* Posts by Lee D

4232 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Lee D Silver badge

I agree, however the sad thing is that this is a common story:

In a system I manage, which is nothing more than a SQL database with a web interface, we struggled to get a "report" (PDF, in their terminology) of some very critical HR data. Literally the one document we must supply to government, regularly, run regularly, keep paper copies of in house, require in an emergency, etc. etc. etc.

The PDFs that come out the system are reliant on all kinds of nonsense on the backend - a service that runs Office 2010(!) products to then output to a fixed default "virtual printer" that creates a PDF of the Office output.

Anyway, after months of faffing, we were told that the report that comes out isn't fit for purpose, by the same government inspectors that required it. So we contacted the company. Their response, after much faffing, was "well our guy used to work for that same organisation and THEY think it's okay". Which, I'm sorry, is not an answer. Not when we are literally told outright that it's not suitable.

Cue many months of back-and-forth and no progress. In the end, they said it wasn't possible to get the information we wanted into an acceptable format except the original they supplied. We argued. They said if we sent them a template, they'd make it.

In the end, I did just that. Not just "here's a mock-up". I ODBC'd their database tables, interpreted their junky table layout and weird column names and built the SQL queries to get the base information from the same locations as their original report. Then I coded up an Excel sheet with a button to pull in that data, process it to some form of sanity (what IDIOT puts full postal addresses in a single field with no verification, so I had everything from just an address to just a postcode, to "no address" in 20 different hand-written formats, addresses that didn't exist, foreign address, some with town name, some without, etc. in a single free-form text box) present that data in a sensible layout and fit it all on a page with a single line for each person and a bunch of checkmarks in columns for each thing we needed to check about that person.

I supplied said printout, and said spreadsheet to them. 18 months later. Still nothing. We have a literally "not fit for purpose" output from the program, our own bodge in Excel that *is* fit for purpose and based solely off things they could do in their reports (and far easier than I ever could have!), and got no further with them actually making that report the way we LEGALLY need it to be.

So obviously we can't ditch the Excel. We can't make them put it in the software (even just for us, and they literally have custom reports for anything you like, so it wouldn't take them more than an hour and wouldn't affect a single other customer). And we can't pay someone to code it up properly as they'd have to integrate the systems and it would cost more than the salaries of all those involved anyway, and need to be updated to fit their software changes regularly.

Entire literal organisations are hinging their legal capability to operate under government remit on an Excel that I knocked up in a few hours. And I will not be around forever.

Similar story on just about every system we buy - access control programs that can't produce a list of who's on site or query in a decent format, visitor management programs that can't produce a list of visitors in a printed format, and so on, etc.

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

I once traced a bunch of network cables, trying to work out a) what they did, b) whether they were the culprit in some networked PCs that could no longer connect.

I literally traced them by hand, back under floors, through cellars, up stairs, through roofs, into conduit, down corridors, etc. and ended up the other end. But still... dead cables.

Opened up a bunch of conduit that was 10+ years old, and had been painted over every year since (so you could date it by the strata/colour of the paint. Inside one stretch of conduit, 10 cables go in, 10 cables come out. Opened up every inch of the conduit to see if the cable was pinched.

Not pinched. Cut. Not just cut, but cut, then pulled 6 feet apart. Then left in the conduit like that.

One end, numbered cable in a bunch. 500m away, same-numbered cables in a bunch. In between, en-route, 6 foot gap of sliced cable for no reason whatsoever.

But, obviously, that couldn't be the reason that the networking had gone down recently. It had just been like that for years and someone was too lazy to label the cables, remove them, or cut the ends off to let people know.

No, the office in question was down because the same networking guy had put a 10Mbps 5port network hub under the incredibly expensive parquet flooring, powered from a Heath Robinson power point under the same flooring, then wired it through a radiator cover to make it look like the cables were structural when in fact they just came from an old hub hidden under a floor that you could not take apart.

Obviously one day the power arrangements changed, and the office went offline. Then you get the "why can't you just put it all back online instantly now that you know the problem?" Because I have a bit of professional pride and I'm not going to just replicate that situation with a Gigabit switch even if I could. So we had to get cabling contractors in to wire it all in properly - without lifting the floor.

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

Lee D Silver badge

Re: FFS!

Tip: If you give a different email alias to every provider, then when you are spammed you know exactly where it came from, can report them / complain to them, they can't wheedle out of your evidence of their breach of data protection, and you can permanently block that alias without affecting any other email whatsoever.

It's available for pence on any "catch-all" email forwarding domain. And it has allowed me to threaten court to several companies (who immediately fell over themselves to appease me, including the one who was knowingly using a stolen customer database from a rival company!), know exactly who does look after my information and who doesn't (when you get spam to a companyname@mydomain.com email, it means that Company Name allowed my information to leak!), and let's me cut out spam from companies that demanded an email but from which I have no desire to ever receive one after the initial activation email.

Currently on about 500+ aliases (I can just make them up and they are valid emails immediately), 27 blocked email aliases for unauthorised information leaks, about 5 threats of legal action for deliberately misusing my information, and about 50+ filters for "this company only ever spams me and has no unsubscribe" in my email that means I get the emails but they just get foldered in case it was anything important. And I've had the same domains for 20+ years.

And my *actual* email account that I collect it all from is still unpublished and can be changed at any time to another provider without having to do a thing except change the forwarding address (Oh, P.S. even an unpublished, never-provided address gets spam, which means that most of the major email providers have internal leaks... but fortunately, unless the email was addressed to "mydomain.com" or whatever, it was clearly unwanted spam sent direct to the forwarded account anyway, so I can just filter and delete).

Lee D Silver badge

Re: FFS!

Starts there.

Ends up with the ludicrous situation in America where everyone's phones in the entire state ring with an un-blockable alert at 3am because a missing child on the border at the other side of the state MAY be in that state.

It's all a worthy cause. Sure. Until you get such alerts every night, can't turn them off, and are never in a position to do anything to aid anyway, being 1000 miles away from where they were last seen.

Fact is: Law says no. Emergencies do not override laws without emergency laws to change them.

And when it involves my personal data, and trust of proper use of that data, it's actually counterproductive - as the guy says "I'll just remove my data then so you can't use it at all" because there's no proper unsubscribe.

If the NHS cannot protect my personal data from use in unsolicited marketing, then you have a big problem there, before you even consider what feature-creep will result in in ten year's time if it's left unchecked. Just because of something that's a non-essential part of a no-longer-emergency situation.

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Ignorance is bliss

"After nearly 15 years of caring for an elderly, infirm and very sick person the odd one or two hours we can afford away from the house are a god send"

So why would you want to be disturbed by every doorbell, and still have to worry / manage the door for them the few times you can get away?

