Posts by thondwe

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Re: Snap Navigator

Yep - I use the MS PowerToys for SNAPing but the Windows 11 seems an improvement - dividing the arrangement "on the fly" rather than fixed via an editor.

SNAP Essential with a big (widescreen) monitors!

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Browser sessions don't work as you've described

Err not sure it's that bad - Edge (Chromium) has profiles - so I can easily have a work one and a personal one and these operate in separate Windows. Chrome seems to have similar?

My Windows is hooked up to both Work and Personal Accounts both with separate OneDrive Syncs - so that's workable. (Account - Add Workplace Account)

Even Teams has me logged in and switchable between orgs (NOT in a nice way with Multiple Windows though - come one MS!!) and my personal account (that is a separate Window).

I have Admin accounts (Azure etc) so they run in my Windows Sandbox or in private browser sessions...

Generally I use the multiple virtual desktop feature to keep these worlds organised...

So it is "doable" - this issue I have is that MS makes it hard to have a separate Admin account (e.g. in Azure) - which should associated with my normal account - so I can share a licence or it gets deleted when I leave and org or change roles...

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Blue Origin "Design"

And if only someone had tapped the Blue Origin Engineers on the shoulder - "You do know we're gonna get ribbed for the look of this thing?"

Sing a song of Office, a pocketful of why: ARM64 version running in a Pi

Or just tick the setting that puts it back to bottom left - muscle memory says that's where it should be...

Leaked print spooler exploit lets Windows users remotely execute code as system on your domain controller

It's not just DCs

CVE-2021-34527 affects all versions of windows - so "valuable" workstations are going to be a target too?

See what's on the slab: Apple reportedly mulls stretching the iPad Pro to 14 and 16 inches

VESA Adapter?

Wonder if they'll come with a VESA adapter (or an Apple Only Patented Equivalent?)

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

MS should ignore the CPU thing?

Really, If the PC's new enough to have TPM 2, it should be new enough to run W11 - the CPU is an irrelevance surely? Or is there some nasty in the land of Intel which means TPM 2.0 doesn't work probably with older CPUs (rarely tested in practice I suspect)

I'm frustrated, as my kids have HP X360 Pavillions from 2017 - TPM 2.0, hits the ram, disk etc parameters - so good - but Gen 7 CPUs. In the scheme of things W10 is fine for them, but I prefer to have the whole family on the same OS as support becomes a pain as MS (and Apple, etc) insist on moving stuff around in the UI and it's annoying!

Personally, I'm with those expecting MS to roll back a bit on the CPU!

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: TPM 2.0 spec is less than two years old

TPM 2 devices pre-date the official spec (Standards always take time) - My kids laptops have it and they hail from 2017 - Google trawl suggests 2014 for first devices?

BTW, Moaning about WIndows 11 Home needing an MS account - anyone got far with an iphone without an apple account or Chromebook/android without a Google account - the world is what it is...

Hubble Space Telescope may now depend on a computer that hasn't booted since 2009

Shuttle!

Shuttle being missed - any plans for an orbit only spacecraft so ISS astronauts can "fly" to Hubble etc to fix/upgrade them?

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Rural...

Putting in Overhead/3rd Rail electric is expensive and needs maintenance - for rural areas this isn't that economic or even practical - imagine Scottish Highland lines - trying to fix an overhead electric thing in winter - also unsightly?

BUT Hydrogen isn't a better solution than battery/rechargeable trains surely?

(I know - " Don't call me Surely!")

VMs were a fad fit for the Great Recession. Containers’ time has finally come

Anyone remember Mainframes?

Back in the day we have one big machine which successfully ran lots of programs for lots of people (safety and securely?). Then people wanted their own little computers.

VMs and Containers just try and re-image the mainframe world with lots of little computers tied together with string (Ethernet usually, unless it's for HPC)

Anyone want to start again with a clean sheet?

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Marketing and Licencing Depts

Tech Peeps -> Marketing Peeps -> You can have another number/name/rounded rectangular windows - no go away

Tech Peeps -> LIcencing Peeps -> You can have a switch to disable a feature based on licence key -> no go away...

