Posts by regadpellagru

Apple's new MacBook Air: Is the jump to M2 silicon worth another $200?

"The new M2 Model (with 8GB RAM and 256GB of SSD storage) hits the shelves today for $1,199 (an inexplicable £1,249 for UK punters)."

It's basically an entry level (very low end) laptop at 1.2 K, right ? With a wonderful 13 inches screen, aka stamp sized ?

And it can't run any video games without an eye watering upgrade on top (RAM, likely 500 more, etc ...).

It's telling they even bother, in 2022, to offer 8GB of RAM at all, given the prices of RAM !

My macBook pro from 2012 is 8GB as well ! WTF ?

No, it's not worth it at all, even for fans. The Apple bubble will burst soon, and soon, they won't sell a single unit if they keep raising prices to this level of insanity.

People won't simply be able to cope with it.

Linux Mint 20.3 appears – now with more Mozilla flavor: Why this distro switched Firefox defaults back to Google

"I've been installing Linux - various distros - for at least 15 years, and I've never had to recompile anything. I've never done it on a Thinkpad, but I have installed on a variety of off-the-peg and home-built kit and I'm surprised that such a popular platform would require recompilation."

Re-compiling WAS mandatory back in the mid-90s (Slackware and its few friends). But it was more 27 years from now than 20 or 15.

Shortly after the old years, did the kernel (2.2 I think) move to massively use modules and every distro started to modprobe HW. Also, HW started to unify a bit, was a bit of a mess those years (3DFX was still a thing).

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Re: Paperless?

"Did you try booking a 3rd jab on Doctolib last night? Webpage came up with a, "You are in a queue of people waiting to access this site. Waiting time is 28 mins.""

Well, it's France and everyone wait for Micron to tell it stuff before rushing to doctolib, like every previous times.

Myself ? I did it last tuesday :) No waiting !

NortonLifeLock sniffs around Avast, announces 'advanced discussions' for acquisition

P. Norton portrait

"In 1990 the company acquired Peter Norton Computing, taking on the latter's Norton-branded DOS utilities - and, of note, its security and antivirus products, which would eventually become the company's primary focus."

It also acquired that famous P. Norton portrait that was on *every* single Norton security boxes, back then.

No-one knew who that dude was. Weird marketing ....

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: Minitel

"It was basically a VT100 with a modem that you connected to a phone line.

Then you dialed the (in)famous 3615 ( or other numbers in case of private servers, like the one we used to have at work ) and entered a code. ( there was also 3616 and 3617 services. 3615 were free the other two were pay services and in some cases quite expensive )"

Yes, and 3615 costed shitloads of money, and was routinely used by crooks. It basically was a scam.

"That's one of the reasons why Internet didn't really appear in France before ADSL showed up."

In fact, the 3615 service was pushing so much money to France Telecom they never wanted to deploy any internet service. At all.

Until the minister realized how late France was into internet and forced them to move on.

Dnsmasq, used in only a million or more internet-facing devices globally, patches not-so-secret seven spoofing, hijacking flaws

Re: "...researchers aren't sure how or when affected vendors will respond"

"On the other hand, Pi-Hole is already updated."

Same with openwrt. Just updated :)

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

Re: Not just Linux

"For me, I find all PC gaming increasingly unsatisfying. I find my serious gaming has moved to consoles and my casual gaming to phones and tablets."

Sadly, Linux gaming is dead, mostly due to Apple going to their own CPU platform. No-one will ever make any MacOS/Linux port, now. The work was shared between platforms, like kill 2 birds with one stone.

Now, this is over.

We can even see it now in the steam store ...

If I pedal faster and feed it spinach, my robot barman might pull more pints

Re: "Innovations" catalogue

"It's my own fault that I receive them as I unpeeled the ugly STOP PUB ("no junk mail") sticker from my letterbox when I moved in. In France you get heaps of printed junk stuffed in there almost every day, which Mme D was not too pleased about at first. However, some of it provides amusement and quite a lot of it comes with generous money-off vouchers to spend at all the highly competitive supermarkets nearby. Over the summer, I must have saved a good 200-300€ on my shopping just using freebies in my junk mail."

Well, Dabsy, that was indeed in the principle a risky move, but fear not, "STOP PUB" only gets you only 50% of junk mail anyway. I take it you, like me, get it in bulk, by 2kg packs, yeah ?

