Posts by Gene Cash

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

Firefox. It's awash with Mozilla developer stupidity

I think that the real Firefox developers have left the house. The only "developers" left are the resume-padding "look ma! imma firefox developer!!" losers. They remove features because it's beyond their ability to add new ones. How else do you explain things like removing working useful features like the tabs preferences for absolutely no reason?

They've removed:

* Ability to turn off javascript

* Ability to not use tabs

* Activity indicator

* User profile manager

* Tab groups

* The ability to disable cookies

* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs)

* Sound (now PulseAudio only, no ALSA)

* RSS reader

* "Save tabs and quit"

* Ability to export history

* FTP

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

Re: Too Late

> hosting on Alibaba and Microsoft clouds

Sounds like time for a block list...

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

That's bullshit

I can see dropping 32-bit support. That's a significant effort to maintain.

However, Windows 7 is not that different, and the reason several folks I know use Windows 7 is a) they want to get off the MSFT treadmill which IS THE SAME REASON THEY'RE USING LibreOffice and b) they need Windows and not Linux

Personally I need a Windows 7 lappie because Yamaha Diagnostics Tools 3 is VERY picky about what it runs on. It will not install on Windows 10/11, for instance, and as far as I know, there's no v4 that does.

Is Windows 7 THAT different in the APIs??? I guess it must be, if YDT3 requires it that hard...

ISS leaks push Axiom Mission 4 launch to no earlier than June 19

Mental picture

I have a mental image of the airlock hissing like a bad toilet flapper, and the cosmonaut jiggling the airlock handle...

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Re: Sleuthing [1]

Interesting... as an American, I thought "soccer" was pulled out of Daniel Webster's[1] ass or something. I didn't know this.

[1] Wrote the influential dictionary that spelled things "color" and "jail" and "check" etc so is responsible for the difference in spelling

Re: Hmm

> If the law required everyone's wages to be advertised net of all deductions, almost no-one would resent paying income tax, either.

The US IRS has developed a scheme of giving "refunds" at tax time. You pay income taxes out of your paycheck all year, but you usually end up paying more than you actually owe. This means you get a check for the overage from the IRS

Thus the idiots crow about the $1K-$2K "refund" they got, instead of bitching about the $10K-$15K taxes they actually paid.

And yes, this works on people here.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

Re: Breaking: Intelligence works like Intelligence.

They are not intelligent. They are statistical bullshit generators. They do not perform reasoning, deduction, or inference, which is intelligence. They output text based on statistics.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

Re: Its always

What? Surely, all the commentards here read UF! It's a perfect reflection of working in IT! It's a must-read!

Oh wait, it's actually been dead since 2010 and deleted from the internet in 2022.

God damn it. RIP Illiad. I hope he's doing ok, wherever he is.

Larry Ellison is still not the world's richest person

Well, how the hell do you suppose he got so rich?

Re: How can Larry get to No 1

You forgot

* Get a black eye from a fistfight with a cabinet member

AST just got a small boost in its D2C battle against Elon Musk's Starlink

Ligado

Don't forget Ligado (LightSquared) are the guys that got that spectrum in the first place on the condition that they restrict power to not interfere with military GPS.

What did they do?

Immediately demand higher power. The US military demanded they put up SkyTerra 1 and demonstrate that they didn't conflict with military GPS. Guess what? They did interfere. Then they blamed it on Inmarsat.

Re: Cellular connectivity is a niche

I can't imagine ever needing continuous access to the internet and phone calls in a device in my pocket.

Starlink has been a lifesaver for those of us where there's only one or two broadband providers, neither of whom deign to provide decent service, either technically with shitty bandwidth and frequent outages, or with customer service hold times measured in hours and reps that don't have the power to fix anything. And this is actually a large chunk of the US, explaining why Starlink is making money hand-over-fist.

Apple fixes zero-click exploit underpinning Paragon spyware attacks

Re: I remember

Well, speaking as an Android user, it's a hell of a lot better than Android.

You can't update to a new OS version in Android. There's a 15% chance that features like the camera or GPS will break, a 30% chance an app will stop functioning, and a 100% chance that Google will not give a fuck.