Guess that's another benefit for Open Source - no Marketing Dept, and no Licencing Dept!

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: (Only) A Bit like Porsche

See I fed someone the chance to crack that..

(Only) A Bit like Porsche

Porsche 911 is what's sold, Underneath it's a 996/7 etc. Windows 10 is like that - 20H1, 21H1 etc. Just expect them to drop the "10" are brand as "Windows Desktop" or "Windows Ten" - or even Windows Millennial/Gen-Z/Alpha or worse..

With incoming iOS 15, update refuseniks will be given choice to stay where they are while still receiving security patches

iPhone 6s

IOS 15 will run on iPhone 6s! So that's a near 6 year old phone still being supported. Am guessing if this ability to run a previous OS with security updates becomes a "thing", then it'll be still supported into 2023? Knock Apple if you like, but that's decent support.

UK Special Forces soldiers' personal data was floating around WhatsApp in a leaked Army spreadsheet

MS provide the tools to secure files using Azure AD/365 accounts - but of course that's $$$$ and resources to manage... Also, there's the question of whether this is an official MOD WhatsApp business account - assuming such a thing exists and adds some level of control, a personal account using a work phone or worse still a personal phone...

CARELESS

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced surprisingly tough questioning from judge

Bank Apps

I did like the Judge picking up on Bank Apps being free - I can also pay for many other things with Apps - car parking, daughters school meal accounts... Only games with this restriction?

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Cart + Horse

Always wonder with these sorts of Psycho tests how the conclusions can be that firm - e.g. are all the activities fun - 2D less fun than 3D - so suppressing the maths talent rather than encouraging it - good teachers = interested and therefore good pupils is a pretty common claim...

I too fall into the bucket of good at maths/coding etc having lived Lego (with motors), Meccano (With Mammod Stationary Steam Engine "power"!), with a dalliance with Origami (Failed with Jackstone though)

Azure services fall over in Europe, Microsoft works on fix

Re: A 'transient issue'

Reminds me of the Monkey causing powercuts in Malawi by getting into a transformer building!

Audacity's new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage

Re: Telemetry

Telemetry has gotten a bad name - it has to to be all about Trust - then clearly making the data open and available for inspection to a user is a step in the right direction - but then of course it's likely to get labelled with that user's details! Anonymisation is hard

Clearly Telemetry data is a godsend to a developer - spotting bugs/issues, allowing focus on improving most used elements in package, dropping unused features etc. greatly augmenting users submitting bug reports/feature requests etc. Just needs to be done in an open and accountable way,..

WhatsApp: Share your data with Facebook, or we'll make our own app useless to you

HMG?

So Facebook has a better idea of who our P.M. /ex P.M.s communicates over WhatsApp with that we do?

Which? warns that more than 2 million Brits are on old and insecure routers – wagging a finger at Huawei-made kit

Re: Catch 22

I had it from my previous ISP - not one of the "big players" - am not saying you can't do it (I did but had to fake the MAC address!) - it's just they sulk if you ring up when the line has problems?

Anyone skilled enough to want to swap routers, is unlikely to bother ISP support's call centre (have you switched it off/on again)!

Catch 22

So the provider router sucks, but we won't support you if you switch router*!

*The better ISPs don't do this! Mine (Aquiss) doesn't even provide a router - so am happily left to my own devices (groan!)

Microsoft's Edge browser for Linux hits the Beta Channel ... if you're into that kind of thing

Re: Eh?

it's a corporate thing!

An MS based org can secure "Edge" via controls which allows a random Linux/Mac/IOS user to access the corporate systems from home or whatever and remain secure.

Likewise Academic/research settings - where Linux based researchers/students need secure access to corporate systems.

Niche. but still a need.

Microsoft loves Linux – as in, it loves Linux users running Linux desktop apps on Windows PCs

Re: If only it didn't lock me into Hyper-V

Personally I'm OK with Hyper-V - but the GUI still sucks, Windows Admin Center can be used, but that's even more basic for this job. But I think if you have time to explore/fight PowerShell, especially around the networking, it's as capable as 3rd party Virtualization Apps?

