Posts by Dave559

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Re: hmmmmm ... yeah

@Eric 9001, you make some valid points, but, realistically, relatively few people have the skills, inclination or time to open up their laptop to replace the WiFi or Bluetooth cards, and sticking dongles into USB ports is a bit of a bodge, really. I agree that things would be so much better all round if all manufacturers always used good quality chipsets well-supported in Linux/BSDs/etc, of course. We can but hope.

When you are using a laptop away from a desk or table (with it often literally perched on your lap), which is the main reason for having a laptop in the first place, a good trackpad is definitely of prime importance, and a mouse isn't really an option in those situations, so that's not really all that relevant. We have to deal with the scenarios that we find ourselves working in, and hardware that actually does work well in those 'restrictive' scenarios is therefore infinitely better than "But if only I were actually at my desk with my multi-monitor setup, sitting in my comfortable chair…" - well, we're not.

As one of the biggest laptop brands in the world, Apple is perhaps scrutinised more than any other by the iFixit people and the like, and, yes, design flaws are highlighted and pointed out. Hopefully this does lead to a process of improvement in later models (and likewise for other brands).

While Apple doesn't make it easy to run other OSes on their hardware, I'd imagine that there would be legal actions were they to attempt to become too hostile to doing so. There is growing emphasis on "right-to-repair" laws and the usual lobby groups are (rightly) becoming equally emphatic about the growing problem of e-waste caused by manufacturers ending software support for devices and how people should have the right to install a different OS and software to extend the device lifespan.

It's a perfectly reasonable perspective to decide that Apple laptops are not for you, but while you are clearly sneering at those who might consider the MacBook Neo to be suitable for them, I suspect we will all find that there might be rather more people who will find this a reasonable choice for their needs than to buy a £300 generic-PC laptop and then have to, in effect, spend another £200 of their time researching and swapping out WiFi cards to get it to work as expected under Linux (and of course there are dedicated "built-for-Linux" laptop manufacturers, but these sadly tend to be rather more expensive). We all make our own choices and we spend our money accordingly.

Re: hmmmmm ... yeah

I used Linux exclusively for many years, and still do use it an awful lot of the time for various purposes. On a server, it's great, on a literal desktop machine, it's definitely pretty good.

But on a laptop it's sadly still too often the case (certainly not a majority of cases, but still often enough to be extremely annoying if you, or worse, a non-techie friend or relative, has to then try to get it all working) that too many WiFi and/or Bluetooth chipsets aren't "out of the box" supported by a given distro's installer.

You then either have to hope that there are some additional packages somewhere that you can install, either not being part of the minimal base OS install or provided as extras by a helpful packager (if you're lucky), or you have to hunt and jump around various threads on numerous different forums before eventually finding some iffy-looking source code on an equally iffy-looking website (with instructions often not very well translated from Chinese, just to add to things) that you have to try to download, compile successfully and install (your non-techie friend has long since given up by this point), or if you're very very unlucky you get to the "Nobody has worked out how to make this weird-but-it-saved-the-huge-global-manufacturer-$2.53-on-build-costs chipset work yet" situation, and then you're really stuck (although maybe someone will have cracked how to do it in 6 - 12 months' time?).

Apple do make very nice hardware, their laptop keyboards (after a certain well-known very bad period) are very nice, and their trackpads are definitely the best and smoothest that I've used. This new MacBook Neo is still somewhat more expensive than a cheapo Windows craptop, but I would say it is a much better proposition, especially if someone is able to stretch their budget that bit further, and I'm sure they will be quite attractive to some who were otherwise thinking of buying a Windows or Linux laptop. I don't know how the Asahi Linux project is getting on these days, but these could maybe also make a rather nice Linux laptop too one of these days?

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

cat

'My cat loves to stretch out and pull the keys off my computer keyboard.

I now have to use a virtual onboard keyboard when I need to use the ">" key'

Yikes! Bad cat! There's a solution to stop that problem from getting even worse, though:

cat > /dev/null

Ah, there seems to be one small flaw in this solution, however…

(OK, two flaws, I wouldn't do that to a cat…)

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

I only know of this Button A, Button B thing from the historical references [sic] in the uk.telecom FAQ, and even that's a looong time ago now…

And these days, kids will barely even know what a phone booth is/was!

