Posts by Sandtitz

"I'm pissed off with Microsoft for dropping it. They may not have had as much initial success with it as they liked but it is a solid OS and ceding the market entirely to Google and Apple is a huge mistake."

MS ceded the market to Google and Apple not because they wanted, but because they were too late in the market, and the poor management and poor technical decisions bungled it afterwards. Not gaining developer love had some part in their undoing as well.

MS could only have had a better chance with underhanded tactics, like hampering O365/Exchange connectivity from non-Windows devices. Similarly, Google didn't code a Youtube app for WinPhone (perfectly excusable), but Google did have a hissy fit when MS made their own Youtube app and blocked access. Well documented on El Reg site.

Re: I really don't care that much about upgradability....

But I DO care about getting my data back after the damn thing dies!

Of course. Just resort to your hourly backups.

But you're right, the Mac Mini could have easily housed an M2 slot for replaceable SSD. The reason for the soldering is not space saving, but because Apple can price gouge the hell out of initial buyers: the 2TB SSD upgrade costs an eye-watering / ludicrous £1440/$1600 whereas we PC users can just buy one of those state-of-the-art 2TB Samsung 970 Evo NVMe drives for less than £500. (or a £100 cheaper 2TB Intel 660P)

Re: Few comments

Remember the story of the XP-controlled six-figure lathe?

Just last week I hunted high and low for < 32GB IDE hard drives because a customer had one of those 6-figure CNC machines with a DOS controller and the old drive was dying. The 200-500GB drives I had didn't work and didn't have a jumper for 32GB compatibility...

Found a working 6.4GB Quantum Fireball. Phew! Cloning all the 50 megabytes took perhaps 10 seconds.

Re: It's an Apple move

I Am Rich. Best app I ever bought.

Re: D-link products are a bit shit. News at 11.

"Normally the only time you buy D-link is when it's a very lightly re-branded piece of kit that's known to be decent, and that if it features firmware, can be updated directly from the manufacturer."

Actually, I could buy only D-Link products that are dumb and non-configurable: PoE injectors, transceivers, antennas etc. Even L2 switches when latency, buffers etc are of no importance.

Of course, I could just as well procure even cheaper brands for those operations. TP-Link comes to mind...

@Michael Habel

"Sadly you are talking to a bunch of npc remoaners here"

I don't understand how you see the commenters here as non-player-characters. Are you a solipsist?

...and do you actually have a stance on this proposed law?

Re: Telling me!

"1. Awful confusing UX - damn, just trying to do a screenshot of part of the screen requires a 'Snipping' app with a 1980s UX."

You're wrong there, buddy.

Snipping Tool is going to be deprecated soon, though it's still there. There are other ways of taking screenshots in Windows.

PrintScreen button takes a full screen screenshot and places it on clipboard.

Alt+PrtScrn copies the active window to clipboard.

Win+PrtScrn takes full screen screenshot and saves it automatically in the documents folder.

Win+Shift+S gives you a built-in snipping tool without a UI - the result goes to clipboard.

"2. Slows down a lot, despite having 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, i7 8th gen etc etc. (And it's not HP's fault."

Slows down how? HP preloads several, rather useless programs in their computers, I wouldn't give HP a free pass that quickly.

"3. Windows keep vanishing across my monitors. 4. Crashes constantly, requiring a re-start. Etc."

Vanishes? I don't understand your problem.

Windows crashes *very* rarely and you can usually point the crashes on either bad hardware or some bad drivers. Windows crashes ("BSOD") produce crash dumps which can be deciphered (to a degree) with the Blue Screen Viewer. I'd also check HP's support pages for your laptop.

Of course, you're free to try Linux on that laptop and see if works better...

Re: Somehow I think the EU is going to reject this "remedy"

"The things that they are charging $40 for include YouTube and Google Maps. You can provide an equivalent API, but good luck providing equivalent data behind the API."

