Posts by sarusa 204 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2022
Group Policy Editor, User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Copilot, Turn off Windows Copilot -> Enabled
Adios and good riddance. Of course I can see the appeal of stripping out way more bloat, but that's the only one that really bothers me that's not easy to turn off.
A branch seems like a very reasonable solution. If you still need Linux on your doomed zombie workstation then just branch a distribution where Itanium is still supported and use that forever. It won't get any more updates, unless you care enough to port them, but neither will your hardware.
And the 'put up or shut up' is fair too - nobody will put that much work into modernizing a dead architecture.
Meanwhile, everyone else benefits from having tens of thousands of lines of cruft removed from the kernel that no longer have to be modernized for future major kernel upgrades.
It's really too bad those twats didn't have their eyes burned out or hair set on fire.
But to make this comment productive, this used to be a real problem on all movie sets! Back around the 1920s-1950s, movie film couldn't expose fast enough to do 24 fps without having giant arc lights making everything insanely bright. And it was even worse for colour film, which needed twice the illumination. For example, the recommended brightness for normal work is 50 foot-candles (FC). If you're doing really detailed work, like inspecting small parts, you might want it as high as 100 FC. Well, black and white movie film needed 250-400 FC, and colour film needed 800-1000! Wizard of Oz (1939) had so much lighting that the temperatures on-set reached over 38C (100F), and many actors in costumes had heatstrokes and needed vast quantities of water. Pity the poor Tin Man or Lion. To get back to the original point, this was one reason actors wore such thick makeup - to prevent 'sun'burn. But there was nothing they could do about their eyes, without having everyone wear sunglasses, so most of the actors and actresses had photokeratitis. Several of the Wizard of Oz cast say it permanently damaged their eyes.
Starting in the mid 50s (Eastmancolor), films started getting fast enough that they could start easing off on the crazy lighting, though it would take decades.
Facebook has a 'virtual you' even if you've never been on the site. It has your name, your age, your date of birth, your national ID(s), your bank accounts, your bank transactions, your credit card transactions, your house history, your car history, your family relationships. Any time you've filled out a form with your info (or your family member does), they've got it. It buys those from third parties in bulk. There is absolutely nothing you can do about that. And then of course it has all the social links - based on shared emails, uploaded photos, etc. Your hidden email helps a little there, but let's be honest, they can probably figure it out anyhow. Facebook is a giant evil vampire squid with 7 billion arms and the best you can do is block their ads and not deliberately contribute to their information by not posting on their sites.
Given the complete sodding omnishambles incompetence of management, all best people quitting or being fired, the toilets not working, no janitors, dealing with f@#$ing Elmo's capricious stupid whims every f@#ing day, it is kind of amazing that the thing is still even creaking along - which is probably due to the 80 hours of unpaid overtime put in every week by the H-1Bs who can't quit.
Okay, I wouldn't call it Engineering Excellence, just enough people beating their bloody heads against the wall till the wall breaks. If nothing else they get an A for effort.
This is HP's near-complete victory (complete would have been getting it tossed out). $18M is nothing. They were penalized much less money than they saved each year by this rampant age discrimination.
So once again big business is reassured it can do whatever it wants and make more money that way.
So many adults are dain bramaged by Facebook (Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Fox News, Daily Mail, etc) - you can easily tell the ones who use them as their primary sources of information if you have to talk to them, as their mouth gapes repeatedly like a goldfish and what comes out is 'HURRR derp hurrr durrrrr barghle warrrgharble'.
However, the law (in the UK, US, and many other places), generally has a fiction that an adult is well educated, sound of mind, and is perfectly informed and can make all the right decisions even though the companies have a million times more specific relevant info and the rich have armies of analysts and accountants. Because the law is for the rich, by the rich, of the rich. So if you want to go after some bad guys you have to go after them for their crimes against 'the chiiiillldruns!' because there are actually laws against that.
Facebook, though, has been very obviously malicious for two decades to anyone who was paying attention. The real question is what took them so long?
