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* Posts by roomey

31 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2009

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

roomey
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Re: " technical and interface debt accumulated over the past ten years"

And it isn't an easy codebase to contribute too. I looked into it years back because honestly I use that email client all day every day in work.

I would have gone mad years ago if I had to use outlook.

(I remember asking myself, why is there no "edit as new" button !?!!?!)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a great coder or anything, but I spend so much of my work day in thunderbird, Firefox and a terminal I wanted to try fix a few bugs. I nope'd out of there pretty quick tho. Massive respect for people volunteering their time for this

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Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

roomey
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Re: An interactive map of the border

I imagine the paramilitaries on both sides will have the smuggling covered. There has already been an up tick.

And as I said above, unfortunately a lot of the good will built up over the last 20 years is already gone, and all that will do is make reaching and agreement much much harder.

I am worried my children will have to live in a country at war... again.

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roomey

An interactive map of the border

I thought this was interesting, then I clicked on a few of the yellow dots and it was suddenly harrowing.

The sheer amount of violence that was happening here even 20 odd years ago. I remember as a child being scared of the border, almost every day on the news you would here about another bomb, another body, another punishment beating.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/brexit/borderlands/the-border

I think there are many of us Irish who are genuinely hurt. Not actually at the Brexit vote, or the UK leaving the EU. To be honest I think most non-farmers don't care much either way. But, what seems like the total and utter disregard for the North, the Republic, and the fragile peace is genuinely hurtful. It has shown us just where we stand.

To put this into context, a few years ago my grandfather in law, an old strong man who worked on boats all his life, an old fashioned man who was not one to show emotion, cried with happiness the day the Queen visited Cork. He said he thought he would never see the day. I'm not sure if that visit happened today the same (well he's passed away but you get my point), and I think that is a shame.

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ESXi on Arm? Yes, ESXi on Arm. VMware teases bare-metal hypervisor for 64-bit Arm servers

roomey
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Re: Fault tolerance??? Really

I'm fairly sure they had two hosts there in the video, you can even see then suspending the replication and putting one of the hosts into maintenance mode to demonstrate downtime free patching

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roomey
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Re: It's all about the money

Ehh, esxi is free to use

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Mulled EU copyright shakeup will turn us into robo-censors – GitHub

roomey

Email your MEP

Elections are next year, so email your MEP and explain why this is a bad idea.

See what they say, I have gotten an interesting response so far!

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Stop us if you've heard this one before: Seamen spread over California

roomey
Terminator

Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

Some of this this fellow's books are unnervingly prophetic.

In his case however they could also self assembly, communicated by scent markers instead of radio (thake that fm), and, oh yea, were petrol powered killing machines.

He also did a Ted talk on this.

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Kids, look at the Deep Learnings! (We’re just going to slurp your data)

roomey

+1 for Naked Lunch reference. Had great fun as a teen attempting to read that book

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vSphere 6.5 goes GA, gains surprise powers to predict the future

roomey

Some resources

William Lam put together a good page of resources:

http://vmwa.re/vsphere65

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Dirty COW explained: Get a moooo-ve on and patch Linux root hole

roomey
Coffee/keyboard

Check out their shop

Very reasonable I think!

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Dropbox sets up PO box in Ireland to handle non-US services

roomey

It's all about the tax is it?

I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that if they want to avail of Ireland's low corporate tax, they only need to incorporate a new company and transfer any patents to it. Dropbox as we know it then licences the patents form this new company. The normal dropbox pays so much for patents from this new company that it barely turns a profit (so less tax to pay on it), and all profit is with the new company, in Ireland.

At no point to they need to physically locate their server in the Republic to take advantage of this. I think it is a bit of an easy statement to say "ahh yea, tax dodgers", without looking into the other reasons they may be locating in Ireland, ie. Highly educated work force, eurozone, friendly data rules, no GCHQ and NSA.

Yes I get tax is a factor, but could we please try to look beyond this at least sometimes? The tax argument is a bit shallow in fairness

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Freescale preps white box switch for Interop launch

roomey

Can NSX user this?

Was wondering can this be used with NSX?

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RIP Sir Terry Pratchett: Discworld author finally gets to meet DEATH

roomey

Influence on El Reg

I have long suspected may authors here at El Reg were heavily influenced by his style! It's why I am a loyal paying customer :)

RIP Terry

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Researchers slurp unencrypted Viber messaging data with ease

roomey
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Re: Recommended alternatives?

I get what you're saying. Put it like this, any text I send no matter what format has a reasonable chance of getting scanned by some government or other. I can't do anything about that.

That is a whole lot different than someone running a packet sniffer on a WLAN and picking my picture texts up without a problem. That is a big issue and one I can do something about. It is a reasonable expectation of privacy (let's call it local privacy) and the fact viber is sending personal data in the plain is negligent.

Is there an alternative that at least uses ssl constantly?

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roomey
Facepalm

Recommended alternatives?

