* Posts by Flicker

53 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jan 2014

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NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Flicker

Re: And fuel cost per passenger would be...?

The other thing which killed Concorde, rather less publicised, was the damage done to the ozone layer from the 50k' cruise. No idea what the design cruise altitude is for Boom, but if anywhere near that they will need to figure out a way to mitigate.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

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Re: Forget Windows - buy a Chromebook!!

I'm aware that this is a bit of a contradiction, but would say that the level of intrusion and upselling from Google seems several orders of magnitude below that from Microsoft on recent Win10 Feature Packs and the Win11 "upgrade". Maybe because I already had a Google/Gmail account for my Android phone the whole onboarding process seemed frictionless and unlike the constant in-your-face demands from MS to take out an MS365 subscription the Google One prompts are low-key and infrequent. It also seems easier to disable the "helpful" email scanning on Google than it is on consumer Outlook. A few years back I would have happily endorsed Microsoft as being far less "evil" than Google in their desire to hoover up and analyse your data but I think now that the positions have reversed - either Google have become better at hiding their level of intrusion or they've moderated it.

If both are equally bad from an enforced Cloud / data gathering perspective then to me it comes down to which platform is better at doing simple things simply and efficiently, and here, especially on moderate hardware, Chromebooks win hands down. They have some annoying restrictions (for example not playing some codecs without installing VLC and inability to select arbitary default applications for File / MIME types) but for most of the things 90% of people actually use a computer for a Chromebook will do the job far quicker and more simply at a given cost than a Windows or MacOS machine. I don't plan to give up my main Windows 10 X220 ThinkPad but certainly won't be upgrading it to something that can run Windows 11, and have migrated to the cheap Chromebook as something to use away from the house. For attendees at the weekly sessions, bamboozled by the monthly, machine-freezing Windows updates, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending Chromebooks, even given some of the data-migration challenges.

Flicker

Forget Windows - buy a Chromebook!!

Microsoft has created a massive problem, and for no good reason. I'd go further than the article states and say that Windows 11 is a significant downgrade from (current) Windows 10, foisting a bunch of AI "features" which few people want and which make it harder to do simple things simply, together with ever more intrusive upselling and insistence on hooking you into their cloud services.

I help at a weekly session in my rural village trying to enable the mainly elderly population to exist in the digital world, with banking, health services, shopping and pretty much everything else dependent upon some level of IT competence and Internet access. Most of them have elderly Windows laptops, some still on Windows7 and a smartphone or iPad (usually donated by concerned children or grandchildren). NONE of these people will derive any benefit whatsoever from Windows 11 and I find it hard to believe that even more IT-literate users want any part of it. My advice to our "customers" happy with iPhones or iPads is to get a second-hand, not too old MacBook Air and to everyone else - buy a Chromebook.

On impulse I bought a cheap (£140) Chromebook in the Currys Black Friday sale and after a lifetime using IBM/370, MS-DOS, TPF, Windows, a bit of Linux and some OSX / MacOS I can honestly say that a cheap Chromebook is the by far the best option for most people to do the things they need to do on a computer - especially if navigating a tiny on-screen smartphone keyboard has become a problem. It doesn't do "gaming", video-editing or any of the minority pursuits which the friendly Currys salesperson will try to convince you are essential, but boy does it work well with the basics. It doesn't grind to a halt every time an update is applied, it's far less insistent on selling you new nonsense than recent Microsoft software and boots up / shuts down and renders websites in a flash - with a decent, offline-capable email, document and spreadsheet editor included.

I've seen a couple of references to Microsoft being in fear of the "Chromebook threat" and they certainly should be. Just like the old, brilliant spoof video showing how Microsoft would package an iPod they seem to have completely lost track of how 95% of the general population actually need (and want) to use IT in their daily lives, encumbering their products with so many useless and unwanted "features" that the basics have been forgotten and buried under bling. Hopefully the world will wake up, reject the nonsense and maybe get back to basics - and perhaps buy a cheap Chromebook!

