Posts by The Original Steve

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Advertent FUD

I use both a water jug with a Britta filter and also a kettle (well, hot water dispenser) with a built in Britta filter. I do by 3rd party (Amazon own-brand) filters though as the cost is ridiculous for the branded ones.

I'm not clued up at a technical / chemical level, but I live in a very hard water area and find the use of the Britta filters soften the water dramatically which results in next to zero limescale in my kettle as well as removing unpalatable tastes and scents which is ideal for light teas.

I'd rather like it if I could filter the washing machine, dishwasher and shower, but that's purely to reduce the limescale and thus prolong the life of the goods. Although I believe dishwasher salt is mean to do that for me.

I wouldn't bother with a filter for the taste alone, but 6 years on the same kettle without needing to descale it at all is something of a miracle given I had to do it every few months pre-filter.

Surf's up: Microsoft emits new security baseline for Edge 83 with way to shut off access to built-in browser game

Rather like it

Sure I'm in the freak in the corner, but I really like the new Edge.

Now I am very much in the "Microsoft ecosystem" both personally and in my work life, so it's value proposition should be higher than FF, Chrome, Safari and the rest of the browsers. Being Chromium based, the engine is naturally going to be pretty reasonable, but I've found I'm getting the best of both worlds. Microsoft have clearly (and finally) thrown considerable focus and effort on Edge, and I find its paid off. Do recommend the Dev channel as a good balcnce between stability and features.

I've been around long enough to understand people's healthy skepticism with Micros~1 and browsers given their history, but I do suggest people give it a try before slating it - particularly if your company uses Micros~1's cloudy offerings as well as selling their own souls by using W10 and a Micros~1 account personally.

RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?'

Re: Pi 4 mouldering?

That sounds very impressive, and a truly excellent use of the Pi (purists may disagree and think that the Pi should be used for educational purposes only, but that's not my view).

I have to cheekily ask... Have your scripts on GitHub or similar for us lazy admins to get some inspiration from?

Enjoy, it's clearly well earned ----------------------------------------------------------->

Kubernetes is 'still hard' so VMware has gone all-in on container-related tech with expanded Tanzu, vSphere 7

Hyper-V

Rather interested in the below:

"Despite giving away Hyper-V, Microsoft never won more than about 20 per cent of the market."

Maybe by number of hosts installed or VM's running possibly, but in terms of customers I'd put money on it Microsoft has more Hyper-V customers than VMWare has ESXi customers.

Source is purely my own experience: I worked at a medium sized crisp factory (600 employees) about a decade ago where I ran vSphere, and I then moved to a pharmaceutical firm with > 20,000 users who also used vSphere for a couple of years. I then left and joined a small/medium MSP with about 90 customers. 2 were using ESXi, about 60 were using Hyper-V and one was using Xen. (Rest were so small it was physical servers only or no servers at all!).

Since then I've joined a consultancy and one customer (50,000 employees) was running vSphere and is looking to replace with Hyper-V, and another customer (800 employees) is already on Hyper-V.

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

My other half moved to Scotland the end of last year near Dumfries. Every chip shop we've been to has had deep fried Mars bars on the menus, as well as haggis and even deep fried pizza.

Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs

vSphere vs Hyper-V

If you've deep pockets, vSphere is frankly the best on the makret. However if you don't need the very best, datacentre edition of Windows per host gives you their VSAN (Storage Spaces Direct) and unlimited Windows guests for considerably less considering you'd still need licences for Windows VM if using VMWare.

These days for greenfield sites that are a Microsoft shop guest wise Hyper-v covers it off

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Re: A historic day in every way.

There's been two referendums on our membership of what we now call the EU. One a couple of years after we joined, and the other in 2016. Basically a generation between them.

And 1.4 million people in a population (not electorate!) of 65 million is only a rounding error if you didn't like the result.

Finally, whilst the the British often demanded exceptions and different treatment / opt-outs (Euro, Shengan etc) we're famous for sticking to the rules that were agreed. Unlike certain other countries I can think of... The nation of queuers will stick to all rules no matter now ridiculous they may seem. Not sure why us attempting to negotiate opt-outs and exceptions when the rules are made is a bad thing in your eyes.

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

"It is 2020, what was the customer data and critical systems doing on Windows boxes, rather than Linux with a snapshotted file system underpinning the storage?"