As for the absurd french regulations (even the german have now shockingly discovered humour by calling France "Absurdistan", by now). The priceless part was: ski stations are open. But no ski lifts, bars nor restaurants. Enjoy going up by feet if you're not into cross country skiing or "ski de randonnée", which is 99.8% of skiers. And if you are into cross country, no worries, no-one will prepare tracks, anyway, given the huge costs and no income, so enjoy bogging down in fresh snow ! And eat a wet sandwich by -10C in the wind.

But welcome to Absurdistan, Dabsy !

After figuring out that hope is not a strategy, SAP has a new one: We're gonna shift on-prem customers to the cloud!

"move" customers to cloud

""This time, we'll be moving large parts of our ERP customer base from on-premise to the cloud, ..."

Wow, so a SW vendor is just gonna be "moving" their customers to cloud, like you move a pawn on a checkboard ??!!!

Like said customer/pawn is just a simple piece of wood/plastic too dumb to even object ?

SAP people need to put their arrogance back in the pandora box, really.

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

the demon earth

Many years ago, in India, we had mail appliances fail every 2 months.

Yep, mobo burned, replacement was painful, because of customs, and it happened so many times, vs. many other sites where the same *never* happened once.

At one point, I asked the dudes where they plugged the double PSUs setup. Of course, to 2 different power sources like is best practices.

After asking them to plug both PSUs to the same power source, the issue never re-occurred.

Yep, the 2 earth from the 2 power source were very different and it repeatedly killed the mobos *every* single time.

In the same way, I had great flashes when working at one building, years ago, between my hand and the coffee machine, even after touching the other coffee machine 2 meters away. Yep, 2 connected buildings, and the earth was not connected properly, and have 100 V give or take voltage difference.

Earth is a bitch.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Re: Style guide

And races don't exist in Homo Sapiens. Black skin, white skin, same race.

Sapiens is a different race than Neanderthal, but sadly, the latter is extinguished.

Sadly, even hacks forget this :(

Microsoft takes tweaking tongs to Windows 10's Start Menu once again

Win 8 icons

"free of the Windows 8-style solid backgrounds for icons, which are replaced with a partially transparent and uniform backdrop."

At last ! The systems from the 80s had better looking icons than all the W8 shite !

Hey, Boeing. Don't celebrate your first post-grounding 737 Max test flight too hard. You just lost another big contract

contradictory

"Investigations discovered that the Max contained software features that its pilots hadn’t been sufficiently briefed about, including the infamous MCAS automatic trim system."

"In desperation to compete with Airbus’ market-share-gobbling A320 Neo, a direct competitor of the 737, Boeing assured airlines that pilots who flew previous 737 models could swap to the new Max with minimal training. This turned out to be a lethal cost-saving shortcut that left pilots unaware of how to shut off MCAS when it kicked in and forced their airplanes to point at the ground instead of the sky."

Just saying, the 2 above statements are contradictory. The first hints at some good will mistake, while the second hints at some full good old corporate and lethal FAIL. Of course we all know which one is the right one.

Actually, the MCAS presence was deliberately hidden from pilot's knowledge in the goal of no training and recert.

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

Re: Interesting stuff

Lucky you if you're in south !

Geez, sometimes I wish I had taken this doctoral thesis in stellar dynamics, several decades ago ...

Back then, black holes were purely hypothetical. And today, not only do we know there's one more or less in the center of every galaxy, but also one we can observe (not directly of course) without any tooling ! Which is right next door !

As for observation, you could probably pin point the movement of the 2 stars day after day during one month, by taking a pic with a telescope each day and see the rotation around "it".

But you would need to correct it by the rotation of the 2 stars set caused by their elevation vs. the solar plane and the trajectory of earth. Looks like Euler trigonometry is in order :)

Mayday! Mayday! The next Windows 10 update is finally on approach to a PC near you

Re: What tweaks to Notepad?

Ah ah, made me laugh, this one.

I thought for a split second they didn't focus on the uber important notepad for important updates.

Pffff, not ! We're safe ...

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Re: "my backpack can weigh between 8 and 14kg"

"And do people still use single SIM phones ?!"

They do. All my colleagues carry their shiny iPhone plus the shite company phone. They even endured win phone before the company switched to Sammy ...

Why ? I do not know.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: Decent aircraft

"The pilots were not trained to do that because it was not officials a new plane but only an evolution of an existing one they had been trained for..."

