Posts by John Brown (no body)

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: Paging file?

"Great idea - any thoughts on the odds MS will allow the user a measure of control over this? I'd happily set aside a few 10's of gigs of space on some spinning metal for a temp folder - don't particularly want to lose 7 gigs from my 256 GB M2 drive....."

According to article, you can specify a reduced size, though not all the way down to zero. How that user choice will survive through normal updates only MS knows. I suspect that user choice will never survive an update that is dead set on increasing the max size up from 7GB in the future though.

Re: WinSXS

"Most of the files in winsxs are actually links, not real files, but set up with some special kind of crazy link that tricks windows into THINKING that the files are in two places at once."

They are called hardlinks, and can be very useful. It seems the people in charge of the underlying file allocation/free space counting API at MS didn't get the memo and how to read the flags and identify when a file is "real" and when it's a hardlink.

Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

"Though 250GB and upwards are much more affordable recently,"

I just breathed new life into an old laptop with a £40 240GB SSD. Very affordable, well under the price of a tank of petrol.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Re: I remember the 2Gb file size limit in 95 / ME

"However being in a government organisation 2 or 3 years earlier, I suspect there was a greater chance the hard drive would've been a more modest size though, so 320-500mb sounds feasible."

Absolutely this! At the start of the 90's, a 40MB HDD was pretty standard. By the end of the 90's, IBM had introduced a 16GB Deskstar HDD and it wasn't unusual for PCs to be expected to last AT LEAST 5 years back then, often much longer.

Back when 40GB IDE HDDs were still standard items, I was dealing with at least one customer still using original IBM PCs, booting from floppy onto an IPX/SPX network to share files and a laser printer running Wordstar on MS-DOS. When PCs cost over £1000 each and a £1000 was a lot of money, PCs were often purchased from the capital budget and were given a depreciation value/duration of a minimum of 5 years.

Re: The roots

"Clunky, unintuitive software."

As GUI based desktops became the norm, apps were strongly encouraged if not actualy forced to follow the desktop style guides, thus making it reletively easy for most users to get the hang of many new apps, at least at the most basic level. With the switch to web apps running in a browsers, the app devs designers have been unleashed once again and it's like the Wild West out there again. Everyone has there own ideas about where menus should go, what should be in them and where to place buttons.

Just today, I've used three separate browser based apps for work and every one of them has the log out button in a completely different place to mention but one oddity.

Linux reaches the big five (point) oh

Re: If only...

"I'll glee in glory at my Windows 10 as soon as my machine applies the 12 update releases since yesterday."

So, sometime next week, assuming it all works ok, otherwise, after the next patch update to fix any broken patches, maybe sometime in June? :-)

Chip-for-tat escalates: Qualcomm's billion-Euro bond to block Apple iPhone sales in Germany

Re: third-party retailers could still offer the affected iPhone models

"My guess is that it would be unfairly penalising third party retailers by depriving them of a revenue stream, when it is Apple that may be at fault, not the third party retailers."

A good lawyer would argue that you are advocating the safe and legal sale of stolen goods :-)

"I bought 'em in faith guv'nor!"

I suppose it all depends on where the 3rd party retailers are getting their Apple phones from. If they buy via a non-Apple agent/importer, then it makes the ban fairly pointless if the importer isn't banned from importing them. If the exception for 3rd party retailers is only while they sell existing stock, then it sounds reasonable.

third-party retailers could still offer the affected iPhone models

Seems like a pretty half-hearted ban in Germany. Either the phones are infringing and therefore banned, or they aren't. How come 3rd party sellers are still allowed to sell them?

Germany hacked: Angela Merkel's colleagues among mass data dump victims

"The plus side is, I submitted the corrections and a month or so later, it was translating correctly. "

It sounds like Google translate is crap at translating but good at matching phrases to user submitted translations. The only reason it sometimes gets it right is because people like you have submitted actual translations to specified phrases. How much are they paying you? ? :-)

SpaceX's Crew Dragon shows up at pad 39A, nearly 8 years after the last Shuttle left

Re: lets try something new.

"Hell give them some charts and goals and let them explore and just have a large earth side beacon so they can find their way home."

Is this intended to be a five year mission?

Naming conventions

Dragon Crew Capsule. Simple and descriptive.

