* Posts by dickiedyce

32 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

dickiedyce
Coat

"Razor blade of life..."

Where is the current mail server housed I wonder? Here perhaps: https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/william-gates-building ?

Incidentally, I still have my red bound-copy of the Phoenix manual. Ah, as Prof Lehrer would say, bright college days...

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

dickiedyce

My father worked briefly in the NatWest tower, when it was first opened. At roughly 10:30am every morning, on certain floors, all the PCs would crash/reboot.

The culprit: The kettles going on in the office kitchens.

Thie Fix: enforced, staggered tea-breaks

The Psion returns! Meet Gemini, the 21st century pocket computer

dickiedyce

Re: What a negative bunch of comments

Agreed.

So I ordered "the full English"... ;-)

...from Scotland.

dickiedyce
Thumb Up

I'm in...

... now just hope the delivery date doesn't do a "Sinclair Research", so I can get mine before I retire.

Star Trek film theory: 50 years, 13 films, odds good, evens bad? Horta puckey!

dickiedyce

Re: Evens good, odds bad only applies to the first six

Yes, although VI is helped by the fact that Bill Shakespeare wrote some of the one liners...

dickiedyce
Coat

Re: ? Caption error ?

;-) That was kind of my point. Oh well...

dickiedyce

? Caption error ?

I think Chewbacca has the mustache, not Spock. No, wait...

UK govt sneaks citizen database aka 'request filters' into proposed internet super-spy law

dickiedyce
FAIL

Wait a sec...

" The request filter will mean that when a police force makes such a request, they will only see the data they need to. Any irrelevant data will be deleted and not made available to the public authority."

Sounds like a table view to me... oh dear, I've just realised...

Filters!

It's not a database. It's an Excel Sheet.

Another day, another Firefox: Version 31 is upon us ALREADY

dickiedyce
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Mitchell Gant would approve....

... as ISTR that the FireFox was a MiG 31 in the film?

UK.gov back-office battle may see British Justice offshored

dickiedyce

Thanks for the new acronym....

... although I propose HAIDI - Head-Arse ID Issue.

Twitter: It's JUST LIKE Elder Scrolls (no it's not)

dickiedyce

Misty Eyed...

Dabbsy - went a bit misty eyed there at the end. Down in the labs, getting slaughtered by your good self, Banksie, Todge, and Herr Smith. Them were the days...

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

dickiedyce
Holmes

Huawei Prism

... is a very popular, cheap android phone I'm led to believe.

Google tool lets you share data from BEYOND the GRAVE

dickiedyce
Pirate

One for Mr Smiley...

Deadletter Box?

Ten pi-fect projects for your new Raspberry Pi

dickiedyce
Facepalm

Re: Thanks

Dave: Sorry! I'm not responsible for the photos, but if you post a link, I'll try and get it attached to the main article.

Up your wormhole: Star Trek Deep Space 9 turns 20

dickiedyce
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Lies.

"It's a fake!"

Heh heh.

Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges is a fine number two. But I'd put "Badda Bing, Badda Bang" joint third with "Our Man Bashir", both excellent homages/pastiches.

dickiedyce
Thumb Up

Best episode ever...

.. has to be "In The Pale Moonlight" - ( http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight_(episode) )

Garak + Bad Sisko, plus tight plotting and decent twists. Still go back to it every so often.

Nationwide to perform IT equivalent of 'replacing jet engine mid-flight'

dickiedyce
Mushroom

"Voyager"? Interesting choice of Project Name...

... perhaps because when it hits the fan they'll be 70,000 lightyears from home...

Titans of tech: Why I'll never trust 'em

dickiedyce
Stop

Re: Apple's Success

Err, actually Trevor I think *you* are missing one quite important point. Innovation is not simply about pure functionality, and Apple do bring something fairly special to the mix. Their fascist adherence to user interface design, and the philosophy that product design should produce an "it just works" mentality. I say fascist with all the connotations of "do as we say, not as we do" of course. Users don't read manuals anymore. Hell, developers barely produce them - no physical product to bulk out maybe - so stuff has to work intuitively. And by intuitively one means conforming to what's expected. Apple do get it wrong and break their own rules occasionally, but for the most part, they get it right in spades. Talking of innovation, ahem, was someone mentioning Windows 8?

dickiedyce
Coat

Reasons for obscurity

Actually, I wonder whether a small point re Roadmaps might be worth making? Roadmaps might be getting harder to come by, because well, certainly in the desktop space, we've been in the "here be dragons" sector of the map for some time. If as a vendor you're resorting to be-ribboned interfaces, and passing cloud-shaped bandwagons, then perhaps you've started to run out of viable reasons for Joe Public/ SMEs to upgrade... CS6, Office 20WTF, I'm looking at you. For vendors wanting to hit next Quarter's tagets, app lock-in tied to forced OS obsolecence may soon become the only tool in the toolbox...

