Posts by robinsonb5

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Ah, Dominos - the company whose attempted viral marketing campaign a few years ago backfired horribly when people actually did get tattoos of their logo to claim free pizza!

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: Why only temporary move for the Windows laptops?

Why not move them back if that band will otherwise be unused? It at least means more devices can use the 5GHz band before congestion becomes a problem.

Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits

"I use Github Copilot Pro Plus as a hobbyist and frequently spend hundreds of pounds a month on additional credits,"

Sounds like this user is the LLM equivalent of the "whales" targetted by lootboxes (i.e. in-game gambling) and aggressively monetised DLC in gaming.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Re: politics and power grabs...

> AGPL is mostly (as I understand) time prevent others making money by selling the software;

Not really, no - neither the GPL nor the AGPL aims to prevent people making money by selling the software. The GPL's main aim is to ensure that anyone who receives a compiled binary is able to access the source code, make changes and distribute their own version if they wish. You might argue that this makes selling the software less viable, but that's a side-effect, not the main thrust.

The AGPL was written to address a problem with the traditional GPL, which is that when GPL software is used to power an online service, the user is never given the actual compiled binary, and thus the license clauses which entitle them to received source code are never triggered.

The AGPL solves that problem by mandating that if you run the software on a server and make it accessible to users over a network, those users have the same rights to the source code as recipients of an actual binary would have with the regular GPL. (That, of course, is why Google hates it with a passion.)

AI server farms heat up the neighborhood for miles around, paper finds

I joked a few days ago that maybe we should ban active cooling in datacentres - so I have some data to back up the idea!

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: "terawatt's worth of computing power"

Given what the datacentre build-out is going to do to demand and pricing for both energy and water, and the hardships that will cause for regular people, we really *really* need power usage to be considered a negative metric, not a postive one.

Here's a radical solution: ban active cooling!

OK I'm joking, I know it'll never happen - but the current approach to datacentres is the exact opposite of "treading lightly upon the earth", and a radical shift is desperately needed.

[ On the subject of water usage: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/ ]

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

Thanks to your question I've just noticed that it's stopped updating itself at some point - so I'm actually on 139. I must do something about that.

But it was the version pre-installed with Linux Mint, which until fairly recently would automatically update itself - usualy at inconvenient moments!

You do get choices, but because of the clout that Redhat-adjacent projects hold in the Linux sphere, it can sometimes take significant effort to defend those choices against the currents of change.

For instance, I use a desktop where middle-clicking the title bar of a window pushes it behind other windows. For some time now that hasn't worked with Firefox's windows because it now uses Gnome / GTK4 / Wayland style client-side decoration.

And a few weeks back someone was attempting to get the Firefox team to remove support for the X11 primary selection buffer (i.e. pasting on middle-click).

Deciding not to accommodate the preferences of a certain type of user is one thing, but it's not hard to see how people might perceive their choices as being under attack when conscious efforts are made to remove those choices.

(It's nothing new, though - back in the Gnome 2 days some 20 years back I remember seeing the extremely antagonistic text accompanying a gconf setting which by any reasonable expectation would disable raise-on-click in the Metacity window manager, but which was disabled unless focus-follows-mouse was turned on. That last bit of idiocy was patched out years ago, but the text remains to this day, in the Marco window manager: https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco/blob/4974ffb4b16bed4bd8e98fd52484cb2a2cfb095e/po/en_GB.po#L473 - so yeah, there are no huge surprises in the trajectory Gnome has taken since then.)

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: Dan Blanchard, deliberately out to cause confusion and upset

To me both the AI angle and the license laundering are side issues here.

The real issue is that a mature, battle-tested codebase of some half a million lines has been flushed away to make room for a complete rewrite over four days - and the result pushed directly to the main branch.

While I'm reasonably sure it was done in good - or at least neutral - faith, it has a distinct whiff of supply-chain attack about it, and it's a hell of a lot of code to review if you want to be certain.

> I've rewritten programs to improve either performance (Python→Vala) or maintainability (C→Python, C→Vala).

And I'm guessing you spent more than four days on it? And communicated your intentions and progress clearly with your userbase?

