Posts by deadlockvictim

Apple Jobs/Woz dynamic

Jobs & Woz are the two poles of Apple.

Jobs wanted appliances and those machines built with guidelines are hard to repair, hard to upgrade not intended for either. Think of the original Macintosh, PowerBooks, and every non-high-end Mac since the Second Coming™.

Woz is a tinkerer and wanted expandability & customisation. Those machines built in his philosophy are the Apple IIs and most of the high-end Macs.

That the iMac was designed to be all but impregnable is not at all surprise. It is actually to be expected and avoided unless you want to play Apple^s very expensive game.

If you want an affordable, well-designed Mac that can easily upgraded, wait for the Mac Pros to go out of support, then they can be gotten on eBay for much less than £100.

Some years ago, I bought a 2008 Mac Pro for £30. I rarely go online with it and I use it for Photoshop and light video-editing work. It supports 64GB RAM, has 8x 2.8GHz Xeon cores and runs very nicely on SATA III SSDs in a RAID-I configuration. It is true that it could be faster and have a faster bus & RAM but for what I am using it for, it is more than fast enough. There is also a lot of software available from that period on the Macintosh Garden. And there is a lot of software there.

I have Ubuntu for Internet work (and to connect to the VM at work) and there is surely a version of Linux that'll run very nicely on that Mac Pro.

I am not a fan of Apple but I do like Macs and I don't mind waiting 10 years. The Macs, the Mac OS and the software that ran on them weren't too bad 10 years' ago.

WALL-E

Since watching WALL-E some 12 years' ago, I have occasionally wondered how difficult it would be to build & send a good many single-function solar-powered robots to the moon to build components for a future space station, although what exactly they could actually do is probably more the pertinent question.

Is this just a matter of the lack of political will and billions required to fund it or are there are real engineering problems that can't be gotten around?

El Reg» ..., has claimed that Apple informed her it has handed over information about her account to the FBI.

What's not mentioned is whether the FBI used a warrant or not. If they did, fair enough. That is how the system is supposed to work.

If not, then she has a good point.

Azure: Pay us monthly

As well as, we have your data.

Title says it all really.

Really, el Reg!

You have a report of a sypmaster named Fleming and not one bad pun or double entrendre?

I'll leave you with Mitchell & Webb on be-tuxedo'd one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIfSQW499Xc

The Onion: GOP Argues Government Shouldn’t Be Deciding Which Bridges Succeed Or Fail

As usual, The Onion puts it best:

https://www.theonion.com/gop-argues-government-shouldn-t-be-deciding-which-bridg-1846591823

Bloody Azure

Microsoft are annoying about Azure. Everything they do is Azure.

Not everyone wants to be or should be tethered to the Cloud and it only really benefits Microsoft.

SQL Server is good software but a lot of us like on-premises hardware & software.

And what about certifications? As far as I can see, all of the SQL Server certifications have been discontinued and only Azure ones have been newly announced.

Normally Microsoft would introduced the next edition of SQL Server by now.

I wonder how long SQL Server has to live before Microsoft tells us that we will all have to move to Azure.

O je

As someone who has a few old Macs lying around, I never saw the attraction of this machine. Give me a IIci over this anyday — a tenth of the price and much more usable, although it is not easy to set up in a coffeeshop. I suppose that it is an investment vehicle more than anything else.

Anyway, the capacitors are beginning to blow now and the plastics are so brittle, that they are barely usable. Vintage tech from the late 1980s-early 1990s is starting to disintegrate now and unless you have a zeal to repair them, they just aren't worth the effort. Although I'm sure that many of the readers here are handy with a soldering iron, know what capacitors are and would simply ask, why wouldn't you want to repair it? Time to put the 3D-scanner and 3D-printer to use.

However, If you do want a good Powerbook from that era and have that sort of money lying around, get yourself a 540c or 550c (with japanese keyboard), or better still a Wallstreet or Pismo. If you just want to play old Mac games or simply open up PageMaker again out of nostalgia, the emulators mini vMac, Basilisk II & Sheepshaver come well recommended.

Pay by weight

I do think that it would be fair to pay by weight (including suitcases and carry on luggage) but it would be a public relations nightmare.

It would also mean that you have to pay at the airport. Everyone would have to be weighed.

Impractical, alas, but fair.

The problem is Congress

These companies followed the law. They did nothing illegal.

If you want companies to pay taxes, the laws need to be re-written.

And that is our job as voters to make sure that politicians are voted in that will pass these laws.

Has this man no shame?

Thanks to him the share prices of many major tech firms could be down and, worse still, executives may face the horrors of a reduced bonus.

Has he no idea what havoc he may be wreaking?

A lightweight OS is to be welcomed.

Look at how the mainstream OSs have mushroomed in size.

It's almost as if the tech giants have considered Moore's Law as a licence to cram as much stuff into the OS as possible: don't worry end-user, the improved hardware that you have invested in is not for your benefit, it's for us.

Progress

I believe that Exchange was a fine server around the turn of the millennium.

For me the first problem with Microsoft (and many other vendors) is the constant need to have a new version to sell.

It must be continually developed and that often means new features, a bugfix when necessary and rarely a re-write. Add to that Microsoft's obsessive need to have everything as backward compatible as possible. And the Microsoft takes all of the hardware gains as reasons why it can expand the feature-set. You, the end-user, obviously don't mind (read: can do nothing about) Microsoft robbing your new system of it's new hardware advantages so that the new MS product runs just the same.

The second problem is Satya Nadella. His obsession with moving everything to the Cloud means that the focus of Microsoft's attention in da Cloud. Is Exchange running slow, requires too much attention or breaking down too much? Exchange Online is (well, appears to be) the solution to your problem and you can fire a few of your sysadmins since they could barely manage Exchange. How good can they have been? Never mind, all that matters is that we allow you to lower your TCO. So, it's a win!

Being thankful for NoScript

I hope that we are all thankful for the presence of NoScript, uBlock Origin et al. and have made a donation to the developer in question.

Mr. Zuckerberg

You see, I AM a good person.

That RDP would be a target nowadays is hardly a surprise. I'd be interested to hear from the sysadmins out there to hear what they have to say.

Is it as bad as ESET make out? And are the problems primarily down to end-users not having their home machines not properly updated, to the protocol itself and was this a disaster waiting to happen?

Still. A nice design. Shame about the sub-editing. ®

On the contrary, well done to those sub-editors who let it pass, obviously with a grin so broad it escaped the confines of their face.

I want that bag.