Posts by David 132

Surface Hub: A Howard Hughes folly, or a cunning Post It Note killer?

Re: It's better than you might think.

...replying to my own post, with an afterthought...

I've seen the Spruce Goose several times; it's currently on display in the Evergreen Air & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. Go see it ASAP if you get the chance; the parent company of the museum has had some financial difficulties, and for a while the future of the museum hung in the balance.

The Spruce Goose is BIG. Makes an 84" Surface Hub look like a postage stamp!

As many people here know (but I'll mention it anyway), the name is a misnomer; there's actually no spruce used in its construction, and you can blame the press reports of the day for coming up with the Spruce Goose moniker.

The whole thing is a masterpiece of epic engineering; the engines alone are so complex that a minibrain such as I could not hope to fully understand them. I did, however, understand the flotation devices used in the aircraft's giant pontoons - each pontoon is packed with brightly-coloured inflatable rubber beach balls, that being (I guess) the quickest and easiest way to provide the necessary bouyancy!

It's better than you might think.

I was at a Microsoft event in Redmond last week and they were showing the 84" Surface Hub. Despite the detractors, it's actually a very impressive product, and the Windows 10 UI makes a little more sense on such a large, touch-only device. MS were running Lync/Skype calls to it from various other devices, and showing off its digital whiteboarding/collaboration features - manipulating a 3D CAD rendering of a radial aero engine, for example.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a fan of Windows 10 in general (see my posts passim) but credit where it's due, the Surface Hub is a great piece of kit. Would I pay $21K of my own money for it? No, but I think there'll be plenty of corporate customers who see it as a good investment. And honestly, if MS only sell a few thousand of them, it'll serve as a halo product for everything else they do.

Microsoft did Nazi that coming: Teen girl chatbot turns into Hitler-loving sex troll in hours

Re: Cortana

"would you like me to help you find some Nazi goat porn?"

Goat porn is just kidding around.

Microsoft introduces yet another Skype for Windows 10

UI

It also features what Stafford called a "streamlined user experience", removing clutter like rarely-used status updates

I'm sure they'll still find room in the UI for adverts and sell-up nags exhorting users to buy more credit.

Oh, sugar! Sysadmin accidently deletes production database while fixing a fault

Re: An ex colleague of mine...

A friend of mine was responsible (circa 2003) for building drivers for a well-known brand of network card.

He wrote a cron job to compile the latest build overnight, then e-mail him the result log.

He made some elementary mistakes, and what actually happened was:

1) build process failed, repeatedly re-trying and re-failing,

2) his C: drive filled up with an ever-growing log file,

3) eventually, when the disk was full, his script progressed to the next stage: trying to email the log to him.

He came into work the next morning to find a very angry IT dept; he'd crashed the company's Exchange servers by trying to send a 2.1GB attachment.

Re: In a similar vein

I once Ghosted a blank drive over a client's hard drive instead of the other way around - oops

I did the same, about 10 years ago. I had a gold master HDD full of product demos that I'd spent days carefully assembling, and I had to Ghost it to a blank HDD.

I made exactly the same mistake as you, with two additional enhancements all of my own:

1) My boss was sitting next to me in the lab, watching his "star engineer" at work,

2) I had just said something like, "Now to copy this disk and we can both go home. Wouldn't it be funny if I got the source and destination disks mixed up! Ha, ha, ha!!"

As I recall, Boss just shook his head sadly and left me to it; he knew from experience that I am not a nice person to be around when under stress.

Astronaut trio blast off to space station with ... er, rearview mirror toy?

Essential part of every launch

"Houston, we are owl systems go".

Flying Scotsman attacked by drone

Re: Think of the cost implications

the windscreens will have been tested with the chicken gun.

Which, of course, brings to mind the old tale about British Rail testing the chicken gun with disastrous results; the punchline to the story is "You're supposed to defrost the chicken first."

I'm sure it's an urban myth, but it's still funny.

