* Posts by Roland6

10620 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: TIFKAM

>Usability went out the door with Windows 8 and MS has made it worse with almost every release since

Totally agree with Win8/8.1 and WS2012 (which used the Win8 UI) are a total pain in the arse and even more so when you are having to switch between Win7, Win10, Win8/WS2012, depending on which system you are having to access.

However, Win10 1909, is a vast improvement, albeit still not as coherent as Win7 and prior.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: The fight below \040

I see the (,,255) corner is not addressible using the new notation...

Weeks before US oil contract prices went negative, a spear-phishing crew went after oil firms. What did they get?

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Who wasn't targeted

Ditto the USA...

Personally, if I were a hacker residing in the US sphere of influence, I can see how a Russian mailbox could be useful in making it more difficult for the spooks to follow my tracks.

UK government to take equity in struggling startups with £250m 'Future fund'

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Pint

Re: UK parks must remain open

>2m distancing, pah, try 2km.

Misread that as being 2 miles distancing, so scratched my head at the mention of trying 2km.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: 8%!?

>The 8% is for a risky startup

But looking at the other T's & C's; not that risky.

The real risk is that these business will have insufficient funding to not only last 3 years but also to have money in the bank to pay the accrued interest.

Don't Zoom off elsewhere: Google plugs video-chat service Meet into Gmail as user eyes start wandering

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Re: do we need have dominated all by a few?

>Does really everything has to be dominated to the same company? I not only like how easy Zoom works but also that it is not tied to any other big company.

Video calling and conferencing has been a thing since the early 1990's. What has been frustrating is the total lack of interest in it by big telcos and ITU/CCITT - similar can be said about chat and rich messaging apps. So with a total lack of interest by the Standards community, we are going to get single company solutions and standards coming to the fore.

I expect many are currently happy with Zoom, but when it has 1+ billion users and has to start turning that into revenue..

Roland6 Silver badge

Agree the requirement for a G-Suite account, as opposed to just a free Google/Gmail account does mean this isn't a competitor to Zoom. It does seem that Google is really aiming at the Teams market, in an attempt to prevent G-Suite customers moving to Microsoft 365, which given Teams is live now, means G-Suite Meet needs to be better not just to retain G-Suite customers but to attract people away from the others...

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: “Old Hardware” is fake news

>The big problem with migrating COBOL off the mainframe is not the language itself which is reasonably portable...

From a project I did pre-2000, another gotcha was that whilst the Unix system could provide a reasonable emulation of the mainframe runtime environment so could handle compiled code, it was another matter with the development tools. Resulting in a mainframe having to be kept...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Mindset

Oak stakes (through the heart) seem to have a better reputation for keeping the dead and buried, dead and buried.

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

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Re: These are wheely gweat!

Wouldn't be surprised if Apple have stolen an idea from Ikea and ensured their rollers attach to the Mac Pro using a totally non-standard threaded connector, so you can't just go out to B&Q et al...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Don't give them ideas

>Apple's going to sue them for rounded corners... that seamlessly blend into each other to produce a continuous corner.

A chief technology officer in a time of COVID-19: Keep calm and make the most of the whole business suddenly realising how important IT is

Roland6 Silver badge

>Only if you set up your laptops to use local egress instead ...

This implies usage of business grade/focused secure remote access providers and/or SIM-based VPNs (£££).

It does look like those 'savings' that cloud was supposed to deliver, will be spent on improving off-premise access to those cloud services. Which reminds me of BPR in the 90's: processes were re-engineered, services offshored etc. yet the overall IT spend didn't go down as much as everyone had suggested it would, in part because the money (and people) were available to undertake all those projects that had been waiting in the queue.

ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close

Roland6 Silver badge

What is the Problem? This Sale is clearly not in the public interest.

Given how much time Ethos Capital's supporters have had to put their case to demonstrate how their proposed arrangements satisfy the "public Interest" requirement - yet have failed to do so, says one thing -very clearly and very loudly: the deal isn't in the public interest.

Which means that ICAAN should be firing all board members who are involved in Ethos Capital for gross misconduct...

But then if ICAAN are dithering, it suggests that ICAAN is lacking in commonsense and probably also says a lot about the state of corporate America.

All your jobs are belong to us... Amazon is hiring 75,000 people but if you want US home groceries, tough luck

Roland6 Silver badge
Pint

Bets on who will be the first company with 1M+ employees...

Not aware of any at the moment - however ElReg readers may know better.

'Anything' related to remote working is a winner for Euro disties, but classic enterprise hardware? That's another story

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Re: But if there is ever an end to this...

