Posts by TS15

UK to test Starlink satellite broadband for those hard to reach areas

Formal testing is surely a bit redundant at this point?

Genuinely don't see why this is creating such headlines. Starlink is (now) a proven way of accessing high speed internet more or less anywhere that falls within their global coverage and is relied on by 1000's of customers worldwide.

It's simple to setup, largely consisting of positioning the dish/receiver somewhere with a clear view of the sky and plugging things in. Instant high speed connectivity.

It's usually much quicker than 4G or older FTTC broadband and unless you can get proper fibre, which of course is better, will indeed provide high speed connectivity without needing to run cables.

Good way to burn cash I suppose.

As for selecting Starlink over OneWeb etc, suppose that's probably got a lot to do with Starlink being commercially available off the shelf - and available to buy and use right now.

Only EU can help us, pleads Slack as it slings competition complaint against Microsoft Teams

Slack... pricing is a problem

We, like many other smallish organisations I'd imagine, were quite happily using Slack's free tier prior to COVID-19 coming along.

With an overnight switch to fully remote working, we had an immediate need for easy to use video calling and small group video collaboration plus screen sharing etc.. all the useful bits that Slack rolls into their "Standard" tier.

Faced with needing to jump up a tier and start paying for it, we inevitably had a look around at the alternatives and quickly realised that we could roll out Teams, complete with all the bells & whistles we needed, for the princely sum of about £2 per seat on top of our existing Office365 / Exchange seats - or indeed free for a year under MS's Teams Exploratory Experience licence compared to an additional £5.25 per seat for Slack.

Simple choice really... the "pain" of switching collaboration tools was non-existent and I have to say, especially for a MS product, we've been pretty surprised at how well Teams has largely "just worked" and tied into existing accounts via Azure AD for a simple end-user experience.

Assuming we're not the only organisation around that needed to fix an unexpected urgent need for collaboration, discovering that Teams filling a Slack sized hole pretty effectively, well... maybe the time is ripe for change.

Who's that padding down the chimney? It's Puma, with its weird £80 socks for gamers

A pair of slippers.....?

So unless I'm missing something, these are surely just a pair of indoor use slippers...?

Suppose the term "slippers" isn't quite as cutting edge as "Active Gaming Footwear".

Next year's Windows 10 comes bounding into the Slow Ring, which means 19H2 waits in the wings

Re: Can't even update Windows!

Buying a laptop running W10 on a 30Gb disk feels like signing up for a perpetual exercise in optimism?

Bad news from science land: Fast-charging li-ion batteries may be quick to top up, but they're also quick to die

Re: Duh!

Chippy is an exceptionally common term for a carpenter; much the same as a sparky for an electrician.

Oh Britain. Worried your routers will be hacked, but won't touch the admin settings

Re: Manufacturers need to do the right thing

Initial details / factory defaults - most routers ship with some sort of randomly generated default wifi key / admin password that gets provided on a label stuck to the router.

Simple for new users to handle for setup if you're right in front of the device. Not so simple if you're trying to "borrow" your neighbour's connection from next door.

In mourning for Nano, chap crafts 1k-loc text editor

Re: A programmer called...

Indeed. Unfortunately there's not much mitigation for a service being installed by a village idiot who hasn't got a clue how to secure their systems or understanding of what something does.

Suspect you'd find a few more than 6000 insecure Windows or Linux machines kicking around on the web. Or compromised mysql installs.. or anything else you care to think of.

A programmer called...

Salvatore Sanfilippo - probably deserves a bit more credit/recognition than "A programmer called".

He wrote a little something called Redis (http://redis.io/), which if you've not come across it directly is a supremely fast in-memory data structure store able to be used in a multitude of ways.

Often used in large-scale web infrastructure and powers a bunch of websites you may have heard of: http://redis.io/topics/whos-using-redis

Embattled 123-reg flings six months' free hosting at angry customers

30%...

So, 30% of servers have *now* been restored.

Um, what about the other 70% ?

Gone for good? Vague hope of bare metal recovery?

Best of luck to anyone who's been caught up in this mess.

Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe

How's this for irony... this seems to have happened on the same morning that our local Exchange 2013 box has decided to die thanks to an Active Directory problem capable of causing Win2012 server to bluescreen..

A small part of me is vaguely reassured that MS's own platforms, running under their own control, are just as fragile as on-premise installations... that said, it would be rather nice if things just worked (and continued to do so) sometimes!

Microsoft boffins borrow smartmobe brains to give wearables 9x kick

May well be missing something here, but isn't this essentially the same approach used by the Apple Watch running the current release of WatchOS & WatchKit ?

The watch serves as an interaction / display medium for apps running on an associated iPhone... Sound familiar?

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/WatchKitProgrammingGuide/DesigningaWatchKitApp.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014969-CH3-SW1

Ford's 400,000-car recall could be the tip of an auto security iceberg

Just an observation - keyless start...

... has been around for a while now; buttons to start / stop engines.. no need to physically insert an ignition key etc.

The whole concept of needing to or indeed being able to remove a key to stop the engine running is already reasonably foreign to drivers of many current vehicles.