* Posts by Wensleydale Cheese

1381 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011

Apple axed Brit retail boss for doing his job well - TOO well, perhaps

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: cost-effective buy

@AC

"f you are really lucky boot into the recovery disc creator image and spend an hour or so in there before you get to the desktop)"

You missed the bit where you don't have any spare writeable media, the salesdroid didn't tell you need any, and the shops have closed until tomorrow.

This happened with my very first laptop.

Apple to live-stream Tuesday's 'a little more' event

Wensleydale Cheese
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So much for the live broadcast

It wasn't working here.

Not impressed.

Salesforce CEO Benioff: Win 8 is 'the end of Windows'

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: I'll argue the difficult

@h4rm0ny

"My main problem with MS's Azure service, is that last time I checked (would love to find out they've changed it but not aware they have), they couldn't guarantee that they would run a server purely in the EU. Which means American data protection laws. Which means no data protection as far as I'm concerned. Could be wrong."

The Reg had a webcast on this subject either earlier this year or in 2011. I think it was a project for the Royal Mail and Microsoft did offer a guarantee that it would be hosted inside the EU (Ireland and Holland I think).

Unfortunately shortly after that there were a couple of reports about the US claiming they had the right to drop a couple of sites they objected to, one because it was a .com, the other because the domain registrar was in the US. See US claims all .com and .net websites are in its jurisdiction

Microsoft plans big licencing price hikes, shifting to per-Device model

Wensleydale Cheese

Migration caveats

@ A J Stiles

Beware of the cowboys who think all you need is an Ubuntu install CD, is all .....

Absolutely correct, and this is where a proper consultant comes in. I would feel derelict in my duty if I were to take on such a conversion then left the client with a bunch of non-working documents.

However, as part of such a conversion one should only agree to convert the documents specified in the contract. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone will have a document hidden somewhere that is a real pain to convert, and if you haven't worked that into the price you can get badly bitten.

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: Think this will affect you?

@ Gary F

It's not possible to swap a decade of Windows experience for a decade of Linux experience unless you're Joe 90.

But for those of us reluctantly dragged screaming into the Windows world some years ago, it is relatively easy to go back to a command line interface. In contrast with the hostile CMD.EXE interface, bash et el are relatively easy to get the hang of.

One could argue that we're trapped and hostage to Microsoft's will and pricing policy. But given the retraining costs and the huge dip in skills we'd suffer for several months (or years?) it's still worth paying a bit extra to remain users and developers on the Microsoft platform. I believe that's exactly what Microsoft is depending on.

Let's not forget that WIndows Server 2012 has a strong emphasis on Powershell, so that environment is also changing, and retraining will be required.

Microsoft Surface: Designed to win, priced to fail

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: What's wrong with Pages, Numbers and Keynote?

Number can't compete with Excel for the sort of stuff my accountant does, but let's face it, how many folks really need the extra functionality that Excel offers?

Swiss photographer sues Apple for pilfering her eyeball

Wensleydale Cheese
Happy

Hey Apple, please use my holiday pics without permission

Then I can afford a better holiday next year.

'Stop-gap' way to get Linux on Windows 8 machines to be issued

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Protecting their investment

@westlake

"Walmart BTW sells tons of software, hardware and accessories to its Windows customers. The after-market in Windows is golden."

Another aspect of this is that a young lady at work was complaining that all her friends were recommending various bits of Windows software to buy, but she had bought a Mac and didn't know where to look to buy equivalents.

I honestly didn't know where to point her (this was pre-App Store days), simply because I am capable of hitting open source stuff and building it, or rolling my own solutions.

This was a lesson to me that we geeks don't always get it.

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: You know what?

@TRT

"It is for the myriad of bootable CDs/DVDs I've got to test hardware, defrag drives, kill rootkits etc."

Presumably everyone can grab the signed versions of GRUB2 supplied by the Linux Foundation or Canonical, and no doubt other major suppliers will provide their own as well.

You might be stuck if you want to use some other boot loader of course.

