Posts by Ken Moorhouse

Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes

Re: Pricing now corrected in the UK

They've reverted it to the pre-Brexit price.

Dell upping its margins again

Maybe it was a CSS error.

UK rail lines blocked by unexpected Windows dialog box

Re: "Train Station"

Looks pretty terminal to me.

You would think that their IT people would simply have moved to another platform. Bad luck if you want to go to places like Streatham as I think they normally depart from platform 10 IIRC.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: That's pretty much it. How is that being 'screwed over'[?]

So if you're going to put up with having the reduced functionality of Home for 30 days then you might as well have gone for Home in the first place.

If it doesn't do what it says on the tin then you should be rightly annoyed. Have a downvote (not often I dish those out).

If their systems are capable of doing that...

...then how about putting everybody back to Windows 7?

Seriously though, if MS can pull this kind of stunt, what else can they do with your machine? Unilaterally turn it into a brick, perhaps?

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

Re: This is why triple redundancy is the rule outside the atmosphere.

So long as the machines are not voting on which one to trust, (without human oversight).

Hmm, how very topical.

Re: Failure is not an option

Having worked on fail-safe systems (for London Underground - for the Signals and Mechanical Departments), the more appropriate phrase would be:-

Wrong-Side Failure is Not an Option

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Re: Your candidate might be John Littlewood (1885-1977)

He would have been a good advert for Littlewoods Pools.

Re: Short of massive inflation reducing the British pound to a fraction of its current worth

Put Boole on the ten pound note, then people will understand that it is really a two pound note.

Re: haven't used pound notes since my visit during the '70s.

Neither have us Brits since 1988 when they (the pound notes) were phased out.

Re: Oliver Heaviside: Didn't like quaternions

I hate them even when they are finely chopped.

Re: Not a mention of Paul Dirac.

Did you think of him on impulse?

Re: Francis Bacon

Actually he could be an appropriate choice in the context of the phrase "bringing home the bacon."

Re: Darwin is the only answer.

He was on the back of the old tenner, which is the reason why he's not been mentioned.

Re: James Prescott Joule ...but how many people know he was a brewer?

He invented the energy drink no?

Re: Hmm. Obviously Isaac Newton I mean, come on... the cat flap.

Yeah, but electricity or magnetism is needed to keep the local mogs out.

Re: "Would Wheatstone be a bridge too far?"

Hmm I can see the potential there.

Re: Not De Morgan?

Then again there's John Venn.

Bertrand Russell

Another one to add to the set...

Equally deserving woud be...

Robert Recorde.

He invented the equals symbol.

According to Wikipedia:-

"Recorde published several works upon mathematical and medical subjects"

Does that imply he invented the colon too?

A logical choice...

...would be George Boole.

Cyber-crooks think small biz is easy prey. Here's a simple checklist to avoid becoming an easy victim

Re: ...should be limited by Microsoft Office, for example by using...

...LibreOffice or OpenOffice instead.

Imperial bringing in budget holograms to teach students

Jeremy Bentham

Does this mean he won't have to attend UCL meetings any more?

BT: We're stocking warehouses with kit ahead of Brexit to avoid shortages

Re: I would be happy to see them hung from a washng line

Your local -er- video emporium probably won't have anything in that particular category. However there's a chance you might find something about being pegged on a washing line.

stockpiling products

I wasn't aware BT sold keyboards.

But they could have chosen a better place to stockpile them than the B6479 between Horton In Ribblesdale and Selside.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Re: What about if the builder fits the sink

I'm not sure about sinks, but if it was a toilet being disposed of then it should fall under the WEEE directive.

Scroll-lock Homes

...would he have deduced these are from some ancient installation, and why?

Well, if you're going to replace the keyboard you will probably get a new mouse too. So there is either a similar infestation of mice somewhere, or this is a dump of dumb terminal keyboards or rentokit have disposed of the mice.

If they were from dumb terminals then it is quite appropriate that they should end up filling a field.

Police are looking for a Shifty Character

Tut tut. You lot's reputation is slipping. Loads of puns but you've missed this one..

GitHub lost a network link for 43 seconds, went TITSUP for a day

Re: We use Orchestrator

This may be painful to think about, but you do know what rhymes with "orchestrator"?

Your data at the mercy of the orchestrator. Mwah ha ha ha.

Database replication is hard

The average business that is hell-bent on sticking data in the cloud needs to bear this in mind. You're buying into whole layers of sophistication that are totally unnecessary. One data repository and backups taken during pauses of data writing is all that many of us really want.

Sure, outages consequently mean inaccessibility to your data, but this is the price paid for being hell-bent on sticking data in the cloud. However, if you count up the risk points of failure of a cloud solution and compare that with the risk points of failure in an on-premises solution and draw your own conclusions.

I'll agree that github, et al are slightly different animals to say, accounts data, but anything basic that can be done in the cloud can be done on-prem. If bells-and-whistles are important then you're incrementing that risk points of failure counter.

Britain's rail ticket-booking systems go TITSUP*

Re: Southern Rail passengers have yet to notice a change to their normal level of service

You will have to wait longer for your statutory refunds to come through.

Techie was bigged up by boss… only to cause mass Microsoft Exchange outage

Re: but what's wrong with say 10:30pm or even 1am?

I used to do a lot of work for a firm of solicitors in central London. I can't remember what the reason was now but I didn't want to do something that was going to disrupt everyone. So it was agreed I would go in, in the evening, do what I had to, and leave, and phoning for a minicab if needs be.

The firm was on the 2nd floor of what was effectively a large house with another firm of solicitors on the 1st floor and a bank on the ground floor. I went in, as agreed, did what I had to, rang for a cab, shut the 2nd floor office door, put the keys through the letterbox and made my way down to the ground to wait for the cab.

