Posts by pogul

With the M series macs, I haven't been this happy with a computer since my Archimedes, which was an Acorn Risc Machine (or was it advanced, I forget, but either way I think you see the key letters there)

Re: Mac Mini ports

> If you are flipping the power to the computer, you still have to turn it on after you restore the power. I don't think the Mac Mini auto-starts when power is connected.

It's very much a configurable option, not sure where you got your information from

I have a Mac mini late 2012 configured to come on when power cycled at the wall - I run Proxmox VE with various VMs and containers very happily.

Please name and shame the particular vehicle so I don't have to buy one!

Re: chicken come home to roost

Calling someone an idiot is pretty unnecessary and smacks of bullying. You may not agree with the architecture of systemd and I'm not sure I do either, but how about keeping the discussion civil?

As for learning from previous mistakes, I would say that bundling whole applications together in their own directory like Mac OS does would be a better idea, rather than spreading files all over the FS in strange and archaic ways.

> If you used the thrid party engine oil, and the car stopped working, who would you sue?

If the car manufacturer issued a software update (and cars do of course have many many microcontrollers in them these days) and that stopped the third party oil from being allowed (perhaps the car refuses to start) and that had worked fine before, then I would be absolutely livid and sue the car manufacturer.

Re: Get over your Filesystem operating systems

"Everything is a file" *might possibly* be an abstraction too far, though I'm a Unix fan in general.

The filesystem though... are you serious? It's possibly the simplest abstraction I can imagine for organising data. You have leaf nodes (files) and ways of grouping files (directories). A simple graph.

I had a boss who thought he was very forward thinking and clever by suggesting the department wiki should be all about search - none of this old fashioned file/folder business. So what happens? Chaos - stuff went in, but it was basically a black hole.

When amazon came up with the genius of S3 (everything goes in a bucket), wasn't one of the first things that happened was being forced to create a fake file/folder system over the top?

If anything, we need a richer abstraction - versioning and tagging on the standard system calls perhaps.

Oh dear,

Every time Java is mentioned on the register, we see the same old, same old comments by people showing that their knowledge of what Java is, and is used for, is stuck in the mid-90s.

Java != Flash

Java != Applets

We're talking about a high-performance VM that is almost exclusively used on the server and smart-cards. It is not used on the browser (the amount of usage is gets there is statistical noise) and HTML5 is, in all practical terms, nothing to do with a replacement for Java.

How can we end this myth!

Re: But it should be

> The big advantage of the increased cadence means you don't have to wait for a big-bang release if you *need* a new feature

True, but it's not like you get to pick just that feature - you get all or nothing, so if people are rushing out half-baked "features" (because, errr, marketing) then you'll get them too, bugs and all.

Re: I miss CVS

I'm pretty sure CVS never told me it loved me. Maybe I just wasn't it's type?!

Re: A contract is a contract

Except Apple isn't "reselling" - a term which implies that the service is just rebadged as-is. I don't think they're just pointing you at AWS endpoints directly are they? What about all the accounts infrastructure and software for example? Half the internet runs on AWS, so when your online shopping data hits the servers is that too deemed as "just reselling AWS"?

Would you sue a cafe for not stating in big letters that it didn't farm all of it's own ingredients? "What? you didn't extract this salt from the sea yourself!?!"

Re: Bloody Cloudflare!

When I checked the status page is claimed it all their systems were functioning perfectly. I must have been clicking it wrong.

So BT provide the scammers with the ability to call you from a spoofed phone number, then sell you kit to block it!? I feel like the phone system has barely changed in decades and it's about time they addressed the root cause of things like this. Does the phone just send the number it would like to appear at the caller display?

Re: Revenue Generating Units?

Just be careful... I ported my phone over to a VoIP provider and asked Virgin to cancel my phone line - based on the bill breakdown they provided each month, this should have saved me a substantial amount of money each month.

My bill went up.

Virgin explained this is because it was in a bundle price - strange that the bill breakdown didn't show it that way at all - and that it was cheaper if I got phone too. I ended up pursuading them to give me internet only at a reasonably sensible price (the new customer price) but only after a fight.

All this came after an enormous argument to get them to lay the cable under our drive way in the conduit I'd got builders to install.