If you can boot from the rescue or diagnostic CD of choice you probably have physical access to the system and can disable the check (on non-ARM systems).

But for anyone who wants to run dual boot Windows and non-Windows systems, turning the check off permanently is probably not a good idea.

I would feel sorry for anyone trying to develop for ARM, except they have shown themselves to be pretty good at, for example, jail breaking phones.

Wensleydale Cheese

Not a big problem, unless you are developing for ARM, methinks

@ Destroy All Monsters

"It has to do with someone [who?] going to the keyholder guy [who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard] with a compiled version of GRUB2, then asking nicely whether he would like to sign this binary thank you very much and can we come back once the next bugfix release is due.

Now the keyholder guy may want to get paid or the outfit which manages the certificate chain involved might. Apparently in this case the latter is Verisign and someone [who?] will come up with the cash."

From the article it appears that both instances of [who?] will be the Linux Foundation, or Canonical for Ubuntu. If I remember correctly, the cost of signing is in the region of USD 95.

For non-ARM machines, the check can be switched off if you have physical access to the computer (i.e. can modify the UEFI equivalent of BIOS settings).

You are right about the bugfix problem of course. This could be a real pain for those involved in developing and maintaining GRUB2 and other boot loaders, especially for ARM systems.

'What was Google going to do, force Apple to change its mind?'

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: Generosity

windows ME of course :-D

Now that's cruel.

But I like it.

Fans revolt over Amazon 'adware' in Ubuntu desktop search results

Wensleydale Cheese

Dunno where you get the idea that Shuttleworth is a billionaire.

You are, after all, a billionaire - and therefore the enemy.

True, the sum he got for Thawte was billions, but that was in South African Rand, not sterling or dollars.

Shuttleworth's 2012 worth estimated at $500 million

Euro watchdog to charge Microsoft on web browser choice boob

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: New anti trust case please

Anyway, isn't it an established fact that BSD flavours are generally superior?

I'm hedging my bets with both Linux and BSD.

Not to forget Windows and OS X.

What have I missed?

Politico's locked room mystery Linux install crime solved

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Are you sure?

It could have been a customised installation disk.

But then I would expect that someone in possession of such a thing would know what they are doing.

Guardian's Robin Hood plan: Steal from everyone to give to us

Wensleydale Cheese

Or the Daily Wail for that matter

<cite>I wonder what the publisher of the Express has to say.</cite>

The Daily Mail also gets a lot of visits from folks mocking their OTT articles, so should they get their share of this subsidy?

Would The Times open up or relax their paywall if they got a slice of this cash?

It's a pity the Guardian has gone the way it has, for it provided much needed balance during the Tory government years. Yes, I did buy it nearly every day back then, but they lost the plot somewhere in the mid-nineties.

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

Wensleydale Cheese

A great story, thanks.

It beats the heck out of weeding, which I was doing last weekend.

Apple time is now world time

Wensleydale Cheese

That GIF is now saying

Says that the Apple Store is down for maintenance and will be back later.

Well it was offline last night when I tried to do a Software Update, but it's now back.

GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Win 98/EEEbuntu - upgrading Linux Mint

"I installed Linux Mint on a netbook just a couple of years ago, and now it's frozen in time as far as software goes"

I can feel your pain.

"b) save all my data, wipe the disk, reinstall a new version, copy back in all my data."

Linux Mint does provide a backup and restore utility to address a wipe and upgrade, and will also save then reapply your software selection to your newly installed copy.

However. While this is fine if you keep all your data in your home directory and only have one user, for those of us who have installed LAMP or other server type apps have to identify all the config files to bring across and/or start from scratch.

It's a pain in the neck.

"a) become an elite hacker"

If I am going to do that I might consider taking a step back and rolling my own distro. I doubt I'd find time to do that though.

Firefox 15 offers fewer leaks, more frags

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Easy update?

@Christoph

"No mention at all that you need to switch to a Windows account with Administrator privileges, then wait for the update to download again because it can't see the copy it already downloaded."

Ah, that old problem again. I don't know why the Mozilla folks apparently refuse to see this one.

