Posts by may_i

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Keyboard layout

Thank $deity that there's a version with a US keyboard layout. I'd forgotten how perverse the UK layout is.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Warren's big mistake

Was giving his employer his own personal cell phone number.

If the company wants you to be available on a cell phone, they provide the number and the telephone. Not keeping work and personal matters separate is what causes this kind of problem.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: Fruit flavors.

Yeah, right. Turn it into something resembling Windows internally. Great idea.

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Hopefully the boss had not chosen the parking space by the building that day.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Thank you

Thanks to Prof. Kurtz for the first programming language I ever learned and the start of a life long career in programming.

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

People who write C code where they don't check the return value of every function which returns one should not be allowed near keyboards.

Re: 1.5x slower....

I think the proliferation of garbage collected languages bears part of the responsibility for creating the lazy, incompetent programmers who can't write C properly in the first place. If languages themselves encourage bad habits then those bad habits become ingrained and as soon as the lazy, incompetent programmer needs to work in a close to the metal language like C, you get crap, unreliable code as the result.

Not to mention the fact that code reviews would catch a lot of the bad programming that makes many C programs insecure, but manglement doesn't insist on code reviews and too many programmers are prima donnas who feel threatened by having their code peer reviewed.

As to concurrency; if your code needs concurrency which can only be provided via locks, semaphores and other techniques, what you really need to do is start again and design your program properly so that concurrency is eliminated.

Sweden's 'Doomsday Prep for Dummies' guide hits mailboxes today

The cold war made Sweden somewhat prepared already

In most apartment blocks in Sweden, there is a bomb shelter in the basement. The shelter has doors which can be shut from the inside. The shelter has a filtered air vent.

I hope I never have to use it.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: what does ~* do?

Doesn't make sense does it? ~* is nothing, ~/* is everything in the current user's home directory.

I can't think of any variations where that might be everything in everyone's home directory.

California's last nuclear plant turns to generative AI for filing and finding the fine print

Is that filling or filing?

You never know after Webster's murder of the English language.

SpaceX plans next Starship flight just days from now

Does anyone have a non-political comment?

I wish the Starship team the best of luck!

I'm looking forward to seeing another catch and more excitement.

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Re: Meanwhile...

The *developer*.

It's a one man band behind the excellent Notepad++. If you use it, have you donated to the author?

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

Cruel

"Or perhaps 2025 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. ®"

We can but hope! The company I work for is rolling out Windows 11 at speed, so the corporate resistance appears to be minimal. Thankfully, I can keep their virus caged in virtual machines on my Linux desktop.

I might have to get some VMs upgraded eventually...

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Get rid of DST now!

Here in the soon to be frozen wastelands of Sweden, I'd really appreciate not having to get up when it is dark for a few months longer.

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

It's been this way for generations. It's just the tint of your glasses causing the problem.

Boffins explore cell signals as potential GPS alternative

> It's not a stretch to imagine a passenger jet has better antennas, meaning they might be able to pick up even stronger signals, given the right hardware.

"even WEAKER signals" perhaps?

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Worrying behaviour just when Mozilla least needs it

Mozilla need to get their act together.

Spurious behaviour towards code from a trusted developer gives me a bad feeling. Like someone decided to let a LLM loose on inspecting code. I'm sure it's wonderful analysis will be inaccurate, arbitrary and unreliable. The next line (humans) is probably outsourced to the cheapest provider and is unlikely to even understand what they are supposed to review. "Computer says no."

This isn't the first time that Mozilla is making me uneasy recently after it got its new CEO. I'm prepared to give them a chance on dipping into the ad money trough, but only under two conditions. First, their solution has to provably work and achieve its aims. Secondly, I can still decide if I want to play or not.

SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, orders staff back to their desks for three days a week

The best balance for who?

I still don't see any evidence to back up claims about better productivity or "collaboration". I've worked fairly much exclusively from my home for the last three decades. Although I'm a sample size of one, I get twice as much done when I'm working from home than I do at any of the company's offices.

This type of "one size fits all" management is what causes normal folk to rename management to manglement.

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg

I think the meddling billionaire should take his opinions and file them on the dark side of the moon.

Google's memory safety plan includes rehab for unsafe languages

Re: My computer, my code, my memory. So I don't need any of this security stuff...

In my experience, people who write crap code with the excuses you present are also the people who have ingrained their bad habits so completely into the way they develop programs that it ends up being the only way they can do things.

Crap programmers make C/C++ unsafe

There's nothing wrong with the languages, only with the developers who are so crap at using them they have no idea how to manage memory allocation and re-use properly.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

LOL

[runs off to github to search for winamp]

Response: Whoa there! You have exceeded a secondary rate limit.

