* Posts by Steve Davies 3

7136 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

From unmovable boot screens to dead certs, neither are what you want to see in a hospital

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Signed Certificates are only as good as...

the process put in place to renew them BEFORE they frigging well expire. If that fails then it could even take a business down.

Otherwise... they are naff all use to man nor machine. In many cases, thay just get in the way.

Colt Technology UK nixes winding-up order threat from Italian VoIP reseller over £3.8m disputed debt

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Joke

Re: "Yeah, he's a good bloke" after a round of golf.

Time to ban Golf then? :) :) :)

Windows Server to require TPM2.0 and Secure boot by default in future release

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Well now....

Or... they will stick with the old version(s) of server until the budgets allow the purchase of new hardware. To enforce this in VM's is a bit rich. Companies will want to test their back end systems and doing it in a VM makes perfect sense until... Sorry MS this is another fail. IT departments need at least 3 years notice of this sort of change.

Oh wait!

They'll be pressurising bare metal customers to go all cloudy starting tomorrow. "we have all the required hardware ready to go. Sign here (says the Devil)

I wish MS would get it through their thick heads that some systems really don't work if the server is in the cloud. Would you trust an Oil refinery control system to run inside some Azure Cloud somewhere on the planet?

No, you would not. The control system will hopefully be air-gapped at least once from the internet.

City of London Corporation explores options to escape Oracle's clutches

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Good Luck

You are right.

There are a few certanties that they should factor in from Day 1.

- It will take at least twice as long as the vendor says

- It will cost at least three times the initial budget

- It will perform like a two legged dog

- It won't work as expected.

I wish the City lots of luck with this project. I hope that all of the above points are wrong but I doubt it.

Microsoft tweaks its 'New Outlook' for Mac – but no support for Exchange on-premises yet

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: it's more of a trip hazard.

nope. It is a plane crash of uselesness.

Microsoft unshackles WSL2 Linux kernel from Windows 10 image for future fettling via Windows Update

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

re: speedy Linux updates

I'm sure that there is a team in Redmond (or India) working away 24/7 to put a stop to that. MS can't let those FOSS boys get one over on Microsoft. It does not look good when their process sucks so much and has done for years and despite countless thousands (if not more) people telling them to sort it out. But, they don't.

Another month, another way to smash Intel's SGX security. Let's take a closer look at these latest holes...

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

Re: I'm starting to think...

You might not be the only one thinking long and hard about their reliance on Intel.

The performance hits when applying the fixes to these vunerabilities can't have gone unnoticed at Apple HQ. This sort of stuff really makes you want to think again about your CPU choice going forward.

Is there no end to the crappyness in the current Intel CPU architecture?

Perhaps we are getting to the point where it is time to say goodbye to X86?

It is reminding me of that other product that had patch after patch after patch. ie. Flash.

It seemingly still won't die but there comes a point where it needs to be put out of its misery. We might be getting close point to that with Intel CPU's.

Microsoft's own operating system should finally start working on its own hardware ... 'in the coming weeks'

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Sums up Microsoft's quality control

another (sigh) footgun moment from The Redmond Behemoth.

They really do need to hire another tester. They can afford it...

An Internet of Trouble lies ahead as root certificates begin to expire en masse, warns security researcher

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Pirate

Lawyers... start your engines

There will be a lot of people with some very expensive kit that has borked itself because of this issue. They will sue, sue and sue until they get a solution.

A lot of companies are walking blind into this mess. Some really don't give a F**k. They have your money and good luck trying to get any support.

If this gets bad enough the Politicians (who it seems are mostly Lawyers or PPE grads these days) will get involved which will only make things worse.

An awful lot of this kit is never connected to the interwebs so I'd like someone to explain why it needs security certificates in the first place.

OTOH, this is a disaster by design and as other comments have said this is all to get you to buy more stuff which will more than likely have even an even shorter lifespan before the same thing happens again.

