Posts by theOtherJT

LG's six-sided battery to take smart watches into new timezones

Wasted space

I'm still waiting for someone to work out that they can put the battery in the strap. Most watches I've owned the strap was a series of linked flat pieces of metal anyway.

Will a data centre be driving your car in 12 years' time?

Cold. Dead. Body.

Over my, etc.

I've done the whole commuter stop-start hour of hell thing, and I can see why you might want your car to do that for you, but even if it did nothing would convince me to move back outside of the city and do go through that waste of time again every week day.

I _like_ driving. I live in the middle of Oxford for gods sake, and you'd have to be certifiably insane to choose to drive around here as a means of getting from point to point. That's not why I do it. I own a car and 2 motorbikes for the purpose of going places far away and enjoying the process. Pick the one most appropriate to the prevailing weather. Sometimes I just go get lost in the back-roads for an afternoon because it's fun.

Pint-sized PCIe powerhouse: Intel NUC5i5RYK

Re: Stackables.

None of which provide enough lanes to put something that needs real bandwidth on. A 16x slot would.

Stackables.

Anyone remember how the SNES used to have a socket on the bottom for stacking peripherals with?

As soon as I saw these back in 2012 I thought "Yeah, that's cute, but what they need is a PCIe socket on the bottom and a bunch of stackable expansion modules.

Imagine buying one of the low end ones and then stacking it on top of a quadruple height box that's full of 2.5" hotswap bays. Awesome little all purpose server. Or a high end i7 one and stack it with a proper GPU.

I still think these are quite nice, but being able to do THAT is what would make me actually buy one (or indeed several)

Cops turn Download Festival into an ORWELLIAN SPY PARADISE

Kinda glad I couldn't get the time off work now.

I usually go to Download, and was seriously thinking about going this year. This is, however, the first I've heard of this RFID system, and I would _not_ have been happy having it dropped on me at the gate when I arrived.

Scientists love MacBooks (true) – but what about you?

Perhaps they have a media relations department?

Ours makes us hide the dell's and break out the macbooks whenever we have a photographer or a TV crew in. They think it makes us look "hip" apparently.

Women are fleeing from the digital sector, reckons UK.gov report

Risky thing to say as a man, I know but...

Could it be that this isn't actually a problem?

I mean, if there are lines out the door of recruiting offices around the world where capable women are being rejected in favour of less capable men, then yes - that's clearly a serious problem - but we have been hiring quite a bit over the last couple of years and so far out of about 100 people who've applied, only 5 have been women.

I know it's not a popular viewpoint and everything, but perhaps women - on average - just don't find our industry appealing? I wouldn't be very surprised. I mean even I don't find our industry appealing, and if I'd had a better idea what I was getting into earlier on, I probably would have quit whilst there was still time and retrained as something else.

I mean, let me paint you a picture here, and lets see if it resonates with any of you:

I spend most of my time in isolation in a dark, noisy, overly hot office, on my own, staring into the abyss of a cheap TFT which gives me headaches if I forget to take my half hourly breaks. I rarely see the other staff I work with, although it feels more like "for" because when I do see them it's only ever because something is broken - in which case I'm already working on it and I want them to go away - or because they have somehow managed to raise ignorance about IT to a fine art, and brandish it about like a shield preventing them from having to take any responsibility for "losing" important emails or documents about once a week.

Neither way are they making my working life better by turning up in my office and talking to me. I don't _like_ interacting with my co-workers. But then I don't like interacting with people much in general. Being an irritable anti-social bastard isn't a uniquely male trait I know, but you gotta admit you meet more of them than women who feel the same.

Oh, and then there's this:

http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Seriously, is there anyone here who _doesn't_ feel that's what it's like? With the camel. Anyone? We're not crazy. We're being _driven_ crazy.

If women are actively avoiding IT, perhaps the problem isn't the way IT treats women. Perhaps it's the way it treats _everyone_ and most women are just either smart enough not to put themselves through this, or not prepared to put up with it in exchange for a life where you don't have to wear a suit or talk to people much.