If you think you are safe from attacks, viruses and malware just because of a particular technology choice, then you're both sorely mistaken and I wouldn't be surprised if you've already been done over without knowing it.

Security isn't actually a technical issue per se, it's cultural. As posted above, a properly configured Windows Server is more secure than a poorly configured <insert OS of choice> server.

End user education, tiered security, least user access, well trained administrators and strong processes including the assumption you WILL be compromised (and thus have a strong, tested, offline backup) are SOME of the measures to help mitigate security issues.

Changing an OS is like changing the brand of car you drive. How you drive and maintenance of the vehicle make far more difference to how likely you'll be involved in a collision.

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

Re: DJI Database

DJI sell products that's literally detect all DJI products (and I think other 3rd party ones too) to airports and other government and related organisations.

DJI drones literally broadcast their location and serial number in real time which their AeroScope product picks up.

https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/aeroscope

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

Re: Please not the old Southampton chestnut...

An interesting article which gives a good comment and counter argument.

Although I did raise an eyebrow at the way some facts were worded. Stating 70% of UK made cars are exported and half of those are sent to the EU somehow seems rather more alarming (given we're meant to be leaving the EU) compared to saying that less that 40% of UK made cars go to the continent. Personally if less that 50% to the EU markets then arguable would it not make more sense to be outside of it and take the hit whilst securing FTA's with the majority of the customers of the cars we make? Purely econmically speaking.

Although when going to the website home page it kind of lost it's credibility. 5 seconds on the home page suggests it's a counter to the rabid nonsense sprouted by the Daily Mail. Whilst that's not in itself a bad thing, it does somewhat water down decent articles like the one you linked too as it's clearly just as biased as the pro-Brexit lot.

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

Re: Who needs a vacuum cleaner on wheels with E 0.62 / L in the land of president Trump.

Couldn't care less about the HP - it's the speed and handling.I'd take a BMW M2 CS over your American motor any day of the week. That's faster 0-60 than your "most powerful car made in Fords history" and can take a corner too.

The CS model is also a bit cheaper, although I'd probably opt for the non-CS M2 Competition instead which is considerably cheaper and 0.5 seconds slower on paper.

Amazing you can honestly write on a public forum that American cars are somehow a better choice. Build quality alone is a different level, then handling. Sure, raw HP numbers the other side of pond wins hands down. Getting from A - B or on a track however and you'll be eating those numbers whilst suffering crappier build quality, worse handling and you'll be paying more for the privllage.

A very satisfied BMW 435D owner. (That's the bi-turbo, 6-cylinder, 4WD, diesel coupe)

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

No ability to launch any executable other than the application required (SAP or similar) on a device without Internet access and someone from IT babysitting you whilst you are on the device.

Your move.

Real life example

My current client is a mid sized pension provider. Whilst lots of staff have access to single records (vetted staff, audit trails, no way to export), the auditors do - apparently - need unfettered access to all the records.

As such, there's a locked down endpoint (kiosk mode, whitelist for executables and no browser, all external ports disabled), chained to a desk in a dedicated meeting room. Screen recording is enabled and for good measure theres always at least one clued up employee sitting and watching too.

It's not bulletproof, but given the sensitivity of the data and the level of access I feel it's entirely reasonable and proportionate.

Funnily enough, the auditor was very unhappy with this arrangement and complained to the FD. When the FD came to 'discuss' it with me I already had a letter printed out referencing this case, and that I'd be delighted to water it down if she signs the letter that clearly shows she has signed off on going against the security consultants advice and on behalf of the company the IT function and myself would not be held liable should something happen.

Auditor still hates me, pension info remains locked down and the world still spins.

All we need is just a little patients: Google's Alphabet hires new chief health officer

Streams?

."...mobile app Streams for diagnosing acute kidney injury... "

Are they taking the piss?

Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

Re: It slows down considerably once you get to multi GB mail storage

Not disagreeing with your headline point about TB being less susceptible to corruption than Outlook.

But...

1. PST files are a PERSONAL export of mailbox content. Outlook uses an OST file as an offline cache, but it doesn't use PST files for anything unless you export content from your mailbox to a PST you create. PST's are really only a thing for end users to do their own, manual archiving and is not recommended in enterprise scenarios.

