Posts by Dave559

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: About a billion years ago in internet time (call it 1986) ...

Ach, to fix your EEPROMs, you should have known that all you really needed to do was reverse the polarity of the neutron flow…

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Password rules make for weaker passwords

NO CARRIER

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: Interesting article, thanks!

Yeah, I did have a look at DevClass when it first appeared, but it sort of unfortunately (and maybe wrongly?) gave the impression of being perhaps not very much more than a site of reformatted press releases, and veering dangerously close to Maximal Trendy Buzzword Compliance, rather than taking the time to elevate the "useful need to know" stuff from the sales-pitch fluff (unlike here), so I saw little to attract me, I'm afraid.

And half the value of The Reg genuinely is the interesting, acerbic, and usually informative (and surprisingly troll-free) comments (beers all round, etc), so, as Dan 55 says, without that DevClass is considerably less useful. In addition, it's much easier to skim over the "what's new" in just one place and open potentially interesting articles in new tabs, than to have to go to two separate but related sites!

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Re: Curious how this gets pastr compliance in big corporations ?

The UK online bank Monzo have apparently done pretty much that, having created an emergency holographic bank in case they need it (and, more to the point, have actually used it on occasions): "Please state the nature of the banking emergency."?

[Yes, I know the original is an EMH, but EHB seemed to phrase better…]

Re: "Successive outages on this scale show" . .

Also, while trying to refresh my memory of what a likely Reg newsgroup name would be like, I came across this:

RFD: Remove comp.unix.user-friendly

Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:21:57 EDT

RATIONALE:

Last activity in 2009

If there is need for discussion, more general groups can be used.

If even the (metaphorical or otherwise) greybeards have gone away…!

(In all honesty, I'm surprised that (m)any people would be still using usenet at all these days. It sadly (mostly) stopped being useful for me (apart from a few excepted groups which somehow still maintained strong communities), and became completely swamped with spam, and new users stopped arriving, a looong time ago…)

Re: "Successive outages on this scale show" . .

"That's why I run my own version of the reg on my own server."

Ah, mirror sites and usenet: more elegant tools for a more civilized age… ;-)

comp.news.media.the-register, anyone?

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

Re: How many outages is that now?

So, where can we place bets as to which of Oracle or Google that it will be next week…?

(If they’re being hacked failing in alphabetical order, then it’ll be Google next, right?)

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Re: Ernst & Young

I knew which company was (presumably) intended from the initials (the most likely expansion of those letters being their, now apparently erstwhile, name), as, yes, they are very big and very well-known if you ever read the business news even occasionally (see also KPMG, which I also recognise, but have no idea what the letters stand for!), but the fact that they had apparently renamed had completely passed me by - not really the most successful rebranding, then!

But, yes, it really wouldn't have hurt for the article to have included, on the first mention: "EY, the large accountancy company formerly known as…".

Unless an acronym is one that can reasonably be expected to be already known to readers of a particular publication, it is good copywriting practice to expand and/or explain on first use.

BOFH: Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time

Indian cuisines

"The indian food here in Auckland is a little differnt more of a Fiji Indian rather than a brick lane style..."

Ah, interesting, I know that a very significant proportion of Fiji's population is of Indian descent, but it would be interesting to know whether that has resulted in some sort of fusion cuisine, or whether it just means that Indian food in NZ is just much more representative of the specific regions of India where their ancestors originally came from, with the recipes still passed down through the generations? (Just like in the UK, where many Indian restaurants are actually more specifically Bangladeshi, or Punjabi, with south Indian cuisine (and many others) much less common in many places - and of course even these descriptions are greatly over-simplifying a very large and very diverse subcontinent (with lots of tasty foods!) very considerably!)

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Gail's app connection error

"Gail's is just a massively overpriced version of Greggs"

Even Greggs is an overpriced version of Greggs these days: showing my age here, but I remember when I first started buying Greggs cheese and onion pasties they cost around 37p or thereabouts, and when there was a price increase (maybe once a year or something) they went up a penny or two at a time… Yes, inflation and time passes and all that, but they're almost £2 now and seem to jump up in price almost every couple of months… :-(

No suds for you! Asahi brewery attack leaves Japanese drinkers dry

Re: Someone’s taking the piss.

A piss-up in a brewery, even…

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Brings a whole new meaning to vapourware

I guess this really does bring a whole new meaning to vapourware!

Attacker steals customer data from Brit rail operator LNER during break-in at supplier

Transport for Wales Rail and ScotRail (and Northern Ireland Railways, come to that, which was never privatised) are already directly owned by their respective national governments.

