Posts by Steve Davies 3

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

re: Peoples' Republic of South Yorkshire

That's no way to describe part of GOC!

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Re: Not quite...

Hey! Don't forget Goonhilly! Without that site, we would never have gotten to see live pictures of "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' (from a Hollywood back lot /s)

re: decent broadband internet access at a decent price

Once upon a time, you could order a Tesla Model 3 for under $40K. Then Elon saw the light and started to raise prices and make himself even wealthier than he was.

He'll do the same with Starlink. The early adopters get a good deal but then the prices start to go up well beyond levels of inflation or taxation.

US Economic Pricing 101. Get them hooked and then... [you fill in the blanks]

Microsoft, NXP unveil Arm-based Windows 10 IoT Enterprise experience

Re: Aren't we supposed to be moving on from Windows 10?

Shhhhh... Don't say that or the MS bots will be all over your post downvoting it.

Sooner or later (or maybe never?) MS will have to take Windows on ARM seriously.

Apple has shown what is possible in terms of a Desktop system on a SOC. We know that a whole heap of other makers are working their socks off trying to keep up with Apple.

The ARM market is maturing fast. If MS does not wake up then, and it won't be the first time that they have missed the boat. Remember how the TCP/IP stack was a bolt on?

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

Re: Trump vs Musk

Sorry to wet your face but Elon Musk can't stand for POTUS because he was not born in the good ole USofA.

Only natural born loonies can stand for election under the GQP ticket.

I predict Trump + DeathSantis to be the MAGA/Q pick for 2024.

Unless Trump is in Jail by then. In that case, it will be DeathSantis + Boebert/Palin/MTG

Microsoft debuts System Center 2022

A simple question...

Does MS ever 'finish' a product before releasing it?

Or... is 50%/60%/70% complete good enough?

Boston Dynamics' latest robot is a warehouse workhorse

And in other news

Baldy Bezos takes a controlling interest in Boston Dynamic and announces plans to replace ALL workers in Amazon warehouses. Plus, they will start with the plants that voted to unionize last week.

In a further quote, he said that his ultimate aim was to make Amazon the first operation that did away with all workers below 'C' level execs.

UK suit over reselling surplus Microsoft licenses rolls on

Sheesh People

Haven't we learned yet that MS is the LAW when it comes to software licensing? What they say goes no matter where it is and even if they are 100% in the wrong.

Next versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu head into beta

Re: any version of Gnome is painful

Can I correct that to:-

any version of Gnome greater than 2.* is painful

?

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

Re: Sue MS?

How deep are your pockets? $20M deep?

MS are not fools. They know that only the very rich or very stupid will sue them for something like this.

They can let you run out of money 100 times over unless you are part of the 0.01%.

I'd love it for someone to take them on but I'll be long dead before this happens if at all.

Re: Stable?

That word is banned in the MS dictionary. As soon as something comes close, they F it up big time.

Inflation and supply chain issues

You are right on that but.... MS will not care one little bit. All they want is for everyone to be on W11 then they'll introduce OS subscriptions. $15.99/month + Tax per machine or VM.

I know two fairly large SME's who are planning on ditching MS (Windows, Office, Teams etc) by the end of 2023. They are planning on using their existing HW estate and a load of Open Source Software. Some of their machines will keep running W7 but they are standalone

I am sure that they are not alone in this.

Intel counters AMD’s big-cache PC chip with 5.5GHz 16-core rival

Don't forget...

a mega-sized stack of £1.00 coins to feed the meter. given the cost of leccy these days...

I hate to say it but Apple might be onto something with their silicon.

Re: Still reeling …

Try 2.4Mb 14in HDD and Paper Tape as the backup. Circa 1974 and a PDP-11/05 CPU running at around 50khz

The wild world of non-C operating systems

What about Assembly Language?

Some notable OS's have been written in Assembler but tend to get forgotten.

My personal favourite is RSX-11-M/M-Plus/S

I had great fun modifying the boot code for 11S so that some extra custom features were enabled. Those were the days when IT was fun and there was always something new happening.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Hey Google!

How about stopping the practice of slurping every bit of data on each and every one of us that you can. That is just wrong.

Start cleaning your own house Google.