2. Exchange uses a relational DB for its mailbox store. A cut of what was the JET database. Last 4 or so releases of Exchange have been very reliable in terms of mail store.

3. As PST's aren't used, corruption claims don't apply. Should your OST become corrupt, simply delete it. Only your offline cache, it'll get automatically rebuilt.

4. Both Exchange on premise and Exchange Online have an archive feature, which essentially adds another mailbox for each user for archive purposes. Users can simply drag and drop content from primary to archive, or admins can create rules.

YMMV, and I wish you luck with TB, but personally I'd take Outlook as a heavy duty mail client in an enterprise over TV any day of the week.

Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame

Re: Any decent AV?

I replaced Kaspersky with Webroot across 70 clients, 4000 odd endpoints and everyone loved it.

Saying that, if you're on Windows 10 and not an MSP, I find Windows Defender managed with InTune to be excellent.

Nutanix lures cloudy bingers with Danish trilogy: HPE GreenLake deal, ServiceNow tie-up and ProLiant DX pact

Re: No thanks

Putting to one side questioning my storage knowledge simply because I advocate using native OS for storage subsystems rather than expensive appliances, I take issue with the general point you raise.

Whilst you are right that SMB support on non-Windows devices is still (amazingly) bloody awful, if you don't mind me saying so it sounds as if you misunderstand Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). S2D is the storage subsystem, not the presentation layer. You can of course deploy scale out file servers that sit on top of your S2D to present SMB, but in this context and in the majority of deployments you use S2D as the storage subsystem for your VM's to reside on, not for the OS/apps inside of a Linux VM to connect to.

Therefore you can quite easily and happily use what MS now call "Azure Stack HCI" (S2D + Hyper-V) and run Linux VM's on top, with the VHDX files living on a ReFS S2D volume. Linux VM's wouldn't even need to have SAMBA installed.

I'd much, much rather use SMB 3.02 over iSCSI as it's demonstrably better performing, easier to setup and administer and better resilience. Feel free to search for references, but if you're stuck I'll point you in the right direction.

The only time your concern would be valid in my view is if you are running a heterogeneous environment where your hypervisor is Linux based and you were running S2D as your backend storage subsystem for your VM's, which would be nuts. Might as well use the equivalent of S2D on your Linux distro of choice, either converged or hyperconverged.

Of course let's not forget that you could use the above model (S2D storage and KVM / Xen for the hypervisor), and simply present the S2D storage via NFS which Windows Server fully supports. That might be a goer if you have separate storage and compute teams, but generally speaking if I'm using Windows or Linux for the hypervisor for ease of use I'd likely use the same OS type for the storage layer too.

No thanks

Far, far cheaper to buy some DL380's or similar and slap on either Windows or Linux to get software defined storage from the OS.

Only familiar with MS Storage Spaces Direct which comes with the OS, has all the features of Nutanix et all but costs nothing extra. All generic x86 tin.

Know Linux can do the same too if you prefer that. Save yourself a packet and roll your own.

Creators Update meets its maker: It's 1903 or bust for those clinging to Windows 10 1703

I despise the overly complex way MS are handling Windows and the updates.

But my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Windows is similar to Ubuntu as you describe. LTSC every 5 years (I think, maybe 3), for servers or you could go with the 6 monthly releases for the latest features. Regardless of which one, there's monthly security patches too.

LTSC is also available for the client too, although I know MS highly discourage use of it for normal desktop usage. (In the past at least Office literally wouldn't install if you were using LTSC on Windows 10 which is fucking mental, but since when were MS sensible in that regard?!)

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

Re: Glad Oracle did this..

Can't believe I'm saying this, but if you're after bare metal then hyper-v is both free and actually rather good including running Linux VM's.

If your desktop is Windows (which I doubt) then it's also a free option to enable.

Got a couple of devs I know who have just moved to hyper-v and WSL and they seem to like it

How long is a lifetime? If you’re Comcast, it’s until a rival quits a city: ISP 'broke' price promise

Re: Lifetime warranty

Been a big fan of ProCurve switching for years and years. Must have deployed a few hundred of them across multiple clients.

I've found them to be very reliable, but I've called on their Lifetime warranty twice and both times had the same experience as you. Free, fast and hassle free.