RealSense possibilities: Dell Venue 8 7000 8.4in Android tablet

I hate to be "that guy" but...

"2560x166-pixel " ?

Warm up the Mega Buster: Next-gen consoles to reboot Mega Man series

That music...

...is making me teary eyed with nostalgia!

So many Sunday afternoons sugared up to the eyeballs screaming with frustration at that game.

It's 2015 and hackers can hijack your Windows PC if you watch a web video

Time to reboot the terminal services machine again...

I hate patch Tuesday. The "You need to save everything and log off" email went out to the dozen or so people who like to use the terminal services machine and *NEVER LOG OFF* about an hour ago and we're already getting the "You MUST postpone this reboot I have important work to do!" mails back.

No. It's rebooting at 6pm this evening. Live with it. It's patch Tuesday, you all know how this goes by now.

A pause in global warming? What pause?There was no pause

This is why we can't have nice things!

...or reasoned discussion, apparently. Always so much easier to adjust numbers to support institutional dogma* than do real science. Screw it. Friday. I'm going for a...

*Pick your institute to decide which way the numbers should be "adjusted"

Chips of the world, Unite: Intel bakes Iris Pro gfx into new Xeon

Fine. As long as they don't force it on the rest of the range.

I'm still annoyed that I can't buy a mid-range desktop chip without an integrated GPU. I don't want or need an integrated GPU, and I sure as hell wouldn't want one in any of my servers. I can see the use case for this, but in the absence of serious competition from AMD Intel has a bit of form recently for pushing their GPUs into places they're really not wanted.

There's data in your dashboard, so liberate it from Big Auto's grasp

Anyone else like the old way better?

Every problem I've ever had with every car I've ever owned has been electronic. I've spent the entire of this week off the road because my motorbike decided that it had been stolen and immobilized itself, despite the fact that mechanically it was fine.

I know, I know it's "Progress" and I am fond of things like traction control... when they work... but I'm more and more tempted to give them up in exchange for an engine I can fix with a tool roll small enough to fit in the glove box.

UK.gov confirms it's binned extended Windows XP support

Translation:

"We're desperately broke because the government is committed to impossible spending cuts, so we just revoked everyone's IT support budget for all cases where the budget isn't being used to support a white elephant project run by a close friend or relation of a cabinet minister."

Celebrating 20 years of juicy Java. Just don’t mention Android

Re: RE: Just in his mind I think

"No, this is still a very common use case for java, especially at the enterprise level. What are the alternatives? A bespoke app for each platfrom?"

The problem is that 90% of the time that is what you end up with anyway - or worse just a list of "supported" platforms that basically boils down to "IE on Windows 7 or below" because supposedly enterprise java apps are always godawful activex tie-ins that only work on one particularly outdated version of Java on ancient versions of Internet Explorer.

Java should be cross platform, sure, but if it actually _was_ then we wouldn't all be so desperate to be rid of it.

Rand Paul stages Senate filibuster against Patriot Act

Re: Opposition Theatre?

Yeah, I know it's going to be hard but... 15 minutes? It's not like he wouldn't have been keeping time. It's not like the people supporting him wouldn't have been keeping time. Surely once you're down to half an hour to go and look like you're flagging someone couldn't have stepped up with a 27 part question that took the next 29 and a half minutes to ask just to push it over the line.

Opposition Theatre?

So, he managed 10 hours, but couldn't see out the last 15 minutes? That's... a bit suspicious to my mind. Smacks a little bit of "Hey, look I tried, it's not my fault it didn't work" when there was actually no intention for it to change anything.

Stripped to the core and full of Xfce: Xubuntu Linux loses it

Re: Lubuntu...

I don't get why you need a GUI for software installs? Seriously, I don't get the point of them?

