Posts by O RLY

Apple launches incredible features everyone else had more than a year ago – this time for the 'smart home'

I'm a big fan of Raspberries. There are about seven in my gaff running a variety of things, including an outdoor weather station (currently down for upgrades), a controller for my 3D printer, and a media player.

MacOS on Arm talk intensifies: Just weeks from now, Apple to serve up quarantini with Kalamata golive, reportedly

Re: x86 Software

VMware does not emulate processors. You can mask features of processors in order to run older OSes, but no VMware hypervisor emulates processors. 99% sure this is also true of VirtualBox.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Come on Twitter

Shouting FIRE in a crowded theatre IS permitted - when there's a fire.

The president's tweets sure seem libelous, or would if Elon Musk's "pedo guy" case had gone differently.

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Maybe easyJet don't need to continue as a business. Certainly the current travel culture will crank "survival of the fittest" up to 11 and easyJet seem anything but fit. It's hard to mourn a company, one of many, that doesn't take security seriously.

Apple's MagicPairing for Bluetooth fails to enchant after mischief-making bugs found hiding in the stack

Re: So, several versions of badly written code

Is there code that is flawless? I've certainly never written it for anything but a "hello, world" script.

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Re: Not a Who Me?

As the intro said, they're not sure days have meaning anymore. It could be Friday in the El Reg Event Horizon and somehow Who Me? got stuck on the article dispatched from within and the editors mislabeled it after our time dilation.

Apple: We respect your privacy so much we've revealed a little about what we can track when you use Maps

I don't necessarily bin the app that asks for location permission. I DO bin every app that doesn't work without it if location isn't core to the functionality. Google Maps gets permission to my location while I am using the application; any app that has no need for my location, but refuses to run without it gets deleted.

VMware plans to give vSphere power to automatically patch everything running in a VM

Re: Old functionallity

Old enough it wasn't even vSphere yet. Virtual Infrastructure and Virtual Center 3.5 were followed by vSphere and vCenter 4.0. Nice to see that in-guest patch option come back.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Re: Translation

Agreed. A problem with IPv4 was its allocation and the reluctance to take it away. MIT was famous (s/famous/notorious or other preferred adjectives) for having its /8 until 2017, despite a /8 being larger than the allocations to the sum of ~130 nations.

Techie collective to whip together official WHO-backed COVID-19 app within a week to meet 'urgent, global need'

To answer the subheading

"But will it be any better than the up-and-running WhatsApp effort?"

In one way, it will have a different audience and one that includes me. I don't use WhatsApp, wasn't aware of the WHO effort through it until I read this article, and don't plan to change the former so long as WHO has a functional website.

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

Re: Individuals can hold off up to $1m

Where should the IRS/Treasury have set the upper bound to delay tax returns/payments? As it is, the range covers individual tax liabilities in USD for the range (-∞, 10^6], so those on much lower incomes are included. It's also only one part of the plan to assist people, but I agree, more can and should be done.

Microsoft picks up Your Phone – unless you're an Apple fan – in a fresh Windows 10 build

Re: Unless....

"Apple knows better than to let us have a password manager and be able to paste a password"

What are you talking about? You mean this capability allowing users to use either Apple's or a 3rd-party password manager introduced in 2018?

Butterfly defect stripped from MacBook Pros, Airs by Q2 2020, reckons Apple analyst

Re: I liked the butterfly keyboard..

The mechanical keyboard from an IBM XT is as close to perfect as I've had. It probably still works today if the box it connected to still did (or I had anything else with an appropriate connector), provided proper feedback to touch typing, and would have made an excellent bludgeon if ever called upon.

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

Curiosity is a wonderful thing

"Our original goal was to explore the boundary between the quantum world and the classical world, set by the chaotic behaviour of the nuclear spin. This was purely a curiosity-driven project, with no application in mind"

Curiosity for curiosity's sake. I enjoyed reading this story, especially because curious investigation is something we should continue to encourage.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Hypocrites

HP allowed the Steves to start their own company with the project, not just an idea, Wozniak tried to get HP to build, the Apple I, and didn't sue them after they got going.