Watch six tiny robo-ants weighing 100g in total pull a 1,769-kg family car

Re: Obvious thought.

"Elephants are rubbish at pushing and pulling, when measured by a ratio. Ants blow them out of the water."

Elephants are also rubbish at scuttling across the ceiling. Stupid elephants.

Re: I, for one,

Upvote here for the Waif-o-Matic(TM), too.

Quick mental exercise, at the risk of taking this thread off-topic - what's the least appropriate song you can think of for the Waif-o-Matic treatment? In other words, what song, if sung in that breathless soya-vegan-latte-coffee-shop wanna-be-folkie style, would most make you doubt the existence of a fair universe?

My vote goes for Ace of Spades, as performed by Lemmy (RIP).

Microsoft Surface Book: Shiny slab with a Rottweiler grip on itself

Re: The real question of course

is the hardware compatible with Mint?

I can confirm, from personal experience, that you can disable Secure Boot in the Surface Book's UEFI firmware. If you do so, however, you get a great big red padlock banner at the top of the screen every time you boot - as if to warn "OH MY GOD SECURE BOOT IS DISABLED YOU ARE SO RECKLESS". Haven't tried installing an alternative OS yet but I imagine one might have problems with some of the SB's hardware.

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

Re: TROPPUS TI

Scunthorpe!

Belgium!

German lodges todger in 13 steel rings

Re: Pedant Alert

Only on El Reg would commenters, on a story about a chap getting his todger trapped in metal rings, obsess about the grammar of the article.

You say I mustn’t write down my password? Let me make a note of that

Re: Clear Desk

The example I use is the Buncefield oil depot fire at Hemel back in 2005

True story - an old friend of mine worked for 3Com in their building on that campus, and had been made redundant mere days (IIRC) before the fire. The building he worked in was significantly trashed by the explosion.

Afterwards, we gave him no end of ribbing along the lines of "sheesh, most people would have taken their redundancy pay, chalked it up to experience, and moved on with their lives. You had to take it more personally, huh?"

Monster motor breathes fire in Mississippi

Re: That's enough to drain an average family-sized swimming pool

Obligatory relevant XKCD:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/144/

As ever, the alt-text picture captions are the funniest part.

Sums are hard

I find it amusing that (at time of posting this) the first three responses to this article each give completely different answers to the "how many swimming pools' worth of propellant" question.

Come on, people. it's not rocket science.

Oh.

Samsung PC, laptop owner? Better update the update tool

Re: ..not to mention their out of date certs

I am not convinced they take security very seriouly at all.

I don't think any of the mass-market vendors, outside of the security industry itself, take security seriously. Security isn't sexy. Security isn't shiny. People will buy a product that's "50% faster than last generation!" but let's face it, "50% more secure than last generation!" isn't going to pull in the crowds.

The IT industry is at the same stage that the automobile industry was in the 50s and 60s, regarding safety. Despite a few weirdos (step forward Volvo, Bricklin among others) pushing safety as a feature, the other manufacturers preferred to make their engines bigger, and their chrome shinier, instead.

What changed matters in the car world was a combination of growing public awareness, plus regulatory intervention and a few high-profile and grisly accidents.

See the parallels with IT?

Normally I'd be the last person to argue for more government intervention, but I think it's the only way we'll get acceptable standards of designed-in security - for everything from smart thermostats to datacenter clusters.

Re: I had a Samsung laptop once...

So I bought another one.

That caught fire.

So I bought another one.

That caught fire, sank into the ground, and exploded.

So I bought another one.

That one's stil working.

I proved them all wrong.

(with apologies to Holy Grail)

UN rapporteur: 'Bad example' UK should bin the Snoopers' Charter

Re: Hmmm....

Upvoted solely for the reference to Ealing Studios.

For my mind, Kind Hearts and Coronets - or the Lavender Hill Mob - are better than Passport to Pimlico, but each to their own.

"I shot an arrow in the air... she fell to earth in Berkeley Square."