Because they're discoverable. This is basically the entire point of a GUI, and one that strangely people who should know better seem to have forgotten.*

Think back to the Bad Old Days when there was no GUI. You're sat in front of a computer which has just turned on and gone "Boop" and now there's a cursor there... what to do? Well, you could try just typing random things in and hoping for the best, but that's pretty risky. Possibly you could spend a few hours trawling through the paper manual, assuming there was a paper manual.** Either way, this is pretty horrible.

With a gui you have a way of not only telling the system what you want, but you have a way for the system to tell YOU what IT has and what IT wants. This is immeasurably useful.

Now, obviously you want a good CLI too, if you're a power user or any kind of systems administrator (which I presume you personally are) because it's important to be able to make tasks repeatable and for that you need a scripting language of some kind. Bash, Powershell - I don't care which, just so long as it's there. Most people however are NOT power users or systems administrators and they not only don't _want_ a CLI, but they really shouldn't need one. If they do whoever designed the system has failed.

* See "Windows 8 and the magic disappearing tooltips" or "Ribbon interfaces for confusion and profit" to see just some ways of really cocking this up.

**You can't look it up on the internet, because it's 1984 and the internet doesn't exist yet.

BARMY bio-boffins are growing DINOSAUR SNOUTS on CHICKENS

Re: It tastes just like chicken

The "5 minutes ago creation" may not be disprovable but it can be demonstrated to be extremely implausible, and without the need to bring theology into it.

Depends on the class in which the question was set I reckon.

If it was a theology class... well, frankly they're wasting your time. If it was a Philosophy of Science class the obvious rebuttal is to claim the the question is unfalsifiable and in accordance with Karl Popper's epistemology of scientific knowledge, is not scientific. As such the answer to the question is probably irrelevant outside of people's individual belief systems.

If you wanted to go further than that you could invoke logical positivism to claim that the sentence is literally meaningless - although logical positivism isn't exactly popular and has plenty of issues of its own.

Re: Geese Speculating....

I'm pretty sure that's how the question arose in the first place ;)

Myself and a few mates have had a long running bit of speculation regarding geese that we've never really been brave enough to test, namely: If you run screaming at a flock of them, do they scatter like pigeons, or attack like small dinosaurs?

Looks like a new challenger has entered the ring...

For its next trick, Microsoft diminishes the iPad with just a driver

I quite like the surface tablets, but I still find it funny that the thing that really sets them apart for most people is the fact that they can be sat on a desk so the cover acts like a keyboard and the screen is at an angle suitable for viewing whilst sat down, thus making them far more useful.

...I'm sure I remember another class of product that did that.

You say you want a musical revolution. Actually, have three

s/saved/ruined

"A lot of hair metal and stadium rock, like Bon Jovi and Bruce Spingsteen, came into the charts, and they had a bigger share of the overall charts," Mauch added. "But then rap and hip-hop came in. I think hip-hop saved the charts."

...but then again I grounded out on the late 80s at some point and am still stubbornly trying to pretend that there's no such thing as "Dubstep"

Flash banishes the spectre of the unrecoverable data error

@ Dr. Mouse:

Depends on your data if that's a bad thing or not I suppose. We throw a few hundred gig a day through some medium sized ZFS arrays (few tens of T) and it's mostly output from big scientific calculations and it really is imperative that it's _accurate_ more than it isn't lost. If we lose it, we can run the calculation again. If it's written but it's _wrong_ that could cause far more problems (Which is why we chose ZFS in the first place)

Re: Hold on a second...

Unless you are running a full-stack solution like ZFS it won't be trivial to even find out which file's block was occupying the block that failed to scrub out.

Which is why you'd be insane not to imo. I've had ZFS arrays survive things they really had no right to. It's impressively difficult to kill.

Relax, it's just Ubuntu 15.04. AARGH! IT'S FULL OF SYSTEMD!!!

Re: "now that it's well into Debian, Ubuntu really has no choice"

So did you file a bug against PulseAudio?

Hard to argue it's a bug. I would say it's "working as designed". My problem is that the design is... short sighted, at best.

Re: "now that it's well into Debian, Ubuntu really has no choice"

It isn't an independent system. systemd is the thing that starts everything else in userland.

