* Posts by Jamie Jones

4282 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: So, Google is pulling a Microsoft ?

Sounds like Google pulling a Google!

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Could a brexiter please explain...

Very true. Unlikely to succeed however as we would lose our opt outs and attempts to keep some distance from the EU control. We would have to accept the Euro, not a good currency at all as the EU proper (Eurozone) is in real bad shape. But it is possible.

Oh, you mean those special arrangements we had? Nice for a brexiter to admit they existed for once!

And yeah, but you realise the country will be desperate to join, due to the crashing economy, and the increased determination by those young you screwed over who will become old enough to vote.

Face it, we will eventually have the Euro as our currency, all due to you leavers! Still, if you don't like it, you can leave!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Could a brexiter please explain...

Because we had a result, to leave. We passed the deadline twice and still there is massive uncertainty of how we will leave. Every attempt to remain instead of leave has brought a delusional situation where MP's even vote against a hard brexit, the legal default they actually cannot stop!

So, that would be "remainers" from the list of excuses I posted.

Damn those democratic politicians doing their jobs as elected for... "the will of the people"

And damn that Westminster parliamentary sovereignty eh? You know, the one that we don't have, but you want to get back from the evil EU.

Of course, nothing to do with the fact that leavers didn't have a frigging clue what "leave" means, and as evidenced by your post, they still don't.

Still, you won. Get over it.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Could a brexiter please explain...

Could a brexiter please explain why all the news and advice these days regarding brexit is not how to enjoy and spend our new wealth, but how to best mitigate it's effects?

Don't tell me, it's all down to the sabotage inflicted by remainers / the EU / foreigners / Democrats.. ?

What can we rid the world of, thinks Google... Poverty? Disease? Yeah, yeah, but first: Third-party cookies – and classic user-agent strings

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Meh

Conflict of interest

Whenever a security breach is found, most responsible people patch to fix the problem.

Third-party cookies are one such breach, and yet google will do something in 2 years time?

As for user agents, all mine have been "stuck" at the same thing (well, updated perioidically to match the latest and most popular version) for years.

Anyone who tries to assume browser-capabilities based on user-agent string can sod off. This ain't the 90's

(We need a "grumpy old man" icon)

ICANN finally reveals who’s behind purchase of .org: It’s ███████ and ██████ – you don't need to know any more

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Whilst the mooted increases may not be much, :

1) That's for now. Nothing stopping them increasing them at any point, on a whim. Basically, they will keep increasing them to a point where the profit from doing so is eclipsed by the lost revenue of falling domains.

No doubt they'll test the water with incremental changes, but they aren't the sort of people you want potentially holding you to ranson.

2) It's the damn principle! :-)

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Both profits and non-profits are motivated by the law / bad press / reduced sales...

Non-profits still have bills and wages to pay.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

"Short of a major improvement in peer to peer networking leaving the current infrastructure redundant I don’t see a good way out of this unless the new owners get an attack of conscience and put .org into charity ownership. Sorry, dropped off there and started dreaming."

ICANN only "own" root because everyone lets them. Similarly, ".org" is only owned by whoever ICANN says it is because everyone lets them.

If the world got together, and said "enough! restore .org or we'll split".

Anyone could recreate root and ICANN would be out of the equation - it's all down to critical mass.

N.B. I'm not for "root" to be fractured - but if everyone else decided to use a new worldwide independent root, they couldn't be technically stopped.

(I'd also kick out all those new "top level domains" for starters.... Shove them all under a domain ".idiots".. But I guess that ship has sailed...)

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

I know... It was my fiendishly devious plan to get my point proven even more!

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

Thanks to the downvoters for proving my point!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

Exactly. I have no issue with Linus's response (just going by what's quoted in this article), but for people to then lay the blame on Oracle is wrong, but typically not surprising.

I'm no Oracle fan, but time and time again, I've seen people diss authors for releasing software under something other than the GPL, often when the license chosen is more free!

On that subject, I suppose that in the times of Johnson and Trump, it shouldn't be a surprise to hear GPL advocates argue that their license with *more* restrictions than, say, the BSD licenses, somehow makes it *more* free.

I use ZFS, freely. I'm not restricted. It's in the kernel (FreeBSD) and Oracle don't charge me a penny for it.

As Rich said, why is Oracle at fault if *your* licensing restriction won't let you use it?

This isn't a rant against the GPL itself, just against all those in the "GPL cult".

Hey guys, use the GPL if you want, but don't complain when others don't. The whole thing is a cult with some people - many of who don't even understand what the GPL actually says - witness the number of people who moan when they discover that someone is making money off GPL software they wrote. Again, if you don't want that to happen, don't use the GPL, but stop cheerleading it when you obviously don't agree with its philosophy.

National Lottery Sentry MBA hacker given nine months in jail after swiping just £5

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Emotive headline

Without commenting specifically on this case, the amount he earnt isn't relevent.