Boss planning to tear you a new one? Google Glass is back: Weird workwear aimed at devs, but on sale to all

Privacy of others

"On the other side of the argument, the question is whether it will ever be possible to fulfil the promise of the original concept while respecting the privacy of others."

Privacy or Google. Pick one.

What a terrible result from this year's Super Bowl. Can you believe it? Awful. Yes, we're talking about the tech ads

Re: "Around 100 million people tuned into Super Bowl LIV"

I suspect the 100 million count is USA viewers, but I couldn't find anything specific for global viewership. Saw some estimates of 50-60 million outside the US. Not quite what, say, the World Cup final gets.

https://deadline.com/2020/02/super-bowl-2020-ratings-fox-the-masked-singer-season-3-premiere-1202849673/

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

After I made my comment, I checked to see if anyone was still updating pine and saw the alpine project. I haven't installed it, but it's nice to hear that it is working at least with the email functions of O365.

Thanks for the data point.

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

I miss pine. No need to worry about malicious attachments running on the IRIX or Solaris boxes I used to use, nor tracking pixels loading.

How do you like them Apples? Cook drops 'record' 30 times* on conf call as iPhone sales up, services up, wearables up

Re: 480 million services subscribers

People who bought Apple devices recently received a year of TV+, so they're "subscribers" in that they have a subscription, but not one for which they directly paid. Some mobile carriers also provide gratis temporary subscriptions to Apple Music. I'm sure the expectation is that the services will have insinuated into punters' lives enough that they will convert to paid users in the manner marketeers are wont to call "frictionlessly."

Cisco Webex bug allowed anyone to join a password-protected meeting

Re: 'an "unauthenticated" attendee'

The El Reg Style Guide says we are "commentards."

The Oxford comma still lives, but there are apostates everywhere threatening it. Long live the Oxford comma!

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: Mixed messages

There is an AppStore for Mac, but it isn't the only way to deliver Mac application software. Personally speaking, I only use the AppStore if it's the only delivery mechanism for a particular application. Otherwise, I get software elsewhere and it doesn't need Apple's approval.

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?

Re: late capitalists

I have always despised the word "consumer" as it is used in the modern parlance. It seems vaguely pejorative, as though the masses of people are bleating livestock wallowing in line for feed before their inevitable trip to the abattoir.

Cynically, that's probably exactly how marketing bods view us, except instead of slaughtered, we're sheared of the contents of our wallets.

Microsoft engineer caught up in sudden spate of entirely coincidental grilling of Iranian-Americans at US borders

Re: And the consequenques fo failing to act?

And German-American. And Italian-American.

British bloke accused of extorting victims for 'Dark Overlord' hacker crew finally gets his free trip* to America

Re: The Dark Overlord Face

The US federal judiciary and prosecutors are not elected. Federal judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to life terms as laid out in the Constitution. United States Attorneys (federal prosecutors) are also appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, typically for the length of the presidency.

The individual states typically do have elected district attorneys (prosecutors), judges, and attorneys general, but this bloke is facing federal charges.

Amazon drops battery-powered Echo speaker so you can play Despacito on the go

Re: I just searched for 'Despacito'

There's a meme on the interwebs: "This is so sad. Alexa, play despacito."

It usually appears without punctuation or capitalisation.

Think your VMware snapshots are all good? Guess again if you're on Windows Server 2019

Re: Application quiescence

Not on vSphere. VMotion and Storage vMotion do not require VSS or any other guest tools, including VMtools.

Application quiescence

To be pedantic, application quiescence is not a feature of the hypervisor, but requires a tool within the guest's OS to commit the data residing in memory and cache to persistent storage so that a storage snapshot, such as a *-snap.vmdk file in vSphere or a snapshot on a storage array, can be used as a quick recovery tool (Application-consistent snapshot). In Windows, that tool is Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). The pain of trying to restore snapshots with VSS is much less than the pain of restoring without VSS.