(Why am I getting my coat? Coz I'd still be happy to pay for an upgrade where the bugs are all fixed, and the formats are all open... but, Shangri-La apparently not appearing on any roadmap soon... )

Office 365: This cloud isn't going to put any admins out of a job

dickiedyce
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Waste of Time

Actually, archiving anything at all... Powershell I guess?

Computer nostalgia is 10 PRINT 'BOLLOCKS'

dickiedyce
Trollface

iPad 3

Dabbsy - wouldn't dream of berating you for buying an iPad three, no, not at all. No, your gross misdemenour lies in buying anything before version 3, hardware or software. XPress 2.1.2 anyone ;-) ?

Basic instinct: how we used to code

dickiedyce
Devil

Re: Type-n-Run-Away shop programs

How about

10 randomize usr 1331

A spooky precursor to l33t i guess ;-)

dickiedyce
Thumb Up

Re: Ughh... Still shudder when I recall those days

Actually, the funny thing was, the short-comings of BASIC, meant it was more a of a stepping stone: like a lot of other people I know, got into into machine code in fairly within a couple of years. Rodney Zaks has a lot to answer for...

dickiedyce
Facepalm

Re: Hmm..

Yep, 1981 actually. No idea where that 1990 came from. Must fix that faulty flux capacitor...

Embattled Foxconn raises wage slaves' salaries

dickiedyce
Black Helicopters

dd@dyce.com

Re: Fair Labor Association - there was an interesting piece in Private Eye this week which seems to suggest that FLA are a poor choice in this case: FLA "has no experience of the electronics industry, with all but one of its reports over the last three years dealing with footwear and garment production". It goes on to mention that FLA was created and continues to be funded by the aforementioned footwear/garment industry, and has several black marks against it for failing to spot cases of 600,000 of unpaid overtime, companies firing employees for trying to forma union, etc.

iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye

dickiedyce
WTF?

Really?

Yeeeeees. Let me see. You're suggesting that I'll be choosing to use multiple apps on my iPhone-alike to get content that I would otherwise get through a single app? AOL anyone? Remember them? The content providers will certainly win, but not sure that users will wear it. I think we should wait and see how the Murdoch press experiment works out first...

Apple waves NFC veteran into Mobile Commerce role

dickiedyce

Acronyms

Just wondered when El Reg stopped spelling out the first occurrence of new or seldom seen acronyms? NFC = Near Field Communications I take it? Happily admitting my ignorance...

Googlegate: Mapping a scandal of global proportions

dickiedyce
Black Helicopters

Draytek fun

My lovely Draytek router has an 'overide default WAN MAC address option'. Another reason why it was worth the money...

Mac OS X cranked to 10.6.4

dickiedyce

SD Sandbox

Time for judicious use of a sandbox - SuperDuper does a great job of it, and 'uninstalling' a system is only a 3/4 of a cup of coffee job...

BCS turns down e-signature petition

dickiedyce
FAIL

BCS

I've been a BCS member for 4 years now. My membership expires in April, and I will not be renewing. Perhaps if it called itself something else, it would be less irritating. Perhaps I'm just too much of a pedant, but it seems a sad misuse of the name British Computer Society. It certainly doesn't speak for me, or other small IT businesses around the country.

There must be easier ways for the sorts of CIO lovies/wannabes that seem to be running it now to get on the Today programme...

dickiedyce
IT Angle

CITP? CITV more like...

I signed up for the CITP process, thinking that it would be interesting/useful to see where the holes in my IT knowledge were. Turns out step one is to pass a PearsonVUE multi-guess test on a syllabus plucked from the management end of their existing test portfolios. V. poor, and having looked more closely at the syllabus, containing very little in the way of IT. Management gibberish a-plenty, but only a very few IT-relevant questions - and then only of the "What does HTML stand for?" variety.

Google uncloaks Chrome OS hardware pals

dickiedyce
Coat

Language Lawyer Ahoy

If you're using 'cloaking' in the trekkie sense, I'm pretty sure the sub-title should read "Google de-cloaks Chrome OS hardware pals".

I'll get my cloak.