It's sadly often the case that the regent government-for-England tends to only do something progressive after the other nations of the UK have already done so (yes, we all either own or directly manage our water services as well). ;-)

(InterCity East Coast was indeed taken back into state operation (as LNER) earlier than those others, but was originally intended to be only a temporary operator, before it finally became clear that privatisation really wasn't working overall, that the public were fed up with it, and that the remaining English and internal cross-border train operating companies should also be renationalised.)

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Atari ST

The other niche that the Atari ST occupied was in music production, thanks to it having a built-in MIDI port. Many very well-known electronica artists used Atari STs back in the day, sometimes eking life out of them for rather more years than could ever have been foreseen!

There was a lot of excellent music software for the Amiga as well, but given all of its other market-leading "multimedia" capabilities, it is a bit of a shame that the designers unfortunately had a bit of a blind spot when it came to MIDI, which really would have been the icing on the cake!

Re: I loved my Amiga 1000

Within the almost infinite and wonderful treasure trove of Amiga software that was Aminet, there actually was a port of csh, which I made great use of! (OK, with hindsight, csh, ugh, but still…)

And the Amiga's own shell was itself pretty good, and there was also ixemul.library which (as far as I know) provided enough of a compatibility layer to make porting a lot of unix tools much easier than it otherwise would have been.

(I remember installing an entire PostScript environment, for pretty much no reason other than I could, and being highly impressed: that tiger.ps sample image loading up on my screen, very impressive for the time!)

[This is all from the later AmigaOS 3.0 / AGA era, but by then the Amiga really was showing what a powerful system it was.]

In the early 90s it seemed to be the case that computers beginning with "A" were just so far ahead of those very rudimentary DOS boxes, that they would surely inevitably dominate the market: Apple, Amiga, Archimedes/ARM…

Well, I guess at least two of them went on to become much bigger things, albeit with a couple of quite severe hiccups along the way. It's just such a very real shame that the third wasn't so lucky.

Re: Thou shalt read ALL the Sabrina Online strips

Wow, I'm impressed (and very surprised) that that's still on the go! I haven't read that since the late 90s!

(It feels "wrong" that it now seems to be in colour, though!)

Microsoft promises to eventually make WinUI 'truly open source'

Re: Endgame?

"Linux + Systemd + WinUI. Just a thought."

I had been going to write something along the lines of: "WinUI? Yuck, the only desktop environment even worse/fuglier than Gnome 4+"

(Gnome 3 at least had some usable ideas (and proper menus!) and you could still apply themes to it)

There is indeed a horrible amount of (coincidental? deliberate?) fuglification convergence going on between the two…)

Skyrora wins green light to lob rockets from Scotland

Re: sovereign launch capabilities

Drat, beaten to it by EvilDrSmith while writing - someone clearly living up to their name! :-D

sovereign launch capabilities

Yep, we did (for some value of "sovereign", well, I suppose sort of literally, monarch and Empire and Commonwealth, and all that stuff), over 50 years ago, with just a little bit of help from the Aussies: Black Arrow

(Some excellent and entirely justified snark in that Wikipedia article: "As of 2024, the United Kingdom is the only country to have successfully developed and then abandoned a satellite launch capability.")

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: UIQ

UIQ was also Symbian. As @mage has written below, each/many of the companies involved in Symbian developed their own interface layer on top of the core OS.

Kind of like command-line Linux + "choose your own desktop environment" on top, in a way!

Planet Computers, startup funding, and ISAs

(As you might expect, I likewise bought a Planet Gemini PDA, partly as a show of support in the hope that decent sales would get them off to a good start, and partly in the hope (sadly, not really to be) that they would come through on their promised Linux support.)

It's so sad that what should have been the start of a successful series of devices ended up afflicted by the all too common British "garden shed" development curse (and I'm well aware that many of the US tech giants literally or metaphorically did start in garden sheds).

To be fair, Planet did very well to "sell the dream" to enough people for kickstarter funding to make actual devices happen (and we probably all knew that that the first product would be a "reasonably well polished beta" if we were lucky), but that's the problem that we seem to have in the UK: scrabbling around for bare minimum funding and if things actually work out it is by incredible sheer luck.