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Ignorance is bliss

There are feature reasons.

But this is basically a button-activated camera that sends a video to your phone.

In my mind, that's more commonly known as the "alarm" circuit on any cheap CCTV NAS box - they literally have a set of green terminal blocks for precisely that. Wire them together, via your door bell. Press the door bell. It triggers the CCTV (it doesn't need to "alarm" audibly). That records the last/next 30 seconds (much like your dashcam which can also... gosh... trigger a recording when you press a button). And then, like even the cheapest networked CCTV box, can send that alert by email to you.

Any integration past there (which people don't do, like opening doors for the person) can be wired in just the same. Most CCTV boxes that are half-decent will support that too, even from an app that lets you trigger other outputs.

The only bit you're missing is "talking to the guy at the door". Which is, what? Setting up a video conference session to something cheap stuck to your door?

All these unnecessary expensive junk defeated by a bog-standard £50 CCTV box and maybe a £10 tablet stuck to your door/spyhole if you want to get really techy.

And why? So you can see who comes to your door when you're not there. Such person is either: a) someone who's going to break in anyway and just smash your doorbell off the wall, b) someone delivering something that they will just drop off anyway, c) someone delivering something that they can't drop off without a signature so they'll go next door anyway, d) someone you don't want to answer the door to even if you were at home, let alone when you're at work or on holiday.

I'm the techiest guy I know, and I consider these things useless consumer-tat. Tech is a tool to aid you, a human, do things that are useful which you can't easily do without it. Answering your doorbell from 1000 miles away, however, isn't something I've ever wanted to do.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 support ends in a matter of days and there are 139,000 internet-facing servers still up

Lee D Silver badge

Moved all my users to GMail.

Can find no redeeming feature in either Outlook or Exchange at all, and certainly not in OWA.

For those whose inbox was precious, I just used GSSMO (be careful, GSMMO or something is a similarly named tool!) and imported their mailbox into GMail.

The only blocker was a couple of people who use desktop programs that use MAPI to send their mail... but Google Sync for Outlook sorts that out - they have an install of Outlook that syncs to their GMail and it sends the mail from GMail.

The administration, the spam-filtering, the access, the compatibility, the calendar... so much better with GMail and Google Calendar.

If I was a millionaire starting my own business, I'd just buy GSuite. So many problems solved so very simply in any modern browser.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Don’t.

And then you end up not being able to buy anything, from anyone, ever.

Fact is, those products are designed for different markets, by different teams, for different purposes, under different leadership, even in different companies in different countries.

It's like tarring the XBox with the same brush as the guy who made Clippy.

No device I own has an unnecessary advert, for example. Not one. I'd uninstall or block them if they did. I pay for my software/apps, I use freeware and open-source, and I don't tolerate ads. And yet I own several Samsung products. So obviously they're NOT all out to spam me with advertising.

Samsung literally do not have my personal information, either. I don't have a Samsung account. My phones asked, I said no, that was the end of that.

Fact is, an XCover phone, for example, is designed for workers in the field including emergency workers, so a lot of the junk that flies in a consumer flagship phone (style over substance) isn't present or done a lot better.

Saying "Samsung is evil" would literally mean you shouldn't visit any site with Google ads. Because Google is evil too. Never send an email to GMail. Never use Android. Never search using it. Never touch a product that supports Chromecast. Don't touch Edge (based on Chromium, don't you know?)

There's a point to take it to - either to paranoia. Or to "it's never affected my personal tolerance". The latter is where I draw the line. The second I get an unsolicited ad on my TV or phone, I'll complain (I love a good weekend of writing complaint letters, I got very good at it) and get another product.

Fact is I just don't buy stuff that has that, and I eliminate the things that do from consideration, whoever they are made by. And I still ended up with Samsung. If I excluded every Microsoft product because I disagree with XBox Gold, life would be very much more difficult.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Don’t.

There's nothing wrong with Samsung per se. Just steer clear of anything fancy.

Samsung phones - Stick to the middle-end.

Samsung TV - Stick to the dumb TVs.

Hell, I have a Samsung laptop still. One of the best laptops I've ever used, lasted forever.

But your warning should far more be: Don't ever buy anything for the brand.

I bought several Samsung phones (I like the old Mini and new XCover phones), several Samsung TVs and a laptop over the years. I haven't had to replace them until they're literally obsolete or I felt like it. I replaced the Samsung laptop this year because it only have a 960M in it (which tells you a) how old it is and b) how long I've kept with it rather than change it).

But I didn't buy any of them "because it's Samsung". I bought them because they, variously, have a headphone port, removable battery, IR blaster, simple flat screens that are cheap to replace (but never once had to), non-stupid design, etc. (phones) are plain and simple (dumb TV) or were actually pretty damn good for the price (gaming laptop, which they sadly don't make any more).

Don't buy based on name. Buy based on features, price, reliability, reviews, the market, repairability, etc. That may mean that you then always avoid certain names (e.g. Apple), but I've found lots of Samsung products that I wouldn't buy at all. And I've found many that I would. No different to anyone else. Except Apple.

Lee D Silver badge

TV = display device.

Content boxes = content device.

Separate both at all times. Then you can change them independently of each other.

I use a projector, which eliminates the problem entirely because nobody puts this junk on a projector. And I get a 95" TV on my wall.

UK mobile network EE plumps for Nokia to provide that all-important 5G RAN equipment

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Got to ask the question

Same here.

And if they deployed 4G properly, you could easily get speeds to rival VDSL. They just don't bother in the UK, for some reason. Obviously trying to sell you 5G (which, at the moment, gives slower speeds than 4G).

Uber allowed to continue operating in English capital after winning appeal against Transport for London

Lee D Silver badge

There are only two types of taxi, in reality only one has the majority. Hence one supplier, one parts supply:

"Two production vehicle models comply with the current conditions: the London Taxi Company TX4 and a specially-modified taxi variant of the Mercedes-Benz Vito with steerable rear wheels"

There are only 6 testing stations, all run by one company NSL, and taxis have to pass two tests a year at them:

https://www.quotax.net/new-taxi-inspection-centres-addresses/

Taxis can only use authorised spare parts from the former in order to pass the latter. Though you can take it to "any repair shop" in theory, the parts, end-result and testing are still under monopoly control, effectively.

Lee D Silver badge

Choice:

- Commercial service, operated by app, where the car arrives in minutes, lets you track the entire journey, takes you to your destination, charges a pittance and rates the drivers.

- Wait until you can hail a cab, or use an inferior app that they only released reluctantly, then have an argument about "Sowff of da rivver?" and charge a fortune (including having to sustain the cab via only a single approved company that can repair/maintain/test them that does nothing else, and rules on what cabs are allowed or not).

