Posts by dotdavid

Fail: Exam paper marked by Elon Musk up for auction

To be fair

My car orbits the sun too.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

"I buttered a bread role"

Is that some kind of recruitment slang for making a job sound better than it really is?

There is no escape: Atlassian to send Jira into places only Excel dares to tread

I would say a good proportion of those that use it would agree with you. Oddly, those that pay for it don't seem to share our opinion.

Mayday! Mayday! Microsoft has settled on a build and Windows 10 21H1 is inbound

Re: I love Windows - update are never an issue

Truecrypt works fine on Windows 10. Whether or not it's a good idea (in a general security sense) to still use it is still a topic veiled in mystery IMHO.

Smartwatch owners love their calorie-counting gadgets, but they are verrry expensive

> I just don't see the point. What do you actually use it for?

I use my MiBand 2 (which I got for a tenner) as a cheap digital watch that has the added benefit of buzzing when my phone rings or gets a message, which means the phone can stay tucked away somewhere. Being a LCD it lights up in the dark which is useful in the dark. It displays the full date. As it syncs with my phone it doesn't need the time setting/updating and remains accurate. The battery lasts for most of a month between charges and I'm generally happy with it. Personally I don't use the fitness features at all, the only thing I'd use that's missing is media controls (stop, play, next track) which is available on newer versions of the device.

Actually there are a lot of benefits of the cheap fitness bands that don't have anything to do with fitness. So much so that actually the extra things a "proper" smartwatch can do above and beyond what my £10 band can do are probably not worth me upgrading for.

Leave your admin interface's TLS cert and private key in your router firmware in 2020? Just Netgear things

Re: .com is for comfiguration?

RFC2606 concerns itself with .localhost, .example, .invalid and .test. Perhaps you mean RFC6762?

Man arrested over UK's Lancaster University data breach hack allegations

Re: And it's based on anecdotes like this...

As a Lancaster graduate, albeit of quite a few years ago now, I can confirm that it only has the one IT department (ISS).

Apollo at 50? How about 40 years since Skylab smacked into Australia

Re: Litter bugs

> Did it ever get that fine paid?

Apparently NASA declined to pay it and after three months it was written off.

Cancelled in Crawley? At least your train has free Wi-Fi now, right?

Re: If only...

"Whats so great about Point "A", that so many Prople from Point "B" are so keen to get there"

Given the opportunity I'd spend pretty much all of my time at Point A, but my boss likes me to be at Point B most of the week so I have little choice in the matter.

ISP TalkTalk's Wi-Fi passwords Walk Walk thanks to Awks Awks router security hole

They TalkTheTalk but don't WalkTheWalk

Productivity knocks: I've got 99 Slacks, but my work's not done

Other alternatives that are worth a look are Mattermost and RocketChat, which are basically host-your-own-Slack. Even compatible with all of Slack's add-on plugins.

*Edit:* Oh there's also Google's Hangout Chat which we tried as we have GSuite anyway but found pretty poor, mainly thanks to lack of integration with other services (due to not supporting Slack plugins) and really poor or missing client apps with broken notifications. I had had higher hopes.

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Re: Typed 'Reboot' where ... ?

He lost his job for a single mistake in two years, I am still a bit angry about that

Indeed, seems a bit of a stupid decision to me, especially as the fired guy is definitely going to be the one person you are certain would never make *that* mistake again.

UK.gov calls on the Big Man – GOD – to boost rural broadband

Re: Good stuff but a sticking plaster fix ...@Nick Kew

> Now they have Gigaclear and completing the red tape is no longer the sole destroying chore it was before I got involved

Sole-destroying? Did the farmer have to walk that 5.3K to deliver the red tape?!

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

Re: Great Headline, Register

> Will he stop to pick up hitch-hikers?

Well the hyperspace bypass is still not even under construction AFAIK so there might not be many to pick up yet.

UK.gov wasted £20m telling you to 'be safe online, mmkay'

Re: Well it's the first I've heard of it

Well okay, but only if you promise to read up on cybersecurity a bit.

UK's 'superfast' broadband is still complete dog toffee, even in London

"Given I read articles on the register et al I am not a subscriber to the grass is always greener brigade."

Surely it's better to have x providers all claiming to have installed fibre broadband to your area rather than have to put up with just one provider claiming to have installed fibre broadband to your area?

"Well I have an Unlimited "up to 80Mbps" FTTC service from Plusnet. I get between 50 and 60Mbps depending on which way the wind's blowing, and I pay £22.49 a month."

Plus £16.99 line rental. Still not sure why the advertised prices of broadband don't include this mandatory charge, even if you never use the landline.

