Posts by TotallyInfo

"I didn't realise how hard it is to destroy HDs until I tried. "Bang a 6-inch nail through it", they said. Well dear reader, none of my nails were large enough, so I cadged one off a neighbour, and set to work with my DIY-sied hammer and the nail. All I managed to do was make a lot of noise, bend the nail and put a tiny dent in the steel case.

Best I could achieve was to prise off the circuit board, and hit the drives as hard as I could in the hope of smashing the platters or heads. Couldn't even get them to rattle."

They generally come apart easily enough. Get the platters out and put nice scratches across them. Or maybe use the magnets in the disk and rub them across the platter surfaces a few times.

Of course, the sensible fast way is to drill through them with a power-drill.

Re: Yet another push for us to all go work at Tesco

IR35 costs more to administer than it nets in tax income.

Ostensibly, IR35 was introduced to protect low-payed contract cleaning staff with no rights.

But nobody really believed that. It was lobbying by the big 4 consultancy companies that caused IR35 - nothing else. Because it drives people out of small (contracting/consulting) businesses into permanent employee status.

All that happened with low-paid workers was that they were forced onto zero-hours contracts instead.

Re: Lets step back a bit

Autosave is its own nightmare UX actually. We are getting so many accidental changes in files because autosave has saved something that the user was only playing with, especially when the user isn't the author.

The only real reason autosave is there is because Microsoft couldn't work out how to do collaborative editing seamlessly. You only get updates after a save - hence having autosave turned on by default otherwise more people would realise just how broken the collaborative editing actual is.

Re: Dolt

"I got in touch with his ISP"

Ah yes, hit that one many times. The answer is simple though. I pause for a bit, maybe make a bit of noise. Then come back and say "OK, tried that, still no joy"

:)

Re: Automatic Sign-in? How else can Google get us:

> at the heart of it all is 'OAuth' and subscribing to Google or Microsoft's services, such that if you're already logged in via google, or 'Microsoft Login' then oauth can silently track you without your knowledge. This article talks about doing this with 'Bing Ads':

This is why I won't sign up to Medium - they want you to use either your Google or Facebook account and I won't do that. No idea why they won't let you use a local account - after all, they claim to want to use a new & different model of monetisation.

Re: Lots of companies run Linux including Google

"t costs you a higher TCO in most use cases to do less and is way more painful to use. Hardly a benefit."

"[citation needed]. Stop spreading FUD. That's Microsoft's job."

Genuine TCO/ROI data is remarkably hard to get hold of because there is far too much emotion and too many vested interests involved.

While, in terms of raw OS licensing, costs are certainly lower. Costs for technical, architectural and support skills are not only at least comparable but may well be higher or indeed **may be unobtainable** - since enterprise quality skills in desktop Linux are pretty rare - of course they are, hardly anyone does that! Decent IT skills are hard enough to come by, specialist ones far more so. That might well leave you tight to a choice of a small number of specialist 3rd-party support organisations who, themselves, would likely struggle to grow in the face of a large corporate switch to Linux desktop.

Then you have to factor in end user skills and knowledge. Few, if any, enterprise users have knowledge and experience of Linux desktop. Even worse when you factor in the need to use non-standard software such as Open/Libre Office instead of MS Office.

Many enterprises (and certainly public sector) have to operate at minimal staffing levels at the best of times, trying to free up front-line staff in order to retrain them to an alternative OS and software would see you laughed out of the board room. And rightly so.

None of this is FUD, all of it is real. Based on experience over several decades. And yes, based on practical experience of trying to move away from Microsoft products in the past. Also based on writing business cases for past and current services.

Let us all do ourselves a favour and leave the emotion out of this argument. The decisions for change vs status quo aren't just based on TCO, nor even on ROI - but rather on all of the business and human factors as well.

Re: ...programmers, aware that every additional character offers another chance to make an error...

Now you are talking. Both of those are in my past!

FORTH: great for squeezing the entire operations of an airport into something no bigger than a raspberry pi! But really head-twisting to get the reverse-polish notation right :)

APL: Spending a week puzzling over a single line of code that recalculated the universe - magic! Of course, useless if you ever wanted to go back and change it 6 months later! Loved it nonetheless, made me feel like I was a mathematician :)

"Windows systems can be quite stable, but can also not be"

This is what is so often forgotten about Windows - its reach. The main issues I have are with external USB docks. The DisplayLink software used to provide multiple external monitors (I have 2 at home and 3 in the office) often leaves the system in a bit of a state when waking up or after multiple dock/undock events. Doesn't help that I switch between one at work and one at home.

