* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3263 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Chime after chime: Apple restores iconic Mac boot sound removed in 2016

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Hadn't noticed it had gone. I only reboot my Mac occassionally to apply patches. Otherwise I just suspend.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Why?

I think Apple's arguement is that they feel Intel's CPUs have stagnated whereas their own ARM based SoCs have grown (in performance) in leaps & bounds. Also, by owning the entire stack (CPU all the way up to software) they can design for just one customer with well defined use cases rather than as a more general design.

This is a brave move by Apple (In my opinion far riskier than the other two CPU transitions they've performed) Only time will tell if it's a good idea or not.

No longer a planet and left out in the cold, Pluto, it turns out, may have had hot beginnings

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Re: It'll be a planet again

if earth has cleared its orbital neighbourhood, why are we looking for asteroids that could wipe us out?

Because Earth has cleared its orbit. All these asteroids we're looking out for are in orbits that happen to cross Earth's orbit. Occassionally, they cross Earth's orbit just as Earth is getting to the same point.

Paging technology providers: £3m is on the table to replace archaic NHS comms network

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Just Works

Pagers may be out of fashion, but they one big advantage: They work. Mobile signal across hospitals can be terrible whereas the signal for pagers just gets through fine.

My local hospital has spent a seven figure sum to get mobile signal across all their buildings.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

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Re: Ridiculous

'monopole' not sure what that is

I suspect the commentard is referring to a magnetic monopole - a hypothetical particle with just a north or south pole.

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

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Re: Stores might suck, proprietary protocols are the real killer

Even now they support IMAP, some institutions refuse to enable it (my university IT team claim IMAP is not GDPR compliant!! so they can't turn it on)

At our place we switched off IMAP on Office 365 because the implementation is so bad. I'm sure one of our engineers still has nightmares after seeing what Microsoft did to IMAP.

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Re: Microsoft are much more evil

Never forgiven MS for what they did to Netware.

Novell were partly responsible for their own deminse.

NDS/eDirectory, Zen for Desktops (& Servers) & DirXML were good products. Groupwise was fair but they were very slow to update the SMTP gateway. BorderManager was OK and Manageworks was just *meh*. (Have I missed anything?)

The Netware kernel was basically a one trick pony (Blazing fast file server) and was a deadend so they should have moved to a Linux kernel much sooner. (They did port Java & Postgres to run on Netware but those had problems - mainly due to the limitations of the Netware kernel) They also took their time to properly accept TCP/IP (Netware/IP does NOT count!)

Trying to compete in the desktop office arena was a major distraction and the company's reluctance to investment in marketing was probably the final nail in the coffin.

Sure, Microsoft "bundling" filesharing & directory with their own operating system didn't help Novell but you can't blame Microsoft for everything.

In my opinion, NT4 should have been the kick up the backside for Novell to up their game but their failled to move fast enough.

Hey is trying a new take on email – but maker complains of 'outrageous' demands after Apple rejects iOS app

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Email already passé?

I've heard anecdotal evidence that email is already becoming passé with businesses moving to Slack/Teams/Hangouts/etc and individuals using Facebook/Whatsapp/etc.

With the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al offering free email services, I think paid for email/messaging is a tough market to be in.

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

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Re: bend over forwards, to bend over backwards to help

Small (Not one person companies) rock.

I deal with a small company who prided themselves on their software never crashing. A week before go-live we managed to crash it. I logged a support case and the news was ominous. They had no idea what was going on or where to start looking. Left the office that day stressing about what we were going to do about that go-live date.

On the way home got a call from the lead engineer (Yes the lead engineer. Not tech support. Not account manager but the person who actually writes the code!): "We've worked out what's going on. We've got a reproduceable test case. You'll have a fix on your system first thing in the morning"

Still using that company's software over a decade later.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Unhappy

I have some Windows 2016 servers which constantly complain when I launch a browser other than IE. No matter how many times I tell Windows that I really do want to use the alternative browser as my default browser and not use IE, they just keep on nagging me.

Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service

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Exchange On Prem

I'm involved in a couple of projects where we're moving customers from Exchange on prem to Office 365/Exchange Online.

Having seen the state of these on-prems Exchange setups, I think the skills required to manage on-prem email (Exchange or something else) are rapidly diminishing. For many people cloud email (Exchange Online, gmail, etc) is the sensible solution. I used to be anti-cloud, but for many people, there just isn't any point in trying to run your own mail setup. It's a distraction you just don't need.

Is cloud perfect? No. But I'm a pragmatist and even the occasional cloud issue is minor compared to when a customer hasn't done any maintenance to the email server for years and finds their server then goes belly up for days as we come in to try and rescue it.