I sure hope that bit about 'alpha males' was ironic (the 'buggy, unstable' is correct), because any guys slavishly lapping up everything Elmo does or says, while on their knees, are hardly 'alpha'. I hate the term and the a-holes who use it unironically, but I think this is beyond any interpretation of it.
'buggy, unstable, bootlicking, wannabe alpha males'?
Which is that Huawei is (by Chinese law) an arm of the Chinese government, and has large cells of the CCP embedded in it. It /is/ the CCP.
Of course you can point to similar situations elsewhere, like how AT&T is the US govt's eager bitch - but in the EU's case (and elsewhere), an aggressive and hostile China is an actual threat. If Xi tells Huawei to take down all their comms, today, they will. And even without something so obvious, there's still China's 50+ years of large scale military and industrial espionage - their moon lander, done with the best ESA and NASA tech, demonstrates it's still working very well. You can't trust your communications to Huawei.
Unity took tons of dirty venture capital money and now they have to return value on that, new CEO or not.
Fabermetrics at Ars made a really great comment about this, so let me just quote that:
> This is less a CEO issue and more a "must pursue eternal exponential quarterly revenue growth" mindset issue. Once a company starts making these moves, they will continue, no matter what. Expect microtransactions for lines of code written in unity, frames rendered, load time booster packs, the most scummy monetization ever. The MBAs running these places are programmed from birth to do this. You can rotate the exec board every month for a decade and they'll still push it. Its a dead company, time for everyone to move on.
> f-strings can now handle multi-line expressions, comments, backslashes, and Unicode escape sequences.
They can even handle infinitely nested f-strings. Here is the example they proudly give for that:
.. f"{f"{f"{f"{f"{f"{1+1}"}"}"}"}"}" # (outputs '2').
I am firmly of the conviction that if you ever use multiply nested f-strings * or worse, multi-line sub-expressions, in your f-string literals so as to make your python code unreadable you are a monster. At that point you might as well just be writing perl for maintainability.
* There is one non-criminal use for all this, which is programmatic string composition. i.e., your f-string includes a variable which contain another f-string(s), and things get evaluated till there's none left. As long as people stick to this things will be fine. But you know some people will commit horrors just because it's allowed.
Lawl, 'free speech'. The only 'free speech' that 'free speech absolutists' like Elmo care about is their own, or people he agrees with. Elmo's Twitter (X) is blocking messages on a massive scale, but if you're a white supremacist, (after The Grimes Incident) viscerally hate trans people, Elmo has your back.
| He thought I was joking. I wasn't.
Managers think they're only doing their job if they're in a meeting or doing one-on-ones (which are two people meetings). The more people attending and the longer it goes the better, full stop. Managers are there to ruin your productivity.
You're telling the union electrician that maybe it would be okay if you let other workers plug their own laptops into the power points, attacking his very existence.
Sincere congrats to India here. The last one failed, but they learned a lot from it and tried again, and succeeded. Unlike China, India's space tech isn't all stolen - they had to work hard for this.
Especially nice to see this in the same week that Pooty Poot's defective tech - showcasing the glory of the Russian Empire - tried to steal a march on Chandrayaan-3 but spectacularly crashed and (metaphorically) burned.
Yes, all the people who did it by cramming all that stuff (and forgetting 95% of it after the test) are going to be annoyed. 'Back in MY day, son...'
But having full access to the internet is how most people do their jobs. When I need to know what's new in Python 3.9 I just search for that. Locking it down to only Microsoft Learn is still clutching your pearls, but I guess it's a start.
You only need need to get /user/ access, not admin access. So basically you just need to get the user to run an executable, or have Outlook do it with all its security holes, or all the usual ways you get an executable run on the target machine. Then the executable just has to create junctions, which can be done with plain old user access. Then OneDrive will happily encrypt all the files, and since it's running as administrator it can get to (almost) everything. And corporate anti-intrusion software, which is supposed to spot and stop this kind of specific suspicious behavior, will just go 'Oh it's OneDrive, must be legit'. Then you use the android OneDrive app (with the keys you grabbed from OneDrive's logs) to delete the original files so all that's left are the encrypted ones. OneDrive does /all/ your dirty work for you.
