Posts by Nick Ryan

Orion snaps 'selfie' with the Moon as it prepares for distant retrograde orbit

Re: What's wrong with this statement?

From what I understand internally NASA use proper units but convert them to outdated imperial units for reporting to the three countries on the planet that are still backward enough to be using them.

China declares victory over teenage video game addiction

Re: Yeah right

Elbonia?

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

The shocking online racist "adverts" shown to the elderly, vulnerable and otherwise gullible were something else. All funded by the same bunch of incredibly rich people of course, as in the only ones anywhere that have benefitted in any way from brexit.

The deceitful ads showing people harassed and busy A&E departments, full of "fornerrs" and then cutting to a bright, breezy change of the single white elderly person being shown immediately by an attractive white nurse to see a smiling white daughter. Except the reality is that those that funded brexit campaigns were those same people behind the destruction (privatisation) of the NHS and why there is so little money it. That the NHS was propped up by non-UK natives and these all left due to the unwarranted and spiteful hate they were receiving is another subject glossed over time and time again by the brexit apologists. Who are only able to deflect queries about the benefits of brexit or to just switch to pathetic blaming of "others" as to why brexit has been and is so damaging for the UK.

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

I'm still waiting on an actual benefit of brexit to normal people. Apparently there are loads... come on, list five.

Microsoft's attempts to harden Kerberos authentication broke it on Windows Servers

It's a part of Microsoft's Azure/Microsoft 365 only stance...

It's a part of Microsoft's Azure/Microsoft 365 only stance...

The bloody error messages, when they are eventually tracked down, state that the Microsoft Azure connected/enabled device is not able to authenticate. Except neither the client nor the server system are in any way Azure enabled and the Microsoft reporting command "dsregcmd /status" confirms this.

In other words, it's yet more Microsoft shite that was only laughably tested against their own Azure/Microsoft 365 systems and nothing else at all.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: The rich investors deserved it.

...and stuff like this wouldn't take long to get a well judged response on from somebody who knew what they were talking about. These experts, now decried by the political press as being naysayers in all forms, are experts for a reason and know their subject. Not all will agree but with blatant nonsense like Theranos' claims any independent with any half reasonable level of expertise would have come down on the "this is bullshit" side pretty much instantly. There are occasions when something may warrant a little more investigation, but that's also a reasonable response - as in "it's probably bullshit but there is a chance that they could be onto something, checking in more detail is recommended".

Physics and chemistry don't bend to charlatan's wills.

Re: Pro tip

Also a really good idea to cosy up with the usual politicians when doing so. These politicians really hate it when independents try it on in their traditional territory.

Re: For UK residents

Which is rather reflected in the percentage of the US population that live in prisons

Re: already suffered by being stigmatized

If she was innocent and stigmatised then that's a fair argument. However, as she has been found not innocent then the stigmatism (which now sounds rather ophthalmic) was rather justified and therefore people doing the stigmatising should be applauded.

Republican senators tell FTC to back off data security, surveillance rules

Re: Simple approach?

Exactly this. We're going to continue adhering to GDPR rules even though Ree Smogg and co are determined to trash the UK's data protection equivalency all in the pursuit of halfwit ideology and the abuse of data by their linked businesses, such as Palantir and equivalent quasi-criminal organisations.

Windows breaks under upgraded IceXLoader malware

Re: "The emails contain a ZIP file"

True, however this is where phishing comes in and the hijacking of a contact's genuine account. Emails coming from the expected source work a lot better than randomly names emails coming from equally randomly named email addresses.

This is where experienced users are able to question expected attachments which is rather more difficult that files provided strangers.

None of this forgives the retarded stupidity in software that auto-executes content in a fucking file allowing the malware to take hold through just opening a document. Every time this stupidity is squashed another dimwit software developer adds further auto-execution capability in a different place or a different manner.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: AdDuplex...

For good reason. It permits users to install random arbitrary software on company computers. I suspect that the hoops required to disable Microsoft's automatic billing mechanism, as in users could start subscriptions to random software services and there's no control over this were the final straw for many.

