Posts by dajames

Even in remotest Africa, Windows 10 nagware ruins your day: Update burns satellite link cash

Re: Set all your connections to metered

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-networking/how-to-set-an-ethernet-connection-as-metered-to/ecdaca08-d413-4a6a-9e33-b4afb337fc18?auth=1

Interesting ... and thanks for the link.

It's daft though, they haven't though this through thoroughly enough (why am I not surprised).

WiFi should be settable to metered or unmetered by SSID, not as a blanket setting. I, for example, should like my domestic broadband's WIFi hotspot to "unmetered" but my mobile phone's WiFi hotpsot to "metered".

Capitalize 'Internet'? AP says no – Vint Cerf says yes

The Internet is an internet

... that happens to be named "The Internet". That's it's name, and one capitalizes proper nouns.

There's no reason why the word "internet" can't have distinct meanings in its capitalized and uncapitalized forms ... this isn't a Windows filesystem, is it?

Re: I'm still upset...

So how do you feel about television becoming "telly"? To be fair, I always used to refer to it as "A box of mind numb", but I digress.

My father-in-law calls it the "idiot's lantern", a term I like and have stolen.

Travelling Wave Amplifier Tube was changed to Travelling Wave Tube Amplifier for some reason.

But, surely, a "Travelling Wave Amplifier Tube" is a tube (which may form part of an amplifier), while a "Travelling Wave Tube Amplifier" is an amplifier (which may incorporate some kind of tube). The terms mean different things, and one should take care to use the one with the correct meaning.

The fact that one forms a more entertaining acronym than the other might lead us to consider terms like "TWA tube" or "TWT amplifier", but shouldn't lead us to use a term that has a different meaning from what we're trying to say.

That way lies madness.

Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted

Re: "your pocket-sized guide"

True geeks have huge pockets to stuff lots of gadgets in

Yes, but those are full of gadgets ...

'Windows 10 nagware: You can't click X. Make a date OR ELSE'

Re: Evolve

Have some punctuation: .,;:().. :)

Have an upvote (for that, if not so much for the rest of your post)!

Re: I actually wanted to upgrade to 10...

They're a packaging firm, and MS Office is used for their label templates, I expect some pain there converting the documents to line up with the physical label sheets, but that should be the biggest hurdle.

glabel is surprisingly painless, open source, and contains most of the heavy lifting.

The Windows Phone story: From hope to dusty abandonware

Re: Hopefully

It might be difficult to find a 100% replacement for Office ...

I was reminded, the other day, of the old adage that 80% of Office users use less than 20% of the features. I suspect very few people actually need a 100% replacement for Office ... and for those few there is Office.

Most people don't need it, and wouldn't want it if they knew there were alternatives.

Re: Aww

I *really* like windows phone. Purely because of the home screen, I hate Apple's and Android's way of just splatting icons, the tiles made the phone for me

Many Android apps have a "widget" that acts rather like a TIFKAM live tile. With the right choice of apps you can have a home screen that looks quite like that of WinPhone, if that's what you want.

Personally, I'd rather my phone wasn't chewing bandwidth updating the data it would need for a live tile until I actually open it so -- for most apps, anyway -- I don't use the widgets though the choice is there.

Re: Shame

Yes, it is a shame. The phone is the one place where TIFKAM wasn't crap.

Surface Book nightmare: Microsoft won't fix 'Sleep of Death' bug

Just shut it down properly. What's the problem? Do people really use a sleep mode?

I must say that I don't tend to use Sleep mode, because experience has taught me that it's one of the things that's least likely to work running Linux on newish hardware. I use Linux, and that just doesn't have manufacturer-supplied drivers for things like ACPI on any hardware (and ACPI is fiendishly complicated so the drivers are hard to get right).

I thought this was just one of the prices one had to pay for running one's own choice of OS on hardware made by companies that only want to support the OS with the biggest market share, but it seems it doesn't even work properly with Windows on Microsoft-supplied hardware. That's not good.

Sleep mode is a standard feature of the Surface Book -- something that is supposed to work out-of-the-box -- and any customer should be entitled to expect that it will work faultlessly 100% of the time when running the supplied version of Windows.

I was about to write "especially at those prices", but even if we were talking about a budget laptop the customer should be able to expect that Sleep would "just work" (TM).

This is an epic fail on Microsoft's part, and they should issue a fix or recall the product line right away.