Re: TomTom

My experiences in the UK with Tom Tom have been overwhelmingly positive. I prefer it to google maps - which often seems to tell me to leave a roundabout just AFTER I've done it, for example. The ETA predictions from Tom Tom always seem to be accurate and when I've been in a convoy with other cars that "know better" they always seem to arrive about 20 minutes later.

Re: RE: Topperfalkon

> The only time I can think of where it would be useful is when I'm snowed in again and cannot get to the shops.

More useful than the smartphone or PC that you've almost certainly been snowed in with?

Re: "3ve" (pronounced "Eve".)"

> "3ve" (pronounced "Eve".)"

Not familiar with l33t speak then? (however stupid it is)

Re: RE: Topperfalkon

> whilst the Pixel is a better phone, being 2 years newer, it felt significantly more buggy and required more reboots than the Nexus did

Can't help wondering what your definition of "better" is?!

Re: I detest that

> will happily execute as a script based on permissions

Yes, exactly - it has to be GRANTED PERMISSION to execute, rather than being able to execute based on whatever name someone has decided to give it. You know, the clue is in the word "permissions" - metadata hat describes security related information. A description, title, name or whatever is the wrong place to put this.

Re: "the Windows 7 hold-outs should finally feel able to make the upgrade"

> The death of Windows 7 is when I go fully virtual.

What, like in The Lawnmower Man?

It's not per day - it's total historical messages

Re: USB stick?

> I’m a bit mistified, unless someone sells a safe that hides in a mains socket?

I remember seeing exactly such a thing in the "Innovations" catalogue that used to come with the news paper or the Radio Times or whatever it was. The earth pin was the key hole if I remember correctly. I guess you wouldn't want to encourage people to stick keys into the other two pin holes?

Re: Don't buy a new Intel based system for a while?

> Our company has temporarily suspended all but essential new system purchases until fixed silicon is available or we switch to AMD or we figure out what the performance hit is.

Except, AMD and ARM designs are affected too -- which everyone seems to be ignoring. The initial reports that broke in the media said AMD and others were unaffected: this is not the case, as has been widely publicised.

I can't help wondering (as I haven't dug deeply into the speculative code execution thing) - is this flaw inherent in this architecture or did certain companies reverse engineer another company's implementation?

Re: Apple

Oh yawn! I'm getting really bored of stuff getting judged based on the technical spec sheet. Firstly, as to the price. I get my Macbook Pro from work, as many do — the price in insignificant next to my pay and conditions :-) Builders for example will often have a much more expensive set of tools than I do. Secondly, the specs. The specs don't tell you what a joy to use the trackpad is, compared to any Wintel laptop I've used. The specs don't tell you how well Timemachine works for backups and restore. The specs don't tell you... well perhaps you get the idea. It's not like it's a 486 with 2MB of RAM, that would be rip off. No, it's a modern machine with a decent OS that works very nicely. I'm also a big fan of Linux and I believe Windows has its positives too, but judging everything by the individual parts (and quantity of them) is not a recipe for getting a good machine (oh look, this Dell has a fingerprint reader!!! and its got some extra Megahertz!)

Re: "the SMB server bug is the result of a buffer overflow in Microsoft's code. "

>Just curious, what's the alternative?

>...and don't say linux because we all know that's not going to happen.

Linux.

Are you one of those people who says shit in meetings like "well it would be nice to do stuff that way, but that's not the way we do it".

So what you are saying is, tell me the answer but I'm going to disregard the answer if it is the one I don't want you to give, yet think would actually solve the problem.

Re: No privacy at any price

What on earth are you talking about? You don't have to use gmail - there's plenty of other webmail out there, both paid for and "free". I personally have started paying for email again, because I want to be the *customer*. I use Fastmail and love the webmail interface, the IMAP implementation is great etc. etc. I've also deleted my Facebook account this week and started using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search. Yes, I know my tinfoil hat seems odd to some, but I have to say, I'm feeling much happier for it.

Re: This is a much smaller update than going from Windows 7 to Windows 10

What I see with people using tablets and phones with flat interfaces is people swiping and poking at everything to discover what does what. On a small(ish) touch screen this makes sense as there isn't much screen real-estate to have 3D borders etc. On a laptop/desktop however, having 3D controls allows you to see exactly what is or what is not a clickable button without having to flaming well click on it.