Posts by Anonymous Cowherder

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Another oldie

I didn't like this feature when I started using Linux, then it became an essential feature that I'd use multiple times a day, and like the author, I miss it badly in MacOS. Taking it out of Linux is a mistake, but symptomatic of much of modern computing where useful features get trashed that have big effects on people's workflows and ways of using Computers. I'm not against all progress, just those that make things just that bit worse for those of us who have long established habits. If you must take it out by default, fine, but please give us the option to re-enable in settings. Us middle-click pasters will die out fairly soon, and if this feature isn't enabled by default then others who came after us won't get that habit

Tiling terminal multiplexers for the console connoisseur

Been a while since I've used it but Terminator served me well for many years

Sadly I've moved from a direct hand-on tech role, for my sins. When I was in that role I had a lot of success with Terminator - https://gnome-terminator.org/ (It says gnome but worked on many distros that didn't use gnome). Lightweight, quick to grasp and easy to use. I had to work across multiple terminal sessions and it had the flexibility to meet most of my needs and gnerally got out of my way, unlike so much software these days!!! Obvs, your mileage may vary

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

I had loads of these green and purple adapters at work, the collection grew as more and more PCs came with enough USB ports to cope with two being needed for keyboards and mice permanently and the PS2 ports disappearing from motherboards. I still find the odd one of them at home and can instantly tell what it is and what it is for by colour and shape alone, we got some things right in this industry in those old days.

Kids today don't know they're born with their bluetooth this, M365 that... I had to get up early, wade through the SCSI mines, fend off zip drives and floppies just to get to a login screen

Google brings more Gemini AI features to Android, saves the best for Pixel 9

I need taking out the back of the barn

I'm old now, I actually need a new phone as my current one is dying and I have been waiting for this to come out as I felt like treating myself to a new shiny toy but meh. I don't want AI on the thing that lives in my pocket that I mostly use when i'm having a sit down in the smallest room. I don't have an interesting life, I take photos of things I need to remember or find funny, I certainly don't have to worry about pasting another middle aged man in to a group photo as I can't remember the last group photo I was in? Getting restaurants from a travel vlog? I've just been sick in my mouth and am not hungry anymore. I've tried loads of shopping list apps and services, none of them work as well as a pen and paper. I do use the google voice thing on my sonos devices to set timers or play music but most of the time it gets it wrong as it can't understand my northern english accent.

I'm very happy with things in this world not being for me that other people do enjoy and make use of, but as another poster has said, do they really expect is less than average Joes to pay a monthly fee to have AI in our pocket/cloud? This isn't progress, this is desperately triying to recoup the massive over investment in the fools gold of AI from the consumer market. There are some great use cases for AI in specific areas but they aren't 90+% of people's phones.

I just want a device that fits in my pocket, works pretty quickly, charges quickly and has an OS that doesn't get in my way. I do what I can to learn new skills but after nearly 30 years working in tech I'm done, I'm management now as my brain no longer picks new stuff up that well so I leave that to the younger ones and I deal with the politics. The sales figures for this are going to be so bad and I hope they take the right lesson from it, but they won't, the 10 will have moar AI. I actually need a new phone and was ready to splash £1k ish but I think I will go for the 8a and put the savings towards some ovaltine

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Re: Someone needs to check that

I've a mole on the inside, a brand new upstart organisation, Jufitsu are currently in the leading contenders

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Re: I don't need new features...

Came in to the comments to post this. I don't want new features either. I've been in IT for nearly 30 years, OSX, Windows, Linux have all been one step forward two steps back with each progressive update in many cases for my desktop usage. Sure there have been some good things at the enterprise management level but a lot of these have been counteracted by the amount of work we've had to do to get our end user devices functional and secure accessing apps our business needs. Just as we get to a good place some bell end with a daft beard of a product manager foists some nonsense at the OS level that means we're back to painting the Forth bridge again.

Yes it keeps me in a job but I'm tired, I'm sick and tired. Please Microsoft, design your OS to give us 5-10 years of stability, we've enough challenges with apps or coping with buyouts like VMware to have space to deal with nonsense features you think users want. And Apple, Jesus wept, the cats were fine, since the shift to location named OSes each update has got worse, things just look worse. Granted some security holes have been patched but ugh, slightly more rounded corners and that thing has moved there now has it, sigh.

