Posts by isdnip 77 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2024
You make a good case for the America of the past, B.T. But Krasnov is doing a good job of destroying American advantages quickly and destroying the Atlantic alliance, on behalf of his master Putin. Now Europe needs to put on its big boy pants and step up.
Moldova is in Europe. Georgia (the E and I are pronounced, unlike in the US state) is, geographically, considered part of Asia. The Caucasus and Urals are considered the continental boundaries. But the mess in Georgia is sort of sad, as it could be a good country if it weren't being pressured so much by Russia. Likewise Moldova, and if the candidate who led in the first round of Romania's vote wins, he has territorial claims on Moldova, which again upset the EU applecart, along with his support for Putin and Trump.
Agreed. I have one special need for a link from the phone to the PC, to enable texting using the PC and its real keyboard rather than the phones screen, which I am not able to use well. Google Messages for Web does that well enough for my Android phone. Google also has an app for texting to and from Google Voice numbers, and my VoIP provider supports an app that again mirrors the phone's text messages on a web page. The rest of the phone keeps to itself, albeit with a lot of help from DuckDuckGo, which blocks trackers in the apps.
Texas and California both have a lot of residents of Mexican heritage, but especially in Texas, the governing class is quite Anglo and would prefer to ignore the others.
Rhode Island was founded by an English dissenter, Roger Williams, not Germans. Pennsylvania was mostly German.
I'm still unclear on the problem the article is trying to solve. Most sources say that come October, ordinary (Home and Pro) versions of Windows 10 will stop getting updates. But they'll keep working. Doesn't that sound like an advantage? The updates are a pain, I'm behind a firewall, and the majority of crackerdom is probably concentrating on Windows 11 cracks by now. I ran Windows 7 for quite a while after its nominal EOL and it remained stable, which is probably not something it would remain if it kept getting updates.
I used to have a Mint installation on one of my computers, the non-work one, though it normally ran Windows. One day I made a change to the graphics configuration. I don't remember exactly what, but it broke the X server. Reinstallation didn't help. Nothing ever fixed it. Somewhere, something, on some Mint partition, stored the change I had made, and nothing was going to undo it. Perhaps if I had totally and completely wiped out the user partition, it might have been hidden among my files. But I didn't think that was a reasonable fix. I no longer bother to try to tame Linux on the desktop.
It's not quite *that* bad. Windows 2000 was reasonably stable and functional. Windows XP SR2 and Windows 7 were pretty stable too. Windows 10 Pro is usable. 95, 98, ME, Vista, and 8 were junkyards dressed up as a Jenga tower and about as solid. Windows 11 is basically 10 with lots of additional enshittification. Since there's a huge application ecosystem built on Windows, it's not bad to have one of the stable Windows releases on the desktop, if you know how to stabilize it. OOTB it's pretty bad, though. I've avoided 11 and don't know if it is really possible to stabilize it to the usable Windows 10 Pro level. (The Home versions are a bad joke.)
The primary purpose of the Pentagon is to direct huge amounts of money to favored contractors, divided among congressional districts. And incidentally to deal with war, but they're not as good at that. So this project was also probably designed to funnel money. Hegseth's whinging about being lethal is almost as believable about his denying that they leaked Yemen attack plans on Signal, when the Atlantic article was in his face. Fox News prepared him to lie baldly.
I'm not an actual programmer though I know a bit of the history. ALGOL-68 is not the an update of -60, but a different language. Lots of interesting ideas but not deemed practical. Apparently it was hell to write a compiler. A friend of mine in the 1970s was working on a language, MARY, which was described as an implementable version of ALGOL-68. But it didn't catch on either. Instead we get most stuff in C, which combines the power of assembler with the ease of use of assembler and the security of assembler.
People raised on C and that type of minicomputer systems-programming language do not get the beauty of COBOL, which was purpose built to do boring work and does it pretty well. It just can't be used to do fun stuff. It does however pay the bills, quite literally, including the decimal (not floating point!) arithmetic.
This is not the same as fracking for oil and gas extraction. This fracking, which happens more than a mile below the surface, circulates water through the cracks, between pairs of boreholes. The water gets heated up because the rock at that depth is very hot. It generates steam for a turbine and circulates back down. This is much less likely to cause earthquakes than removing liquid or gas from the ground. It's about as clean as you can get, energy-wise. Estimates are that a given boring can operates for around 30 years before the rock loses too much heat.It's not even likely to be that expensive, and it works on a small scale, so it can be done at or near the data center, at least if the rights to the land underneath (the fracking spreads horizontally once it gets down deep enough) can be obtained.
The Second Amendment was put in at the insistence of southerners, who intended it for slave-catching militias. "Regulated" in that sentence meant trained. Of course the first part has been totally ignored by the extremist Supreme Court and now the country is awash with military weapons in the hands of yobbos.