Nvidia outlines subscription-fueled journey to $1tr revenue

Re: Have they jumped on the crypto wagon?

Yes, They encrypt your data and it costs you an arm and both legs to unlock it.

Gives a new slant on 'ransomware'...

Nvidia is going to shoot itself in the foot big time if AMD comes up with a performant Graphics card without the subscription.

Eat this Nviria execs... -->

GitHub explains outage string in incidents update

Cue news that MS is dumping MySQL

after this and their reluctance to be audited by Oracle, they will be moving it all to SQL-Server.

only joking but...

Adobe anticipates $75m hit from Russia, Belarus pullout

Making money means nowt

They'll raise prices for everyone and to hell with the users. As long as the 'C' level execs can get their hands on one of those Oligarc's yachts at rock bottom prices what do they care eh?

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Why?

The M1 Mac Mini running Linux WILL be a very capable replacement for old Intel based SFF servers such as the Intel NUC. The reduced power consumption alone is a big plus.

Given the demise of macOS Server running Linux on the M1 hardware is almost a no brainer.

Win 11 adds 'requirements not met' nag for unsupported hardware

Re: pleasures of apt-get

Other package managers are available.

Choose the distro that meets your own use case.

Re: Nix it in el Reg

Until the next update changes everything.

The game of cat and mouse continues...

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

It gets worse...

Now Microfuck is adding a watermark to screens where W11 detects unsupported hardware.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/03/21/1523212/windows-11-gets-a-desktop-watermark-on-unsupported-hardware

There seems no end to their ability to kick users in their dangly bits.

Proudly Windows free since 2016.

Re:Please tell us if the year of Linux

The OP didn't mention Linux at all so please get off your high horse...

What we saw is clearly Microturds vision of the future where Ads are part of the OS itself and not just a [[cough][cough] feature of an app such as a web browser.

I might be wrong but I get the feeling from previous comments on this that Ad in the file browser is well beyond the pale and is a mega step backwards.

IMHO, Operating Systems are there to facilitate the user to do stuff. Anything that gets in the way of that purpose is to be avoided at all costs. MS has been eating away at our ease of doing stuff for years. This is just the next small step.

I will not be going down that route. The IT industry as a whole needs to give a collective finger to MS. If it does not then... you see that slippery slope over there... lookout you might well be tumbling down it very soon.

If you want to go all in with MS's ambitions for subscriptions and more tracking and slurping of your every keystroke/mouse movement then please go ahead but there are a lot of us who will not be following you down that slippery slope.

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

Re: So the moral of the story is...

Or HP or ...

My guess is that in less than 2 years you won't be able to buy a printer WITHOUT taking out an ink subscription.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here

Re: Hmm

Mint that's Debian is where it is at these days. Ubuntu is so passe' now besides, some of Canonical's decisions don't play well with the rest of the Linux community.

Gnome V3 and V4 are dead men walking as far as many long time Linux users are concerned but at least we have a choice unlike the monstrosity that Windows has become.

I'm pleased that Flatpack has been adopted. The more nails in the snap coffin the better as far as I'm concerned but my opinion is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Re: Bonkers

Doh! That warning is just to save their Ass when it is discovered that said packet of nuts actually contains zero % of nuts.

They can point to the warning and walk away smiling.

Heaps of tweaks and improvements incoming with GNOME 42

Re: GNOME themes are CSS stylesheets

More of a case of 'fiddling while gnome burns' IMHO.

The excellent usability of Gnome 2 is a mere memory that has to be expunged from everyone's memory in their view of the world.

Like Windows, it seems that the whole concept of 'ease of use' has gone the way of the Dodo.

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Mistake my ass

This is a foretaste of 'The Shape of Things to Come' in MS world.

IMHO, this is all leading up to £10.00/month subscription for Windows OR get inundated/deluged with ads.

Get out now people while you can.

You know it makes sense.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Re: This may worry Microsoft.

as long as those to move over still pay their Orifice 365 subscription then why would they worry?

They make more profit from software than they ever did from hardware.

It would not surprise me if MS floated off their OS business and kept the rest.

It is mature and will only ever suck up more profits. If they don't float it then they will have to either:-

- Introduce hefty end-user subscriptions. I'm talking about £20/month + VAT per device.