If they had been in the USA, I'm sure they could have waved a prototype (or maybe even just a slick presentation) around a handful of potential startup funders and have raised millions to work with, and really got off to a good start…

Which then brings things timeously to the current hot issue in British personal finance discussion: ISAs (for the rest of you: those are Individual Savings Accounts - a tax-free savings wrapper). All the recent political discussion about whether the amount of ISA deposits that can be saved as cash (rather than invested in stocks and shares or elsewhere) does have a degree of validity in it, in that we collectively do need to invest in our companies for them - and us as a country - to be able to become successful (taking into account that for some people, investing may be too much of a risk and it would certainly be wrong to reduce the limit that can be saved in Cash ISAs too far). But even then, deposits going into investment ISAs generally go into buying funds or shares in existing large or medium companies, and not startups (where it quite likely is far too big a risk for individual personal investments). Possibly what might be a good idea is for there to be "Startups ISA" funds where - if people want to, and accept the higher risk - you can invest some of your planned investment in pooled investment funds which make their investments across a whole range of startup companies, so that your risk is spread widely, rather than putting all your eggs in one company's basket and potentially losing them all? But we also need institutional investors here in the UK that are more willing to invest in our potential future successes as well!

Re: Ah, Symbian

I miss Symbian, too: well, I don't know if I technically miss it as an OS itself, never having delved at that level, but as a means to the end of having some, at the time, state of the art (and far less bloaty than the nascent competition) smart mobile devices, long before Apple and Google very belatedly jumped aboard the train, it really was great in what it enabled you to do.

Although you could, if you wanted, spend (by the standards of the time) what seemed like terrifyingly large amounts on some of the really high-end devices (such as Nokia Communicators), it also powered a great many much more affordable devices too (which is, again, far more than can be said for many of Apple's and Samsung's (etc) devices these days).

And it was an all too rare (mostly) British success story too!

Forgive the flag-waving, but, ARM itself aside, we sadly have far too few more recent tech success stories to shout about… :-(

I still really miss my Nokia E7, combining both touchscreen technology and a really, really, usable slide-out physical keyboard, a true successor to its at least equally innovative Psion 5mx ancestor. If only Nokia hadn't spent far too long running around in multiple different directions once they realised that maybe it was getting to be time for Symbian to start to think about going for a well-earned rest in the summerhouse at the back of the garden, and had got MeeGo and the N900 and N9 ready much sooner, and most especially before the fireraiser arrived…

GParted: Still the best free partitioner standing – unless you're on a 32-bit box

“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”

[Roughly paraphrased - obviously Windows is certainly no revolution]

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: That's not an extinct bird

We need to stop and do a risk assessment here. It's bad enough with seagulls trying to steal your chips, but one of these big blighters…?!

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

Re: Stupid

If Wayland miraculously becomes as good as X, fine, but I don't see it there yet, and I doubt it will become so by October.

We recently upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 at work, and I was shocked at how Gnome now seemed to have completely forgotten where my windows had been (and what size they were), from session to session. Then I realised the system was now starting a Gnome / Wayland session, and was just spewing the windows all over the place - pathetic. Yes, Gnome 3+ has always been rather crap about window positioning, but at least when I switched my sessions back to Gnome / X, it was better, well, less worse, once again.

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

Re: Take it or leave it...

Aren't you forgetting all those Raspberry Pi and other ARM boxen running Linux (and other OSes)?

If I were Intel or AMD, I'd be getting quite worried these days. Even Windows is dipping its toes into other CPU architectures (again)…

And ARM might also see RISC-V come along and take some of its share…

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Remember who owns, and by extension [sic], controls GitHub and GitHub Flavored Markdown, and may or may not have a vested interest in making that the one variant to rule them all…

(Other flavours of Markdown are available - it would genuinely be nice if there were just one proper standard (and hopefully non-evil) version, but, well, we all know how that goes.)

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Customer service

"Vodafone were on my blacklist anyway due to their shitty customer service."

Do any of the mobile networks actually have good even at least fractionally above appalling customer service?

One of the best things that Ofcom ever did was make porting requests by text compulsory for the networks. It meant that no longer did you ever have to waste lots of time in a tedious call queue (because having a port-out form on the website would have been far too much like providing actually useful customer service) to eventually get through to hard to understand offshored call centre staff (I'm sure the experience was mutual on their part) any more, when the network decided to stiff you by deciding that your current contract was "no longer available" and "Would you like to be mandatorily upgraded to a worse contract at twice the price?" instead…

Even if the call centre maybe would have tried to offer a slightly less exploitative 'deal' in a last ditch attempt to stop you from porting out, it really just is not worth the massive inconvenience and hassle of having to deal with a call centre.

