Posts by Down not across

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: "On the matter of international keyboards causing chaos"

PC keyboards work with scan codes and are all to do where the keys are on the keyboard, not what the keycap says.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Mr Xorg

You mean bit like what Vincent Damon Furnier did? Although at least he was in the band.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Re: All too familiar.... :-)

...unless you are a thirty ton mega elephant with bronchial pneumonia

I did rather like the bit...

The renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right.

“Freedom,” he said aloud.

Trillian came on to the bridge at that point and said several enthusiastic things on the subject of freedom.

“I can’t cope with it,” Zaphod said darkly, and sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn’t yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and preferred the one on the right.

He poured a drink down his other throat with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well.

He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that, so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: Spawn of Satan

Manual? On paper? You should be so lucky. Seems to be some online these days. Firmware might have some minimal baked in help.

Re: Rent seeking

Also their ribbon "Smart Hub" or whatever it is is awful. I found the pulling/cancelling the apps quite welcome. Only reason it was connected at all was to temporarily use for Netflix (or perhaps Prime). Had it been newer model with mic and/or camera it would never see the net.

As for LG, they were already on the "do not buy" list due to their prior shenanigans, but now they're irrecoverably on the don't buy ever shitlist.

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

You will still get them calling umpteen times to arrange collection of their kit. Despite what was agreed when the contract was terminated. Not that it matters as they'd be unlikely to keep to the appointment to collect. Eventually "Look, the kit no longer exists. I'm no longer living there" will sink in and they will stop calling.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Reseller

Intriguing. I kind of thought the cloud provider would be the customer and Rocky would not be RH customer, but customer of the reseller. I suppose lot comes down to what the reseller agreement and cloud providers agreement with its customers say. Plenty for legal people to think about.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Paris...

I went to Nanterre on a work trip (decades ago...) and unless it has changed since....few burning cars aren't going to make it any worse.

Re: Paris...

CDG.. possibly the worst (in many ways) airport I've had the misfortune of having to use.

Does any flight ever leave it on time?

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

I used Sun "UNIX" layout for ages without any issues. Any umlauts etc are easily handled via Compose. And CTRL is much more comfortable.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Re: Facts:

- Less payroll. Just because the job is 'Silicon valley-esque' does not mean that is the COLA pay when the employee lives in Sheboyganville. If employees want 'Valley pay', move to Cali and enjoy the expensive lifestyle.

I can understand that point of view. However, employees are (or should be) being compensated for the value they bring to the employer. Where they are when producing that value shouldn't really affect the compensation.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: PGP exports

Ah yes, I've mentioned it here before that I took part in the proofreading. Thick stack of paper. A floppy disk. On the diskette was the aforementioned stack OCR'd.

My (and many other volunteers') task was to proofread the code on the diskette. OCR back in the day was not great. Still, better than typing it in and still needing to have it proofread anyway.

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Re: Now forgotten

Worked very well indeed. its what I used on Convergent MiniFrame/MegaFrame (running CTIX) with dial up for news and email feed.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Unfortunately the water in the crawlspace under the raised floor doesn't play well with the power conduits and other wiring.

Don't ask how I know.

Just hope its water and not sewage.

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

Re: Its a cunning wheeze

Caliber is at least one thing you can't blame Brexit for. Possibly more amusing is that US and UK caliber are not same (well neither are their gallons).

Lenovo's Yoga 9 is flexible at home, but stretches the friendship at work

If you buy this machine for personal use, you'll part with around $1,700 and bring home a pretty, slick, and pleasing machine that won't particularly delight and probably won't disappoint. I do worry that its silvered edges will scratch.

How much?!

For $1700 it would bloody need to delight and not disappoint in any way. While reading the review (before reaching the above revelation) I was thinking it might be in the 600-700 region, which would still be more than I would be willing to pay after reading the review.

(yes yes, alright with i7 and 16GB perhaps 700-800, but still ~1k overpriced (IMHO of course))

EDIT: I suppose if the $1700 is AUD and not USD then its not that far off. still rattling sound, when the soundbar is clearly a selling point, is unacceptable.

Re: I genuinely don't understand

I agree. In the same way why would an employer even contemplate allowing employees' personal ,potentially malware laden, devices to connect to the corporate network.

I've seen some pretty dire empoyer provided devices, loaded so full of corporate security/tracking/authentication crap that the poor things are on their knees, laptops with screen resolutions from decades ago hence I can see why some employees might be tempted to use their own devices. Personally I wouldn't.

Employer provides the tools and if the tools are insufficient that is up to the employer to resolve.

Also more importantly these days, The employer has full control of their kit so the employee is less likely to be on hook for issues. As for allowing employer (some level of) control of personal device(s), as i suspect is often case with BYOD, not going to happen on my kit.

