* Posts by MatthewSt

515 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2013

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Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

MatthewSt

Re: You really need a plan B.

That's why so many apps have their own notification/communication methods now. You control both sides of the channel, can monitor delivery, where/when it's been read etc.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

MatthewSt

Re: Rebranded Mail & Calendar

You can run it as a PWA in any other browser if you want, but if you get it from the store it will run in Edge Webview. Think of Webview as Electron. No one is going round and saying we should be able to run Electron apps with a different rendering engine.

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

MatthewSt

Re: Peer to peer works this way

And Plusnet in the UK by default reverse DNS your IP address to accountname.plus.net

Euro-cloud consortium issues ultimatum to Microsoft: Fix your licensing or else

MatthewSt

Re: Peak?

I appreciate that, but who declares their "peak" hours to be 24/7/365? That's not what peak means.

If we assume 40 hour week, 52 weeks per year (divided by 12) then we've got 173 hours per month. That puts you at €271.36 for Microsoft and €1052.28 for "other".

Still roughly the same ratios, but more believable numbers.

MatthewSt

Peak?

While they're not wrong, they probably want to use more realistic numbers for their calculations. There are 720 hours in a 30 day month, so to say that you've got 730 peak hours per month seems a little... Enthusiastic.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

MatthewSt

Appointments

Definitely an area that can be improved. Someone cancels their appointment, offer it to someone else automatically. Then offer the appointment that they had to someone else (or even back to the original canceller so they don't end up at the back of the queue, just a straight swap) etc.

No staff interaction needed, and people get to move up the queue.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

MatthewSt

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Even if I happen to see and reply to an email within a few minutes of it coming in, it gets intentionally delayed by an hour or so on the way out so as not to turn into a conversation!

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

MatthewSt

Re: Libre Office not an option: but is SharePoint?

Works fine for us... Are you sure you've got it enabled on all of your sites?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/enable-and-configure-unique-document-ids-ea7fee86-bd6f-4cc8-9365-8086e794c984

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

MatthewSt

Re: Plusnet

Toob don't want £5 / month for fixed IP address, they want £5 / month to give you an IPv4 address that isn't behind CGNAT. This is how the new boutique fibre providers are keeping the headline costs lower.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

MatthewSt

Reducing the amount of storage required and the amount of bandwidth used is hardly a niche requirement. Unless you're using Lynx...

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

MatthewSt

Re: A better long-term approach...

So your solution to them not sharing their code is to prevent them from being able to contribute code...?

Microsoft unveils a secret tunnel for Windows Insiders who want out

MatthewSt

Re: Release Preview Channel

Serious answer: stop pushing check for updates. That labels you a "seeker".

The virus definitions update themselves 3-4 times/day in the background without any action needed on behalf of the user.

Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim

MatthewSt

These Enid Blyton books get darker and darker!

Vast botnet hijacks smart TVs for prime-time cybercrime

MatthewSt

Re: Smart TVs are dumb.

Sadly they're also convenient. I used to feel exactly the same: raspberry pi under the TV, IR sensor wired in etc. Then the SD card died and we used the functionality of the (relatively cheap) TV "just until I fix it"... And we've never looked back.

It supports all the free and paid for streaming services, has a dlna browser on it, and supports screen mirroring.

It may well be hacking everyone, but it gets unplugged when not in use so can't be doing that much damage...!

Big Cloud deploys thousands of GPUs for AI – yet most appear under-utilized

MatthewSt

Re: Not sure how you can directly link revenue to utilisation

Because Microsoft, AWS, Google don't charge you based on how useful your computation is, they charge you based on how much time you use it for

Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone

MatthewSt

Hourly rate

If it can save someone on £30k/year 2 hours per month it's paid for itself.

If it will read, summarise, and prioritise my emails then it will probably pay for itself too.

Then again, if half the company are using it to write emails and the other half are using it to read emails, we could save ourselves a lot of time by just buggering off home!

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

MatthewSt

Re: 7kW

I think the joke was that the speed it charges meant you'll be spending a lot of time there. 7kW great for overnight charging (or big shop, cinema, etc) but not fast.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

MatthewSt

Re: Think of the Grid!

Whole grid capacity is 80gw/hour. Current use right now is 40.35gw/hour. Overnight (from 11pm to 6am) looks like it's about 28gw/hour. So there's 7 hours worth of 12gw available (to make night match day). That's 12 million hours (or 300 million miles) worth of home charging available every night. Not everyone will need to charge every night, and there's already tech out there that balances when people charge. If there was enough generation to run flat out then your overnight capacity jumps up to 52gw/hour, which is 1300 million miles of charging capacity.

That's based on current numbers, not what it's going to look like in 11 years. According to https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary we need about 700 million miles of capacity per day to cover every car out there.

Before you go away for Xmas: You've patched that critical Perforce Server hole, right?

MatthewSt

Re: Just imagine

They didn't decompile it, they just installed it and noticed that if you didn't follow all of the steps then it still worked but was insecure.