US is moving ahead with colocated nukes and datacenters

A literal DBAN…

Yahoo! Japan! and ! Line! to! merge! systems! into! massive! private! cloud!

Re: Yahoo???

Yahoo Finance provides the data for Apple's Stocks app, so I dare say that's the main reason that that part of what's left of Yahoo-non-Japan still works.

I assume that possibly some payment from Apple to Yahoo USA (or possibly ad tracking data reaping) greases the wheels there somehow…

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

Re: Authenticity?

The spring equinox [1] is sooner, and just as (if not more) astronomically suitable a gifting point :-)

Just a smidge too late for Imbolc, however…

[1] It is a northern hemisphere rocket after all, sorry upside-downers…

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

It's a Big Storage conspiracy!

Clearly Microsith are in cahoots with Big Storage. They need a way to make you buy ever larger hard drives, just like the bloatier code needs faster processors game of old (of old? who am I kidding…).

(muses: Is it still a "hard drive" if it is an SSD and has no moving parts?)

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

Re: AIdvertising

"No, no, no... you're misunderstanding the basic use case for AI: replacing pictures of cats with unwanted adverts."

Oh, like a reverse CatBlock, you mean? :-(

(CatBlock of course isn't AI, it's just pattern-matching on known advert URIs. But then again, isn't (current) so-called AI just big-time pattern-matching? Discuss…)

[Oh, and until I saw the text editor box here, I thought this thread was titled "ALDVERTISING", not "aidvertising". Damn you, overly-zealous sans-serif fonts that don't top-and-tail their capital-i's!]

Sony no longer home of the Bravia as it plans TV biz spin-out to China’s TCL

14 year old TV

It's obviously not remotely the same from a technology perspective, but my parents had their main (and for most of that time, only) TV (wooden-framed and on wheels and all) from about the mid-1970s to probably around the early 2000s or so, and it worked perfectly fine for all that time.

That there is now an expectation that LCD TVs might not last anywhere near as long as that is a little bit depressing, really.

Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

Re: Elderly curmudgeon here

Someone on the social netz highlighted a nice "long read" article about the history of Markdown just the other day (basically telling the story of how an as-simple-as-it-can-be 'grassroots' text format became indispensible):

How Markdown took over the world

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

Re: Non-standard kiosk?

Yeah, that kiosk looks so, umm, hacked together that my initial thought was that surely it must be a fake put in place by a local haxx0r crew in order to harvest bank card magstripe details from gullible marks… K'ching!

(Not that genuine self-service kiosks seem to be much better quality: when I occasionally get some fast food, I now always have my fingers ready to activate my phone's camera immediately after paying, in order to quickly snapshot the order number, as more often than not the order receipt completely fails to print!)

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Definitely! I'm assuming/hoping that everyone did of course read that in Richard Burton's voice! :-)

Re: No one would believe

There can be only one conclusion as to what has happened:

No one would have believed that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

With infinite complacency men sent their machines across the gulf of space, to and fro over that red globe, going about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

Yet, those intellects, vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded these intrusions with some annoyance, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Unknown to mankind, that seemingly desolate distant planet was defended by an array of heat-rays. Abruptly, the sounds ceased, and communication from the satellite there was no more.

[With apologies to HG Wells]

Death in the dollhouse as Microsoft marketing reboots digital soap operas

Zava?

Hmm, I guess Microsoft have never heard of Zavvi, a real life company which bought up Virgin Megastores, changed them to that ludicrous name, and then fairly promptly went bust barely a year later…

Re: They have no mouth, and they must scream

There were lots of rather nice slightly snarky cultural references in the article, the beer is well deserved!

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

Re: Retro games

Yeah, their choice of bundled games is pretty good, a fair number of well-chosen classics there!

(Although, on the other hand, about a quarter of them I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever - or are some of those ones maybe later fan creations (yes, such things do exist!)?)