>"It looks like there will be piles and piles of junk to recycle because it is clear that the moronic unthinking dinosaurs in middle management are already planning to have us chained back at our desks after fighting through the same rushhour pollution creating mess as before because otherwise we cant work as a bloody team"

But you are only looking it this from one viewpoint; middle management will have discovered that whilst working from home is a bit of a pain (partner and children), working from somewhere else, like the Golf Club etc. is perfect because with tools like Zoom they don't actually need to be in the office to do their job, and at theGolf club they don't need to mingle with "oilk's" , in fact a little distance might help give them a better perspective on just how little their meddling is actually needed. Additionally, without having middle management constantly on the prowl, more real work might actually get done quicker and more efficiently than was previosuly the case.

UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Hobson's choice

>Some may not remember the days when people like Foundem were trying to fill every page of search results with meta searches.

Some may not remember the days when companies other than Google got useful results into the first page. Remember the battles (still on-going) over Google scrapping other websites like Wikipedia and presenting their content formatted as "Google" content; we saw similar skullduggery with maps, shopping - and we haven't even touched on "Hey Google"...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Hobson's choice

>Surely it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that someone who no longer works as an SEO could be appointed by Foundem to review the code independently,

Why?

Basically, Google don't want to admit the degree to which its 'algorithms' are manipulated by its employees ...

Remember, Googles defense "The integrity of Google's ranking processes relies upon all webmasters or website owners having the same degree of access to information about Google's ranking..." can be satisfied by the judge deciding a public interest angle and puts Googles entire evidence into the public domain...

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Windows Server 2000

>It was Windows95/98

Funny how my first thoughts were 49 days, that sounds like Windows 95; does that mean the 787's are running Windows for Avionics 95...

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: To be clear ...

WhatsApp and Signal share the same roots - as do Webex and Zoom. so they are 'like' in the way that they have a common history, so I fully expect weaknesses in Zoom to also be present in Webex. However, like Signal and WhatsApp, I would expect Zoom to do better than Webex.

Roland6 Silver badge

>But I can see why they went for Zoom. Setup and use is idiot-proof.

Plus, would not be surprised if they were already using it for inter-Conservative MP and Constituency communications, so minimal set up and learning required.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: wait, what?

"GCHQ operates in a purely advisory role in this case; it is the Cabinet Office which is actually responsible for providing secure communications links."?

I thought it was the responsibility of the Parliamentary Digital Services to provide technology to enable Minsters and MP's to communicate.

I suspect the Cabinet Office has no ready to roll secure conferencing solution that could be deployed within 24 hours to a variety of geographically dispersed users and their mobile devices...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: To be clear ...

>I presume it's all about the slurp.

No I suspect Zoom does it that way because that was the way they did it in Webex (remember Webex and Zoom are like WhatsApps and Signal).

I suspect it was done this way so as to keep the client small and have a single stream from the client to the streaming server, thus able to execute on a wide range of systems. Also, architecturally it makes sense - Webex is effectively just an enhanced streaming server - remember webex was designed before today's obsession with communications security. So having the streaming server save a copy of the stream in massive purpose built storage array not only makes technical sense, but also commercial sense as you can make this a chargeable feature...

Also remember Skype was originally a one-to-one telephone call replacement, not a one-to-1000's conferencing solution.

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

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Re: "Why the heck did we buy loads of desktop PCs"

>Some time ago I got a lot of downvotes for suggesting my company was doing the right thing by replacing desktops with laptops (while keeping the peripherals) so we'd be mobile if needed.

Depends on your meaning of mobile.

Having a office full of laptops doesn't help when most people leave them on the desk overnight and a terrorist bomb goes off and staff are prevented from returning to the (unsafe) building to retrieve said laptops. This is just one business continuity scenario made real in the 1996 London Docklands bombing.. .

Roland6 Silver badge

>In my sector (HE) the question is: Why do we need a big campus anymore?

Because the management wanted a big campus (same-place same-time working) and dismissed same-time different place working (ie. working from home) as being too difficult, requiring too much management overhead etc..

>The other question our place is asking: Why the heck did we buy loads of desktop PCs?

Because they were cheaper than laptops and because as all your people worked on campus at desks, they didn't need laptops.

Basically, this last month management has had to face the reality of what technology can actually do now.

I wager, if you had asked the same management in January ie. before CoViD19 spread outside of China, they would have found many reasons why they should continue to require all staff to work on a big campus and thus have desktops; suggestions that events in Wuhan (never heard of it - they probably would have said) might have a massive impact in a few weeks on the business would have been dismissed as scaremongering...