The irony is that people are starting to speak as though code has no cost / value (leaving aside the environmental costs, or long-term costs of allowing AI megacorps to tollbooth software development) - the value in code now lies in it being mature and battle-tested. That value in chardet was flushed away a few days ago.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: Unfortunately

When I was a teenager (many years ago) Barclays quite happily gave me a credit card (albeit with a modest credit limit) but wouldn't give me a *debit* card because I wasn't a well enough established customer yet! (I think that was weasel-word for "We'll make way more money out of you if you get into the habit of using a credit card"!)

The Linux mid-life crisis that's an opportunity for Tux-led transformation

Re: They can do that because they subverted Free Software

> If people don't want others using the software they give away for free with no strings attached they should attach some strings.

I do attach strings - the ones expressed in legal terms within the GPL.

It could be argued that doing so is pointless since I lack the resources to take legal action against violators - but it does at least express my wishes, and mark out anyone who disregards them as acting in bad faith.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

Radio 4 did dramatisations of them some years ago which were very good.

Much as I'm not a huge fan of Harry Enfield's comedy, he was an excellent choice to play Dirk. It also featured Olivia Colman and Jim Carter among others.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Open Source

For what it's worth I just tried opening it using Inkscape 1.3.2's internal PDF import (rather than Cairo's) on Windows 10 and it looks OK at a first glance - I don't see obvious font problems.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Re: Who watches the global kill switches? -- Rust is well named.

But how, in 2025, do we have configurations of indeterminate and flexible length being stored in a static, fixed-size buffer?

I mean, OK, thanks to Rust it's not going to result in a security problem but neither is it going to fail gracefully.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Early On-Line Shopping

I gather some machines will actually stop working and require a service call if you try it too many times.

Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

1.2 kilowatts? If only that were the true figure!

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: My advice for some time now

...then they removed the branch.

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon

Re: GTK3 and the Gnome team........

Every time GTK1 is mentioned I'm reminded of just how hideous its file dialog was - and just what a dream it was to drive using the keyboard. Type "~" followed by the tab key - now you're in the home directory. Type *.jpg followed by tab and now you only see JPEG images.

I use the Gtk3 file dialog on a daily basis and it's a nightmare to use with the keyboard - the focus always seems to be in the wrong place, even though the text highlighting implied that it isn't.

I'd like to think that's improved in Gtk4 but I wouldn't put money on it...

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Hows that!

I often wondered how TruPrint prints managed to have a simultaneous green and purple cast - now it becomes clear!

Re: Hows that!

If you miss the days of multi-minute (or hour) build times, and C++ and Rust aren't quite enough, try FPGA development. Vivado's got you covered.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: Digital democracy - a different take.

And don't forget that in the meantime we all need to delete old photos and emails*, so that those poor parched datacentres can have enough water to keep them cool.

* [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-drought-group-meets-to-address-nationally-significant-water-shortfall]

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Things have moved on from loyalty cards now, in the supermarkets' quest to persuade you to shop exclusively with them.

I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago about the vouchers being dispensed by Morrisons, and the workings of the Lidl Plus app, with their time-sensitive offers incentivising you to visit them instead of a competitor next time you shop.

I was musing that Lidl Plus is a masterclass in customer manipulation, when my friend's phone pinged with a Duolingo notification telling her she was about to be demoted from her league.

I was wrong - compared with Duolingo, Lidl Plus is amateur hour!

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Re: "I Could Be So Good for You"

I'm pretty sure both archetypes are already well-represented in the web-design world.

Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Re: 32 bit support

Ironically it's not 32-bit Linux apps I want to keep running, so much as 32-bit Windown apps.

For instance, I have a portable audio recorder which stores audio tracks on SD card in a proprietory format, and a small Win32 application (which works perfectly under WINE) exports the recordings in WAV format. I definitely don't want to keep a Windows install just for that.

Also, if I feel the urge to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein again I'm going to stand a much better chance of running the Windows version under WINE than running the actual Linux binary from 20 years ago - but neither will work without 32-bit support.

