* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Google tried to be funny, cocked it up, everyone thought it was a bug

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I am angry

It sometimes sent this even if you used the normal send button. Probably brought to you by the same people who did Android's UI.

Myself, I think I'll stick with Thunderbird and K9 Mail.

Brexit: Time to make your plans, UK IT biz

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whose agenda?

That's as sensible as holding you responsible for the pork barrel that is HS2.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: Whose agenda?

Greece was forced to privatise €50bn of state assets. That is a) forced privatisation, b) undemocratic, and c) a right wing neo-liberal agenda whichever way you look at it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: And on the other side of the channel...

I'm not scaremongering, I'm not particularly pro-EU... I am familiar with laws used to 'regularise' whatever it is that suddenly needs regularising this time around.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

And on the other side of the channel...

The UK government will likely follow the model adopted by British colonies as they gained their independence by preserving most existing laws until they are specifically replaced.

But what about other EU countries? What happens if some of them start treating the UK as ex-EU right away or make a retroactive change at some point in the future from some arbitrary date? If this happens and you're an expat or a British company with an office abroad, you could suddenly find yourself doing something illegal.

The Register to publish Mindful Sysadmin adult colouring book

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Shame Really

I'd have ordered one to take a break from this wretched charmless pile of code I'm supposed to be maintaining. Perhaps I'll print out the samples right now and colour them in instead, it might stop me from going postal.

IT freely, a true tale: One night a project saved my life

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: A great article

Ideas for future articles - coping with health problems (including but not limited to stress, anxiety, burnout) or useless PMs/bosses with strategies like negotiation, diet, mindfulness, etc...?

More of this and less DevOps stories, which itself is probably not a very good thing (perhaps DevOps should be called firing people and constantly firefighting problems with those that remain, it would sound less glamorous then).

Microsoft cracks open Visual Studio to Linux C++ coders

Dan 55 Silver badge

If competition from VS inspires Eclipse to make remote build more usable instead of having to mutter incantations and sacrifice PS/2 cables then that's got to be a good thing. Although, at Eclipse's pace, the pace of improvement will be glacial.

Rant over.

Apple's fruitless rootless security broken by code that fits in a tweet

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: OpenBSD Pledge?

You're never going to have a 100% bug free OS, so waiting till it is before adding new features would mean no new features would ever be added.

pledge at least is a usable step forward in security.

Theo suffers from the same problem as Linus, only with less swearing.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: OpenBSD Pledge?

SIP only exists because a home user will obediently type their password into anything. Now OS X always has come with a passwordless root user, to get root you use sudo -s and type your own password and if your user has admin privilidges you'll get it.

SIP isn't really necessary, what's necessary is an admin and a standard user with different passwords and a user which won't obediently type their password into anything that asks. Is that too complicated for the average home user? It seems so.

With SIP Apple is also saying they don't trust the root user or suid binaries. That is fixed by making sure OS binaries can't be exploited, not sticking a what is essentially a passwordless superroot user on top. It could be passwordless root users all the way up, it doesn't make it a particularly good design.

Pledge is a good way to defend against exploits, meaning a kernel will not allow an exploited binary to do something which in normal use it would never do anyway. They should incorporate it into OS X.

Big Blue bloodbath: More IBM staff slashed in Europe, US

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: IBM will be fine

Maybe they've fired the people who were good at reinventing?

Speaking in Tech: Batman vs Superman... absolutely sucked

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Anyone

Of course it's bobbins, it's DC Comics. They don't have the characters to make a believable comic universe, if believable is the right word. Batman vs Superman should be over in 5 seconds.

Also it's the same director as the last Superman film, which was also bobbins.

Firefox features will land out of cycle and Mozilla's cool with that

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

If you're going to go all modular...

... why have you axed tonne of features that people want? If everything's modular, they should be easier to maintain.

Spanish launch heroic bid to seize Brit polar vessel

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

RSS Isn't it about time you renamed the Armada Invencible to something else?

See tile.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Seriously

Another bit of pedantry, Spain didn't exist then either.

A 'hundred million' Truecaller users vulnerable to privacy bug, security bod says

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I am a Truecaller user

You can disable it in Dialler > Settings but you can completely uninstall it from Settings > Apps.

Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Reality Check

PR syndrome...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Did you say Windows 10's UI is less awful than OS X's?

Windows 10 takes Windows 8's UI and then replaces the icons with outline stick drawings, sort of like placeholder icons developers do before software is fully finished.

It's seems impossible to make it look any worse, but I'm sure they'll manage it for Redstone.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

"As a user I want the desktop experience to look and act like Windows 7's."

"As a user I don't want to be spied on."

See? Not that difficult to fix.

Let’s re-invent small phones! Small screens! And rubber buttons!

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

On remote controls...

The kitchen telly has an Auto button next to the guide button. "What does this do?" I asked myself after setting up the telly.

So I pressed it. It immediately forgot the channels and retuned the telly leaving the channels out of order.

And it's next to the Guide button.

Microsoft did Nazi that coming: Teen girl chatbot turns into Hitler-loving sex troll in hours

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: And on the other side of the world:

As I said somewhere else, they have graphically illustrated the perils of AI in a way everybody can understand and that alone is worth something.

Do you qualify as poor in Palo Alto? Spoiler: Yes, yes, you do

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Come to Spain

But you are talking about a house in rural Andalucia or wherever and the IT jobs are in Madrid or Barcelona.