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

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Re: chromebooks suck

Have to say that's the exact opposite to my experience! Bought a ludicrously cheap (£139) Asus CX1 14" Chromebook in the Currys sale and couldn't be more impressed by it. Decent, Full HD IPS display, nice keyboard, charges from a tiny USB-C phone charger and wizzes along for the email / web browsing / basic text editing tasks I use it for away from home. Bit of an impulse buy - I was looking for something which wouldn't hurt too much if it was lost or stolen when travelling and this fits the bill perfectly. Runs all of my phone's Android apps, mostly in proper re-sizeable windows and so long as I don't try to have much open at once performs well, with zero heat, no fan noise due to the anaemic processor used and happily runs an old custom Windows application via Linux + Wine that my main Win10 system now won't even open after one of the Windows Update patches last year. Maybe a niche use-case, but I've become a total convert - I love the simple efficiency of the thing and would recommend them to anyone who moves in areas where there's a risk of their laptop getting nicked or broken. Not nearly as beautiful as my wife's MacBook Pro, but also one tenth the cost!

Infosys launches aviation cloud it claims can halve lost luggage

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Re: 5%???

Airports around Africa are littered with the things just outside the peri fence with people sleeping / living in them. 5% maybe an underestimate....

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

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Until you try to replace the Morris Minor's master brake cylinder, buried in the main chassis member and firmly welded in place due to ally/steel electrolytic corrosion. You need to add a cold chisel to your toolkit and hope that your hammer is a decent weight lump variety...

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

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Re: If Only ...

Instructitive to look at who actually owns NATS and is thus ulimately responsible for their investment priorities... so from their website:

Our ownership

A public private partnership

NATS is a public private partnership between the Airline Group, which holds 42%, NATS staff who hold 5%, UK airport operator LHR Airports Limited with 4%, and the Government which holds 49% (the golden share).

The Airline Group comprises:

USS Sherwood Limited

British Airways PLC

Pension Protection Fund

easyJet Airline Company Limited

Virgin Atlantic Airways Limited

Deutsche Lufthansa AG

Thomson Airways Limited

Thomas Cook Airlines Limited

and the irony of then having rent-a-gob Wee Willie mouthing off as usual...

LibreOffice 7.5 update: A great time to jump on this FOSS productivity suite

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There's another neat trick that LibreOffice has which is completely missing from O365, MS Office or whatever they're now calling it... You can load text-based PDF's into LibreOffice Draw and then Copy (as in Copy / Paste) and to some extent (results a bit more variable here) Edit the text at will. In no sense is LibreOffice a full-fetaured PDF editor, but it's "good enough" for quite a wide variety of uses. LibreOfice Draw is also a long way from a full AutoCAD or Visio product but definitely, again, good enough for quite a range of simple, domestic vector grapics drawing tasks - and streets ahead of trying to use Word or Powerpoint in that way!

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

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Best of both worlds??

Very, very happy with my setup of a refurb Lenovo X220 laptop (c.£200 as I recall, fitted with SSD and 8GB RAM) plus a £15 Lenovo docking station and matching PSU from eBay, coupled with a good Benq 27" QHD monitor (£320 and worth every penny).

All the benefits of the built-in laptop "UPS", a decent keyboard and reasonable IPS display when I want to take it somewhere with all of the cables for monitor / LAN / keyboard / audio / webcam etc. left in situ neatly at the back of the desk.

No reason to change at the moment but if I do it will be for another ex-business refurb laptop / dock combo.

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

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It was Moriarty!

... the airliner's [sic] corporate affairs officer Donal Moriarty ...

That's the problem - they have a criminal mastermind running corporate affairs!! Maybe they should put Holmes on the case...

Meet Mantis – the tiny shrimp that launched 3,000 DDoS attacks

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For those with long memories, MANTIS was (still is!) the name of one of the first 4GLs (late 70s / early 80s as I recall?) - an early example of "any idiot can write computer applications (and bring the entire system to a grinding halt)" snake oil. Just looked it up and Cincom are still marketing it. Like some other Cincom products it was sort of ahead of its time, overtaken by bigger, meaner competitors (looking at you, Oracle...)

Experimental WebAssembly port of LibreOffice released

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ChromeOS Flex - works, very, very slowly...