However, forewarned by your post I fired up FF in a non-admin account in Windows 7 to see what happened here.

It immediately took me to an update page for the mobile version, but there was a Desktop tab to click there, and I downloaded the Windows version from that (17 MB). In the downloads window I right clicked on the download, and chose Open Downloads folder.

From there I could right click on the downloaded file and choose to run it with Admin rights. That ran OK.

Windows 8: Microsoft's tablet-desktop still painful to swallow

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: 438 per cent better, but that is for drawing rectangles

"Should speed up Solitaire..."

Only if the cards don't have rounded corners.

Buffett no longer Intel Inside

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Well...

That's probably a fair assessment. He's not sentimental about his investments and it might be simply that he has found somewhere else to put that money which he thinks will provide a better return, or feels more comfortable with.

Google to skew search results to punish PIRATES

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Ho Hum

@Marty

"I tried finding a review for printer a week or so ago, the first 3 pages were websites selling said printer, or websites that list comparisons of prices on the websites...."

I have had the same problem looking for technical manuals. I really do not need prices when I already have a piece of kit in front of me and want to know how to get the best out of it.

Microsoft: It's not Metro, it's Windows 8

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: Sod that!

@NogginTheNog

"I used to install them into a directory called Apps"

Likewise I started putting stuff I'd written myself into a directory called MyApps, long before Apple coined the term Apps.

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

Wensleydale Cheese

Happy memories here

I'd just started a new job and had a shiny new Alphastation with a whacking great DEC monitor (so bulky and heavy that the box warned that it needed two people to lift), which ran CDE.

It got the job done and was far preferable to the NT4 box sitting on the same desk.

Wensleydale Cheese

@AC 12:34 GMT

"I've always liked being able to reduce windows to an icon that could be positioned anywhere on screen."

And if I remember correctly you could send escape sequences to do things with those icons. I used some monitoring apps which changed the icons different colours depending on the severity of alerts and that was useful.

"Most of my work is done in xterm sessions so I don't want or need a fancy gui."

Exactly-. Though my first job was to customise the colours of those windows.

Software disaster zone Knight Capital bags $400m lifeline

Wensleydale Cheese
WTF?

And since it’s just a testing program, it didn’t keep track of any of its activity...

" And since it’s just a testing program, it didn’t keep track of any of its activity – meaning it wasn’t easy for Knight to immediately understand the magnitude of what had happened and the massive losses they’d incurred."

Uh? What?

That implies that development was far from finished and had no audit logs in place.

What's the modern equivalent of "Designed on the back of a fag* packet?"

*cigarette packet for you Yanks

Woz: Cloud computing trend is 'horrendous'

Wensleydale Cheese
Happy

Trivia

"you should see what comes up when you type Zuckerberg into Firefox or Thunderbird if you're using the EN-GB dictionary."

So it does. I always thought that was a Yank phrase.

For flock's sake: Scared sheep send SMSes to Swiss shepherds

Wensleydale Cheese
Happy

Re: Being pedantic

"Actually it's Kanton, not Canton, being German speaking. If you want to be über-pedantic :)"

überpedantisch surely?

And canton is the English word for der Kanton

Microsoft tightens grip on OEM Windows 8 licensing

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: That's going to make virtualisation a bit tricky.

@Jess

"Wouldn't a VM just inherit the relevant details of the host?"

I just moved my Windows 7 OEM version into a VM under Linux rather than direct on the hardware and it activated without any fuss.

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Well you are overlooking something

@RegGuy1

"What really pisses me off is the fact that Microsoft are trying to make the UEFI boot process impossible to Linux users "

Here's Fedora's take on that.

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Bauernfrühstück v bacon sarnie

Wensleydale Cheese
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Bauernfrühstück is a great hangover cure

We were recommended this for brunch in a German pub after a very late party the night before. It did not disappoint and the top quality German beer we washed it down with was the perfect accompaniment..

It set us up perfectly for the football match we went to see afterwards.

