Posts by Necronomnomnomicon

Re: What happened to cheap and cheerful?

What melt said. Aside from Frontpage, there'll be plenty of weird and wonderful legacy stuff. You tell the customer they need to make sure their shit works past 2003, they never reply. you move it to a modern server, it breaks, they complain that you broke their site, you move it back. Running a dodgy server open to every virus under the sun doesn't eat into your time the same way dealing with idiots who think their decade-old software should run without support forever.

Although why fasthosts haven't VMed their server and so could just restore it from a snapshot I do not know.

Re: You've got it all wrong....

Why is everyone forgetting that they started the 3D mapping years ago?

www.androidcentral.com/google-maps-adds-more-3d-buildings-more-cities

Re: In its way, a good sign

My 2012 Nexus 7 has slowed down in it's old age, but it's been reinstalled a few times (I like mucking around with Cyanogen etc.). From what I gather, the original flash chips were a bit poo. Still, that's what you get for a very discount tablet, I guess.

There's probably more to it than that

I suspect they're more interested in the "we attack the infidel at dawn on Thursday" kind of message.

Re: Why won't they sort it out?

They are! Well, they think they are. There's been two major redesigns in that last 18 months. It's just for better or worse, neither of those make things look much more like Windows 7 and so it's still a huge departure from historic Windows.

Re: Driverless car

Not entirely.

My vision of the future (TM) is that local commutes will be done by these autonomous vehicles, which will be electric motors, and should they need to step outside of their modest charge circle then they'd pick a route to the nearest train station, hop aboard a specially-designed carriage where they can charge, and then pop out at the nearest station to the destination.

Or they just kick the meatbags out at the station and make them travel with the hoi polloi.

Re: Front facing camera

So the lack of a camera made you give them £20 more than you would have otherwise - I'd say that £2 saving in parts worked out quite well for Motorola!

Re: First Direct 'Secure Keys'

Why is your security code vulnerable? You need to enter a password to get it, which can be different to your actual First Direct account password?

So for a thief to get the data out of my phone, they'd need to

A) bypass the lock screen (OK, fairly trivial)

B) Guess the Digital Secure Key password (which as a sensible person, I have made a random string and stored in KeePass, which I keep in sync via OwnCloud - other file syncing services are available)

C) Take that secure key and enter it on the First Direct website, having guessed or otherwise found both my username and the answer to my security question.

You can still log in with your security question and a few password characters- but as that's not two-factor, you can't transfer money, only view stuff.

Seems more secure to me.

It's not true everywhere - luckily for me

I'm the lone IT bod in a more-medium-than-small enterprise, and I am lucky enough to be able to build things that actually solve problems.

We've been hectoring one of our main IT suppliers to add a not-mission-critical-but-extremely-useful function into one of our systems for ages. Unfortunately they're a useless set of ballbags and they've never managed to get started on it. Bored of this delay, a few weeks ago I went on GitHub, found someone had already done exactly what was needed. The code was a bit mucky, so I contributed a little, fired it up in a VM and we're rolling it out next week.

I know that nearly finished code off GitHub isn't the same as building something from the ground up, but you do come across the thought of "how many times has this wheel been reinvented elsewhere?" and then you look on GitHub and it turns out they've got not just the wheel but another wheel and an axle between them. Hurrah for open source software and the internet for making it so easily accessible.

Re: Exchange 2013

Oh yes, I wasn't suggesting that Linux would cure OP's command line allergy. Just that Microsoft don't want to either - they want to cloud him up.

I personally don't mind command line mucking about and so I'm finding that a good linux groupware setup could be just the ticket, because the bosses here are a bit cloud-phobic (and rightly so).

Re: And ...

As well as getting round governments, they also get around the Visa/Mastercard/Paypal monopoly.

Say you want to donate money to Wikileaks (don't ask me why, but for our purpose you do). Because their actions have been deemed unsavoury, you can't donate with your Visa or Mastercard because Visa and Mastercard are refusing to let you do that. Ditto for Paypal*. Now you can either send your pound notes in the post and hope the postman doesn't nick them, or you can use bitcoin. There is the value.

Of course, that's not likely to be an everyday scenario for anyone. But where other payment options have failed, bitcoin will be there and it can't really be blocked. Therein lies the value. You might be supporting freedom of speech advocates in Iran, or it might be NAMBLA, but it's your call and The Man can't stop you.

*Disclaimer - I'm not sure if this is still true, it certainly was at one point

Re: *just* 14 more months to upgrade?

Tell me, where can I buy this Intel iPad?