What I hadn't bargained for was someone working late on the 1st floor who left the building before me. He/she had dead-locked the front door to the building, so when I tried to get out, I couldn't. If only I hadn't been instructed to put the keys through the upstairs letterbox. The battery on my mobile had died by this time and I now had the minicab driver outside. I shouted through the letterbox to him, "I can't get out". He looked up and down, round about - where's that voice coming from? "Over here, I'm locked in." "Oh so you don't want a cab then." "Yes I do, but I'm locked in." Well miffed at being messed around, he went.

What would you do at this point? Think before you answer, and then read on.

Lots of things running through my head, my wife knew I was going to be late, but not as late as this could end up. Suppose the police think I'm a burglar, suppose the building caught fire, etc. Burglar? Fire? I know, I'll set off the alarm. The alarm company are sure to have details of the key-holder. So I did and it was your traditional very loud continuous bell.

The police pitched up. They see me looking through the letterbox. "Can you open the door please sir?" "I can't, I'm locked in." "Are these your premises sir?" Etc. etc. They believed my story after a few runs through it, including the minicab driver. "No we don't have keyholder details, sir. Nothing we can do, apart from informing your wife."

So I slept on the hallway floor with the alarm bell ringing. At about 7.30am the cleaners came in and nearly tripped over me.

So, take my advice, 6.30am has some advantages...

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: Archer was token passing

Typical auto-correct: Correcting the words you don't want to correct and leaving ones you do wanted corrected, uncorrected (e.g., tweisted).

Re: Novell WAS ethernet.

As some folks on Experts Exchange are/were very fond of saying when I was a contributor/moderator there "Novell is/was a company, Netware is/was the product'.

...and Netware is/was compatible with Token Ring, so to amend the title: "Netware was not just ethernet."

Re: NetWare 2.x used to have a non-dedicated mode

Yes, I should have been more specific about Netware. All the servers I ever setup were v3 and upwards.

Novell acknowledged Lantastic as a competitor by launching Netware Lite, but IIRC Lantastic was a far more sophisticated product.

Sage even dared to tinker in that market too, their selling point was that their network cards were incompatible with the competition, which Sage asserted was a good thing where confidentiality of accounts data was concerned.

Re: if it's an obscurity contest

I used to supply Artisoft Lantastic. Brilliant bit of kit for those not willing to fork out for Netware + dedicated server.

Ethics

Hats off to all the ethical people on this thread... worthy competitors if we were ever to meet in that context.

I've come across a lot that aren't, mind you. Here's a sample (I might have mentioned this one before, apologies if I have).

My biggest customer in my early days bought all their newer pc's from one of the lower tier manufacturers whose head office was only a few miles away. I would support the equipment they'd purchased from said manufacturer as well as supply other bits and bobs as required. One of the bits and bobs was a Logitech Mouse. In those days configuration involved a diskette (5.25" floppy). Supplied that, configured it and off I went.

Days/weeks later I had a very unhappy customer on the phone "You've given us a virus."

What had happened was that there had been a power surge which had taken out a few bits of electrical equipment, including one of these pc's (on the financial controller's (FC) desk). A guy from the pc manufacturer had gone in, replaced the motherboard in the pc and had suggested doing a virus scan on it using the latest "super duper" virus checker (which he was trying to sell, I can't remember if it was Dr Solomon or MacAfee). Anyway it found a virus and this guy implicated me as having spread it using the mouse software.

I went in and talked to the FC. I knew full well that he locked all disk media I gave to him in his safe. So I asked where the Mouse disk was. In the safe. Has it been outside of the safe since my visit? No. Right, let's do a virus check on it. (No virus found).

So where is the media originally supplied with the pc? In the safe. Has that been taken out the safe since being supplied? No. Right, let's virus check that. (Viruses found).

As the curtain came down the FC was thumping his fist on the desk, "get me that pc supplier on the phone, right now..."

Yahoo! $50m! hack! damages! bill!, Russian trolls menaced by Uncle Sam inaction, computer voting-machine UI confusion, and more

Re: I don't see what the problem is...

There probably is no issue if democracy is an ongoing thing that is being voted upon. However....

I believe the problem lies with unstable or non-democratic regimes where there may become an absolute insistence on photographing one's ballot in order to determine good or bad actions, either against the person voting (bribery or repression respectively), or against the polling station where the vote is cast (oh look the polling station has caught fire, what a shame votes are unable to be counted).

By putting red tape obstacles in the path of such interference the general public is being protected for its own good... for a change.

Voting machines in Texas

Screen shots in the linked twitter thread clearly document an issue. However, taking images of a ballot document is illegal, isn't it? So how do you highlight such important deficiencies to the public at large?

It's OK, you can pick up real-time IoT analytics – it won't bite... unless you ignore this advice

1982

Arguably the year of birth of IoT: The Internet Coke Machine at Carnegie Mellon University.

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

Re: If it's not well modularised adding a feature might well touch core code.

The cynic in me suspects that this is done on purpose. So that when the Anti-Trust people come a-knocking on their door they could honestly say "Ooo, no, we can't remove Internet Explorer, everything else depends on it". (IIRC, an example of what I often used to illustrate systemic flaws in MS' design philosophy).

RE: a major banking operation

The problem with many big corporations is summed up (pardon the pun) in one word: Excel.

Great for prototyping but should be banned for "production" purposes.

"Quality" is a structural attribute, not a bolt-on

Therefore prodding a "black box" after creation and each iteration is not going to be effective in converging to a satisfactory product.

Brit smart meter biz blamed Apple's iPhone 7 launch for its late taxes

Re: when someone calls, you answer the damn phone

HMRC were practising their planned response to a Hard Brexit on the days they happened to call.