Google-backed British startup ‘stole our code’, says US marketing firm

Re: "behavioural marketing automation software"

"behavioural marketing automation software"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh !!

Indeed. It's like watching a scorpion and a wasp fighting - I don't much care which one wins, and rather hope that both lose.

'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'

Re: I can imagine a coworker coming for someone's kneecaps

No idea WTF this fixes the crashing as it is effectively a null function, but it does. Feel free to spend a week hunting the root cause if you have the time.

Reminds me of the "magic switch" anecdote - if you're not familiar with it, it's a good read, like so much of the old computer lore!

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Yelp-for-people app Peeple is back – so we rated Julia, its cofounder

At least they're restricting it to residents of Canada

A nation famed for being far too nice and unable to be mean about people, eh?

Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail

Re: battery charge times

The other 10% can stay with the combustion engine.

You know, I keep hearing this, but to my mind it's overlooking a very important point.

Why would the infrastructure for ICE vehicles be maintained if the customer base is 10% of what it is now?

Can you really imagine having petrol stations everywhere they are today, if so few holdouts/"eccentrics" still need them?

Sorry, but having such a small customer base would drastically change the economics of the whole thing, which only works as it does because of economies of scale.

Dealerships.

Filling stations.

Mechanics (with appropriate skills - all the others will only know how to fix EVs).

I can imagine that owning, fuelling and maintaining an ICE vehicle would become far more awkward - for example, having to travel 100 miles+ to find the last remaining stockist of gasoline in the county. Oh, and because there's so little demand for it, it's 50x the price it is today in real terms.

Not to mention the regulatory pressure and fiscal "nudging" that our ever-loving governments would bring to bear. You know, because they're always so keen on people maintaining habits/hobbies that can be demonstrated to be "harmful" (think smokers, or drug-users) - "You want to use a fume-belching car with no autonomous control, when there are safe, clean googlecars available at very reasonable cost that cannot travel in excess of the speed limit and are totally green? You monster!"

I don't think we can blithely assume that running an ICE vehicle will always be an option.

Re: @uncle sjohie (and others)

The car is a personal transportation device. The idea of which, is that you can use it whenever you want. Going backwards, and being restricted by charging times and places, and you are now removing that freedom.

But isn't that exactly what's going to happen? In the brave new world that's coming, as existing technological trends align, the masses won't have "personal transportation devices" - so wasteful, so consumerist. The future combines existing ride-sharing services with Google-style autonomous cars. If you need to go somewhere, you'll whistle up an automated travel pod from a public fleet. No worries about maintaining the car or finding somewhere to park it.

Also, no individuality, no chance to leave your personal possessions in the car, and someone else will have ultimate control over when, where and whether you can go anywhere.

Won't that be fun?

Only the rich and eccentrics will have personal cars; the insurance costs alone will, I'm sure, be exhorbitant ("you, a fleshy fallible meatbag, want to try driving on the road alongside the perfect, all-knowing Google AI? Ha!").

Bah.

ICO fined cold-call firm £350k – so directors put it into liquidation

pierce the corporate vale(sp?)

'SP?' indeed. In this context, it's "veil".

Spelling error...must...resist...urge...to be pedantic...

Personally, I'd pierce more than the veils of these cold-calling tosspots. Torsos, limbs, skulls. For a first offence.

Who hit you, HP Inc? 'Windows 10! It's all Windows 10's fault'

Re: Argh!

I'm still devastated about the Safe deposit box Robbery in London last year, I've no chance of getting that photo grey cartridge back

Don't worry, most of them are now ink-arcerated, serving multiple sentences in parallel cos they're serial offenders. Doing A4 year stretch, at least... reams of evidence.

Surprise! British phone wins Best Product at Mobile World Congress

Re: With built in thermal imaging camera

I sense a new category of porn has been created.

For those who get turned on by video of amorphous red/yellow/white blobs?

So HOT.

Um...