Bank in the UK? Plans afoot to make YOU liable for bank fraud

I'm all in favour of customer liability

... but only when the customer is actually liable.

The bank specifies the equipment and the security measures used, the bank controls the processes by which online trading and online banking are carried out; these processes produce audit trails, and it is the bank that has access to those data. The onus MUST therefore be upon the bank to prove that a customer has done something fraudulent -- or at least negligent -- and the bank must bear the cost in cases in which it cannot demonstrate such proof.

If the bank wishes to reduce the incidence of fraud it is the bank that is in a position to improve security, not the customer, so the bank must bear the responsibility for their security being effective.

iPhone 'Error 53' plaintiffs say Apple not giving reimbursements

Re: With apologies to DA

... also major manufaturer, testing it's a thing.

Yeah, testing is a thing ... but even major manufacturers sometimes get it wrong.

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Pointless features add to browser bloat and insecurity

Re: Just looking at public "commercial" web site won't tell all the truth.

A browser able to disable some features when accessing external ("untrusted") sites, while enabling them for internal applications, would be welcome.

It's a server problem.

HTTP supports an "ACCEPT" header which, in theory, allows a browser to tell the server what sort of content that browser will accept in a page. Web servers should be required to (as in an RFC "MUST") honour it.

Servers should not be allowed to serve Flash (say) to any browser that didn't explicitly accept it, but should be required to deliver equivalent content (as near as possible) using whatever that browser did accept.

The browser could then be configured with a list of "trusted" domains from which it would accept specific formats of richer content, and could refuse to accept anything but text/html (without scripting) and image/png from anywhere else.

We'd need a bit of enforcement ... if anyone set up a site that wanted to serve Flash and just returned an HTML page saying "This site requires Flash" would have to have a pretty good reason for doing so or be liable to some punishment too horrible to countenance -- including but not limited to the confiscation of the domain name.

The end result would be a much less rich browsing experience, overall, but one that would be inherently easier to secure, and much less greedy on bandwidth. A net win, methinks.

90 days of Android sales almost beat 9 months' worth for all flavours of Win 10

Re: Symbian

The other one is Symbian. Don't laugh - this is 2011 days.

In 2011 Symbian was already dead in the water.

For a long time Symbian was the only decent mobile around, but it was flawed. When IOS and Android appeared its days were numbered. (I'd mention Blackberry here too but for the fact that RIM went all headless-chicken in the run-up to BB10 and threw away their market advantage.)

Symbian had two big technical problems:

One was that its ABI was based on an obsolete version of the GNU C++ toolchain for ARM. That meant that until GNU changed their ABI (which they had to do to support C++ exceptions) one could write C++ code for Symbian and essentially regard the target device's ROM as a shared library -- a nice trick, and one that had worked well for Psion (Symbian's authors) in their earlier 16-bit x86 organisers. However, when gcc added support for c++ exceptions (whch were late coming to the ARM toolchain) the ABI had to be changed and was no longer the same as that used by the ROMs of millions of existing Symbian devices. Psion couldn't retroactively change the ROMs in all devices so Symbian was stuck with an obsolete version of gcc with increasingly poor support for the evolving C++ standard. Psion should have realized that the gcc ABI was liable to change and not designed an OS that depended on it not doing so. It was pretty obvious that a change was coming -- in the absence of exceptions Psion had had to invent their own (notoriously difficult to use) "trap" mechanism for error handling and must have seen that the existing ABI would need to be changed to add C++ exception support. Non-standard C++ features like the trap mechanism meant that Symbian C++ wasn't standard C++, and Symbian code was harder to write than code for other platforms -- with the result that there were fewer third-party apps for Symbian than there might have been.

The other was that Psion bowed to pressure from OEMs and allowed them to replace the top layer of the presentation stack with their own code. This was done so that different vendors could offer Symbian devices with different GUIs and so create distinctive branding of their devices ... but it was done in such a way that prevent third-party developers from writing a single executable that would run on every vendor's devices, so developers had to write multiple front-ends and market the same app as mumtiple different products, each for a different GUI. It should have been possible to define a presentation API and allow different OEMs to write their own front-ends so long as they supported the standard API and so support common third-party apps, but that wasn't done. That pretty-much put the kibosh on Symbian ever being able to offer a universal app store along the Apple lines and denied them a major potential source of income.

Most apps are crap, but the app store was a major factor in the rapid uptake of IOS devices. Had Symbian been able to offer the same thing they might have been able to hold onto much more market share for longer.