Being a glutton for punishment I just tried this on my newly created Acer ES 15 Frankenbook. Really slow!! Was hoping I could install it similar to a PWA but it downloads / compiles at each use even when "installed" as a Shortcut, so not remotely practical. Looks pretty horrible compared to a native LibreOffice. Oh well...

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

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Works well, but not a great solution for everyone.

Installed this yesterday on an aging Acer laptop which had pretty much ground to a halt trying to run Windows. Yes, I know RasPi OS or Mint might be a "better" option but as a device to hand to aging in-laws who persist in downloading malware posing as revolutionary software to make your PC go faster it seems just perfect - a browser, lightweight word processor and Gmail are all they need and this should keep them out of trouble for a while.

The Acer isn't on the Certified Device list but everything - Trackpad / Bluetooth / WiFi / Sound, the usual suspects - seems to work well, the thing now hums along and battery life looks like it's roughly doubled!

Definitely worth heeding the advice to update the BIOS before starting - Acer (and others) only provide BIOS upgrades via Windows executables so if you've already hosed down the HD with Chrome then you're stuffed! (luckily thought about this in time...)

Would definitely be better if they supported Play Store / Android apps, but for specific use cases I think it's a pretty good solution.

What begins with a 'B' and is having problems at tsoHost? Hopefully not your website

Flicker

Re: There's another problem at TSO...

Not odd at all - it's a scam to collect more revenue, with attractive headline / lead-in pricing for basic shared hosting with the profit coming from pretty-much essential "add-ons" like SSL certs.

Their on-line help does at least acknowledge that you can continue to use Let's Encrypt or other 3rd Party certs, but tries to scare the bejesus out of any non-tech customers from doing so. I've just updated the cert on my club website using the CertSage script mentioned above and can confirm that it works perfectly, with clear instructions that most users should be able to follow. Only real downside is the need to repeat the exercise every few months.

In general not at all impressed with TSOHost / GoDaddy but, like a slowly boiling frog, I can't quite bring myself to go through the hassle of migrating the (inherited..) website and email to somewhere better.

Direct link to CertSage here:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/certsage-acme-client-version-1-2-0-easy-webpage-interface-optimized-for-cpanel-no-commands-to-type-root-not-required/164784

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

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Fatter Albert..

Two other reasons why they (and other recent kit like 787/A350) are so nice to fly in for the self-loading freight...

1) The cabin is pressurised to a lower height / higher bar than older 747 / 777 / 340, so higher oxygen content means you feel far less knackered at the end of a long sector.

2) They don't use engine bleed-air to warm the cabin air so no really nasty, unexplained headaches as the oil seals start to degrade.

Apart from runway length (and runway / taxiway / apron weight limits), their other problem for airports was the cost of all the gate modifications needed to handle them - extra, elevated jetways, more gate lounge capacity etc.. You need to be pretty confident of ongoing demand before laying down that load of capital.

But lovely to fly in, although to my eyes they look horrid and dumpy next to a 787, which is a thing of elegance and beauty!

Foreign Office IT chaos: Shocking testimony reveals poor tech support hindered Afghan evac attempts

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Re: It boils down to your way of running things

Too late - already happened...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/dec/08/capita-undercuts-british-council-to-run-turing-student-exchange-scheme

Capita?? Really? Talk about rewarding repeated failure! Let's just keep on privatising profit and socialising risk and debt.

El Reg visits two shrines to computing history as the UK lifts coronavirus lockdown

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Have TNMOC finally made peace with Bletchley (Theme...) Park? Must admit I was pretty disgusted on my last visit a few years back by what seemed like an antagonistic and depressingly dumbed-down approach by Bletchley Park Trust towards anything which didn't fit their simplistic, bring-in-the-crowds approach, with the infamous fence only part of it. Kicking out David White and his wonderful DWS treasure trove was the low point for me. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a Bombe Water Flume ride was BPT's next big idea!

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

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Flywheels....

The site where I worked 25 years ago in Swindon had two large gensets in a seperate building adjacent to the datacentre, with rapid start obtained via a pair of continuously turning massive, iron flywheels mounted on horizontal axles inside steel cages. Two days after some routine maintenance the bearings on one of the flywheels seized, melted, the flywheel broke free and went straight through the steel cage, through the wall of the building, across the car park, a field and ended up about quarter of a mile away embedded in the trunk of a (formerly...) substantial tree.