Is it just me, or is there a conflict between the sentences

"We keep hearing British manufacturing is a thing of the past"

and

"With its phones it’s been able to tap into the Shenzhen economic miracle, with rapid advances in engineering and manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta, home to Huawei and Foxconn..."

Sounds more like British design to me, with outsourced-to-China manufacturing. I'm sure most of the added value is in Britain, but it's stretching things a bit to call this "British manufacturing" if the actual phones are stamped out for pennies in Shenzhen.

Reminder: How to get a grip on your files, data that Windows 10 phones home to Microsoft

Re: But my friends, it is much worse --

*sigh* Not this canard again.

On all recent Intel PC systems, the ME is responsible for:

- monitoring fan speeds / voltages / temperatures

- running the secure enclave for SGX secure guard extensions

On vPro-branded systems ONLY, the ME runs a more complex firmware that includes a network stack.

Consumer, non-vPro PCs don't have a large enough SPI flash chip to run this firmware - that's one small reason why vPro systems are more expensive, the extra $0.02 or whatever for the larger flash chip, multiplied by the system vendor's usual mark-up. The network stack also relies on the presence of a specific Intel ethernet controller and/or a specific Intel Centrino WiFi card - again, most consumer systems don't use Intel networking parts, and certainly wouldn't use the more-expensive vPro ones for no benefit.

So unless your system says "vPro" on it, nothing below applies:

Out of the box, the network stack ("Active Management Technology" or AMT) on the ME is disabled. Shut off. Inaccessible.

None of it can be used until the owner of the PC (either you, or in a corporate environment, your IT dept) has taken the action to "provision" the AMT capability and switch it on.

That involves: setting access credentials, configuring the IP address etc, and choosing the level of user notification.

Provisioning can only be done from the local PC via the BIOS, or across the LAN (not WAN) with appropriate certificate-based provisos (e.g, if the machine sending the provisioning info is on the kontoso.com domain, your machine must be too, and must have a cert from a recognized provider, valid for the *.kontoso.com domain, embedded in its BIOS at time of deployment).

TL;DR: Hackers from China or Fort Meade aren't going to remotely enable AMT without your knowledge.

Once the provisioning's done, then AMT gives you remote power-on/power-off capabilities, and a built in KVM redirection server (based on the VNC protocol with secure extensions).

If a KVM session is initiated, a great big flashing icon appears in the top-right corner of the screen the whole time, and the screen border changes to a yellow/red stripe pattern. You WILL be aware that the PC is being controlled.

There is so much security built into AMT that it's a PITA to provision and use it. I honestly sometimes wish that the security wasn't so robust - it'd make it a darn sight easier to deploy this stuff. AMT is very cool.

Short version: does your PC say "vPro" on it? Then yes, it has "robust [...] remote control capabilities". For the PC's owner, by their choice.

If not, it doesn't. It physically can't.

NASA's Orion: 100,000 parts riding 8 million pounds of thrust

Re: There's only one MOUSE

I assume you mean this one?

The Mouse On The Moon

Icon shows a bottle of Grand Fenwick wine -->

Linux Mint hacked: Malware-infected ISOs linked from official site

Re: The feel when the discussion reminds one of the Amiga vs. Atari ST days of retardation

You mis-spelled Emacs.

Touché (have an upvote).

I heard that Emacs now includes Systemd...

...or is it the other way round?

Re: What am I going to do now?

Same here. I had a spare NUC kicking around the house, and put Mint 17.3 Cinnamon on it earlier this week (yeah yeah, I downloaded the ISO via torrent well before this incident).

First impressions:

- it installed beautifully from the live USB image, taking maybe 20 minutes

- Everything was recognised out-of-the-box - even wifi and S3/S4 worked perfectly, which surprised me.

- just for giggles, I installed WINE and tried running an old Microsoft game (Age of Mythology/Titans). Blow me down, it worked perfectly. Better, in fact, than on my Windows 7 PC, on which it crashes periodically. I can just click the .EXE or a desktop shortcut and the game loads. Super easy. Even the network game mode works.