ROFL!

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

I love FreeBSD for its reliability

My TrueNAS server runs FreeBSD and behaves just like a proper UNIX server. It just does what it's supposed to do, year after year after year.

That iXSystems have now spurned FreeBSD for Linux so that people can overload their reliable storage systems with loads of plug in and VM add-ons is probably one of the most monumentally stupid decisions I've seen.

TrueNAS Scale? Just say no.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Well done Cloudflare!

The biggest problem here is the fact that the USA allows patents on software.

It should not be possible to patent intangible things. Only physical inventions, for which a functional prototype exists, should be patentable.

Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract'

Hyperlinks in a contract?

Surely that can't be legal by any stretch of the imagination.

Anything hyperlinked can be changed after the contract is signed and you'd be hard pushed to prove what was at the link at the moment the contract was signed. Sounds like a perfect mechanism to defraud customers to me.

I hope that instead of settling out of court, Realogic pursue this all the way to the bitter end. Oracle deserve to be sanctioned for this kind of chicanery.

AT&T claims VMware by Broadcom offered it a 1,050 percent price rise

The word is "oblige".

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

I'd like to know how you acquired this zillion acre plot?

Intel: Trouble draws private investors like vultures to a wounded giant

Wow

The sharks have smelled blood and are circling.

Could Intel's days be over? I expressed the opinion here, not long after Pat had presented his plans to save Intel, that they were insufficient and too late. Maybe my fortune telling will amount to more than just that.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Re: "This unified app serves as your secure gateway to connect to..."

Corollary: If the company you work for allows RDP logins over the Internet, start looking for a new job.

US indicts two over socially engineered $230M+ crypto heist

Crypto currency's end days

I like the idea behind Bitcoin and other blockchain systems. It's an irrefutable public ledger. That's a really useful thing, whether you use to to record property deeds or Pokemon card trades.

The problem with crypto was that someone floated the idea that crypto transactions were anonymous. Every illegal market was immediately drawn to crypto because of this idea. What surprised me was how uninformed the crooks were to believe that a public ledger would afford any anonymity.

In the end, the crooks have ruined cryptocurrency. It promised to be a way to hold assets with a market price completely independently of any bank owned and regulated by a country. That's a great thing for personal autonomy and freedom. It's a way for people in very undemocratic countries to receive money without risking imprisonment. But now, it's just tainted and is single handedly responsible for enabling the rise of ransomware.

Iran's cyber-goons emailed stolen Trump info to Team Biden – which ignored them

Re: What does this have to do with the Register?

I did.

The subsequent comments to this article only serve to confirm my impression that this "story" is just bullshit about American politics.

It's a shit article with an offensive sub headline and clearly shows the Register's USA bias since it was transformed from the best tech news site in the Internet into a poor shadow of its former self.

What does this have to do with the Register?

This is political bullshit. I fail to see the tech angle.

Begun, the open source AI wars have

The OSI are making themselves look stupid in public

To start with, the people at OSI should be more than aware that no artificial intelligence exists and stop calling LLMs AI.

Open Source means that you can have a copy of everything used to create the final system and this, of course, includes the data. There lies the problem. As a previous commentard pointed out, the training data for an LLM is of such a size that you will not be downloading it.. Feeding and training the model is a job requiring lots and lots of compute and storage capacity. Nobody is going to be doing this at home except for very geeky millionaires.

I don't know what OSI thinks they will achieve trying to define some slippery new definition of "Open Source" for LLMs. It looks to me like they have been owned and are trying to weaken the concept of Open Source from the inside.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

There are accepted standards in publishing for romanising languages with Cyrillic or other non-western characters.

When there are accepted substitute names in English for other countries or their cities, then of course the substitute should be used.

Everyone is just fine with "Gothenburg" instead of "Göteborg", but when there isn't an accepted substitute, place names should be written as is.

The characters öäå are letters of the Swedish alphabet. They are not "accented versions" of o and a. If you don't use them, there's a risk of referring to a completely different place than the one you thought you were talking about. And as a previous commentard rightly pointed out, CTRL-C and CTRL-V are available to short cut having to type the Swedish characters.

This discussion isn't about (or shouldn't be about) any cultural elitism or ad-absurdium arguments, it's about the standards that El Reg and their journalists should be following when referring to unfamiliar place names and non-English languages in general. Writing "Vasteras" instead of "Västerås" is unprofessional.

It's a Swedish word. It should be spelled with the correct characters.