Viber is in big use in Ireland, and shame on me I never checked was it encrypted! I understand about lowered expectation of privacy when using these services, but there is a difference between somone or a government having to target your data, vs broadcasting it in the plain over any network you happen to connect to!

I actually though no way would somone not be encrypting their traffic.

So I guess it is now time to engage in a campaign to move people off viber, but what is a good cross platform alternative?

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VMware takes aim at AWS with hybrid cloudy infra service

roomey
Mushroom

No price war

I doubt they are going to be competing with Amazon on cost. I'm sure there wont be a huge difference, but I am sure bug customers will be adding this to their ELA.

It will be difficult to do a straight up cost comparison.

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Mighty multi-scope snaps stunning STARBIRTH image

roomey
Coat

Supersonic speeds

Just heard this on euro news, apparently the gas is getting expelled at SUPERSONIC speeds.

Coat... Gone

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Getting worried, Assange? WikiLeaks spaffs out 'insurance' info

roomey
WTF?

Anonymous cowards are out in force

Wow never saw so many cowards blasting away on a story. I'm not "saying" that these are not genuine comments, but as a very long term, committed el reg reader this feels off to me.

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Mozilla links Gmail with Persona for email-based single sign-on

roomey
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Black Helicopters

Re: Single login?

A possible issue with the idea of using a different password for each website is, that if your email gets broken into, most websites will allow a password reset, so the baddies will get access to all of them anyway. In effect you have the same single point of failure as you do with persona.

Unless of course you have a different email account for each website....

But what happens if you reset them email account passwords.... ahhhh pop.

Non-password authentication will always win security wise for a number of reasons, so now I just have to wait for el reg to get sorted with it :)

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Boffins get black hole double-vision

roomey
Alien

time travel?

I just saw a vid there with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in which a question was asked, what happens if two black holes collide. The answer was, according to the general theory of relativity, if you were to pass in between them, space is so distorted you would travel back to where you started from, before you left. Backwards time travel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE good vid

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Old men who use computers less likely to get dementia

roomey
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Joke

Re: In other news...

>People who try to train their brains with puzzles

They must be using gentoo

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Brutal web vice of the People's Republic crushes innovation, growth

roomey
Big Brother

El reg Blocked in China

Is dear El Reg blocked by the great firewall?

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LOHAN starts to feel the barometric pressure

roomey
Paris Hilton

Post post burst launch

I think the decision has been made,

But what if there is a post post burst launch, ie. ballon bursts, as the assembly drops, through very little atmosphere (so ideally little turbulence), a drogue stabilizes the launch platform and allows a launch.

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ISP kills off country-ban dodge after just 48 hours

roomey
Paris Hilton

Action against GeoIP

I feel that the use of GeoIP is fairly distasteful in most situations, and strikes me as limiting peoples choice solely for the economic gain of a few companies.

What would be a good way to effectively protest against GeoIPs? I imagine Boycotting would not be so effective, but is there grounds to right letters of complain to those who use it?

For example, would UK taxpayers be justified in writing to the BBC to ask them to allow users from around the world access iPlayer?

-Paris, cause there's no Geo IP filter there (sorry, can't help myself)

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Chinese coders beat all-comers

roomey
WTF?

Good coders = hackers?

I love the instant association this article makes between people good at coding, and cyber-terrorism.

Firstly I would think they are pretty different skill sets, and secondly.... What?

The commies are coming... No leaderboard is safe.

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Irish banks settle with Oracle over banking software 'fiasco'

roomey
FAIL

I believe this may be the real reason for the Irish banking crisis!

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Scareware slingers stumped by Google secure search

roomey

Secure search without logging in

You can use the secure search without logging in (I've had it as my default search for the last year):

https://encrypted.google.com/

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Safe as Windows: Smartphones' security nightmare

roomey
FAIL

Poor Rob Cottingham

I think you just DDOSed Poor Rob Cottingham. opps

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Inside 'Operation Black Tulip': DigiNotar hack analysed

roomey
Joke

letters and/or digits

DigiNotar? Diginothankyou

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Ditch the malware magnet

roomey
Linux

Okular

About two years ago I installed kubuntu on the all the users pcs where I work- about 11 boxes. Never had a virus or any sort of security problem with them. We deal with a lot of email based comms from the public, and the email addresses we have are published on the web. Specifically, we use okular to view PDFs. I'm not sure what vunrabilities it has, but we have never been the victim of any. I had to install Linux acrobat reader the other day to read someones cv(I think the fonts were missing in okular)! But other then that I have never needed it (and have since removed acrobat).

For creation we use open office built in PDF export, which works fine, other then for some reason, by default, it saves PDFs in presentation mode!

I guess it depends on what you need to do, for the vast majority of users, acrobat is overkill, all they want to do is read a doc, and copy text out of it. Any extra features which are uneeded are a vunrability or bloat, in my opinion.

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Eircom to block Pirate Bay

roomey

Lets have a fight

Eircom have the worst, most costly service anyway... but if they allow censorship, no doubt the others will follow... We'll have to fight it. Us paddies may get off our arses and do what we do best.. complain :)

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