But it should be an independent system. Why is the PAM doing the creation of a directory that downstream services have an implicit dependency on? pam_systemd is an authentication module. That's all it should be doing. Authenticating. For my audio system to start I should not have to rely on a specific form of auth to have happened. Those are not related systems!

And anyway, systemd isn't the thing that's starting everything in userland. I'm using 14.04 and still using upstart, so for pulseaudio to have a dependency on pam_systemd really isn't on.

Re: "now that it's well into Debian, Ubuntu really has no choice"

Your argument falls on its face with the fact that systemd isn't "shite".

I think you've rather missed the point. The argument is that it doesn't matter if it's "shite" or not - I wouldn't know, I've been avoiding it so far because it means massive sweeping changes to large parts of my systems - even if it were genuinely gods gift to init the fact is that it has its claws in so many other things that it's really hard to remove if you have reason to.

Simple example: pam_systemd

Without pam_systemd /var/run/user/$UID isn't created at login. Without /var/run/user/$UID pulseaudio doesn't start.

I recently had reason to write a custom pam, and whilst looking through the list of things that I needed to call to get a GUI, pam_systemd stood out like a sore thumb, because I'm not using systemd, I'm still on upstart. So I removed it. At which point pulseaudio packed up.

That's not a good way for supposedly independent systems to behave.

Re: "now that it's well into Debian, Ubuntu really has no choice"

From the people that brought you pulseaudio, another clusterfuck that will hold us back for years.

I only just had my first run in with pulseaudio, and if that's any way indicative of the experience I'm about to have with systemd I'm quite worried.

In this case it was stupidly aggressive restarting. Pulse creates some files in /var/run/user/$UID/pulse. Fine, perfectly sensible place for them. But should that directory have messed up permissions, or not exist for some reason it doesn't throw an error and give up, it just keeps respawning forever whilst spamming syslog with dozens of "permission denied" errors per second.

Yes, I know you can turn autospawn off in the config file, but this is not a sensible default behavior.

Word to your mother: Office 2016 preview flung at world + dog

Dunno, have they fixed outlook?

Office hasn't really added anything worthwhile in over a decade. There is no need to upgrade.

Depends, I've not tested it yet, but it seems that outlook 2010 really doesn't like it when you get mailboxes in the 5+ Gb area.

Nice as it would be to tell people to just "Stop leaving everything in your damn mailbox!" they're going to do it anyway because the zimbra webapp is just fine with that.

What makes it funny is that somehow the fact that Outlook crashes all the time with their enormous mailbox is clearly zimbra's fault, not Outlooks... but that's office staff for you.

Facebook serves up shaved, pierced, tattooed 'butterfly' as CAPTCHA

Re: ???

People who aren't used to bodymods can get a bit worked up about such things. Leave them to snigger and make faces for a bit, they'll get over it.

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

If you're not the customer, you're the product...

...why not just give the car owner the option of disabling the device if the public's reaction to tracking is so severe?

Because that implies that the purpose of the device is to serve the interests of the person on whose car the device is installed. The purpose of the device is to serve the interests of those selling the device, and ultimately the interests of those who can sell the data collected by the device.

How many of you aren't already being tracked via your always-on mobile phones, or by the number-plate-recognition cameras?

We don't like those either.

Re: A 'dormant' GPS and telephone device in every car

The system is not even powered up for external signals except in a crash or if I press the emergency button

Never the less it is there. It's not powered up NOW, but once everyone has gotten used to the idea that it's there and can't be removed, it becomes a much simpler matter to legislate - or even for insurers to simply demand - that it be on all the time. It's a step down a road I don't want to take. Neither my government nor my insurance company has any business keeping track of where I am all the time - especially since at least one of those parties seems pathologically incapable of keeping such information to themselves.

/sigh. Another reason to buy that '66 galaxie I've been lusting after I guess.

E-voting and the UK election: Pick a lizard, any lizard

Re: Plenty, though, were disillusioned with politics

Absolutely. I look at the candidates available to me in the constituency where I live and despair.

