Posts by phuzz 6730 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
"only one works when it's in modem mode, it's either 1 or 4"
It's port 1. Or at least it is on our superhub3.
Personally I'm using an Asus router at home (their firmware is GPL, and gets updates for almost as long as Draytek do), but I use Drayteks at work and they are worth all the praise they get.
"most people in the U.K. are under PAYE and never have to complete a return"
I've never had to file a tax return, but a while ago they did send me a letter saying they thought I might have been paying the wrong amount of tax and please could I post them details of all the money I'd earned over the last five years or so.
Obviously I took the grown-up choice and ignored the letter, until six months later when the next letter arrived telling me they'd checked it out and please accept a check for a £500 refund.
Linux distros aren't exactly small these days either (although still smaller than Windows). Mint 17.3 requires 9GB of space before it will install.
Mind you, it's hard to buy an SSD that's smaller than 64GB these days, and £25 will get you a 128GB NVMe SSD, so it's hardly a problem.
"And the USB ports are on the back so you can barely see them when looking from the top."
That's because you're supposed to put your iMac™ on a designer table in the middle of a room so you have easy access to the back, and so that people can admire your iMac™ from every angle.
Of course, in such a situation you shouldn't actually plug anything into the USB ports, because it'll just make it look untidy.
"do you really think there is a country wherein a company based in that country can say no to the police or government of that country?"
Possibly there might be, but realistically there's only a handful of countries that have enough high tech manufacturing capacity to build kit like this (eg, you couldn't in the UK without buying half the kit from abroad anyway), and all of those countries have governments that will quite happily insist on backdoors if they feel like it.
Is there any newer alternatives to DBAN?
It's always worked just great for me, but it doesn't seem to have been updated since 2015, so I'd be worried that it might not cope with more modern storage (eg NVMe). What about using the Secure Erase ATA command (eg this)?
I'd be interested to hear other commeter's opinions.
"A 7.8km railway, with trains modelled on Swiss locomotives, takes staffers from location to location."
Well, that makes a lot more sense than copying British ones.
"The world needs a cutdown version of Windows that has all the fripperies removed, also all the legacy 8, 16 and 32 bit code it is what Windows 10 should have been."
That's pretty much what Windows RT (aka Windows on ARM) was going to be, and Win 10 IoT is sort of supposed to be.
The problem is though, people buy Windows to run Windows programs, and if you take away the ability to do that, then nobody will buy that version of Windows. Every time Microsoft try and wipe the slate clean, everyone complains and they give up and just add yet another windowing system in.
Paint has been flat, sorry, 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO, for longer than it's been skeuomorphic, eg, here's version 1. Looks flat to me bob.
You could almost say (although, perhaps not with an entirely straight face), that the Windows 10 UI is actually going back to it's 1.0 roots.
Yes, but the original MCE came out in 2004, and a TV card alone would set you back the best part of £100 then. Once you'd added a mid range P4, half a gig of RAM and massive harddrive (which were only just dropping under $1 per GB at that point) and a pretty case to go under your TV, you were racking up quite a bill.
Even more if you splashed out and went for one of the ATI All-In-Wonder combined graphics and TV tuner cards. Those things were great :)
Yes, first thing I checked. Also, I made sure that they're shown as 'Not Removable' in device manger.
In fact, they didn't always show up there. It only started when I went into the registry and edited it to prevent my new NVMe drive from showing up as removable (like this). I rebooted, and found that although now the NVMe drive isn't present, all the spinning rust drives were now showing up instead. I could just go make the same changes in the registry again, but tbh I just gave up at that point.
Nuclear is the correct spelling, both in English and US English.
"the lure of StarTrek foldable phones"
Star Trek gave us flip phones and we've done those. I think the recent interest in foldable devices comes from the ones on Westworld (eg), which I have to admit looked really cool.
Of course, it's a easy to make it look cool when it's a prop, not a real device.
"nationwide calls & texts"
Your nation is a bit bigger (and the population more spread out) though.
The UK must be one of the easiest places to run a network because you have many potential customers packed into a small geographic area. There's practically nowhere you could plonk down a tower that wouldn't cover at least a few people.
A few years ago, I noticed an option in our backup software to output a printed report after each job (I already got an emailed version). I clicked the tickebox, and went home for the night.
The next morning, I wandered up to the main printer to see if my report had been printed, only to find that the printer was stalled because the output hopper was full. Yes, the backup software had printed the full report, including the filename of every file backed up.
Fortunately the output hopper could only hold about 30cm of paper, and I'd got in early enough to chuck it all in the recycling before anyone noticed.
I stuck to the emailed report after that.