We could never work out whether it was luck or design which had the flywheels spinning in that direction - had they turned the other way then it would have quite cheerfully run straight through the main datacentre / processor room taking out at least eight of the fanciest IBM mainframes that money could then buy.

Everyone was always rather careful where they parked their car or walked on that side of the building afterwards...

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

Flicker

Re: Backhaul limitations

"...This is not true. You can lease dark fibre right into LINX using the likes of ZAYO who have a comprehensive backbone covering most of the country...."

Well you obviously don't get out much! Once you move outside the main metro locations / business parks then Openreach / BT pretty much are the only option, and rural areas are where the AltNets have been making a real mark, helped by BT's absurd internal cost allocation and structure which purport to show that doing any real work spirals into stratospheric amounts of money - until, of course, an upstart, more efficient operator starts to lay serious local fibre whereupon BT Openreach will like magic revise their plans and overbuild like crazy.

Having tendered several >100 location UK networks there are indeed multiple providers who can cover the metro areas - but when you actually look under the covers they all sub to Openreach for the more "interesting" sites. I do have some sympathy for OR in that some of the regulation is wierdly weighted against them - for example I can see no good reason why duct-and-pole access rights shouldn't also apply to Virgin Media, Kcom, Vodafone/C&W etc. - but this surcharge seems blatently anti-competitive in an area where the notion that Openreach don't have Significant Market Power is just nonsense. I really hope the CMA fry them for breakfast.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

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The 0 / O confusion is less hellish than the 1 (numeric) / I (Upper-case letter i) / l (Lower-case letter L) mess which bedevils most fonts. Trying to figure this out for system-assigned User IDs and Booking References etc. is a constant nightmare when you can't copy/paste.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

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Re: Perfect burner phone!

Actually pretty much useless to take to the US - good luck trying to find a working 2G signal there. 3G seems to be the bare minimum for use in the States...

If Fairphone can support a 5-year-old handset, the other vendors could too. Right?

Flicker

Re: Consumers aren’t being served by Android

I'm in exactly the same situation, still happily using my 2nd G4 after the original was very helpfully replaced by Vodafone a week before the warranty expired due to the endemic bootloop hardware problem, complete with a new battery leaving the original as a spare.

As far as I can tell the Fairphone 3 is the only phone sold today which comes close to it, and if / when the G4 finally dies the FF3 or successor is what I'll move to.

And yes, typing this on an IBM Model M + Thinkpad X220 while listening to the radio via my Leak Stereo 20 valve amp - bit of a pattern here... :-)

You can get a mechanical keyboard for £45. But should you? We pulled an Aukey KM-G6 out of the bargain bin

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Rescued three Model M's from the eWaste bin at work a few years back, typing on one now with the rest as spares or to leave to the children in my will...

Some tips - take a photo of the layout and then pull off all the keycaps, place in one of those muslin zipped bags for washing tights etc. and place in the dishwasher on a full cycle. Vacuum out all the accumulated crud that's settled between the keys and replace the now-sparkling keycaps for a good-as-new keyboard.

One of the techs at work said that they used to put complete IBM keyboards into the dishwasher and after draining they came out working just fine, but haven't had the courage to try this yet! If you feel the need to dismantle completely then save youself a lot of anguish and get one of these:

https://www.axminstertools.com/wiha-t-handle-nut-driver-5-5mm-223034

which fit the very tight screw recesses perfectly...

Yes, TfL asked people to write down their Oyster passwords – but don't worry, they didn't inhale

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The Secret Industry Code (cf. Flight of the Conchords) is a "Boundary Zone Fare" which can be used in conjunction with a Z1-6 Travelcard, Freedom Pass or (arguably...) PAYG cap between a station outside the Oyster Z6 area and anywhere within the area. They're not advertised or available online and can only be bought from NR Ticket Offices and certain, seemingly random Ticket Vending Machines. Sample discussion from a quick online search is here:

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/boundary-zone-tickets.166875/

They're a bit like Split Ticketing, with the important difference that the train does NOT need to stop at the station on the Z6 Boundary to be valid.

