Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

Lots of new toys, caps lock still stuck on: ONLYOFFICE hits version 7

To quote the website, which is a tad annoying, with it jumping to the bottom of the page randomly whilst I was reading it - "ONLYOFFICE Document Editor supports all popular formats: DOC, DOCX, ODT, TXT, PDF, HTML."

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

Re: Bait

It's not really bait & switch, they closed the service to new accounts 10 years ago.

International police shut down 15 server infrastructures as part of VPNLab.net's takedown

Re: Yes, shutting one VPN network down definitely will end all criminal activity

So what you're saying is that if a police action doesn't wipe out that type of crime entirely they should just not bother at all...

Could BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery) offer a solution for charging electric vehicles? Microlino seems to think so

Re: Hits the sweetspot for me

I think it's because the Mini E weighs about the same as a small building. When I checked it's about 150kg heavier than my Cooper SD.

I have no way to install a fast charger at home, so a Mini E would take a whole weekend to charge.

Living rurally there's not a whole heap of charging points available either...

Hits the sweetspot for me

I love the idea of the Microlino, it's right in the sweetspot of price and range for me, I could drive to work and back for a whole week, then leave it to charge over the weekend.

The Mini E would be fine except the 120 mile range isn't quite a week's worth of commuting, and it's astonishingly expensive

Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

Yep, The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation helped substantially in the effort to wipe out polio.

Warren Buffet is at No 10 in the list and he's pumped a lot of his money into the foundation, the other 8 on the list appear to be more interested in feathering their own nests, or islands in the case of Larry...

Microsoft tweaks Teams and Viva to help bridge gap between frontline workers and their managers, among other things

I've still no clue what Viva is.

All I know is the email I used to delete daily from Cortana is now from Viva...

Ransomware puts New Mexico prison in lockdown: Cameras, doors go offline

Re: "The attack took automatic security doors offline"

Electronic locks generally offer Fail Safe or Fail Secure

With Fail Safe if the power is removed the lock is open

With Fail Secure when the power is removed the lock stays locked

One would hope a prison would have fail secure locks...

Software engineer jailed for 2 years after using RATs and crypters to steal underage victims' intimate pics

That Sexual Harm Prevention Order will seriously impact him for the rest of his life, as there's so many jobs that require a DBS check and that Sexual Harm Prevention Order will be a massive red flag.

I can't see him getting any worthwhile employment for decades.

So yeah, only 9 or 10 months in the big house, but many years of being messed around by The Man in his future.

" but tend to be in their 20s "

According to the article he's 32 and had been doing this for more 10 years, so solidly in his 20's for the majority of his criminal career...

Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

Re: Tried Avira...

It's only recently been subsumed into Norton, so in all likelihood it was independent when you tried it.

To be fair, it was pretty decent years back when I tried it for a year or two.

Nowadays I use Sophos, but I'm seriously tempted to boot that too and just use Defender on my Windows machines

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Since you mention software, I was appalled to find out the software to setup the multi-device buttons on my K780 was a 278mb download.

Why? It's a frigging keyboard, why does the driver software have to be so bloated...

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Re: Words Fail Me

Look at your workplace:

Does each department know what kit they use?

Does the senior management know what each department uses?

Now multiply that by every division in every department within every ministry of Government.

I'd be surprised if a competent Government even knew how many Windows licences they hold, never mind the shower of shit in charge at the moment...

Re: Late?

Loath as I am to defend the Government, but based on my attempts to log make / model / OS version & software installed on the ~500 PCs across the couple of dozen buildings at my last employer, I can imagine how much of a nightmare it must be across the whole UK Gov estate...

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Anyone remember the BBC Micro software pages?

You could get a decoder for BBC Micro that read the software off CEEFAX, I think it was page 800

We had one in school, it also read Prestel although that needed a phone line, which cost money, so we rarely used it

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: So. many. legs.

There can't be a huge number of predators 60m underground, apart from huge drill-bits obviously

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Will be get to watch the launch on NORAD's Santa Tracker feed?

https://www.noradsanta.org/

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

Re: Copper

"Using a mobile in an extended power cut - assuming the base stations are working - is likely to mean starting the car to recharge it."

Or having sufficient USB power packs to recharge the phone for a few days

Re: Copper

Not so good when the storm also takes out the only available cell tower.

Or as happened during Storm Desmond, the power outage is so prolonged (4 days in our case) the battery backup on the tower died and generators ran out of fuel.

We were forced to drive 10 miles to Morecambe and use the feeble signal coming across the bay from Grange to phone family to tell them we were safe.

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

Re: At least with paper currencies...

The current Bank of England polymer notes are less useful in that task, being somewhat like Izal toilet roll...

2033 is doomsday for 2G and 3G in the UK

Re: 4G, 5G I'll take fibre

Where I live, every time Openreach (usually Murphy Telecom engineers) come round to do anything they spend half a day figuring out which box we're connected to, then the second half of the day scratching their arses.

The next day a second team arrive, spend the morning finding the box etc...

Re: Tracking.....

If you're part of the great unwashed why go to the expense of 5G tracking, they can simply follow your aroma...

James Webb Space Telescope may actually truly launch this century, says NASA

It holds 240 litres, whish is a little over 63 US gallons and just short of 53 real gallons

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

Yep, but be careful about drivers, the official Lenovo USB-Ethernet dongle may be required also...

Re: 1920 x 1080

Anything higher than FHD on a 14" screen actually makes stuff too small to read for most people, so they'll set screen magnification to 125 or 150% and negate the higher resolution.