When I "upgraded" my Pixel 7 Pro to Android 14, the GPS did indeed stop working. Since I'm not paying $1K+ for a phone, I've bought a Pixel 6 Pro running Android 12 and I sure as hell am not letting it update.

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Ugh. My oldest bike has a huge fuel tank and 300+ mile range.

My newest bike is nearly empty after the 45 mile round trip to work, yet it's advertised as their "touring" model.

Worse, the damned fuel gauge has ONE segment for half-to-full, so you're tootling along and suddenly you go from full to half empty with no in between. How the everloving hell did that pass design review on a modern machine?

(So it's not any better than the bikes I grew up with no fuel gauge, just the reserve petcock, but with added complexity)

> switch on the side that turned it off

Those (such as the mute on my headset[1]) usually meet a drop of superglue to prevent them from ever being turned off again.

[1] the one that's almost invisible, impossible to see the current setting, really difficult to switch, yet it changes position every time you set it on the table. I'm impressed.

Re: Phone down

Well, Windows does keep a record of boot/shutdown/logon/logout times. I'm a Linux guy but I have looked at those on my work machine. And of course there's the Linux syslogs...

Now granted, I don't expect Asshole Author to know this, but she might know people who do, or be able to do the simple Google search I did.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Are you kidding? You don't think there's hundreds of thousands of punters wanting to see celebrity X or personality Y "nude" or even just that hot PA 6 cubes down? And willing to pay for such an app?

You poor sweet summer child

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Ve haff implemented ze mitigation for ze issue

Can we get any more nonspecific? Can you vague that up a little for me?

Falcon 9 leaks keep Axiom private astronaut mission on the ground

Nope, more leaks, this time on ISS

Now the mission has been indefinitely delayed because the Russian segment is leaking even more air. Not only is Zvezda still leaking, but now the PrK docking module vestibule is leaking, and they're kind of worried the latches are failing, meaning the damn thing could actually pop off the station in the worst scenario.

Maybe they need to send up a Ukrainian drone to inspect it.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

Man, I'm surprised and saddened to watch Linux follow Windows down the path of enshittification. First systemd, now wayland.

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

> Unfortunately transcribing JWST or LHC data onto velum is rather time consuming and costly.

Why? We have printers that can write on vellum. The costly part is the vellum itself.

Re: 'Write only'?

Er, when did you last see a legal document in Latin?

Nvidia hits the gas on autonomous vehicle software

Re: Complex environments

Eh, could be worse... could be my dad going "let's see if it fits" [SCCCRAAAPPPE] "eh, it had dents to start with...."

And that would be a dead peacock.

OTOH, people did stop parking on the street in our neighborhood.

Amazon has changed its nuclear deal in Pennsylvania to bypass grumpy regulators

Not as it seems...

This is actually about local power companies not investing in the grid, and being embarrassed when Amazon does.

It's basically "our grid is so obsolete and shit, we can't handle it when Amazon buys a lot of power from us"

And I don't have any love for Amazon, but I do hate the local regulators even worse because of BS like this.

Google faces billion-quid bruising over Play Store fees in the UK

Google took steps to undermine those as alternative methods of distributing apps and in-app content

Yes, trying to enable alternate sources such as fdroid is a huge pain with lots of bogus warnings, and every time you install something new, it puts up yet more scare dialogs.

I've had a ton of useful apps die because they want to support older phones, and they don't have the time/money to navigate the minefield of updating to the latest Android code, the PYKL3 weather radar app for one. Enabling the latest Android OS support removes a lot of functionality and adds a lot of "nanny code" to do basic things like open/save files.

Also it looks like AOSP is going away for Pixel phones, and Google is now developing Android "in private" - they've removed the device trees, driver binaries, and a lot of the kernel commits.

Of course, they say it isn't, but actions speak louder than words.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-3566882/

I hate Microsoft, but I do wish they still made phones to provide some modicum of competition.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

"We called him 'drillbit' because he was a small boring tool."

