Posts by steamnut

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

New box required?

What we need to upgrade that box that featured on the IT Crowd called "the Internet". Or maybe cloning it will double all of our speeds.....

Oh, Kaltern, take a powder and lie down.

Brit local authority appoints a systems integrator in leap to Oracle cloud, but support time-bomb is already ticking

We will be waiting...

As very few projects like this are ever on time or on budget, I fully expect to "read all about it - Solihull in Oracle licensing debacle" in the closing months of 2021....

Don't any of these Councils read IT press?

If you own one of these 45 Netgear devices, replace it: Kit maker won't patch vulnerable gear despite live proof-of-concept code

Not just Netgear

Yes, Netgear are being naughty but what about all of these so-called "smart Home" devices? They too need updating from time to time.

What is worse, is the fact that a lot of them use a closed cloud provided by the manufacturer and, when the manufacturer decides to force an upgrade / move on / go bust / get taken over, then the, usually dumb, users are left with non-working systems and more land-fill.

We are sleep walking into a real problem for consumers and there must be stiff and enforceable legislation to stop this happening.

Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready

Re: Been saying it for a long while

I thought that the mobile networks now had some override functions built-in to allow essential services capacity when the normal traffic was blocking the system due to a major event (not a Boy's Own comeback). If not, then it does seem like a good idea.

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

Amateur design and construction.

Surely, everyone who designs cockpit instrumentation has seen the film "Fate Is the Hunter"? A plane crash is caused by a coffee cup being tipped over the centre console? The spill produced an instrument error that resulted in the pilot making a fatal mistake.

Anyone involved in electronics must consider the operating environment. At the very least the PCB's would be coated in a conformal coating which ought to render them short circuit proof against liquids. And, I would have thought the control switches would be waterproof. Any other gaps in the panel for slider type controls would have brush seals too.

All in all an amazing "fix" to be applying after all these years.

TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

Tom Tom are a PITA

I have had TomTom satnavs since the beginning and my family use a lot of them too. I still have my original TomTom Go although they no will longer update it. Back in the early days you could email them and get answers now you have to go through lots of suggested fixes all designed to stop you actually contacting them at all.

The SatNav in my Lexus is a TomTom and I had a problem with the live traffic subscription. Although the satnav said my subscription was active and I was connecting to their server, if I actually logged-in the live traffic, the service stopped working. I ended up taking image copies of the SD card and proving that it was a problem with the configuration file caused by their server. I even did a hex dump to show the differences. However, Tom Tom insisted that it was a Lexus problem and to contact the dealer. Lexus say that, as it is basically working ok the unit was working and any problems were with either the Tom Tom software or their servers. This ping-pong went on for months until I sussed the flag bit and fixed the problem. In the meantime, Tom Tom sent me lots of offers to upgrade my obsolete units (Go, One, 910 etc) with "lifetime" map updates and free traffic.

My other beef is the map updates are always more expensive for my Lexus than my other Tom Tom units. End of rant....

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Why Galileo?

It's easy to say that losing access to Galileo is a problem but, Galileo is not finished and not 100% operational and, what is working, has had some spectacular outages. We have access to the US GPS system and most of us get by with what that offers. Leaving the EU will not stop our GPS clocks, TomTom's and Android phones from guiding us to B&Q so what is the problem?

Finding SAP hard to swallow? ERP giant says it's working on something more bite-sized

Will it cost less?

It's ok to seem to offer bite sized SAP which implies lower costs of entry but I doubt if the SAP consultants' fees will be any less. And, without consultants, you will never get it to work as quickly as the PowerPoint slides promise.

A relative of mine just retired from a large company that implemented SAP. She got the job of travelling all over the world to supervise new SAP installations. She has an alternative for the SAP acronym - Slows All Production....

Release the pressure: Win16 support arrives for version 3.2 of Free Pascal

Re: Granny pix

Me too! I wrote my first app that earned me money in Turbo Pascal. On a humble IBM PC it was lightning fast and created an executable that you could just run.

I updated and kept all of my Borland packages (I know sad) including Turbo C, C++, Delphi, Java, Paradox and even Turbo Prolog. I loved Delphi but, sadly, it is no longer a low priced product so stopped at version 12.

I have written apps in Lazarus and it is close enough to be usable and, of course, free! These days I only use Python but I do miss those days of Turbo Pascal on 4.7MHz 8088's..