MacOS on Arm talk intensifies: Just weeks from now, Apple to serve up quarantini with Kalamata golive, reportedly

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Buy now?

My main Macbook is overdue a replacement. I've been eeking it out as it still going quite strong despite its age. I think I'll start look at replacing it whilst I can still get a x86 powered device.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge
Unhappy

x86 Software

Some of us Mac users use Bootcamp, VMware, Virtualbox, etc to run Windows software. We'll loose that ability.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

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Re: @phogan

I had a tour of the Rolls Royce (car) factory in Crewe many years ago. Around the back of the factory were various manufacturers cars that they'd bought and were taking apart.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

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Re: PHP

Granted there was plenty of terrible copy-pasted code out there..

Terrible copy & pasted code exists in all languages - mostly driven by Q&A websites that just post a line or two of code without bothering with error or security checking. e.g. How many code examples out there just disable SSL certificate checking and then get blindly copied?

UK council dodges £100k hosting bill, opts for £6.5 million ERP migration

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Re: A new one will not help

A typical procedure for vendors is to make the initial price cheap and then ramp up the costs over the years as they think you don't have the stomach to move to another vendor.

Brit MP demands answers from Fujitsu about Horizon IT system after Post Office staff jailed over accounting errors

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As previously mentioned, what about the poor souls who took their own lives when convicted of crimes they did not commit? No amount of money can bring those innocents back from the dead.

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The episode has also triggered a wider review into corporate private prosecutions brought by companies who are "victim, investigator and prosecutor

In the UK, the prosecutional role was removed from the Police into the CPS years ago because of problems. Why on Earth have private companies been allowed to continue when this system has shown to be broken?

Spending watchdog doubts UK is capable of managing Brexit and coronavirus info campaigns at the same time

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Joke

Re: Naysayers

Visit-a-poledancer.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

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Re: The video

If it's take-off noise, what about a hybrid? Enough battery capacity to get you in the air then fire-up a normal engine to power the rest of the flight and recharge the batteries.

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Re: Compulsory El Reg commentary moan

8 - Don't forget the children.

As anti-brutality protests fill streets of American cities, netizens cram police app with K-Pop, airwaves with NWA

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Flame

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

There are several things that surprise me about this kneeling on the neck technique.

First, it's an official method of restraint. WTF? Who the heck thought that restricting the neck was a good restraint technique?

Second, this isn't the first death of a suspect from being restrained by this technique. Here's a suggestion for you: If people are dying from your restraint technique then clearly somethings wrong!

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Now you mention it, I do recall something along those lines. It was (ab)used by people to sue in the UK as we have/had better/worse libel laws than America.

Nokia's reboot of the 5310 is a blissfully dumb phone that will lug some mp3s about just fine

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Would this be a good 'phone to have ...

My gut feel is that 2G will survive for a long time, but 3G & 4G support will dwindle as 5G increases in coverage.

Frontier: Yes, yes, we've filed for bankruptcy protection, but that's not stopping us giving key staff $38m in bonuses

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UK vs USA

In the UK we swear (frequently!) at BT/BT Openreach. By the sounds of it, we're in a better position than those poor soles in America.

Mulled Chrome API shines light on long-neglected privacy gap: Sites can snoop on your find-in-page searches

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I kinda hope that password fields can't be read. Maybe I'm being naive, though...

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The Register asked AppsFlyer if anyone could explain why the company website implements its own search box instead of using the native [one]

"We believe our solutuon offers the end user a much richer experience when visiting our site."

"So we can better stalk you."

Simples.

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

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iWork is utter crap compared to LibreOffice.

I've used both iWork and LibreOffice. Sure, iWork doesn't necesarily have the same depth of features as LibreOffice, but I think the UI is better for the simple use cases. And if you're storing your documets in iCloud, then the seemless transition between MacOS and iOS for editing your documents (and the iOS apps are quite good) is very useful.

Do I use iWork as my primary office suite? No. My go-to office suite is LibreOffice - but I'll fire up iWork some tasks.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

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I suspect it's the cost of checking to make sure you actually own all the code.

There was also the problem of inappropriate comments that need to be sanitised. At the end of the day, it's not just a case of flicking the "Make repo public" switch.

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Re: every byte mattered ...

Ah Z80 assembler. I remember doing that on Spectrums & Amstrad CPCs. Once I went to Uni and discovered Intel CPUs I was shocked by the x86 memory segmentation and wondered how anyone could work with such an environment.