If you can't pronounce Swedish (and nobody expects you to be able to) then just make up your own sounds. Suggesting that the article's author should attempt to spell the name phonetically in English when they are unlikely to know how it should be pronounced is a terrible idea and would merely lead to even more ridiculous spellings which would be meaningless to everyone.

Your suggestion of "Vesteros" is incorrect. While your interpretation of "ä" as sounding like an English "e" in this context is correct, the Swedish character "å" is pronounced like the end of the English word "paw".

Spelling nazi here...

There's a huge difference between "Västerås" (the name of a city in Sweden) and "Vasteras" (which isn't a word).

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

Re: Backups!

The missing word here is "immutable".

A large service provider here in Sweden got owned recently. They didn't have immutable backups, so the first thing the crooks did was to encrypt the backups.

The biggest shame is that many of their customers were government authorities. None of these authorities could be bothered to check the security and recoverability of the cost saving outsourcing they had realised moving everything to "the cloud" and firing everyone who worked in their IT departments.

The only losers here are the taxpayers of course. To levy a fine against a government authority for incompetence is pointless.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

M$ Unveils, blah, blah, All users, including those on Windows 10 and Mac can blah, blah...

but Linux users can go fsck themselves.

"Unified" eh?

"one Teams app" eh?

Nah.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Re: He didn't really say it was Agile's fault

Indeed. Handling database concurrency in a sensible, predictable and reliable way cannot necessarily be accomplished with the "one size fits all" thinking behind most abstractions. Few developers have to make this work by talking directly to the database and few of them have any concept of how isolation and locking strategies affect concurrency.

As long as you don't have thousands of concurrent updates to your database, the abstraction works. As soon as you get into real sized workloads and it all falls apart, unless you understand the database, you won't even have a clue how to handle the volume.

As I'm an old bastard, I can work in everything from assembler to C#. This is what leads me to agree wholeheartedly with Marlinspike's point about the dangers of not understanding programming any further than the rosy view of reality presented by many high level abstractions.

He didn't really say it was Agile's fault

What he actually placed most of the blame on is the layers and layers of black box abstractions so beloved of Microsoft and there, I completely agree with him.

When all the software developer sees of his tools is some horribly abstracted black box package, that's as far as they get in understanding what they are working with. They lose sight of how the stuff hidden by the abstraction works. This is behind the fact that our computers are vastly more powerful than they were 20 years ago but don't deliver any of that improved performance to the end user.

Many developers make fatal, performance guzzling mistakes, by restricting their level of understanding to the highest possible abstraction and have no idea why they suddenly find their latest and greatest program exhibiting the performance level of a drunk snail when it gets real production data thrown at it. Add to this, the fact that Microsoft deprecate C# packages and abstractions at an ever increasing rate, making keeping code up to date almost impossible and you have the recipe for the malaise that Marlinspike was actually referring to.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

True to form

The landscape of Windows apps is about as short lived as supported versions of C# and .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Core and whatever version or branding it is today.

You're confused? I have to work with these constantly shifting sands which they call a development environment.

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

I find a lot of the M$ C# development patterns totally impenetrable, web development in particular.

How anything works is hidden behind so many levels of abstraction and hidden code that you can't see and don't know how it works that doing anything with this stuff amounts to little more than making magic incantations in a language you don't understand and hoping you don't summon a major demon.

ICANN reserves .internal for private use at the DNS level

Re: Would have prefered "*.int"

Or maybe "*.lan", which is what I already use on my local area network.

Nvidia's subscription software empire is taking shape

Re: shareholders

Have one on me.

NFL to begin using face scanning tech across all of its stadiums

Stop making up words!

"credentialing"

No, just no!

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Strange policemen

In any normal world, the customer would have been arrested on the spot as they had just committed a criminal offence by threatening to assault the shop worker.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

And yet

Despite screwing over countless customers and bringing half of the global economy to a grinding halt,

CrowdStrike shares have dropped just 12% at this moment.

Clearly investors don't seem to care much.

Microsoft to intro checkpoint cumulative updates for Win 11

That's a very good question! I've long failed to understand why any windows update, differential or otherwise, takes several orders of magnitude more time to install than a bunch of updates on any Linux system that I run.

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

Re: "encrypts files on both Linux and Windows machines"

The clue is in the fact that some access broker will have needed to establish a domain administrator's hash or password. You can make Linux servers part of a Windows AD domain. Once they are members of the domain, administrator access is going to give the ransomware all the access it needs to encrypt every file.

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

AI?

It's ML!!

If these "biz leaders" could get their heads around the fact that there's no intelligence here, artificial or otherwise, maybe they might start to understand.

If I try to contact a company with an issue and get diverted to a chatbot, or even worse, a voice recognition system, I hang up and do not return.