Are you having a hard time following what Microsoft is trying to do with .NET 5.0? You're not the only one

kill the beast...

"Single file apps remain an ambition" - is that with, or without, the gargantuan over-bloated monolith called .Net? The many, often and massive, .NET upgrades convinced me a long time ago that .NET is not for me. As it gets ever larger, the number of potential CVE's grows.

How many of us have downloaded a small Windoze app only to be told that it needs a certain version of .NET and then you wait for a 400Mb+ download to finish before you can continue. for those of us in rural areas served by slow broadband speeds it is no joke.

Franco-German cloud framework floated to protect European's data from foreign tech firms slurpage

How will they build it?

Assuming that the EU finally settle on a design and a location; and that could be many expensive years away, how are they going to build it without hardware from non-EU countries. China, America and Taiwan are already major suppliers of the essential chips and components. India is joining the supplier party too.

It is a typical EU project that it attempting to create an EU monopoly. And, like the failed EU patent project, it will just burn Euros and time with no final result. That said, there will be lots of consultancy fees and expenses in the trough.....

Don't panic: An asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is flying past Earth this weekend but we're just fine

future orbits?

After from being disappointed about the size comparison not using the size of Wales I put my physics hat on. If this asteroid as a mass then surely, as it passes the earth, it will get a small "tug". This "tug" will affect the orbit a little each time it passes. This affect is used to slingshot space probes so it does work. This led me to wonder if anyone calculates this affect when predicting future passes.

AppGet 'really helped us,' Microsoft says, but offers no apology to dev for killing open-source package manager

Flatter to deceive?

I am sure that M$Soft knew what they were doing. As a mega-rich corporation dangling an employment opportunity they sucked him dry of everything they wanted and then tossed him aside.

Many years ago I had a simple bit of PC hardware that made me a nice living. A "prospective" large customer called me and, before placing an order, wanted more internal information about the product to make sure it would be accepted by their quality and inspection regimes. The order would have doubled my turnover in an instant. Naively, I freely gave them all they wanted without an ND in place. I never heard from them again but I know they fulfilled the requirement internally.

UK takes a step closer to domestic launches as Skyrora fires up Skylark-L

Good old British ingenuity...

Looking at the "rig" it is good to see the collection of orange ratchet straps in use. I'm wondering if space qualified versions are available and at what cost?

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

In keeping

As we already have ChipZilla for one half of the Wintel conspiracy then I guess you know what my vote was.....

UK, Ireland users call on SAP to extend indirect licensing deadline again as COVID-19 ravages project plans

A bit like Oracle?

The recent changes in the SAP licencing approach is beginning to look like the Oracle strategy. Bait your customers with lots of easy to try/use possibilities and then enforce the licence conditions with a hard approach with the "peace offering" of a "cloudy" solution. In the end, it's all about the money.

I have never come across a company that implemented SAP that was 100% happy. The trouble is most SAP users cannot see an easy way of getting rid of it either.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

It started my career move...

We had an Elliott 803 at Rugby College (later absorbed into Lanchester Poly). Although I was studying Applied Physics, the computer part of the course fired me up and I went into computing from that point on. I remember the console speaker that, although abused to play music, did give you a sense of what your program was doing. Later on, in my 6800/8008/8080 hobby days, I used a transistor radio for the same thing.

There were two no-no's: The first was to remember how little memory you had to play with so large arrays were not possible and, if attempted, resulted in a subscript overflow message (iirc - SUBSCROFLO). The second was to make sure your plotter programmes completed. The plotter involved an extra paper tape load for the operator. If your plot failed then the whole machine had to be restarted. The plotting code was probably an early form of overlay.

Before we had magnetic tape installed the paper tape reader was something to behold. The output from the reader had to be caught in a basket as the speed was so high. The computer operator was a very smart young lady too.... Happy days. ;-)

Proof-of-concept open-source app can cut'n'paste from reality straight into Photoshop using a neural network

Unintended consequences

This is an excellent piece of work for sure but, I do see some "dark" applications for it. For instance, how about taking an image of your bosses signature and posting it into an important document? The process is so fast that you could do this by a quick visit to his desk while he is taking a comfort break. Yes, there are other ways of doing this but nothing like as fast as this is.