Shame pretty much everything else HP/HPE is utter dog shite.

Hey, it's 2019. Quit making battery-draining webpages – say makers of webpage-displaying battery-powered kit

Actually found Edge (ducks for cover) to be very battery friendly and it allows for ad blockers. Can't remember what one I've used but can't recall the last time I saw an ad on my droid (in the browser at least).

Genuinely worth a go.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

So the majority of MP's voted for the referendum, then when the majority of the electorate that voted opted to leave the EU, a majority of MP's then voted for the EU withdrawal act which sets the exit day (which was amended to 31st Oct). A majority voted against Mrs. May's Withdrawal "Deal" / Treaty three times and the speaker said it can't be voted on again without there being something different.

Because the UK and the EU can't agree a deal, the only outcome is a no deal unless something gives, surely?

Whilst I'm not in favor of no deal as a preferred outcome, leaving should be implemented (as the electorate was told in writing from HMG at the time that it would).

The above seems very logical to me, even if not having a trade agreement in place is far from ideal, it appears to be where we are.

So unless we get some wiggle-room from the EU on the backstop (although I'd love to see a hell of a lot more changed in the rejected withdrawal deal), I'm not entirely sure what else can be done other than to try to make the most of leaving without a deal. If we refuse to leave without a deal, then we can't leave if Parliament refuses to accept what the EU and the UK Government have negotiated.

There's a lot of passion on both sides of the debate, but I'm most angry with the politicians. If you vote on legislation that sets an exit date and then reject the deal negotiated then no deal is the outcome. MP's outraged by no deal that voted against the deal and voted for the referendum and the EU Withdrawal Act have failed to do their jobs, as scrutiny of bills is literally a massive part of their job.

What a fucking mess!

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

Rather like it

Not a fan of Google's slurp, and sadly FF hasn't performed adequately for me for years now.

Been using the Dev channel of Edge for the last few months and I'm genuinely impressed. Flawless compatibility (as you'd expect) and essentially has most of the benefits of Chrome whilst also having the benefits of Edge. (Yes there are some. Netflix 4K steaming, integration with MS services etc.).

Recommend people give it a play. You maybe pleasantly surprised.

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

How to fix?

I'm what my MD has called an "expert generalist" in that I've spent the best part of 2 decades doing ethernet networking, storage (FC and iSCSI SAN's) and compute (VMWare and Hyper-V) as well as applications (SfB, Exchange, SharePoint etc.)

Whilst I'm familar with network loops and can have sufficient networking knowledge around TCP/IP for things like QoS/DSCP, STP, VSRP etc, I'm curious as to what the engineers in this case needed to do once they "fixed" the offending kit that sent out the bad packets. Article says that the packets already generated were still bouncing around and continuing to broadcast around the nodes and it took them a further 3 hours to get onto these nodes to remove the bad packets already generated.

My question is how..? A case of just rebooting the kit as the packets and sessions shouldn't be persistent? Or is there some dark art I'm unfamilar with where you can go onto a node (I'm reading a node as a switch / router. Afraid fiber isn't one of my skills) and almost select packets based on a filter and then remove them?

Just curious.

Web body mulls halving HTTPS cert lifetimes. That screaming in the distance is HTTPS cert sellers fearing orgs will bail for Let's Encrypt

Re: Follow the money

Whilst these tools are good for the most common use case scenarios, there's often very many other scenarios that aren't covered. And if I need to remember to do my Exchange, Skype for Business, IIS servers with multiple and complex cert bindings and other servers, the piss easy vanilla IIS boxes are hardly any bother to add to the list.

Tools to renew certs are all well and good, but generally they only renew the cert in the OS cert store and maybe IIS binding too. They are the vanilla and super easy ones.

Not forgetting certs that aren't issued by public CA's and devices that don't use Linux and Windows such as iLO/iDRAC, routers/firewalls etc.

When I was the Infrastructure Architect at a MSP a year or so back where everything was Windows based for our clients (at least that was critical in terms of certs) I ensured that we raised an automated alert when a cert on a box has less than 2 weeks left before it expires.

Helped prevent certs expiring and also caught the lazy engineers who never deleted the expired one post-renewal too.