I'm not laughing, it's tragic.

Re: They are not comparable.

You can't compare "sales" of windows and android.

One is an actual computer operating system. The other is a kind of phone. They are not the same thing.

That's a little unfair ... I think a lot of people would claim that Windows was an OS too.

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

All Archimedes' rig would need (I'm speculating) would be a smaller targeting mirror...

"speculating". Very good. I see what you did there.

Re: Predicting Problems

Not if the mirrors -- if they can be made at all, note: they'd need to withstand much more intense, focused rays -- were angled to reflect mis-aimed beams upwards.

... or if those mirrors were made convex, so that they would defocus the beams making them (relatively) harmless.

Goracle latest: Page testifies, jury goes home

Re: Java? Java? What's that again?

C# itself is a Java clone made after Microsoft lost its litigation with Sun. Just MS did it different enough to avoid further litigation, and made its whole tooling stack on its own.

The Sun/MS case was different.

Sun's complaint was not that Microsoft was using the Java APIs without a licence -- Sun were quite happy for Microsoft to use the APIs and to produce their own version of standard Java -- it was that Microsoft had extended Java in such a way that would encourage Windows Java programmers to write MS-Java code that couldn't be compiled on a standard Java compiler or run on a non-Windows platform. Sun's goal with Java was portable code that could be run anywhere and Microsoft's extensions would have restricted Java code (that used the extensions) to Windows platforms. It would have been easy for a developer to write an application in MS Java thinking that as it was Java it would run anywhere, and only to discover that that was not the case when the time came to port the application to another platform.

Yes, C# is different from Java ... the most significant difference, from Sun's PoV is probably that it has a different name. Nobody is going to write a C# program thinking it will run on a standard JVM.

Google instead wanted to use the whole existing tooling stack to support Android development without investing too much, thereby it needed a 1:1 replacement of Java.

Methinks that that is in keeping with Sun's original goals for Java. The Java language isn't being changed or extended by anything that Google are doing, and any Java code written for Android that doesn't directly use Android APIs will be usable in Java apps on other platforms.

This is all in Java's -- and so in Oracle's -- best interest, but they're getting greedy. I hope they get slapped down.

The Sons of Kahn and the Witch of Wookey

Prophetic

Borland became Inprise

Inprise went back to being Borland, because Inprise was a stupid name in anyone's book.

Borland spun off the only interesting and useful part of their company as Code Gear so that the part still called Borland could concentrate on navel-gazing.

Code Gear was bought by Embarcadero.

Inprise + Borland + Code Gear

In Bor Code Gearo ... Embarcadero

Strangely, though, I have always found myself thinking of them as InBorCodeGear-a-dillo (perhaps in homage to some half-remembered old English folk song).

Now I realise that I was just being prophetic: It's InBorCodeGear-Idera-O

60 per cent of Androids exposed by new attack on mediaserver

It's not one or the other ...

"Yet again, the fix would be proper vetting of code in Google Play and other app stores"

Why? The fix would surely be to patch the bug, that way you fix the hole wherever the exploit comes from, including direct download. Lock the door, don't rely on a security guard on the front gate whilst leaving the back open.

You need to do both.

You lock the door if it has a lock, but you keep the security guard for doors that don't have locks. You employ a security guard but you still lock the doors because the guard can't see everything that goes on.

In this case, the unlockable doors are lots of older Android devices running e.g. KitKat that are never going to get an upgrade to Marshmallow (much though we may wish that that were not so) so we -- or rather Google -- do still need to improve the filtering of apps in Play Store.

That filtering is never going to be perfect, though, so Google do also need to issue patches and improve the security model of the OS.

Android Lollipop sucks at security, says researcher

Re: What is the exploit here?

Ok, the user installed an app that probably did something they didn't want it to but that's hardly android's fault.

It's not the fault of the Android OS, per se, no.

However, what we commonly see is that an app advertises itself as providing one useful feature but in fact also (or instead) does something quite different. That instances of such malware can get itself into the official Android store is the fault of the Android ecosystem, if not of the OS.

That the Android OS doesn't (until Marshmallow) give the user any way to vet the permissions actually requested by an app, and deny them on a permission by permission basis, is a shortcoming of Android, if not a fault.

World goes SIM-free, leaving Sony and HTC trailing behind

Re: "SIM free" ?

Is this "Network free" ?