How about putting people into security images just before presenting evidence at a court case?

I think that this is just the start of some very scary technology......

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Where does this stop?

Is the expression "brown out" next? That would create zillions of cut and pastes with the microprocessor data sheets alone. And mains wiring in the US has black and white cables; get out of that one!

Once we have sanitised our language for Black/Asian people who is next - the Chinese? Then a "chink in the armour" or "Chinese burn/copy" might have to be changed.

Going forward we may have to please the LGBTQ lobby so we are no longer going to have male and female plugs and sockets.

The blacklist, whitelist episode was started "following a request from a customer". Surely, possibly just one "customer" does not mean that it was a big issue in the first place?

With a deference to people that are not of sound mind this morning - the world had gone mad!

Hana-hana-hana: No it's not your dad trying to start a motorboat... It's Northern Gas, renewing its SAP software

payroll has reduced from six hours to five minutes - really?

Extolling the virtues of their self imposed SAP lock-in they said that "payroll has reduced from six hours to five minutes". I cannot see how SAP would do this. Even if their payroll was run on a 1980's PC running MSDOS, this sort of "improvement" exposes some other problems in their systems.

It is easy to see why SAP consultants are amongst the highest paid; it's a job for life!

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

One of the best early ISP's for sure.

I was my first ISP and they were the best at the time as they had techies you could talk to. I upgraded from dial-up to ADSL with them and the service was always good. But, once I had access to FTTC, Demon, by that time part of Vodafone, said they could not offer me a service so I skipped to Zen where I have been ever since. It was obvious the Vodafone were slowly winding down the company having taken the parts it wanted. Sad to see them go....

Who's going to pay for Britain's Aunty Beeb to carry on? Broadband users, broadcaster suggests to government

BBC Licence..

If the BBC really do think that 5 million viewer watch East Enders each week then simple make it subscription only and charge £5 each of the four episodes per week. That is worth around £5.2bn per year. That exceeds the £3.7bn they currently get. Add 50p for Antiques Roadshow and £1 for Question Time and they will be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The reality is, the moment they charge for 'Enders, the viewing figures will drop like a stone. It is time the BBC had to earn their revenue and stop treating it as regular income with little justificaiton. And why do we pay for the BBC World Service?

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Alternatives

At least Microsoft users have alternatives with Linux & Mac (if you must). This same slow shuffling of users towards the "wonderful cloud" by companies such as Oracle, Sage, Adobe, Salesforce, SAP and Quickbooks offer few easy alternatives. Users will just keep sucking it up.

But, if we are all cloudy based, then the average office PC need not be a very powerful box at all and no more office servers will be required. This is not good news for the likes of Intel and AMD. Maybe that's why Intel is focussing on it's server offerings these days?

With the Internet bandwidth being throttled during this upsurge in home working, and even Microsoft having to ration Azure resources, I wonder if the "cloudy" bubble will burst once the users work out that their work rates are slower than before. Or even at a dead stop when someone puts a JCB though the optical fibre....

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Licensing fever...

I bet that our favourite database supplier will be keeping a close eye on accidental licence abuse. After all, they really need lots more users to "volunteer" to sign up to their cloudy systems.

Microsoft starts a grand unification attempt with .NET 5

More Bloat

Having suffered mandatory installs of various .NET versions in order to run applications, and watched massive .net updates of over 350MB, I despair at this latest .NET5 incarnation.

Yes, I am a grey beard, but the whole .NET bandwagon needs a reality check.

Oracle staffers in Europe weather cloudy job cuts: As many as 1,300 workers face chop after sales slide

It's a trend that will not reverse

Oracle's reputation for an aggressive licencing regime with subtle "gotchas" has ensured that new businesses are not putting Oracle into their database plans.

There are lots of database alternatives around, some free, and there is no longer the imperative to go for Oracle. Back in the day it was said that "no one got fired for buying IBM"; with Oracle being a solid database from a large (ie not likely to go bust) company then this was the database of choice - then.

Despite Oracle's denials about it's sales practices the rumour mill is fairly solid. So, new businesses look to other database sources. This means that Oracle's existing customer base is going to slowly shrink. The Cloud has better alternatives which is why Oracle tries to coerce their existing customers to use it.

Every empire has it's day and I can only see this one entering a period of slow decline. It's no wonder they were desperate to get the US JEDI contract.