So yes, this is a quite a security hole. It only needs user permissions, bypasses nearly all EDR, and OneDrive comes pre-installed on all Windows machines (and keeps coming back like cancer ever if you remove it).
Yes, this hardware is way more powerful, but it's not natively running the 2600's chips, it's just a software emulator. So it needs the extra power to overkill it. This is basically just putting a RaspPi in a case, cheap and easy - though adding the hardware to read the old carts into memory is a nice touch.
And this seems way more practical than the stupid 'next gen console' nobody wants that they've been promising for how long now?
'The pair of orders follow claims from the world's richest man on Friday that X would also eliminate blocking from the platform, except for direct messages, which many users feared would enable more harassment on the platform.'
To Elmo, more harassment on the platform is a /feature/. That is why he decided to buy it in the first place, to make it for friendly for racists, nazis, and right wing trolls. He even said this, though he didn't explicitly name them as racists, nazis, and right wing trolls for some reason *cough*.
Also, can you just stop calling them X in the headlines? It's still Twitter, f@#$ Elmo. Don't give him the satisfaction of playing along with his every stupid whim. You could call it Twxttxr, or if you need it for the SEO, then say 'Twitter (aka X)'.
I love the idea of being able to use python instead of their terrible BASIC (VBA), but now /every single/ python calculation in the spreadsheet gets sent to TEH CLAUDE and back?
So now even simple spreadsheets are network chatterboxes and don't work at all if you don't have network access, like on a plane or way the eff out in the field, or maybe your ISP is just having yet another outage.
The obvious reasoning for this is so they can have a peek at your data and even more so they can charge you fat subscription fees for it. They're trying to make Office entirely cloud hosted anyhow (so you can't even run it locally) so this would be one more step towards that.
This is absolutely rushed in the sense that it was mandated just because Pooty Poot has had so many humiliations in the Ukraine war lately and thought maybe they could still be relevant in space (the one thing they have going for them because they're riding on 50 year old legacy), so it got pushed through even though the engineers knew it had almost no chance of working. It was entirely political. 30+ years in planning means worse than nothing if your capability has been plummeting every year because it's a rapacious kleptocracy.
Unless you have the engineering down and are confident about the components and design, if you just flail about and launch it for purely political reasons it's RUSHED - even it you've been working on it for a hundred years. And Pooty Poot's kleptocracy is no longer capable of doing anything other than destroying nice things, which is what Russia has been best at since Ivan the Terrible (with a very brief blip of 'Okay, they're pretty good at space').
"I think part of the problem here is that some drivers simply have a higher tolerance for risk than is healthy; self-driving systems are not yet fully autonomous"
It's not really 'higher tolerance for risk' because what risk is there in letting your 'Full Self-Driving' car drive itself? Yes, there is some small print, but it's called 'Full Self-Driving' (and still marketed as such, I just checked their site quickly) and Elmo will tell you on Twitter any day of the week that it's 'autopilot' (and that the car gets 50% more range than it actually does).
The problem here is that Tesla has purposely lied to everyone, about multiple things, to sell more cars. They knew this didn't work and covered it up. And some of their buyers believed the lies because you can trust 'the world's smartest man', right?
I'm in the US, and people who live near me think 20 minutes is about as far as they want to drive each way to work. My last job where I had to go in every day (pre-COVID) was 15 minutes.
Of course I'm not in one of the big dysfunctional cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston... Those completely warp your psyche and sense of reasonableness. The 2 hour each way commuter is someone who gets a job in, say, Los Angeles, but can't afford to have a family home in Los Angeles, so they go live in one of the outer ring areas. And of course we have no decent rail systems so then they have 'no choice' but to drive into the complete hellhole that is Los Angeles traffic every day, and then drive out at night, ditto. I don't think (opinion time!) anyone in their right mind would consider 2 hours each way a reasonable commute daily, especially if it's driving so they can't be reading, gaming, etc while doing it like people on a train can. I've known some people who 'had' to do it for a while, but at least they understood it was a terrible thing, hated it, and eventually escaped it.