If he hadn't have earnt the £5 does that mean he should have been let off scot-free?

What if everyone just said 'Nah' to tracking?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: But How ?

An app shouldn't have such low level access to GPS/wifi information.

Mind you, it's still possible to grok wifi location without privs even on the latest androids...

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: But How ?

All these geoiplocators still haven't worked out how the UK's ADSL works.

Very rarely I'm located as being in Swansea (where I actually am)

Bridgend and the Rhondda are apparently places I frequent, as are various English and Scottish towns.

Oh, and "speedtest", asks permission to use my (real) location to find the closest server, and thus chooses Cardiff, despite the fact my connection enters "the internet" at Telehouse in London...

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: On the plus side...

The thing with photos is you can mount them at 90°!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

On the right track...

... still a bit too wide for the hand, though. Now if they narrowed it a bit, and contoured it to fit the hand more naturally, they may have a winning design, back like the phone shapes of 20 years ago...

Oh, and for a communications company, they don't have much to say - their website has an average of 20 words per screen. Crappy PR faff for the hard of concentrating. Hardly trendsetting.

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Round phone,... yeah whatever,....

> Oh, I'm back....

That was quick!

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Obviously downvoted by someone who dislikes Richard Briers!

A shame, because he speaks so highly of ALL Reg readers!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Business Opportunity!

Hell, the community should arrange to finance a **free** boat service. If I lived there, I'd subsidise such a service, and it's promotion, just to spite the bastard!

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Jamie Jones Silver badge
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Re: Americans are so polite

I don't understand that view - it appears that there are many properties beach side. Obviously I'm wrong, but that's how it looks to me!

As for the bozo, I'm surprised his locked gate has survived.. Especially as it's been shown to be illegal!

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

Jamie Jones Silver badge

I remember reading ages ago a comment on here, or maybe slashdot (yes, it was that long ago) where a guy was on a camping holiday with his mate and his mates girlfriend.

She always claimed to be affected by wi-fi signals (specifically) and whilst on the holiday, happened to mention that her head was much clearer now in this environment with no wi-fi buzzing around.

He didn't tell her that at the time, his portable hotspot just a couple of meters away was powered up...

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Not enough room

"I never used to have this much trouble when I wrote with a fountain pen."

Paaah. Won't somebody think about us left-handers?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: They may have sucked

I've no idea how good they are, but geatbest sell them, and I've reliably used them for lots of stuff:

You'll presumably want to select GBP from the top drop down menu:

https://uk.gearbest.com/pen---pencils/pp_3003773264317246.html?wid=2000001

https://uk.gearbest.com/keyboards/pp_597022.html?wid=1433363

Cloudflare buys browser isolation biz S2 Systems in bid to realize Sun's network computing vision at long last

Jamie Jones Silver badge

No, VNC is more analogous to the "remote video" example.

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Devil

Re: I've had .....

OSS on FreeBSD has supported mutliple mixed virtual audio devices (and hardware-provided ones) for as long as I've been using it, which is over 20 years.

[ https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?sound ]

Linux did use OSS, but their implementation was buggy, and couldn't do virtual audio device mixing.

Instead of fixing it, they wrote "the new shiny" ALSA (The "L" standing for Linux just in case anyone still thought that linux users cries about MS software not being "cross-platform" actually meant anything other than "it should run on linux.- don't care about anything else!"

And so, we get the sitution where Mozilla etc. drop OSS for alsa, or pulseaudio etc. and so FreeBSD has to support these unnecessary gimmics just for sound to work..

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: They

I propose "phe" as a new word, as the gender neutral form of 'he/she"

(Do we also need gender-specific forms of the plural "they"? :-) )

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Progress

If they blow off where they shouldn't, why don't they just blame the dog, like I do?

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: BSD

Ahhhh yes, I remember when ports was more than just a plaything for pkg developers...

There have been some good advances, but some iffy ones, but woe betide anyone who dares have a different opinion... As you say, pet projects and idealism - it's why most of my patches remain local these days :-(

I totally agree on the space hopper too!

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: No Service

Of course, there was a payphone 10 minutes away, but it wasn't in a pub, right?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: No Service

I would just say "my phone will be on the kitchen table, or on silent, switched off, or just won't be answered".

No need to come up with excuses when I'm on my own time! (Not quite the total bastard, if a colleague did phone and I happened to hear it, and was in a position to help, I would, but don't expect me to be prepared for such a scenario!)

A user's magnetic charm makes for a special call-out for our hapless hero

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Fred's looks like a UK based "American theme" pub!

Beware the Y2K task done too well, it might leave you lost in Milan

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: ...why Microsoft taught people to hit Ctl-Alt-Del...

Obviously I meant "hard to do accidentally", but yes, now you mention it, it is quite hard for us otters!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: ...why Microsoft taught people to hit Ctl-Alt-Del...

That's his point - why did MS think it was a god idea grab a deliberately hard-to-do key sequence designed for hard reboots, and make it into a generally used command sequence?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Similarish happened to me...