I'm impressed with WSL2 - see it being especially useful in the academic/teaching space

Microsoft realises constant meetings stress people out, adds Office 365 settings to cut them short or start them late

Infinite Rooms

One issue with Teams/Zoom meetings is they don't require a room while everyone is still working from home - result is even more meetings! In the old days meetings were a little constrained by having to get a room.

As we return, it seems every room is going to be enabled for Zoom/Teams so - the constraint issue re-appears - but will anyone notice - we'll all be Zooming from the desk - always wanted to work in a call centre...

India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

The big plus that IPV4 has for consumers and business is NAT - essentially you get easy isolation "out of the box" when you drop a pretty much any old router in and tick NAT. IPV6 comes "inside" that safe world - so ISPs need skills and tools to management in that space? If the ISP controls the router, then they stand a chance, if the consumer/business provides their own then trouble starts as many don't do IPV6 properly (looking at you Sophos XG!)

University of Hertfordshire pulls the plug on, well, everything after cyber attack

Bastions of Shadow I.T.

Uni's, especially the older ones (e.g. which weren't once F.E. colleges) are bastions of shadow I.T. - "Academic Freedom" accounts for a lot of D.I.Y. I.T. both on tin and on t'internet. Plus students on their own kit and staff working from home... Throw in some custom research I.T. and big research hardware (Electron Microscopes etc) probably still driven by Windows NT.

All of which makes security much harder than a huge Government who can deliver locked down standardized devices.

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

co[.].uk site leads somewhere

The co[.].uk site leads somewhere - but not the council - looks to be a Ltd company with a web site which seems somewhat incomplete if you follow the links?

Working from home is the future, yet VMware just extended vSphere 6.5 support for a year because remote upgrades are too hard

Imagine sites have either not invested in proper remotely accessible "Lights Out" kit (no excuse - I've got ILO running on my old HP server in the garage - i.e. not hard) or have secured the "out of band" network to the point of not having access remotely (reasonable security approach for an on premises centric view)

Either problem should have been fixed by now surely...

SQL now a dirty word for Oracle, at least in cloudy data warehouses

Re: Can you imagine...

Give someone a 3D printer and a CAD package and suddenly they are an F1 aero engineer...

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

Re: re: Tell me again why putting everything in the Cloud is such a brilliant idea.

And "The Cloud" has army's of on site 24x7 staff to fix it, access to the source code to find root cause and improve it. On site you're probably waiting for someone to drive in, find a problem, wait for a supplier patch...

Another Windows 10 patch that breaks printers ups ante to full-on Blue Screen of Death

Re: "in some apps"?

Youngsters eh - Think yourselves lucky - we ran a network (!) with a server with TWO EIGHT INCH floppy drives - (RM 380/480z for other ancients here) - of the day when two of us carried in the external hard drive unit 5MB total capacity!

SpaceX wants to slap Starlink internet terminals on planes, trucks, and boats – but Tesla owners need not apply

Re: Hopefully

It's all pretty random - our village {nearby city would call it rural - but Londoners would call in (not currently) commuter land} - got FTTC years back via a Welsh Gov scheme, and now has FTTP delivered by OpenReach. There are places in the bigger cities who still struggle due to distances from Exchange, random distribution of Virgin Cable)...

Microsoft promises end-to-end encrypted Teams calls for some, invites you to go passwordless with Azure AD

Bio metrics is local to device

So most people on here will use a password manager to remember long and complex passwords? So have one master password for the manager.

The FIDO tech essentially the same thing - something to unlock the local password database (happens to be held in a TPM chip on a PC/[phone/key), rather than an encrypted database) - this is either a PIN (so device stolen, PIN socially engineered - hacker in) or bio-metric (can be hacked, just a bit harder?).

Once the database is "open" the secure password is used - password-less just replaces pasting the password into a text box with a much better public/private key exchange.

The actual pain point is that only works for a limited number of systems - so you still need "real" passwords for "legacy" systems.

Doctor, I think I have an HDMI: Apple starts investigating M1 Mac Mini graphics issues

Do these Pink Squares have rounded corners?