The Mad Kings just fired NASA's long-time Chief Scientist and much of her staff. Of course she was by expertise a climate scientist, and the Mad Kings do not believe in climate science, except perhaps to the extent that it helps one of them sell electric cars. They do not believe much in science at all, including medical science, witness their brain worm in charge. NASA is pointy-headed academics, not the kind of Creation Science whose acolytes solidly vote for the Mad King and his minions,
Verizon's local telephone companies suck, and they've been letting those networks decay for years (since 1993, when the end of rate of return regulation ended any incentive for capital investment). They put some money into FiOS but even that new investment has mostly ended. The big money goes to the mobile network. But the network they're probably providing FAA is likely to be the former MCI assets, including some former Worldcom assets. That's a lot of long haul fiber.
Exactly right. It's not about having enough, it's a P.D. contest among the top tycoons. And Musk takes the P.D. stuff seriously; after all, he has 12 children that he admits too, and another woman has come along claiming that her baby is his, and while that would be #13, there may be more. That's how natalists like him and some other nutcases in the regime show off their p's dimensions.
True. Linux-on-the-Desktop is not a viable option for a majority of Windows users, for reasons that many El Reg readers don't quite get, because it seems natural to Unix programmers and shouldn't everyone think like that? Windows 10 without support, however, is a great long-term option. And 0patch for those paranoid enough to think they need updates.
And the usual case being addressed here does not provide for that effort. Something like 90% of venture capital backed firms fail within five years; that's the VC model, after all -- bet on a lot and hope a big winner covers the losses on the losers. So a customer buys a device from a firm that fails, and the device looks for that firm's bucket. The company closed down and laid off its entire staff, shut down its real buckets, and turned the lights off. So weeks later someone else comes along and impersonates that failed firm's buckets. The customer devices are happy; they think they found the mothership again. Sure, a device might have a fancier level of authentication, but that VC-backed startup was in a hurry to ship something and didn't want to add t hat complexity.
I never did either. (I'm using Windows 10 Pro.) And there's no Outlook in my Microsoft Office folder, though I do subscribe to Office 365 and did not ask for its Outlook. (I use Thunderbird or Betterbird.) However, I just peeked and indeed there is now an Outlook in my start menu. And it runs. I don't know if this is the same program that Office uses or just an update of the old Outlook Express or Windows Mail, both of which were atrocious. The Windows Mail that used to come with Windows is not there any more, not that I've looked since getting this machine a few years ago. So somewhere along the line MS apparently installed this "Outlook" in one of its updates.
The previous Windows Mail had the interesting POP limitation that it lacked the "keep mail on server" option, so ISTM if you ever actually used it with POP on your mail server, it would download once and delete everything right then and there. Malignant. I don't know if that has been fixed as I'm not going to trust this on my real mail server.
Yep -- the article essentially takes contradictory positions. Steven doesn't trust Microsoft, and doesn't realize you can turn off Recall (which was removed and will be defeatable) or most telemetry. If you're the kind of person who cares enough to even think about Linux, you know that you need to check your Windows settings for things like that. And then he turns around and says you can run your Office apps on the web in Microsoft's cloud, which means that *your* personal or business information, which in many cases may be subject to nondisclosure (much of my work certainly is), gets transferred into Microsoft's grubby hands. As if you should trust them with *that*. Uh, no. Remember, for most consumer cloud applications, you're the product, not the customer.
Linux is a religion as much as an OS. The Register's readers are largely members of that religion so sure, it's fun to bash MS here and feel superior because you use <the one true distro> instead. But for many people, especially who have to exchange Office documents with others for work, Windows is still needed. And if you're worried about safety after MS stops pushing updates Windows 10 is much better than 11 so it's worth sticking with it whenever you can), there's always 0patch.
Like it or not, Office files (especially Word, but to some extent Excel and Powerpoint) are the standard ones used for business and government collaboration. You may like your Libre Office or whatever, or be happy to have your little docs edited on the web via Google's js nightmare, but a lot of us need the real Office files since we do have to pass them around. And Libre Office is not good enough for that. So we're stuck with MS Office and it's just a business expense.
What's especially annoying, though, is that they are trying to justify a higher price by saying it has improvements. What it has is enshittification galore. Office 2010 was the high point and it is down hill ever since. It is buggy and unreliable now, with annoyance piled upon annoyance. Making the scroll bar disappear just because they can? Having a second minimized file open up just because you opened a different one? The f'n ribbon? They've made it worse and worse. And it's pretty clear that the code base is a total mess, decades of badly documented spaghetti code that they are having trouble maintaining. For this they raise the price? Gag me, Witherspoon!
It may be Microsoft's version of tick-tock. Not like Intel's, which makes sense. But Microsoft's seems to be that Windows releases come in alternating good and bad ones. (Okay, Linux fanatics, that's *relative*.) So XP, 7, and 10 were good ones; Vista, 8, and 11 are the bad ones. It may be that they have two teams doing releases, and 11 comes from the "B team" who also did Vista. Maybe 12 will be better, coming from the A team. In the meantime I'm sticking with 10, which basically works.
That's not funny, it's part of the big lie. Trump does more projecting than a movie theater chain. Tariffs won't bring industry back to the USA; it'll just break supply chains for what remains.
But yes a fair number of my phone calls do end up in the Philippines nowadays, not just India. Not that it makes much difference; they still usually just read scripts.