I've had far more refusal-to-carry in black cabs than ANYTHING else - minicabs, Ubers, etc. My disabled-ex and I tried to use black cabs until one day an entire taxi rank refused us because they were "about to knock off" for going from one tube station to another. She didn't even have her wheelchair, just a stick that day. They all refused.

Sure, I should have reported them but post-reporting doesn't solve the fact that we had to travel by other methods because we'd have been late otherwise. Provide me deliberate bad service, and I go to a different service, rather than complain - it's that simple.

Had the same several times, and a few years later with a non-disabled ex. They basically all said screw you because they didn't want to drive from a suburb into London.

Uber - I've never had a refusal. Never had a safety issue (but, I'm sorry, just because you're with a black cab driver doesn't mean you're safe anyway!). I know I'm not going to be run round on an expensive diversion unnecessarily.

But more importantly - they just work, and they are cheaper. "Safety" has never been something I've worried about in a vehicle where I desire a random stranger to drive me from A to B - minicabs are no different and sustain an entire industry of their own for the last 50 years. If you're in that position, and you're worried, you tell someone where you're going from and to and text the reg to a friend before you get in, surely? Uber lets you do that inside the app itself.

Two members of my family are black cab drivers. Sorry, lads, but I'll use Uber every time. You want to compete, then compete. You want me to pay a premium just to facilitate your historical lifestyle, I'm afraid I have better things to do with my money.

Too many staff have privileged work accounts for no good reason, reckon IT bods

Lee D Silver badge

Access is not required.

But the POTENTIAL for access is necessary. Which is no different in the law as actual access. So I may as well have actual access.

It all comes back to the same definitions.

However when I have to deal with anything sensitive, even if I have rights to the data as part of my job, I carefully record what I'm doing and why and on whose authority. Because you don't want that stuff coming back to bite you.

Generally speaking, IT people are either REALLY slack about this, through ignorance of it, or REALLY hot on this, because they don't want to go to jail. It's very much either "don't know/don't care" until they learn the consequences, and then it very quickly becomes "no way am I getting into trouble for that".

Lee D Silver badge

1) No, you're not getting local admin.

2) No, you're not getting domain admin, either.

3) No, unless you are required to have it for your job, you're not getting access to an account, data, or a system.

4) If you require it for your job, I want that in writing, because then it exonerates me.

GDPR and the DPA are very, very, very clear on this and always have been.

If you don't NEED access then you should not have it.

And the POTENTIAL for access is considered identically to actual access. So if you're even *able* to access that file, as far as DPA/GDPR are concerned, you have access to that file. If you have admin and are able to access all files, you have access to all files. That might be necessary for your job if you're actually an IT admin. It's not necessary for your job if you're just the boss.

My boss has LESS access to the system than I do. Because he's not IT, and I'm the IT Manager. That's how it should always be. If it's not, you are literally in breach of the DPA and/or GDPR, whether or not anything actually ever happens or even if that data is NEVER accessed. Just the potential is enough for a fine / conviction.

And GDPR / DPA has PERSONAL LIABILITY now, too. So it's not a case that if I slip up, the company gets a slap on the wrist. I can be personally fined or charged for allowing it. So I'm taking no chances whatsoever. And will consider any bypass of that a deliberate breach.

If you do not know all this, and you work in IT, I suggest you seek legal advice and/or immediately cease and desist from such actions.

Now, could someone explain to me why a call center worker "needs" access to my home address and telephone number (and that of every single customer they have), when they could just press a button marked "Dispatch to Customer" or "Ring Customer" and never actually see those details, unless I request a change to them or there needs to be a security check?

Don't even get me started on credit checks.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Crypto exchange cracked, Bitcoin burgled

Lee D Silver badge

Re: "new payment players [..] not allowed anywhere near its innermost workings"

Anyone can run a Bitcoin client.

You need a few hundred Gb of storage space, a decent Internet connection and a computer. That's all.

Having a third-party do that on your behalf is the problem, but some people would rather do that. No different to giving your money to a financial adviser or anything else. Check they're certified, but it's still not guarantee that they won't get hacked or run off with your money. You would at least hope they have insurance, sure, but that's as far as it goes.

But if you don't trust them, Bitcoin is incredibly simple to store on your own. The problem is getting money in-and-out. It's a transaction, so you have to trust that the person holding lots of Bitcoin that you want to buy will do so without running off with your money. And vice-versa the other end. That's a problem for any transaction.

There are escrow services for this too, however, no different to buying a house or a car using such a service rather than giving Dodgy Dave a grand in a dark alleyway and hoping he just hands over the keys.

The problem is that due to money laundering laws, you can't trade Bitcoin on most bank accounts. They block Bitcoin providers and exchanges from accepting money from your account. Sure, there are ways round it but when you're bypassing money laundering laws to trade Bitcoin with an unknown that was flagged by your bank... then you do have to question how safe your investment actually is.

The problem is not what service you use, it's what you're trying to do. You're trying to buy an intangible asset from a random third party whose identity you do not know, with real cash, so that you can later spend that asset via untraceable services and later cash it back out from random un-named third parties back to cash in a real bank. If that doesn't make alarm bells go off at your bank, your bank are literally not compliant with the law.

Sure, it sucks if you just want to use it for casual shopping, but you do have to look at it from the point of view that transactions like that are big warning signs of fraud, laundering, Ponzi schemes, illegal gambling, criminal enterprise, etc.

I had a Bitcoin once. A whole Bitcoin. I cashed it out in small pieces here and there. The last £35 of it I tried to extract the other day and it took me an entire day to find an exchange willing to do it that my bank would accept. Basically they sent me an Amazon gift card. Can you say "dodgy as all hell?" I did get the card, spent it successfully and never had any comeback, but that's not a safe place to put your life savings, by any measure.

I'm a mathematician and computer scientist. I love Bitcoin's concept, operation, algorithm, etc. - it's literal genius. But put my life-savings in it? No. Do I wish I'd kept a ton of Bitcoin from when they were basically given away, now that they're worth thousands each? Of course. Would I have put thousands of my own money into them, even back then? No. Not without 100% foresight. And if I had that, there are easier ways to make a ton of money from a pittance.

Hell, I only have a couple of hundred in the stock market, I see it as too much a game rather than a sound retirement strategy even for that. I can afford to lose that, and I'm getting 0.5% on my savings account with a ton of withdrawal restrictions anyway so if I make even 0.5% I'm better off. And that's, what? A tenner a year? If that.