I'm one of the lucky ones. My vote will count - sort of. This is a marginal seat and changes hands often, but only between 2 parties I don't particularly care for. I do get the opportunity to vote against someone I really don't like, but not for someone I do.

There's a simple reason for that. The "someone I do" doesn't exist. There isn't a political party anywhere on the UK radar that I believe actually represents the interests of me and mine, and I have to believe that's going to be the same for a lot of Reg readers.

Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit

système D

Is a piece of French slang for "système démerde" (literally "system out of shit") and means taking a cheap and easy way out instead of doing something properly.

I find this particular coincidence amusing.

Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

Re: Falcon 3.0, the ultimate test of your config.sys/autoexec.bat skills?

My personal demon was MechWarrior2, which needed to be run off a parallel port connected zip disk because there wasn't room for it on the C drive. Himem, CDRom drivers, Sound drivers, joystick drivers LAN drivers and Zip drive drivers... Took DAYS to finally get that bastard to start.

Re: From the article:> get-childitem | where name -notlike Windows

This is true.

get-childitem | where {$_.name -NotLike "Windows"}

is what you want here.

What's broken in this week's Windows 10 build? Try the Start Menu, for one

Re: Company bloat/inertia?

I think we're just seeing the inevitable outcome of perpetual development.

Windows has been around a very long time, and there are ghosts of those early dos days still in the code. Every version has been an update from the version before to some extent - even when we went 32bit native from the awful dirty 16/24bit stuff, and again when the NT kernel came along. Every time there's been some bit of legacy crap from the previous version that couldn't be replaced because too many other things relied upon it.

Like Ankh-Morpork, what Windows is mostly built upon is the remnants of previous iterations of itself. There's so much _junk_ down there that I don't think anyone on the Windows team really knows what a lot of it does, which has turned the development process of each new version into a hunt for buried land-mines.

Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs

How is it stored?

Presumably device guard has to live on the disk somewhere, and if I can get raw write access to the disk I should be able to kill it, no?

Or are they suggesting that Windows 10 is going to live on something like an LVM volume managed by the hypervisor? I'm not sure I like the sound of that. I don't see that playing nicely with my various multi-boot setups.

The Internet of things is great until it blows up your house

but when the manufacturer offers ‘Electric blanket-as-a-service™’ - free for the first year, and at a modest annual fee thereafter - it becomes very appealing.

You and I clearly have very different ideas of what is appealing.

The words "as-a-service" are like a warning bell attached to the end of any product telling you that the "whatever" that's being "as-a-serviced" won't work out of the box the way it's supposed to and will somehow end up costing more than the national debt by the time you've got it set up to be _almost_ as good as the one you had before.

LA schools want multi-million Apple refund after kids hack iPads

Re: Inventory management: - TEXTBOOKS

Older than I look, younger than I feel ;)

Still, this was the better part of 15 years ago now, and most of our teachers then were still using rebound copies of books from 20 years earlier. Largely this was because they didn't trust the new ones to contain anything more useful than a list of examinable facts, and seemed to think it was important to teach the kids to understand the subject matter and from this exam passes would follow.

Inventory management: We've heard of it...

When LAUSD bureaucrats subsequently demanded kids return the tablets, only two thirds were actually handed back.

...and they don't have records of exactly who has them? Or a signed agreement from a parent/guardian who agreed to pay for it in the event of loss / damage?

When I was at school we weren't even allowed to take TEXTBOOKS home without having signed for them, what's wrong with these people? Kids BREAK things. It's practically a defining characteristic.

Life after Nokia: Microsoft Lumia 640 budget WinPho blower

Re: GUI madness

So, they've moved from forcing a phone UI that no one wanted onto the desktop to forcing a desktop UI that no one wants onto the Phone... Something is seriously wrong here.

Desktop UI. Phone UI. Separate products.

Come on Microsoft, you've managed to get them both right individually; stop getting them wrong in combination.

Verizon to world: STOP opening dodgy phishing emails, FOOLS

No defense against willful ignorance.