- coming from the Windows & OSX world, there's obviously a lot for me to learn! Plus, I keep managing to break it in unexpected ways. For example, following a list of "11 Linux Mint Tweak tips", I disabled access-time via etc/fstab 'noatime'. When I rebooted, the desktop had reverted to a different window manager (?) - right-click menus looked odd, the wallpaper didn't load, and all my desktop icons had reverted to a different theme and didn't want to change back. Weird! So I undid the 'noatime' tweak and all is back to normal. I think I need to back off from my compulsive urge to fiddle, and just accept that until I understand it more completely, I should leave well alone.

- Firefox / Pale Moon and all my plugins work perfectly too.

General impressions: I like it. My house network is now a a well-rounded mix of OSX, Windows 7, Ubuntu LTS (on the NAS) and Mint. I can have flame-wars with myself.

Re: The feel when the discussion reminds one of the Amiga vs. Atari ST days of retardation

Pffft, everyone knows the Amiga was the better of the two any day!

In your dreams!!1!. Vi is CLEARLY superior!

I'm sorry, I seem to have wandered into the wrong argument.

OpenBSD website operators urged to fix mind-alteringly bad bug

Re: I hate this.

J'accuse ... TUVALU!

San Seriffe, surely?

Or possibly Phaic Tăn.

Just in time.

They narrowly avoided the Helvetica scenario.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqfSqUuo7Ms [00:40]

Microsoft hoses down Windows Server hardware support change fears

Re: I'm confident this will be pushed on users

Aniya,

You wrote:

when I heard that Microsoft was not going to support Skylake on Windows 7 for much longer

My understanding is that it's future platforms that won't be supported for Windows 7 or 8.x; Skylake will continue to be supported as a Windows 7 platform (with Intel drivers, etc) for the foreseeable future.

Microsoft will not support Windows 7/8 running on next year's Skylake replacement. And that's where the objections are coming from; by doing this, Microsoft are effectively saying to corporate buyers "you WILL upgrade to Windows 10 within the next 12 months".

Helpdesk? I have a software problem. And a GRIZZLY BEAR problem

Re: A problem with a text editor?

Maybe it responded to the call to be Vi-olent!

Or it just decided to take a pico-ver the wall.

Don't worry though; the bear wanders in, but emacs 'is way out again eventually.

(it's the end of the week, my puns are feeble)

Triple-murderer prisoner keeps mobile phone in his butt for a week

Does the phone have a "motion" detector?

You'd think by now they'd sphincter check there for phones.

Anyway, without a SIM it's for e-merde-gency calls only.

And that's the best I can do. It's late.

Comodo's 'security' kit installed a lame VNC server on PCs on the sly

Re: Their slogan:

Cratering Trust Online

FIFY.

Reluctant Wikipedia lifts lid on $2.5m internet search engine project

Missed opportunity

They're getting a grant from the Knight Foundation and they're spending it on a search engine??

Golden opportunity missed. I expected that "copying Google" in this case would mean a self-driving car... in the form of a black TransAm. Bah.

Putin's internet guru says 'nyet' to Windows, 'da' to desktop Linux

Re: Reasons are probably many

6) cocking a snoot at US/"The West"

I believe the expression is "cocking a snook".

But other than that, well said.

Re: Or

And presumably, with the TsarOffice productivity suite.

The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads

Unfortunately, the wrong lessons will be learned.

Don't you just know that somewhere in an advertising agency's HQ, some Bright Thrusting Young Exec is currently giving his pitch...

"Folks, we all know that advertisment impression metrics are down. But relax! We have a solution! I give you...

...ADZILLA!

TWICE as obnoxious! FORTY-SEVEN percent larger! THREE-X times more difficult to close!

We'll have these babies on every major website by the end of the month. That'll solve things.

If the peons are ignoring our adverts, that's because we haven't made them intrusive enough! Yes!"

...because these people just don't learn.

Icon is what I'd do to them. They'll be second against the wall when the revolution comes.