Windoze 10: New levels of tedium reached with latest Insider build while 'stable' release still a bit wonky

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Windows - seems a bit wonky

Nowt new there then. It has long been a war between MS and the Graphics Card makers. I really don't know why MS can't test for an Nvidia or AMD driver and just not replace the far superior drivers with their bit of tat. But no... you gotta do it their way or not at all. Nowt new there then.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
FAIL

All part of the planned obsolesence

the makers want. The less time you own a bit of kit that works, the sooner you need to go out and buy another 'improved' model with probably less support time than the old one. Samsung is well known for not updating its phones after a year or two so it isn't unreasonable to expect them to do the same for their white goods.

I won't be buying any of this 'limited use tat' for my home. As for connecting the tat up to the internet? forget it sunshine. It ain't gonna happen.

'Smart' anything is rapidly becoming a word that describes anything but smart. Rip-off more like.

British Army pulls up its SOC: New regiment to do infosec work even civvies will recognise

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Leet Hackers Corp

Post them to GCHQ. Problem solved.

Repair store faces hefty legal bill after losing David and Goliath fight with Apple over replacement iPhone screens

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Change Apple to Boeing or Airbus

and think again about the case.

Counterfeit aircraft parts is a huge problem. They look just like the real ones but the plane could fall out of the sky because said part failed in operation.

I agree that Apple are wankers when it somes to repairs but they like all businesses have trademarks to defend. They also face many, many law suits for phones blowing up when being charged with what looks like a real Apple charger but isn't. There really is no middle ground here.

The UK's favourite lockdown cheese is Big and Red but doesn't require a stinking great audit after consumption

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

American Cheese

Is basically slightly edible rubber. Tasteless to an extreme.

Snapping at Canonical's Snap: Linux Mint team says no to Ubuntu store 'backdoor'

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Linux

re: It's DLL hell all over again

shudder.

Canonical are really taking whole chapters out of the Microsoft 'How To' book.

Do it our way or not at all.

Good for the likes of Mint to say NO.

What was so wrong with the .deb package format anyway?

We got through 'RPM Hell' which mostly went away with tools like 'yum' and now Canonical are foisting this onto people. They'll start wondering where all their disk space went. Memories of the sort of issues we had 20+ years ago.

I never really got on with Ubuntu despite everyone in the LUG telling me that it was the greatest thing since... the last greatest thing. Now? hardly any of them use it. Mint is the most popular. Perhaps Canonical really need to listen to their users (unlike Microsoft)?

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Facepalm

re: 1) my phone blocks numbers not in my contact list

That is all well and good but how does your Doctor or the NHS in general get in contact with you?

They think that calling from a phone with 'Number witheld' is a good idea. They say that it is for data protection and privacy reasons. (eg if the call is to tell you that you have the 'clap')

They could impliment a solution but my guess is that they can't be bovvered to impliment it.

Perhaps you might like to think again about that rule given the current climate with CV-19

Had a bad weekend? Probably, if you're a Sectigo customer, after root cert expires and online chaos ensues

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Yesterday (1st July), (3rd July)

I see you have invented the 'Time Machine'.

Can't you use it to get into the Root Cert store and fix it?

However, as you say...

Failure to renew certificates on time is increasingly common

It will only get worse and we will see more 'Bork Bork' postings. Someone somewhere thought that Secure Certificates that expire was a good idea. Shame they didn't think it through properly esp wrt renewals. The annual costs for this must run into the billions or even the same as the GDP of a few countries.

AppGet 'really helped us,' Microsoft says, but offers no apology to dev for killing open-source package manager

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Holmes

Mandatory...

"The day is not done until 'yum' and 'apt' won't run"

Not invented here rules apart from when they can steal someone elses and make it their own after.... {you fill in the blanks}

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: sequence Numbers on punched cards

Yep. I remember them well. You would if your card deck was over 2100 cards in size and that was just for the program itself. The data that it would use when compiled was another 400 cards. At least we could get the output on paper tape.

Wasn't 'George 3' wonderful...

Things changed for the better when the Poly got a Dec PDP 11/40 with a single RK05 disk drive.

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: voting in the US is not compulsory.

In some parts of the USA, one party actively tries to stop people getting registered to vote. All manner of dirty tricks are used to rig the voter lists and thus make sure that the election goes the way of the desired large camaign donors.

USA the best political system the top 1% can buy. /s /s

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: pascal was simply useless.