A company curated Microsoft Store would be fine, but definitely not a wild west of uncontrollable rubbish that will often steal data and copy it to regimes with no data protection whatsoever, such as the US.

A sensible regime where a company "Microsoft Store" could operate and only provide a selection of applications would be OK, allow this company to deploy their own applications through the same "Microsoft Store" and it would be it actually useful.

Global recession, companies necessarily saving money and not wasting it, PCs largely having reached saturation point already... and Microsoft feel the need to release a new "last version of windows" with fictitious hardware requirements.

Re: OS X?

Yeah, but doesn't the blind person really appreciate how much improvement there was through applying paint colour 48956 (legally registered trademark colour) over everything? In particular a really thick application of this to ensure that there is no tangible difference between anything at all and absolutely no edges anywhere. This paint was expensive therefore it will be used everywhere to demonstrate the superiority of the colour. The application of typeface 9093, which is a dedicated new typeface designed with exclusively narrow strokes to make it as hard to read on all devices unless font scaling is set to 800% and even then only the truly discerning will be able to appreciate this. Mostly because the standard text colour is 48957 which is the very similar to colour 48956 just marginally darker. 48956 would have been used as the text colour as well except one of the unwashed (not in the marketing department) complained too loudly and a very costly compromise was made to adjust 48956 darker by 0.05% and billed to the complainant's department.

Re: As a Win11 user myself, don't bother if you don't have to!

A machine with 8GB runs (walks slowly) like a dog (snail) with Teams on auto-start after login. Many users have either taken to not logging out to avoid the pain, which just delays it as eventually performance becomes so bad that a restart is required and that's aside from windows updates, or they remove Teams from auto-start and start it later when they have a gap in work.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: "gather the data for the purpose of understanding [...] the crisis in treatment waiting times"

Also the enforced privatisation of large operational chunks of the NHS through forcing hospitals to no longer use internal services and instead to have to out source these same services to an external organisation. Which will always cost more of course, as there's another level of profit to be made, and it's very common to find direct links between these external organisations and politicians and Tory party donors.

Re: And after

Oh no, there was definitely millions more promised every week for the NHS. The criminal Boris Johnson stood in front of a big bus with it plastered all over the side and promised it personally.

There are even pathetic excuse-makers around who enable liars such as this who have tried to claim that the NHS has already been given this extra sum. Except that the extra sum they were deceitfully trying to claim was just the inflationary increases in the NHS budget that tend to go through every year... nothing actually additional to this and nothing like the lies on the brexit bus.

Re: I'm sorry

It's short termism and greed combined with a desire to finish off the NHS. The NHS had the capability to do a great many things and did them in-house where appropriate. Now the line of "where appropriate" is gone and almost everything has to be farmed out to contractors to do instead. While in some situations this is a good idea, given the scale of the NHS farming almost everything out to contractors is only going to significantly raise costs, distance those doing the actual work from the organisation (people removed from an organisation are not so motivated) and line the pockets of those with interest in the companies doing the contracting.

Re: Hidden backlog

Ah yes, the "great american way". Where if you not rich enough you can just suffer and die in pain. The US has the worst medical health of any "developed" nation, more personal debt incurred by medical needs and more individuals desperately trying not to pay for even basic medical care. Hell, many would rather walk tot he hospital if they could rather than have to pay for an american ambulance.

America does not have a functioning society - a functioning society looks after all members of the society. America pretends to be christian, the politicians won't get voted in if they don't at least pretend to be christian loudly in their profiles. Yet absolutely none of what christian morals are meant to include, looking after each other, everyone's equal and so on are applied in any way whatsoever. A "society" that caters only for those at the top 0.005% will become more and more unequal over time, and more and more draconian measures will be put in place to put down those not in the 0.005%. The reversion of females to second class citizens in the US under fundamentalist pretences is part of the journey. Where will it end? Don't know, but it's going to be messy.

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Re: Get that green screen capability baked in

It's only a feature that was requested years ago.... why would Microsoft ever want to implement something Teams that users actually want rather than something that pushes yet more lock-in? They'll probably introduce video quality controls first... no wait, that doesn't enforce lock-in either.