Incognito mode won't stop smut sites sharing your pervy preferences with Facebook, Google and, er, Oracle

Re: Paranoid much

Say that to the Ashleigh Maddison users

Oh good. This'll go well. Amazon's Alexa will offer NHS advice

I actually didn't think this was really a big issue at all, if all it's doing is allowing Alex to relay stuff from the public NHS website. No more worrying than your ISP/browser/Gov from knowing/recording you've accessed the NHS website.

But the point about a teenage girl using it about a sexual related query and that query being stored on the account is a good example of the worry. Likewise Amazon collating the queries and using that to build profiles etc. Very troubling indeed.

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

Nailed the final episode about 20 mins ago (I'm in hotels most nights and I don't enjoy free labour) - outstanding I thought

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Re: Queen of the Streams?

On an actress of a particularly niche, adult sub-genre...

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Independence

Am I the only person who is a little uncomfortable about Cloudflare? Not just it's dominance in the market it plays in, but also that El Reg uses it.

I have nothing against them, and actually think they are a great company who have done some incredible innovation. I have no issue with them per se. But it just doesn't fit right to me that the mighty El Reg - who operate using open source (https://www.theregister.co.uk/about/company/website/) - have such a dependency on a commercial 3rd party.

Where does it end? The ethos of El Reg comes across to me as being fiercely independent which I like (they have cynicism for all IT vendors equally), but being so dependent on a sole provider just doesn't seem right. I'd like to think that they have half their servers in one colo, and their others in a different one, with different telco's (inc backhauls) supplying connectivity.

I know that they'll likely be dependent on lots of commercial 3rd parties (from hosting to water supplier) but the (valid) DDoS comment aside it's an optional choice to place your tin behind Cloudflare, not a technical necessity. Proudly declaring your technology stack which is all open source on your website just doesn't seem to fit with funneling every inbound packet over single for-profit 3rd party. Might as well use Microsoft/Oracle/IBM (urgh - I feel dirty even writing that) if you're going to give up any semblance of ownership and independence by slinging everything to a commercial 3rd party.

(I know that Cloudflare are also big users and contributors of OSS - it's not that I think it's proprietary - it just doesn't seem to fit with the independent nature of El Reg. I have a huge amount of respect for both organisations and wish them all the very best)

What would Jesus tweet? Church of England hands down commandments for Anglicans on social media

Factual

"The voluntary pledge calls for people to ensure what they post on social media is true and "fair and factual".

Yet be religious?

Should be a very quite Twitter account that one...

cPanel unleashes price hikes on its most dense customers

Re: It also refers to its employees as "cpeeps".

I read it as creeps!

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

You can do that yourself for half the price of one Audi-flip. Buy an ODBII connector from Amazon and the appropriate app.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

Re: " wine has no affect on "

"What effect does wine have?"

The effect of running Windows application on Linux I believe.

But don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Biz tells ransomware victims it can decrypt their files... by secretly paying off the crooks and banking a fat margin

Buying Bitcoin from a legit broker is fine, and you can legitimacy say that transaction was ultimately for data recovery services.

What's the difference? Still get a VAT receipt for what HMRC would register as an asset you brought.

P. S. They paying you freelance for this defence or are you a permie after a promotion?

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

Re: Microsoft did not used to need to see the future

Long boot up times and shipped with an AV...

You must be referring to Android.

Whilst I use a droid today and I'm very pleased with it, WinPho neither had nor needed an AV and its boot up times kicked the shit out of Android and even iOS at the time.

But let's not let the facts get in the way of a good MS bashing.

Which is odd, as there's a plethora of excellent criticisms you could have chosen from.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

Insane

WTF are they building?!

Can't seriously be saying there's not a HA SQL cluster in use (with dev/test, DR etc) in use today which can't handle another DB with circa a million records? Sure, blow £500k on another shelf for the SAN and the extra backup tapes, and then what... 3 months development?

They can use existing CMS for the front end too. I can't see where even half their estimate is coming from.

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Re: It all works fine in theory

Totally agree.

I do enough beta testing for Microsoft free of charge and that's enough problems, you can forget it on a FUCKING PLANE!

My old mums 60's next year so my brother and me are taking her on a luxury holiday of a lifetime as a present (with us coming with). I'm was giving very serious consideration to refusing to fly in a 737 MAX already, but that's looking like it's going to be anything by Boeing.