Outlook.com launch a gold rush for jokers, spammers

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Migrating spam

After years of managing without a hotmail account I signed up last year to get access to the evaluation versions of a couple of Microsoft products.

I have never used my hotmail address for any other purpose, but the pills 'n' potions spammers still managed to reach me.

Unless they have scraped firstname.lastname from elsewhere and decided to give @hotmail a try with that I don't see how they got my address.

Wensleydale Cheese
FAIL

Re: Hack /and/ a hoax

@ShelLuser

"Haven't those idiots (personal opinion) never stopped to think that while outlook.com may attract some new users it could also mean others might walk off when you enforce this upon them?"

The last version of Outlook I was forced to use was unreliable and a pain in the neck. While that might have been down to bad configuration, the very name leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The name Outlook also reminds me of the huge amounts of spam I got at that time because our superiors couldn't be bothered addressing the issue.

No thanks.

Hundreds of websites go titsup in Prime Hosting disk meltdown

Wensleydale Cheese

And for those of you using hosting ISPs

Do you take regular backups of your sites?

I certainly do and can restore the lot reasonably quickly. I have tested that too.

This article does present a scenario I hadn't thought of though, namely that of the ISP restoring older backups over whatever I might have already restored.

Sysadmins! There's no shame in using a mouse to delete files

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: I'm a Unix guy and I have nothing against GUIs.

Class rant there Mostor!

"Honestly, the number of completely crap graphical apps I've been forced to work with makes me wonder whether anyone ever tries to use these things before allowing them to escape from R&D"

In the late 90s I came across a so called management console that was supposed to make life easier than using the CLI. The two main components of it that I hated were:

User maintenance

Nuts to that. I've got a list of 5000 users in a text file I got from another department. I'm going to use CLI and some scripting to get that lot in. I am not going to type that lot in by hand!

Disk maintenance

The evil side of this one was that the manufacturer's policy said this was the only officially supported way of managing disks.

Again nuts to the GUI. The thing could only show you half a dozen disks at a time. I had several hundred to manage. Oh, the server component of that GUI would grab the disk controllers so that engineers couldn't use the serial interfaces on those controllers to do trouble shooting.

The icing on the cake with this GUI was that it offered no way of printing out the items being managed.

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Remote Control

@Alister

"Windows comes with a telnet server or remote desktop - neither are ideal, I admit, but to say "you can't remote log in to it anyway" is complete bollocks."

The trouble with telnet in the remote login context is that it passes usernames and passwords in the clear.

Many of us swittched to ssh years ago and now routinely disable telnet server.

Life would be much simpler for those of us working in multiplatform environments if Microsoft would provide an ssh client and server for their products.

Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Your 'gigbytes of patches and updates' statement is null.

@404

"Your 'gigbytes of patches and updates' statement is null."

I have got to slap your wrists on that one.

1. Install Windows Server 2008

2. Enable a few things like Active Directory, Backup and so on

Total disk usage at this point: less than 10 GB

3. Now run Windows Update

4. Rinse and repeat until no more updates are available.

5 Notice that total disk space consumed is close to 20 GB. If you did this inside a Virtual Machine for training purposes., an initital allocation of 20 GB might not be enough.

Fear not, Linux admins: There are TOOLS to help you

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: webmin is OK

@Jacqui

"and you get to add comments :-)"

That gets a big thumbs up from me.

This is what is missing from many GUI tools. Editing raw text files may be slower than point and click, but you can put a full change history in there.

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: GUI-SHMUI

@eulampios

"The reason why CLI is alien to you is that Microsoft didn't do it right. DOS was a piece of junk, as was cmd.exe"

Absolutely correct. It took me a couple of hours of trial and error to get NT4's 'ntbackup' and 'at' commands working back in 1997. All I wanted to do was set backups off at a certain time of day rather than running them manually. Quite a simple task on any other O/S but Microsoft had a fixation that we should all become point and click merchants.

Wensleydale Cheese
Happy

Re: For [Insert Diety here] sake

"Just changing the port SSH runs on doesn't make it anymore secure."