How about coding the application so it doesn't require an obscene amount of resources at login to start the damn thing up... because all the MS developers are going to do is to pre-load everything possible into memory and call this "optimisation"

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Re: "The telephone providers are in the business of providing a sound link from point A to point B"

There are a couple of issues with fax transmissions over VOIP. Firstly the frequency range that a FAX uses to communicate is not necessarily supported in enough integrity to allow fax transmission and secondly VOIP uses lossy compression algorithms which will cut out some of the fax data. Either of these on their own would cause serious FAX transmission problems, but both together can almost kill it stone dead. Fax is quite a resilient protocol though and if it doesn't succeed at the first speed it'll drop down to a slower speed and so on. Eventually it could go through on a VOIP connection but it's far from guaranteed.

Re: "the services necessary to send viruses and malware"

Yep. There was a lot appreciation given when I set up a computerised fax receipt service. The administrator no longer had to daily replace the fax rolls/paper/ink because of the nightly load of spam that came through usually swamping anything that we actually wanted to come through. Instead they could preview the page and delete the spam without it costing us money to receive it (wasted paper/ink aside from lost real faxes) and forward on any genuine faxes using email to whoever in the organisation needed them.

Re: RE: fax requirements

only a fax transmission has a [reasonable] level of trail of custody on the data

No, it does not. A fax transmission is entirely opaque and relies solely on trust. If you were to mistakenly fax a document to me I could edit the document and retransmit it to your intended recipient with changes included and there is absolutely no way that the recipient would know this has happened this unless you communicated directly and separately and compared copies.

I suspect your point is that a fax is a point-to-point protocol which is true and as long as there is no interception along the way, is all fine. But the process is entirely trust based. I could send a fax purporting to come from you or from your doctor or lawyer and you would not have any evidence that it came from anywhere else other than independently checking the content of the message. I know this is the same as post but at least with post there is a physical copy to check and not a digital copy that can be recreated and amended and for serious legal documentation there is a reason why seals are still used.

That's because faxes have a status as a legal document, that not all (in case I've forgotten one that does) electronic communication equivalents do not...yet

Probably because some utter luddite lawyer couldn't understand that a fax transmission is not in any way trustworthy even though it's magic and a horrible copy of a document comes out of a magic box. That faxes are considerably less secure than email has ever been is something entirely lost on these kind of people.

If it weren't for lockdown I suspect lawyers up and down the country would be protesting about the removal of this archaic technology.

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Re: a way to make the good of the end user more relevant than maximising revenue

I thought the more common similar saying related to light bulbs and candles/lamps?

Re: a way to make the good of the end user more relevant than maximising revenue

Too true. A few years ago we asked users what improvements they wanted in a couple of our crusty, and really badly written, applications. In general it was stuff like "change the colours" and "make this specific input box bigger" or "make it do what some unrelated application does instead".

That's savage. And stupid, although I can see part of what was probably the original reason for it. Almost as stupid as Microsoft's stack ranking system and now their move to silo their products as much as possible.

Re: Word Count.....

....add Microsoft into the mire here too. Pretty much forcing all users to suck up to their cloud subscription as a service. The price of Windows Server is so insane now and add in the near criminal licensing terms as soon as you consider virtualising a Windows Server and the only conclusion is that Microsoft really, really don't want anyone using anything other than Microsoft cloud services. The Microsoft 365 and Azure interfaces are a spaghetti mess of barely working probably unwanted functionality with defaults that are only of benefit to Microsoft. If you've gone anywhere near the shit show that is the Microsoft xbox online zune game whatever administration interface then you'll see more of the same disjointed cobbled together mismash or shite that carefully doesn't do what anyone actually wants. Of, if it does, good luck funding it without googling and trawling through all the out of date online help and reference pages. All Microsoft want is lock-in and nothing else. It's a continuation of the same just a tweaked arena.

Bumble open sources AI code to automatically blur NSFW photos

Re: Art class

Computer generated art has been ongoing for some time. Creating a collage and post-processing it is nothing more than an inevitable progression.