Aria Technology loses Court of Appeal bid over £750k VAT dispute

Bankruptcy next?

Well, they fought and fought and fought again and lost! With all that VAT and HMRC fees to pay, as well as their lawyer's fees (never cheap), then I guess they will just pull the plug on themselves. The week after, someone will pick up the company for a £1 and start all over again. Then the whole exercise will have been a waste of time and HMRC (aka taxpayers) will still not have their money.

Zyxel storage, firewall, VPN, security boxes have a give-anyone-on-the-internet-root hole: Patch right now

Re: CPE

And the Zyxel routers (free from Zen) are a real crock anyway. It took me just 1 hour to work out how poor it was and replaced it with a Netgear offering. Ok, even Netgear have their issues too but this was be best of two evils.

Private equity ponies up £2m to help launch satellites from sunny Shetland by next year

Life imitating art?

It sounds like a 1958 film called "Rockets Galore" (showing my age a bit). The plot of the film: A British military commander Hugh Mander (Donald Sinden) arrives in the Hebrides island of Todday to investigate the land for the government's plan to build a rocket launch base there.

You really couldn't make it up!

Of course, back in the 1950's we did have a rocket industry. We used a place in Australia called Woomera which was an Anglo-Australian Project. Construction of Woomera began in after WWII.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

A great product that is too expensive now..

My first paid-for application on a PC was written in Turbo Pascal running under MSDos 3.3. Back then we only needed 512Kb of memory and a couple of floppy disks to make a PC useful. TurboPascal compiled fast and produced single executables. I also used TurboC/C++ too. Borland was a real pioneer that is often overlooked in my view. Sadly, I still have the disks....

Later on I used Delphi to write Windows applications and it was a great product and reasonably priced. I stopped upgrading after 2009 as it's future was uncertain with each new owner and I was using Linux platforms more often.

I did look at upgrading in 2013 but Embarcadero has really stiffened up the prices. The cheapest option is now £1399 initial payment with £399 per year after that using the, now popular, subscription model.

Thankfully the open source Lazarus fulfils my needs at a much more sensible price!

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Was this the last straw?

Today, we see that Boeing's co-chief CEO (need two really?) Dennis Muilenburg has resigned. Maybe this latest failure was just one too many. Any bets on how long the other CEO will last?

Poor, poor mobile networks. UK's comms watchdog plans to stop 'em selling locked-down handsets

Prices will rise though..

I would love my Vodafone sourced S9 to be free of both Vodafone and LG apps that I cannot even uninstall. But, without these lucrative apps, aren't we going to get higher priced unlocked handsets?

Tory chancellor pledges to review IR35 rollout in UK private sector – just like all the other parties

Yeah right...

David Cameron said he would look at it but then he and George Osborne just reformed it a bit and still left us with the same problem.

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

Delusional

I guess they (Boeing et al) all believe what they are telling us; that is very dangerous and, at the same time, arrogant. Of all times for Boeing, now is the time to really come clean and be as transparent as possible about their inner workings and problems.

Most Register readers are going to be cynical about this situation because we have seen it before. I just hope that it doesn't cost yet more lives to get proof.

If Boeing is proven to be wrong then they are finished as a company as this really is a case of three strikes and you are out.

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Embarcadero is priced too high for developers .

I still have a copy of Borland Pascal which I used to develop applications (just called programs back then) in 1983 on grey imported IBM PC's. It was a low cost and fast way to write programs for PC's. I continued to buy and use Borland products including c, c++, Paradox, Quattro, Jbuilder, Prologue and Delphi. All of these products were reasonably priced for small companies like mine. Now, with Embarcadero at the helm, there are no "reasonably priced" products so I don't use them at all. Also, my current systems are all Linux based which, until now, was badly served.

Thank goodness for Lazarus which does all I want for little money (I do send donations). It is going to be interesting to see how well this "new" Delphi will fare in the Linux space. I think that it is too little too late.

With Python, Kivy, QT, Lazarus etc already well established (and low cost), in the Linux space we don't need Delphi now.

Despite the recent emails and phone calls from Embarcadero asking me why I am no longer a Delphi user (answer is always "too expensive" - even for upgrades), I think than Linux, with Python and Lazarus, are not going to be displaced anytime soon.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

Bad design and bad project management vs the accountants....