I've probably got another 15-20 years of this ahead of me and the change fatigue is giving me the heebeejeebies because I know it is coming. Football Manager realised this and let's you play with the new features where you can specify the length of the toe nails on your defenders but also gives you a classic mode that does what many of us want.

Please can Skynet hurry up? Or the Matrix, just tell me where I can go to volunteer to be downtrodden by the robots or become a battery, either is preferrable to more "features" that are then dropped from the following release as they brought users no benefits and they can see the usage stats to back that up.

Unless Windows 21 or MacOS Dagenham makes the tea and gives me 6 solid hours of sleep a night I'm no longer interested

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Being done in job applications now too

I've recently had 150+ applications for a couple of roles. I started shortlisting and spotted some really good applications and was hopeful of recruiting people that seemed to really understand what I was looking for. Then I realised that approx. 30 applications were just rewrites of the job advert and the candidates job history didn't tally with the skillset.

I admire the chutzpah, and problem solving is part of the role but as a lowly IT manager it is hard enough to recruit the right people, AI is already making changes that we aren't prepared for. I've too many miles on the clock and have seen many changes to the landscape that haven't resulted in the armageddon scenarios predicted for them, but I am very concerned that the AI genie is already too far out of the bottle.

There are massive benefits to the technology but there are downsides too and we'd better start to get a good handle on managing these downsides soon.

As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix

We have been planning for our VMware renewal for a while, I casually mentioned to my fairly newish boss that in the short term it would be unwise to expect stability from VMware till Broadcom's plans played out a bit more and it would be better to try and string them along until at least one C level was forced to take the fall for the hastiness of any planned VMware restructure. A fairly bland and predicatable statement from anyone who has been through enough vendor acquisitions I thought. My boss now thinks I am Mystic Meg and we have started to show a bit of ankle to Nutanix

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

I think the late great Norm McDonald would've said "That there Elon Musk fellow, that guy seems a real jerk"

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Shame he didn't call it "Knowingly Not Only Bots", would've matched a bit more with the site's owner

Just because on-prem is cheaper doesn’t make the cloud a money pit

Almost as if this computing thing is quite complex

I remember being the PFY, full of hope and excitment at working in the dynamic world of IT. I bemoaned the grumpy and wrinkled older guys who moaned that they'd "seen it before", or told me about the cycles, outsource, bring back, centralise, devolve... I scoffed that they were letting their greybeards cloud their thinking and that virtualisation and then cloud were game changers. They pointed to the mainframes and other technologies gathering dust - but largely still running "legacy systems".

I've worked on programmes with a "cloud first" approach and ignored the squeals of fellow techies when they claimed that X wouldn't work in the cloud... and written them off as luddites, only to also see their smug faces as they were proved right, usually expensively right too.

I am now that wrinkled old guy who has lived through enough battles to know that there isn't a one size fits all approach as I am about to embark on a new programme following a change of director and change of direction. He's not siad the actual words "cloud first" but came very close, I think my pre-emptive wince stopped him in his tracks.

To paraphrase the patron saint of IT workers "Jesus Christ", Give unto the cloud what is the clouds, but keep the stuff better run on prem, on prem". Hopefully another deity can help us better identify which systems and services are which. In the meantime, if the thing has given 2 contractors nervous breakdowns since management decided to let Keith go as he could be easily replaced then it probably should stay in house

Plagiarism-sniffing Turnitin tries to find AI writing by students – with mixed grades

Looks like some AI help with the headline might've helped correct the typo? Missing I in Turnitin resulting in Turntin

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

`Same argument can be applied to any area where "choice" or "competition" is supposed to make things better for the consumer, it doesn't, it won't and it can't.

Apple's M2 MacBook Pros, Mac Mini boast more cores, higher clocks and bigger GPUs

Grr!!!!

My trusty 2017 Macbook Pro gave up the ghost about a month ago after years of service and I was able to finagle a replacement through work. A shiny new 2021 Macbook Pro with an M1 Pro chip, really nice device once I'd changed some settings back to my personal preference and I was straight back to work, until I needed to use some software that only runs on Windows, not a problem, just install VirtualBox and spin up a Win10 VM and I'd be back up to speed by the end of the afternoon... Having changed roles over the years I have to admit my fingers had come off the tech pulse a fair bit and so I'd missed that running MS based VMs on the new line of Macbooks wasn't possible like it used to be.