Flicker

Re: I've got a little list

"... I can't think of a single thing they've done that shows the remotest sign of intelligent planning..."

Well you've obviously never lived in a major UK city outside London then.. Compared to the near-total fustercluck of other urban transport provision, mainly instigated by Nick Ridley's disasterous policy of bus deregulation, transport planning and innovation in London is pretty much a model of how things ought to work. TfL's introduction of the whole zonal / smartcard consistent fares system (along with Hong Kong) is a structure now being copied across the world, their retention of control over the bus network (in the teeth of opposition from Ridley and the Treasury) saved the whole thing from certain meltdown and the creation of the Overground network from the ashes of some near-defunct suburban lines has transformed public transport in swathes of outer London.

They're certainly not perfect - Crossrail overspend, recent bus network cutbacks come to mind - but many of the problems have come from ill-advised political interference and grandstanding (Boris Routemasters, crazy no-fares-increase promise from Khan at a time when the central Government subsidy was being withdrawn, deep-seated mutual hatred and rivalry between Khan and Failing Grayling).

I'm seldom a fan of public bodies but TfL are, overall, one of the better ones and it seems highly likely that much of their thinking on contract structure and overall control of strategic planning will and should find its way into the Williams review of national rail provision.

(disclaimer - I've never worked for TfL, just willing to recognise a rare example of an organisation which gets more right than wrong)

Flicker

Re: Badly designed system

Two Together is one of the few (the only??) railcards which can't be added to an Oyster to apply off-peak discounts to Oyster fares - logical when you think about it as there's no obvious way to check the conditions are met by two linked peple travelling at the same time .

Was a bit surprised by this story, as I've been getting TfL (LUL) staff to apply my annual Senior Railcard discount onto my (registered) Oyster for several years and never once been asked for a password or handed a form - they do it at any station Oyster Top-Up kiosk and it takes less than 30 seconds. Maybe the Overground / Arriva kiosks operate differently to the Underground ones, or maybe it's the (completely barmy..) process when trying to apply the discount to a new or unregistered Oyster card?

Adding National Railcard discounts to an Oyster is very badly publicised but absolutely worth doing - you get 1/3 off the off-peak PAYG rail (not bus) fares on all of the TfL / National Rail systems in the Oyster area AND 1/3 off the daily off-peak cap.

NB - not a London resident so can't get a Freedom Pass :-(

</TfL Fares nerd mode>

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

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Au revoir to the world's only other Windows Phone enthusiast! El Reg will be the poorer for your departure, but life moves on. Good luck and best wishes for wherever your writing takes you...

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

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Re: Written by Citroen ?

Consider yourself lucky - my mate's ancient Citroen Club needed the engine removed (or at the very least the exhaust manifold) before you could change a blown headlight bulb and the Citroen SM I briefy coverted before coming to my senses had an insane Maserati engine which needs heavy-duty maintenance every couple of thousand miles. Citroen always built "interesting" cars, but not for the faint hearted! But then my otherwise lovely Renault 16TX had designed-in wheel suspension rust problems which would cause the nearside rear wheel to (literally) fall off under heavy cornering - you pays your money...

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Re: Management's job

Ahh! Chris Grayling.. Apart from the minor detail of him refusing, ever, to admit responsibility for anything.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

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Glasgow Call Centre the only good thing about VF Broadband...

Was on VF Broadband until recently and the Glasgow team were the only people who seemed to have the slightest clue about anything vaguely technical. Initial setup was a string of problems (to be fair many of them Openreach's fault) and if I didn't get a Scottish accent after the hold queue then I'd simply ring off and start again (although the team in Portugal weren't too bad). Closing down the Glasgow Call Centre seems like a typical bit of Newbury stupidity and absolutely guarantees that I won't be going back to VF!

Vodafone signs $550m deal with IBM to offload cloud biz

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Re: Blame it on David....

@devTrail - "The story of the psychopaths is a way to concentrate the attention of few people and cover up the larger group...."