Is this plagiarism or inspiration? Is a human applying an "oil painting" preset to an image plagiarising those who can paint in oil? How about a robot that has been programmed to paint using oil based on an image (this happened quite a few years ago).

How about someone applying a lot of post-processing and image merges in photoshop to enhance a photo they took, adding or changing the sky? Is that art or not?

The problems are not about the use of tools, which is what computers are and the marketing BS of "AI" aside, they are still just tools. The important dividing line is where something is passed off as something that it is not. Does it really matter if a computer generated an image or not? Claiming that it was generated by a human, let alone a specific human, when it was not is where the line should be. Similarly claiming that a heavily manipulated photo is real is wrong too, it may be lovely and a work of art but it is not a photo anymore, it's a piece of art.

The spittle sprayers who claim that it's wrong for a tool to be able to mimic an art style are completely out of touch with reality. How do they think that animated movies are made to look in a particular style? By individual hand drawn cells?

Computer generated music will come along soon enough too, and we'll have the same old arguments rolled out again about how a computer shouldn't be allowed to create music. They are tools, nothing more.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Re: Windows machines lifespan

Stopping a few startup apps does not repair the abhorrent mess that accumulates at high speed in the WinSXS directory (.net and library versioning is such a bad joke in Windows). It does not repair the mess that accumulates in the registry over time. It does not repair the mess of lots of windows updates being applied over a long period of time.

Registry cleaning tools can help. Disk space cleaning tools can help too. However, in the end the mess is bad enough that a wipe clean and restart is still the most effective resolution.

Re: Windows machines lifespan

True. More than a year, at most two, then? It's staggering the performance improvements that can be had from a wipe and a fresh install.

Re: Windows machines lifespan

I consider a reinstall of Windows an absolute fail on my part as an admin

How long have you been using Windows with Microsoft applications installed on it? Wiping the damn OS is often the only way to repair a system should deleting a user profile not do the trick, which it often doesn't because Microsoft like to hide broken settings in all manner of stupid places and often "all users" is the place.

If you're lucky then you can reset Windows but often in order to restore some hint of prior performance an entire disk deletion and fresh install is the only way to get a system operable again. I'd like to be able to fix them of course, but I don't have enough time or patience to deal with the mess that Microsoft make in an ongoing way with thousands of duplicated files and marginally updated files on a system that's been in use for more than a few years.

Microsoft realizes it hasn't updated list of banned dodgy Windows 10 drivers in years

Re: Define Bad

That'll be the print spooler that has now hung in really annoying ways twice in the last few weeks. With files locked in place by the bloody printer isolation executable. For anyone else who suffers from this, it's a slight extension of the old fix to first stop the printer spooler service, then delete the printer spool files and restart the printer spooler service. Made more annoying because we now have to terminate the print isolation executable as well.

Before Microsoft decided to fix the horrible printing driver mess of their own making, in the most dumb way possible, the print spooler ran for a few years previously with only the very odd issue like this.

Microsoft fixes printing gremlin, ends that block on Windows 11 upgrades

Re: Have we made no progress?

I suspect, or more accurately hope, that "may" is used because of the way Microsoft Updates are distributed over time. Microsoft do not have the online resources for every single Windows client to connect in and download the latest updates all at the same time. As a result these updates are staggered timewise and while restarting and doing a manual check for updates will usually show the update earlier than just leaving it, there are still priorities by way of connecting and downloading updates and therefore sometimes even with a manual update check the update will not be made available.

Re: It's got breaking bugs in it

Can't disagree with that, however the level of complexity of computer games is considerably higher than it previously was. The gameplay and systems are often still stupidly simple but the overlaid complexity of graphics has added a huge amount of complexity that wasn't there previously. I suspect that previously games were largely designed by one competent designer and extended from there whereas now it's a team of quite obviously disinterested individuals with no overarching eye for design, consistency or quality.

Many games seem to be developed from the visuals first and then an attempt to cobble a game backwards from that. Not that games in the past have been great of course, just to show my age I remember the routine stinkers from Ocean (I think) who just churned out lame platform games one after the other vaguely tied into a film release. Change the box art, tweak the sprites and tadaa! another Ocean platform game was released.