Re: squishy "dead flesh" type keyboard

Absolute nostalgia bliss, and I'm certainly not ashamed to acknowledge it!

I'll admit that I looped through the rather spiffy 3D roll-around animation on the website quite a number of times, it really did bring back memories (and I'd completely forgotten how the Spectrum rainbow stripes actually wrapped around the side of the case, a very nice design feature then and now!).

Hehe, trial by Daley Thompson's Decathlon (etc) was exactly my first thought on reading the article, too!

Tiny tweak for Pi OS, big makeover for the Imager

PIOS

Hehe, seeing PiOS written as one word reminds me of PIOS, a name I've not heard in a long time…

(I always thought it was a really stupid idea to change the OS name from Raspbian - an easily searchable unique word, if you're looking for relevant information - to a new multi-word name, one part of which is OS as a separate word, which, given the quantity-over-quality crappiness of many search engines nowadays, is often likely to turn up all sorts of irrelevant pages in search results…)

This Thanksgiving, top your turkey with Cranberry sOSS to fund open source

Re: sOSS

Hauppauge isn't actually an English word, of course. When I first heard read of the company, I had assumed that they were German and that the name would be pronounced as such - it looks rather like a German name, after all!

But it's actually the name of the town (on Long Island, New York, USA) where the company is based, and the name of the town derives from the local Native American name for the area.

(And to further show the perils of pronunciation spelling, your version with the "r"s only really works for non-rhotic speakers (where r tends to get glossed over (eg, car => "cah")), the rest of us would verbalise the r as an actual r, which is much more intrusive than was intended!)

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

Re: Why was this page unavailable ?

I was also experiencing similar problems with comments and votes yesterday, and so emailed The Reg webmaster to let them know. I got a nice reply - they know about the problem, have put workarounds in place and are looking into it. (It seems to be database server related, rather than knock-on ripple effects from the Cloudflare outage.)

Wishing them good luck in getting it all sorted out!

CPython may go Rusty, but older platforms risk getting iced out

Re: Rust's mascot is a crab

Musing about a crab simile, were you? Today's word of the day therefore has to be, probably rather appropriately in this context: carcinisation

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Re: Musl libc is only a small project

Hmm, has anyone ever seen LP and LP in the same place at the same time…?

Then again, it looks as though all this writing about systemd has maybe seen LP (no, not that LP, the other LP) actually assimilated by the collective now?

"The run0 command, systemd's replacement for sudo, which we introduced with systemd 256" ;-)

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Who, me?

Thank you very much! It just seemed to fit quite perfectly there!

(In the probably very unlikely event that any commenters are unfamiliar with the thagomizer, all credit has, of course, to go to The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, and to the entire paleontology community, who quite clearly do know a funny bone when they see one…)

WARP

If they have problems with their warp cores, they clearly need to employ greater numbers of skilful and experienced Scottish engineers (and have a few bottles of whisky available to assist with post-incident recovery processes - the real stuff, none of your synthehol muck, laddie!)…

Who, me?

Hopefully someone, suitably regomized, will be sending an email for the "Who, me?" column in the next few days or weeks about how they managed to thagomize half of the internet this time…

(Otherwise, they'll need to be keeping an eye out for freshly delivered rolls of carpet and poorly maintained lift doors for quite some time…)

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Firefox Profiles

That's good to see that Mozilla haven't forgotten about Profiles (firefox --new-instance -P FTW!), I had thought that their scatterbrained attention had seemed to be much more on "container tabs" of late as a (different) way to keep your different web activities separate? (I still prefer the more definite certainty of different instances of Firefox running different profiles, to be absolutely sure that nothing inadvertently leaks between tabs in just one instance.)

They do seem to have a rather jumbled up approach to things sometimes, with it almost seeming that different development teams work on separate approaches without much or any internal communication at all: see also Bookmarks, with (as long-time users will surely have noticed) the Bookmarks toolbar falling out of and back into favour at different times, a Bookmarks menu, a completely bizarre "Other Bookmarks" section, a Bookmarks menu/toolbar-icon-thing coming and going, etc, etc…)

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!