Absolutely agree, certainly to the extent that the habit of keeping senior managements' snouts firmly in the trough at the expense of the wider company is now so firmly ingrained that it's almost a given. That said, I think there's quite a bit of evidence that David Young and George Simpson both had very significant personal responsibility for major and ultimately disasterous changes in corporate strategy, linked to a combative, take-no-prisoners style which justifies the branding..

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Blame it on David....

Isn't this just the final, dismal chapter of David Young's destruction of Cable & Wireless? Although less dramatic and more drawn out than George Simpson's wrecking of Marconi it's a graphic demonstration of the damage corporate psychopaths can do to a decent company. I feel sorry for the C&W, latterly Voda employees caught up in this mess but the writing was on the wall in 1995.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/five-years-of-crossed-lines-at-cable-wireless-1582359.html

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

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Re: So what can we do about it?

Actually... purely for control of multiple bits of AV kit via IR I've found One-for-All remotes hacked / re-programmed via their JP1 interface to be much more usable than Harmony - and even more important so does my wife! Bought a Harmony ages ago (before Logitech bought them) and found it far more error-prone than OfA, especially if trying to control multiple devices through a macro. Bought a bunch of OfA 5's on sale some time back for £15 each and have been using them across a very wide range of devices, helped by an active and inventive community of JP1 hackers...

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Re: Went off of Logitech...

Logitech were never a great fit for the Squeezebox products and their death was pretty inevitable once Sean Adams and Dean cashed out, but I'd give Logitech some credit for keeping the forum alive on their servers, agreeing to properly open-source the LMS server code and providing some level of tacit, informal updates and support via at least one of their employees in Switzerland. For a discontinued product line I think they've treated the Squeezebox users rather better than they seem to have stuffed the Harmony people (and yes, I'm still very happily running a mix of SB3s, Boom, Radio Slim / Logitech kit together with some re-purposed Jogglers and Pi's)

Planning on geeking out at CA World this year? Think again

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Re: Due Diligence

Goodwill? CA? I guess in the "normal" sense of the word a very, very large negative value would have to be booked. In the arcane parallel universe of IFRS / GAAP I guess things work differently, especially given CA's tottering edifice built on acquisition!

A £1.3m prize for a plunging share price at BT? Not so fast...

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Some historical parallels...

For those with long memories, brings to mind David Young's destruction of Cable & Wireless and George Simpson's even more dramatic wrecking of GEC Marconi - all proof that a CEO (or hands-on Chairman) with a mission to change a stable firm's core business into something more frothy and "sexy" can do a massive amount of damage in a very short time!

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Hope he gets nothing....

Couldn't happen to a more useless bloke... Patterson was always obsessed with the idea of BT as purely a Content / Consumer company and fixated by competing with Sky, his office walls lined with sports posters etc. Visibly bored by anything relating to infrastructure or technology, he's pretty much destroyed the engineering-led core which made the "old" BT quite a decent, interesting company - albeit horribly overstaffed and too arrogant by half.

That said, the board knew what they were getting when they appointed him, and given that CEO selection is the primary way that a board can have much impact on a company today they're at least as culpable as him for the current BT fustercluck...

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

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Always thought of Prince Philip as a pretty decent bloke - he visted my school when I was doing O-Levels (GCSE in new money..) and toured the newly built metalwork room where a group of us were trying to build a hovercraft. Apart from me everyone was wearing immaculate, gleaming white labcoats but for various reasons mine was uniquely and disgustingly filthy, covered in a mixture of grit and grease. To the horror of the assembled, inanely grinning teachers he made a beeline straight for me and had a brief but surprisingly well-informed chat about why a donated iron-block, water-cooled Vauxhall Viva engine was probably a Very Bad Idea for a vehicle where light weight was an important design factor. He was dead right - the thing could never get off the ground, probably a good thing for the safety of all concerned!

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

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Re: The economics??

@Nigel W - Yes, I saw the announcement foretelling the death of the remaining R4 LW service - a real shame as it's just about the only thing you can receive pretty much anywhere. I don't really buy the arguement about the cost of keeping the transmitters going - I bet there's people with some high-power output valves squirreled away who would be only too happy to donate or sell at a reasonable cost to keep the service afloat.

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The economics??