- or deluge the user with endless ads that are impossible to block.

OR both.

Re: Apple on a super computer

You'll probably see Linux on an M1-Ultra based system on the top500.org list pretty soon.

A win for Linus and Apple.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Re: where did you hear THIS myth, exactly?

Please look at the Youtube channel 'Lehto's Law'. The guy presenting it is an attorney in Michigan. He has covered a number of cases where this actually happened from a traffic stop.

In one case, A serving soldier was stopped on a spurious traffic charge and lost the several thousand $$$ that he was carrying to give to his daughter. The cops had no 'just cause' to search his car but they did.

It is not a myth but the upside is that some states are outlawing this practice.

Then, of course, you could google 'civil asset forfeiture'. It is not a myth BB. Far from it.

re cash : easy to carry

Watch out if you are carrying even $500 in parts of the USA. Get stopped for something like speeding, driving too slowly, being black, and you could lose all your cash even if you have proof that you came by it legally due to 'Civil Asset Forfeiture. The Local PD takes the cash, sends it to the DEA and gets back around 80-90% of clean legal money...

A nice earner for the PD and the person losing the $$$ has to sue the DEA and prove that it wasn't illegally obtained or the proceeds of drug pushing/trafficking.

That costs money and... oh yes, you have lost it.

Chip world's major suppliers of neon gas shut down by Ukraine invasion – report

Re: Unlike fscking Helium

and H2 is a whole lot worse when it comes to leaks.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Re: Password? What password?

I've just had (well at 07:00 today) an email from my leccy supplier informing me that

"We are sorry to see you go. We have been informed that another supplier is taking over your supply"

etc etc etc

But... I only changed my tariff last month and I'm not paying a £150 fine for leaving early.

Needless to say, the said leccy company knows nothing about this whole thing.

Time to give VM the finger

and move your email to a provider that takes security at least half serious rather than none at all as VM clearly don't care.

Yes, it can be difficult but it is possible if you take your time.

However, if you are fighting a determined hacker then you have to go for broke.

VM need to be hauled up before the ICO not that they can do anything but any publicity that shames them can't be bad.

Just two die for: Apple reveals M1 Ultra chip in Mac Studio

Re: Because they've already got them

Yep... I say looking that the large box of old I/O cards that sit on the shelf in my garage. There is even a SCSI-1 card with cables and a terminator. Sadly, there is nothing left to connect it to. The last device, a Tape drive when Phut a few years ago.

That lot will be taken to the WEEE recyclers one day along with a Sun E450 and a few monitors.

There comes a time when you have to let go of all the old crap that you have collected over the years.

I've been gradually sorting through things since the pandemic began. There is some light at the end of the downsizing tunnel.

Perhaps you should try it yourself sometime.

Microsoft 365, Office 365 price hikes delayed

Re: Yammer

Yep. The company I was working at the time, tried it back in around 2011 and dropped it like a lump of smelly dog poo. We put Wireshark on the network and saw all the data slurping it was doing so we passed despite management wanting us to use it. It died a natural death and not one person with a techie background missed it.

I think this was about the time that MS bought it. Strange that...?

Amazon cuts credit for charities to access web services

Bezos must need a bigger yacht then

(through his stockholding)

Most charities don't have lots of dosh so any reduction in this sort of thing could impact their operations. Scumbags!

Russia scrambles to bootstrap HPC clusters with native tech

Re: See ? That's what all those EULA's were for !

Anyone who has visited the markets in the 'Projects' around Moscow knows only too well that any form of licensing is laughed at in Russia. Hardware and Software of all sorts are readily available.

Google blocks FOSS Android tool – for asking for donations

Re: App Store Pricing

AFAIK, the majority of Android users are cheapskates. That said, I have not paid Apple a penny for my phone or the apps that I have on it. My iPhone was bought secondhand and none of the 30+ apps are priced at anything other than free.

duh!

Open Street Map is not Google Maps. Isn't that reason enough?

Anyone using Google Maps provides all sorts of data back to the mothership. OSM users don't.

$$$$$ matters to Google. Any limitation of their revenue stream is a clear and present threat to their business.

President Biden calls for ban on social media ads aimed at kids

Re: 15% minimum tax rate ? Great idea.