Microsoft qualifications will pad the CV for another year, Teams for ventilator boffins, and Windows 10 threatened with very retro news app

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Rise of Windows 10 1909

"New shiny aside, the latest production version of Windows 10, released last year as 1909 or 19H2 depending on your preferred naming convention, saw a considerable jump in usage from 22.6 per cent usage to 28.2 per cent in the latest batch of figures from AdDuplex."

I expect next month's figures will show a significant increase in 1909, and a massive decline in Win7 as people rushed to install systems with Windows 10 and Teams.

Roland6 Silver badge

>Wow that News Bar is just awful.

And a total waste of screen estate.

Lets hope that both end users and GPE can easily turn it off permanently.

UK Information Commissioner OKs use of phone data to track coronavirus spread

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Not sure how it can be anonymised

The assumption is that either you will succumb to SARS-CoV-2 within 7 days of the first person becoming ill or you won't, in which case you have developed a resistance to it and can no longer be a carrier.

Remember the person who becomes ill will have been spreading SARS-CoV-2 for several days around your house before they became ill, so an assumption is that at the point the first person becomes ill all other members of the household will already be carrying active SARS-CoV-2, just not displaying CoViD19 symptoms.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Wedge

Haven't you realised, a 'smart' phone is your identity card...

I suspect that in the near future the government will provide free 'smart' phones to every one and legislate that they must be switched on and carried at all times outside of your home...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Bugger

Surprised given his other comments on his government's response to CoViD19 he didn't mention the word 'pray' once.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Roland6 Silver badge

>Could this apparent apathy kill OpenSource as a tool?

It depends on whether project overseer's fully appreciate the change in their status and thus role once they make an open source project's on-going development open to community contributions.

A conscientious overseer would put in place continuity plans and thus try to ensure the survival of their project(s). However, I suspect that currently many, whilst wanting to ensure project continuity, are uncertain about the bests ways of achieving this.

I think that GitHub and others have a role to play and probably need to develop and promote the services they can offer - users with project overseer responsibilities, in this area. In view of CoViD19, I suggest they need to get something up and running within a week or so. Looking at Abandonware's adoption process, a process that utilises the consent of a project's supervisor is trivial.

So a well orchestrated response and some good marketing, CoViD19 might actually benefit some open source projects. Certainly it would beat negotiating your own escrow arrangements with each and every supplier of proprietary code.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Simple solution

There is no copyright issue - the escrow contractual clause handles that; which the project leader will have signed up to on creating their project on GitHub et al.

The issue which the clause needs to resolve, is as you note, is the maintenance of the dependency network so that core-js(2020) can simply take over from legacy core-js(Denis Pushkarev) and users don't see any change.

Given the age of many open source projects, and their leaders, I expect we will be seeing this handover problem occurring regularly in the coming decade.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Simple solution

Escrow isn't new or rocket science. Github (and other open-source repositories) simply need to amend their standard terms of service for projects to include an escrow clause, allowing them once certain conditions have been satisfied to transfer the ownership of a project in the absence of the project's designated lead maintainer...

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

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Re: Civilian note

>It turns out that IPv6 works OK and dual stack works fine.

I think Jun Murai, an "IPv6 advocate" would agree with you.

>That /n has absolutely no value whatsoever.

Clearly Jun Murai disagrees with you here. Perhaps because he wants money to fund a pet project: "boosting Asia-Pacific connectivity and online services".

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Old blocks that not abide to current rules should not be routed

>Making them non routable will drop their usefulness and value to 0.

Might get a call from the US military/defense establishment - they seem to be sitting on rather a lot of /8 address ranges...

Roland6 Silver badge

>For one, the pool is in no way free.

Given the recent events at ICAAN, can't help but think Wilson was thinking more of his potential slice of the resale revenues such a cache of IP addresses could deliver...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: In 3.. 2.. 1..

>The guys who learned from Cisco seem to put the gateway at .1.

Given the origins of Cisco, I suspect they just picked up a pre-existing convention, which was probably set by Jon Postel et al: ".1" is only two characters to be keyed, ".254" is four - important in the time before DNS and RIP...

Don't believe the hype: Today's AI unlikely to best actual doctors at diagnosing patients from medical scans

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Re: Don't believe the hype indeed...

>"Furthermore, think about this: the major part of a medical treatment is is the human aspect. Just consider this example: got corona? Please input your data at the screen at the entrance of the hospital... Processing... Our triage protocol shows that you will not be treated at this facility. Next patient please... "

If you replaced entrance to hospital with NHS 111 and a real person at the end of the phone, you've got the current situation. Given the state people have to be in to be admitted to hospital, the "your condition isn't serious enough to be admitted, please call back if they worsen" responses must be difficult conversations...

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

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Re: Home PC accessing the corporate network? Hell no!