One topic that's missing from this discussion is the economics - how much does it cost the BBC and other operators to lease capacity on DAB vs. their other distribution channels? My guess is that although renting capacity on all of their options (DAB / FM / AM / DVB-T(2) / DVB-S(2) / Internet) in parallel must be eye-wateringly expensive with a combination of OFCOM Spectrum Licence fees and carrier costs, they are probably equally wary of being backed into a monopoly supplier corner - certainly given that Arqiva are now in complete control of most of the terrestrial broadcast options.

Anyone any idea how much it actually costs the BBC to broadcast on DAB vs. DVB-T vs. FM vs. their Internet bandwidth?

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Re: There are plenty of reasons NOT to use IP

Multicast??? Don't make me laugh - with no hope of a workable standard across UK ISPs and CPE or motivation for them to support it carrier-grade consumer multicast is a mirage that's never going to happen here. The BBC ran a trial some years back which I spent ages trying to persuade my ISP to particiate in - the Beeb eventually gave up in the face of complete ISP indifference and myriad technical equipment issues.

I've implemented multicast media distribution in an enterprise using a carefully controlled and configured narrow set of hardware / firmware and even that's not a picnic - for example a minor difference between the multicast support in different firmware levels led to the complete meltdown of Heathrow's IP network some years back following an upgrade (not my site BTW...). It sounds like a great answer but forget it as a practical solution.

National Museum of Computing rattles the bucket: Help shift war-winning proto-puter

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Went there once with my Dad for a reunion with his mates from Hanslope Park ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/05/geeks_guide_hanslope_park ) where he was stationed as a radio intercept operator in the war. All the best bits were staffed by volunteer enthusiasts, with the main BPT stuff all dumbed down drivel. I heard afterwards that BPT had kicked out the best bit for me - a hut full of early DWS kit run by a fascinating chap called David White who I think ended up having to break up his collection in what seems like an act of pure spite by BPT. Never been back, no intention of doing so unless only to TNMOC part... Very sad...

Vodafone boasts 200Mbps with 4G mini mast in Cornish trial

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Don't really see what's new about this - they have a mast disguised as a flagpole just down the road from us which looks far less obtrusive, and the "fake tree" masts you can see from the M4 J12-13 blend in pretty well. Maybe the advance is the absence of a large green cabinet near the base? Also interesting to see how it will cope with West Cornwall wind gusts - the towers around there are pretty substantial for good reason!

Liberty Global's sale of Austrian biz paves way for Voda merger plans – reports

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No bad thing - the link with the Grinning Jumper stops me even thinking about taking any sort of service from them at the moment.

How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini

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The Indiegogo page (linked from Page 1 of the article) lists Dvorak as one of the keyboard options.

Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics

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Re: Electronics Today International (ETI)

Yes, Lisle Stree was magic - and the top end of Tottenham Court Road. Still have various odds and ends from GWS, including the teak sleeve case for my Leak valve pre-amp, retrieved from the back of their stockroom, I think in their closing-down sale when Lasky's took over. Before that they'd bought a load of old Vortexion valve PA amps from me and my mates, acquired in a highly dodgy auction from the old ILEA. The past is another country....

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

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Re: PgUp PgDn

If they've really kept the old 7-row Thinkpad layout then those keys are Page Backwards / Page Forwards (works as Back / Fwd in most browsers) and there are dedicated PgUp / PgDn keys at the top right, next to dedicated Home / End. The Fn modifiers for the Home / End increase / decrease LCD backlight brightness.

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Re: and remember that the X220 with a ugc bios

This is the place I bought my X220 a year ago - not clear whether their current stock has the (much better) IPS screen or a TN LCD, but still good value. No connection with the company other than as a happy customer. May also be worth checking that they have a UK keyboard - as with most things on traditional Thinkpads the keyboard can be swapped out, but worth getting right first time.

Hope this fits OK within ElReg posting guidelines??

http://microdream.co.uk/laptops-and-netbooks/lenovo-thinkpad-x220-12-5-1366x768-2nd-gen-core-i5-2520m-2-5ghz-4gb-250gb-webcam-windows-10-professional-64-bit.html#.Wa1z8diQzIU

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