Posts by Dominion

Home Office seeks Brexit tech boss – but doesn't splash the cash

Re: Over in Brussels this morning

The probability is that someone taking that job is on a 3 month notice period, so by the time they recruit them, wait 3 months, Brexit will have happened. Or not.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Dabbsy for PM!

“If I give you some money, would you take your clothes off?”

Standard behaviour for my MP. I don’t even have to affix a HIGNFYesque “apparently” at the end of that statement!

UK Home Office sheds 70 staff on delayed 4G upgrade to Emergency Services Network

Reviewing the review

If the review of the project is 7 months late what chance has the actual project got? It looks they need to initiate a review of the review.....

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

Business as usual

This has been an ongoing problem for well over 20 years - look at the complete mess that Birmingham Cable left behind when they trashed vast swathes of the city. Probably the same cowboys in Carlisle that were in Birmingham.

IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs

Re: I know....

You mean make a UK copy of an existing system and migrate all the data across? They should get Paul Pester in to manage it, he’s well in with the UK Gov at the moment....

Apple somehow plucks iPad sales out from 13-quarter death spiral

Meh....

If I want to change the playlist on my Sonos, or turn the heating up then I grab my iPad, if I want to do something more substantial like editing photos or updating my websites then I grab my laptop. Different beasts for different purposes.

LG's flagship arrives with <checks script> ... G7 what now?

Re: Imperfect notch hiding

Well if it hadn't had a notch it would have been a deal breaker...

DIY device tinkerer iFixit weighs in on 15-month jail term for PC recycler

Pedant Alert!

" impossible-to-repair rating of 0 out of 10."

Shurely that should be possible-to-repair rating ?

ZX Spectrum reboot firm's shareholders demand current directors go

Manufacturing?

If it's true that these are going to be shipping, then someone somewhere must be able to corroborate that they are actually being manufactured?

All that Levy, Martin etc need to do is confirm where so that it can be independently verified? Put it to them el Reg ?

Reg writer Richard went to the cupboard, seeking a Windows Phone...

Re: I want you back, I want you back.. for good

Sorry to vote you down but my Apple iPhone 5s is great. It's coming up on 4 years old and still works absolutely fine. It's a perfect size for a phone and still does everything I want. If I had to replace it now I'd get an SE.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

Brennan*

You can also use a Brennan with Sonos - it works really well.

Where's my free monitoring service, One Plus? – hacked-off customers

Don't Panic!

It's OK, they've given all your details to Equifax. What could possibly go wrong??

Probe: How IBM ousts older staff, replaces them with young blood

Re: Meanwhile in the UK,...

23 month contracts? How convenient.... Utter weasels.

WordPress is now 30 per cent of the web, daylight second

Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS

It's easier for non-techies to publish content via a CMS. Which is precisely why I went from a website with flat HTML pages to a CMS. Whilst I'm happy to code HTML with notepad and upload with command line ftp, having a CMS means non-techies can publish content without bugging me to do it for them.

Re: Wordpress is NOT a CMS

If you'd made that assertion many, many years back when I was evaluating WordPress vs Joomla I'd have agreed with you, and it's why I went down the Joomla route. If I had to make the same decision now I'd probably go with WordPress.

Wearables are now a two-horse race and Google lost very badly

Re: Why is Garmin

Tom Tom are / have bailed out of the wearables market.

Arsenal are red, pundits have 'insights', BT and Sky splurge £4.5bn on footie rights

Re: BT return?

You're forgetting advertising income?

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Another Amazon Key door-lock hack

Re: Okay, let's pretend I had an aneurysm and bought one of these IoT lock thingies

The weakest point of the door is probably the frame. A good kicking in the right place will soon smash the door out of the frame - the effectiveness of the the lock is irrelevant.

Apple: iPhone sales are down (but they've never been more lucrative)

Re: I still own an iPhone 6 plus

Show off! I still own a 5S. Can't see any reason to replace it at the moment. I am thinking about getting an SE for when my 5S inevitably fails.

Heart Internet outage... three days and counting

Re: #Metoo

Every time there's been a buyout, Heart -> Host Europe -> GoDaddy the level of service has degraded. Another week and I'll be off them for good.