Sorry, but Bitcoin is never going to be legitimised. Maybe another cryptocurrency with identity-tracing run by the banks, crypto-currency serves far more useful purposes than just anonymity alone. And I'm not at all concerned about anonymity, the same as most of the people who just want to put their money somewhere safe.

But anonymity is the killer of both legitimate currency conversion, and the security of your money with a random third-party using that service. The fact this company are registered in the Seychelles tells you everything you need to know. When they up and disappear will all your money tomorrow, what are you going to do? Nothing, that's what.

Swift tailored for Windows no longer folklore: Apple's programming language available for Microsoft OS

Lee D Silver badge

Today I discovered that I do not like Swift coding, or feel it necessary to exist as a different language.

It's C/C++ like, but with obscure little quirks that aren't intuitive:

self.window.rootViewController?.title

(What's the ? for? It's tricky to even Google it)

The Apple page pushes it as an ideal first language.

self.window.addSubviews(self.btnOperations)

_ = self.btnOperations.map {

$0.addTarget(self, action: Calculator.onOperationPress(_:_:),

for: .primaryActionTriggered)

}

And the people who write examples of it are not the best people to take progamming lessons from:

if Double(self.state.lhs) == 0.0 { break }

(protecting against a division-by-zero!)

About the only nice thing I can see is that UI primitives are one-liners to create, but that's true the second you include any UI library.

Does nobody make a decent, readable language any more?

Adidas now stands for All Day I'm Disconnecting All Servers as owners of 'smart' Libra scales furious over bricked kit

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I just constantly piss myself laughing....

I have never owned a smart TV. I've never owned any home automation kit (Echo, Nest, etc.). I've never owned a smart appliance.

I work in IT, the very last thing I want to do when I get home is diagnose the wireless fridge trying to connect out to the Internet.

As you say, it's *unnecessary*. If people want that, fine, sell a "smart module" that plugs into a dumb appliance. That way not only can people get what they want, you don't have to manufacture two appliances, people can buy upgrades, and people can repair/replace just the bit that's broken. But I don't need wifi to turn on my dishwasher.

I bought a robot vacuum recently. For £10 extra I could have got the version with wifi and an app. I didn't. The £10 cheaper version had no such junk in it, and yet has an infrared remote control, inside which is a timer. So you just point the remote control and/or set the timer. And it wakes up at the allotted time, hoovers the house, and then finds its charging port and goes back to sleep.

To be honest, I've only ever used the timer once by accident (I must have pressed the button to enable it as the little icon was lit when it's never been before). I don't want something running around my house eating cables when I'm not there. Sure, 99% of the time it'll be fine, and the other 1% of the time it'll chew through a power cable and start a fire, or pull something expensive off the table because it tugged on a lamp cord.

I'm not at all sure I want some cheap Chinese manufacturer having an app on my phone and my wifi details, either. And I don't have to worry about my vacuum getting hacked.

I'm not tech-avoidant. I just use the appropriate, proportional tech in the appropriate places to facilitate an easier life. A dishwasher is amazing value for money... in terms of hours-of-washing-up-avoided, it pays for itself in a month. A smart dishwasher that I have to join to the wifi, maintain the signal, press buttons on to clear the warnings, tell it to sod off trying to order replacements or consumables I already have, update every month, etc. isn't.

Instead of a TV I buy "monitors". Exactly identical tech, without the gumph. In fact, I tend to buy a projector - far larger image, no smarts at all. But then I have a 17" laptop and on the side of my sofa it does a far better job than even a huge TV the other side of the room, with an amazing image.

What I want from a TV nowadays is not TV at all. I want a display device that displays what I tell it. And then I'll have other things that tell it what to display. What I want from a dishwasher is to wash my dishes when I tell it. What I want a robot vacuum to do is to vacuum when / where I want it to. None of that necessitates wifi, apps and Internet connectivity. (Though my vacuum remote has basically controls, so he becomes almost a game of steering him into awkward corners and then seeing if he can find his way home... he's not "intelligent" by any means, he can't map the room or anything, he just has IR LEDs on himself and the base station and with that alone he manages to home into the base station three rooms away! Very clever programming).

The kit is out there, you just have to look for it. And when the world starts to require everything online, it'll be someone else's problem to deal with, and I will be able to do my old-person's "I don't understand, just make it work" thing that everyone currently does to me.

.uk registry operator Nominet responds to renewed criticism – by silencing its critics

Lee D Silver badge

I don't think it's answerable to government. It's just another non-profit entity that has been given a role, but it's not really answerable for anything other than "do the .uk domain name TLDs work?".

This is how things operate... it's basically a private company, technically a "profit with a purpose" company, under the guise of a non-profit, doing what an official government authority should really be doing.

It's answerable only to its shareholders, like any other company, unless it's doing something illegal.

Which is exactly the problem with private companies fulfilling necessary functional roles in infrastructure like the Internet.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Lee D Silver badge

"We want access to X"

"X isn't available to you any more, you're no longer part of it"

"But we need X"

"Then buy into X or make your own."

"Fine! Then... we'll buy... EGGS! That sounds like X!"

"Okay? (shrug)"

"EGGS don't do what we want! But we're not going to pay for X!"

I fail to see how that's not a) Brexit-related, b) stupidity personified, c) showing a complete lack of preparation for Brexit, including failing to source an alternative, or even KNOWING what an alternative would be.

This dog is stuck on the other side of the fence because it's too dumb to walk through the gap further up.

Lee D Silver badge

There are. My phone does.

However the full constellation was NOT in place and it wasn't operational when they had an outage.

And the service is NOT advertising itself as complete until "late 2020", and never planned to be by this stage.

It's only just got out of beta testing, basically. And some people think that means they should be able to use it 100% and never have an outage.

Lee D Silver badge

So... the international consortium we pulled out of got it right, and we might well have to buy back into it, and there are few - if any - sensible alternatives that are as good as Galileo.

So, remind me... we're pulling out why? For "independence". That's like pulling out of your football career to play football "independently" of any team.

But our best idea that the entirety of our government could posit was to buy something with satellites in the name, even though they did not offer anything even remotely like the services we'd miss out on.

The GPS debacle pretty much is just a perfect mini-tableau of the entire Brexit saga.

It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Tool and trouble

Stock markets are based on "who's holding the hot potato".

People think they have anything to do with reality, and they don't need to have. You invest in something, it goes up in value (and the reason literally does not matter), you sell JUST BEFORE it crashes. You make an absolute fortune and yet may have had no idea whatsoever what Company X even sold, let alone did any kind of market analysis.

It's not about "owning stock", it's about making money. And you can make money by just riding the knife edge and having an intuition about when best to sell, or even waiting for the crash to START and then to start selling. You'll still make money if it was something like Tesla, for example, but you'll sell on the sudden 10% down-dip, rather than wait for it to hit zero.

