Posts by Jason 24

Er, Ofcom, please tell us more about Murdoch's £11.7bn Sky bid

Re: Not an alterntive

It's an alternative source of news. You can listen to BBC radio and read the news site without a license.

This discussion is not about what pay, it's about ensuring the news can pretend to be independent.

Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain...

Re: End of an era

You bastard. No work is being done today!

Re: Why wait?

I run many Watchguards, never noticed them needing flash. But then I rarely use the web interface, WSM is much better, prep all your changes in one go and upload.

Now if only Fortigate could come up with a half decent client, with some decent debugging tools as well please.

Microsoft hits new low: Threatens to axe classic Paint from Windows 10

Re: The end

Sometimes adding a little red circle of arrow to highlight a point helps. And if you have 3 screens you should ALWAYS crop what you are sending, don't want customers to see what you have in your browser tabs...., especially on those "home working" days....

Photobucket says photo-f**k-it, starts off-site image shakedown

Re: Or do what they did

Something we did fairly regularly when I worked at a hosting provider, you find someone has hot linked to an image off one of your servers and suddenly bandwidth goes up dramatically to a particular site.

Unfortunately that was a professional setting on family friendly web shops so no chance of putting anything rude up, just a new image with the words "image thief" on them usually.

As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off

I have found that letting it hit the fan once in a while can be an excellent tool to finally getting the nod to get something else done.

But then I've never worked at anywhere this high level, maybe that doesn't extrapolate up.

Broadband providers almost double prices after deals end

Normally I'd agree that Broadband advertising is a shambles and a load of bollocks (upto..Xmbps???)

But in this case customer signed up for a introductory rate with clearly stated costs after the rate runs out and they act like it's all a surprise?

It's an introductory rate, of course it will go up.

Smacks of idiots who are incapable of taking some personal responsibility.

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority… OK, maybe second-highest… or third...

Re: Public wifi?

"And paying in cash is just as bad in this day and age."

Certain "goods" aren't payable via card, and I'd ideally like to keep a little bit of mystery between my bank and me, I'll keep my cash thanks.

UK to block Kodi pirates in real-time: Saturday kick-off

Re: VPN?

You really can't just "go to the game" particularly for the bigger clubs they are very strict about who can get in. Want see Liverpool vs Man Utd? Then you had better have been to 5/10/15/20+ other games the previous season to even get a look in at the tickets for that.

I think most peoples biggest bug bear is having to pay both BT and sport full whack for half of your teams games.

How about you both air all games and compete based on punditry/coverage. I know I don't want to hear Michael Owen so would count BT out.

Thousands of NHS staff details nicked amid IT contractor server hack

Re: @AC: Welcome...

"They still insist that all PCs in the trust are kept on 24/7 as there could be a an update that needs dropping on them urgently,"

That's run slightly contrary to their change control management which takes weeks to approve even a simple change.

There's a very good chance the left and right hand aren't aware of each others existence of course.

Oh UK. You won't switch mobile providers. And now look at you! £5.8bn you've lost

Re: Does it take into account

I also doubt it takes into account those of us who can be bothered to do the retentions dance, I've never had a problem calling EE, telling them about a deal through Carphone warehouse on their, or even another, network and them matching it via a line rental discount, takes 20 minutes maximum if you're polite about it.

They're usually happy to carry over a previous discount as well, meaning my line rental actually ends up cheaper than the offer I'm giving them as an example.

Did EU ruling invalidate the UK's bonkers Snoopers' Charter?

Re: Still debating the same points, again

Because the bad guys are absolutely going to wait for a judge to say that they can access the data.

It's not about having the correct procedures for law abiding citizens to adhere to, it's about collecting vast quantities of personal information with no reason to beyond "it could help".

If this amount of data is accessible to anyone, then it is potentially accessible to the bad guys as well.

On the other hand if the plod are only collecting data relevant to people who are under suspicion then the less huge vault of data becomes much less attractive.

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

Re: Yup...

I seem to recall that most of our glorious leaders were all for staying in the EU...? Not sure what you mean by that comment.

Blue sky basic income thinking is b****cks

Re: Mixed feelings

I'm not sure the bottles of water analogy works, to simple.

We've one bunch of people screaming that they took our jobs.

And then another screaming that if EU labour dries up there won't be enough workers.