I remember the switch to Intel chips being seen as heresay by many several years ago, much to my amusement. Well this change of chips does feel like payback, or the sign that I have gone from being a young thing with new and exciting experiences ahead to being an old hand moaning at progress and change that means some things do their thing at slightly higher speeds, sometimes, when the planets align and under lab conditions. But mostly imperceptible to the average human. I remember Gnome 3's painful birth that led to my switch to Macs, 32 bit's demise, multiple USB standards requiring me to carry several cables just so I could charge or import from specific devices now gathering dust but got work done or gave happiness.

So this is a delayed grump about changes that happen to tech stuff that don't always benefit the consumer and user. And I'm not happy about it, no sir. I'd already noticed that I had edged well away from the bleeding edge and left the cutting edge behind too, I've not upgraded my phone for years, the Pixel 3a is still going strong, does exactly what I need it to and will only be consigned to the drawer when the battery holds even less of a charge than it does now. So by the end of this year when it will be replaced by another mid-range device, probably one that is being sold off cheap as it is last year's model.

I've managed a reasonably good living in the tech industry since the late 90s but it has finally happened, I've become one of them, multi times burned but not so shy about it anymore. All this progress coming along and breaking things that don't need breaking. No wonder that IT depts are only second to HR in people's lists of most useless depts at work. I'm too tired to have to learn new stuff to do simple and mundane things anymore. Desktop virtualisation was like wizardry, it enabled so much, effortlessly and now I've got to look into solutions that work for me with the least amount of fuss.

Or maybe I'm just ready to go willingly to landfill myself.

You're not fooling anyone on that vid-conference call: Walmart says shirt sales soaring, pants not pulled up

It's 2020, what you wear is irrelevant

As we've seen the parade of charlatans and spivs in suits impart falsehoods and make catastrophic strategy choices over what has felt like an aeon but only been a matter of weeks, a dangerous and useless nincompoop doesn't become competent by wearing the ridiculous accoutrements that comprise "business wear".

I know this pales in to insignificance against Covid 19 but I hope the sudden and rapid change to more working from home puts the final nail in the coffin of the suit and tie as essential clothing to go to work in. We're being forced to accept doctors wearing bin liners yet not one person would protest at being treated by a person dressed in such manner, the ability to perform their role and the merits of their skillset are far more relevant.

We've currently got a Chancellor who hasn't even started shaving yet, delivering a £300+ billion spending package wearing what looks like a suit his mum has bought for him (But probably cost more than my entire wardrobe) and she's made sure there's a couple of months growth in it. We've also seen him in a hoody at a desk pretending to use a computer and manage the economy.

Neither Covid19 or the economy will be resolved by a single or double breasted suit, ties have been found wanting and Oxfords or brogues in black or brown have so far had limited effect.

The people who have imparted the most wisdom and value have been those experts at home over Skype using their grey matter to provide information for us unwashed. I've become seriously concerned about the wellbeing of our academic community's bad choices for décor in their spare rooms but not given a second thought for what they were wearing.

A nice suit is a wonderful thing to wear on occasion and if you want to wear a suit and tie to work then please feel free to do so, or put a shirt on to use Teams but they don't give you special powers, you're just a person overdressed in a chair that's ruining your posture, you're a bad Vincent Adultman pastiche.

Clothing keeps you warm and stops others being put off by your interesting bits, when we build the new normal after Covid19's effects have waned let us kill off business casual, smart casual, formal business and what other nonsense we've let permeate our thinking. Never again should we mistake looking smart for actual smarts. The people who will develop the treatments and eventual vaccine won't be wearing smart clothes, the people who try to monetise the vaccine will definitely be wearing suits though.

As for Johnson, his habit of selecting suits that look like he is in the middle of putting it back on, quickly, doesn't make him our Churchill. It just reveals his lack of overall competence. Looking the part isn't anywhere near enough, being capable is what butters the parsnips

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

What a load of joyless c***s.

Boaty McBoatface is a perfectly cromulent name. The narks rolling back from letting the people name the bloody thing preferring a "Panel of experts" do it instead is a nonsense. How does one become a boatnaming expert? I've named dogs, cats, rabbits, teams at work, cars and other inanimate objects as well as fantasy football teams, servers, networks, AD domains and all manner of other things, does this make me an expert?