And they were never informed of this MCAS system !

European smartphone market rallies but Apple didn't get the memo

"With no compelling reason to upgrade, people didn't."

Actually, there is one compelling reason to upgrade: bragging about.

Oh, wait ? Did Apple leave the personal tech market and move onto the luxury market ?

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: Who gets the profit?

"To be fair, most energy companies hate the concept of smart meters as much as the public."

Untrue. French EDF loves it since it will allow them to cut people off at no cost when they're late on paiement.

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Re: Why no whistle blower’s?

Yes, all of this.

Many times, some security bloke would tell mgmt: OK, quick and diry like this, only if for internal use.

Then, same incompetent mgmt would go to network, to link this to da net. Network of course had no idea of the content.

Et voila, nice scandal. But yes, for a security company, this is extremely worrying !

Hands up who likes gaming! Hands up who likes gaming on Macs! Er, OK. Well, Parallels has an update for you

DX11, my ar*

Seriously, would games today on a MAC, given the policy of 5 years old low spec gear on current models at insane prices.

There was a surge of MAC ports for even FPS years ago, and it's now dead. There are more Linux ports than MAC ports. Devs have stopped bothering.

And frankly, even if Parallels' effort are commendable, they could have waited 2025 for DX11. DX10 games are probable the only runnable on today's MACs.

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

Re: Firearm Justification!

"The firearms issue is a bit of a mess in the US but even I no longer feel banning them will help. It won't. "

It definitely won't. Too late. If firearms were banned today, it would take 200 years for them to disappear.

And like has been said in this thread, the issue in the US is financial/living conditions.

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

scared

"Quite honestly, he had scared me a little before this, but after that I actively avoided him whenever possible."

Every AS400 admins scare me to death, when I see one, TBH. No scoop here, Sherlock :)

Brexit jitters fingered as UK consumer PC sales collapse

Re: You sure...

"it is not down to the problems that Intel are having making their processors?"

Or NVidia having totally insane pricings ?

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

Re: You brought up an interesting point

I do as well. Cancelled my ISP service from Freetelecom (France) 8 years ago.

I know the account is still active because I use gmail to aggregate multiple active mailboxes via POP3, and still today, I receive emails relayed by it !

Microsoft reveals terrible trio of bugs that knocked out Azure, Office 362.5 multi-factor auth logins for 14 hours

the gaps in telemetry ...

In a Microsoft article, World has gone banana !

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

Re: C

"What we don't have though, is the clip on the pump handle that allows you to walk away whilst the fuel flows."

Same in France. This has been removed in the whole country some 25 years ago, I think. It was available back then, but not any longer, specifically to avoid the issue the OP pointed out.

Tech to solve post-Brexit customs woes doesn't exist yet, peers say

Re: How does this work?

Another very good example is Switzerland. Surrounded by EU countries but NOT in the EU.

I've moved a DC from France to Switzerland (actually, 2).

It worked like this:

- you need the actual value and descr of all systems, on a proformat invoice sheet

- you hand over this to a export company

- your lorry with systems passes customs, is checked

- if cleared, it passes

- I think, not sure, there is also a re-invoicing of VAT difference (in case of Switzerland, WAAAY less than in France)

So, end of the day:

- more expensive post Brexit (export provider)

- a hell of a paperwork to do for people that never had to do that in the EU

- the country with the highest standards (Switzerland, here) needs to maintain a quite sizeable customs force. Switzerland does.

It's September 2018, and Windows VMs can pwn their host servers by launching an evil app

'"Open the wrong image – even through a web browser – and code executes, making this a browse-and-own scenario," explains Dustin Childs of Trend Micro's Zero Day initiative.'

Why ? Why is opening an image ever triggering an execution of downloaded code ??

WHY ? It's bloody insane !

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

"OpenBSD supremo Theo de Raadt today reiterated his plea to people to disable Intel's hyper-threading for security reasons. "DISABLE HYPERTHREADING ON ALL YOUR INTEL MACHINES IN THE BIOS," he carefully suggested in a mailing post post to OpenBSD developers and users."

I'm glad my latest build is based on an i5-4690K vs. an I7-4790K !

The only difference between both (apart from price) is ... HT :)

IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs

I knew it, M'lord, there was a cunning plan

"In a no-deal scenario, Defra is currently looking at introducing manual processes if IT systems are not ready."