Re: Not surprised about XLibre

Even before Xinerama came along you could use two monitors: they were just separate displays - typically ":0.0" and ":1.0". But they would be truly separate, running distinct sessions. You could move the mouse from one to the other but you couldn't drag windows from one to the other.

I actually used Mint 13 that way up until about 2020 - it suited me better than either Xinerama or XRandR. (I could guarantee that nothing would ever open on the wrong monitor when one of them was connected to a different device; I could play a movie on one monitor and it wouldn't disappear when I switched virtual desktops on the other.)

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Re: What is the issue with keyboard these days?

I'm starting to turn into a bit of a vintage keyboard nerd. Over the last year or two I've accumulated various boards from the 80s and 90s with interesting keyswitches - and all of them feel way better than these horrible laptop-style keyboards.

(I recently picked up an Apple M0116 keyboard with Salmon Alps switches - it's probably 35 years old, it's a dream to type on, and still works perfectly, and with the help of a ProMicro, now speaks USB.)

Re: What is the issue with keyboard these days?

The best use for keyboard lighting, to my mind, is highlighting which keys' functions have changed when you press a layer-modifier key. Other than that, I think of it as a useless gimmick.

Re: Struggling to understand this

So that it looks and feels like a (black version of) a modern Apple keyboard?

<Looks at the IBM Model M in front of me right now...> Yeah, I'll pass.

Re: Why didn't they plug the mouse into the keyboard

About 20 years ago I had a keyboard with exactly that facility, and it was made by... Logitech.

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

This is becoming a major problem for good old fashioned web forums, too. One I read on a daily basis has had days of downtime over the last few months thanks to the whack-a-mole process of keeping AI scrapers at bay.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: Tears of nostalgia

What I find astonishing is that current PCs are literally thousands of times faster, and yet feel less responsive than machines from the late 80s.

(Then you do something like generate a fractal which takes minutes - if not hours - on a retro machine, and which can be done in realtime on a modern machine, and the difference is thrown in sharp relief.)

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

I love my Model M but the older Model F is generally considered superior in keyfeel and sound - if not in familiarity of layout.

I have quite a collection of vintage keyboards now, and my favourites are an Apple M0116 (Salmon Alps), an Oriential Keyboard OK100 (ATW Alps Clone switches - feel great but ping like a kalimba!) and a new-old-stock keyboard with linear Space Invader switches.

Re: "For most, not so bad"... bloody excellent actually.

I hate keyboards that light up spontaneously, but I do have one keyboard which has a couple of different layers accessed with modifier keys - I have it set to illuminate the keys whose functions have changed, just when the modifier is pressed. I quite like that.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

I found I prefer full-size boards - and the best ones are still those from the 80s and 90s.

I use a Model M as a daily driver, but have collected some other vintage boards from EBay over the last couple of years.

My favourite feeling full-size board so far (apart from the model M, of course) is an IZE OK-100 (not the OK-100M, which is a rubber-dome-and-membrane board) - the ATW Alps clone switches feel fantastic, the only downside being that they ping like a kalimba!

My most recent acquisition is an Apple M0116 board, not full-size and needs some restoration - but again the key feel is amazing compared with regular keyboards.

My biggest surprise, though, was an old cheap e-machines (remember them?) keyboard - just a rubber-dome-and-membrane keyboard but the best feeling non-mechanical board I've ever used.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

My cat has a habit of strolling casually up to the monitor when I'm working and nudging the power button with her nose.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

partially implement every networking protocol known to man, badly

Not to mention partially implementing each file format / printer protocol badly.

In a past life as a printer, I used a digital print engine which, by way of an EFI Fiery RIP, would print directly from PDFs. As long as they hadn't come from Apple Pages.

But Apple PDFs weren't rejected with an error message, or failure to print. Oh no - it would just merrily spit out pages with much of the text missing.

It's tempting to say "if I had a pound..." but the reality is I lost several for each time that happened!

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

It might amuse you to google "PiStorm".

Re: Still runs well on 35 year old hardware

Get the battery out at the earliest opportunity - it's probably too late to save it from some leakage, but if the damage isn't too severe that machine will be valuable.