I think the point is that phones are being sold direct rather than via airtime providers who customize them and load bloatware onto them and then fail to provide timely OS upgrades (for their patched OSes).

By selling direct (or through a normal retail shop) the OEMs are able to ensure that updates are released as fast as they can develop them ... or, if the OEM doesn't customize the OS at all, as fast as they receive the updates from the OS vendor (Google, in the case of Android, which is what most of these phones currently run).

So it's not so much "Network free" as "without network-specific crapware".

Malicious Android apps slip into Google Play, top third party charts

Re: If you are running an up to date android

No, it's not too difficult a problem to solve, Microsoft manage to update windows.

Leaving aside the fact that Microsoft manage to make a right pig's ear out of Windows updates, from time to time, even when they're not trying to force-feed one with Windows 10 ... the problems are not the same.

Windows is Windows. Virtually all of the updates that Microsoft shift through Windows Update are updates for Microsoft software that has not been touched by anyone else (the remaining tiny fraction consists of updates for third party device drivers that are shipped with Windows by Microsoft).

Android is not sold unaltered by (most) OEMs. The likes of Samsung and HTC apply their own user interface layers (TouchWiz, HTC Sense, etc.) to the software and these too need to be patched. That requires extra work by the developers at the OEM -- work that often isn't done because the engineers responsible are busily working on applying those layers to newer versions of Android and haven't time to go back and patch legacy (i.e. more than six months old) versions.

The majority of Android devices are phones, and many of those (in the UK, at least) are sold by the airtime providers, who add their own customizations to Android. These customizations may also need to be patched and, as with OEMs, the skilled staff needed to apply the patches and test the resulting code are busy elsewhere.

Android is Open Source, anyone can build an Android version without a contract with Google. Those OEMs who preload their devices with Google's Android applications and provide access to the Play Store must have a contract, and Google could amend the terms of that contract to make the OEMs liable to a stiff financial penalty if they didn't apply patches and reissue firmware within a stipulated timescale. However, Google don't have contracts with OEMs that don't bundle their apps, and don't have contracts with the airtime providers, so they have no leverage there.

Yes, this update system is deficient. Google are aware of that, but there's a limit to what they can do about it. They now provide a lot of support functions in the shape of a monolithic process called "Google Services" and that remains under their control, with the result that it can be patched via the Google Play update mechanism regardless of any (unpatched) OEM code that may be running, and this helps but only on devices that have Play Store access. It is unfortunate that whenever Google bring more functionality under the auspices of Google Services they get criticised in the press for exerting yet more control over the platform

Destroying ransomware business models is not your job, so just pay up

Just don't pay ...

Making random payments to unidentified bad guys in the hope that the data fairy will grace you with a visit sounds like hopeless optimism, to me.

... but if the purpose of the ransomware is to extort money to fund a terrorist organization it may (depending on where you live/work) be a crime to pay to the ransom. Even where it is not directly a criminal offence any victim who decides to decides to pay is likely to attract uncomfortable scrutiny from the security forces.

Re: It's not three choices for most businesses, only those run by idiots.

What if the highly confidential documents you had were stolen? You wouldn't want your competition to go over them, would you? So you pay them again. Do you trust them enough that they never showed the documents to anyone?

The malware artists won't have taken your documents away -- just encrypted them in situ so that you can't access them. What you get (of you're lucky) when you pay the "ransom" is not a clear copy of the documents, it's a key you can use to decrypt the copies that are still on your PC.

Methinks a hacker who wanted to alter your payroll data or steal your documents for blackmail purposes wouldn't draw attention to his visit by leaving ransomware as a calling card.

Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google

Re: "decisioning"

"decisioning"

is that even a word?

One of the great things about the English language is that you can make new words from old whenever you like, and there's a reasonable chance that what you come up with may have a meaning that is obvious to your audience.

... but sometimes it doesn't!

Don't split Openreach, says BT, and we'll splash BEELLIONS on broadband and 4G

Re: Something needs to change - shit service from the monopoly

The kind of 'fuck you, take what you are given' service only a monopoly can provide.

As opposed to the kind of "fuck you, we can't make a profit by selling to you" service that only an open market can sink to, you mean?

Internet connectivity is getting kind-of important. The government wants us to do more and more online -- as a business owner I have to make VAT and employers PAYE returns online, for example -- so the government should be putting legislation in place that will ensure that every home and every business can get an internet connection with a sufficient speed to enable us to fulfil our statutory requirements without paying the earth. That doesn't mean "superfast", but it does mean a reliable connection at around 10-20Mb/s

Once you have that legislation it matters little whether the service is provided by a monopoly or by commercial companies in competition, but without the legislation you will never get decent service in remote areas.

Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job

Re: What?

I don't get the stock photo: her spectacles have tape wrapped around the nose bridge, yet their straightness of the frame shows they are structurally sound, so why the tape at all?

Just like DevOps ... Nothing is broken, so do we really need a new way to mend it?

That photo, though .... the image is called "broken glass girl" (note: not "broken glasses girl") but it is not the glass of her glasses that is broken.

Just like DevOps ... it completely misses the point.

Linux Mint to go DIY for multimedia

Re: Er... NO!!!!

I don't think we actually mean the GUI when the phrase "more like Windows" is bandied about. I think we mean something that your granny can use without having to phone you every two minutes.

So ... NOT like Windows then?

The Windows GUI isn't actually all that easy to use if you're not familiar with it, as grannies tend not to be, and it's getting worse with each new release. We in the IT industry tend to forget that what is familiar to us may seem to be dark magic on first exposure.

Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch

No, but seriously ...

Because computers didn't work properly with BIOS.

Computers did, of course, work properly with BIOS.

Well, if they didn't (and most didn't, at least some of the time) it usually wasn't the BIOS's fault.

UEFI is veritably the road to hell -- paved with good intentions. The good intentions are many: It's supposed to support booting from hard disks that are larger than a BIOS can handle. It's supposed to provide a mechanism whereby a an x86 PC can boot straight into protected mode, so the chip makers can finally stop supporting legacy real mode operations in their precious silicon. It's supposed to enable expansion cards to be made with on-board firmware that can work in a PCI/PCIe slot of any computer regardless of the type of CPU fitted (Intel wanted this so that cards designed for x86 could be used in Itanic^WItanium systems). It's supposed to provide an OS-agnostic pre-boot environment from which system administration functions can be run. It's supposed to provide a level of security that will ensure that a system will only boot from a properly signed and authorised image.

The big problem is that it was designed by a committee, a committee of interested parties who each wanted to bring their own pet feature to the standard, and who apparently didn't pay too much attention to what else was getting in through the door; a committee that didn't have the budget, the trust, or the authority to take actual responsibility for the monster they created.

Have you seen the size of the UEFI spec? Have you ever tried to read it? It's a fine example of a document that was put together by people who knew what they were trying to say, but didn't think to say it in a way that would be accessible by anyone else. To say that it was impenetrable would be kind. It's hardly surprising that it's taken several generations of supposedly UEFI-compliant motherboards and their firmware to get to anything that works somewhat consistently between different boards and vendors. The standard is far too ambitious, encompasses far too much, and explains far too little. Someone should have taken it in hand and whittled it down to usable size.

Secure Boot is actually a very good idea -- it's in the users' interest to be able to have some confidence that the OS on a PC hasn't been suborned by malware. The problem with it is that the UEFI Forum didn't -- wasn't in a position to -- create a master set of vendor-neutral keys and set up a service whereby OS providers could get their OS images signed. The meant that Microsoft, as the biggest commercial provider of OS images, set up the signing infrastructure themselves, and own the main OS verification keys that board manufacturers supply preinstalled on their boards. This means that the boards that are sold accept only Microsoft-signed OS images, at least out of the box, and in order to install another image it is necessary either to get Microsoft to sign that image with their keys (which some Linux distros have done) or to add a new set of keys to the board (which not all boards allow).

For most users, the main advantage of UEFI is that it supports GUID partitioning, and so enables disks larger than 2TiB to be visible at boot time. Even that's becoming less important than it once was, as many PCs are now fitted with a small (certainly less than 2TiB, at today's prices) SSD and larger spinning rust for storage, but the spinning rust doesn't have to be visible at boot time, so a traditional real-mode BIOS booting a GUID-capable OS will work just fine.

When SSDs drop in price by another order of magnitude it may again be important to be able to boot from GUID disks, but by then I hope UEFI will have died the death it so richly deserves and been replaced by Coreboot or Open Firmware or something else that does the jobs that actually matter without the bloat of UEFI.

Re: and after disabling UEFI...

There is always an alternative to Windows that is not Ubuntu.

I thought it was quite refreshing to see something recommended other than Mint!

Brit polar vessel christened RRS Sir David Attenborough

Re: William Spiers Bruce

I voted for the Scot, William S Bruce ...