Many years ago I worked on some civil aircraft software. It's purpose was simple: take a number of inputs from "real world" sensors and a single "command" from the pilot/auto pilot and produce just one output which was to control the engine thrust. There were three processors and a voting system. In addition to doing this job there was some logging (to magnetic memory!) for specifics like maximum thrust called for, temperature extremes, vibration alerts etc.

The control software was derived from Pascal but was designed in such a way that infinite loops (aka lockups) were not possible. It was really a specialised state machine. The point is this software was only accepted for use if it ran perfectly on all three different hardware platforms. Also, the code and test harnesses for each hardware target were written by different teams behind Chinese walls.

Assuming the overall software design was good - and this was not a trivial process to get through and signed off - the final product was eventually signed off after all tests were passed by at least two test teams. And, of course, the documentation was humongous.

In the context of the current Boeing crisis I cannot help but think that there must be some serious compromises going on for their systems to fail as they clearly are.

Boeing nowhere fast: Starliner space taxi schedule slips once again to August

Software glitches?

Maybe they are sharing the software from another project and they are having to change the message from "pull up, pull up" to "abort abort". Either way, Boeing are not having a good year so far and any failures with their name attached will not go down well.....

Radio gaga: Techies fear EU directive to stop RF device tinkering will do more harm than good

Re: What's the problem....

Buying "Pro" equipment does not solve the problem - even if you have the budget for it. I'm sure we all have equipment gathering dust or long since skipped where the "pro" manufacturer decided to milk it's customer base by obsoleting the equipment and offering buy-back deals against new equipment.

Another side to this which could be classed as "unforeseen consequences" is the use of Software Define Radio (SDR). In the beginning amateur SDR activity was confined to hacking an existing TV/FM radio chip. Now we can easily receive and transmit on any frequency from 00 KHz to 6GHz. The genie is out of the bottle. Now we don't worry about hackable equipment as lots of SDR gear is widely available. A early "abuse" of this technology is the man in the middle attacks between car entry keyfobs and cars resulting in a rise in car thefts. I can create my own GPS signals, FM radio station, collect data on aircraft and ships at sea and also create a mobile phone base station. The equipment doesn't change as it's all software due to GNURadio and other open source applications.

The moment officialdom (EU, FCC and others) creates restrictions and barriers then you can bet that the hackers and open-source movements will get creative. Let's Face it they thrive on those challenges.

The EU is trying to "bolt the stable door after the horse has bolted". Like the recent copyright and patent issues they our way out of touch with the real world.

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

Bye Bye

I was with them almost from the start with 32K USR modems (you can still hear those tones in your head cant you?) followed by iSDN, early ADSL, better and better ADSL standards and always reliable.The techies knew their stuff and the service was always the best around for me.

When FTTC was available here I was told they were not supporting it and I was offered a move to Vodafone but the deal was not good and no fixed IP address was offered either. There was no great feeling of them wanting to keep me so I guess they already knew that Vodafone was going to shutter it anytime soon. I moved to Zen and have not looked back since. It is a shame to lose one of the pioneer ISP's; they served me well. Bye Bye Demon.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Re: Is their hardware history better or worse than their software history?

But we did invent the Jet engine that the jump jet uses and then promptly gave the Americans the details for free. Oh, don't forget the magnetron (radar) and the digital computer; although we crushed the evidence and put all of details under top secret for a stupid length of time so the Americans commercialised them before us.

In fact, going back in history, more was achieved by private entrepreneurs and inventors (Cockroft, Mitchell, Watt, Bolton, Parsons, Brindley, Stephenson, Newcomen, Trevithick ) than by Governments. Maybe we should encourage more entrepreneurs with better tax breaks?

As for Gallileo, do we really need it anyway?

Windows 0-day pops up out of nowhere Twitter

More cloud anyone?

U$oft would like us all to log in to virtual cloud-based machines in the future. It's all part of their drip drip subscription model (ditto Oracle, Adobe etc). But, just imagine the chaos that would (will) ensue when the machines they they have total responsibility for go tits up or are compromised.

Windows is clearly still a very flawed OS with U$oft trying to calm us with their regular patch updates. And yet the bugs still come.....

It's bad enough that Azure and Office365 (more like 360) go offline for long periods of time but who knows what the affects would be of total shutdown.