M2 Ultra chip lands in 'cheese grater' Mac Pro to displace Apple's last Intel holdout

And not just memory. I/O throughput as well.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

I like the application that Michael Crichton came up with in his book "Airframe". A mechanic/technician working on a complex device such as a passenger jet could use AR to access schematics, specs and other technical information while they worked on the device. I already have an old laptop on an arm next to my workbench to display schematics and parts lists while I work on something.

That was first reasonable work application that I thought of. Hands-free access to documentation without needing to move or look elsewhere could be handy in many maintenance situations be it aircraft or some kit on an oil rig. Add the ability to magnify part of field of vision and take pictures.

Laptop is fine for most of us, but if you're on a ladder/hoist working on something it might be bit less practical.

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

Barn find

Corrosion found in the craft's systems kept it grounded for the rest of 2021

Oh well, nice patina is all the rage now.

Brits and Yanks join forces to make fusion magnets cool again

Re: If you want a second unit of temperature ...

Primary unit should've been Kelvin to begin with (IMHO). No objection to having Celsius as secondary.

Absolute mad lad renders Doom in teletext

Have one of these -->

Totally useless and yet totally awesome.

I love it when people with some spare time do wacky stuff like this.

Neuralink says US OKs human experiments with Elon's brain chips

Resistance is futile

Perhaps Ikea will start offering "stylish" alcoves.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers - You Forgot

Seems to be universal. i resolved that by buying a house with large loft and outbuilding(s).

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Re: Windows ME

Solaris is still really just version 5.

$ uname -sr

SunOS 5.11

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: I need my local printer

Ah, and I thought that the local printer would've been replaced with one of the networked ones so he'd get to enjoy the traffic of lots of other people coming and going collecting their printouts.

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

Re: "Do the benefits far outweigh anything that are the societal consequences?"

Definitely profits.

"This new generation of AI will remove the drudgery of work and unleash creativity," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. "There's an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools to help alleviate digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees."

Remove drudgery of work by terminating your employment. Employees are then empowered to do what they please.

Chrome's HTTPS padlock heads to Google Graveyard

Re: Typical Google doublethink

There's no excuse now for using any unencrypted service on the raw internet. Whether that's DNS, HTTP, FTP, Telnet or unencrypted SMTP (which is a bugbear for myself because it should be end-to-end, not just you-to-server, it's 2023 ffs!). Even a personal forum, or a login to your own server, or your own dumping-ground storage on a remote server that you own, etc.

You literally cannot trust things to just get to their destination unread or unmodified any more, so you must encrypt.

Sometimes it doesn't really matter. Read-only/anonymous access to FTP or website to read or download something is kinda pointless to encrypt (unless you're worried it might get modified in transit or accessing dubious material I suppose).

Any tarballs you download can usually be verified reasonably well with checksum (yeah i know MD5 doesn't really cut it anymore) If someone wants to snoop me reading RFCs they're welcome to it.

Some simple data gathering and distribution within your own network with low power/small memory machines might not have the headroom (either in ROM, RAM or power envelope) to encrypt and intecception of the data might not matter anyway. (granted, this is not example of anything on "raw internet")

Obviously something with real authentication or more sensitive (for whatever reason hat might be) content you would naturally want encryption.

TLDR; it is a bit silly to make a blanket "nothing should be encrypted, its of no cost" statement.

CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain

HTTP works just fine without DNS. Of course it is more convenient to use easier (often, not always) to remember names than bunch of octets.

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Re: Need to get away from these names

Too slow. What you want is Ludicrous.

LattePanda's Sigma crams a 12-core Intel Raptor Lake CPU into an itty-bitty SBC

Umm...yeah. That is actually quite appealing piece of kit. Could run few VMs and have arduino as well.

iäm quite tempted, if I can catch my wallet that just took off and legged it in fear.

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

Re: Not his first rodeo

Sounds like DRAIN.COM to me - a joke program that claimed to have detected water in the floppy drive and initiated a "spin cycle" that involved torturing the floppy stepper motor a bit.

Handy for running a head cleaning diskette.

Turing Award goes to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet

Re: Don't blame Metcalf for CAT 5 plug

I still have a box (can't recall exactly, but I think there are dozen or so cards in the bulk box) of 3Com Etherlink III 3c509b combo cards gathering dust. Having tried various cards one tends to settle for something that works reliably in most settings.

Amazon to shutter Digital Photography Review

Re: That's a travesty!

Proper in-depth reviews (like ones DPReview publishes) can be useful many years later when acquiring some old kit where manuals might not be readily available, or there are some idiosynchrasies which would be explained in the manual.