Prof squints at Google's mobile monopoly defence, shakes head

Re: The Fire Phone flopped in the famously fair but fickle marketplace

Yeah, interestingly the main differentiator between the phone and the tablet was the price; the Fire Phone was horrendously overpriced. Do we need any other reasons for its failure? The tablet sold well and is relatively cheap, despite a lack of Googley ecosystem.

Three to chop off £3bn of its network in bid to woo EU over O2 merger

Re: That pledge on prices...

"Hutchison responded that for five years it would not hike up bills for consumers"

Also doesn't guarantee that they'll drop bills for customers if industry-wide costs decreased for whatever reason.

Contactless payments come to in-flight entertainment units

Re: "Some even charge for in-flight entertainment."

I'm honestly surprised that the likes of Ryanair et al haven't spent the money outfitting their aircraft with seatback screens that play adverts constantly at you until you pay to turn them off.

ESA decupboards asteroid-dusting brush-o-matic

" designed and lovingly built by Spanish outfit Added Value Solutions"

What an excellent name. If the space sweeper business doesn't work out you could literally create and sell almost anything and the company name would still work.

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

Re: So...

"You need some goggles, two LCD screens, and an accelerometer? And after you've paid six hundred bucks for that, you need to pay twice that to get a computer that can drive it fast enough... amazing what people will spend money on."

Yeah I can't believe that they needed Facebook's money to develop it at all!

On a related note a car is just four wheels, a steering wheel, a few pedals and an engine, why do people spend so much on *those*?

How to make the trains run on time? Satellites. That's how

Re: Attention passengers

"There fixed it for you. The Swiss do use 24hr clocks for railway operations unlike the USA."

Why do you assume it wasn't a train at 5:17 AM?

Linus Torvalds wavers, pauses … then gives the world Linux 4.5

Re: PS/2 Mice

"do you still need to reboot after inserting a PS/2 mouse or keyboard for it to be recognised"

In my experience it would be fine to detach/reattach a PS/2 mouse/keyboard as long as you initially booted with it plugged in, but I don't know how typical that was.

Virgin bins Webspace, tells customers they can cry to GoDaddy

Re: ISP Email

"And I bet despite another service going (Usenet seems to be either dying or closed) my bill won't come down at all."

Virgin Media bills come down in the same way that rocks fall up.

LG builds a DAB+ digital radio radio into a smartmobe

Re: 1280 x 720 on a 5.7" screen?

You find the strangest things funny.

Re: DAB would have some great potential if you get propper equipment

"But remember the Pure Bug radio? It was, to my knowledge, the only one that came close to the promises with ability to record. I don't know why."

I'm guessing record company execs decided that radio taping would kill music just like home taping did.

Beer-powered bid to build mobile network goes flat

"Anyway, I'd loke to know more about why the talks tanked."

It sounded like a great idea last night but everyone had their doubts the morning after?

Google emits Android N developer preview early to smoke out bugs

Rearranging the deckchairs

Every new Android version I hope for a saner update mechanism, and every new Android version I'm inevitably disappointed.

I got briefly hopeful when Android-based things like Android Wear came out with updates direct from Google and I naively thought it was a sign of things to come, but nothing has materialised. Android-on-phones is probably the only Google product I can think of that *doesn't* auto-update by default and that leaves the millions of Android users that don't have Nexii vulnerable. Yes I know Google patches AOSP even on past versions, even if OEMs rarely distribute/use those patches, yes I know there are custom ROMs but both are workarounds not solutions to Android's support problem.

So no improved security. Still I'm sure cosmetic tweaks to notifications are a very important feature to have too...

Sexism isn't getting better in Silicon Valley, it's getting worse

Re: "Make me a sandwhich"...?

Didn't work

make: *** No rule to make target 'me'. Stop.

Between you, EE and the lamppost ... this UK cell network is knackered

"Funnily enough, there is one thing still working at least: EE was able to text people today warning them that their tariffs are going up in March."

I'm quite surprised that they're still doing that; none of the other networks have within-contract price rises inflation or not and it was one of the many reasons I left them.

Feds spank Asus with 20-year audit probe for router security blunder

> > The free market would have fixed this

> There is one, and it didn't.

Speaking as a capitalist running dog, internet of things security, like automobile safety standards, seem to be winding up as a thing that the free market cannot adequately handle mainly because the average purchaser lacks the expertise to even know that it's a problem. We don't have to be mechanics to have a safe car; we shouldn't have to be networking engineers to have a safe router. I don't see a problem having regulators impose standards in these sorts of situations.

Re: Free Markets

"Personally I think there s no hope until routers go fully open and run Linux (for example, OpenWRT) so that security updates happen in a timely manner"

Not knocking OpenWRT or its controversial cousin DD-WRT (which I use myself) but AFAIK you don't get automatic security updates even with these firmwares, and the average user won't want to nor should need to install a third party firmware and more importantly keep it updated to remain safe.