Port out somewhere else temporarily on a month-by-month SIM-only contract, port back in a few days later if the original network does actually have any good deals for "new customers" (because loyalty for existing customers never gets rewarded!), or stick with the network that you ported to, if not…

Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels

Re: "reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies"

> However, I don't like bottom-posting.

The opposite of top posting (or retard quoting, as I prefer to describe it) is not bottom posting: it's (trimmed and) interleaved quoting. ;-)

> Luckily, I don't think I will ever be sending you a story pitch.

I probably won't be either, but I do like Liam's strategy for separating the wheat from the chaff. :-D

Re: And still no iOS/iPadOS version

They recently posted on social media that an iOS version is currently in development, so…

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: I wish them well...

Indeed, I was going to make a tongue in cheek comment about whether the distro includes a scroller of "greetz" with a chiptune playing, while it is loading, but it seems from the article that they've already thought of that… «laughs/cries»

The desktop theme shown reminds me of Tron, which is pretty cool. I don't think I'd want it for everyday use, but kudos nonetheless.

Perhaps the real question is why they haven't gone for MagicWB icons and MUI interface widgets…

(goodness, those are all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away now…)

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

If they wanted cost savings, they'd focus on highly-paid people who are unlikely to be doing a better job than a potted ficus. So how much are they going to save by replacing the CEO with ChatGPT?

Gronda, gronda?

(A language that Duolingo probably doesn't offer…)

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: [citation needed]

For obvious reasons, I think it's a real shame that they didn't just call it IMP (Image Manipulation Program, as above). It would have been entirely inoffensive and it would have have had quite a nice (if not necessarily intentional) nod to how cameras work on Discworld, too…

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

Re: This is brilliant....

Harkonnen Industries are undoubtedly working on a 'plug-and-play' version as we speak: the perfect product to be sold to American (or Imperium) citizens who potentially might not pay their private medical bills [1] (oh, did we mention that plug-and-play means it is unplug-and-unplay as well?)…

[1] «rolls eyes (albeit with some sympathy) in most-of-the-rest-of-the-developed-world-speak»

Re: From 100 days to a lifetime?

"All artificial hearts last a lifetime. It's in the guarantee! The clever bit is making that lifetime a long one."

All biological hearts last a lifetime. It's in the guarantee! The difficult bit is that the duration of the guarantee period is not known in advance… ;-)

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Compose key

So, after all that, is there a way to get a proper unix-style compose key on MacOS nowadays?

The built-in MacOS key combos are indeed quite clever, but it still lacks provision for many characters that you can type via a compose key (eg, «compose» + xx -> multiplication sign), and some of its choices are somewhat awkward and hard to remember (eg, opt-k -> ˚ (degree symbol) as compared to the more mnemonic «compose» + ^0 (yes, it's like a superscript zero)).

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

Meh

"blown away nearly a trillion dollars in stock market value from Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta."

…and nothing of value was lost.

(And add me to the votes for: "If it wasn't worth putting in writing, then it certainly isn't worth us wasting the far longer time it takes to listen to someone waffle on about it in audio".)

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Re: Interesting . . .

I more often than not just do a big highlight-n-paste from the scroll buffer these days when I want to look through logging output (mate-terminal being my current preference, again because modern new versions of gnome-terminal have foolishly borked the M(enu) in WIMP with their rotting hamburgers), but might the typescript command perhaps also be of use when you need to save output somewhere for later peeking around in?

(Bah, why doesn't The Reg editor let me use kbd tags?)

OneOdio Focus A5: Big battery, budget sound, and a bargain bin price

Re: This is a bit random, isn't it?

The Reg used to do rather more in the way of reviews: mobile phones, netbooks (remember them?), the latest expensive Apple shiny thing, possibly even digital cameras (if my memory isn't imagining that), etc.

The products reviewed were indeed always a little bit random (probably aligned for the most part with whatever specific products had actually been sent to the vultures for them to pick over), but I rather enjoyed reading them, and it added a bit more of a human touch that sadly is a little bit lacking from the current style of The Reg to some extent nowadays.

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more of this sort of thing again…

(But, yeah, this review would indeed have been better timed for a week or two ago…)

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Re: Get a Dog, Learn to Bark

Amazon has often been described as having become a computing infrastructure business with a gift store on the side.

Maybe Netflix should similarly consider becoming their own computing infrastructure business with a content (ugh) licensing / production business on the side?

They could then start touting spare capacity to current AWS customers, and see if they can offer a better deal… «gets popcorn»

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: Have to agree M'lud

That's exactly it: the first few incarnations of the theme sound nothing less than completely out of this world and otherworldly (which is precisely what the theme for this programme should be), and are absolute perfection (Brava, Delia!), along with the equally otherworldly opening credits special effects which were often literally not much more than smoke and mirrors, and oil droplets and kaleidoscopes, and careful camera and lighting effects, but also look awesomely alien.