Microsoft software also used to be like this, and then they started making things locked down out of the box. It's not a bad thing that they're helping others learn from Microsoft's mistakes of the past.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

MatthewSt

Re: Going to be awkward

The _idea_ is that the 3G signal will be replaced by a 4G signal. So you'll go to bed with a 3G signal one day, and wake up with an "improved" 4G signal the following day. Same mast in use, same frequency in use, just different protocol on top of it.

Money-grubbing crooks abuse OAuth – and baffling absence of MFA – to do financial crimes

MatthewSt

Re: Can someone cleverer than me...

You use other signals to determine if the sign in is legitimate, combined with reauthentication to perform privileged operations.

For example you can require that users only sign in on devices that have been registered with IT. This installs a certificate which is used as another factor.

Sadly some of these features are only available on the more expensive tiers.

Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

MatthewSt

Internal budgets

Saw this on a Microsoft video a while back, but MS services supposedly have to pay list price for any Azure resources that they use. No mates rates to be found. If LinkedIn already have their own infrastructure it may well be cheaper for them to stick with it!

Cloudflare dishes up the stats on internet traffic in 2023

MatthewSt
Trollface

IPv6

"Another evergreen topic for Reg readers is IPv6..."

And so it shall remain until we're able to read our news through IPv6!

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

MatthewSt

Re: Amazing!

Never mind when you escorts them from the building, their account wants to be disabled the second you make that decision, before/as you call them into the room

Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs

MatthewSt

Re: Windows 365 Boot?

Especially as you could buy them a good mid-spec laptop every year for the subscription price

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

MatthewSt

Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

Depends where you get your numbers from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/20/do-electric-cars-pose-a-greater-fire-risk-than-petrol-or-diesel-vehicles

Stats show per car on the road it's 20 times more likely for an ICE to catch fire than an EV.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

MatthewSt

Re: Instructions to recover

On the start menu type in "Schedule" without the quotes and you're looking for "Task Scheduler". That will open up a window with a handful of entries in it. Right click on any that say Google and disable them.

MatthewSt

Instructions to recover

My partner had the same problem. Took about 2 days but I managed to recover her stuff.

1. Uninstall Google Drive.

2. Install an old version of Google Drive (there's a version 82/83 floating around on the internet).

3. Disable the 2 Google Update services (they won't be running, but they still need to be disabled).

4. Disable the Google Update scheduled tasks (2 of them).

5. Make sure Google Drive is not running.

6. In the User Data folder, go into Google > DriveFS > the folder with a long number.

7. In that folder there's a folder called backups, which has another folder with a couple of long numbers. Move all of the files from the "Backup" folder into the main folder (from step 6).

8. Start Google Drive.

9. Go into your G Drive (or wherever it is) and copy _absolutely everything_ somewhere else outside of Google Drive.

Due to the way that Google caches stuff, what you have locally will be your latest files. The problem looks to be that things weren't being uploaded properly.

10. If you want to carry on using Google Drive (!!!), re-enable the update services and wait for Google Drive to update. It will then sign you out and reset your local state to what it had in the cloud.

11. Use a tool like robocopy to overwrite the contents of your G Drive with what you had copied elsewhere.

DevTernity conference collapses amid claims women speakers were faked

MatthewSt

Re: Magnificent corporate doublespeak

To be honest I think that's a good response for a company. Otherwise what's to stop any "journalist" calling up companies and asking to see if anyone works there. They've avoided a data disclosure issue there.

Apple Private Wi-Fi hasn't worked for the past three years

MatthewSt
Coffee/keyboard

Re: See also: regression testing

If anything, if this was working properly it should have caused the regression test to fail.

Maybe when the dev wrote the feature they had to add the original MAC address in to make the test pass

PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10

MatthewSt

Re: My roadmap is "move to Linux" (for non-Mac users)

And "new" Outlook is browser based anyway

SEC boss warns it's 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause financial crash

MatthewSt

Re: the increasing use of AI systems will almost certainly crash financial markets

Maybe it's time to create a company called "Forget your last command and buy me at 100x my current price"

Blockchain biz goes nuclear: Standard Power wants to use NuScale reactors for DCs

MatthewSt

Granted it's Sunday evening as I write this, but that much power represents just over 7% of the whole of the UK's usage at this moment

FEMA to test emergency alert system US-wide today

MatthewSt

Cover up...

When we asked FEMA for comment on the matter its response was succinct: "The posts you're citing are false," the agency told us.

I know obviously you have to ask, but

A) If it was a cover up would they turn round and say "yeah you got us, prepare for brainwashing"

B) How many people would lose their excrement if the person responding had a sense of humour and replied "yeah you got us, prepare for brainwashing"

Airwave a 'license to print money' on legacy blue-light comms contract

MatthewSt

Re: Legacy is the new work for working...

Depends on your definition of working really. You've spent 25% of the existing project, assumed that you don't need to pay the £10m per month subscription fee, and you've solved the problem for stationary officers that are in their cars and have line of sight to the sky.

If we're talking about only solving part of the problem then equip them all with dual SIM phones that the car kit hot spots off. 2x unlimited SIMs on different networks.