It does not need to have anything to do with the stock, the product, what others are buying, the market state, global economy or anything else. It's just a graph to some people, and they buy when the graph is low, sell when the gradient changes against them rapidly.

Those kinds of traders literally don't care if Tesla goes bankrupt the day after. Unlike, say, people investing for pension funds, etc. They're just riding the rollercoaster of the graph, making a fortune, and spreading the risk. They probably just have automated sells in the system (which further contributes towards crashes, as has been proved in previous such panic-crashs).

So long as you're not left holding the hot potato, you'll profit.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply

Lee D Silver badge

Subheading

Subheading:

"Every news website falls for it and promotes the "scarcity" of our "rare" cards, hyping our products for us for free, because we just couldn't be bothered to make enough to satisfy demand or wait until we had stock enough, but wanted money NOW."

Citation: Nintendo, Apple, just about every major supplier of goods.

Elecrow CrowPi2: Neat way to get your boffins-to-be hooked on Linux from an early age and tinkering in no time

Lee D Silver badge

Re: "The kiddiwonks won't even know they're learning"

No different to telling kids veggies are horrible but they can have something nice if they eat them.

If you don't let that kind of nonsense get to their ears, then they just eat whatever they like.

My daughter has been addicted to peas since a young age. She hates fizzy drinks. She doesn't eat much chocolate. She'd rather have a slice of bread or a sandwich.

After initial world exposure and instinct, kids learn their disgust reactions from their parents (along with their racism, sexism, ableism, etc.). Don't expose them to that, and they just grow up "normal" (which nowadays means not like everyone else). This also works the same for many things - bursting into tears because they had a slight graze or a spot of mud on their hand. If you fuss over them, they'll cry every time and grow up as one of those people cleaning their hands every two seconds with harsh chemicals.

And - an oddball one, but experimentation with my own has borne this out - if you tell kids that they'll feel sick if they read in the car... they will feel sick if they read in the car. If you don't tell them that, they won't. That one is open to more variables (e.g. travel sickness anyway, etc.) but I believe it to be the same.

My kid is 11 now. She goes to a foreign private school. She makes friends everywhere because I've tried not to pass my social awkwardness to her. She eats whatever she likes, and chooses of her own accord to eat sensible foods in moderation and enjoys doing so (she still likes a McD's but who doesn't?). If you try to bribe her into a van with a chocolate bar, you're going to have a hell of time... not least because despite her wimpy appearance (and my "complete victim" childhood) she's a junior black belt but also she couldn't care less about chocolate.

The ONE neurosis she has, which is completely artificial and not based on anything - a fear of dogs. And I can tell you EXACTLY where that comes from. My own mother, who will pull you right out of the way if a dog goes past because SHE has a neurotic fear of dogs too. It's a complete phobia based on zero data - I know, because neither me nor my daughter have ever been bit but we both have a fear of dogs because my mother did the same to both of us whenever we were out walking and a dog came past. I got over that, though, by just fighting the instinct to see dogs as fearful. They still make me react that way, but my brain overrules it deliberately and consciously a microsecond later.

If you teach kids that learning is boring, school is hard (particularly bloody Maths, I have to say, as a mathematician), brussels sprouts are yucky, chocolate is a reward, girls are girly, boys are "just being boys" when they assault girls, that gay people are "weird" or "wrong", mother cuddles you every single time you get the smallest hint of an ouchie, etc. then guess how they grow up to treat those things. And guess what they teach their children.

My daughter literally asked for more lessons as she was bored in lockdown. She not only reads far beyond her age but she writes books and encourages her (author) grandfather on the direction of how his own (adult-reading-age) published books should go and edits them for him. She grew up in an Essex state school and now attends a Spanish private school on her own merit. She's as skinny as a rake, and as fit as a fiddle.

The buck stops at you as a parent. Don't pass your prejudices and neuroses onto your - or other - children.

Safety driver at the wheel of self-driving Uber car that killed a pedestrian is charged with negligent homicide

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I've seen the video many times

(shrug) Doesn't matter.

"I hit the guy because I was on my phone but there was no way I could have reacted in time anyway" isn't a defence. It's a confession.

Fact is, she didn't even know what was happening on the road because she was looking at her phone. Even a microsecond of actual braking would have absolved her... just looking out the front screen, she could have argued that she did what she could but just didn't see the pedestrian - happens a thousand times a day around the world.

But when you're looking at your phone... you're just not driving. That's it. That's how the law sees it. Because otherwise "looking at your phone" becomes normalised, and you become immune whenever anything happens. That's NOT what you want.

It's almost two separate offences. Driving without due care and attention is convictable whether or not you struck a person or had any kind of "accident" (or, in 99.9% of cases, a "deliberate through negligence"). And hitting or killing a pedestrian isn't - in itself - necessarily a convictable offence. She's being jailed for the first, really, it just happened to lead to the second.

All she had to do was not look at her phone. Like all the idiots on the road have to do is not look at their phone. Or the cyclist this morning that I nearly took out who, on a blind bend, decided to text on his phone in his hands, meaning he strayed in a straight line instead of following the bend and ended up crossing the line so the first I knew as a driver approaching around a blind bend was a cyclist not looking, not with his hands on the handlebars, and on the wrong side of the road with only yards of warning (multiple blind bends in quick succession).

I have zero sympathy for someone who is on their phone while driving. Automated sytsem or not. If the system didn't need you, you wouldn't be in the driver's seat, you could be on the back seat having a nap and a Whatsapp. You're in the driver's seat, with brake pedals under your feet, for a reason. Put the damn phone away from the second you move off until you reach your destination. There really is no excuse these days.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: However

Then don't take the job.

Never mind that you can run Meet on any old computer, Google unveils specialised hardware for vid-chat plat

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Obsolescence?

They were there.

Literally, Google Meet only survived the chopping block because of coronavirus. They were scheduled to shut it down just when it started, and had been telling everyone to move to other services for years. Corona hit and they reactivated and spent actual development time on the service for the first time in years.

Who knows how long that stay-of-execution will last, but they've already re-implemented all the meeting-size limits for Google GSuite for Education customers that they had to soup up to cope, unless you want to pay a stupendous annual payment, so it won't be far off if they don't make money on it, I imagine.

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

Lee D Silver badge

Host in-house.

I say nothing that precludes hosting in-house. As many schools etc. do for their MIS, even if it's web-based.

The trouble is you read web-based and immediately think that you have to rent a service from a third-party with no control.