It is a passion project, because - as I understand it - while Hyperion are in fact charging money for it, they're not paying the developers - the devs are volunteers.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Meanwhile I carried on using PS/2 keyboards and mice because why I would waste one of the very few USB ports on an early USB-equipped PC on keyboard and mouse when there were perfectly good dedicated sockets right beside them?

Re: Bloody Rust

Storage is emphatically *not* essentially free. I really don't know where this pernicious lie comes from, but it absolutely is not the case.

The cost per megabyte may very well be at an all time low - it may not cost you that much to buy a large capacity drive (though they're definitely not free) - but that doesn't take into account having somewhere to put it!

Most laptops have physical space for 1 hard drive. Once that drive is full you have to remove it (if you even can), spend money on a larger replacement (which had better be an SSD, since modern bloated OSes are hideously painful on spinning rust - at which point you're into three figures) and spend time transferring everything across.

Even my desktop PCs each have an SSD boot drive, a spinning-rust storage drive and neither the physical space nor the spare power connectors and drive bays for more.

External drives are a partial solution, but a relatively fragile one with compromises speedwise, and also not "essentially free" for the kinds of capacities that can cope with software like Vivado, or the trend towards everything being containerised. NAS boxes are a more robust solution, but again *definitely* not free.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: they were "hovering" it a few mm above the surface.

> No if that happened on a graphics tablet that outdated be interesting…

Interestingly Wacom graphics tablets (at least the older Graphire and Bamboo Fun ones that I've used) run in a "relative" touchpad-like HID mode if their driver software isn't installed - in which case, needing to pick up the pen and reposition it is a distinct possibility.

(Typing this on a machine equipped with an oldskool ball mouse, by the way - as well as an IBM Model M keyboard!)

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Stop

Without any particularly special (i.e. expensive) tools an everyday tinkerer can climb at least a few rungs down that ladder-of-turtles. You can go beyond code - look at, understand and modify the code generation, even design your own ISA and emulate it - or better yet implement it as a soft-cpu on an FPGA - all without spending more money than a couple of decent restaurant meals.

That's where I stopped, though. If you want to go one level deeper still then there's always Tiny Tapeout, but to go beyond that you're going to need very deep pockets.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

Where I live, the tip (sorry, "recycling centre") has a policy of actively rescuing items which still have some usefulness, and there's a "re-use shop" on-site.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

One of those mechanical entry keypads that's never had the combination changed, and now has four particulary shiny buttons?

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

It's almost as though the systems controlling all those things should be air-gapped and not connected to the public internet.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Impressive as this is, it's horrifying that it's possible!

Re: How much ink?

Yup, I've used a number of Fiery-equipped colour photocopiers and "light-production digital presses" (which is what you call a colour photocopier when you want to charge three times as much for it) over the years. The first had a freestanding Fiery RIP like you describe - it was a quirky little box, tapered in odd ways, like a cartoon characature of a small tower case.

The others have all been installed internally (which is a kind way of saying "bolted crudely to the side of the machine").

I have to admit the RIP itself produces excellent results (modulo one version that would choke on the dodgy PDFs produced by Apple Pages) but the Command Workstation is a poster child for software bloat.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Re: Linux Lockups Probably Not Due to Swap Management Failure

Even if you're right that memory leaks are the underlying cause here, the parent's point still stands: once a swapstorm starts it's unreasonably difficult to get a Linux machine (or a Windows one for that matter) back under control. It can be quicker to power-cycle the machine than wait for the chain of events between a mouse-click on the close gadget and the application finally terminating.

Even Ctrl-Alt-F1, login and kill the offending process can take several minutes.

(And disabling swap won't necessary prevent swapstorms, either - applications or libraries can still be paged out and re-loaded on demand, which for interactivity can be worse than mutable data being paged out. What's missing is some way of "pinning" UI / desktop environment code as "required for interactivity". I don't know how much better Haiku is in that regard - it may be better simply through having a much smaller footprint and way less complexity.)

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: The Power of Fear!

> I even once dented an IBM Model M, but I had to take a sabbatical after that!

I bet that hand still hurts when it rains.