Posts by nematoad

Microsoft's Windows Terminal preview gets jiggy with Azure – but emphasis on 'preview'

?

"It's more consistent with how browsers such as Chrome or Chromium Edge work so feels a good deal more natural."

More familiar would probably be a better way of putting it. If that is you use Chrome or one of its ilk. If something is natural it has probably got to do with the way we are set up to work. So something like a tin opener would feel "natural" to a right handed person but not to someone left handed. They would get familiar with how to use it but it would still not be "natural" to them as it's the wrong way round

Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

Here we go again.

"...so that it can stick to its announced schedule"

Aye, that's right, lets not have any trivial things like reliability or safety get in the way. The top brass is losing out on their bonuses so we must stick to the schedule come hell or high water.

Speaking personally I know where they can stick their flying coffin.

Official: Microsoft will take an axe to Skype for Business Online. Teams is your new normal

Re: "Fall Creators Update"

Having suffered with the way Microsoft has operated over the years I'd go with the arrogance option.

Re: Skype for Business

"Was a headache to use, not fit for purpose and could be described as at best, a slow and buggy mess to be avoided."

Bloody hell, you could be describing Lotus Notes!

Thank you MS for making our life so miserable, and in gainful employment.

There fixed that for you.

UK parliament sends snippy letter to Zuck and his poodle Clegg as it seems Facebook has been lying again

Re: You'll be amazed

I agree with you entirely but the sad thing is most of its users do not give a damn about all the lies. Facebook has become a de facto utility, a lot of people depend on it to keep in touch with family and "friends" and as all the shenanigans are hidden away a lot of them are blissfully unaware of all the nastiness.

Many of people do not like their water, electricity or ISP providers but in a lot of cases they are stuck with what they have and is there a viable alternative to Facebook for these poor souls?

New British Army psyops unit fires rebrandogun, smoke clears to reveal... I'm sorry, Dave...

It's the right badge.

I just checked and they are just using the traditional 6 Div, badge.

These date from 1916 when the decision was taken to try and conceal the order of battle by doing away with the plain designations and substituting these badges. Many have not changed, though some have. 1 Div.'s being an example.

As for calling an ad-hoc collection of psy-ops, propaganda and other odds and sods a division is not going to fool anyone. Instead of pissing around like this how about actually recruiting a few more infantry and other teeth arms then the threat that we will come and sort you out might have a bit more clout behind it

Facebook, Microsoft, Google among tender, caring tech giants on UK internet safety board

Argh!

Wolves! not wolfs.

Maybe not.

I'll tell you one thing.

Margot James may well not be on the board having just resigned as a minister in protest against Trump mini-me Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Sigh!

"...that were exported couldn't allow anything more than (initially) 40-bit encryption."

Yes, that's something that has always puzzled me.

Now I know about "American" exceptionalism but did they not realise that there are a lot of very clever mathematicians living outside the United States?

You don't have to live on an island to be insular.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Re: What they really want..

"per say"

Spelling!

It should be "per se" from the Latin meaning "By itself".

UK cops blasted over 'disproportionate' slurp of years of data from crime victims' phones

Not an option I'm afraid.

I don't have a mobile phone so does that mean that I can never report a crime committed against me?

If I had a phone and some police snoop demanded access to it I might have to think about granting access, but as I don't then basing any investigation on producing something I do not have makes a mockery of any rights I might have in obtaining an outcome on my complaint.

That's just plain wrong and looks like a fishing expedition is of more interest to the police and CPS then actually going out and trying to solve the case.

UK government buys off Serco lawsuit with £10m bung. Whew. Now Capita can start running fire and rescue

Commercial confidentiality.

"...a protracted legal battle over the tender, the details of which are not public."

There's an old saying. "He who pays the piper calls the tune."

Not in this case it would seem. Instead we have the sight of two bunches of incompetents, Serco and the MOD huddling in a corner and stitching up a deal with our money and then saying that it is none of our business. This lot make the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation look like geniuses. It's a pity they won't be suffering the same fate

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

All piss and wind.