Another reprieve for exhausted IT admins: Looks like there are no whizzbangers in Windows 10 21H1

In the "Beta" channel

Download on Insiders Beta channel this morning (UK) - along with usual collection of Surface Firmware bits - expect it'll have broken bluetooth/wifi/etc again!

No egrets: Ardent twitchers fined for breaking lockdown after bloke spots northern mockingbird in his garden

Re: Is the point of a personal interest that you persue[sic] it?

Making an assumption about twitchers - if there's a rare bird in the offing, then the will flock together - local sighing of some rare hawk, basically blocked the road and there wasn't a spare gap along the hedge. Plus they have their own specialist holiday groups!

Windows' cloudy future: That Chrome OS advantage is Google's to lose

Re: Contributing? Surely you jest ...

Infecting in the same way as Oracle, Amazon, Redhat, SUSE, Canonical...

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

So...

Does this sort of compare with Microsoft's Insider Program? - Fedora = Dev Channel, Stream = Beta or Release Preview Channels, Red Hat = Release.

Noting that MS requires you to own a copy of Windows to access the Dev options whereas Stream/Fedora are free. And yes the MS Beta Channel is usable as a daily driver.

If so it seems a muddled way of labeling it all? Any rather implies that Stream and Fedora are not production level OSes?

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Money making middle men

So these laptops are "Poverty Spec" Geo E1 - obtained via CompuCenter (Friend of the Torys) and some Chinese importing company in London (Tactus Ltd). So expect they are imaged in China. 4GB Celeron, with Windows on an 32GB eMMC (SD Card) - threads around about how slow they are and likely to die after a couple of Windows Updates due to disk space issues...

Wasting public money again?

Dell CTO shares his hottest trends for 2021: Four interesting technologies, one of which is still borderline sci-fi for now

Re: 5G is fine with the plebs

Capping exists for two reasons - one - financial - ability to charge for higher caps and practical - managing the amount of traffic on the back haul.

Apple reportedly planning to revive the MagSafe charging standard with the next lot of MacBook Pros

Err - Surface

MS Surface power/docking connectors are the same thing??

(And SD Card essential for Raspberry PI imaging!)

Ubiquiti iniquity: Wi-Fi box slinger warns hackers may have peeked at customers' personal information

Re: Alternatives

pfSense 2.5 is about to be released based on BSD 12.3 - which is why things are quiet I think - for an idea of activity check the pfsense redmine site.

Re: Alternatives

Just switched Firewall to PFSense on a "Nano PC" - was running "Sophos XG" home but switched due to lack of proper IPv6 support on the later. Both good Firewalls though. My Unifi Controller is a old PI model B running Debian. Switches are NetGear - cheap, but the GUI is so bad!

Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero

MS breaking Windows

So phases when MS had multiple docs as "Sub Windows" - Excel IIRC but others (Word) had them as real Windows. Then they invented OneNote and moved things and THEN Teams - lets give up on Multiple Windows/Tabs or anything else - the number of times I've hit back while in File View and jumped out of the files view...

Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

Re: How is that possible ?

Lego are so good at it - I've just finished the Lambo Sian (I love my wife!!) and there's no more than a couple of pegs left - and nothing missing - nearly 4k parts...!

Not just Microsoft: Auth turns out to be a point of failure for Google's cloud, too

DISK FULL

I read that failure as "Disk Full" (OK - so unable to allocate more space failed), but effect Google fails because "DISK FULL".

And just to wind up the "Local is Better than Cloud" brigade - how many orgs can afford dual everything + hot spares on tap? Most orgs can deal with a 45 min outage from a cloud provider - it's less well equipped to deal with a (very expensive) main router failure on a Monday morning with a "time to fix" of at least a day whilst a van brings a replacement from Germany and installs it...

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Fail-over/Fall-over

What's the betting that's another "transparent fail-over" fail in the ultra-clever routing domain then?

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

Re: This is a crime against the planet

And just upgraded my last HP ML110 G6 with some SSDs and now exploring the delights of Windows 2019 + Hyper-V