Thank goodness there are alternatives.

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

Putin are you reading this?

Well, if we cannot get a single aircraft to the UK today then getting the rest of the squadron will take until 2025 at this rate. I'm sure that Putin must know how vulnerable we are now......

When you read about how we did amazing things in WWII (Spitfires, bouncing bombs, radar, ships built at a rate of one a month...) you wonder where we went wrong as a nation.

And so it begins: Veritas lays off UK workers, R&D bods hit hardest

More boilerplate work

The statement beginning: "Veritas is moving into the next phase of its transformation...." is just pure boilerplate work with the usual use of words like "transitioning". The bottom line is they have lost the plot and are struggling to stay in business.

They also sponsor the Williams F1 team and that is cash they can no longer afford.

Are you SAP-py now?! ERP giant overhauls pricing model following indirect access drama

Is it really any better?

I don' t use SAP but have clients that do. They are generally nervous of missives or visits from SAP. Worse still, a lot of them wish they has not adopted SAP in the first place. Often SAP it is so embedded in their business that that cannot see any way out of it. Bet I guess that was SAP's intention in the first place.

I just read the pdf of the new licence "deal" and I fail to see where the transparency is coming from. it looks complicated and very convoluted. Maybe that is the idea....

This new SAAS world seems to be based on the bait and switch model, and is only interested in your monthly payment. And, the small print still basically says that you don't own anything and, if the software doesn't work, then tough.

What other industry would put up with this sort of contract?

Details of 600,000 foreign visitors to UK go up in smoke thanks to shonky border database

Blairs joke..

This morning I heard Tony Bliar on the radio extolling the virtues of what effectively was an ID card as a way of tracking immigration. It's the only real solution and lots of other countries have them. It's about time we had them here and sod the liberals.

And, if we started this year, it might be finished before I die.....

Crunch time: Maplin in talks to sell the business

It's done

Back in the day when RS and Farnell were strictly trade vendors we had Maplins and Cirkit or others like Criklewood and Watford for components. At the same time we had Laskeys and later Comet catering for Hif-Fi enthusiasts.

RS & Farnell, and their sibling CPC, will now sell online to anyone online or via the phone. Tandy went some time ago as did Laskeys and Comet. Maplins tried to cater for components and hifi and CCTV at the same time and didn't really do a job at anything.

With the growth in the Maker movement with 3D printing, Raspberry Pi's Arduinos etc, I think they missed a golden opportunity to move their business model. They could have even run maker workshops in their stores alongside their stock of suitable parts.

I have been getting an email a day from Maplin for the last two weeks which looks desperate. Sad to see them go though.

Cisco surges after pricing switches-plus-subscriptions just below old hardware prices

It's another rip-off in the making

Yes of course Cisco are changing their financial model at their customers expense. It's just that initially it doesn't look like it.

Ask the Cisco users if they feel ripped off when their third subscription payment is due which, I'm sure, will be inflation adjusted. What happens to the equipment if the subscription payment is late or stopped altogether? At least with the fully paid-up model everything continues to work.

The market for second-hand Cisco equipment will be interesting too if "subscriptions" are not transferable.

As usual the vendor will hold all of the cards.....

Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners

What a waste.

Assuming this wonderful technology actually works and the Police find an illegal immigrant what happens next? Well, the person would be taken to a Police station and probably bailed until an immigration /extradition hearing and then they would disappear again.

So what's the point?

It may be unpopular but we should have instigated an ID card scheme. The ID card could be used Police checks, confirmation ID for banking and NHS treatment.

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

Not totally accurate?

If the computer was a 360 or 370 then the IBM actual 1403 printer could be taken away without doing much harm as it was connected to a 2821. control unit. The 2821 was used to connect a 1403 printer and the 2540 card reader/punch to IBM's byte multiplexer bus. If you removed the (bus & tag) cables from a 2821 without then re-terminating them than you caused all sorts of problems with any other devices on the same bus.

As a number of control units could be daisy chained on the same bus then what probably happened is he removed other devices from the bus as the chain was broken.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

It's about time the industry gave Intel a big spanking.

Intel said "We take the feedback of industry partners seriously" - really? Since when did you listen to us?

I hope the class action suits from the corporate users will give you a lesson in humilty....