are in a panic because they want to sell handheld devices to the corporate sector, but the looming Windows Phone 7 seems to be chasing consumers at the expense of support and functionality corporates are looking for.

Creaky old Windows flaw rises, divides doommongers

Re: B,b,but...

That was supposed to be Vista. Except of course no-one from Microsoft actually said it - it was a rumour started by Internet retards.

If Microsoft had really decided to make Vista a rewrite of Windows, we would still be waiting another seven years for it to come out. Besides, if a group of people were to wake up tomorrow and decide to write a new operating system from scratch, it wouldn't be like Windows (or Unix and its stepchildren for that matter). All current general purposes OSes you care to mention suffer to varying degrees from clunky, outdated core design from the era in which they were first conceived.

Britain warns businesses of Chinese 'honey trap'

Hey kids!

Sick of hearing about the fundamentalist Muslim terror threat? Wish there was something new to keep you scared?

Here's our all-new, all-exciting Cold War with the Chinese! They eat babies, y'know.

Windows 8 possible July 2011 release?

H2 2012 release for Windows 8

... I'd put money on it.

Mozilla shoots out fifth Firefox 3.6 beta

Firefox 3.6

If the developers want to grant the world a special Christmas gift, it would be just smashing if, instead of shitting out a half-baked version of Firefox 3.6, their gift could be to promise to continue testing until it has slightly fewer vulnerabilities and stability issues than 3.5.

Then it'd be a truly happy Christmas. Although I'm easily pleased because the only Christmas present I'm getting this year is a sack full of medical waste.

PrevX U-turn on Windows update Black screen of Death claim

Fascinating

I've been fascinated by the type of coverage this story has received in the mainstream press and on the web, often in well-regarded publications and sites.

The poorly researched and poorly written nature of Prevx's original blog post was immediately visible with only a cursory glance, so it's disturbing how the rumblings about this (almost) non-issue has brought all the amateurs and incompetents out the woodwork with supposedly expert articles and commentary in tow. That's not exactly uncommon, of course, but this is a particularly clearly-defined episode.

Sony's Windows 7 virtualization switch-off (partly) reversed

No more Sony Vaio notebooks for me!

I have a one-year-old Vaio notebook which also has virtualisation disabled. Fortunately I didn't have to pay for it, which is just as well.

To add to the fun, it also has a 10/100 rather than gigabit Ethernet port, which is simply nonsensical in a modern and otherwise well-specified machine. Oh yeah, and Sony's x64 Windows drivers are provided 'as is', not updated, and not officially supported. Just to really stick the boot in, you understand.

Apparently Sony's customers who buy the model I have deserve second-rate service because they only spent $1800 instead of $3000 on the machine.

If anyone from Sony is reading this, I just want to let you know... I will never buy or accept another Vaio machine. Ever again. You've lost me as a customer for life. I dissuade friends and colleagues from buying Vaio notebooks. I now also try to avoid other Sony brands as much as possible. Enjoy your $268 million operating loss, lads.

Microsoft rejigger judges Window 7 a success

Windows Live is a nuisance

Microsoft's upper management seems to be expending too much thought on nursing their pet Windows Live services, to the detriment of their core customer base.

At its heart Windows is a business operating system. Microsoft seem to have forgotten that their grassroots users are the business Windows 'n' Office crowd - anyone who thinks corporates will be moving en masse to the cloud any time soon has badly lost touch with day-to-day life on the ground level.

Time to take a step back and a deep breath. Time to start concentrating more on bringing genuine innovation to Windows itself - despite the continuing lack of real, revelatory innovation coming from their competitors, including Linux (sorry, lads). If they're dreaming of a Windows Live empire, no matter whether it works out or not, the foundations could do with care and attention.

The Win32 API is ubiquitous, but it's also horrendously out-of-date. How about a new, modern native API alongside Win32 that's built with security in mind from the ground up? Y'know, where applications can no longer assume that they can interfere with each other or with OS files and services (the woefully inadequate sticking plaster of Windows File Protection notwithstanding) without specific user or policy authorisation? Where the OS has complete control over software installation so that applications can finally be audited and uninstalled cleanly and completely? On the server side, how about a networking model that moves away from the old fashioned, finicky shackles of Active Directory and onto something cleaner, more freeform (but still programmable), more comfortably scalable and more user- and administrator-friendly?

Just a few examples off the top of my head, not intended to be comprehensive. Huge amounts of work in what I've suggested, of course, for both Microsoft and other software vendors, but things that Microsoft could achieve if they would only put the effort in and get excited about Windows itself again. Not to mention that they're things that would secure the future of the Windows platform and bring customers in their droves to new versions on solid, technical terms rather than endless marketing-driven spit and shine.

Speculation mounts over AVG plans for OS X client

As I gaze into my crystal balls...

The fog is lifting! Here are my predictions:

1) Histrionics about viruses on OS X will steadily increase and be amplified over the next few years.

2) The fearmongering will be unwittingly bolstered by hapless bloggers and the mainstream press, being manipulated by press releases and the sinister industry rumour mill.

3) All this will happen as the Windows antivirus vendors start seeing their profits eroded by Microsoft's free antivirus software and become desperate to flog their shoddy wares in new markets.

Cross my palm with silver to continue, or alternatively perhaps someone could hire me as yet another fraudulent tech futurologist.

Microsoft begins Security Essentials downloads

Norton, McAfee et al are doomed...

... and they know it. Good riddance.

Their consumer-level products are doomed, anyway - I'd give them five years, maximum.

I'm sure that Security Essentials will prove to be perfectly adequate* for most home users and small businesses, and that's all that matters. Plus the price is right, and the beta at least seems unobtrusive and resource efficient.

So what if it has a dreary name and can't compete with more comprehensive enterprise security software? That's not the market Security Essentials is aimed at. As for the other functionality in consumer-level antivirus suites, Symantec and pals are going to discover (as if they didn't know already) that consumers don't understand it and couldn't give a shit about it.

All Microsoft need to do now is build up user awareness. After that it's just a matter of subtly inching it into the default installation of Windows like they did with basic PDF support in Office 2007. Plus it'd be ever so lovely if they could persuade OEMs to stop including abusively intrusive trial versions of Norton and its manky brethren in new PCs.

*: 'Adequate' insofar as any current antivirus software provides much more than a false sense of security against anything other than a fairly narrow set of predefined threats.