Re: Have we made no progress?

Probably because the only developers left at Microsoft are the type that are only capable of badly reinventing the wheel using ridiculously inefficient toolkits and care nothing for efficiency, error handling, usability and in particular testing. Usually they don't care about keeping the previous functionality either... as long as it's shiny it doesn't matter.

Re: It's got breaking bugs in it

I'm not sure it's entirely because of Microsoft being a monopoly, but it is allowing them to get away with it easier. Many other software providers acted like asses, and still do, but aren't monopolies.

Microsoft, in particular, are showing just how stupid it is to be run by a nefarious pairing of marketdroids and accountants.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: Genuine question...

aerogems: So far the only thing that you have demonstrated is that you should not be allowed near anything of importance until you gain some real experience. Hacking a crappy website or web service together and re-inventing the same old thing over and over again? Maybe, but there'll almost certainly be a trail left by you of failed or hacked systems in a year or two. But to be allowed near large scale existing deployments? Absolutely not.

You used Perl as an example. What has "conveniently ignored" got to do with it at all, you've not making any point at all.

A couple of other posters have already answered your points very well, and replacing these old legacy systems is something that does need to happen at some point but pretending that "dime a dozen" developers can do this is nonsense. Even if you got in highly skilled and experienced developers and started again from scratch targetting the supposedly easy 90% of processes that often make up the bulk of such work you'd have to implement this in a highly professional, stable manner and be as certain as you possibly can be that whatever you are implementing it in will still be available in 20 years time - virtualisation is incredibly important of course. This leaves the remaining 10% of the processes that can't be easily re-implemented, usually because how or what they do is likely a mystery and doing something about them will take 100x the amount of effort as the easy bulk and even then you can't be sure that they'll work in the same way as they did previously and working the same way is critical. Therefore the old system will continue to be left running. You now have two systems running in parallel and this will almost certainly continue for many years. Eventually the hope would be that the processes running on the old system will stop being used, but that could take some time.

I've worked in systems where we fixed a bug in the pricing calculations and then had to put the damn bug back in because the customer used the prices that the system generated in their brochures and they'd already been printed and distributed for use the following year. This meant that we had to put a conditional state around the bug to ensure that the incorrect code was kept in use until the following year where the fixed code could be used. Naturally enough the old bug had to remain because historical reporting would be out if the exact same code was not in use. This is just one example of what happens in large and real systems - these things are annoying and stupid but that's reality.

Re: DX2

The odd thing is that even in the 8bit CPUs it was known that timing things to the CPU clock rate was a silly thing to do just for the differences between NTSC and PAL systems let alone different generations of the same hardware. That the early PC computer game developers didn't get this was quite disturbing... and also highly amusing when doing a drive by "turbo button press" when someone was playing Star Wars on it... :)

Thanks for reminding me about 64k boundaries. Shudders. Now back to the pills..

Re: Genuine question...

While standardising on IE6 is crazy, developing to defined web standards and not whatever fad bullshit Javascript library is the flavour of the month is a reliable, long sighted way to work. Code a website or service using HTML, CSS and the minimum of JavaScript (i.e. using JavaScript to enhance, never implement functionality) and the website should continue to operate stably and reliably for years. When a website is vomited out requiring JavaScript just to show the home page, let alone navigation and the JavaScript is repeatedly used to replicate standard browser behaviour then it will never work reliably nor for a long period of time.

Re: Genuine question...

You really missed the parts about the scale and about professional development and software.

These financial systems have been operating reliably for decades. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code, interacting with each other in previously defined ways with a lot of edge cases almost all of which have been encountered and dealt with by now. There's a fair chance that the documentation for some of this is just not there. Is this code perfect, probably not but it's known code.