>it's just moving the point of attack slightly.

But it is a useful move for Internet facing services.

It also changes the attack. With a MS RDS Server directly visible on the Internet, you are enabling the full range of RDP/RDS exploits to be tried directly against a live server. The addition of a VPN gateway, means an attacker has to mount a (successful) VPN attack before they gain access to the RDS server.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Home PC accessing the corporate network? Hell no!

Bet they allow OWA...

If you're prepared to take the licencing hit, WS2012 and later supports the Remote Desktop web client...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

>The next level is what you talk about, a full Windows Terminal Server, which require your mentioned RDP CAL.

Which (if memory is right) is concurrent user-session based not actual machine, named individual or location based. Hence if you have a correctly licenced RD or TS (without without gateway systems) for normal office use, it is correctly licenced for remote access by those same users.

So the licence issues only really appear when under normal circumstances an organisation with a large user population but low level of concurrent RD/TS users changes to one with a large level of concurrent RD/TS users.

About the only licence issue an organisation may encounter is if they decide to use a Windows server as the VPN host, but who in their right minds would do that when dedicated VPN appliances are readily available and can be up and running in minutes compared to building a Windows VPN server.

Forget about those pesky closures, Windows 10 has an important message for you

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: The long, dark teatime of the next few months

>or having a big family

Expect a large number of babies in Nov~Dec..

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

>Partitions ? Yeah, it's heard of them

But only for its own comsumption.

A clean install of W10 will happily create 4 partitions, only 1 of which is "C:\" and user accessible.

It amused me that doing a vanila install from MS supplied media that W10 automatically creates an OEM recovery partition without giving me any option in the matter; furthermore I'm not aware of any OEM that provides a recovery partition image (and tools) that I can download and install into this reserved partition.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

>Windows will remove old files and update-related downloads after a month.

Bet when W10 is showing the error seen at Ikea, normal housekeeping procedures such as this get put on hold or even better actually get done but the update process displaying the message doesn't get updated to the new state. So when some poor engineer takes a look there is a practically empty HDD...

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Pesky thing...

>"or the right of the people peaceably to assemble"

Says nothing about the size of an "assembly", nor anything about people not having to be at least 2 metres away from others in the 'assembly'. Naturally, the instance someone demonstrates with an official about their "peaceful assembly", they are no longer "peacefully assembling"...

Equinix closes data centres to customers, contractors in France, Germany, Italy, Spain amid coronavirus pandemic

Roland6 Silver badge

> "What happens when due to illness the staffing levels for the cloud suppliers falls below the minimum needed to maintain service"

Nothing until something happens and there is then something to be done that requires more than the staff on duty can handle to restore service...

Currently, creating tertiary continuity provisions - although currently only the FinDir at one client has the password to the payroll system... But there is a point where you do have to decide just how many people need to know where to obtain the combination to the safe containing the master access codes and are these the same people that know the access codes to the building and room containing the safe...

Thought you'd go online to buy better laptop for home working? Too bad, UK. So did everyone. Laptops, monitors and WLANs fly off shelves

Roland6 Silver badge

Prices are being to make Maplin (the deceased high street store) prices look like bargains.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I Hate This Panic Buying!

Hope it was the superduper one - complete with a variety of useful attachments so you can offer your services in the coming weeks and months to the "Good Life" brigade...

A friend once complained the shaver they brought, whilst good and came with lots of attachments, was missing the attachment to use it on your boat. As he didn't own a boat or have even stepped on a boat, he naturally got the p*** taken and still gets reminders.

Roland6 Silver badge

>Ourselves we ended up with 9 Dell Vostro's.

Seem to be solid systems, whilst not particularly exciting specification-wise or visually, the do seem to take the knocks and last - one client has been using Vostros as their mobile classroom laptops since 2012 about a third of their current classroom laptops are from that original batch.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Delays

For one client I've just completed going through their store of "for disposal" laptops - I've been pleasantly surprised just how easily windows 10 installed on Dell Latitude/HP ProBook laptops (i3 and better variants) dating back to circa 2012 and yes the impression is that Win10 (1909) - after it has sorted itself out is slightly snapper than the pre-installed W7/W8 images.

Obviously, the laptops have received a physical clean - superclean keyboard cleaning gel is surprisingly good at its job - plus your hands also get a good cleaning. But people have been really pleased to be given a laptop and not really cared that it might be 'ancient'.

However, my experience with doing similar with HP/Dell desktops isn't quite so positive.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: and desks and chairs at IKEA

>Swedish doesn't do grave or acute accent marks.

You mean Ikea product names are actually correct Swedish and mean something in Swedish?