Posts by Soruk

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

Re: !Audacity

That would be the RISC OS port.

Re: Hindenburg

They even attempt to justify the name...

https://hindenburg.com/about#/why-hindenburg

Re: How about "Audible City"?

Sadly, Amazon might have a thing or two to say about that.

Playmobil crosses the final frontier with enormous, metre-long Enterprise playset

Re: Shuttle?

Amazon Prime Directive?

UK's competition watchdog gives £31bn Virgin Media and O2 merger the seal of approval

Re: Too confusing

I must have missed the NTL ownership. I may well be wrong but I thought Hutchison sold Orange to Mannesmann. Vodafone did s hostile takeover of Mannesmann and were thus forced to sell Orange quickly, the buyer being France Telecom.

Re: Ownership of MBNL

MBNL was originally Three and T-Mobile. EE inherited T-Mobile's share. O2 and Vodafone were never involved (they have their own, Cornerstone).

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Been there, I typoed the default gateway when remote configuring a new physical server. No ILO or iDrac either. Oops... (Though it wasn't yet live, thank $DEITY).

I was preparing myself to have to take that long journey to the data centre to fix it at the console, when it dawned on me that I had access to another box on the same subnet. Thankfully this worked and I was able to SSH in and sort it from my desk, but that was a really close shave. Almost too close.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: Obviously

I tend to prefer Book Antiqua over Times New Roman.

And for a fixed-with terminal font? Bedstead.

You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

Re: Hands up, intentional mixup

At the minimum I will take a screenshot of the chat and send it to the other party as confirmation of the instruction.

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: if it works...

My leaf blower is reversible, so it can also be used to hoover them up and even comes with a bag that can be emptied into compost.

Barcode scan app amassed millions of downloads before weird update starting popping open webpages...

Re: But which app is the bad one?

It is com.qrcodescanner.barcodescanner

To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

Re: Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

They should have left CentOS 8 EOL at 2029, left Stream in parallel as it is today and jus announced there would be no CentOS 9.

ZIP folders were originally a Microsoft engineer's side hustle until bosses figured out he worked for Microsoft

Yep, the capability was introduced in RISC OS 3, and widely used by applications such as !SparkFS and !ArcFS. The same capability allowed the RISC OS desktop to look inside and access files contained within the PC Emulator (and later PC Card) hard disc image file.

Actually, he released a patch update mid-2020.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Proof reader

That's where you shift to a higher or lower pitch...

Re: Proof reader

Why would you be allowing Delete? Surely the high water mark should be 0x7E?

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: I think you 2 have stumbled onto something there

There is a reason it is sometimes known as "autocorrupt" - even offered by my phone as soon as I've typed "autoc".

Passwords begone: GitHub will ban them next year for authenticating Git operations

My reading of that is SSH keys will continue to work including for new setups and are not being deprecated.

Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

Re: Build process public?

Oracle is a bargepole situation. They have form for being downright evil.

I did test their distro on an old Atom box. It installed (eventually), and booted into their Unbreakable kernel. Which caused dnf to crash with an illegal instruction after hosing the RPM database irreparably. Reinstalling and forcing the boot to use the RH-compatible kernel dnf worked.

Hmm. Did I manage to break their unbreakable kernel?

Re: What would I run away from fastest ?

This. It may be free now, but down the road they can introduce a feature, enabled by default and buried in the release notes state it is chargeable. Then audit you down the road. I would not like to be in that position. Also, they have form in demanding payment out of the blue for something that was once free. *cough* Java *cough* Putting that sort of liability on my employer is not something I will risk my job for.

I have slammed the brakes on our CentOS 8 upgrade plan, and will wait things out to see what happens regarding alternatives.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

While I don't have the scripting skills to do this, a possible way forward could be some kind of dnf plugin that looks at the RHEL source packages (that CentOS has traditionally picked up and rebuilt), and block any binary package in Stream that has no corresponding RHEL source package.

Thought the M3 roadworks took a while? Five years on, Vivaldi opens up a technical preview of its email client

Re: M3

As any British driver knows, the M1, M3 and M5 do not meet. To get through all three you also need the M25, the A303 and the A30.

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Re: I'm going to be called a Fanboi but...

I am no fanboy, but Apple have been part-owners of ARM since the Acorn days, thus most likely had more close involvement in it than pretty other manufacturer (maybe aside from Broadcom, who acquired Element 14, which was previously known as.... yup, Acorn.)

Linux on ARM started life as a port to run on Acorn kit. I remember seeing it run on an Archimedes machine. Okay, it was slow as hell, but seeing it able to do stuff on an 8MHz box was an achievement.

(And knowing how well RISC OS ran on it, it still feels blisteringly fast on the original Raspberry Pi.)