If you're talking about two hours total (one each way), then I would still consider it quite excessive, but it's what typical people driving in those big dysfunctional cities are doing every day and they've just accepted their fate. So yeah, not 'unusual' for them. And even in the medium sized cities (Honolulu, San Diego, Charleston, Colorado Springs, El Paso, Knoxville), where you can reasonably get a home near your job (or vice versa) you have some people who just decide to live way the heck out in the middle of nowhere because they can build a house cheaper there, but that's their choice, not necessary. Most of us do not want to drive that much. Driving cross country on holiday is fun, commuting is zero fun.
Management never knows what it's doing. It always goes by its FEELINGs.
And their FEELINGs were telling them that their FEELINGs were hurt by not having enough employees to jabber at senselessly all day in the office and ruin their productivity.
So back to the office you go so executives can feel like they're actually doing something useful again (they're not).
This will be a tough sell because it's hardly the worst thing Elmo's Twitter has done and gotten away with. And then there was IBM, which got away with much larger scale very obvious age discrimination (with recordings and emails between IBM execs admitting they were doing it and needed to do more of it, now).
Sadly, the bad guys with the bottomless legal pockets (IBM, Oracle, Twitter, etc.) usually win, or at worst 'lose' but the penalty is a tiny fraction of the money they made doing it so they're effectively rewarded for their evil deeds. Elmo should be held liable here, but given past history I find it hard to actually believe he will be.
Of course I could name a lot of other corporations and people there (Exxon-Mobil, AT&T), these are just a limited few in a specific industry - otherwise this comment would be two pages long.
> ChromeOS is a desktop Linux with the Linuxiness stripped out.
And that last line is the kicker - it is technically a Linux kernel but for the 'THIS is the year of Linux on the Desktop!' (TitYoLotD) people it needs to be flying its Linux flag high. The whole point was that users would have an epiphany and would dump Windows (and then later MacOS) like the plague and move to the enlightened world of the non-commercial OS. That is absolutely not the case with ChromeOS. They're not running ChromeOS because it's Linux, they're running it because the laptop was cheap, and for the most part they have no idea it's even Linux.
Now I'm not one of those TitYoLotD people, so I'm fine with counting those as Linux desktops as long as you realize that your number now has zero ideological relevance any more. Linux on the Desktop is no longer an aspirational open source dream, it's just the cheapest way for a different giant amoral corporation to sell you its products.
Yeah, technically it's very possible. When the application makes a drawing call, the window manager just rescales it based on what window it is and and what monitor. Like AC said, Windows does it no problem, even for windows that are across multiple monitors with different resolutions and scaling factors.
The big hassle is putting in all the UI and hooks for all this, and handling the edge cases (literally in this case, har) where the window goes across multiple monitors. Basically, you just need some developer to care enough about it to put in the work.
Having suffered through useless Indian outsourced support many times, even very recently, AI has to be better since they're nothing more than just blindly reading scripts without comprehending a single thing. I'm sure well trained AI can be much more helpful than just 'You must to be rebooting, I cannot be helping you further if you can not to be doing the needful'.
This sounds like taking open office (which is already Hell) and making it the 9th circle.
There are few things skeezier than a nightclub during the day. They're dirty, the furniture is NOT comfortable (it's not trying to be), it is absolutely not designed for desk work (ditto), and every single sound is audible from everywhere. You're going to be hearing those douchebags on the phone all day long. They didn't provide any extra furniture or expected tech like external keyboards or monitors. And they didn't even have snacks or drinks, you had to use the company's own skeezy app to order some to be delivered whenever. Yeah, this is upper management's wet dream (they'll have real offices), everyone else's worst nightmare. Of course I can't help but fear this is the glorious future for the terrible corporate Elmo bosses of the world and and this was just ahead of its time - but then instead of nightclubs they'll probably just use public pavements (sidewalks).
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