Hands off our phones, says Google: Radar-gesture-sensing Pixel 4 just $999 with a 3-year lifespan – great value!

Re: Data slurpers selling Wifi meshes

Amazon succeeded in acquiring Eero.

That lithium-ion battery in your phone or car? It has just won three chemists the Nobel Prize

Re: Isn't Chemistry, Physics?

As usual, there's a relevant XKCD

Purity of science

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Re: Maker breaker

Thanks!

This does work to remove the update from the tool, but the red "1" remains on the Dock icon.

It appears that can be removed by

'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0'

But that hides all badge alerts for future updates or issues that arise in System Preferences, so not a perfect fix.

Re: Maker breaker

While I agree for the most part, Apple sure would like to force Catalina down punters' throats. I have not yet found a way to make Mojave's System Preferences ignore the Catalina update, so there's an incessant and insistent red "1" sitting in the dock. Or at least there was until I removed System Preferences from the dock.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Re: It's the new world order...

And as Will Rogers said, "be grateful you're not getting all the government you're paying for."

First they came for 'face' and I did not speak out because I... have no face? Then they came for 'book'

Someone did, in fact, get the trademark for 'FUCT' and it was upheld by the US Supreme Court in June.

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

Re: Engineering? Why?

Two minutes and 52 seconds, so sayeth Johnny Rotten.

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Re: Pedantry

The OP has the iPhone 1 as “original” in the post. There was no iPhone 2; the second iPhone was the 3G. The XR/XS line definitely should be counted, though, but the 8 and X should be considered the same generation as they were two tiers in the same release.

Massachusetts city tells ransomware scumbags to RYUK off, our IT staff will handle this easily

Re: Cut off one's nose ...

You’re absolutely right. I misread that sentence completely.

Cut off one's nose ...

"For New Bedford, no ransom was paid but Mitchell said he expects further costs in terms of MIS staffing."

So, the reward for the MIS team that recovered without ransom is reductions in staff? That's the short-sighted decision-making I know and ... well, not love ... from civil servant budget people!

We checked and yup, it's no longer 2001. And yet you can pwn a Windows box via Notepad.exe

Not 2001

But 2018 had the same calendar. So, too, do Windows bugs cycle and recycle with minor tweaks.

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Re: USB-C

USB-C is a quintessential example of "design by committee." If it had been one inventor, it would have been much more likely to be suited to purpose.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

Still channelling the spirit of Dennis Kozlowski apparently.

Well, he's gone, but shady people still remain in charge of Tyco.

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Re: "Cupertino idiot tax"

Eh, I'm a Mac user since they ran Motorola 68k series procs and an iPhone user since the 3G and I don't take offense to the "idiot tax" comments (writing this on a 2018 model MacBook Pro with the fragile keyboard that has certainly made me feel idiotic periodically). It's part of the El Reg charm I've come to appreciate.

This is, after all, the site that offers an icon of a wino with the label "windows user" to as a choice to enhance comments. I've chosen the beer one for you since it seems like you could use one.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Andrews

Erin Andrews sued the hotel chain, Marriott, and was awarded $55 million in judgements. Her stalker, the man who filmed her, was sent to prison.

It would be much harder to earn justice against an entity like an Airbnb-booked grey market short term rental host.

Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext

Re: They make billions

I’m inclined to think Facebook are the inverse of Hanson’s Razor: I attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence. They DO hire competent coders for the most part.

French internet cops issue terrorist takedown for… Grateful Dead recordings?

Re: Seems the principal problem is not the legislation

How many were mentioned in the Monty Python skit?

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

BBC stole that tweet about the two scientists without correct attribution.

Here is the original tweet from MIT CSAIL:

https://twitter.com/MIT_CSAIL/status/1116007460039483392

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

Re: Job security

Old developers' joke:

"99 bugs in code that's released

99 bugs in the code that's released

take one out

patch it around

120 bugs in the code that's released"

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

Re: M&S and MS

Not sure if I saw it here on El Reg or another forum, but I like the moniker "Office 350-something" for MS's SaaS moneygrab.