Socat slams backdoor, sparks thrilling whodunit

Re: Obvious, indeed!

I tried that on my puny little Ubuntu box, and the factor command choked pathetically on a number of that size (actually, I think it has problems with anything larger than three digits...*)

Anyone know if the University of York still has a VAX? They did when I was there 20+ years ago and I think that's the only one I've ever used. I miss it.

(*feel free to insert mental "That's what SHE said!" here if so inclined)

Apple yanks international travel plugs over shock worries

Re: Mystery solved

Hot on the tail of their declining revenue announcement, more current-cy problems.

Watt next?

Apple growth flatlines ... Tim Cook thinks, hey, $80bn is still $80bn

Re: "growth in services revenue"

Is this an euphemism for fleecing existing customers?

I fear so. You can expect to see ever-more-intrusive nagging to get you to use their services... App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and so on. Apple have moved towards adding features that suit them and their need for ongoing revenue - not stuff that suits the user.

/rant on My own enthusiasm for all things Apple has cooled somewhat because of this. Forced to upgrade my (work-issued) iPhone from 7.x to 9.x last month, I found that it

a) runs at half the speed (the UI is very laggy, and applications stutter and stall)

b) incessantly tries to push me towards using Apple Music and iCloud.

Seriously - just about every time I try to go to the Music app on the phone, it hits me with a full-screen splash offering an Apple Music trial. Even though I've turned AM off in Preferences. Siri won't even start playing music unless I have Mobile Data enabled for Music... so it's obviously trying to connect to AM regardless of my preferences. Grrr! /rant off

Apple, here's a hint - when people have paid premium prices for your products, they probably won't appreciate subsequently being treated like cattle ripe for the milking.

If your services are good enough, people will come flocking to them. If you have to pester your loyal users with pop-ups and coercion, you'll just breed suspicion and resentment.

Oh, Microsoft and Google - that goes for you too.

B@stards.

The next Cuban gristle crisis: US Navy warship powered by beef fat

Are the cows accommodated onboard...

...in steerage?

Or is that what the poop deck's for?

Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and VPN's...

Audio effects plugins for OSX and/or iTunes

This is a long shot, but does anyone here know of a way to simulate vinyl record-type crackle/rumble/hiss effects in realtime while playing music on OSX? I mean, from iTunes/VLC or similar app, not as part of a dedicated $$$ audio editing suite.

Apparently iTunes has a plugin architecture, but my google-fu isn't good enough to find anything that's relevant. Ditto for VLC; their plugin site is a barren wasteland.

A long long time ago, I used an applet called Izotope Vinyl. Can't even remember if it was on Windows or OSX, but it had presets for different speeds and even eras of playback equipment - select "1960s" or "45rpm" for example and it would tweak the audio to sound appropriate - boosting/reducing frequencies and introducing rumble/skipping/scratching/dust artifacts.

That plugin's been discontinued by the manufacturer, although it can still be found from various sketchy download sites. It doesn't seem to work on more recent versions of OSX, though. Damn shame, because it's exactly what I need.

I'm wondering if there's something equivalent. Anyone have any ideas?

Oracle blurts Google's Android secrets in court: You made $22bn using Java, punk

Fortunately, the info is very hard to find.

After literally a picosecond's diligent hacking, I found a little-known site that is making the information public, the scofflaws:

https://www.google.com/search?q="%2422Bn using Java"

Top link. Boxed out, no less, to highlight it.*

Thank goodness Google are safe from the risk of anyone disseminating this information.

*- I wouldn't put it past Google to censor the results and spoil my joke, so for anyone in the far-distant future reading my comment: at time of posting, that search term returned umpteen links to this story, with this very page on the Register at top of the list.

Fears of fiber cable cuts, rogue drones menacing crowds at Super Bowl 50

Re: well...

Disclaimer: I haven't watched this particular event in a couple of decades... and I'm American.

Besides, the American mascot is the Bald Eagle, not this so-called Superb Owl.