We get about a user a month ends up having their account closed because it suddenly starts sending a few thousand emails a second. Every time they show up in the office with this "What's going on here?" face on and say something like "But you told me you needed my password so you could validate my mailbox!"

We make everyone read the "how to spot a phishing email" thing when they sign up for an account.

We send out stock reminders 3 times a year.

We send out specific reminders every time someone falls for a phish.

The trouble is that the vast majority of our users don't _care_ about computers, don't _care_ about email and don't _care_ about security - at least until the day they end up getting their account locked and a stern talking to by one of the IT security team.

If people are going to type their passwords into random websites because an email in broken English from a random Albanian email address told them to, there's not a great deal we can do to stop them.

could we have an automatic detection of when the sender and the Reply To names/domains are different and instantly class that as Criminally Suspect ? With a popup when clicking on such a message that reads something like "The address of the sender and that of the reply to are not the same. This is generally a sign that the message is spam or may originate from a criminal source. Are you sure you want to open this mail ?"

Only problem is that that happens all the time.

The last thing we need is something popping up and spooking the users when they get an email from it-announce@[nameofbusiness].uk with a reply to of it-support@[nameofbusiness].uk

It's a feature that would just immediately get turned off by 99% of sysadmins in response to user complaints.

Motorola Mobility loses another patent suit to über-troll Intellectual Ventures

I blame the jury.

No, really, I do* How on earth could they not strike this down for obviousness given that there are about a bazillion examples of prior art? The only explanation I can think of is that they just didn't care and wanted to go home as soon as possible.

*unless the jury aren't allowed to do this - my understanding of US court procedure is a little vague. If this is within the judge's power, then I blame them instead.

Euro THERMONUCLEAR REACTOR PROJECT is in TROUBLE

Oh just give them a blank cheque already.

Yes, that's right, lets further delay something important the world desperately needs. If everyone would stop trying to score political points off it and just concentrate on BUILDING THE DAMN THING it wouldn't be so far over budget!

Make up your mind: Microsoft puts a bullet in Internet Explorer after all

Re: Not going to be just the NHS.

Allow me to set a scene:

The comedy begins with some important high level managers who have macs. They love their macs and insist that any future software we buy has to run on them. Of course, they're not going to buy macs for everyone in the institution (would tarnish the halo) but they've heard the word "cloud" and think it sounds jolly exciting and so the best thing would be for everything to run there. Browser interfaces are the way the world is going dontchaknow?

So a browser interface is specified in the requirements for the next big departmental software purchase. The managers in question, who have most definitely earned their salaries by turning up to this specific meeting, now exit stage left and are never heard from again.

Meanwhile the contract has gone out to tender and the lowest bidder (Which is to say "the least competent") wins it. In this contract a "browser interface" is specified, but it doesn't say any more than that, so to get the job done as quickly as possible a whole ton of legacy code is run through some fairly perfunctory translation to active-x, a crappy java app is knocked up and bish-bash-bosh we have an interface that runs in a browser.

The fact that it's a very specific browser - IE8 and below - and only on a specific OS (hard coded 32bit calls mean it barfs even on x64 Windows) and thus completely misses the original point of "should run everywhere" is considered irrelevant since all the staff who are going to actually use the thing are using 4 or 5 year old windows desktops anyway, the Macbook toting high level managers have already lost interest and fucked off, and the IT support staff are left to clean up the mess.

This worked perfectly well as native code 7 years ago. It would have been fine as an in-browser front end to some server side processing. What we actually have is some hybrid abomination where the native code version was forced into a java virtual machine so it could be run in a browser where it performs like shit and goes wrong all the time.

Chrome trumps all comers in reported vulnerabilities

Isn't the point of installing Firefox or Chrome to make that the primary browser instead of IE?

In our case at least it's just so that when we have to go and look at user's computers we don't have to use the ancient version of IE that our finance software mandates as a front end. Most of our users can't handle the idea of learning how to use more than one browser, so IE for one, IE for all :(