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

Re: Sleek chargers

Sleek chargers may also be somewhat underrated so that when running the device full tilt the battery is draining slightly instead of charging. I suppose that will force you to take a break at some point to do nothing and let the battery charge.

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

Two is good. Two is much better than one. Two is a bare minimum. But for over a thousand quid, I expect more than a bare minimum. For a £1200 device, I expect a plenitude.

You don't say. For a "pro" device wired ethernet is a must, although Dell for example has ultraportables that require their "puck" or other USB device for wired ethernet so I suppose it is the unfortuante trend. I'd rather the devices stayed thick enough for RJ45 and make use of the space for larger battery or something. They even charge 10 quid for ethernet dongle on 1500 quid laptop (at least looking at Lenovo's site)

Anyway, i digress, I was expecting the price tag to be less than half. For ~500 (quid,euro,dollar(US)) it could be worthy of consideration. Anything over 700 and it isn't (for me anyway) any kind of value for money. Pleased to see WWAN (well 5G in this case) is an option but costs 200 quid extra.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Spot on. As it happens the E1 vs T1 is not anything to do with speed of the channel but quantity of channels in the TDM mux (32 vs 24).

Baud has very little to do with data rate as it measure modulation. Even the early V.22 was transferring 1200 bps at 600 baud.

Re: BT Home Highway

Nothing that good when I had HomeHighway, but Freeserve did have free calls up to 30 mins so I had my cisco 2503 configured to dial up on demand but drop the link before 30 mins was up. Initially they didn't even check for channel bonding so for quite some time it was 128k free access.

Freeserve did eventually cotton on and stopped channel bonding. by that time DOCSIS was becoming available so ended up canceling the ISDN not long after.

Re: Mobile dongle and ISDN

Whilst your phone may happily roam with multiple operators there can be big differences in charges. Choosing operator to roam with manually could save a lot of money.

Qualcomm adds 'premium experiences' to Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2

I have a Oneplus 6 which supports 2 active SIMs

I think you'll find that your phone most likely has dual standby (DSDS) (which is what most multi-SIM phones have).

Yes you can receive and make calls on either SIM but not on both at the same time as your two active SIMs still share just one transceiver.

As to why or whether you would want or need to is another matter.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

Sadly, we're running out of options on that front. The EU decided every car must have a 'black box' fitted so...

Nah, not quite. That is every new car. So unless you want something new, there is still plenty of choice.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: A Little Bit of History

But in all seriousness, who thought it was a good idea to put end-users (ordinary bobbies) in charge of collating engineering requirements? :P

Dunno, to me it makes sense for the end users who actually use the system to come up with the user requirements and then its up to the engineers to scratch their heads to work out how to deliver that (which will then be the engineering requirements).

Microsoft pushed 'inaccurate' Windows 11 upgrade to unsupported devices

Stat Counter

According to Stat Counter, Windows 10 was running on 68.75 percent of PCs worldwide in January, versus 18.13 percent for Windows 11. Windows 7 took a 9.62 percent share of desktop Windows versions, with Win 8.1 clinging onto 2.31 percent and Win 8 and XP the remainder.

So various Windows versions add up to 100%

I beg to differ as there are number of desktops running MacOS, Linux and *BSD.,

What's really up with data disconnects in the deep blue sea?

Re: Excellent opinion piece

Usually when I read article tagged OPINION, I take that to mean it is authors opinion and not necessarily something that would be totally (or even at all) factual and is more 'food for thought' type piece.

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Re: Formatting DVDs?

Not only that, DVD-RAM required no finalisation or even burning software (you did need drivers for the drive) You just used it just like another disk.

Re: Formatting DVDs?

Unless my memory fails, when DVD-RAM first came to market, it was available only in cartridges and plain discs were later. Cartridge was bit different (opened at one side) compared to the early CD caddy (which opened from the top).

Re: Most tasks can be condensed onto 1 page of A4

Reponse files are finicky. If you really want to tear your hair out try the dbca response and template files. To make it extra fun most error messages will be misleading and/or confusing.

Having said that, I do agree that time would've been better spent by crafting appropriate response file rather than tedious manual (especially a manual where you're nearly guaranteed to at some point get lost as to which point you were at.

Germany to court Indian IT talent – starting with easier visa application processes

Aren;t they already bucking the trend by staying? The experts were talking about "skilled Indian nationals"....

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Signal, Telegram....Some Of Us Don't Care!!

So.....yet again.....our lawmakers in Westminster propose to "do something".......which can never be enforced!! Your taxpayer dollar at work!!!!

Bit premature perhaps. It's still GBP at the moment..

BOFH: The PFY has won an award … for outstanding service?

Re: Oh happy day

...(I'm supposed to be tidying my office for an important customer visit on Monday.... sadly I've run out of desk drawers to hide all my crap in)

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? – Albert Einstein