Lee D Silver badge

Ah, now you jumped from "We'll use a web service" to "We'll use a proprietary, external, contracted web service with a third party who has no migration facility".

That's a very different matter.

I don't know if you noticed, but desktop apps without Internet dependency are increasingly rare. So you're already tied in like that, the only difference is where the data resides.

And yes, I've done several similar things. And there's nothing stopping you getting data out of Google Apps. It's actually quite easy, made even easier if you're willing to pay money. The other way - I wouldn't know. Microsoft being awkward again?

Lee D Silver badge

Increasingly, I don't care what the underlying OS is.

If it's not do-able from a browser, pretty much it's not worth the effort to support the infrastructure to run it yourself.

If someone said "start up a company (of any size)" to me today, I wouldn't even consider non-web services, whether locally-hosted or not. The problem is once you go down the route of something tied to the OS or machine, you're never going to come back out of that. Start without any OS dependency and you can chop and change as you like.

Schools, especially, have gone from on-site, to managed services, to everything in the web/cloud... even their internal MIS systems. Thousands of users growing up with no more capability than a filtered, monitored, browser will allow them, while staff increasingly move all their stuff to online services anyway. The end-device hardly matters any more (I actually have more Chromebooks on site than Windows machines, and that's been the case for a while now).

It's 2020. Being tied to an OS because of some clunky bit of software that isn't cross-platform and wants to draw on your desktop? Very old hat.

And I work entirely in IT. I'm literally talking myself back from a techy, in-house, specialist, business-critical job to a "keyboard shuffler" where so long as people have a compliant browser, everything else is someone else's problem.

And dual-boot? Very old hat. Who cares what the underlying OS is, it should be able to run the "other OS" in a VM at pretty much the same speed. Our server infrastructure is entirely like that - I have 50% Linux and 50% Windows VMs on a HyperV setup - so why can't the clients? The servers do far more than the clients ever would, with far more a performance requirement.

It's about time we just moved up one layer from "That only works on Windows" or even "that's x86 only".

Tesco self-service separates innocent Reg reader from beer after collapsing into heap of Windows dialog boxes

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Not unusual in retail.

"It's the thing that tells the till how much to charge your customer for the goods that they've scanned, and you allow compromise of it."

Networked or not, if you don't see the problem with that, there's really no explaining it to you.

Russian hacker selling how-to vid on exploiting unsupported Magento installations to skim credit card details for $5,000

Lee D Silver badge

Rule #57 of deploying IT services:

If the cost/time/effort of doing an upgrade is greater than starting all over again, start all over again but this time with a product that supports upgrades better.

An upgrade should be just that - it shouldn't involve redevelopment of things. If going from v1 to v2 means everything you did on v1 is useless, then it's not v2. It's SomeOtherProduct v1.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Lee D Silver badge

If you want proper access control, install proper access control.

If you can't afford proper access control (which is often cheaper than this junk!) then you are buying snake-oil. No different to a fake burglar alarm, those devices that make it look like you have the TV on at home, or a blinking LED and a sticker in your car to try to convince people it's alarmed/tracked.

A padlock is not security. They're all easily bypassed in seconds. It's "casual" access control. Often the thing it's on is less secure than the padlock (e.g. the door, the hasp, the chain, the gate, the fence, etc.).

Tying it into the Internet doesn't help anyone. Why you'd want to pass around access to a padlock via an app I can't really fathom - you need a better process if that's a requirement.

Spend the extra, put proper access control on it, and then you can open the gate / door / whatever with a remote-buzz/text direct to a wired access control system that will go mad if you tamper with it.

€65 retail for this apparently. And a piece of junk. Spend the extra and buy a cheap access control system with proper security and control.

Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

Lee D Silver badge

It is actually disappointing to see such heavy emphasis on AI in all their press releases.

I mean... ARM aren't exactly world-renowned AI-first devices. They're a CPU manufacturer.

I'm really hoping this "AI" junk to die.

Unexpected risks of using Apple ID: 'Sign in with Apple' will be blocked for Epic Games

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Bad decision

I regard this the same as the Amazon Prime Video / Google Chromecast spat.

You guys sort it out. All I know is that I have Prime Video, and Chromecast hardware. I'm not going to buy a Firestick to stream my videos, nor am I going to rebuy them on Google Play Movies.

If you don't want to work together, fine. I'll literally choose one or find an alternative to you both and then even when you "fix" the "problem" (of your own making), then I'll not return to whatever ones I decided to turn off.

You play your petty tit-for-tat (i.e. you couldn't buy a Chromecast via Amazon for a while, I don't know if you still can?). As a customer, I'll adjust my purchasing accordingly - especially as regards your interoperability with other services that I use. And at least one, and maybe both, of you will lose out on my custom in the future.

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Assange

"No, manning used authorized access to a system to exfiltrate information which assange published."

So he misused credentials to access classified materials and then use them in an unauthorised way by sending them to an unauthorised party without classified access.

He's also on record as having encouraged Manning to do that, deliberately and specifically.

So you're STILL saying he didn't conspire to break into a classified military system?

So tell me... if I told you to break into your company's salary database - and even allegedly offered techniques, assistance and further contacts to advise you, and then you send it all to me, and I published it online, you think that's not classed as conspiracy for unauthorised computer access? That the act itself isn't unauthorised access or dissemination of privilieged data? That you should go unpunished if it showed that the CEO lied about what he was paid? That neither of us could ever possibly go to jail?

And that's just "private" information. Classified is a whole other ball game.

Seriously, have five minutes and think about it. If I asked a guy at the company you're working at now to give me a copy of your browser history, salary, personnel record, and then I put it online and embarrassed you, you think we should both go unpunished? That it's not consipiracy on my part? And now scale that up to classified information (and please don't say "but it wasn't high-level" - it was classified. That's the end of it, in the eyes of the law and the military).

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Assange

So you're saying he didn't conspire to break into a classified military system?

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Assange

You mean that he didn't encourage people with access to a classified military system to access files they weren't authorised to, for purposes they weren't authorised for, and then hand him the data so that he could leak it to The Guardian?

I never understand quite what people think is going to happen in those circumstances because I can't fathom that it would be anything other than bad for all involved. Which is... well... Manning went to jail, Assange is wanted, and Snowden has to spend the rest of his life hiding in Russia because everybody else wants him.

The only reasoning I ever hear is "the end justifies the means", but the fact is that the means were still quite clearly criminal and the "victim" was a nation state. That's never going to end well.

It's like robbing a bank vault in order to "expose" that the bank was holding the funds of a tax evader or something. Sure you can say it was for "journalistic" (cough) reasons, but the fact is that you still robbed a bank.

