* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Fairphone thinks its fair to offer a not-very-major and slightly-more-recycled new model

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Facepalm

Buying

Our CEO is very keen on the green agenda and we tried to buy a couple of Fairphones to test. Fairphone said you can only buy the phones from them direct and only with an airtime contract. (Which is no match for our corporate contract)

Cue one disappointed CEO.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

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Re: And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail.

And switching between plain text and HTML on Outlook isn't difficult either.

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I thought Sarah was talking about how developers share their work on the kernel, not how how each developer should write said code..

Google says Australian pay-for-news code means it can’t quit the country

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Re: Murdoch

Wasn't Murdoch lining up his children to take over his empire?

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

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IANAL...

Isn't the contract of supply & purchase between the eBay seller & purchaser? eBay is just a way for a seller & buyer to find each other and Paypal is just a means to transfer money, just like a bank, credit card, etc. Paypal don't care if the buyer doesn't have the funds. They'll just decline the transaction. The seller could try their luck in court claiming breach of contract by the buyer.

The buyer needs the seller to agree to cancel the supply contract.

Pot, meet kettle: Google claims Australia's pay-for-news plan could see personal data put to nefarious uses

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Paying El Reg

Why doesn't El Reg offer a subscription option like other websites?

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Holmes

Re: Poor punctuation alert!!

If you're readying so closely, you might spot the "Tips & Corrections" link at the bottom of every page.

CREST: We are investigating NCC Group certification cheat sheet scandal – and not with NCC personnel

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FAIL

People are being taught to pass the exams rather than learn the subject?

I'm shocked.

Cisco to sell everything-as-a-service – even core networking hardware – and cut costs by a billion bucks

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Cisco As a Service

Cisco's current network-as-a-service offering is that you buy the hardware (with bare minimum feature set) as normal, but the advanced feature sets are subscription services. Stop paying and your switch/router goes dumb.

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

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Hat tip to London Reconnections for their coverage of Uber in the UK.

We have bad news for non-US Microsoft fans: The incoming Surface Duo is underspecced, overpriced, and over there

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Why?

Why do Microsoft do hardware? Whenever they do it, it invariably ends badly.

UK.gov to propose new rules for online political campaigns after last election marred by an avalanche of fake news

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Re: So that's Cummings out of a Job then.

That's standard fare for politicians, isn't it?

What are you gonna do? Give me detention? Illinois schools ban pyjamas in online classes

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Re: So long as it's not mixed thread...

I always felt school was just preparing kids for a life of taking arbitrary orders from people

To quote Madness:

"All I learned at school was to bend not break the rules".

We've reached the endgame: Bezos 'in talks' to turn shuttered department stores into Amazon warehouses

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Re: Coming soon

There used to be a regular article in one of the old print trade newspapers (Computer Weekly?) where they highlighted the absurd packaging of some companies.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

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When opening a CSV I think Excel (& LIbreOffice) should give the user the choice: Either let the program auto-guess the column types or allow the user to specify them. (Ideally allow the user to supply a template of the column types so you don't have to rebuild the format every time)

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Not just genes

Shall we change the global phone network and get rid of leading zeros from phone numbers too?

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

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Re: change for sake of change

I suspect a fancy dinner was involved

And I hope you have a bloody good lawyer as you're implying Microsoft bribed Cambridge.

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Facepalm

Re: Emd of Cambridge SMTP development

Er, have you looked at the git history for Exim? The last commit from a cam.ac.uk address was April 2012. Cambridge stopped developing Exim 8 years ago.

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Mushroom

Re: £35 / user?

I see my simple fact has a downvote. I wonder why? Is the fact wrong? If so, say why it's wrong. If the fact doesn't match your reality distortion field....

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Re: Call it blunt...

In theory, practise & theory are the same.

In practise, they're different.

You can teach students as much as you want about, say, email. But the only way you'll truely learn is on the job, And how many people nowadays see email sysadmin as a career path?

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Flame

Re: Why ?

In a word: Scale.

Running one or two email servers is trivial. I've done it.

But this setup is running email for 40,000 or so mailboxes. You don't run that on a couple of AWS/Google/Azure VMs. You need real tin - and not just a couple of cheap 1U boxes. You'll need a setup to spread the load across multipe servers - plus a front end to make it look like one system to the users. You'll want some sort of HA/DR system. You'll want backups. You'll want management of this cluster of machines.

Finally, as you get bigger & more complex your number of failures will increase.

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It's a sad day for Exim

Why? I didn't see anything about Cambridge terminating its support for Exim.

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Re: £35 / user?

MS A1 licenses (which give you an Exchange Mailbox) are free to education.

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

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Re: Hmm.

A flight where you are licensed to take off or land, but not the other, is not going to go well.

I thought there were already countries whose certification processes for aircraft & pilots was already distrusted so can't fly to Europe.

Struggling company pleads with landlords to slash rents as COVID-19 batters UK high street. The firm's name? Apple

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Mushroom

There are many independent sole-trader shops on the high street that are perilously close to financial ruin (Both for the business and the owners) who should be getting every break possible to keep them alive.

Mega corps such as Apple should suck it up as part of their social responsibility.

Elite name on Brit scene sponsors retro video games preservation project at the Centre for Computing History

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Re: Screenshot

Other games on other platforms did a similar trick of changing mode mid-screen draw.

Dutch Gateway store was kept udder wraps for centuries until refit dug up computing history

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Re: Some Gateway stuff is still out there unopened

I don't think Gateway were alone in designing PCs that could trivially rotate between desk & tower.

911, I wanna report a robbery. Hundreds of thousands of stars stolen from a cluster. I think it was the Milky Way

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Facepalm

Re: Light years not a measure of distance

Amanfrommars' posts are more conherient than yours.