The cunning plan was to hire brits to do manually all of what was automatised before !

Cameron was right, it will bring more jobs for brits !

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

Re: Chocolate

"We just had a great one - a security company sent us a box of chocolates in a locked box and said we can get the key if we have a sales meeting with them. A colleague simply smashed the box to pieces :)"

Loot boxes ? Freaking cancer. I'm speaking for video gaming ... Didn't know it ever existed in IT sales !

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Fan ???? Oh no !

"Sadly, the module will need a tiny fan to keep things cool."

Oh no, not worth it vs. the previous completely passive model. This needs to be industrial stuff. I use it as a home automation POC ...

Also, for those worried with bluetooth, don't be. It never works correctly, any time I tried to use it ...

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Re: Typed 'Reboot' where ... ?

"Telnetted into various Unix machines, wanted to restart the one in the server room. Whoops - I forgot which machine I was logged into and typed 'reboot' to a machine on the other side of the planet. It did not come up, had to wait until teatime for the guys there to come in and push a button :-("

Who hasn't done this one, I wonder. Happened to me as well: wanted to reboot my SUN workstation, so typed "reboot", then I had "end connection" on that very window ...

Got me quite pale for a moment: I didn't know which system I so rebooted and I was logged to quite a lot !

Then colleagues told me every workstation had frozen: I was logged to the NIS server, which, fortunately came back 30 s after ...

Malware again checks into Hyatt's hotels, again checks out months later with victims' credit cards

Re: On-target messaging?

""Protecting customer information is critically important to Hyatt, and we take the security of customer data very seriously,"

I read that and realize, there are no commitments or promises in that statement. And that is their message, right?"

Where have you been in the last 5 years ? This is the usual blanket statement every company (IOT, router, hotels, what not) has been using at every security blunder that costed money to their customers.

And it's just here to hide the fact they don't get a fuck and won't spend a penny on it, even reusing previous web pages. Therefore no commitment. Sounds logical to me.

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

Re: This is nothing...

""Crates" and other prize boxes drop in the game, given to players. But these need "keys" to unlock. To get the keys you spend real money, for one use. Boxes are "random" and thus you are entirely at the mercy of random results, presuming you trust the company to even be "fair" in that regard."

This is what I found the most annoying in Team Fortress 2 (which is free BTW). I once went into unlocking a couple of the (many) chests I had discovered, only to find out, after 10 bucks spent, I hadn't found anything worth it !

It's actually better to purchase objects directly ...

Creepy backdoor found in NetSarang server management software

Re: Easily detected - monitor for DNS TXT record queries ...

Good luck anyway, in any 2000+ employees company, with detecting an 8 hours period DNS lookup, amongst all the shit going to DNS, due to wrong configurations/design of all products/OSes used by everyone ...

Dunno whether TXT loockups are common way, but this is actually quite stealth method of remote activation ...

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

Re: In over 40 years of programming ...

"Surely these languages are popular for a reason?"

Eat shit. Billions of flies can't be wrong ...

Shadow Brokers hike prices for stolen NSA exploits, threaten to out ex-Uncle Sam hacker

Re: Just $130,000?

"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. Isn't it a bug bounty worth paying (even secretly) to avoid the negative PR of another global ransomware attack."

Why would MS do that ? They want to sell more security products, so surely welcome any security issues with their bloat-everywhere OS ! The Shadows Brokers are doing marketing for MS, here ...

Insert coin: Atari retro console is coming back

Re: Sadly you're right

"Allow me to help you. The last thee years have given us Watch Dogs 2 and Saints row 4 if you're into stupid but fun. On the lines of more serious games we have The last of us and Spec ops: the line. The indy scene is going from strength to strength with amazing stuff like The Sexy Brutale and Undertale. Even Doom made a resurgence into the PC shooter we've been waiting for since the turn of the century.

Gaming is doing just fine, thanks."

Yep, and depending on taste, there are many others like, Stellaris, Hitman (burnt so many hours in it, and I'm not even done), Tales from the Borderlands, Prey etc ...

I think this is the golden age of video gaming ...

Re: Sadly you're right

"Leave them in the past, along with your happy memories and move on."

I'm on the same page. Even though some games genres disappeared entirely (not entirely true as kickstarter revived some), the look and music feels very old now.

And there are such current immensely good games that it's pointless to loose on those for so old games ...