I have a dream of getting back into assembly programming - but with a CPU with a sane instruction set.

OnePlus to disable camera colour feature with pervy tendencies in latest flagship smartphone

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Re: Some materials are see through in infrared

One of the comments on the post suggest that Apple deliberately made the case transparent to infrared. I doubt many other vendors deliberately make their kit transparent to infrared.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

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Mushroom

Re: Never store CC details

Even worse when the "clever" website programmers prevent pasting into fields.

NASA launches guide to Lunar etiquette now that private operators will share the Moon with governments

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The Artemis program aims to put the first woman and second man on the Moon more money in Boeing's pockets by 2024.

FTFY

Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint

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I don't want to be a kill joy, but three hours a day does sound a bit excessive to me.

O2 be a fly on the wall during BT and Vodafone's video calls: Telefónica's UK biz, Virgin Media officially merge

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Re: Logical Next Move in the "comms+pay tv" "market"

That would be interesting as both have significant investment in broadband.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

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Re: Approaches to testing

We had a HA system which worked fine. Then one day, the primary failed and everything jumped over to the secondary. Which promptly failed and everything failed back to the primary (which was just about getting back on its feet) Which failed, etc. , etc..

It turned out one client got into a very weird state and sent command packets to the servers which the servers couldn't handle. Once we managed to get some logs and isolate the client the system became a lot more stable.

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Experienced tester.

Users have a habit of using software in ways the designers never thought of.

Guess which cloud giant Zoom picked to handle millions more video calls? Bzzt, wrong answer: It's Oracle

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Re: I hope they thought this through

Zoom make you sign three year licensing deals. (There's huge pressure for Zoom at my place but we don't want to sign a three year deal and Zoom have no interest in offering anything else)

Wall Street analyst worries iPhone is facing '2nd recession' after 2019 annus horribilis

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Saturated Market

I think the market is fairly saturated and there are far fewer reasons (i.e. New gimmicks) to replace a smart phone before it dies. I'm probably going to keep my current phone until devices supporting 5G come out at a reasonable price point (and battery life!)

Cosmo Communicator: Phone-laptop hybrid is neat, if niche, tilt at portable productivity

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: Why are you going with Psion comparisons?

I've used both a Nokia Communicator (Several flavors) and Psion devices (several flavors) It's definitely more like a Psion than a Communicator.

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Stop

Mmmm, not seeing a physical keyboard on those devices....?

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

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Reminds me of Chemical Ali...

Ex-TalkTalk infosec exec's equal pay and unfair dismissal claims tossed out at tribunal

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Re: "Previously in charge of a £20m project to roll out fibre-optic"...

A project manager paid over £100k to manage a £20m project: Sounds like they were overpaid anyway.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

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Re: Surely someone has already invented...

You can get intelligent patch panels and suitable patch cables. They talk to each other via RFID. If you pre-plan your patching the patch panel can tell you where you should be plugging in and indicate if you plug into the wrong socket.

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Re: Data Centre Management

It's an off-the-shelf package - there are several in this area.

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Data Centre Management

We're not the size of Cloudflare, but we use software which tracks every server, switch, patch panel, PDU, cable (data & mains), duct, etc. in our machines rooms. Any scheduled work has to be pre-booked through the software (Which gives you a report on what you're going to do) Any emergency work has to be updated into the software ASAP.

Failure to comply with using the software is quite simple: Everyone gets to take the piss out of you for causing someone else pain. (Yes, I've been on the receiving end) No management intervention required as peer-pressure is a far more effective stick in this situation.

The initial inputing of the data was a tedious piece of work and getting buy-in took some time, but now everyone sees its value. Now, when someone says "What happens if I cut this cable?" you click a button and it immediately tells you what will be affected.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

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Lord Sumption

I liked the quote from Lord Sumption (Former Supreme Court Judge):

The tradition of policing in [the UK] is that the police are citizens in uniform. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government's control.

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Mushroom

Re: Cambridge Police are too busy with serious crime

I went to the Parkside police HQ to report a crime. "Oh, you can't do that here, you have to do it online". I duly went online and filled out the form. They couldn't even be bothered to give me a crime number.

Muppets.

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

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Joke

It's because in the direction of Earth's orbit the Aether is being compressed, so making it denser and harder for the light to travel through and behind the Earth, the Aether is thinner so it's easier for the light to travel through.

SImples.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

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Teams video conference view

Since we rolled out Teams across our organisation we've inundated with requests for Zoom so people can see everyone in a meeting.

We spoke to our Microsoft account team and it was hinted that Microsoft just don't have the compute power to handle more video streams on screen at once at the minute.