So did I ... but my candidate spelt his middle name "Speirs".

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on July 29th

Re: The Last of Us

Regular people are prepared to spend extra money to get Windows, or even more money to get Mac OS, rather than accept the Linux OS for free.

That is how regular people feel about Linux -- so lame they will pay money to avoid it.

I think you underestimate the comfort factor of an OS that comes preinstalled on a computer, and doesn't require any thought or effort on the part of the user.

If every PC in the world was supplied with Linux (or some other free OS) and Windows was something one could download for free and install oneself then most people would stick with the free thing and not bother with Windows.

Most people don't care which OS they have (unless they have a specific need to run a particular application) they just don't want to have to learn anything or do anything technical for themselves.

Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network

The password salt is itself stored in the password file - in plain text. If it weren't, it would be impossible to verify a password by comparing

Exactly so.

The purpose of a salt is to ensure that if two different users coincidentally choose the same password they don't generate the same hash. There is no requirement that the salt be secret, just that it be different for each user. That prevents rainbow table attacks, among others.

You enter "Password_4".

System sees last digit is a number, replaces that number with n-1, generates hash result (for Password_3 in this example)

I seriously doubt that anyone would bother to code a check for such a specific incremental password change. The user could just as easily change Password_3 to pAssword_3 or Passwor_d3 or Password*3 or Qassword_3 or ...

No. If you're going to compare a putative new password against a list of old ones you need some way to recover those old passwords in clear. That doesn't mean that they have to be stored in clear, though.

Doesn't this mean that they are storing previous passwords in plaintext? Surely a massive no-no.

Not really. It means that the system has to store the previous passwords -- not necessarily in plain text -- but not the current password. If the system is successful in ensuring that the passwords are appreciably different then having access to the password history won't significantly compromise the current password.

The password history can be salted and stored using a key accessible only to the system -- or using (say) a hash of the current password -- so it needn't be easily attackable in any case.

Re: Pointless

... changing shared passwords after someone leaves (say any shared admin accounts on certain boxes that don't support more than one admin user), or following a potential compromise, make a lot of sense.

Shared passwords are a problem best avoided by not sharing passwords. Every user should have a unique ID and their own password, and shared permissions should be managed at the group level.

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

Re: Trump? Who's he?

He's saying whatever it takes to get elected, he means none of it, and we're none the wiser as to what his policies actually are.

I'm not sure what the scariest aspect of that is -- that people elect candidates that they know to be lying, that the things Donald Trump has been saying are appealing to the electorate, or that people elect candidates whose true policies they do not know.

Or, for that matter, that DT may not actually have any policies, but just wants to lie his way into the job and wing it from there.

Intel has driven a dagger through Microsoft's mobile strategy

Re: It's not just Microsoft.

Apple are also reliant on Intel investing heavy R&D into CPUs that can crunch lots of data without hammering the power. Their MacBook range is built on the same "Core M" CPU as used in Microsoft's own Surface 3.

If I'm reading the report correctly it's the Atom CPUs and the SoFIA system-on-a-chip lines that are being axed. "Core M" is something very different, offers far more performance, and has a higher entry cost. The message from Intel seems to be that there aren't enough profits in the bargain basement so they'll only be selling higher-end chips with higher-end margins in future.

I'm not sure that that's a bad thing ... and I don't think it affects Apple at all.

Hold on a sec. When did HDDs get SSD-style workload rate limits?

Re: Why not bigger drives

... why do drives have to be limited to 3.5 or 2.5 inch sizes? Using the larger 5 1/4 inch size would allow far more data to be stored ...

The larger the platter the more energy it takes to spin it up (and down) and the greater the gyroscopic force on the spindle (causing wear) if the disk is moved while spinning. Large platters also need longer, and so stronger, and so heavier, arms for the read/write heads, so these have more inertia, which increases the energy needed to move them and increases the track-to-track access and head-settling times.

Also, the more energy you need, the more cooling you need ...

There's a reason drive sizes have been getting progressively smaller and smaller.

I am Craig Wright, inventor of Craig Wright

Re: null output

Not sure what shell you're using, but base64 and sort trash the output file before reading the input.

I'd been thinking that applying a line-by-line alphabetic sort to a one-line file would be pretty pointless but, as you say, the file being sorted is null by that stage anyway so there's (if possible) even less point in it.

Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

Re: Apple users want Windows OS

Apple users want the Windows OS, but Windows users never want Apple OS.