Boeing Starliner. A bit like the Wright brothers calling the Wright Flyer the Jumbo Trans-Atlantic Airliner!

Marking people should be kept well away from prototypes and early production models.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Re: Please add article upvote buttons...

I'd have been more impressed if Dabbsy had managed to put up/down vote buttons by each list item :-)

Re: You miserable sod ...

"I expect most of his no-nos will put in an appearance."

Isn't that one of those things for "shaving" your legs but actually rips the hairs out by the roots?

I'm not sure I particularly want to see Dabbsy mutilating himself with one of those.

Re: You missed one...

"My concrete-floored downstairs - in addition to a Tiki Lounge, bike shop, gym, and airgun range - has a scooter track that winds through the rooms."

I suspect you might be the exception rather than the rule. I doubt many people even have the space for all that, let alone the scooters to ride around on.

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

A handy part-time job for stay-at-home parents?

"Start with porn and then once that is restricted they will start on other online services.. anyone who cant see that is naive."

It started with blocking "piracy" sites, then moved onto "extremist" sites (both porn and terrorism related). This is not the first step, it's merely another step.

Re: from 1 to up to 50

As far as the law is concerned, any site accessible from the UK is within reach of the law. Even if the only option is to block it, which is the point of the statement re. blocking 1-50 sites per year, however laughable that estimate might be.

Re: Protection from what?

"But I have never seen a porn-related incident."

No, they tend to be stupid adults, with dicks stuck in various things from curtain rings to vacuum cleaners, and women with various things stuck in places they should probably never have been inserted. Kids seem to have a bit more sense in these matters.

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

...looking at my teenage son's browsing habits with dismay and thinking to myself ....... "for fucks sake, you should be browsing some porn at your age".

Maybe he was just better at that internet stuff than you? You should probably have been more worried (or proud?) there was no evidence at all. Maybe he hacked your logs :-)

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

"Also, these tools that are available most people just don't know about and aren't technical enough to figure out how to set them (or they just don't care)"

I do wish people would stop trotting out that rubbish. The internet and computers in the home have been a thing since those parents were kids themselves. The assumption that parents are too old to understand the internet is a dead meme. Many may not think about it, or care enough to do anything, but they pretty much all had access to computers and the internet at school themselves and probably shared porn and how to access it through the school firewall/filter.

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

Re: Similar story

"who sold a set of floppy disk holders (5 1/4 natch) which were designed... designed! to fit over a CRT monitor like a pair of saddlebags, with the floppies each side of the screen!"

I saw similar with speakers. The original design used shielded speakers of course. The cheap knock versions were, well, cheap knock offs with no shielding.

Re: on a similar note ...

"Moving the computer's power plug to a three-pin socket on a different AC phase solved the issue. But there was a lot of "you're daft" comments wen I told them that the fridge was doing it."

We had 3-phase power in a building and the phases supplied 3 lighting circuits and 3 ring mains. It sounds like overkill, but the large work unit we inhabited was originally meant to be about 6 separate units. When about a 1/3rd of the computers seemed to glitch ever now and then, we eventually traced it to an arc welder next door.

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Re: A question about buttons...

"There used to be buttons to Up/Down vote a comment."

They are still there. They have mouse-over text descriptors too. I have no idea why your screen reader is not finding them. May the El Reg webdevs or more knowledgeable commentards can look into it.

Pewdiepie fanboi printer, Chromecast haxxx0r retreats, says they're 'afraid of being caught'

Youtube channel subscribers

I get that youtube channel operators like to willy-wave their subscriber numbers, but what benefit is there for me to subscribe to a youtube channel?

I just bookmark things I like. There are even a couple of youtube channels in my bookmarks. How is "subscribing" to a free channel different from my just clicking my bookmark?

Florida man stumbles on biggest prime number after working plucky i5 CPU for 12 days straight

Oh crap!

Now I have come up with ANOTHER new password.

I'd have been ok if not for that meddling kid and his computer!

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

Re: A lot of snobs in here today.

"Also, train drivers don't do the maintenance on the engines they drive (and probably never have done)."