He went on to compare the UK's full-fibre penetration of 7 per cent with Spain's 85 per cent.

Ah that's because of the nasty EU interfering with British sovereignty and not allowing us to do this sort of thing.

What's that you say, Spain is in the EU as well?

Idiot.

In the US? Using Medicaid? There's a good chance DXC is about to boot your data into the AWS cloud

" And yes, it really has a DC called Mid-Atlantic."

Then they are all at sea.

But we knew that anyway

Who's been copying AMD's homework? Intel lifts the lid on its hip chip packaging to break up chips into chiplets

Re: "Back when I was young..."

"...the CD driver also needed drivers, meaning you needed to use a floppy to get the CD working..."

Ah yes, good old Win 95.

Irritating but when you only have one to do but not too bad. On the other hand when you were doing it on a daily basis as well as all the other break/fix on a huge site then it was a real pain in the arse. In the end the people on my team just used Ghost and dumped the whole image in one go. Not strictly by the book but a lot easier than faffing around setting IRQs, sorting out config.sys and so on.

Re: Chiplets?

Ah, I see where youare coming from here.

The US calls them chips and we call them crisps.

Therefore if they want to call them chiplets then perhaps we should call the crisplets.

Prenda Law boss John Steele to miss 2020 Olympics... unless they show it in prison

Re: Good, but

Paul Duffy.

Chinese government has got it 'spot on' when it comes to face-recog tech says, er, London's Met cops' top rep

Re: Decisions, Decisions...

"...just that you can't blame states for wanting to defend their borders. "

Which begs the question: Who is the state for?

It might be that to those of an authoritarian mindset like Ken Marsh the state's only interest is the state itself and anything done by the state to its citizens is acceptable.

To others, including me, the role of the state is to help protect the rights and privileges of the people who make it up. The state is an artificial structure, it has no purpose other than to serve the citizen.

Of course Marsh finds the actions of the Chinese government correct, the people running China have the same attitude as he obviously does.

UK privacy watchdog threatens British Airways with 747-sized fine for massive personal data blurt

Re: What goes around comes around....

"...good IT skills and abilities seem to be the opposite of skills required to reach senior management..."

I don't know about that. Try working on a site that has the ability to blow the nearby town into the next county, with process operators more interested in keeping the place safe than why the computer won't do what it needs to do and is thus pretty upset with IT and the IT department in general and is in no mood to wait or be fobbed off.

I did that as a desktop support person and believe me a having a 17 stone Scot raging at you as to why you can't fix the computer NOW needs a lot of people skills. If you had said skills most of the guys were fine once you explained what needed to be done and what you proposed to do about it. Same with senior management. The trouble was with the middle layers. Noisy, demanding and cursed with a minuscule amount of "computer literacy" those were the ones to avoid if at all possible. Dealing with them meant you really got a "people skills" workout as well as developing techniques for controlling blood pressure, temper etc.

So yes, you don't get to develop arse-licking and back-covering but that again this is top brass we are talking about and I reckon those skills would only qualify you for a middle level job.

Wait and see.

"...had found no evidence that the stolen cards were used"

Yet.

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Strange

It does seem as if Youtube has got itself in a bit of a muddle as far as banning channels. Now of course they have the right to choose who is shown on their site but the ban-hammer seems to be a bit arbitrary

A fine example is the trouble one of the channels I follow got into. I went to the channel to look at the latest post. Instead I got a banner saying that the channel had been terminated for breaking the terms of service.

And what was this naughty channel I hear you ask.

It's one by a antique furniture restorer. Not the sort of thing that I think that anyone would find objectionable. Fortunately the channel was re-instated but it must have worried the person running the channel as he would have lost over five years of posts.

Serious Fraud Office fines Serco £22.9m over electronic tagging scandal

It's that word again.

I followed some of the links in the article and I came across this one:

Here.

One phrase that caught my eye was this:

"James Rutherford of Serco said: "The equipment we use for Electronic Monitoring is proven to be robust and reliable."

It seems as if the Post Office got the memo as it is exactly the same phrase they use to describe their Horizon system.