Youtube works quite well on my Firefox Focus, just like I use Youtube via a web browser on my PC.

Google Maps, do they allow offline maps these days? I'm pretty happy with the competition: HERE WeGo has the stupidest name ever but that and say, Maps.me work pretty well.

I certainly have no problems having a Google-free phone.

Re: @Flatpackhamster @Paul

"1) It is for crappy media or Linux ISOs and I always do a separate sha256 checksum test on those."

How many times have your BT downloads had wrong checksum? (not that I have anything against checksum checking)

BT is fine for many types of software delivery. Each BT piece is hashed, so chance of delivering malformed files is rather minuscule. I've personally used P2P since Napster. The total ingress data is in terabyte range yet I can't remember malformed files getting through the clients.

Also, MS patches are signed, what makes you think Windows - or any OS - doesn't validate the updates first?

2) I can tun my BT client on and off with ease and in an obvious place, and not magically find that I have seeded many GB of OS image over some fee-paying or bandwidth restricted network route.

The setting to turn this off lies obviously within the Windows Update settings. Besides turning on/off, you can configure it to work only within your local network. If you have multiple computers the bandwidth savings can be tremendous.

But all this you knew already.

"It also says a lot about the alternative and how desperate some people were."

"Also gullible."

No, it's just a case of the Marching Morons.

Re: No seperate headphone jack?

Headphones I can live without. Sure you can get nearly free basic headphones, but is that an issue when you're spending $1k on a phone?

I've been purely Bluetooth user for the last 10 years or so. My noise cancelling Bose headphones were rather expensive but the battery life is measured in days and they also work very well with my laptop and other stuff.

My beef with these new phones is the big form factor. They're just unwieldy. And just fucking pricey.

@AMBxx

"I miss Paintshop Pro."

I miss Deluxe Paint.

Also, I don't miss Dr Halo or Zsoft Paintbrush...

Re: Every game bundled ... appears to have been written by one Jonathan Cauldwell...

TBH, the games got much better (technically) later in the 8-bit computers' lives when the coders really started to master every aspect of the hardware.

Some latter day C64 demos have been so stupendously good that had they been there from the get-go, no-one would have bought even Amigas.

Re: HP Network Laser Printers....

"....at one time included an FTP server....you could print stuff by sending files to the printer IP address....i.e. anything at all! I wonder if this was secure. I wonder if this "feature" is still available."

FTP is still available, or at least until very recently.

FTP is not in any way less secure than printing to port 515 or 9100 which most default to.

FTP has the benefit of making printout scripting easy and it works without needing OS support on the client. FW updates via FTP can be done from any OS, so you don't have to rely on some update software that runs only on Windows.

If you want secure (encrypted) printing then IPP over HTTPS is the solution. The printers should also be in a separate network and only the print server should be able to talk to the printers, the clients should have no direct access to the printers.

On a different note, I'm not clear about the vulnerability described in this article. Surely one would need malware in someone's printer driver to cause buffer or stack overflows. If so, are HP printer drivers also suspects here?

No. First of all, you can these days print without any drivers via USB, email, FTP, Cloud Print (Android) or Airprint (IOS). I may have missed many other methods here...

The print processor (inside the printer) handling all the PCL/PS/HPGL/etc. code probably just produces overflows when a specially crafted print job is fed to it. The drivers probably could never produce such print jobs.

@HmmmYes

"Intel will be wiped out by a company that cracks large scale cores, large caches, running at 3Ghzish."

So something like IBM POWER9 (except slower) will wipe Intel off the map? Got it, thanks!

Re: Advertising from mobile 'phones

Sent from my iPad

I have no idea if it is possible for them to tickle a setting to not put this in.

It's easily edited or removed.

My .sig used to be "Sent from my Vertu". I've never even seen one.

Now it's "Sent from my iPhone 9". My phone wifi SSID is "iPhone 9+".

I have to update the settings every year just to keep annoying people, hence the troll icon. :-D

Re: So...????

