* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Wireless screen in estate agent window just begging for someone to fill it with mischief

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A Life Of Grime

RIP Mr. Trebus.

The special they ran about Mr. Trebus' after his passing away was excellent.

Salesforce to buy Slack for $28bn in cash, shares – and vows to make it the new face of Customer 360

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Re: Slack Enterprise Connected Synergy Cloud Platform Edition

Amanfrommars - is that you??

Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

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Stop

Always do the sums

On-premise tin may be cheaper than a long term usage of cloud services. Always do the sums and see if the numbers stack up. Don't just jump to cloud* "because"

* Actually this applies to all the latest vendor fads.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

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The difference between RISC & CISC chips has blurred enormously. I don't think any chip that started as "RISC" is really RISC any more (Well, not in the original ideals of what a RISC architecture was anyway) And CISC chips borrowed ideas from RISC too.

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Pint

Beer to those at Acorn who took a massive leap in faith.

European Space Agency will launch giant claw that drags space junk to its doom

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Facepalm

And I suspect a lot of armchair space engineers will come up with "obvious" & "better" ways that the space boffins just have not considered.

(And in this context "not considered" actually means "They barely gave a thought to as it just won't work.")

NASA building network cables that can survive supersonic flight - could this finally deliver unbreakable RJ45 latching tabs?

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WTF?

What exactly is the problem these special cables need to overcome? I can't make it out from the article. Surely it can't just be a "cable that survives flying at over Mach 1" or one that "survives a sonic boom"?

NEC to sell the accelerator cards it puts into supercomputers – for about $11,000 a pop

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Why integrators or buyers will be interested when GPU software ecosystems are burgeoning is unclear

Throwing away $20k on a failled experiement is cheaper than six or seven figure sums for a low end supercomputer so maybe NEC see it as a gateway drug to their supercomputer ecosystem.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

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Re: Windows 3.1 or burst

There speaks someone who's found this out the hard way ;)

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

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MCAS was a software fix bodge for a hardware kludge.

FTFY

UK Court of Appeal rebukes Home Office for exceeding its powers with bunkum 'national security' GSM gateway ban

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The Home Office is expected to make a statement this afternoon.

Maybe using one bad of bad news to cover another? Sir Humphrey would be very proud.

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

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That's the SS7 type attack where routing messages are injected into the phone network.

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A PAC is used when you're swapping carrier. To change to a new SIM with the same carrier doesn't involve a PAC. It just requires you to smooth talk the under-paid call center person that you are the genuine user and here's a spare SIM card you have lying around.

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Re: Errrr

In your Office 365 environment you can select what types of 2FA the use is allowed to use.

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

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Maths is cool

Matt Parker has debunked one of the allegations about voter fraud:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

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Coat

Surely they should ring the fire brigade...?

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

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FAIL

I'm always reminded of the Brunel's atmospheric railway.

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Re: Logistical Challenges

In the UK, the new Crossrail trains are around 200m in length which can accommodate 1,500 passengers (With provision to extend to 240m). One of the reasons for that is that longer trains are more efficient than shorter trains. On urban/metro type services, the length of time to bring a train to a stop, allow passengers on & off and get back up to speed again is the limiting factor for the frequency of trains.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

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Flame

Isn't one of the other problems of a hydrogen system safely storing the stuff?

Icon: What happens when you don't store the stuff properly.

Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways

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Our Driver-as-a-Service model will first be focused on highway driving and also handle driving on a limited amount of surface streets to depots

This makes much more sense as a first step for semi-autonomous vehicles than taxis.

Cisco penta-gone from Pentagon as Aruba rolls in a new net

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Re: Cisco Vs Aruba

The prices I saw from both Aruba & Cisco were not list: They were heavily discounted.

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Cisco Vs Aruba

I've seen prices for similar Cisco & Aruba solutions. The Cisco solution was eye-wateringly expensive compared to the Aruba one.

Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network

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Re: Surely illegal

I can't speak for America, but I suspect in Europe you'd get a sympathetic view from the courts of a large company unilaterally fundamentally changing their T&Cs to the detriment of consumers.

Kick Google all you like, Mozilla tells US government, so long as we keep getting our Google-bucks

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I know modern web browsers are very complex beasts, but does it really cost $400m a year to employ the necessary staff to develop Firefox?

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

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WHY isn't something happening to sort this clusterfuck out ?

At a guess: Money.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

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Joke

Advert from Matt Parker about spreadsheets in light of the recent issue;

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

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Of course all the vendors want "as a service" It keeps the money coming in when the end user would rather just stick with the five year old (or older) version of the software they were previously running. As to hardware, the pace of change/improvement has slowed over the past decade so there is less drive to upgrade. I've seen people running 10 year old network switches as they're "good enough". (Sure, there might be some security issues, but with a bit of skill you can block that off and the switch keeps running)

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

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Cozying up to The Orange One is not a reason to make a political decision.

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

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FAIL

information they had obtained from an academic at Cambridge University, Dr Aleksandr Kogan

I hope El Reg have run that statement past their lawyers. Was Dr Kogan employed by the University for a period of time? Yes. Did he (or anyone else at the University) either collect or use that data? No.