You've opened the poll, live by the winning entry, who cares what the bloody thing is actually called? Vote freedom, vote McBoatface!

HTC teases yet another make-or-break comeback flagship

Get the alternate HTC releases, just like Microsoft.

I've owned the HTC Desire, One X and M8. Each of these have been the leading Android (If not all) phone at the time.

I skipped the M7 which was a humdinger and am waiting for the M10 before upgrading my M8. The M9 wasn't a bad phone, it was just that the M8 was so good that the leap to the M9 wasn't that noticeable. We reached a point a while ago that the rate of improvement in phones has slowed as the current crop of devices are pretty magnificent and only differentiated by tiny differences.

BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide

Mine's fine

This is being posted via BT Infinity.

The Register's entirely serious New Year's resolutions for 2016

Thank you el reg

Without intending to win the sycophant of the year award this early in the year (if indeed at all), it is rather scary to think that I have been reading your content for most of the time you have been churning it out so thank you.

You must be doing somethings right for myself and many many others to do so. I've lost count of the times you have been the source of useful information at work, discussions and actions leading out of emails containing a single blue line - a link to a reg article...

Thank you for being you </barf> Keep it up, keep up the text content and leave videos to youtube and, er, other sites. I would like to see a little more in-depthness across stories that warrant it and when you are going to make changes please adhere to the change process and give us good notification!

UK research network Janet under ongoing and persistent DDoS attack

Not sure if serious?

I know of at least 5 people that have been doing that legitimately, trying to find information about the recurring outages!

Outsourcing to 'play a part' in reducing £1bn police IT bill

Is it too late for entries to Edinburgh's funniest joke?

Outsourcing, save money?

Ho ho ha ha ho ho ha ha ha hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Reduced cost of ownership, return on investment..... I wouldn't say my sourcing partner is fat...... I haven't spoken to my sourcing partner for months, I don't like to interrupt the bills, the additional charges, the hidden costs....

I'm here all week, try the chicken in a basket, it's lovely but the basket was out of scope so it will be served with your pudding and you'll be charged twice.

Government embarks on futile mission to censor teen music vid viewing

Won't somebody think of the parents???

We need a Helen Lovejoy icon!

This is Daily Heil writ into policy. If parents don't want their kids seeing the videos then manage their device usage properly. Don't expect technology companies to police what is and isn't acceptable this is a function of parenting and your responsibility.

Bill Hicks: 25 years on from the cult comedian's big break

Sorely missed.

I loved the stuff that Channel 4 showed and digested as much as I could. I had the privilege of seeing him live in 92/93 at it was phenomenal. I would love to know what he thought of today's society and politicians.

I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT

Re: Send this e-mail and keep a copy.

I'm now at PHB level, the fact that you have put "companies" rather than "company's" undermines your attention to detail and raises the issue of whether I can trust your judgement on this matter. On this occasion I note your concern however I do also need to cut the budget and I'm now more convinced of this than before I read your email.

Love 'n hugs

PHB

P.S. I'm also looking at your use of "days", confirming my initial fears which are then compounded by the odd break in that line.

Even Yo! was insecure!

An app with a single purpose of sending 3 characters across the intertubes was fundamentally flawed. Granted there were dependencies such as contact lists... but bringing the kid into our IT fold the fact that we can't even get 3 characters from one device to another securely and safely shows the flaws in our industry.

If we built houses, roads or made food we would be worse than the charlatans currently doing those functions who are using our products and services.

This was one of the most accurate articles I've read on a tech website, or any website for a long time, real hitting nail on the head stuff. It was hardly rocket science either, just the big secret we all know and pretend to forget for our 7+ hours a day.

Smart Meter biz case still there, insists tragically optimistic UK govt

I had a smart meter fitted last week

And I am pretty happy with it. It shows our energy usage in £s and has actually, even in a relatively short time got my wife thinking about the energy we are using and that it costs money! Horrifically sexist comment but true, instead of my channelling my inner father and telling her to put a jumper on she did it herself last night.

So thanks British Gas for fitting the smart meter! Great Success!

Cinnamon 2.6 – a Linux desktop for Windows XP refugees

Great success!

I started on Linux in 2007 in the good old days of GNOME2, coming from a windows background GNOME2 helped the migration on the desktop through things such as the panels that I had known and loved since Win95 brought them in.