In the days of steam, the driver and fireman turned up to work 3-4 hours before the train was due to set off because that's how long it took to get up to steam and to check, oil and grease everything to get ready for the day. They were probably really technicians rather then engineers by modern standards, but it was much closer to being an engineer than todays train drivers who basically turn up 5 minutes before setting off, get in and press the starter button.

Re: Great for this Engineer

"As somebody with no engineering qualifcations nor membership of any professional body but who could call himself a software engineer, I take exception to your comment. I am perfectly competent to do my job, if I were not I would not be allowed to continue to do it. I've learned to be an engineer by working as an engineer. I don't need bits of paper with logos on them to prove that to anybody."

I don't think anyone is arguing about the competence or qualifications of those who are called software engineers. It's more about whether the term "engineer" is the correct one for the job. As I've stated in another comment, the term "engineer" has been bastardised and mis-used until it's almost become a meaningless term. It's not the only one either and it mainly seems to have happened over a relatively recent times as people have been promoted or given pay rises and needed new job titles to justify why they got the rise and others didn't. It;s a bit like having a senior programmer rather than a supervisor or foreman because "senior" command more money and respect than foreman, even though there's little difference in the practicalities. Team Leader instead of charge-hand etc. I suspect a lot of it stems from the transition between Personnel Department and Human Resources Management.

Re: Great for this Engineer

"and yet companies seem happy to employ people to perform Software Engineering jobs without any qualifications or registration."

Maybe the problem is the term "engineer" when combined with "software"? Engineer is already an overused word for many wildly different activities but ar least most of them involve something mechanical. Software Engineer is really just an allegorical phrase.

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

Re: Seems a bit odd

"Looks like classic Menu pricing to me. If you can sell only at £30, you can't get any of the cash from people with a tenner spare."

Yes, it's probably the licensing cost for the ROMS. As other have mentioned, it's not hard to find the ROMS for "free" out on the 'net, but a lot of people want things to "just work".

Re: F/A 18 Interceptor

" I actually met the guys behind SAE."

I once got sent out to fix a PC, needed a new motherboard. I did a double take on the address. Team 17!!!

What I remember most about the visit was the live size "cowboy/western" style cacti around the room built from hot-glued coke cans :-)

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

"Remember, these machines can be buried or remote, meaning physical switches are not an option since that will mean expensive physical trips."

Security costs money. The less you spend, the less secure your system. Maybe those expensive physical trips are expensive, but are they more expensive than the potential losses (and/or fines)? Security professional and beancounters will probably come to different conclusions.

"while slopslowing things down by thousands of orders of magnitude,"

I remember when I was first shown the "new" BIOS that was no longer written in assembly language. You could see the screen updates happen in the BIOS config screens. Of course, assembly language programmers cost more than JAVA-like programmers and I suspect that was one of the prime motivators behind the change.

Re: Wait, what?

"There's no excuse in this day an age for anyone in IT in a business to be in the position to be able to run executables or see URLs in emails!"

Try telling that to the Sales and Marketing departments!!!

We ARE an IT company and you'd not believe the shit they send out, even internally! Exactly the sort of stuff we should be wary of. Having said that, we recently a security advisory warning users about phishing emails. It was a pretty coloured image file you had to click on to get the rest of the information about what not to do which basically told us not do what we just had to do to get the information on what not to do.

I did consider that it might be a double bluff to see if people would click it, but then considered the previous missives from our "security department" and discounted that level of intelligence.

Re: The real solution

"Of course, a lurking rootkit installer could sit in the background and watch for a valid attempt to update flash memory, and then add its payload before you've had time to switch off writes again."

Yet another reason for never doing firmware updates from within Windows. I always boot a pendrive into FreeDOS for BIOS/UEFI updates or hardware diagnostics. I don't know enough about the internals of Windows to know for sure if the software is talking direct to the hardware or if there's a chance it's going via a potentially buggy Windows API, possibly multiple layers.

Re: The real solution

"It would however make sense if PCs were supplied with a fall-back BIOS in non-rewritable ROM that could be copied back, if possible without CPU intervention, if the flash version is found to be compromised."

There are boards which have that. IIRC, HP do it. Not sure if the "backup BIOS" is in ROM though. One of my desktops has two copies of the BIOS, the newest version boots and an update (ie newer than both copies) replaces the oldest one and becomes the boot BIOS.

Re: The problem with that is...