Virgin posts increase in profits and sales amid 900 jobs chop

Re: That's the idea silly? (!)

"and then what?"

Shareholders sell, happy with the Shareholder Value they have earned, and skip off into the sunset. No-one but the customers and staff care about the failing business and they're not Key Stakeholders.

Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages

Re: RE an unlamented fragment of my past

"where do you want to be in 5 years"

On a beach sipping cocktails enjoying my lottery winnings, I think.

Oh, sorry you wanted me to pretend to *want* to have to go to work? :-)

Argos offers 'buy now pay in 3 months' deal

"I am unable to discus this"

They may not be able to discus this but nevertheless I think they're throwing your query out of the window.

Computer Science grads still finding it hard to get a job

Re: Unfortunately...

"CompSci's are skilled, just not 'skilled' in the way employer's want, like or need, so there's still a skills gap"

Indeed. Until I joined the "real world" I had very little experience in key business skills like filling out a career development plan that's worth more than the time and effort put into filling it out, learning how to suck up to the right managers and setting SMART objectives that sound terribly important to the business but are nice and easy to achieve with flying colours. A module or two of those sort of things in my compsci course would have gone a long way towards giving my first employers what they appeared to want ;-)

Re: Degrees these days....

" even once had a bloke bring in some code that was hassling him and we debugged it in the interview. The interviewers fixed the interviewee's bug!"

I wonder whether the technique would work for some DIY I need doing at home ;-)

Hold the miniature presses: Playmobil movie is go

"The Lego Movie, which enjoyed huge public and critical acclaim, but inexplicably and controversially failed to get nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar"

Strong competition. The Lego Movie was good, but IMHO How To Train Your Dragon 2 was better.

Three scoops 'most reliable network' crown, EE takes every other title

Re: Another EE win?

Still better than when I was with them and they had three impenetrable and awful web sites; one for each brand.

German Chancellor fires hydrogen plasma with the push of a button

Re: re.Mutti

"It is meant affectionately, i.e. mother of the nation... Mutti der Nation. ;-)"

In Britain we have a Nanny of the nation, perhaps we should call Cameron "grossmutti" ;-)

Go phish your own staff: Dev builds open-source fool-testing tool

An ex employer sent me a snotty email once when I reported one of their phishing test emails as abuse to Google and told them I had. I very much doubt that Google did anything with the report but some wannabe-bigwig emailed me telling me my action had been "escalated" as it might have effected the success of the education campaign. Of course nothing further happened to me, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth for doing the right thing.

I think ignoring phishing emails, legit or otherwise, is the best policy.

Big Ben belittled by Infosys' plans for enormous erection

"The Chamberlain Tower at Birmingham University at 99, 100 or 110m depending on who you talk to"

And presumably how cold it is?

Built-in LG smartphone app created data hack risk

Re: Grrr - so far I've been really happy with my G3

"I've just received the update to Smart Notice."

Me too. I'm glad someone at LG decided that a way to update built-in apps would be a good idea, although I wonder how many people would bother checking their "Update Center" app at all.

Re: Grrr - so far I've been really happy with my G3

"On my stock unlocked G3 (software version V21a-EUR-XX), I can add and remove Smart Notice just like any other widget"

The widget, sure, but I can't disable the app in Application Settings like you can some other "built-in" apps.

"My experience with Cyanogenmod (on Galaxy S2) is that it's ... bad for stability."

Samsung's fault because of their horrendous record of not releasing code for their Exynos chipsets. The G3 with its Qualcomm-based chipset should be much better.

Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

Re: To all of you with older phones...

Hmm, never heard about the Barclay's app before. That does seem pretty ridiculous - xposed and rootcloak has always worked for me with other apps like Three's wifi calling one.

Re: To all of you with older phones...

"* Continue using your device for financial stuff and have the whole thing compromised exposing all that data to the bad guys.

* Have a secure device but lose the ability to do financial stuff with it."

While I agree with your sentiment I must point out that some custom ROMs, like CyanogenMod, actually don't execute as rooted by default. In the latter case you have to enable root using a developer option, so you can still get the benefit of the quick updates without root.

UK govt right to outsource everything 15 years ago – civil service boss

Re: "doing "what everyone else was doing at the time""

"Government + outsourcing = even slower progress, even more overspend and later delivery"

In my experience it's "Government + civil service + outsourcing". Oddly enough, adding another organisation to the plus list doesn't make things more agile.

Hackers mirror 250GB of NASA files on the web

Re: Terminator seeds

"I'm curious to know, why the downvotes?"

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/files/2013/01/10yvf8m.gif

Re: Oh the conspiracies ...

"Heavy metals? Last year it was mind control chemicals..."

Evidently the mind control chemicals worked.