YouTube turns off cash tap for automatic video nasties

Subscribers

I've never seen the point of subscribing to a channel. The content that comes up when I go to YouTube is based upon previous viewing habits, so if something new from a channel that I'm interested in is published I'll see it anyway. Being a subscriber doesn't add value for me. I get only paying out after x number of views, or total viewing hours, but not based on subscribers.

Tata for now: Marks & Spencer transfers 250 tech jobs to outsourcer

Meh...

The manufacture of clothing for M & S, which used to be predominantly in Britain has long since been pushed out to 3rd world sweatshops. This is just a continuation of that.

Woo-yay, Meltdown CPU fixes are here. Now, Spectre flaws will haunt tech industry for years

Opportunity to sell more CPUs?

So let me get this straight. In order to mitigate against this I have to take a performance hit. As I'm close to the limit of capacity already I'm going to have to buy new CPUs, which are known to be vulnerable. And then, once there are new CPUs available I have to buy those as well. I'm not sure why the Intel share price has dropped, at the moment they seem to have a prime opportunity to sell more of their faulty tat and then sell us supposedly fixed tat.

IBM does what IBM does best: Raises the chopper again

LLoyds Bank

Is that the Lloyds Bank staff that have just TUPE'd across that are on their way out so their jobs can be sent offshore?

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

Re: Who gets paid for stating the bleedin' obvious ????

In what way are they "amazing"?

I honestly think I need to stockpile a few iPhone SEs for when my 5S finally dies (3 years old and no reason to replace it)

It was El Reg wot won it: Bing banishes bogus Brit bank banner ad

Re: What worries me

From experience, the opposite is true. My parents only go to the list of favourites that I've created for them - and on-line banking isn't one of them, whereas tech savvy work colleagues type bbc into a search engine.

Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'

Selfie?

I guess using a selfie as your lock screen is a really bad idea!

Want to provision a new VM on Azure? Get in line

I love the irony that yet again these stories of cloud failures are sponsored by.....

Sponsored: Ensuring end to end performance of a cloud phone system

Sponsored: Buyers guide to cloud phone systems

Sponsored: Getting the most value from cloud phone system

Vodafone signs deal with CityFibre to connect 5 million homes with full fibre

Good news?

I presume this will be rolled out to towns and cities that don't presently have decent internet connectivity rather than just a faster connection for places that already have decent connections?

No?? Thought not...

BT hikes prices for third time in 18 months

OpenRetch

I bet it's that pesky OpenRetch fleecing their customers again, nothing to do with BT at all...

ATM fees shake-up may push Britain towards cashless society

Re: Link ATM?

Sainsbury's self-checkout -

Do you have your own bags?

- Yes

*scan, beep, scan, beep, finish*

How many bags have you used?

- 0 (I fucking told you I had my own bags!)

How do you wish to pay?

- Card

Payment accepted

Voice prompt:"Please take your bags."

*Inward screaming*

BBC Telly Tax petition given new Parliament debate date

Re: Telly Tax Is Value For Money

10 down votes - unbelievable!

Are you really all Dad's Army fans?? It's was vaguely amusing 40 years ago when they last made a new episode, but come on!

The award for worst ISP goes to... it starts with Talk and ends with Talk

They’re all rubbish!

Had BT, Sky and now Utility Warehouse, all via BT / Openreach. Sky - router was crap. BT - incompetent billing department - the bills were a confusing mess of services being charged and refunded each month, sometimes over several months due to being billed quarterly. Ended up shouting at them because having left them they insisted I still needed a direct debit for BT Sport, even though I’d never asked for it, never watched it and it was added to my account without my consent - charged each month and then refunded. Utility Warehouse are ok, but speeds not great. No option of cable round here so ultimately stuck with a service ending up with BT, but I will never, ever pay BT directly again. I’d sooner not have an internet connection than deal with vermin like them.

Ex-EDS bod at DXC Technologies? Sign up to new pension scheme - or else...

I've never seen any proof that final salary pensions are used to off-set salaries. I wonder which is the better deal, accepting no further pay rises that result in a higher final salary pension or taking paltry pay rises and a lower pension?

Oracle to shutter most Euro hardware support teams

Oracle to shutter Solaris and SPARC

FTFY.