In Serco's case it does not seem to have been very "robust" and looking at the trial of the Post Office's system just ended neither does Horizon.

Oh, one final thought. The Post Office refers to itself as "Post Office" and that really irritates me. Have they never heard of the definite article?

NASA smacks an Orion into the water with a successful Ascent Abort-2 Test

Re: Stumpy...

"It just does not look *right*."

Maybe, but worked though.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

Oh!

"Boeing agrees with the FAA's decision and request..."

How nice of them.

As if they had any choice, this time.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Re: Passing the buck back to Europe...

"Anyway, this is Fujitsu we're talking about ..."

Indeed, the same company that's in charge of the Post Office's Horizon system and look where that has got to. Imprisonment, suicides and a lot of mental health problems, not to mention the series of trials currently going through the courts and running up legal bills in the millions of pounds. And yet they say that Horizon is "robust" and does not make errors.

As the old saying goes "I wouldn't trust them to run a whelk stall".

P.S. Are whelk stalls difficult to manage?

The latest FCC plan to boost US broadband? Prevent competition in apartment blocks

Re: Had this for years already

"...and destroy the internet in the process."

I think that will find that the internet is a bit more robust that you imagine. It was after all developed from a system designed to survive a nuclear war. (Arpanet)

In any case I think that your UScentic view is misplaced. There is a lot more to the internet than the FCC and the US.

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

"RC Aircraft flyers will also be encouraged to pay their tax... sorry, registration for this?"

Yes it looks like the RC folks might well be caught up in this little earner.

See here.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

Re: What could possibly go wrong

"Such as "Brexit means Brexit"?

Yes. This makes the quote "People experiencing psychosis find it difficult to tell what’s real or not... and are led to believe delusional thoughts." a pretty good summation of the current Tory party. The dangerous thing is one of these numptys is going to be the next PM.

Run away!

Dev darling Docker embraces Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Cut out the middle-man.

Why talk to the monkey (Windows) when you should be talking to the organ-grinder (Linux)?

This does seem to be a lot of faffing around must to keep MS in the loop.

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

Using a virtual aircraft to test the structure is fine, if, all you are going to use said aircraft for is virtual flying. Otherwise it would not be a good idea to trust that the simulation is capable of accurately modelling what happens in the physical world.

After all the simulation is only as good as the data it is given.

So thanks, but no thanks. I for one have no wish to be "collateral damage" in Boeing's quest for a fuller bottom line.

ALIS through the looking glass: F-35 fighter jet's slurpware nearly made buyers pull out – report

Further reading.

As an insight on how these projects are pushed through I recommend "The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James G Burton.

It's a good read and shows the manoeuvring, game playing and down-right fraud involved. HildyJ is right. This whole thing is just a fine example of "pork barrel" behaviour involving the air forces, politicians and the defence industry lining their own and their friends pockets.

This ALIS business is just the icing on the cake.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

"yum install ipa-server"

I'll have a pint of that!

Rock, hard place etc.

"A few bean counters can't cope with Linux 'cos they might accidentally see a command line so they need Windows."

Yes, and won't that put said bean counters in a bind?

On the one hand they have been used to the Windows "experience" and had to pay a smallish amount for the privilege. Now however MS has decided "No more mister nice guy" and upped the rates. So where are they going to turn?

Moving to another OS is often a somewhat jarring experience but with the skills of the organisation surely it is not beyond their abilities to smooth the path for those affected.

Remember this is not a SME we are talking about, this is CERN and they have some extremely smart people working there.

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

"But what happens when the thing you have to do is "EVERYTHING"?

You become systemd.

Powers of stash and rebase fall into the hands of noobs with GitHub Desktop 2.0

Ignorance is not bliss.

"...so that millions more can participate in software development, research, design, and more,"

Obviously not. I mean there aren't many devs working on Linux now are there?

Slippery slope, thin end of the wedge, embrace, extend, extinguish. You know the score.

"Our team has a strong background in Windows and macOS development..."

In case you have forgotten Git was developed by Linus Torvalds who if I recall correctly also had something to do with developing Linux.

