* Posts by trolleybus

40 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2017

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

trolleybus

Dogs

I've owned dogs for many years.

US piles yet more charges on Theranos CEO, COO. We could do with good blood testing now... and this wasn't it

trolleybus

Re: The rule more than the exception

Are you claiming that an official press release containing information that may affect the value of a company isn't covered by investor protection laws? I'm not in the US (and IANAL) but if that's the case then how come Elon Musk's tweets have caused so much ire?

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

trolleybus

Not the only Burroughs ATM story

I worked for Burroughs/Unisys and one day an engineer told a story. He'd been called by an irate bank. I won't name them but in those days you were unlikely to find a branch south of Hadrian's Wall. One of their customers had complained that the atm had failed to issue the tenner. A long argument ensued: the engineer defended his machine, explaining that such a situation was impossible.

Years later he was uninstalling the machine in question. Tucked away underneath he found a tenner. Rather than reopen old wounds he secreted it from the premises.

trolleybus

Re: Experienced tester.

I visited a Unisys plant once that was close to releasing a new version of software to configure a communications controller. There were signs all round the plant asking employees to spend a given day trying to break the software in any way they could.

I stll think a formal script is necessary, but maybe it isn't sufficient.

Snapchat domain squatter loses comedy £1m URL sellback attempt

trolleybus

He could have a bright future as an advisor in the White House.

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

"... any amendments will probably be implemented too."

Perhaps probably isn't good enougn for IBM?

GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats sued by hangry, overcharged coronavirus customers

trolleybus

Re: "We are going to be very strong on food supply."

I take it you have reputable cites for these allegations?

Brit housing association blabs 3,500 folks' sexual orientation, ethnicity in email blunder

trolleybus

Bingo!

It seems to be a fiull house: keeping personal data in the sensitive category without it being necessary (so far as we can see); keeping it in an unencrypted spreadsheet, then mailing it to world+dog.

I bet the person responsible has had little or no training in data protection and GDPR.

I really hope they informed the ICO before this was published.

Microsoft names priority users for new Azure capacity – emergency services, government, remote workers top the list

trolleybus

There are different kinds of free

The biggest area of free is probably individual free OneDrive. But there's also free Office 365 nonprofits. Some charities may be essential services (air ambulances, hospices and so on) so I hope their use isn't curtailed.

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

trolleybus

Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

I seem to remember the scenario you suggested - caller in Devon, call centre in Scotland, ambulance despatched from Birmingham - was exactly the problem. For some odd reason there was a feeling that a Scottish call handler might, just possibly, lack local knowledge.

But you made your anti-union point.

What could possibly have gone wrong with a huge Government IT project, outsourced to a private contractor? The track record of suck projects had been so good recently.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

trolleybus

Re: apps ?

Really? I always understood that here in Blighty we had programmes on the tele or at a football match, but programs on our computers.

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

trolleybus

"HMRC say they will reclaim Gift Aid from the donor if not enough income tax had been paid to offset it. That implies they correlate a charity's claims with the donor's tax records .... "

It does, but they don't. All the charity collects for a Gift Aid claimant is their name, address and the date of their declaration. No DoB, NI number or wany other easy way of linking to a tax account. In fact I've long thought that HMRC seem to have no interest in policing the scheme.

Go on, eat your fibre, new build contractors. It's free! OpenReach lowers limit for free FTTP connections

trolleybus

Re: Wow, what a pain

I'm confused. Openreach are wholesale only, so I'm not surprised you had difficulty finding prices.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

I think Lewis Page was a denier, but he's not been seen around here for some time.

A user's magnetic charm makes for a special call-out for our hapless hero

trolleybus

Re: My only memorable incident

A mainframe computer, Burroughs 4700, late '70s. We rented out time to users who needed extra capacity for routine batch jobs. One user, a London discount house, was famous for its attractive computer operators.

One morning one of said attractive operators come out of the machine room to say they had a problem: their work was taking much longer than usual. I went in and saw immediately that the array of lights indicating the system state was static. The computer wasn't actually doing anything.

The second thing I saw was a handbag resting on a long key labelled stop/run.

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

trolleybus

Re: Back in the day...

cont? Are you sure you got the vowel right?

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

trolleybus

Re: But you can recover deleted Items ON AN EXCHANGE...

I was thinking the same thing about 'permanently' deleted emails still being recoverable. For a certain number of days the user can recover the mails themselves through the Outlook UI. After that, but for quite a long time, an admin with Powershell magic can still recover deleted mails.

As to those who whitter on about people needing to keep old mails for regulatory reasons, Exchange will enforce that for you, no need to concern the user.

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

trolleybus

Re: Ooooh first post....

You got to write the first post and you failed.

You're supposed to say that Windows XP was better than anything since, that you ditched Windows for Linux some years ago, systemd is crap and you run Noscript to avoid this JS nonsense.

After 10 years, Google Cloud Print will finally be out of beta... straight into ad giant's graveyard

trolleybus

Re: Not that big of a loss

The people who come to the library I volunteered in, for a start. They walk in with their phones, join the free wifi then use Cloud Print to print their boarding pass, job application or whatever.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

trolleybus

What's DAB for?

I understand why the broadcasters want DAB. They control all the masts and can cram more channels in the spectrum. But what's in it for me?

I can use FM, which sounds better than DAB and which degrades gracefully, or I can use the Internet, with a hugh choice of channels (including small players who can't afford a slot on a DAB multiplex) and sound quality comparable to DAB.

What's the use case for DAB?