Always puzzled me as those 2 statements cannot both be correct at the same time.

Not sure I can make the water bottle analogy work.

BOFH: The Hypochondriac Boss and the non-random sample

Re: Brilliant

Beat me to to it ---> see icon, what's the PO address for a new one again?

Apple drops dongle prices to make USB-C upgrade affordable

Re: How generous

"For the record, if I'm spending US$2K-3K for a laptop I'd expect a few dongles"

If I'm spending that much I'd expect the damn connectors to be built onto the hardware, not needing a flimsy dongle that will inevitably be trodden on and need replacing umpteen times.

Hey, you know what Samsung is also burning after the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco? $2.3bn

Re: Maybe

If it's to much hassle to remove the battery now, then odds on that it's to much hassle in the future too, meaning the phones life is only as long as the battery, so they can't be re-used at all. 2.5 million phones is a lot of landfill.

Police raid India call centre, detain 500 in fraud probe

500 seats...

Is not a small operation, I'm wondering if these people knew full well they were making fraudulent phone calls, or if the bosses have hoodwinked them all into believing they have been contracted by the IRS to make these calls?

Also, how scared are US citizens of the tax man to pay up like this?

Oops: Carphone burps up new Google phone details

Re: Wonderful news @Khaptain

Doesn't make it less of a good idea to not let a complete stranger be alone with your card.

Blighty's telly, radio watchdog Ofcom does a swear

Re: The watershed [..] still has wide support among those surveyed

There was a good confession on Simon Mayo earlier this week where a lady took her 13 old kid to a comedy show with Sara Pascoe. The lady had told herself that she lets her kids stay up until after 9 anyway to watch TV, so what harm could a comedy show have?

I think she ended up with quite a shock when she realised just how much the TV is filtered, even after 9pm.

Brit loan firm gets comeuppance for 7.7 million spam texts

Re: Sad Aside

Complaining about a text is easy, forward it to 7726 (SPAM).

You'll get a text back asking for the sender number if it wasn't forwarded on.

Used to do this quite a lot, not had to in at least 6 months though, wonder if that's because my number made it to the "don't send it here, he'll bother to forward it on as a complaint" list.

Samsung: And for my next trick – exploding WASHING MACHINES

Re: "Exploding"?

"I recall that one washing machine I owned did exactly that: it would stop the spinning, rotate back and forth a few times, then try anew."

My current samsung (front loader!) eco bubble does that if it finds the load is unbalanced, swishes round a couple of times to try and level it before going hammer and tongs on the spin cycle. A couple of times with a big heavy sheet it's refused to spin.

Re: Eeek!

My grandma still runs a top loading washing machine, so I've always assumed these were the old way, and front loaders are newer and better. I can always remember having a front loader since being a kid.

A quick Google shows that front loaders will clean better, spin faster, use less water, and use less energy. but cost a few quid more.

A case of the US lagging behind?

VW Dieselgate engineer sings like a canary: Entire design team was in on it – not just a few bad apples, allegedly

Re: Colour me surprised

I've an Alfa 159 2.4 Turbo Diesel engine, with a DPF and EGR. It's 200BHP and returns around 38MPG up and down the A65 every day, so I think your Auris is probably on point, the golfs are clearly doing something they shouldn't to get those results.

Again similar reports on the forums that removing the EGR and DPF can give you much more power and MPG, presumably at the cost of more NOX emissions.

I think the DPF removal is more to do with back pressure, it's basically a huge blockage that has to be overcome to get the exhaust fumes out the back. A lot of people have everything removed, I bought mine second hand with both DPF and EGR removed, but had them both put back on by the garage as DPF is now an MOT requirement and they are cracking down on it.

Pains us to run an Apple article without the words 'fined', 'guilty' or 'on fire' in it, but here we are

If you notice the other article they have running where it appears that Apple will only allow people to their press events who get a major hard on for anything fruity based then I'd have to say it's all the more important that El Reg continues their coverage, so we get some alternate views on the propaganda.

Hopefully a fanboi or two may stumble upon the articles and find themselves enlightened.

Tim Cook: EU lied about Apple taxes. Watch out Ireland, this is a coup!

Re: Can someone just fill in the blanks for me?

Apple pays naff all tax on the profits because it's taxable income is not the typical "sales - costs" calculation.

It's based on a percentage of their operating cost.