I hadn't realised that the theme had been changed quite so many times, but, as the video compilation shows, by the time we had reached the 1980s it had been regenerated degenerated too many times that "conventional" electronic music had kind of caught up with it and sort of converged to the extent that it had completely lost its essential otherworldliness. Some of the versions from that period even sound like they could be Jean-Michel Jarre compositions (and I love Jarre, but the Doctor Who theme isn't exactly his style), and the more recent bombastic efforts could be from just any old straight-to-video action movie, sadly…

The only others who have come close to capturing the essence are Orbital! 8-)

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: But

The image is just an accompaniment to the article, to serve as an illustration of what the interface looks like (it's the cherry, not the cake), so a (reasonable-quality, but not overly-compressed) JPEG is an entirely reasonable choice, being an acceptable trade-off between image quality and file size, bandwidth usage, and download time. This seems perfectly acceptable for a news article, although you would indeed probably want to use a lossless format such as PNG if the image were part of an encyclopaedia article or instruction manual, etc.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Re: Auto Delete

You do have to wonder just what sort of pst-up "almost but not quite unlike email" system ever thought it would a good idea to stuff all of your email (etc) into one giant complicated (and therefore easily corrupted) "data" file? Even mbox, which is at least human-readable, restricts itself to the rather more rational choice of one file per mail folder.

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

Re: RE: why?

That sounds like you have maybe installed Firefox manually? In any sane Linux distro, the distro packagers will have disabled the update checks and nags, and just let the package manager take care of updates (and, if your distro gives you the choice, choosing the ESR version helps, because what sort of lunatic wants to update their browser every 6 weeks and find that things have been shuffled around for no good reason yet again?)

Re: Crumble? Wallow morelike

I thought that the Firefox implementation of Safe Browsing only checked the URLs locally within Firefox within the browser itself against a (regularly updated) list of unsafe sites, precisely so as not to tattle your browsing habits to Google (unlike certain other browsers)? Or did they sneakily and evilly change how it works at some point? :-(

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Picture of Cray

And all of the male Enterprise crew members are wearing some pretty pimptastic shoes, to be honest…

The other strange things about that photo are that James Doohan rather looks like he could be auditioning for a role as another Scot, namely Billy Connolly, and Gene Roddenberry likewise as Terry Wogan!

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Re: bit hypocritical?

"Given Hollywood's (et al) well documented, strict copyright enforcement policies and multi-billion dollar turnovers, it seems strange than FOSS organisations should actually choose to get into bed with it ..."

I'm actually more surprised from the other perspective: as special effects gradually become more computer-based, I can well see the, uhh, money conscious movie industry seeing (as they indeed did) Linux render farms as being much better value for them than whatever Microsith might have wanted to charge them for something vaguely similar, were it even possible.

What I'm much, much, more surprised at is that they have then released a number of their tools as open source (where, shock, horror, their rival movie studios and SFX labs could also use them), rather than each jealously keeping them in-house. A very welcome, but often too-rare, example of co-operation which then benefits an industry as a whole.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

KaiOS

Firefox OS was definitely quite a good idea, a lightweight OS running only web apps on modest and relatively affordable smartphone-like hardware in the Goldilocks zone (not too overpowered and expensive, but, just as importantly, not too underpowered either).

But sadly, from all the reviews I have read, it seems that KaiOS have taken the OS but try to squeeze too much out of the cheapiest nastiest most sluggish underspecced RAM-crippled hardware they think they can get away with, with sadly predictable results. Yes, they are mostly trying to reach price points for certain developing world markets, but it really does sound like the proverbial basic old skool Nokia phone would be a far better experience and much better value for money for that market, even if it has slightly fewer features. Ironically, some of Nokia's later lower end Symbian smartphones were still reasonably good in comparison to their bigger brothers (and had a reasonable web browser): if they hadn't invited the pyromaniac in, it would probably have been possible to still churn those out now extremely cheaply for developing markets today (or MeeGo would have got a proper foot in the door, at least).

There are various semi-hobbyist Linux smartphone projects on the go: I keep hoping that eventually (at least) one of them will get to a stage of reasonable utility! It could make an interesting Reg article to do a round up of where things currently are in that area?

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

shouldiusetablesforlayout.com

Hehe, some nice easter eggs in the page source for that site!