Replacing this with "dime a dozen" perl programmers just will not work. Ever. You are suggesting replacing working code that has stood the test of time with untested code almost certainly written by developers who have not got a clue what error handling is, let alone testing and even less likely have the remotest clue about full dependency testing. When developing a stable system that one wants to work reliably for any period of time, linking to gigabytes (including duplicated dependencies) of third party libraries, any of which can be changed at any arbitrary point in time, is a utterly stupid way to write software. It's bad enough for web sites and services that will just be replaced in a couple of years anyway, but for something that needs to be stable for many years? Forget it.

Re: <raised eyebrow>

The first brand new hard drive that I bought myself was 16Mb! It wasn't exactly a large amount of storage but a hell of a lot better than not having one and also a hell of a lot better than the MFM drives that preceded it. It also had auto-park which was another stress removed from earlier HDDs.

Re: <raised eyebrow>

I can't help thinking the original poster meant Mb! I remember having a seriously well specced system which had 4Mb of RAM. That was not remotely cheap either.

If something relies on that old hardware then updating it to a modern OS is just not going to happen. As long as some numpty doesn't decide to connect it directly to the Internet, which has happened a few times, then the old hardware running an old OS may as well continue as long as there is hardware for it. Hell, if the hardware is important enough then the hardware will still be available somehow, although whether or not this is affordable is another problem. Essentially, if it's not broken, leave it. Something that has run stably for the last twenty years doesn't need the latest revision of any OS applied to it just because it's available.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

Good point about concurrent jobs, one after the other is not uncommon. However, I don't think this topic is really about someone who does a day job and an evening job, more that someone is doing two full time jobs concurrently.

I also think a lot of the issue is around semantics and a lot of the rest is the hours.

If a job is a "full time job" then it really shouldn't be possible to do two of them. Because if it's a full time job therefore it should take up all of your time. If, on the other hand, your job has so much down time in the allotted period then why not fill it with something productive? But this does require flexibility as noted elsewhere, they'd need to be there for meetings and calls and not unresponsive for many hours at a time - that's not doing their job as expected.

Doing two full time jobs one after the hour is, in theory, possible, but there are only 24 hours in a day and doing two 8 hour jobs one after another leaves no time for anything other than 8 hours sleep as well. That's doable for a short period but not continually.

Fortinet warns of critical flaw in its security appliance OSes, admin panels

Re: Who??

I had an argument with some senior network person at our MSP who was trying to tell me that the admin interface could be safely left open to all of the Internet because their passwords were secure and they manage access carefully.

I got my way and the access to the admin interface was restricted to only be permitted on expected originating addresses. As a result we are almost entirely safe from this exploit. Paranoia in security is a good thing, but this is just expected good practice.

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

Re: Take This With a Grain of Salt

If it was that early then it would likely have been EGA or even CGA video. There was something before that but it's lost to my memory, and probably just as well. Moving the ROM or RAM really depended in whether or not the card manufacturer supported it and if you had the patience to play the jumper game (I probably still have oodles of spare jumpers) and manage to get whatever cards were in a system somehow cooperating on IRQs and memory space.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

Research by Lansweeper shows Microsoft's stringent hardware requirements still at play

Hardware requirements? That'll be the same fictitious hardware requirements that can be relatively easily averted?

Windows 11 is nothing more than an annoying marketing gimmick to try and force hardware churn for no benefit to the end user whatsoever. There is nothing in it that shouldn't be there as part of a regular update to Windows 10.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: 17 yrs FFS

While you have a valid point, it is lost in a strawman type argument. Small scale UPS type batteries are not scalable is the answer out of it. However, a distributed scheme where every property has a battery or similar has some benefits, not least should rolling blackouts happen in this country again. Just better hope they don't get caught in a fire or are damaged...

The important point is that energy storage is required, and other technologies are available to store energy, not batteries and not purely electric although the never-ending future promise of super-capacitors are a potential. These are probably on the same timescale as commercial nuclear fusion though.

One practical and already existing example of energy storage in operation is pumped storage hydro electric schemes. For example, Dinorwig Power Station in Wales. Look it up, it's one hell of an impressive system, is much more efficient than you'd probably initially predict and can spin up to generate electricity very rapidly. There are various other options for energy storage, but the key thing is that no one system is perfect nor applicable in every location and every scenario.