"No LTSB support though. It won't run on that at all. But seeing as LTSB is specifically not for standard desktops that run MS Office that shouldn't be a problem for anyone that listened!"

Technically you're right. Won't work on LTSB. However...LTSB is to be renamed LTSC and the next version (due this year) will support Office 2019.

Also, LTSB works just fine as a desktop. MS is just trying to usher companies to use the regular Windows 10 editions (and therefore get more users for Store/Edge/Cortana etc.)

Re: Windows roaming profiles

"Yes, just exactly what sort of bloated crap does Windows store in its roaming profile?"

Anything ranging from app/user settings to email, files, temp files etc. I'm pretty sure you can calculate your user profile size via explorer and track what exactly is taking the space.

"On my Windows box, login, anything from 1 - 5 minutes passes while who knows what junk gets downloaded"

Ask your admin why it's taking so long. Perhaps your infrastructure has a bottleneck or the admin is incompetent?

Are your roaming profiles set to save everything or are the documents and such redirected to a server location?

Could even be some stupid misconfiguration of antivirus checking all the stuff that gets loaded and slowing everything down.

Re: I was surprised

"After booting into Win 10: the static IP connection to a hidden AP didn't work."

What are you trying to accomplish with hiding the SSID?

Re: @Pascal @Coward

"Chrome and Firefox support TLS 1.3."

True.

"Remind me, which versions of IE support it?"

None yet, and I didn't even allude to TLS 1.3 support. The article was about dropping support for TLS <1.2.

TLS 1.2 is not going to be deprecated soon. No-one is going to drop TLS 1.2 soon. Not because of IE but because of most mobile devices don't have don't have TLS 1.3 implemented. Plenty of web servers and cryptographic libraries still don't have TLS 1.3 support.

Here's a small tidbit about TLS 1.2:

TLS 1.2 was ratified back in 8/2008. IE had it implemented in 7/2009 when Win7 was released. Firefox/Chrome implemented TLS 1.2 in summer of 2013.

Care to comment on that?

"Nice trolling."

You didn't even have the balls to post with your screen name, silly person.

"these days Chrome blocks flash by default and only allows it with permission. At least Google is trying to keep things secure."

Edge has been doing it like that since v1703.

Re: Nice embedded device there...

"The definition of blackmail: Paying someone not to do something. Can M$ sink any lower?"

The IoT is a freemium product. Similarly almost every free app for mobile phones etc show ads and are restricted in some way unless you pay up.

Stop whining.

Re: Click bait @chivo

"Here I thought there was something new in Sonic Firewalls from Dell... You do know there is a product called a Sonic Firewall?"

When using the Pedantic grammar nazi alert icon you really should double-check your facts.

a) the firewall brand is Sonicwall

b) Dell sold the Sonicwall business couple years ago

HAND.

Re: "I wonder why Bing isn't the dominant search engin" @AC

"I think the point is that the majority of people not only make an active decision to use Google, but it also requires effort to do so."

Majority of people are on Android and IOS.

On PC (Windows) many people use non-IE browser which usually default to Google. Google pays these 3rd party browser makes for these defaults.

Many Windows users also prefer Acrobat Reader, which by default side-installs Google Toolbar for IE and/or Chrome. Google pays Adobe for this behaviour.

Re: Oh Sorreee! Sorree!

FB can always blame the usual suspects - rogue coders did it!

(that's rouge coders for the illiterate)

Re: That sandwich is an abomination...

Meh... I'd still eat it.

Re: Use-After-Free and Heap Overflow in 2018?

Seriously, with all of the tools available to check for and mitigate these defects how do these make it through QA and testing?

Perhaps Adobe should change to FOSS model to avoid such bugs...

Re: I am Shocked I Tell You.......

"I've heard the view is fantastic in Silicone Valley."

Yes, a lovely dell indeed to spend quality time in, although I prefer the natural, untouched landscapes.