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

My ex-wife's Blu phone kept turning the mobile data on by itself, so I installed a profile action thingy that has the action of disabling mobile data when the phone was unlocked. No such misbehaviour on any HTC, Huawei(!), Samsung or Motorola device I've had.

As for scanning WiFi when switched off, that is switchable under Location Settings (on my Moto One Hyper).

In Germany, they call it a "handy". I wouldn't recommend using that term (especially when asking for a phone) outside of Germany.

My Motorola One Hyper runs Android 10 (so not exactly an "older" phone) and it has that mobile data toggle right at the top on the swipe-down menu - as has every Android I've ever owned.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Re: Unloved?

The South-Western mainline runs through Wimbledon...

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

Re: As I always say

Service in the agricultural sense. As in how a bull services a cow.

Re: These point scoring things....

Definitely an IBM prisoner.

This is how demon.co.uk ends, not with a bang but a blunder: Randomer swipes decommissioning domain

Re: A sad day

Not everyone, I went to PlusNet (FTTC) in December 2014 when I moved house.

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

This hasn't been true for a while. https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces

Re: keep the family on Windows

Exactly, last Christmas I migrated my mum from Win7 (after it keeled over irreparably) to CentOS 8, with a desktop interface made from IceWM and ROX-Filer. (Her other daily driver is an Acorn RiscPC.) Having been using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice on Windows, migrating these was a doddle and she had no trouble adjusting to the new reality.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

Re: Makes a change

Network over Mains kit tends to annoy them quite a lot too.

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Re: Not met a demon

Upvote for "BorkZilla".

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

Re: Other BOINC projects

My mirror is failing to sync.

Re: Other BOINC projects

I'm still on the STI project - the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence. Not found anything yet.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

Would the (UK) Computer Misuse Act come into play, as they have actively put out software which has destroyed data on users' devices? It could come under malicious software as this feature wasn't disclosed to users before they installed the software.

Farewell to notches and hole-punches? ZTE expected to announce mobe with under-display camera next month

Re: I would be happy with a no camera phone

I've not tried it with a ruggedised case as I have no need for that. However, a case designed for that phone will most certainly take it into account.

One other thing for Motorola, they provide a rubber case with their phones, and to date I haven't lost a screen yet from accidentally dropping the things.

Re: I would be happy with a no camera phone

My Motorola One Hyper has one of these pop-out selfie-cams, and so far it works well.

Last phone I saw without a selfie-cam was the HTC Wildfire.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

About 10 years ago I used the Paragon driver on evaluation for a project I was working on for my then employer. The USB disc I was using to test it with happened to have a bad sector, and I got quite the surprise when the NTFS driver triggered a kernel panic when it hit it. It wasn't so much that it was faster, they wanted a driver that had commercial support. However, when we raised the issue of a kernel panic on a bad sector we were completely ignored. We weren't a small company either, only a multi-national that has graced these pages several times in the past. I successfully steered the powers that be in the direction of the NTFS-3G drivers that were not only free, but far more stable.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Re: Magic?

I did this last year to retrieve data from a failed Acorn Risc PC hard disc. In this instance I used a USB to IDE adapter, so ran the disc in the freezer! The image was then transferred to an SD card, and with a suitable adapter the Risc PC now uses that as its hard disc - and it now runs faster than ever.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Re: Adding a comment sometimes caused compile failure

Back in the day, some BASICs were zero-based, so DIM a(10) had subscripts that went from 0 to 9, others went from 1 to 10. As an aid to portability, BBC BASIC went full Spinal Tap and the above statement allowed subscripts 0 to 10, thus allowing 11 members.

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

Re: Memories

Never heard them called that before!

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Re: New leopard...

This sounds like something out of that old film, Antitrust.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

WHILE/ENDWHILE only appeared in BBC BASIC V for the Archimedes and later.

BBC BASIC is still being developed in three branches - firstly RISC OS continues to be developed and is now open source, BBC BASIC for Windows has branched to BBC BASIC for SDL2 and is now cross-platform, and the open-source Brandy BASIC still sees development on the Matrix Brandy fork.

Openreach tells El Reg it'll kill off copper sales in 118 UK locations next year

Seems my area is on the list too (Chineham). I didn't know FTTP was here. I might look into an upgrade...

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Re: A long time ago

My bodge was a hacked straight Ethernet cable modified to work as a cross-over E1. It looked ugly as hell and was complained about by our data centre manager every time he visited the place. We did try to replace it with a properly crimped E1 cross-over cable, which was met by our call centre going offline. The bodge was reinstated and the call centre came back.

It was finally retired when we changed call centre operators to one which received calls via SIP.