Ok then... who do you want to be sworn in as POTUS come 20th January 2025?

From the polls, I've seen, taxing the likes of Amazon with a 15% flat rate is pretty popular. As is nixing most of the US Student Debt but what do I know eh? (don't answer that because I already know that I know nothing)

Plans for UK rival to Silicon Valley ditched

Re: Upgrading rail lines

If you do Peterborough->Brum then it should start at Felixstowe and electrify it all the way. The freight traffic alone will justify it but the crazed beancounters at the DfT use crooked models that are skewed to make any rail project like that uneconomic.

As for Manchester to Sheffield, there was an electrified line between the two that was closed in 1976 by a Labor Government. Most of it is now a public footpath. The existing lines follow the valleys and are hard to properly upgrade to increase capacity. One slow 'All Stations' royally F's up the line for fast trains.

Transport policy in this country is a hotchpotch of unjoined up non-thinking.

Here in N.E. Hampshire the transport interchange at Aldershot Station is about to be 'F'd up. The land used by the bus station has been sold for more new apartments. the new must station will be a number of stops on an existing congested road. Progress? Yeah, 10 steps backwards.

What is it with cloud status pages not reflecting reality?

Clouds are not permanent

They aren't solid. They come and go. AWS is just like clouds in the sky. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Sadly the beancounters out there rule the IT roost. They see 'putting everything and everything' in the cloud as a way of removing CAPEX from their bottom lines.

One day, one of them will get royally hacked and be down for days costing its customers Billions.

With what Putin is doing in the Ukraine, what is to stop him from getting his hackers to take down AWS or any of the other major cloud service? Nothing.

Watch this space...

Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech

Google Doublespeak

This...

Although Lite mode is going away, we remain committed to ensuring Chrome can deliver a fast webpage loading experience on mobile

Actually means

Although Lite mode is going away, we remain committed to ensuring Chrome can deliver a fast webpage loading experience and subsequent data slurping returned to us in a timely manner on mobile

Chrome and all its derivatives are banned from my network.

Experimental WebAssembly port of LibreOffice released

As far back as the mid 1990's?

How about the mid 1980's or even earlier? Even the humble Amstrad 8080 powered all in one had a WYSIWYG editor. Maybe this was all from before you were born?

DEC had the WPS-8 (powered by a PDP-8) workstation with twin floppies and had a decent editor.

Otherwise, your comment about 'apps shouldn't be built this way' is perfect.

Shame that it will fall on deaf ears with the power brokers in the USA.

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

re: Windows is no longer fit for purpose

That is exactly the conclusion that I came to when W10 was released in 2016. I guessed then that the telemetry was only the tip of the iceberg.

I have a W7 VM that I run perhaps one every three or four months other than that I'm Windows and Microsoft free.

My family and friends are getting increasingly pissed off with the time it takes for updates to be applied. By contract, I powered up an old Mac Mini today that hasn't been on since last August. It runs Alma Linix. The update took 26 minutes to apply. That sort of time is what you expect from most Linux Distros.

Windows is not fit for purpose but... I'd better stop now before I start to rant.

Facebook is one bad Chrome extension away from another Cambridge Analytica scandal

Facebook is the new Borg

and I refuse to use their new name just like I do with Google.

In the words of an old song,

They Want It All by The Byrds

They want it all, they want it now

They want to get it and they don't care how

They want it all, they want it now

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/byrds/they-want-it-all.htm

How prophetic they were.

Suck on this Zuck -> see icon

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

Of course we should expect

our communications to be private. We have put snail mail in envelopes since before 1840 for good reason.

But... our Gubbermint seems determined not to all us to take relatively simple steps that will do that.

There is the 'think about the children' argument.

Fine. go after the kiddie porn by all means but leave the rest of us alone.

There are more than enough attempts to get our data from 3rd party hackers so we put up defences and keep everyone out and that includes the Spooks.

To have the Gubbermint opening and inspecting our electronic communications is no different to opening every envelope delivered by Royal Main and scanning the contents. How many ministers in the same government are conducting clandestine affairs using phones, email, IM and even love letters sent in the Post. Do they want them to be exposed?

Oh silly me. They will add in enough loopholes for them to escape the law but that's for them and not us proles.