ILike a total idiot, I'd messed up the order of a new filesystem in /etc/fstab - I placed it before it's parent mount. The server was used for interdepartmental stats reports by various boses, along with being a site dns server, and site internet proxy/intranet.

Months later, one bozo from the windows team went to do something on one of their servers, and did alt-ctrl-delete on the wrong keyboard, trying to wake his box from the screensaver (who does that anyway?? Pressing "SHIFT" surfices._

Needless to say, the box tried to reboot, and failed due the fstab entry, about 10am. I wasn't in that day, and so the machine was down until a colleague started work at 3pm..

There was a bunch of Unix support guys on site, but no-one had a clue what was wrong.. sigh.

Still, it was my stupid cockup...

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Drone delivery - again?

Doesn't everyone have a butler these days? :-)

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Drone delivery - again?

Just like with autonomous taxis, designers forget one big problem: People. People are jerks, and will not act responsibly if they see free food arrive ungarded.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Deleted

Thanks-you! I feel my work here for the day is done!

Now it's time to relax with some monkey-porn!

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Deleted

......of bananas & a book of animal porn...

"And that, your honour, is why I had that book in my posession..."

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Deleted

It reminds me of something a sys-admin of a university wrote years ago, back when people cared about such things:

Every time a member of staff left, he set up an email autoresponder on their old email address, saying something like:

"XXX has left the university. His new email address is YYY. Your email has automatically been forwarded onto this new address, but please update your address book, as this old address will be deleted on ZZZ [ 6 months after leaving date]

He said that after the account was deleted, he always got people asking for the new address, as they'd forgotten to update the old one.

So subsequently, he changed the system, and the email response to say that the email HASN'T been forwarded on, and the user HAS to resend it to the correct address themselves.

From then on, when the old account was deleted, he barely had any comeback.

People are lazy. Do something for them once, they'll expect it forever, which is probably why I'm pissed off I wasn't invited to my brothers for Christmas like I was last year :-)

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

The future is here already...

By Gavin Clarke 23 Jan 2020 at 19:00 119 Reg comments SHARE ▼

The US-based GPS....

UK's Virgin Media celebrates the end of 2019 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*

Jamie Jones Silver badge

No, it's a generic stock image (shutterstock_laying_fibre2.jpg) because El Reg think we're too thick to know what a hole digger looks like.

Apparently, as per other articles, it also helps to see what a person shouting at their phone looks like when we read artciles about customer complaints.

Articles about people frustrated by some piece of software are only clear to us when we see someone sitting at a laptop shaking his fist at the screen.

And who the hell would know what a network outage meant, without photos of spaghetti-riddled switches and routers?

Of course, when an author does use a valid photo, it leaves us thinking "Is that the mentioned grifter just before his court case, or is it file_dodgy_looking_bloke_enters_court_looking_angry.jpg"

HPE goes on the warpath, attacks AWS over vendor lock-in

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Hotel California is very apt

Reading that reference to Hotel California upset me - am I now really that old that they felt the need to explain the premise of the song to a generation of readers that might not have heard it?

Happy Christmas, and baaaah humbug to the lot of it!

'Supporting Internet Explorer is hell': Web developers identify top needs – new survey

Jamie Jones Silver badge

"Should we all just use (say) chromium"

No, no, no! And it's not to do with the "competition" angle mentioned, but as soon as you assume a browser quriks, you end up locking out systems that don't even have that browser available.

It would be a return to that "best viewed in internet explorer" or the ever inappropriate one often seen on commerce sites "This site will only work with internet explorer 6. You must upgrade to continue" - A lovely way to treat potential customers who were most likely "upgraded" far beyond what IE6 offered.

In a similar vein, how many of these "browser quirks" today are real, and not down to badly written html/css/code that doesn't conform to standards?

InLink Limited limited: Firm that puts up UK's ad-supported phone booths enters administration

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: "London Streets"?

Probably them too!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

"London Streets"?

They are all over Swansea streets, too.

I assumed that if Swansea had them, everyone did...

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: What nonsense

True....WAY over the top for them!

But more importantly, how do you know my friends?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

SJW's - suck it up

Did I like being called nerd/geek/swot in school?

No.

Was it said with malice?

Yes.

But it's nothing like "the N word" - I don't recall my ancestors being slaves, or made to sit away from "normal" people, and I don't recall us being systematically attacked, murdered, and generally abused and looked down on.

**That** is what defines hate speech. Not something you hear that you don't like.

Taking her point to its logical conclusion, no-one would be able to say anything that someone else didn't like.. A dystopian facade of utopia.

Hate speech, racism, and other forms of hate are legitimate issues, but just like calling Cuomo "Fredo", this ain't the bloody N word, and I say this despite being on Cuomos side in his attack on the right wing troll who hassled him.

People have the right to be jerks - no matter how much it annoys me when they are.