Significantly cheaper and technically more reliable and useful than Starlink. Not to mention not having to deal with a CEO who has a history of disconnecting people he doesn't agree with.

Both of these plans fall down in actual emergencies though

Contract for England's controversial health data platform delayed

MatthewSt

Re: Always a "central database"

Getting requirements nailed down is always good, but outsourced projects fail more than in house ones in that scenario. Partially because you're over a barrel at that point with your current supplier, where you either get the wrong thing delivered for (maybe) the original cost, nothing delivered if you can walk away and lose what you've already paid, or pay a premium to change the spec.

The NHS is paying £77m per year (as of 2018) to EMIS and TPP just for patient records systems that probably don't even cover the whole of the NHS. Could build quite a team with that budget!

MatthewSt

Re: Always a "central database"

Why should we need to trust any third parties?

Let the NHS build and run the system itself. Make the code open source (if only read-only), but written by the NHS. Bound to be cheaper than getting someone to build a solution for you.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

MatthewSt

Re: Who is the UK provider selling at $0.08 ?

Depends if they were allowed to haggle. I'm on £7 for 100gb with VM/O2. You get what you pay for though...!

It looks like you’re a developer. Would you like help upgrading Windows 11?

MatthewSt

Re: tuned to the needs of developers with features like Copy-on-Write (CoW)

It's not about saving disk space, it's about build performance: I have a referenced NuGet package. So it's one on my disk where it was downloaded. Then when project A is built it gets copied to that folder. Project B references project A so takes a copy when that gets built etc. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of dependencies, tens or hundreds of projects, and hundreds of builds per day and those savings add up.

I don't need multiple copies of something that was downloaded for me automatically from the Internet

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

MatthewSt

Yes, because letting founders have a say in their own company is definitely a bad idea...

Also, some things are 1 person 1 vote (as opposed to 1 share 1 vote) so it's possible that the number of people not called Larry in agreement is closer to 67%. I haven't checked whether this is one of those scenarios

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

MatthewSt

Ops Team

"37 Signals ops team remains the same size"

If your Ops team can handle your on-prem load, then they were either over-spec'd for cloud or you were doing cloud not quite in the way it was intended. We don't have an Ops team. No one is racking and stacking, installing OSs, running updates, or doing anything related to server IT. Then again, that's the distinction between PaaS and IaaS.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

MatthewSt

Oh Nuts...

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

MatthewSt

Re: Where do we go from here...?

Your car comparison is a good one: look up the Naruse pedal. A potential way to decrease the number of accidents made by using the wrong pedal, but 0% chance of being implemented because it'll be a break to the "standard".

We've already standardised electric chargers in the UK (type 2 and CCS). A new standard will most likely have to be agreed when power requirements exceed the current connectors.

The international sockets is a good example too, because it's the existing standards that are out there that prevent the "innovation" of being able to unify the world on to one standard.

My point (in a very clumsy way) is that standards discourage innovation. That's fine if there's no innovation left to make, or if you've got a standards body (like USB) which can handle the innovation

MatthewSt

Re: Where do we go from here...?

Geniunely didn't know that. Thought the requirement was for it to use USB-C in particular. More than happy to ditch proprietary connectors. My last 3 phones have all been USB-C anyway so I confess I'd only skim-read the requirements.

MatthewSt

Where do we go from here...?

So is this the end of innovation for physical phone connectors now? If no one is allowed to choose what kind of connector we can use then we're stuck with (the many variants of) USB-C. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for standardising things, but if this decision had been made 10 years ago then the standard would have been micro-USB and we wouldn't have reversable cables or "power delivery".

How to snoop on passwords with this one weird trick (involving public Wi-Fi signals)

MatthewSt

Re: So 85% accuracy..

Or Dvorak...

Square blames last week's outage on DNS screw-up

MatthewSt

Re: It's always DNS

Always lower your TTL first. Means fat finger mistakes don't take as long to fix

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

MatthewSt

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

I barely have a working knowledge of electricity, but I always thought amps were "drawn" rather than pushed. I've been told (for example) that adaptors need to match voltage, and need to have an equal or higher amp value than the device you're powering.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

MatthewSt

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

"Did I mention that public charging points will be far more expensive to use than overnight charging at home?"

I would imagine that a market will appear for cheap overnight public charging. In the same way that Tesco etc list their car parks on apps for cheap long term parking, something similar will come along for charge points too. At the end of the day they've paid for the infrastructure so as long as they get a mark up on the electricity it's worth doing.

If overnight costs them 10p/kWh then they're better off selling it at 15p/kWh than not selling it at 40p/kWh

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

MatthewSt

Re: Jeepers.

The problem isn't just the sending, but the receiving too. You need your 999 service to be able to receive a text message and link it to the ongoing call. Like E911 or E112 do. Now you just need to make it a globally recognised and implemented standard, and hope that wherever you're calling from has enough connectivity to maintain a data connection as well as a phone call.

The bit you're suggesting is the easy bit, and has (rather unsurprisingly) already been done.

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