Take the bloody blinkers off and try and see that the whole world does not revolve around Windows any more, if it ever did.

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

Re: Money, money, money.

Yes, what is it about the people that these kinds of organisation attract? You have the likes of ICANN making things up to suit themselves and enriching the employees of supposedly "non-profit" companies. Non-profit for who I wonder.

It seems as if NOMINET has been watching ICANN drive a coach and horses through the regulations and thought "Hang on a minute, I'll have some of that!"

Greedy, manipulative bastards who could not even spell integrity if their lives depended upon it.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Re: @nematoad ... Also...

"Can you say Flying Tigers?"

Yes I can. I can also say that the Flying Tigers were mercenaries in the employ of the Nationalist Chinese government.

Look, there were some US citizens actively engaged before 1941. The 3 RAF Eagle squadrons come to mind, but my point was that the US has always talked and acted as if nothing really happened until after Pearl Harbor. Quite apart from the fact that as other here have said the Soviet Union played a huge part in bleeding the Third Reich to death.

Re: Also...

"“Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent,”

Yes wasn't it nice of the US to let the likes of the UK and Commonwealth, the Soviet Union and China in on the war.

They didn't win it all by themselves. A lot of Allied troops and civilians died trying to do that before December 1941.

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

Re: the desktop project codenamed Polaris

"...may I suggest that "Fat Boy"

The two nuclear devices were named "Little Boy" used at Hiroshima and "Fat Man" used at Nagasaki.

Re: to mould Linux into what Microsoft wants.

"I for one will never touch an MS Linux."

Nor me.

Oh, by the way, how's "Oracle Linux" doing these days?

Re: That's what Plinston said

"On macOS (maybe even Linux), mandatory reboots do happen, but they are quite, quite, infrequent."

As far as I know with Linux reboots only seem to be mandatory when either the kernel is affected or if Lennart Poettering has his fingers in the pie.

See also Pulseaudio.

We ain't afraid of no 'ghost user': Infosec world tells GCHQ to GTFO over privacy-busting proposals

Re: Here we go again...

"...for example to stop terrorists."

Yes, for a given value of "terrorist".

nichomach is right. What's to stop any jobsworth sticking their nose in? Give them the tools and they will do the job, whether it's ethically right, proportionate or even legal.

DXC Technology seeks volunteers to take redundancy. No grads, apprentices, and 'quota carrying' sales folk

Re: What this really means

"It is clear that we cannot rely solely on training our staff with new skills..."

Or in other words:

"Peanuts are cheap, therefore we are going to employ monkeys."

You get out of a company what you are prepared to put in. Judging from this all the top brass are looking for is a way to squeeze the most out of the company before driving it into the ground.

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

Re: WTF?

"Cue Yaxley Robinson..."

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson.

Legal bombs fall on TurboTax maker Intuit for 'hiding' free service from search engines

Re: Not being an American

"...used an emacs org mode table to compute the taxes, and filled them out using image magick to overprint the values onto the forms."

Of course! Why doesn't everyone do that?

Or are you just showing off?

UK Home Office: If we want Ofcom to break the law, that should be perfectly legal

I am the law!

" Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "

Nope,

More like "L'etat c'est moi."

This is not a case of who watches and supervises Whitehall, this is the government deciding that yes, it really is above the law. I thought that we had done away with the divine right of kings nonsense when we topped Charles l.

Maybe not.

Portal to 'HELL' cracks open in street – oh sorry, it's just another pothole

Re: Warning - tory bashing.

"...it was Labour that built up the large dept that made the cutbacks necessary."

Oh, which one would that be? The Home Office, the MOD or currently anything run by Chris Grayling? They are all good at wasting out money.

I reckon the word you are looking for is debt.

Not any more.

"Isn't maintaining the road the supposedly reason we have to pay for your car tax?

Nope.

That was done away with many, many years ago. (1937 according to Wikipedia). Instead the "Vehicle Excise Duty" aka "Road Tax" goes to the Exchequer and is included in general taxation.

Oh, if you are going to have a whip-round to pay my VED for me, thanks very much.