Hotheaded Brussels civil servants issued with cool warning: Leak

Booze will be necessary

"Davis will likely have no problem with the advice on attire and lights - the UK seems to be heading blindly into the negotiations anyway. But as for asking us to lay off the booze... ®"

That'll probably be too much asking for this poor guy, given what he has to go through ...

He's going alone, in a place where absolutely no-one has any sympathy for him or his country, facing shitloads of civil servants on so many treaties ...

Some people really deserve their wages ...

Faking incontinence and other ways to scare off tech support scammers

Re: Quick solution

"While playing elaborate pranks on the scammers may be fun, you are wasting your own time as well as theirs -- and your time is probably much more valuable, to you at least.

So when I get a call from someone claiming to be from the Microsoft Tech Support Centre or some such, I just say "No, you're not" and hang up."

Well, yes, exactly that. I don't really have scammers' calls but a never ending stream of People calling "on behalf of " my electricity Company to sell me solar Panels ...

I'm doing this way:

- get the phone set open

- wait to make sure I detect a Sound detection algorythm

- say hello

- get the noise of phone set on from their side

- put the phone off

Done, quickly, without the usual bullshit.

OpenWRT and LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan

Re: Doesn't bother me

"Besides, I use Tomato on all my routers."

So, if you see no Need of anything above 802.11g, I can surely sell you my old WRTG54 ...

Make me an offer ! I think, for outrageously outdated Museum stuff, you could cough out 200 E/box ...

Intel scales Atom to 16 cores, updates Xeon SoCs

"Same here. While I'm quite a fan of virtualisation (the computer industry have been virtualising different layers for decades) when it come to life critical systems these should be physically separated from anything else. This is standard practice in industrial safety systems."

Agree, but it won't happen before many People have died due to security issue on the cars' Systems, and it has been proved, and some regulations has happened.

Cars manufacturors, those days, are after 10 E worth of costs cuts per car, which is incompatible with anything dedicated.

Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

ransomware model

"Why is Oracle acting now, six years into owning Java through the Sun acquisition?

It is believed to have taken that long for LMS to devise audit methodologies and to build a detailed knowledge of customers’ Java estates on which to proceed."

This is called drug vendor business model: get your customer addicted for free, then force them to pay the bills ....

Everyone should have learnt to RMS rants about licences. He warned everyone about this ...

As for Java, sorry, but this has always been a retarded language, that never coud decide if it was compiled or interpreted, bearing the cons of both worlds ...

C and many other languages (Ada, yes !) have always been a lot better. I never could fathom the hype on Java ...

PC sales sinking almost as fast as Donald Trump's poll numbers

Re: Games

"Lets hope that new generation of games engines are tied into something platform neutral like Vulkan, not chained to the dysfunctional bag of shite that is DirectX + Win10. "

There's a lot of hope, here, and I see it a future success. Doom with Vulkan runs like no other FPS has ever run on my gaming rig. It flat out beats DX11. So, I think the day of DX are counted. Devs are not stupid, and between good propriatory and good open, the choice is easy.

Some Windows 10 Anniversary Update: SSD freeze

Re: Leaving Microsoft

"Why on earth did I abandon M$ all these years ago? What was I smoking back then? Think of all the fun I could have had sorting out borked machines..... Ah well, it is too late to go back now......."

Yes, you and me, both having done the same terrible mistake, I feel for ya. All the fun, the hours of fun missed at determining which of the sneaky updates would put you back in "W10 is coming" state, and excluding them, edit registry, all of that. All before, the next week, doing it again, just to stay in business, because Windows is clearly a rapidly decaying OS: bad but nonetheless mandatory patches, disk fragmentation etc ...

And then, the usual bugs, re-install fun, SP, patches, dozens of hours missed actually.

/Sigh

Now, we only use the same OS, which stays the same unless we choose to update it, and its behaviour is exactly the same as yesterday. Boring, really.

Only thing is: we are 2 times more productive.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update crashing under Avast antivirus update

different from my 8 years experience on a dozen of systems, then.

always worked like a charm

I think they were here only another victim of MS' always patch policy ...

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

turning the screw, slowly

"Windows 10 has been a free upgrade for Home and Pro users, and it may be that accepting a modest amount of promotion is in this case the price of free."

Well, this was long ago predicted in those forums every time something was discovered in W10. It's just coming progressively as it should. More to come ...