The death of GNOME2 and transition to GNOME3 completely changed the way I worked and I jumped from Ubuntu and Fedora to Mint and haven't looked back since. Cinnamon was the reason I switched to Mint and the reason I have stayed, one of the nicest desktop environments I have used and to see the developments and level of stability it has achieved in such a short time warms my cockles.

I'm pleased that it is getting the love it deserves and the wider audience using it will hopefully continue its development and doing what it does best.

Thanks Clem, you've done a great job!

DRONE ALONE: US Navy secretary gives up on manned fighters

I for one welcome the birth of Skynet

Typical humans, always building their own obsolescence.

Mom and daughter SUE Comcast for 'smuggling' public Wi-Fi hotspot into their home

Re: I find BTWifi-with-FON annoying

I had this for a while till I changed the settings on my phone to forget the BT-FON network, now it only connects to my SSID.

BT Do this with my infinity router, I'm fine with it.

I've been doing this on my BT routers for years, not got a problem with it. I use the service when I'm out and about, it is usually easier to connect to similarly shared BT-Open or whatever it is called than to ask the person for their wifi password.

Ferchrisakes, if this is all the mom and daughter have to lose sleep about they are doing fine and dandy.

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Been using this free service years. This is the first outage

As per title, I use the free service, I had the offline notice this morning but didn't think too much of it as still had access to stuff.

I've never given lastpass one penny yet their product has worked fine for me (as far as I can tell, they may be sending my credentials to bad people who are able to see all of my boring life play out for them too.)

This is the first outage I have ever had with lastpass, that isn't a bad strike rate as far as I am concerned. Once in several years. Things I have paid for have had much worse failure rates.

Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report

It doesn't like my northern English

I have siri on an iPad which I occasionally use in the kitchen to display recipes and play music whilst cooking. I have tried to use siri here as I can press the home button with a knuckle whilst I have all manner of chicken innards or other kitchen things on my hands and ask it to set timers or reminders with varying degrees of success.

If I try to use it for anything more complex it really struggles with my Mancunian accent which gets very frustrating and ends up with my just insulting siri, repeatedly.

Google now on the other hand is more than able to cope and understands me most if not all of the time. I'd much rather have a desktop google now (I'm a neckbeard so the latest google updates don't really work on my linux desktops.) than a desktop siri on my machines.

Look behind you, 'declining' sub-$5bn iPod. The iWatch has come... to EAT YOU

You can have my ipod when you get it from my cold dead fingers

I have a 120GB iPod Classic that was only replaced when it became too small, I replaced it with a 160GB iPod Classic.

I manage it through iTunes which is a bit of a pain and can't use flac but it does mean I have a large part of my digital music collection with me on the move, it plugs into my car nicely and lets me change tracks, playlsts, podcasts via the car's touchscreen.

If I connect my android phone via bluetooth I don't get quite the same functionality. Plus, I'm not a fan of cloud stored music, I have a 5GB 4G data package which I could use for this but would rather use that for other purposes.

It is for us the consumers to decide how we access the content we wish to access, not for consumer device designers to dictate how we do this. Just give me a massive amount of disc space in a portable device and let me worry about backing it up and syncing. The cloud works best for me as a storage space but for day to day use I use local copies.

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself

So I'm not the only experiencing this?

I had a meeting with "the business" earlier this week. Several departments were there who had previously gone off and done their own thing but were now being hit by vendor lock-in, price rises, failure to stick to contracts... All the time we had been providing nuts and bolts IT services in house that kept chuggling along around 99% uptime.

The various business departments wanted to bring their IT needs back in house for IT to design, build and support. It was a very enjoyable meeting, means I'm going to be doing a lot more work soon but in this climate I was fist pumping all the way back to my desk.

RIIIGHT. Sysadmins: Have you ever even MET an overly suave IT guy?

Yay for the trading cards

I'm a level 4 which ever "hat" I'm wearing!

Baldness fix from foreskin follicles

I don't want hair back.

I've been balding for the last 20 years, I've been shaving my head for the last 25 and I am happy with the situation. I wouldn't know what to do with hair if I had any.

Rejoice! Sysadmin day is... TODAY. Now get in here and win free stuff

Cookies!

I've been given cookies!

Ones that you can actually eat, not ones that store preferences either!

The IT crowd: Fiercely loyal geeks or 'inflexible, budget-padding' creeps?