"The obvious solution would of course be to get rid of UEFI completely"

As a field "engineer", (not in Oregon I hasten to add!), I see mainly broken desktops, server and laptops. Apart from the odd mis-configured system that to boots to the UEFI shell, I've never had to deal with anything other than the BIOS emulator in the UEFI. I regularly replace and configure motherboard and in my experience, nothing has changed at the user or technician level interface since BIOS was a thing.

I've looked at the UEFI shell and played with it a bit. I can even do "useful" things with it, but have never, ever had to use that knowledge in anger. What is UEFI for and why does it even exist?

Boffins manage to keep graphene qubits 'quantum coherent' for all of 55... nanoseconds

Re: 1k qubits ?!?

"Otherwise IBM's 50 qubit machine maintaining state for 90 microseconds makes this look piddly."

I wonder if quantum computing is the next fusion? We know we can do it at small scale for a fraction of a second, but a practical working example is always 30 years away?

Oz cops investigating screams of 'why don't you die?' find bloke in battle with spider

FTFY

So, whoever you are, Australopissecus, we feel you.

New Horizons probe reveals Ultima Thule is huge, spinning... chicken drumstick?

<geordie>Whey man, it's a bit nippy, ah might need a wooly pully\ tuh gan wi'me t-short and shorts!</geordie>

Re: Alice

"Wait, what? Alice was a name of an instrument on an interplanetary probe? What is wrong with these people? Alice belongs on a Lunar probe."

Well, New World is Living Next Door to Alice, so it kinda fits.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Re: After you. No, after you!

This reminds me of (obviously made up) apocryphal story of the US aircraft carrier demanding the lighthouse change course.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Re: lie detector

"Presumably none of them can sense whether you are lying to yourself and believing it and/or manufacturing confidence that you are right about something."

Something like that, but I was really referring to the apparent rise in the belief in pseudo-science in general but in the USA in particular.

Re: 2019 is also the year for the events of...

"The Running Man (surprised it took so long)"

It woudn't surprise me to find that something akin to Running Man is already a game show on Japanese TV.

Re: measure the subject's empathy response to questions

"Basically the same idea as the "lie detector" or polygraph much loved by USA and rubbished as pseudo-science by real scientists doing proper testing."

Is that part of the reason Trump got elected?

surpass humans in specific intellectual tasks

"Machines can already surpass humans in specific intellectual tasks, like playing chess or Go."

Now there's a discussion to be had between the pub crawl and post-pub neckfiller. Are chess and Go intellectual pursuits or just a complex mathematical puzzles?

Since we don't have AI, then I feel it's unlikely any computer can compete with a human in any intellectual task. Any task that can be broken down into a series of mathematical or mechanical steps isn't intellectual in my book, ir anything which can be automated.

You are right! It ought to be "I can haz"

Re: C'mon

Yeah, even my bank has started using them. A long established British institution. But I'm expected to be able to identify "crosswalks". I assume they mean pedestrian crossings, "Store fronts", by which I think they mean shops. Traffic lights are bit easier but I wasn't expecting them to be hanging from wires in the middle of the road. Oh, and it appears taxis are always yellow. Likewise, school buses.

I have written to my bank to point out that as they have little to no dealings with the US or it's residents, it might be an idea to use a test designed for UK citizens rather than one which tests to see how much US TV their customers watch.

The glorious Brexit uncertainty: The only dead cert on data rules for tech biz in 2019

Re: My prediction is...

"We can infer from the noise coming from the MSM"

Please define what you mean by "the MSM". Everyone who uses the term seem to have their own unique and personal definition, so it would be helpful to give us your definition. The most common definition seems to be "the MSM are everyone I disagree with" or variations thereof.

Re: The only thing certain is

"the Navy is on full alert in case even a half dozen blokes in a dinghy might land."

Is that not expecting a bit much of the current Navy?

Bored IT manager automates Millennium Eve checks to ditch snoozing for boozing

Re: HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

"Which reminds me - 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the start of ARPANET."

Although on a sad note, "Net's founding father Dr Larry Roberts dies aged 81"

"American scientist Larry Roberts who helped design and build the forerunner of the internet has died aged 81.

In the late 1960s, he ran the part of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) given the job of creating a computer network called Arpanet."