Equifax mega-leak: Security wonks smack firm over breach notification plan

Re: Class action lawsuit.

Not exactly. Someone else trusted them with your personal data, which has now got leaked. As mentioned above, they are now using it as a marketing opportunity to sell you their dodgy products.

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

BA is joining an ever increasing list of companies that are nothing more than financial investment vehicles. The fact that they happen to be an airline is irrelevant, they are there to serve the investor first and foremost, not the customer which is just an annoying necessary irritation.

Same with most multinationals.

Nationwide’s online banking goes down again

Re: Some people...

It would be better if other retail businesses stopped opening 7 days a week and gave employees more time with their families. Or do you really think that retail businesses are opening for your benefit and not the grubby tax dodging offshore shareholders?

Now here's a novel idea: Digitising Victorian-era stamp duty machines

Re: Vintage stamp duty

I often wonder where tax is being spent. VAT went up from 15% to 17.5% due to to the utter incompetence over implementing poll tax. Even though poll tax has long since been scrapped the VAT rate has remained higher, now 20%.

Mappy days! Ordnance Survey offers up free map of UK greenery

Free maps that have been mostly paid for by the tax payer? Thanks for errrr.... Giving me what I already own???

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Alan Cox

Alan Cox explained the problem in an interview once. He said (paraphrasing) that the great thing about LINUX is that developers aren't beholden to commercial constraints, someone can look at a piece of code and just think it's crap and re-write it from scratch for the sake of it. Unfortunately the opposite is also true and someone can also rewrite perfectly good code for no reason and wreck it.

Brit prosecutors ask IT suppliers to fight over £3 USB cable tender

Re: Hello

Yeah but what we really want to know, is how much did they actually end up spending on a USB cable? Come on El Reg, we need to know!

Oh my Word... Microsoft Office 365 unlatched after morning lockout

Re: Please explain to me ...

Alain,

Are we talking a single application on a single PC or a large enterprise with multiple offices and their own data centre?

People keep shouting about "cloud is great", or "cloud is hopeless" without any kind of context as to what it is they are trying to replace, or what the "cloud" is that they are looking to replace it with.

Then you need to fork out on your own 2 datacentre setup with full resilience / no single point of failure - and that won't come cheaply...

You forgot he also needs a PC with dual NICs and power supplies, multiple switches, mirrored or RAID HDs, hot swappable memory and CPUs, diverse power and network links into his office, onsite UPS and generator.. All completely acheiveable, but pretty expensive for that 0.000001% of the time where it's needed.

Ubuntu 'weaponised' to cure NHS of its addiction to Microsoft Windows

Re: Patching

If they can script using apt then they can script to push / pull rpm databases back to a central server? Or use Chef/ Ansible / puppet or what ever to run compliance reports. It really isn't that complicated for someone with decent scripting skills.

Cheeky IT rival parks 'we're hiring' van outside 'vote Tory' firm Storm Technologies

Re: @Dominion: @Sabroni

No "matey", they don't pay "more tax" they pay tax at the same rate as everyone else pays tax, but on the dividends from their shareholdings. If they sell the shares then they pay tax on the profit. At the same rate. And if the investment drops in value then you don't claim the loss back against other tax paid. That's already being abused by scam merchants too much.

As for pensions, they're nothing more than a ponzi scheme and should be outlawed.

Re: @Sabroni

The people at the top of a business earn more money. I absolutely agree that it's the way it should be. I don't agree that they should receive preferential tax treatment because they earn £11,500 in "Salary" and £1,000,000 in "Dividends".

The MD of Storm should be prosecuted for failing to understand what redundancy is, ie you can't make someone redundant because you don't agree with their political viewpoint.

Oh snap! Election's made Brexit uncertainty worse for biz, says BT CEO

Re: The gargoyle’s mouth is a loudspeaker

If "Yes Minister" is to be believed, the Government does nothing anyway. It's the Civil Service that wields the power?

I fought Ohm's Law and the law won: Drone crash takes out power to Silicon Valley homes

Re: Interesting regulations

You're kidding right? This is the US.....

Who will save us from voice recog foolery from scumbags? Magnetometer!

Solution looking for a problem.

If voice recognition is so flawed then don't use it?