The impression given by that sentence is that the University was involved in the collection or use of that data.

www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2018/04/13/dont-blame-cambridge-for-facebooks-privacy-crisis/

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

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Power corrupts.

Hasta la vista, Ola: TfL bans ridesharing startup, claiming unlicensed drivers picked up passengers

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Uber Employees

Uber, for example, handed out nearly 6,700 pink slips worldwide in the month of May alone

If the drivers aren't Uber employees, who are these thousands of people that Uber employs?

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

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Mushroom

Outage Notifications

What's more, it has a plan to prime its automated communications pipeline to get outage information to customers within 15 minutes, so they spend less time in the dark

I've lost count of the number of times we've logged support calls with Microsoft and being told there are no service problems to suddenly seeing an announcement saying the issue (that we were having) has been resolved.

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

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Flame

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Can we move on from the playground "My CPU/OS/Application is better than yours". The joke's past it.

If you bother to look at MS' recent business decisions, products are moving to be online services. The only thing that MS then cares about is the browser. Guess which product MS are getting to run on multiple devices.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

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FAIL

Re: Windows' Future

Guilty as charged.

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Windows' Future

For a long time the Windows O/S hasn't been a money spinnner per-say. It's always been things like Office & Exchange. (OEMs were never paying anywhere near full price for their bundled copies of Windows)

With Windows 10 now getting updates/upgrade for free, it does make you wonder what Microsoft's long term plans are for Windows. I feel the obvious answer is that they're interested in the subscription services (e.g. Office 365) over perpetual licenses. There were reports several years ago that MS was pushing its resellers to sell subscription Office 365 over perpetual licenses.

When Microsoft employees turn up at my office with Macbooks & iPhones (soemthing BIll & Steve would never have allowed) it only confirms my suspicions that MS see their future as on-line only. So the thought that Windows may fade into the distance isn't totally radical.

And now for something completely different: Ultraviolet aurora spotted around comet for first time

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You mean you're not packing some Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses?

Microservices guru says think serverless, not Kubernetes: You don't want to manage 'a towering edifice of stuff'

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Shocking suggestion: Maybe one solution doesn't solve every problem? Maybe you need a series of solutions in your pocket?

GNOME alone: FOSS desktop folk to start counting in whole numbers again

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Joke

Re: Downvote...

Well you can kinda use whole numbers if you use scientific/E notation: e.g. 10E-3

Dying software forces changes to VMware’s vSphere Clients

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Meanwhile 6.7 still relies on the Flash client for the Update Manager

Are you sure. I thought that was the final piece of the puzzle that came in 6.7

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I think the author is giving VMWare too much credit. VMware were late to market with a web interface (Flash) and when they did release it they'd based it on obsolete technology.

The Flash interface was VMWare's first web interface. Prior to that we had to use the Win32 client. And for a long while the Flash client still couldn't do everything. For once thing it was vCentre only. You still had to use the Windows client to manage individual hosts. Also VMWare tech support often told you to perform tasks with the Windows client rather than their Flash web UI.

But even whilst VMWare were working on the Flash interface the writting was already on the wall for Flash so they were working on a deadend product.

iOS 14 suffers app preference amnesia: Rebooting an iThing resets browser, email client defaults back to Safari, Mail

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Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Thunderbird implements PGP crypto feature requested 21 years ago

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Re: identity and encryption

Thunderbird can really take the initiative here, and simply implement it. If two Thunderbird clients are emailing each other then it will automatically be encrypted after the first email exchange

PGP & Email does two things. It encrypts emails in transit but it also provides identity assurance.

You can't automatically provide the identity assurance without either a manual process or recourse to a trusted third party.

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Re: Encryption should be automatic

PGP never took off, because it requires a public key server to verify identity and identity simply has nothing to do with encryption

And the fact that Johnny Can't Encrypt.

PGP's usability is very poor.

Surprise! Apple launches iOS 14 today, and developers were given just 24 hours' notice

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In the past 24 hours I've seen two messages from different companies saying there are problems with iOS14 (which have been there since the beta versions) and telling their users not to upgrade.

Net neutrality lives... in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs

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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I can see that these zero cost tariff options (e.g. Netflix, Facebook, Youtube traffic doesn't count) are good for the consumer and are a way for an ISP to differentiate itself in the market.

But I can also see that it could be seen as a slippery slope to only allowing blessed video streaming or social media companies.

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

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Re: OA publishing

I think you'll find that some grant awarding institutions now make publishing papers in open access journals one of the conditions of the grant.

No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too

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It's turtles all the way down....

India flies Mach 6 scramjet for 20 whole seconds

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And...

You forgot to add "and may go to war with neighbouring states who also posses nuclear weapons."

SMEs to UK.gov: We need vouchers for tech and training ahead of final Brexit curtain falling

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Mushroom

Based on current form, expect a u-turn or two.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a pair of black holes coalesced resulting in largest gravitational wave we've seen

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Pint

One heck of a blip!

The blip, which resembled four squiggles, lasted less than one-tenth of a second, and was created when two black holes with 66 and 85 solar masses smashed into one another

Everytime they announce a new find I'm amazed that they can tell so much from apparently so little data.

Beers all round.