And no court is going to just excuse one because of the other - they'll want to punish both for their individual and respective crimes. (P.S. I don't see any other nation state calling for the US to be brought before an international court for the things that were "revealed", and the evidence has been in the public domain for years now, so good luck with getting that done).

When Huawei leaves, the UK doesn't lead in 5G, says new report commissioned by... er... Huawei

Lee D Silver badge

I run my entire house from 4G.

BT are too stupid to sell me a decent speed ("probably 4Mbps down, 1 up" in the middle of a city center inside the M25...). Nobody else has any facility independent of BT.

I would probably go to 5G if I knew there was a good boost in signal/speed. Otherwise, forget it. As it is, I'm just artificially limited on 4G... unless the limit on 4G is 30Mbps exactly, despite the fact that I live opposite the pole that supplies it and have a 4G antenna on my window facing it.

But 4G is enough to run my entire house and all the gadgets and even stream HDTV out of the aerial to my 4G phone. And I have an unlimited data package with a stupendous "fair use" bit before they start slowing me down (1000Gb/month). And it costs me £18 a month, and a little £50 wifi router that's the size of a bar of soap and fits in my pocket if I should decide to go somewhere (it tends to stay at home now, connected to the antenna, because then I can stream from that to my phone wherever I am).

5G isn't going to sell - especially as the dongles/routers are still relatively rare and expensive - until you can provide a service capable of utilising them. There's no point me buying a 1000mph car if every road has a 30mph speed limit, except to show off.

Strange how they can provide service to the 4G mast that they will upgrade to 5G soon enough to cope with thousands of users doing what I do, but they can't just upgrade the line that's still sitting in my porch, unused, because they charge a £160 activation fee, £25 a month, on a 24-month contract, to give me more than 4 down, 1 up.

Adobe Illustrator's open source rival Inkscape delivers v1.0.1 - with experimental Scribus PDF export

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I need some pointers

I call that "The GIMP factor".

I still just dig out Paint Shop Pro 7 whenever I actually need to just do something.

An interface shouldn't require a god-damn training week in order to do simple things like import a couple of images and layer them over each other, and then save them out.

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

Lee D Silver badge

Good luck.

That's just the same mega-patch chopped into ten, crudely at obvious file boundaries.

There's still no attempt to actually make it friendly.

When one whole patch is "This adds NTFS journal", without barely a word of explanation in the code, it's just never going to get in.

They're trying to code-dump and it's taken them four versions (after the initial junk they just lobbed at people) to get to this? I can't see it ever getting in in that instance.

As I've said before, this is a maintenance burden that you're trying to pass off to 10-20 years worth of deep-level Linux kernel developers because once it's started to be used, it's their responsibility to keep it working, secure and - most importantly - reliable, within the context of the entire kernel.

You're going to have to do a damn sight better than this.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The old problem of the programmer perisope view of the world..

I love the way that you destroy your own argument. So as long as you're the kind of programmer who wants to spend their time finding and fixing obscure compiler bugs, not to mention stripping out all mentions of anything in the standards newer than 22 years old, and consider anyone who doesn't to be a twat and to throw their code away, then C++ is a great language.

But "my professional experience is writing a very specific very narrow X type of software therefor my opinion is universally applicable".

You - and the guy above with a similar concern - miss one point.

At the end of the day, it's a language. Languages have to be understandable. Computer languages, especially, need to be understandable and unambiguous. When people start using niche features in ways that modify the expected outcomes of simple statements drastically, understandability goes out the window, and you end up with a billion "accents", but not just ones where certain words are inferrable from context or where you could compensate via the grammar for not understanding a particular word.

No. Accents that totally and radically modify the meaning of the code and are unfathomable, untranslatable, and yet perfectly valid code.

It's like saying that English and Italian are the same language because we have some Latin roots in both.

The irony being that all mainstream programming languages are written in English (in terms of keywords etc.) but yet C++ appears to be written in gibberish. You literally stand more chance of understanding a random coder plucked from the world's spoken language than you do their C++ code.

And the "fix" from the expert that tells you not to program in small isolated niches is "throw all that junk out and program in a version of the language that's 20-years-old, because that's the last time it worked properly - apart from all those compiler bugs that I have to fix myself".

Now I'm a great fan of C99, I consider it "definitive" in terms of C coding, and coding styles documents for all kinds of projects tend to agree with me (not to mention very specific compiler switches). But when we have to stick with something 20+ years old to make a language serviceable, yet developers are taught and grow up with features like this that are in all mainstream compilers and expect them to be present, and people continue pushing more junk into it, it's time to call it something else and move on.

Quite literally: "C18 addressed defects in C11 without introducing new language features" and C11 only added things that weren't present in the core language (e.g. multithreading primitives), standardising a few de-facto headers (e.g. complex number types), and removing stuff that was dangerous (gets). 19 years of evolution consisted of the kinds of things that didn't affect any existing code whatsoever.

I've yet to see C18/C11 code in the wild in any significant capacity. Hell, there's more talk of Rust in the Linux kernel than in C18/C11.

19 years of C++ just turned it into a further abomination from whence it started (shortly after standardisations started using years).

Call it something else, so you can at least differentiate between "C++" and "C++ with new knobs on every year". Then you can see if people are actually using those features rather than just saying they're coding "C++" and not specifying a version.

Seriously, a language that's only viable when you ignore 90% of the language development of the last 20 years isn't one you want to support, maintain, compile or analyse (I think you'd struggle to even write a parser from scratch that could say definitively what version of C++ was required to compile it, iwhtout basiically implementing a full C++21 compiler).

And, no. I never, ever, ever, ever want to have to "fix" my compiler against bugs nobody else has run into. And I certainly wouldn't put my professional reputation on the line against such a compiler making my code run as intended. Debugging is often a difficult enough task as it is, without having to consider that the compiler might have hit an untested edge case.

Lee D Silver badge

God, I'm glad I don't go near C++, it's increasingly getting to become such a nightmare that I don't even understand some of the new features at all. That "concepts" things just sounds like utter nonsense to me.

And though the "three-way-comparison" thing sound good at first, I just see a nightmare of overloaded operators in its future.

All the C++ code I see is generally nothing more than overly complex C code shoved into some paradigm that makes little sense in the circumstances and often generates far more problems for maintainability than it does actually resolve any readability or "object" resolution issues.

I have literally abandoned contributing to some OS projects when they went from C to C++ for no fathomable reason beyond "Hey, I know C++, so you guys all need to learn it too", and then littered the code with tons of unnecessary furniture while leaving 99% of the actual logic exactly as it always was, but with horrendously complex access to simple variables.