As I see it

In the 90/00s we in IT were seen as a cost, an unnecessary budget burden and in many ways we were. We had poor products that didn't scale across very large organisations. Through as series of acquisitions and mergers many IT systems were brought under one roof and we had the whole "Legacy systems" issue and systems not talking to each other. One by one, bright sparks decided to "buy a new IT system" and various IT companies made a lot of money without delivering a system that the people who create revenue for the companies could actually use.

We were then seen as an even more expensive department that was delivering even less products. Along came the raft of outsourcing and the opportunity to listen to the salesmen and slash budgets, the link between business and IT was further broken.

Next we hit the massive growth in consumer IT, suddenly people not only expected corporate IT to work as well as their mini network at home did but also give them the same flexibility as their home network, despite home and corporate being two different beasts.

IT still have poor products to work with and on reduced budgets. Roll out 8000s machines, with different application portfolios, different access rights, hot desking, legacy systems, security, lack of management buy-in, dumb decisions, crazy policies.....

We are still delivering poor products as our goalposts change with each management whim, we want flexibility, security, availability, redundancy and we want it cheap. Now we're into cloud, BYOD and I want my iPad to print to that printer and use it as a full on workstation.

As IT we need to align with our users to deliver services that they need. When we are seen as delivering value we will stop being seen as a cost and barriers to change.

Websites to 'close' for China's 'Internet maintenance day'

I'd like to be able to do this

I recently had a morning without water at home as the water company had to perform maintenance, they put a note through the door a week beforehand and as I was due to be at work on the day in question all was fine. At work however we regularly need to do work that would be done so much quicker if we were able to say "We need to turn everything off network wise for about 30 mins" - If we were able to do this without the panic setting in that a few hundred emails wouldn't be unreplied to for those 30 minutes we would be able to provide a better IT service in the longer term.

We've become a little too accustomed to 99.9999% uptime that when any unplanned outage occurs, even when they are on free services it becomes a catastrophe. When we try to schedule a planned outage it is like we are asking for something totally preposterous.

HTC woes prompts 'leave now' tweet from former staffer

2 year contracts syndrome?

I've had a Desire and currently have the One X, both exceptional phones, my wife has had the same and between us we've had a sum total of zero problems in the last 3 years, (6 years if you count us twice).

For me the issue HTC had was the "too many models", the Desire was the top phone when we got ours but it was followed shortly by the Desire HD,Z and god knows what else, then came the Sensation... All the time our 2 year contracts on the Desire were chugging along and the phones were still working but missing out on some of the later android version goodness the newer phones had. As our contracts ran out the One X appeared, so I waited to renew the contracts until we could get the One X. By this time there was also the One S, followed shortly by the One XL and now just the One. In the meantime Jelly Bean appeared and it too a while to get to our "flagship" phones.

I'm still happy with my One X but it does grate that the world and its wife is fawning over the One and the One X appears to have been relegated to Wildfire status in terms of support. I'm a pretty big HTC fan but I will probably move us both to Samsung once these contracts are up which is a shame as I like Sense and am not too keen on Touchwiz.

HTC may have been better off tying their product release cycle to contract cycles, 24 months have been standard for contract phones for some time. Granted not everyone is on a contract but large numbers of people are, if HTC stuck a balance between contract cycles and android versions they could be sitting pretty. Plus as has already been mentioned blown a bit on marketing they may not be facing some of the issues they now have. They have splurged on Champions league advertising for the One but it would appear too little too late.

Queen's Speech: 'Problem of matching IP addresses' to be probed

Re: No MACS to be seen here. Was: The police are as bad

The mac address is persistent on a device, the multiple IP addresses it or the router it attaches to are assigned are not persistent which is the point I was making to the police. Two xboxes may have at one time connected to the internet via the same IP address, both could later have been nicked, if the police wanted to use the IP address to identify them then it wouldn't work. If they could cross reference this against MAC addresses they might have a chance of identifying it.

There isn't an easy way of identifying a stolen device if the owner hadn't already taken down its serial number, imei number or scrawled "pRoperTy of Doug" in tippex on it. I was asked who they could identify them via IP, I tried to steer them in a way that may help.

Re: The police are as bad

I did mention this, along with NATing, private/public IP addresses.... which is why I was stressing to them that the MAC addresses, wireless & wired were better to use as an identifier than an IP address. An IP address on its own is meaningless.