Engineers didn't avoid it. Far from it.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: And there is of course also lazarus/freepascal

I use Lazarus a lot. What Delphi should have been but the fleecing of customers by Borland and their succesors made using their version very, very, very costly if you wanted the ODBC Database compnents.

Linux-loving Windows 10 May 2020 Update squeaks in with days to spare before June

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

re: Good riddance Cortana

Cortana was heard replying

"I'll be back and even more intrusive. Enjoy your brief holiday while I gather my army and return!"

Personally, all of these so called 'assistants' including Alexa and Siri are more trouble than they are worth to 98% of us.

Like many things in the MS world, once MS has decided that they are a good thing lots of people spend a lot of time working out how to 'nuke' it. Isn't the 2020 version of cat and mouse wonderful eh? /s /s /s

Pablo Escobar's big bro and former accountant sues Apple for $2.6bn over FaceTime bug

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Pirate

Escobars phone is a scam

Can't someone sue him for $2.6B?

It seems that he really needs the publicity to prop up his fake business.

Broadcom sends its England-based staff back into office as UK lockdown eases – though Welsh workers get a free pass

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: vote fae Trump

If you use the US Political spectrum as a basis with the GOP on the right and the Dems on the left, even the most rabid right wing Tory is well to the left of the majority of Democrats.

Most of us would be regarded as truly commie or at the very least hard socialists (by the US Measure)

That means very, very few of us would vote for Trump (even if we could). The exception would naturally his holiness, Lord Almighty Farage.(sic...) who is apparently very pally with 'Tweeter In Chief'.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: 22nd Amendment

Trump has mentioned trying to get it repealled should he be re-elected again. He wants to have a 3rd and a 4th term... not that there will be a planet left by then given his recent talk about Nuclear Weapons testing.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: You supported a system...

Voters did come out and vote for the other person (Hillary). She got more votes that Captain Trumpton. The problem was that those extra votes were in the wrong places due to the 18th/19th Century voting system used. It was designed back when it took months to cross the country (Native Americans permitting).

It is clearly not fit for purpose now but no Republican will dare to try to change it.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Ah Powershell....

An update pushed out by MS (bless their cotton socks) removed a crucial part of the MCSC cluster service that was controlled by Powershell.

That meant we could not manually fail over the cluster.

Wonderful

Magical

Tremendous.

Took them a week to supply a fix. Three of us sat on our thumbs in an expensive foreign hotel waiting for it. Once we got the fix, we could carry on with the system acceptance tests.

I wish Powershell would die sooner thather than later.

Rich Communication Services: Nobody uses it, nobody wants it, but analysts reckon it's on the verge of a breakthrough

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Why would Google...

want this to be the messaging to end all messaging unless there was some way that they could slurp the data? They won't be doing this out of the kindness of their heart that's for sure.

So...

RCS is still very much NOT needed.

There fixed it for you.

It just depends who you think is the lesser of all evils (perm one from Apple, Chinese Government, Google or Facebook) in you choice.

TBH, NONE of the above tickles my fancy.

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

re: new shinies

There is "Nothing like a 'shiny' that is like an MS shiny." (with apologies to M&S)

The PHB brigade will love this. "MS == Great, wonderful, do it today" in their eyes.

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cleared to hoist real live American astronauts into space

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Joke

re: Nuclear Warhead

I very much doubt that it will be armed...

Unless 'The Tweeter in Chief' is aboard then all bets are off. [see ion]

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: CHinese Junk

Good luck not buying anything that is not made in the PRC or has some parts not made there.

You my find it harder than you think.

You could also boycott Bangladesh, India and a half a dozen other S.E. Asian countries while you are at it. None of them are saints.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Anone surpised?

Wasn't IR35 concieved when Tony Blair was PM? I think that predates the US Tax law.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

re: just wait until the US trade talks start.

What do we really want to import from the USA? (That is made in the USA)

{not a lot really}

Still we are over a barrel. The USA is a big bully and will demand that we take all sorts of crap US food that we could produce here at better standards but that will count for zilch, nada, zero. We will do what Trump says and that's the truth.

The longest card game in the world: Microsoft Solitaire is 30

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: "an ill-advised redesign"

That's "windows as a service" for you... An ad delivering service and it will only get worse.

To all Advertisers -> see icon.

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Perhaps...?