Re: No, Liam, I won't be using a fondleslab as my primary computer.

"I have tablets with keyboards and mice. They are univ3rsally crap. They are nowhere near as productive as a real PC. Next."

They're crap NOW. How much of that is because tablet software is still in it's infancy?

A tablet is a PC with different software, a touchscreen and without a keyboard and mouse. If you add a keyboard and mouse back in then the only thing that's different is the software and a bonus input. Software improves over time if there's demand, so assuming tablets don't suddenly become hugely unpopular then the software will only get better.

The only thing I think tablets are missing is the ability to do multiple displays like a PC. Most users don't use it, but it's marvellous.

Re: Why?

You're forgetting all the official music videos that are on there. I'd imagine being able to play them without adverts (assuming you don't know about adblock) would be valuable to VJs in clubs, if nobody else.

Re: Surprise!

But is isn't about Microsoft? They're not even mentioned.

Re: Interesting article; I look forward to the rest.

I moved to a standing desk at home a few months ago.

I say a standing desk, I mean an £8 IKEA table on top of my existing cheap IKEA desk.

I have to say, it does work fairly well. It's quite a liberating feeling, walking up to your desk and instantly being ready to do stuff with no sitting down. I find it does focus my brain a bit - I tend to get through things, rather than forgetting what I was doing and cycling through reddit and facebook until I remember.

As I'm at home I use it barefoot and if I stand too long then my feet start to ache. But, on the bright side, it forces me off the computer and into bed where in the past I'd be slouched in my chair playing games because it was less effort than actually getting out of the chair.

I really want to try it out at work, but our existing desk layouts won't work with such a simple fix as my home desk. Definitely something I'd consider in future, though.

Don't forget the meatbag factor

I can encrypt all my outgoing emails if I want to. But as not one of my friends, even those in IT, are set up to receive encrypted emails, I may as well just mash the keyboard at random for all the information they'll be able to get out of it.

If we want PGP and the like to actually take off, it needs big, widely-used mail providers like Outlook.com and GMail to talk you through setting up PGP when you set up an account with them, and then ask "Do you want to send this securely? (This is recommended)" every time you send an email. Only then will it get the mass adoption it needs to work.

The fact that email clients like Outlook don't have any way of encrypting without plugins is another hurdle we need to jump for encrypted comms.

Given how embedded email is in everything I can't help but think the DarkMail lot are right and we need a new standard that is encrypted by default to slowly usurp email as the default method of messaging.

Re: Good advice - but not enormous amounts of fun

In transit? Yes, with a self-signed SSL cert and enforced SSL connections. In storage? Some, but not all, via TrueCrypt containers and similar. OwnCloud does have it's own encryption stuff built in but I've not really played with it yet.

The hosting provider is the weak point, but even with them I get the bonus of not having my emails and data spidered by Google, and as SSL is still apparently strong where they haven't got your key my in-transit data should be good.

Re: Completely pointless

You're right, of course. The only people buying storage drives are filesharers. Facebook/Google/CloudServiceXYZ only store their data on punch cards, or floppy disks if they're feeling showy.

Re: Edge Snapping == Fail

You can turn it off if you want. But I find it unbelievably helpful to be able to put two documents side by side with a Win-Left, Alt-Tab, Win-Right. All my screen is instantly used for exactly what I want to use it for and no fiddling around finding the hover spots to resize the windows.

When I tried Mint last a few weeks ago it was ctrl+super+left/right, and the additional key was a minor annoyance, but nowhere near as annoying as finding the finickier-than-in-Windows edge spots for resizing.

Re: Makes me wonder though

I mean, say I emailed n people internally. As I understand it, Exchange (or similar) will put one copy of that email into each of the n mailboxes. Each of those emails is identical, so the server is using n -1 times more disk space than it needs to.

The AC above points out that I'm not having an original thought as it was done years ago, but I'd have thought that at least the giant-scale mail providers like Google and Microsoft would have thought about something similar because at their scale the level of duplication must be huge.

Re: Glad I walked away.

Hang on, typing "reddit" and getting Reddit is spamming your desktop? You better make sure you don't accidentally search for "pictures of naked ladies". You'll go blind.

Re: Regardless of the merits of the Apple patent

That's covered in the link at the end - in the US you get 12 months grace period from when you first start shouting about your new invention to get your patent in. In the EU there's no such grace period and you need to get it patented before showing the world.

Both systems make sense in my mind - the US system protects the innovator a bit more, but the EU system means copiers don't have to wait to see if a patent is filed before starting to make copies.