Maybe not, but moving it well up stopped a lot of noise from the script kiddies who were active several years ago. I don't just mean noise in the logs, but the disk on my home system used to rattle pretty non stop when it was on port 22; life got more peaceful once I'd moved it.

Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review

Wensleydale Cheese
WTF?

Re: Please don't let them revert to Classical Windows 7

"Classic XP Only please. Everything else since has been as if it came right from the Fisher Price/Teletubby La-La Land school of design"

Please dear God no.

I managed to skip most of XP and once I loaded the XP VM under Windows 7 the contrast was stark. XP was the Fisher Price version. Yes I do switch off transparent windows and other effects and pick a more sober desktop for Win7.

And I hate those huge cascading menus under XP.. Give me the Win7 Start thingy instead.

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Catching up to Linux in user friendliness

@Mikko

"Perhaps there will be some handholding in the release version to try and help 60-somethings (and 30-somethings and 15-somethings, for that matter!) get to grips with the new UI."

Going back to last century's versions Windows included a pretty decent mouse tutorial for beginners.

The same approach for Metro would not go amiss.

Backups? Use disk. Archives? Disk. Particle accelerators? Fine, tape

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: @Shocking

"Dont know where you got the concept of "bent pins" as a a real world problem..."

Well, er, that was the idea behind the Windows Server 2008 backup scheme. I assume that someone somewhere is doing that.

"DLT and LTO have massive amount of not just CRC checks but CRC correction. Consequently there is absolutely no point in putting that stuff in software as the hardware does it already in a fraction of the time."

We went through this argument 15 years ago and again a decade ago. CRC in backup software covers the entire path from disk to tape. It depends how paranoid you are. Disabling CRC in software was a performance gain before the mid-90s but in my experience by the late 90s it wasn't an issue. YYMV.

Wensleydale Cheese
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Re: @Shocking

@Pahhh

"Disk to Disk over WAN works if your change rate isnt huge. Removable disk which are robust (like RDX) are only suitable for small volumes. This leaves you with good old tape."

I am reminded of a Usenet sig line many years ago

"Nothing beats the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes".

That might not be as true any more, but tapes are pretty robust.

You can drop them and they'll probably work.

They don't have pin connectors which can get bent either in transit or inserting them into a disk array.

There's also the server room footprint of a tape robot versus a disk array to consider.

I still like tapes for long term archives, but please give me a backup program which has CRC error correction built in. That can make all the difference with older tapes.

Microsoft promises Metro developers 'fame and fortune'

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: But it's NOT Windows 8

"Go to the terminal on Linux and type uname -a - it doesn't say "fedora 15" on my laptop, rather it gives the kernel version number."

This is what my Fedora 17 system says:

3.4.5-2.fc17.x86_64

See the "fc17" in there?

Wensleydale Cheese
Happy

Re: amazing

@jim 45

"I was able to find the steering wheel, it's actually in the front seat, just square now instead of round :-)"

LOL! Memories of the Austin Allegro which 'featured a quartic" steering wheel, which was rectangular, with rounded sides'..

Microsoft picks October 26 for Windows 8 launch

Wensleydale Cheese
WTF?

Re: Windows 8 does work for users

@Jason Hall

"The problem most of us here have with it is THAT WE AREN'T GOING TO BE USING IT ON TOUCH SCREENS!"

I fired up the preview version of Server 2012 the other day. When I loaded a CD I got the expected first time around Autorun dialogue (isn't it time they dropped that?).

That dialogue suggested that I "Tap here" to get more information.

WTF, a touch screen on a server?

P..S. Yes, I know the recommendation is to run Server 2012 in a headless configuration, but I've gpt to find my way around the whole thing if I'm going to support it.

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Room 101

@Obviously!

"Can you install rival OS on an Apple?"

Yep. Via Bootcamp or if you really want to you can zap Apple^s OS X and put Windows 7 or Linux on it.

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Oh noes 0xDEADBEEF

I heard a tale that IBM used 0xDEADBEEF to initialise memor y in one of their OSes.

This made it easy to see what memory was untouched when analysing a system dump.