Re: Memory Retrieval

> Begin your search at a local computer club and/or Uni.

Sigh. Do local computer clubs even still exist? I haven't seen one in decades, which is sad, because that's how I got my career started in the '80s.

And my Uni has NO clue what paper tape even is, unless you managed to find some of the old services staff (not the teaching staff) who are definitely not "customer facing"

Which is sad, because I still have my stacks of cards with the Uni seal on them.

Re: A parallel problem

Yup. There's valuable stuff on YouTube amongst the terabytes of pure crap, and I download and save it. (actually I download EVERYTHING and play it with a REAL video player, so I avoid the broken YT player and ads, but I delete most of it afterwards)

For example, Rooster Teeth was incredible, especially in its early decades, and now its gone titsup after years of mismanagement. Literally thousands of videos, possibly hundreds of thousands will probably eventually go away in the fight over rights to the content.

Websnark was another hidden great, and both incarnations have died after the owner suffered health issues. Fortunately, it's on archive.org. Most of the hundreds of webcomics it discussed that have now themselves vanished without even a trace on archive.org

Google has managed to squander and piss away its excellent netnews archive.

I don't see any of these people ever willing or able to archive any of it.

Re: Fascinating stuff

"Confluence - where information goes to die"

My work cheatsheets are all plain text files. I keep getting crap to put them in Confluence, and I double-click them and they open in seconds - "Can Confluence do that?"

I can also easily search them - "Can Confluence do that?"

If I need fancy formatting (and I don't) then I can hand-write the HTML.

I don't use any kind of "markup" because I know at least 16 mutually incompatible flavors and they all suck. For example, Jira can mark a block of text as SQL code, but you can't highlight an individual line to bring attention to the broken part of the code in the Jira ticket. WTAF.

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

Re: "provide emotional support"

> If you're lucky enough to live long then you'll need help yourself one day

Not really... my mother's specific terror was cancer, despite smoking 2-3 packs of cigarettes a day. She died of COPD.

Mine is dementia. To me, losing myself slowly like that is a horror beyond horrors. I've read Rob Wilkin's bio of Terry Pratchett and his last days. I've also listened to Big Clive's video about trying to care for his mother, and tracking her when she wandered off.

To this end, I have a 9mm pistol in the safe specifically to cure my dementia, if required. Hopefully, I won't ever need it. Everyone in my family has lived to their 90s without dementia, so that's a positive.

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

Re: Give them your keys?

> who would have believed that an online bookstore would become the main datacenter powerhouse?

Remember that's because that online bookseller had tons of spare capacity laying around just to accommodate the end-of-year buying spree, so they decided to rent it out the rest of the year.

Weird how things work out.

Apple AI boffins puncture AGI hype as reasoning models flail on complex planning

AI 'thinking' may just be an illusion

I think I might speak for the majority of commentards when I say:

WOT!?? NO, REALLY?? What have we been yelling for years?

And the "no shit, Sherlock" icon has never been more appropriate.

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

Do they NOT test these things?

So the first one has a major software issue with the altimeter seeing the edge of a crater, when the mission is to land IN A CRATER.

C'mon, people. WTAF.

This one has an issue with "slow updates" from the altimeter.

This is all stuff that would be obvious if they ran the hardware through a well-simulated mission scenario.

I don't see how a laser altimeter has "slow updates" - in my experience, it returns a reading every time it fires the laser, or it doesn't. There's no "slow" about it.

So is it the case that the Lunar soil does not reflect laser light well, and they weren't getting readings?

Do they not correlate the readings with the estimated trajectory? Why the hell don't they have a microwave radar backup? You can get those in something the size of a cigarette pack. Hell, my motorcycle has one, so it's not a size/power issue.

Are they having budget problems? Management problems? Cultural problems? Spaceflight Now had an interview with the American astronaut guy, and I got the strong feeling he's had to deal with a lot of bullshit and he's tired of it.

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

They are learning

They'll copy the AI code and stick it in their Pi... and guess what?

They'll learn that AI writes crap that doesn't work. And now they need to fix it.