3 (super expensive!) tickets is small fry I know, but other than my wallet what else can you do?

LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court

Re: Sony and Fujifilm tape media patents

Bravo Sir. Bravo

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Re: Elections???

The fact these people have lost their lifes is a tradgey, no doubt.

However we don't know why they died yet. I hear on the news that the vast majority of people counting were unemployed and extremely poor / lowest end of the social economic scale. As such this group have a significantly lower life span and higher chance of dying early / severe untreated illness than the general population.

Polygraph knows all: You've been using our user feedback form

Re: Hot desking

Thanks for the link. Was a big fan of R4, particularly the comedy and news until about a year or two ago where I drifted towards commercial radio.

Not only was the recording you linked to informative, relevant and interesting, you've rekindled my love for R4 again.

Thank you, and have a good weekend!

Russian bots are just for rigging US elections? They hit home, too: Kid stripped of crown in TV contest vote-fix scandal

RE: Kernel

"Yeah, that might be bad but look at what you/those guys are doing!"

There's a name for that kind of tactic in arguments and debates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.

Guess what country has a reputation for using it during these wonderful and modern times?

P-p-p-pick up a Pengwin: Windows Subsystem for Linux boffins talk version 2

Golden rule

As it's from Microsoft, don't even consider it until version 3 is released, and even then treat it as a beta.

Re: Exactly true

"E.g. stuff like this."

Any reference that isn't from half a decade ago?

EU lumbers towards Apple probe as Spotify cries foul over App Store's 30% cut

Nope, but I would expect them to levy the same charges on both my product and their own brand product at the point of retail without special exclusions or rebates for their own brand vs everyone else.

Of course if Tesco can buy their own brand at a lower cost than I sell them my product, then sure, they are more than welcome to charge less at retail. But if the cost price was the same as what I was selling my product at, but the Tesco stores decided to not put their standard 10% markup on their own brand product but enforce a minimum 10% margin on all other products - that would also be very unfair.

Swap out Spotify for "TalkTalk" and for Apple as "BT". BT Openreach must provide equal and open access to their network, so that retail companies can resell it. If BT Openreach charged $$$$ for access to TalkTalk Retail, but charged BT Retail only $, then that also would be very unfair and illegal.

The fact that Apple allow some large companies that don't compete with their own apps a discounted rate for the store / free pass entirely stinks to high heaven. Stifles competition and increases costs for the consumer.

Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop

Was about to post the same thing re: throw it in the green bin anyway.

It simply isn't beyond the wit of man to be able to split out the plastic from the metal in a broken nerf gun.

I'm not a materials engineer, but as other have said there are various solutions. Top of my head: crush it and use magnets. The remaining plastic and possible non magnetic metal could be dumped into a water pod where the metal sinks, plastic will float.

Seriously, all the local authority / government need to do is actually fucking try. We, the individuals should do are bit, but the system needs to meet us half way.

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

El Reg recommends 2FA

Funny that, because when I just logged onto the El Reg comments...

Equinix is rolling in it.... money that is

In these large colo datacentres for cloud players, who looks after the hardware such as remote hands? Do MS, Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Google have one or two of their own chaps on standby for their respective suites, or do these suites literally never have anyone technical from said cloud owner ever see their kit?

Disco Dingo fever: Ubuntu 19.04 has an infrastructure bent, snappier GNOME and another stupid name

Silly names

That's my biggest bug bear with a lot of OSS - idiotic names.

Yes, if you care enough to learn why something that updates applications is called YUM or APT, then sure - it makes sense in a geeky way.

But most people couldn't give two shits about that, most people would be wondering simply why its not called "Update".

Windows has many, many faults - but it's very hard to argue that it's considerably more intuitive and logical to non-geeks than a lot of OSS (granted MS have gone slightly down the stupid naming path with recent releases).

A 30 something office worker could probably take a solid guess at what these all do and get most of them right: Windows Update, Control Panel / Settings, Windows Media Player, File Explorer, Internet Explorer.

A lot of OSS is considerably better than its closed source and commercial cousins, but the open source community needs to understand that your average man on the street doesn't want to have to think about this stuff, they want ease of use above all else. They certainly don't want to feel stupid for not knowing that APT is what's used for updates.

Addressing this would, in my very humble opinion, help a lot towards usability and therefore adoption.