As a desktop user, I am thrilled that the Intel chips of today can still run old programs, stuff written before "Hello World" was bloated into gigabytes of crud by "modern" development practices. I am pissed that Windows 10+ cannot run old code that Windows 7 could run. I do understand how most servers, with a narrow task, can be limited to recently-compiled binaries, but the desktop track benefits from all the backwards compatibility.
And the statement released "by" Gelsinger should actually be called the statement prepared by the corporate communications department in the name of Gelsinger, who was kicked out as the scapegoat for this quarter's bad results. Ever notice how every departure from a C-suite job is accompanied by almost exactly the same statements from the kickee and the board?
You missed the issue. Grub booted Windows, but Mint offered no way to make Windows the default boot, only one that could be selected during the few seconds between Grub boot and Grub's booting of its default OS, which was Mint. Yes, that's a setting somewhere in Grub but Mint offered no tools to fix it. Users have to go and do the manual Linux find and edit text files routine.
Yes, it seems that the only benefit is to Microsoft, who gets to spy on you more and sell personal information you don't want sold. My ham setup uses an ancient Creative USB soundcard that is utterly perfect for digital modes (line level stereo inputs and outputs), and while it works in Windows 10, it's so old Creative doesn't even acknowledge ever having built it. Windows 10 just understood it but any changes in driver support in 11 might break it. But then I also have a random collection of old software dating back to the DOS era, a lot of which broke in the 7->10 migration. So it's a risk. MS only thinks of currently maintained commercial software, and half the fun of Windows is the huge collection of random programs people just write and stick out there.
And a lot of that doesn't work on Linux, which has a very different flavor of "lots of free code". Linux is largely written by and for programmers. "What, you don't write your own c and shell scripts, you luser?" I don't want to. And frankly I think Unix sort of sucks as a starting point. TOPS-20 and VMS, now those were good OSs. OS/2 wasn't bad either for its day. Linux is a nice server system. Profoundly bloated for embeds, though -- compare the <1 MB codebase for the Xiegu G90 (pure SDR, no real OS) with the ~100MB codebase for the Xiegu X6100 (Linux with SDR as an app, and less reliable).
I'm still waiting for someone to show me any user benefits in Windows 11 compared to 10. I'm sticking with 10 and all of the talk about 11 is about how to downgrade to it, not why, other than the threat of no more updates, which frankly doesn't see like a big deal by now (of course being behind a firewalling router).
Honestly, and I am not looking for an answer involving the L-word, is there any advantage to 11 over 10? The new GUI is much worse (I don't want Mac-style icons without text on the bottom of the screen) so I'd need to install the third-party replacement for that to begin with.
To be sure, it works both ways. I had a desktop machine which ran Windows 7, but also had Linux Mint dual-boot. While I'd previously used distros that made it easy to set the default boot in Grub, Mint didn't, so in order to boot Windows I had to catch Grub and switch it over to the non-default Windows on time. Windows does reboots in its update cycle and that got in the way. And Mint is considered one of the user-friendlier distros.
Of course if I were 'leet enough I would have known how to find and tweak Grub in vi, but again that's old school. What really killed it for me is that I once made a mistkaken change to the GUI settings and could not undo them, even after reinstalling -- it found something hidden on a user data partition (not one that was normally reinstalled) that had the changed setting, and kept it. No undoing the mistake. No usable GUI.
My browser of choice is Firefox, with the Chrome-based Edge as a backup for sites and (more often) devices that demand it. Chrome is the biggest player now; Firefox exists because Google pays Mozilla royalties to list their search engine. So in order to improve competition, DoJ wants to take away the funding from the only non-Chrome-based PC browser with any market share? That makes no sense. And I'm normally an antitrust hawk, but it has to be done right.
Huh? Does anyone remember Windows NT on Alpha? That was one of the things that brought DEC down. DEC's last leader, "GQ Bob" Palmer, wanted to promote Alpha chips and thought that Microsoft would support it. There was a release of NT 4.0 for Alpha but it didn't exactly set the world on fire; more of a dumpster fire.
Trump's tax cuts helped "normal" people like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Jared Kushner. It did jack squat for people making less than $200k/year, but helped fuel inflation. Though to be sure the US had less inflation than the UK or most other major economies caused by the pandemic and resulting breakdown in the supply chain, too much of which came from China no thanks to Trump. And Trump is hawking bibles (!) that are printed in China.
McDonnell was purely military and it essentially took over Douglas, which had made some civilian craft. McD's accountant-first culture took over McD-D and then Boeing. But we passengers are not the same risk takers as Top Gun flyboys.
Where did you get 36 watts?
The power limit in the US for unlicensed 6 GHz indoor use without subscribing to an AFC is 1 watt (30 dBm); with AFC it's 36 dBm, which is 4 watts EIRP but the transmitter power is limited to 1 watt. Without tearing one of these down it looks like it is a Wi-Fi radio with a backing plate to limit how much it picks up or sends except into the wall, and while 8 inches of wall may have 40+ dB of attenuation, radios can work quite well with 90+ dB of path loss.
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