Weird, huh?

Ireland taxman: Apple got NO favours from us, at all, at all

@AC, thanks for themiddleclasseconomist link, that pretty much hits the nail on the head;

"In 1991, a basis for determining Apple Computer Ltd.’s (subsequently AOE’s)

Irish branch net profit was proposed by Apple and agreed by Irish Revenue.

According to that ruling, the net profit attributable to the AOE branch would be

calculated as 65% of operating expenses up to an annual amount of USD [60-

70] million and 20% of operating expenses in excess of USD [60-70] million. "

From page 9

So if you're a fictitious headquarters with minimal overheads then everything becomes profit, and your profit as calculated by the government is in no way related to your sales.

AdBlock Plus blocked in China: 159m forbidden from stripping adverts

Re: At least they can't block a hosts file

Cheers, not seen that before, just updated mine now

What Brexit means for you as a motorist

Re: Passport, driving licence validity

Our old friend Mr Worstall has already covered the French and the language issue. Not likely to happen, how do Germans and Spaniards currently converse at the EU? Not in French....

Lester Haines: RIP

RIP old chap

Raising a beer >

Your articles will be sorely missed.

Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job

Re: There's a skills shortage

"If you want to get ahead in DevOps, realise that you'll do the same thing, people paid more than you ...."

How do I upvote this more? You've just described my last role perfectly.

BT hauled into Old Bailey after engineer's 7-metre fall broke both his ankles

Re: The three-week trial

Each BT engineer seems to follow their own rules. For example I've recently had 2 PSTN lines installed at an office.

The first bloke (in his 40s?) was more than happy to run the cable up from the demarc on the ground floor, up to the 3rd, then across the ceiling tiles on the 3rd to the comms cabinet and fitted the NTE there.

The 2nd bloke (in his 20s) point blank refused to go above head height under any circumstances, he was willing to attach a long cable to the demarc on the ground floor and leave it up to us to run it up the 2nd floor.

Not sure if that's a generational thing?

Iain Duncan Smith's Universal Credit: A timeline

Anecdotal I know...

But there's not a cat in hells chance that giving the housing benefit payments to the other halfs brother would be a good idea, he really could not be trusted to actually give it to the landlord, it would be frittered away on full price dominoes take aways for the family or any other tat he fancied.

Bleeping Computer sued by Enigma Software over moderator's forum post

Re: I was beginning to wonder if this whole article is just an advert for Bleeping Computer?

I can't say I've heard either of them to be honest, good to know though.

It has however been a long time since I had to clean malware of a desktop, I think last time I did that Spybot and Adaware were top of the bill for removing malware.

But then I work infrastructure, so very little need to see a desktop bar my own. No need to be arrogant about it like no-one in particular however.

Bacs corporate website still runs obsolete crypto

Re: It's not just them making it bad

Different experience to me, though we have Barclays, Bottom Line have been pursuing us relentlessly to upgrade ePay to the newest version. As far as I can it's exactly the same software with the old cipher suites removed and new ones added, yet they want £2k+ to do the upgrade.

Patch ASAP: Tons of Linux apps can be hijacked by evil DNS servers, man-in-the-middle miscreants

Reverse lookups?

Windows boy here, but my email proxy is a red hat based system which does an awful lot of reverse look ups, is this something to be concerned about?

Dell PowerEdge R730: Reg rack monkeys crack smiles over kindness of engineers

"Eh, I'd think if you're swapping the drives often enough for caddy wear-out to be an issue, then maybe you should have bought better drives to start with?"

My last place bought a bunch of really cheap dell servers, and went so cheap as to not to get hotswap drives and no cable arrms. Within a week we realised we had a whole batch of dodgy disks. That wasn't much fun.

As for the article, " the other drive caddies were placeholder dummy caddies."

As it is for all Dell servers, so you have to buy their drives. Until you've enough dead servers to cannibalise the caddys from.

PDF redaction is hard, NSW Medical Council finds out - the hard way

Re: Sending Spreadsheets to customers...

Yup, they do, I have a filter on the email gateway to stop any excel sheets going out that don't have [ultimate] in the file name.

Telecity shuffles off London stockmarket

Re: some UK customers

We moved out of IFL after the take over due to them upping the price by 50% for no additional benefits.

I think some other people did too as there's several bits of kits in Teledata still sporting IFL stickers.

Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking

Whilst FDs online system is nowhere near as complete as HSBCs, it does let you get the basics done. Never understood why they can't just take HSBCs code base and reskin it, but then I guess this little incident may give us a clue why!

Their phone support is 2nd to none however, and you can usually get all the answers you need off the first person you speak to.

After Death Star II blew: Dissecting the tech of Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

I can't help but get the feeling...

Somewhere an ex Navy officer/El Reg author is banging his head against a desk at this article.

It's not often that every single comment disagrees with the author!

Adobe: We locked our customers in the cloud and out poured money

More than likely, I've had entire departments of web developers at companies making very good money using pirated Adobe throughout.

I priced up the legit stuff and got laughed out of the owners office.

Yet when someone asked for an installable local copy of the software they created they refused on the grounds it might be pirated.

Data breach at biz that manages Cisco, F5 certs plus many others

Re: Congrats on your Certification! A grand waste of time and money

"more interested in your $2500US "

To be honest I think that £/$2500 is pretty much on the spot between "too much for any muppet to learn the answers and pass" and "What I'm spending won't be offset by increased salary".

Unlike MS where you can just brain dump from exam collection and pay £99 to become an "expert".

"It's like the assholes I meet in tech who run to google search every single solution they need, rather than craft it themselves using only man pages, the first party docs, and the software/hardware itself."

Have you tried the user manuals on most software released as a service? You'll get a perfect guide, screenshot by screenshot, of how to do something, but no context as to why you would need to do it, or how it will affect other areas of the product. The proxy I run at work is a perfect exactly, "here's how to set up a facebook policy, click this click that, click finish". Ok, but what does that mean exactly? What effect will that have on the traffic?

And as much as I'd love to be given the time to try every setting and see how it responds it's not very often I have that much time, usually it needs implementing yesterday. So a decent book (such as the "mastering" series) is an absolute god send, those peoples jobs is to sit there and play with all those lovely settings I can only dream about.

On the other hand a home lab alone simply isn't enough. There's no way I can dream up some of the random shit management decide they need (which they never actually do), so planning out actual projects with business requirements is impossible.

Irish electricity company threatens to cut off graveyard

Re: Not only in Ireland

"Typical NPower, took 4months to get a refund on an overpaid direct debit"

Take it up with your bank, not npower, if the amount is incorrect then they'll refund the money immediately and then you can take it up with npower. I've done this on numerous occasions.

From the guarantee;

If an error is made in the payment of your Direct Debit, by the organisation or your bank or building society, you are entitled to a full and immediate refund of the amount paid from your bank or building society

If you receive a refund you are not entitled to, you must pay it back when the organisation asks you to

One-armed bandit steals four hours of engineer's busy day

Re: Fruit Machines

"Turn in your nerd card."

I think he nailed it with the last sentence tbh...

Bacon as deadly as cigarettes and asbestos

Re: Wouldn't be worth it...

"Nobody told you to stop smoking. They suggested it. You're an adult and you make your own decisions."

Except for THC (incidentally good for fighting cancer), they sure told us we can't smoke that.

Bastards.

Oh dear, Microsoft: UK.gov signs deal with LibreOffice

Re: VBA - calm down dear

You can not run Visio 2003 anymore on modern Windows for example.

I have it here on Windows 8.1?

Terror, terror everywhere: Call the filter police, there's a madman (or two) in town

Re: Filtering and removing

3 - Laugh at them.

Always applauded Adam Hills and The Last Leg for their "Jihadi Spot" for exactly that reason, they are on the money there.

VMware sees BILLION-DOLLAR upside in Dell buy

I seem to recall Dell offered some sort of cloud service not to long back either, they were peddling it to our management team when they fell for bought one of the Dell preconfigured vStart racks and Dells cloud was supposed to be available for us to burst into when we needed.

6 month later we got an email saying the cloudy goodness was no more.

Testing CarPlay with Apple’s most expensive ever accessory

Re: Head unit obsolesence.

"Being a Fiat, the Ferrari would probably give you the dreaded/annoying flashing odometer CANBus error and you'd have to get a "proxy alignment"."

Had this on my Alfa 159, £30 for MultiECUScan + £15 for a cable, all sorted and the damned odometer stopped flashing at me.

Not sure how far you'll get with something newer though.