Having higher resolution just for the sake of willy waving in a business laptop is akin to having a 200mph car to sit in traffic on the North Circular...

Re: Nice set of options, but Ethernet?

A regular USB-Ethernet cable adapter will work, they're about £8.

However, from experience with other Lenovo laptops, these don't work from boot, so you can't use them to boot from the network, they're fine once you're in Windows and most flavours of Linux

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Re: a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band"

The solar panels will take almost two weeks to deploy, then there's weeks of testing. They'd have had to launch in June to get any photos of Santa...

UK Department for Education to schools: Maybe delay signing that 3-year licensing deal for MIS with Education Software Solutions

Parts of SIMS date from the late 80's, Firing up Nova 6 is like going back to DOS.

There are still areas that don't know mice have scroll wheels.

There are windows that react badly to being resized

Snails pace development will be a vast improvement on the current glacial pace...

Is your Apple Mac running macOS Monterey leaking memory? It may be due to mouse cursor customization

Re: Who still uses swap/vm these days?

Here's a test for you - find an M1 iMac and add try to add extra RAM.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

They can't hike fees though, as they're capped...

Russia blows up old satellite, NASA boss 'outraged' as ISS crew shelters from debris

Re: Hasn't he launched one of his Teslas into orbit already? I assume it's on Autopilot...

The Tesla is outside Earth's orbit, it's currently orbiting the Sun, although it may one day be captured by Mars and enter into orbit around the red planet...

Cruel and unusual IT fail upstages Megan Fox. Transformers: Windows in disguise

A decade ago I was working at a security industry exhibition at the NEC.

Samsung had a huge hi-def screen that took up most of the rear wall of the hall. The engineer had just finished configuring it and decided he'd definitely earned a little R&R, so he settled down to watch some adult entertainment on his laptop, forgetting he was still hooked up to the huge video wall...

System at the heart of scaled-back £30m Sheffield University project runs on end-of-life Oracle database

At a guess it's a system that handles all interaction with students, so it'll need to plug into UCAS for a start.

It will need to interface with all the academic departments, it will need to interface with all DfE systems, it'll need to interface with the company running the cafeterias, and the Halls of Residence, probably all the student housing companies as well.

Then it will need to work with the various careers agency systems as well

Probably half the cost will be consultants who specialise in all those areas

Re: @ShadowSystems

Luckily Sheffield University isn't in the United States, so that really isn't going to happen.

Microsoft touts Windows 11 SE: A locked-down OS to give Chromebooks a run for their money in schools

Re: Lock in revenue stream

Did you see the bit were other manufacturers are producing these things as well?

Re: I bet...

Would you really want to do those things?

The laptops are running Atom processors, they're designed for schoolwork and Teams.

Considering the last batch of laptops we bought for pupil use cost us close to £600 and are way over spec for the job at hand, I see these as a real boon for schools.

Their popularity will depend very much on the Apps available to deploy via InTune...

Microsoft rolls out $3-a-user Defender for small biz types

Re: I can already smell the Fail!

At my last employer we found Defender to be far more reliable than Sophos, and easier to push out to remote workers via InTune.

It uses fewer resources than Sophos as well.

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Remember Demon Internet

They were clever, they had two separate lines from two separate telcos coming into their data centre

All good, except they entered the building at the same spot, the exact spot where a van crashed into the building and took them out for about a week...

Give us your biometric data to get your lunch in 5 seconds, UK schools tell children

Re: Really odd...

Kids lose ID cards, along with pretty much everything else, so we gave up issuing them to anyone below 6th Form.

We thought of going the NFC route with phones, but we're trying to discourage phone use, not increase it, so we've stuck with fingerprints and regularly cleaning the readers. For any kid that doesn't want their fingerprint storing, that isn't a problem, our canteen staff remember them using their own built in facial recognition brain.

We have 1,000 kids in school, around 60% have school meals and they're all served in around 20 minutes...

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

Re: 'something you have'

That's fine for you, but I know a lot of staff around my workplace have ridiculous passwords based on the their kids' names, far far too easy to break

Microsoft shows off Office 2021 for consumers ahead of the coming of Windows 11

Re: Standalone versions need an MS Account

The standalone apps don't need an internet connection to work, especially if you're also saving lcally.

With regards to a MS account, there's usually no need for one if you're installing whilst offline, disconnect WiFi and/or network cable during install and both Windows and Office usually skip the MS account check.

Fairphone makes wireless earbuds less foul, by charging batteries carefully

Re: "six years of software updates"

I guess the 6 years of updates are for the new phone, not the earphones

Re: Instead you've got to use wireless earbuds

Get a USB-C to headphone adapter, most have a USB-C passthrough so you can listen while you charge

Get a USB-C headphone adapter, they cost a couple of quid on eBay, and pay a bit more and they have USB-C pass-through as well so you can carry on listening to music while you charge the phone

Apple debuts iPhone 13 with 1TB option, two iPad models, Series 7 Watch

Re: Apple Watch battery life

It's not just that it sucks power so fast, the form factor necessitates a pretty small battery.

As for what's using the power, GPS mostly

Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Sub-$600 midranger makes premium phones feel frivolous

Re: Charger

It's USB C, so you can connect to pretty much any USB equipped charger with a suitable lead.

I havd an A21 and it charges nicely from my 25w Anker charger

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

A lot of fire and intruder alarm panels still use RS232 or 485 for management, and in the past I've found USB-Serial dongles to be flakey at best

And Lenovo, who also ship laptops sans-RJ45, which means adding the school image and managing during exams was a major ball-ache

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Re: Surprised it took this long

Hasn't Giuliani been disbarred?