You really should think about investing in a new monitor. 1366x768 is so.... so 2010 ish. 1080p monitors can be picked up for under a £100.00 these days. Using one might even improve your productivity.

I'll also be willing to bet that your smartphone has higher resolution than your monitor.

Unless you are talking a load of Porkies?

Wanna force granny to take down that family photo from the internet? No problem. Europe's GDPR to the rescue

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Just don't post anything on Social Media

then you can't piss anyone off. Doh!

Just stop using it for everything. FB is not the answer (42 is naturally). All my family have stopped using it apart from their kids schools who insist on it...

Remember folks, those posts on FB etc could come back to haunt you in later life which could cost you jobs, relationships and even your freedom. The UK does not have statute of limitations unlike the USA. Google, FB and the rest will have all that incriminating evidence on you just waiting for the Warrant from Plod/MI5 etc.

The world is a dangerous place. Don't add to it.

Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK's phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Numpties!

The lot of them at NHSX

With this and the even the MOD getting in on the act... the mind boggles.

COVID-19 sparks new wearables to push the pandemic away

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: if that's the only product they have.

thry'll be like a gazillion other startups in that they are hoping that nice big conglomerate comes along and buys them up before their startup run out of cash.

[sign of the times I'm afraid]

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Antisocial distancing

I'd rather wear a Fedora than a baseball cap turned around the wrong way. In fact I'd rather wear a Fedora than any baseball cap unless I was actually playing baseball that is...

Mines the MCC Blazer with white had in the pocket.

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Boffin

Why not use an existing Package Manager?

Are you mad?

You WILL do things the Microsoft way or not at all. That is the Microsoft Way, the world masters of NIH.

Oh, and they'll change the package format with each and every update. /s /s /s

NASA's Human Spaceflight boss hits eject a week before SpaceX crew launch

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: The NASA Offce of Inspector General was involved

OR... Trumpo said those immortal words "You're Fired (and not into space)"

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: coming soon

You had me until you said 'Subscribe'.

Boo hiss.

Seriously, it is the way the MS is going to go and I decided a long time ago that I was not going to play their game (subscribe or don't get patches) and left the MS shell game behind.

Fancy watching 'Bake Off' together with mates and alone at the same time? The BBC's built a tool to do that

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Joke

Re: And yet they still can't manage subtitles....

The subtitles are probably there but only availably on the Teletext channel.

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Alien

Re: Apple told The Register - ????

Strange times these... are they not?

Note that even Fox News has come out and told people NOT to take the same anti-malarial drug as Trump as it could kill you.

For those two things to happen really does show that the world has indeed turned upside down. All we need is a 3rd miracle and the disaster will be over... (sic)

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Carbonade Flamande

Hmmm. I have a couple of Bottles of OTT (Old Tongham Tasty) that might be ideal for this.

The last of 2019's Onions need eating up and my herb garden is looking pretty good.

That's Sunday Lunch sorted..... Thanks.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Mushroom

re: great 48 United States...

Wot! Has Trumpo sold off Hawaii and Alaska and didn't tell anyone? Was that money going to be use to buy Greenland?

Fox News demands to know!

Seriously, I really do hope he explodes before November. But there again, the GOP might just keep him president after all dead people can still vote in many US States.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: like going back 60 years and going out with a jug to get some milk

You don't have to go back that far.

Going out for the Milk (in a large white enammeled jug) and the bread (only edible if covered in Mllk)

was part of the daily ritual when working in parts of the former USSR in the mid 1990's. The Milk tanker would arrive and sound it's horn. People would emerge from the 'projects' and form an orderly queue (err... don't we have to do that today???) to get the milk. Hand over a few roubles/tenge/sum and your container was filled with milk that was still warm.

History does repeat itself...

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

Re: Warning: Weasel Alert...

BT could be preparing to make OpenRetch a totally separate company (As Sky, VM and Talk-Talk want) if OFCOM says jump.

Then the issue of ownership would have to be sorted. It might even need an act of parliament given the strategic nature/national security impact of the OpenRetch network.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
Alert

And in other news...

Facemask makers are gearing up to start making masks with BoJo's face on the front.

All the more BoJo's to confuse the Plod!

What can be wrong wtih that...?