The continual downward pressure on wages, little serious development outside of banks and public sector (which aren't really spending much at the moment), and not much in the way of new startups do not make it an ideal job market either.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not liking the job security on that

Your contract is safe until a) your employer's start-up running on unicorn rainbow farts has a problem sourcing more unicorns farting rainbows or b) your employer has a tantrum.

Microsoft introduces yet another Skype for Windows 10

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: With all the random changes of direction at Redmond-

I think MS might have done more to warn everyone about the perils of AI than anyone else up till now. Well done MS.

UK.gov kicks long awaited digi strategy into long grass, blames EU referendum

Dan 55 Silver badge

Didn't stop Gideon announcing they were going to privatise all schools and get rid of parent governors, so from that it seems that there is no digital strategy.

Police create mega crime database to rule them all. Is your numberplate in it? Could be

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: called into question by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner

It'd be pretty boring. The Biometrics Comissioner's not got very far either.

'Contractual barriers' behind geo-blocking could breach EU rules

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I'm not selling abroad vs. my suppliers don't let me sell abroad

Where's the logic in a flat deal? Business running costs and disposable income are different in the UK and Bulgaria.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

I'm not selling abroad vs. my suppliers don't let me sell abroad

Six of one vs. half a dozen of the other. Any company can argue they don't have an international agreement with their suppliers because they didn't want to sell abroad anyway.

And if suppliers just dig in and refuse to let a company sell their wares abroad, why should the company be punished for it?

So where has the legal 'right' to 10Mbps broadband gone?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Universal broadband in 2020 is an EU directive

So if Britain leaves, it might decide to carry on rolling it out, but it wouldn't have to.

Microsoft will rest its jackboot on Windows 7, 8.1's throat on new Intel CPUs in 2018 – not 2017

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

MS inciting people to insert their CC info in unrequested popups. That's going to end well...

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: EOL.

Rumour has it if you purchase JetBrains software for Linux, when you try to install it a crack team of beardies may break down your door and drag you off for reeducation down at the FSF.

We know for a fact that this doesn't happen with Windows.

Twitter at ten: The social network designed for 2006 struggles into a second decade

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: twitter ruined journalism

Matthew Wright and Jeremy Kyle did that long before Twitter. Before they came along we had proper journalism with The Sun.

Oh damn.

HERE: We're still, er... HERE

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Quite an uphill battle on iOS and Android

Not easy for Google, they'd need to reduce the amount of offline data by an order of magnitude compared to Here.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Alternatives?

Wileyfox Swift (5") or Storm (5.5")?

But the Nokia Symbian phones still have Maps and they still have map updates. So I wouldn't change your phone now just because of that.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I was sitting in my car

That's why they're still maintaining the Android and iOS apps. I suppose if they're interested in developing for Android Auto or CarPlay there are some code sharing that could be done there too.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The Android version has live traffic info which it takes into account when calculating the route. I suppose what's missing is the app deciding to recalculate the route on its own, you'd have to mess about with the screen.

A Logic Named Joe: The 1946 sci-fi short that nailed modern tech

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: *Remarkably* sharp prediction?

Jeez... Some of the answers in that "warbling phones" link. I am officially old.

Back to the story, it seems to show a setup where each house has a local server and storage more than computers connected to the Internet and uploading everything to four giant US companies.

FreeBSD crushes system-crashing bug

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Friday afternoon, is it?

Should have stayed in the pub, the writer obviously did!

(The operating system had a kernel vulnerability due to an integer signedness error that resulted in a heap overflow?)

Labour: We want the Snoopers' Charter because of Snowden

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A necessary evil?

Would staying in the EU/a sentence from the ECHR against the Snooper's Charter really mean anything? The spooks are going to do whatever they want anyway (that much has been proven), and the law is always catching up. If the Snooper's Charter is passed then later overturned, I really doubt it would make any difference.

If there's a politician who's whiter than white and able to oppose this bill it's Corbyn, but it doesn't look like he's interested in this battle.

Swede builds steam-powered Raspberry Pi. Nowhere to plug in micro-USB, then?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Not a bad design...

... I've seen power supply units which get hotter and give off more steam.

Top rocket exec quits after telling the truth about SpaceX price war

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Reality versus spin @ A Melbourne

Four helicopters and a big net.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Reality versus spin

The weight of that extra fuel is equivalent to another rocket. Which is cheaper, do you think?

T-Mobile US finally lets websites escape Binge On's web vid crusher

Dan 55 Silver badge

What's wrong with compressing video streams for a mobile?

Given that bandwith is finite and you're watching on a small screen, you're more interested in the video not stuttering than watching it in all its 1080p glory on a 5" screen while shaking about on the train or bus.

One in five PCs will be a tablet with detachable keyboard by 2020

Dan 55 Silver badge

Do people really want an OS which works in tablet and desktop mode?

It's almost as if they've worked backwards from Windows 10 to find the question...

IBM wants to harden your 'data centre on wheels'. Yes, your car

Dan 55 Silver badge

Turns key in ignition...

... -45103 Car will not start. Retry operation.

How Microsoft copied malware techniques to make Get Windows 10 the world's PC pest

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Get a Mac

One notification and a nice picture in the 'Appy Store for while... and everybody ends up updating.

Sometimes less is more.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I is dreaming

That is GWX Control Panel with each nagware item set to "No" or "Off". Try it, you might like it.

You have to tackle the telemetry updates yourself though.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Block it ...

Uninstall Mozilla Update Service from the Control Panel and that should be that.

Or there's a setting somewhere in Firefox's preferences which disables it but leaves it installed IIRC.