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

trolleybus

Re: Why should the licence payer in the UK provide free content to others?

I think that went the same way as paying for the over-70s. The Government decided to pass it on to the BBC.

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

There are still plenty of pairs of signal boxes linked by telegraph on the UK's railways. Signallers communicate with each other by means of single-strike bell codes then use block instruments to track and repeat the status of the line: whether it's clear, occupied or the default status of line blocked (indeterminate).

Cash carousel spun between Filetek and Autonomy, Lynch employee tells court

trolleybus

Re: Nothing to see here

"This is a simple batter sale ..."

So it is fishy, then?

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

trolleybus

Why do they always forget the cooling?

I was at a Telco in southern China, during the rainy season. We were working on a fairly beefy mainframe that had a short message service centre installed on it.

The heavens opened at lunchtime, just as we crossed the road to the restaurant. A mighty thunderstorm rolled over, with sheets of water running along the road and constant lightning. Unsurpisingly, the lights went out. We weren't bothered. The customer's a telco, their power supply won't be affected.

Once the storm subsided a little we swam back across the road. As we expected, the computers were all up and running. What we didn't expect was the cacophony of warning beeps due to overtemperature.

Yes, the aircon wasn't on the UPS.

Didn't really matter as the service wasn't live yet, but a timely reminder.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

trolleybus

Re: In my 25 years in IT I learnt at least one thing.

Correct.

Burroughs used to have a 4GL called Linc. In the early days it had no graphical development environment, everything was specified via text files.Then a colleague of mine developed a way to graphically describe LINC components. He called it Direct Input of Linc Definitions Online. And sold it to several companies.

Marketing weren't too impressed.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

trolleybus

Re: Dick

And there's a tyre dealer in north Londion called Sambos Tyres

trolleybus

Re: Dick and other unfortunate soubriquets

My colleague in the next cube went red trying to suppress the giggles when taking a call from a South African named Isaak de Coch.

Security? We've heard of it! But why be a party pooper when there's printing to be done

trolleybus

Did you ever work for RM? Their default password was always Change<e or change_me. I worked in several schools where the top level admin account had one of those as its password, years after installation.

Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

And the Victoria Line in London has had level 3 since 1968.

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

trolleybus
Pint

Re: "The age of digital money has arrived"

"Not having folding money in my wallet is a good disincentive to not pull out my plastic cards."

I find the exact opposite.How else can you make the beer come from the other side of the bar when the cash has gone? Oh have I misunderstood? There are a lot of negatives in your sentence for so early in the day.

Yes, we are all different people. I find contactless easier to control than cash, because every little transaction appears in my bank account.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

trolleybus

MacOS does, and so does Windows 10. It's bloody annoying.

Meet the Great Duke of... DLL: Microsoft shines light on Astaroth, a devilishly sneaky strain of fileless malware

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

"Apps that get installed into a users profile don't go anywhere near the system32 folder."

But any system admin would prevent that from happening, ot at least prevent the installed application from running, using tools such as Software Restriction Policies or AppLocker.

Problem is an increasingly large number of vendors who should know better choose to distribute software that is designed to work like this (I'm looking at you, Autodesk).

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

trolleybus

"I worked for a small (now defuct) fledgling ISP".

I'm going to use that word from now on.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

It can't have been Mitcheldean, because he had to travel there from Europe. Maybe the Birmingham is in Alabama?

This two-year-old X.org give-me-root hole is so trivial to exploit, you can fit it in a single tweet

trolleybus

Re: Now, if this were a Windows exploit...

But it isn't.

I know what you're saying. I even agree with you, to a point. But this isn't a Windows bug, and shouldn't be used as part of a religious war.

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

trolleybus

Re: And then billed 3 extra hours?

Nothing unusual about that. Some Burroughs upgrades were simply moving a jumper. No different than changing software settings to change the way a car works - you pay for better performance, you get better performance.

You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't

trolleybus

Re: music

"Does this apply to Music? Could the music that I’ve ‘bought’ from iTunes disappear because they lose the rights to it..."

Much of mine has disappeared. Apple say you can download music you've bought as often as you like, but there are weasel words along the lines of 'so long as we still sell it'. Many of my purchases were made when replacing my vinyl catalogue, so there was plenty of 70s stuff with titles like 'Diamond Dogs 2015 remaster'. Once 2015 ended the title of the product on sale changed to '2016 remaster'. At that point if you lose your local copy, you're well and truly stuffed, as I discovered.

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

trolleybus

Re: And which bunch ...

This isn't autorun, in the .inf sense. Just mounting a new volume when it sees one. Something that Burroughs computers were doing quite happily in the early 70s without magaging to run arbitrary code.

Google asks browser rival Vivaldi to post uninstall instructions

trolleybus

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

"AC because at the place where I work, central IT does MITM with https. I've tried explaining to people that the padlock which shows when they log into their bank at lunch break does not mean they have a secure connection with the bank, just a secure connection with work's proxy and that IT can potentially log and see everything they do online, including usernames, passwords and potentially sensitive information such as bank statements and that whether or not you trust IT do be sensible with these logs, what happens if there's a breach and the logs are stolen, and "meh" is exactly the reaction I get, followed by placing an Amazon order for a couple of hundred quid."

The web filter I'm most familiar with, Smoothwall, has a builtin category of sites, mostly banking, which are exempted from https mitm inspection. Sure, you have to trust your IT folks not to override this but I'd have thought most companies other than those needing very high security would realise that it's in everyone's interest to allow their employees this amout of privacy.