"At the time, I almost NEVER used the actual Facebook/Twitter app. See the problem with this? If I don't use the App, I don't see any of the ads or sponsored content. FB does not make money. So this had to go. :("

Ads? What are those? Does FB actually have ads on the web interface - how quaint! I Never see them of course, why take the risk.

Re: Change in mindset is needed IMO

Self-signed cert chains can indeed be a LOT MORE secure than publically signed ones. But it all depends on the process. Done wrong, they are worthless, done well they are very strong. Of course, you are also taking on another issue which is issuing and managing the trust chain and that can get very complex very quickly.

But it does annoy me greatly when people and organisations assume that self-signed certs are "insecure", this is not a foregone conclusion at all.

When I connect to one of my servers to do admin, I'm almost always using self-signed certs and they are very secure since I created the trust chain manually and the root CA cert is kept offline. I therefore have no worries about compromised CA's and MitM attacks would always stand out like a sore thumb. But that only works because I have a very limited number of places where I need to install the CA public keys to prove the chain of trust.

Re: Virtual and real servers?

"Say you aren't into development but just want a web server, mail server and VPN end point?

I can see the flexibility in a virtual server environment, and the potential economies for the provider, but is this now the best route to an emtry level hobby server?"

Nope, the best entry point - in terms of cost - for a web service is still a shared server. Followed by a VPS from a low cost provider. Costs can be insanely low, especially if you can pick up a special offer.

For most individuals, public cloud for running web services is never going to make sense while costs are balanced as they are. Where they begin to make sense are when you need a highly variable workload - e.g. you need to scale up periodically. Or where you need a large "virtual datacentre" for specific workloads.

Re: It doesn't make sense

"Send an email with people in the Bcc" - urm maybe you should have gone to Microsoft themselves then because that certainly doesn't happen on Office 365. Anybody charging you for a service that does that needs a nice legal looking letter sending to the CEO and CFO.

Re: Reply All Fun...

Yes, that one had me in stitches!

Re: Biggest problem with Windows phone continues to be mismanagement shocker?

Hmm, it seems that diatribe's can come from anywhere.

Of course MS have a lot to prove and a new CEO to do it with. Unfortunately he has many decades of Balmer to undo - it may take a while.

But your figures don't show the whole deal. Yes Windows Mobile is a small % of the global market. However, in certain markets it is already >10% which is enough to trigger development of apps by certain vendors. MS are focussed on the enterprise market at present while keeping the handset prices low enough to make them attractive. Low cost + Windows Manageability is not to be sneezed at when you have thousands of handsets to manage on a tight budget.

And Azure is similarly making significant progress in certain areas. Government and health for example where the work MS have done getting certified to industry and government standards is helping drive a massive wave of cloud deployments (ref UK MOD for example). Might be a small % but it still means that MS are building cloud capacity at an exponential rate and doing so while meeting the requirements of enterprises that wouldn't commit to the way that Amazon and Google work.

Re: Rubberhose Cryptanalysis

Come and work for me then ;)

Re: But it *must* be wonderful

That's why Gaffer tape was invented!! All of my travel power has a liberal (am I allowed that word on El Reg?!) helping over the stupidly bright LED's that would quite happily double as street lighting in many countries.

Re: Gov UK +1

Did that and the result was perfectly understandable! Complex, yes as there are quite a few exceptions but that isn't anything to do with the gov.uk design.

Re: Yawn!

I agree with you in general though maybe not quite for the same reasons. Certainly they are about a decade behind the times as usual!

The main problem with Google maps for accurate navigation is that they are generally quite a bit out. At least 3-4m normally. This is due to their projection being based on a single height - not surprising due to most of the early data being satellite data.

On the other hand, OS are clearly deciding to totally ignore the most amazing work done by the OpenStreetMap guys and all their many contributers. This is social based so they have 10's of thousands of mappers worldwide and in many countries, the OpenStreetMap data is better than official maps. Paths - even those through small parks - are clearly marked as is a lot of other data and it is easy to contribute to.