The police are as bad

I was contacted by our local police force to assist with the identification of stolen equipment. One of their senior bods had heard that you could trace machines via IP address and wanted me to let them know how they could match up devices (PS3s, Xboxs and phones) with IPs so they could return them to the owner.

I told them that they each device would have a MAC address that was unique (I didn't go into spoofing) but that the IP would change depending upon which network it was connected to. They could cross reference the MAC address against information ISPs help about which MAC address had been assigned which IP address. The police were adamant that this wasn't the case and that the IP was the only piece of information they needed to identify the device.

I tried to explain that the laptop I was emailing them on was picking up xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx at work but it picked up yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy when I was at home and zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz when I was connected to a different network. I gave them a brief overview of DHCP and DNS and they were still fixated on IPs and IPs alone as the single identifying factor.

I advised them to contact their IT department to corroborate what I had told them and to get back to me if they wanted further clarification. They never got back to me.

Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!

Install cinnamon and upgrade

I've been running ubuntu on my main PCs for years, well since fedora jumped fully in with gnome3. When ubuntu made the leap away from gnome2 I struggled for a bit, dallied with XFCE and mint but as soon as cinnamon was available on 12.04 I've been back. (Had a strange dns issue on mint that I didn't have time to sort out).

Since then I've just needed to sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and away I've gone. There's been issues with networked printing and something else that escapes me now but I've not seen unity for years, haven't needed to.

I do wish they'd stop dicking about with useless stuff, get the platform unbelievably stable, get it to work with most mainstream hardware vendors, make sound and video work seamlessly, decent fast file system and a good portfolio of tools then work on hardening it so that it is the most secure OS.

Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow

Re: "Comfortable with the terminal"

I've got a windows background but run linux on my main work PC and have had a macbook for about a year. I use the command line on all operating systems, not because I need to but because I can. How do you find the IP address in windows? Run, cmd, ipconfig/all, on a mac I'd use the gui in preferences but could also do it on the cli.

Pointing and clicking is good, the command line is good too, there are times when one is better than the other and I like to think that I use the best tool for a task, much like I try to use the best OS for specific tasks.

Computing is there to help us, not hinder us.

WORLD temporarily FREED from BURDEN of TWITTER!

Football's transfer deadline day

The power of football to kill websites dead.

Public sector 2 YEARS behind biz on cloud adoption - suppliers

Good!

Another success for the public sector.

If everyone else jumped of the cliff it doesn't mean you should. There are some advantages to "the cloud" or "the effing cloud" but there are also some pretty large downsides. There are some massive downsides to keeping everything in house too but in some areas of the public sector the only way to keep the show on the road is to keep everything in house. For example some of the data and services provided need to be 100% confidential and records kept for x number of years, I'm sure there are private organisations with similar regulations too who have also hit this issue and possibly resolved it in the cloud and good luck to them, I've got an issue with this as well as maintaining the current flexibility of some of our systems.

As someone who works in public sector IT (in case you hadn't guessed) one of my problems is running a public sector environment on a public sector budget but delivering an enterprise environment with the flexibility of "the old days" without any buy in from upstairs or the users. An environment that has grown organically over 30 years into a bespoke living organism with interdependencies that will not die does not lend itself to compartmentalisation and hiving off to a 3rd party who can offer the same level of service as we currently do, cheaper than us and still make a profit.

I'm sure in time distributed computing will begin to make my life easier but at the moment the costs outweigh the benefits, until this changes I'd maintain my Grandpa Simpson stance:

http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg

BOFH: Can't you just ... NO, I JUST CAN'T

Have you got a sec?

Or

"While you're here"

"This has been happening for a week" - Bit I need it fixing now as the deadline is almost up, I could have told you 4 days ago when you had time to fix it but it really is urgent now. I know you are dealing with someone else's "just" request but can you "just" do this one as well?"

I can't possibly remember 2 passwords

I know we are there to support our users, we provide a service, without you our jobs do not exist but part of the time we have to do things that may seem unreasonable to you but there is usually a good reason.

Fossil reveals spider in mid-strike

Re: A scale would be useful . .

I'd say it was about yay big.

Hunt vows: 'UK will have fastest broadband in Europe by 2015'

Re: Fibre has always been weird ...

Are you talking about somewhere north of Manchester?

That is spookily reminiscent of something that has happened to, er, my friend, yes, my friend.....