GRUB2, you're getting too bug for your boots: Config file buffer overflow is a boon for malware seeking to drill deeper into a system

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An interesting question for me that wasn't raised in the article not sure if it is an issue or not, but if/when this cert is revoked by the vendor(I assume vendor like HP, Dell, etc) could it prevent the system from booting(assuming Secure boot is enabled) if the grub update isn't already applied?

Yes. And it'll aslo prevent any old rescue/install media from working too.

Mysterious supernova is blasting far-flung galaxy with flashes of UV light – and astroboffins don't know why

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Unhappy

Re: For a standard candle to measure the universe

But the smell in their stores.

Less than six months after original release, Samsung reboots its Galaxy Z Flip pholdable for the 5G age

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Facepalm

A fool and their money are easily parted.

Only EU can help us, pleads Slack as it slings competition complaint against Microsoft Teams

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Flame

Teams' Architecture

If you peer under the surface of Teams you'll find that Teams is just a thin warpper around existing MS products.

"Team": An Office 365 group.

Chat? That's Exchange email messages.

Files? That's Sharepoint.

Joint doucment editing? Sharepoint.

Voice/Video callings? That's a re-re-re-implementation of the Office Connect product.

Planner? Exchange tasks.

Calendar? Exchange calendar.

So Teams is less a "product" and more an illusion. This is all in published MS documents.

Brit telcos deliberately killed Phones 4u, claim admins in £1bn UK High Court sueball

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Re: A few things

>> 2. Why would past employees still have company data from 2014 on their personal devices? That would surely be a breach of data protection laws

Data Protection doesn't say anything explicit about what you can/can't keep or for how long. The general thrust is that what & how long you keep something must be appropriate & proportionate.

What's appropriate & proportionate? That's for a judge and/or jury to decide.

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Re: Supposed to give a warning

There's a case in the High Court at the moment involving the Barclay family (Not the bank) which hinges on secret recordings. My understanding is that the recordings haven't been thrown out. (Yet...) For more details, Private Eye is your friend.

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The full trial is not due to take place before mid-2022 "at the earliest", in the judge's words

So someone rich is bankrolling a lot of expensive lawyers for several years.

Everything must go! Distributors clear shelves of ALL notebooks in Q2, even ones gathering dust over last 12 months

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Flame

Some of us like to switch off from work every now and again...

NASA delays James Webb Space Telescope launch date by at least seven months

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Cost Plus

Is this another NASA wonderful Cost-Plus contract?

Twitter mass hacking: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Biden, Obama, more hijacked to peddle Bitcoin scam

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Re: A sad reflection on society

I don't think you have to be a GOW/M to see through the thin veneer of the celebrity cult. Just someone who can open their eyes and think for themselves.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

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Re: Job ad requirements

And then there is this strange obsession with degrees

It's not just degrees - any type of "qualification". All that these qualifications mean is that you've passed the exam: Not that you can do the job. Sure, the qualification can be a useful steer as to whether they have some background in an area, but it shouldn't be a deal-breaker.

Some places I've worked at use the phrase "degree or equivalent experience" which is much better.

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Facepalm

At our place they started centralising and standardising the production of job descriptions & adverts and I supported the idea of standardising the recruitment process. A short while later one of our administrators moved to another part of the department. HR's new process got on with doing the job adverts, etc and finally presented us with a shortlist of candidates we were going to interview.

Reading the CVs it became clear that HR didn't have a clue what the original person did. They'd shortlisted systems administrators whereas we desperately needed an office administrator (ordering, billing, stock control, etc)

Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October

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Re: Can it reduce the time spent at airports

If Greta wants the world to use less air travel all she has to do is persuade the politicians to increase the check-in & arrivals checks.

Just claim the extra checks are "for terrorism" or "think of the children" and no-one will complain.

£40m wasna enough for ink and toner cartridges in public sector, says Scottish government

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Where I used to live, you used to be able to tell the upcoming end of half or full financial year by the state of the roadside as they spent leftover money on flowers & trees.

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Leaving that aside though, framework contracts are a joke. Nice idea in principle to use public sector economies of scale to drive prices down, but has failed spectacularly.

When I was in the public sector it was cheaper to buy outside the main framework contracts.

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Flame

Y2K

I think a lot of people are using the Covid-19 pandemic as the latest excuse to say "Ah, we didn't see that coming so we can't do X, Y & Z", just like many people did with Y2K.

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

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Alien

Maybe someone's lashed up a dyson sphere around it?

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

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Joke

With the growing use of eBPF in the kernel, I could see kernel ending up just being a eBPF VM.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

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Re: Been thinking

These annecedotes all sound the same as those idiots who blindly follow sat nav and don't bother to look at their environment: A total and blind trust in technology.

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Re: Been thinking

I had a summer job in a supermarket X years ago. During training we were told our checkout could be randomly audited to make sure we weren't on the take. Sounded reasonable: We were handling money. One day I was audited. I was a bit nervous, but shrugged it off as it was just a random event as told in our training.

An hour later I got audited again. A short while later I got audited again. And later on a fourth time. All in one shift

During the last audit I asked what was going on, as I thought these were supposed to be once in a blue moon events.

I was told that the computer consistently had my checkout as being out by a certain amount. Yet the checkout next to me was out, by the same, but opposite, amount.

I never found out what was wrong - but I never got fired so clearly they didn't blame me.

Apple gives Boot Camp the boot, banishes native Windows support from Arm-compatible Macs

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I rarely need to boot to Windows on my Macs. What I do do frequently, though, is fireup VMWare Fusion and run a Windows VM to run minor applications that are only available as Windows apps.

*IF* VMware/Parrallels, etc were to emulate an x86 processor on ARM on Mac, top speed isn't required. It just needs to be fast enough to do a task.