"The PDF file format should have been left as a way of distributing documents"
The irony is that PDF was originally intended to be a much simpler version of Postscript, without any of the (Turing complete) bells and whistles.
Of course, thirty something years later it's so bloated that Postscript looks positively svelte by comparison.
I use SumatraPDF, but just to be on the safe side, I run it in a VM copy of Vista, which is running on top of Knoppix Live CD, in an emulator running on an Amiga 4000T.
All this is set up in the next room, and I operate it with some long sticks and pair of binoculars.
Better safe than sorry :)
"Another product made for absolutely no reason."
The reason was "it looks really cool". That's all the reason needed for many, many things. The functional reason is so that someone can have a phone sized device, that can also be a small tablet as well, you might not need or want something like that, but reportedly they've sold out of their first stock, so there's plenty of people who think they do.
You might as well say the same thing about "Why do cars come in more than one colour?", there's no functional reason to have red cars and green ones.
"When I signed up for the Swiss equivalent I went to a railway station with my passport in order to open the account."
That all makes sense apart from the bit about the railway station. Police station I'd understand, or maybe local government office (ie town hall or similar), but I wasn't expecting 'railway station'.
Are Swiss Rail some ultimate arbiters of identity or something?
"It's really not difficult to limit access to data"
It's easy enough to limit the access of an average employee, but what if (for example) they're the sysadmin in charge of backups? Or, as in this case, an auditor?
That said, if someone requires a high level of access, then the next best thing would be to log their actions as closely as possible. However, that only helps identify them after the event, it doesn't stop them from copying all payroll data on to a USB stick.
"no meaningful penalty?"
The ASA doesn't seem to have any sanctions that are monetary in nature. If they think that a company has been really naughty, then they'll refer them to Trading Standards for punishment. I assume they don't have any actual power to issue fines.
Otherwise the worse they can do is stop their members from cooperating with a company, eg no bulk mail discounts from Royal Mail.
There's a full explanation of their sanctions here.
I'd be surprised if Intel actually told Apple explicitly that they couldn't deliver, more likely they were unable to show enough progress, and Apple read between the lines to realise that Intel couldn't produce 5G modems in time.
Possibly a too-honest Intel engineer told someone at Apple that they weren't likely to meet their deadlines, but I doubt it was an official communication.
"But they're not going to apply it to Twitter, cos nobody ever posts pr0n on twitter" (or tumblr)
They've said it will apply to websites where more than one third of the content is porn, so presumably if for every photo of someone with their kit off, you have two photos of them wearing clothes, everything is ok. I'm not sure how it's counted if one person is naked, but they're next to two people with their clothes on. Or perhaps you have two pictures of kittens for every bit of porn.
Which is part of the problem. There's no definition of porn that works, which makes legislating against it tricky.
Oh well, I know how to set up a VPN, so this is a moot point really.
"it's believed Wertkin tried to sell to Fortinet confidential US government papers about its investigation into Fortinet"
Why the fuck would you do this? Did he have gambling debts to pay off or something? It would be a pretty crap idea for anyone, but for a DoJ lawyer to try it!
I also wonder how long Fortinet thought about it before they shopped him to the feds, but I suspect we'll never get a straight answer to that question.
I read through the ICO's full complaint, but they don't give the name of the lead company.
However, you can look up the funeral company on Companies House, and find details of all their previous directors. Then it's just a matter of checking each person and finding two who have both also been directors of another company together.
Two of them were both directors of TFLI Limited, which had previously been dinged by the ICO (as mentioned in the ICO complaint), and so it's pretty likely that Daniel Rodgers and Adam Bowers were the two directors of the lead generating firm (who's name I've not been able to work out yet), who clearly should have known better than to ring a bunch of pensioners who didn't want spam calls.
Amazing what you can dig up from five minutes of searching eh?
Also, rockets have been launched from carrier aircraft before (eg Pegasus), so the only questions about Stratolaunch are, 'is the plane technically capable' (I'm no engineer, but it's built by Scaled Composites, and they're pretty good at this sort of thing), and the slightly larger question of 'is there a viable market for air launched rockets?'
Skylon is much more hypothetical so far, they're aiming to do something no-one has managed before.
Although it does beg the questions, how do you measure the "most safety and privacy users" [sic], and how many people do the categorise as 'most', and what proportion of those are teenagers (and how sure are they that the ages are correct?).
Or did they just sort their list by "length of password" (that's basically the same as 'most safety', right?), and find some (purported) teenagers in the top 50%?
Mind you, I'm assuming that Facebook would say something misleading but technically correct, rather than just straight up lying.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