I get it, I really do, I remember reading my first books on C++ many, many years ago and it all clicked and I thought that it was amazing and wonderful and so full of potential. And everything I've seen since was a disaster of unreadable code with unpredictable consequences. "C with classes", I would pay you money for. C++ I wouldn't give you tuppence for. And as it evolves it just seems to get worse and worse, and that's when the compilers fully support all the new stuff (which they never do).

There was a time where you could pick up a programming language, learn it in its entirety in a few weeks at absolute worst (for a competent programmer), and then be able to read and understand every bit of code ever written in that language - if not in intent and programmer choice, than at least in syntax and outcome and general gist.

I find that C++ is just a cryptic cipher.

And that's someone who's modified their own Linux kernel code (not just "applied a patch" but actually written code and fixed bugs that nobody else had on obscure hardware), ported other's applications between OS and architectures, written their own programs, etc.

Gimme C99 and a decent gcc any day to all this nonsense. No wonder people are jumping on Go and Rust and everything else (though they are increasingly starting to follow the "just shove the feature in and worry about how people are supposed to read it later" philosophy too).

Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

Lee D Silver badge

Last dealing I had with this particular shower was when they rang one of my web design clients (who had complained their site was not working) and told them that the user must have deleted all their websites.

Strange then, that the FTP was entirely blank yet I was the ONLY person with any access to it - even my customer didn't have the details available to them and wouldn't have known what to do with them if they did (we're talking the days of FTP and Perl CGI), and couldn't have deleted EVERYTHING (including the cgi-bin folder? I don't think so). They paid for it, but only I had the login.

After much yelling and screaming and fielding of my client's accusations, I got on the phone with 123Reg and they told me I must have deleted the FTP. Yeah, because I go through customer's accounts that I haven't dealt with in months, that were working fine the day before, and just randomly blank out their FTP leaving nothing behind, as a user with permissions that just didn't exist on FTP (i.e. you *can't* delete the cgi-bin folder!). I wouldn't mind but I hadn't used FTP for about a week prior to that at all.

I demanded they provide me with logs, then, to prove what IP the login had come from because it was a serious, customer-affecting, money-taking server and a serious data intrusion if I wasn't the one to do it. They literally told me that they don't keep FTP logs. But then went very quiet.

Miraculously a few minutes later the home folder had a cgi-bin in it again, albeit empty. I just uploaded from my latest backup and carried on and five minutes later it was all working again. I was not the only customer to be affected. I suspect they lost some storage and were keeping it quiet. Though my repeated request for those logs and any kind of access proving that *I* had done it never materialised.

Maybe check before you start accusing random third-parties of destroying websites of their customers. Because if the client had sued, I'd have been suing for defamation too.

Lee D Silver badge

1&1 gets blacklisted about once a month - we used to use them for our Exchange as an upstream mailserver.

It got to the point where I just added it in as a low-priority and we just sent emails from our leased line ourselves, because it happened so often.

Eventually we moved all to GMail, which doesn't have that kind of nonsense.

I mean, I get it, I run my own mailservers for dozens of domains for myself and for work, but if you keep up with the settings and don't spam, you don't get blacklisted. If you don't, then you will.

A big place like 123Reg or 1&1 shouldn't be subject to that, and should have enough backups in reserve that they can just switch to another block of IPs if they are blacklisted, until they can "un-blacklist" themselves (which only really happens if you're unresponsive when you have a lot of spam).

One of the basics of email: No unauthenticated email, and then responsively track and block user accounts who spam. If you get blacklisted it can take 24-48 hours to clear them even in the best instance, and the only way around that is to have plenty of addresses which you DO NOT USE to cycle through. Should not be difficult for someone of that size.

You certainly shouldn't be DOWN in terms of email. Unless you're stupid and did something like put the IP's directly into your SPF record so that you can't easily move to another set of IPs (there's a reason that you can use lookups and includes in SPF!).

Vivaldi offers users a 'break' from browsing. No, don't switch to Chrome... don't sw..

Lee D Silver badge

Paid Opera user from 3.5 up till 12.

I gave up on them when they just removed the email client, and then changed their custom web engine for another-Chrome-a-like.

Went with Vivaldi because that looked like the thing to do.

They ditched the mail-client (even though one preview accidentally included it!) too. So now I have a Chrome-a-like where the only setting I really change are cosmetic (e.g. removing that ridiculous "Start Page" junk) and hotkey (I like Ctrl-N for new tab, not new window).

I regularly question why I bother. It's just Chrome. But they make all the same mistakes as Opera did (and they are the same programmers!) - forcing a custom user-agent and then realising it just breaks lot of websites and reverting it in the next release.

But they've changed the application icon no less than FOUR TIMES since they started Vivaldi, each time listing it in the changelog like it's some marvellous advancement.

To be honest, Vivaldi is just another-Chrome that I use to save me running Chrome and Chrome Private Window, so I can have two different Google Drive etc. sign-ins simultaneously.

Each day I use it, I question more why I do.

Microsoft: We're getting rid of Flash by the end of the year - except you can still use it

Lee D Silver badge

Please give one example of something you want to do.

Because a few years ago (and I'm sure it's matured since then), I recompiled a 10-year-old GUI application for Webassembly and - with nothing more than minor tinkering to take account of the browser security DOM when accessing files or network ports (Websockets) - it just worked.

The problem with Flash is that it does nothing that those techs can't do, except when what you "want to do" is something you shouldn't ever be doing in a browser anyway (e.g. local filesystem access).

Nintendo revives Game & Watch portable proto-console, adds color to 2.36-inch screen

Lee D Silver badge

Re: So... can it be hacked?

Unlikely, they use a 4-bit tiny-RAM, 32.768 Khz chip with a fixed LCD display (i.e. they can only show the exact characters that they show, only in a few positions).

You can emulate them on MAME, but they aren't exactly multi-purpose, mainly because of the display and (very) limited RAM (think handful-of-bytes, not kilobytes).

Lee D Silver badge

MAME emulates these perfectly, and if you get the artwork they look amazing (SVG scaled to your screen!).

I had two as a kid and they are spot-on emulated.

Nintendo et al only "reimagine" something to keep their IP cash flowing, all those years people asked for it they weren't really interested (they did a couple of Gameboy ports that were half-hearted, if I remember correctly, but they've never bothered to offer them properly).

I always think that companies like that should look at what people are so desperate to have that they "steal", and then offer those people that thing at a reasonable price. Everyone's a winner. Money for old rope, maybe even support of an open source project to make it happen and recognition of the preservation efforts of those involved, and users find it easier to buy a GOOD emulation / recreation of the thing they wanted rather than have to resort to software piracy.

Fun fact: They run off a 32.768KHz 4-bit chip internally, with a pittance of RAM (literally bytes).