So how do you explain the Hackintosh project?

In any case: Microsoft will sell a copy of Windows to anyone who wants it, regardless of whether it will run, but Apple don't really want you running their OS on anyone else's hardware, and never have.

Ex-Apple gurus' elusive Android phone coming to UK next month

Re: Lollipop?

CM 13 is available for many other devices already, so is there a valid (technical) reason why Obi doesn't offer the latest?

They're presumably still working on it, since the website also says:

"Each MV1 is shipped with Cyanogen 12.1.1 and comes with a guarantee that it will receive an over the air update to Cyanogen 13.1 for a far more immersive experience."

... though exactly what an "immersive experience" is, I wouldn't like to guess!

Speaking of immersive experiences, though, it's a shame it's not waterproof.

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

Re: There is no FTTC in central London

We have lots of customers in central London & there is no FTTC available there, hence no take up.

When I'm at home in sunny Berkshire I have ADSL2+ which is nominally "up to 16Mb" and generally synchs at about 17 or 18. I find the speed of the line less limiting than slow servers and web pages overloaded with more adverts than content (El Reg take note!). I could have fibre (FTTC - cabinet about 150m away) but it would cost 50% more and the extra speed would only be noticeable on large downloads from fast and responsive servers. I feel no temptation to pay for that!

SWMBO has a flat in the City of London, but there she can only get "Up to 8Mb" ADSL 1 (same price, same ISP) which generally delivers between 5 and 6 Mb/s. I find that OK-ish for most things, but she says it's at best a bit slow for her work (using a virtual desktop system of some kind -- I try not to get involved) and at peak times much too slow. She doesn't experience that slowness at peak times when in Berkshire, so it does seem to be due to ADSL contention, not server load.

At the flat there is no possibility of FTTC or even of ADSL2, and the reason does seem to be that BT don't care about domestic customers because the City is largely about businesses, and businesses (in the City, at least) generally have SDSL or better.

Sometimes it's better to be out in the country!

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Re: there's no bad advertising :(

... doesn't beat those large BSD panels you come across at stations, airports and cash mashines across the world.

I had a brief alternative reality moment there ...

You might want to look into the difference between BSD (a version of Unix) and BSoD (a Windows error report).

... Wn7 64 Professional is not home software, the word "Professional" gives you a hint !

This is Microsoft we're talking about. "Professional" means "this is the version with the minimum feature set that actually works" and "Home" means "this is a half-arsed cheapskate version from which we've removed a bunch of useful stuff that home users may not miss just so we can push the price down without tempting IT departments to cut corners".

Note the emphasis. The networking tools, for example, in "Home" versions of Windows are so seriously crippled that anyone with pretensions toward being a power user - or even an enthusiastic hobbyist - should just say "no" and walk away. It's not just about using workgroups (or the latest atrocity "Homegroups") instead of domains.

Don't start me on (lack of) tools for managing permissions in Windows "Home" versions!

Bundling ZFS and Linux is impossible says Richard Stallman

Re: You probably don't want to use OpenZFS on Linux...

By now, all SSDs on the market have decent (or better) garbage collection algorithms.

You seem to be missing the point of TRIM. It's not an alternative to GC in the flash controller, it's a technology that assists GC and makes it possible to achieve better wear levelling.

It does this by ensuring that flash blocks that formerly belonged to files that have been deleted are made available for garbage collection sooner -- at the point of file deletion (when the TRIM command is issued) rather than at the point of reuse -- so that the garbage collector has more free blocks to work with.

Panama Papers hack: Unpatched WordPress, Drupal bugs to blame?

Re: Simpler yet - Just Encryt

But if the files were accessed through an application that had been compromised and had access to the data, would encryption help you?

No ... but that sort of volume-wide encryption doesn't afford the sort of protection for client confidentiality that ought to be (but hardly ever is) in place in a law firm.

There should be a document management system that encrypts each document with a different session key. There should then be an access control system that assigns each document to (say) a particular client account, and allows only specific employees to access the documents for each client account. The access control system would manage the encryption keys, so enforcing the security, and would audit every file access, so fingers could be pointed if documents went astray.

This stuff hasn't been rocket science for years ... it's just expensive so hardly anyone bothers.

Watch: SpaceX finally lands Falcon rocket on robo-barge in one piece

Re: Mice

No cats?

I'm having difficulty wondering how a zero-G litter tray might work ... or smell.