It's perfect preparation for working with Indian tech centers on the job in the future.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

"from Yantai, China"

So I'd guess they're the oh-so-wonderful BYD cars that YouTube is pushing so hard these days.

Trump tariff turmoil hurting global smartphone market, but hitting US hardest

I just upgraded

From a Pixel 7 Pro running Android 14 to a Pixel 6 Pro running Android 12.

My GPS died, and my touchscreen started going, and I sure as hell wasn't paying $1,000+ for a newer phone.

The 6 is the exact same size and speed as the 7, and the camera isn't any worse.

Put a headphone jack in it and yes, I will buy a $1,000 phone. Otherwise, fuck off.

Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

Google?

Excellent news! How can I tell MS in in the EU?

Now can we stop Google from pushing Chrome if you use a Google site with another browser?

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

"The impact of this is that Windows 11 now occupies the majority of Windows desktops in the US, according to Canalys"

So where's the numbers for this? I don't see 43.72% as a majority of anything.

Pulled out of their ass (or AI) as usual? Canalys is in the same reputation/trust bin as Gartner.

Schneider Electric says US grid will be less stable by 2030 as datacenter demand rises

Re: Why not

"But then they'll go elsewhere!"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not real sure how putting a computer in a shipping container makes it draw less energy?

Unless it means it's using a local generator, so it's no longer part of the overall energy budget? And this helps, how?

Microsoft patches the patch that put Windows 11 in a coma

Re: Coming next week...

Well, I mean... if you read Raymond Chen's blog, it apparently already is, and has been so for years.

Workday promises to grow workforce slowly and differently after shedding 1,750 jobs

Probably means you must do the needful.

Atlassian tweaks licenses to reward those who buy more, but gets its sums wrong

"Confluence: where information goes to die"

Management HATES it when I say that.

IBM Watson zombie brand shuffles forward with new AI lab in NYC

Conviction Partners?

Are these the guys that go to jail with you after your embezzlement sentence?

NASA boss-to-be gets spaced as proposed budget cuts detailed

As much as I hate him...

Bill Nelson was the only decent NASA Admin since the '60s.

When Congress does the "NASA needs to do X & Y, but we are taking away the money" all the other Admins went "please sir, may we have some more?" whereas Nelson was a long-time hard-boiled congressman and was like "what is this shit? give us money or we cancel programs and lay people off, and yes, I'm talking about canceling programs in YOUR district"

Remember when he laid off all the JPL staff and Congress had a rummage around the back of the couch and suddenly found money to pay them?

Which is, of course, why he was gone so quickly.

I think Isaacman made the mistake of doing this before he was confirmed. (which the article did suggest)

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Does anyone remember how Also Sprach Zarathustra was used in every. single. damn. TV commercial after 2001 came out? Even salad dressing commercials. (Since it wasn't copyrighted)

It was SO annoying after about the 20th iteration of the 50th commercial to use it.

"We get it, guys... you're trying to ride the coattails of 2001... we GET IT"

(Edit: Yeah 57 years later and I'm still grumpy. I hate commercials and ads. Thank god for the internet giving us the tools to fight back)

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: Not to cast doubt but...

> takes a reasonable amount of proper vibration to get a drive to persistently error

Bullshit. I had a Western Digital 500GB drive in one of those USB-3 external enclosures, next to my keyboard, plugged in and running. (back when these were a newfangled idea and EXPENSIVE)

I had my glasses sitting on the keyboard. They slid off and landed on the enclosure, and the drive immediately started clicking and giving filesystem errors in the log.

I stood there in shock for quite a while, unable to believe what I had just seen.

I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and all it did was click. I was never able to get the data off, even taking the drive out of the enclosure and attaching it as SATA.

I'm still pissed about it, years later.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Were there any of those that weren't complete shite?

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Uh huh. I used CRTs for decades and there was never any sort of aftermarket anti-reflective coating for them.

The best I ever saw was these half-assed polarized film things in a frame you could stick on, that pretty much cut the output of the monitor in half. The cure was worse than the disease, so it was perfect for American doctors.

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Who's Matt Black?