Posts by Havin_it

Former Mozilla dev joins chorus roasting antivirus, says 'It's poison!'

Re: Problem with Anti-Virus

Having a prescribed dropzone for downloaded files would be a royal ballache for me a lot of the time, though I'm not against it as a default for new users. What would be more beneficial to my mind, would be if downloaded files weren't executable by default and had to be explicitly OK'd as such by the user.

I've tried in the past to make Windows systems live up to that philosophy, typically by revoking execution permissions on all but one of a user's folders (and crucially not the default download folder) but this just tends to hit problems. 1: some apps have installation/update routines that fail if your TEMP folder doesn't have execute permissions; 2: the stupid-ass Windows permissions granularity where the key permission is "Read AND Execute" whereby if you revoke this permission from a given folder, you can download shit into it and be sure it won't execute, but unfortunately nor can the shell navigate that folder!

In short, a setup whereby the user is required to manually bless the execution of a downloaded file is not a goer without training or seriously crafty system configuration.

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

Re: Yet another Windows 10 annoyance

>same reasons that UNIX / Linux systems still have a statically-linked (and therefore less dependent) subset of binaries in /sbin.

Mostly only true in the initrd nowadays, from what I've seen. And under systemd, you pretty much need an initrd if your system has any kind of mount that doesn't come up instantly :(

Gone in 70 seconds: Holding Enter key can smash through defense

initramfs shell?

So, um, what if you don't use an initramfs? I don't. Just wondering ...

2016 in a nutshell: Boffins break monkeys' backs to turn them into tragic shuffling cyborgs

Re: Delaying Hope

Well, you know, we could use what we learned to fix knackered (not by us) monkeys too. I doubt we will (outwith the class of vet practice Michael Jackson had for Bubbles back in the day), I'm just saying.

Don't be too hard on John. His language is a bit blunt, but he has a point and I find I largely agree with it (uh-oh). I don't desire the extinction of any species of life, nor inflicting suffering (a very difficult thing to quantify in less-sentient organisms, mind you) without purpose. However, it's unthinkable that humans could thrive as we do without exploiting other species in various ways, including lethal and "life-changing" ways. Polio is a lifeform, but I'd eradicate that in a heartbeat. It's all relative.

By and large, I'd sooner we cracked the technique of not doing unspeakable cruelty to our own species before we get to micromanaging the extent to which we're comfortable doing it to cows or monkeys. Because one way or another, we'll always be doing so. I challenge anyone to establish a "red line" on that which can't be argued against.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Re: What's the thinking?

I hope you kept your Tor on when you admitted doing this while signed in to this (non-SSL) comment forum then. Oh, and that you've done so every time you've ever signed in to El Reg, otherwise Insp. Knacker of the Yard can pop down to Vulture Central and ID you right quick (if he can be arsed).

US citizens crash Canadian immigration site after Trump victory

Re: what eurocrats dont understand is..

Enter key broken?

Re: Canadian immigration

I don't advise requesting a blanket from a USAfriend, it may contain smallpox.

IPv4 is OVER. Really. So quit relying on it in new protocols, sheesh

Granny factor

I won't be the first to opine this, but the worst thing about v6 is the lingo.

I (eventually) got the heads of my dependents, both at work and closer to home, around the concept of an IPv4 address. Four integers with dots in between. Sort of like a phone number, in that the format was consistent.

IPv6? 8 numbers in hex notation (with which we're all super comfortable, yeah), colon-delimited, which if they happen to be zero can be omitted, and if a number of them adjacent to each other are zero the colons can also be omitted just to make it extra opaque.

Do people really not get this? It's too much. Joe sixpack does not want to speak hexadecimal, nor to make sense of which address components are elided or why. If the address is reliably eight integers, with colons or periods or fucking Euro symbols delimiting them, that he can grok (possibly with help). IPv6 address notation is design by engineers, for engineers; granny need not apply.

Any questions? No, not you again at the back, please God no

Re: Incontinent Flyer

>an intercontinental flight from the UK to Europe

Christ, I'm not looking forward to Brexit either but I hadn't heard we'd be classified as a different continent!

I vote we name it "Justenoughrope" :(

Re: I know that feeling

So you're the spoilsport, eh?

Damn your eyes, I was really looking forward to my wonderful knob.

Re: Ah...

Don't think Dabbsy was El Reg's cross to bear back in 2003. Legend has it the snub was sparked by a Reg hack mocking Jobs's pronunciation of "Jaguar".

God, but I have been here too long.

Uber drivers entitled to UK minimum wage, London tribunal rules

I think it's reasonable to assume that Scrooge's parsimony was a year-round occupation, and that the Christmas season merely provided the appropriate background conditions for the filthy lefty free-riders to perform their cynical bit of social engineering upon him.

(Signed, someone for whom the emotional blackmail to spend spend SPEND has already entered high gear.)

Besides, a downvote is as expensive as an upvote, so I don't think it was him at all. QED

Re: Will this do anything...

Well this just comes across as bitterness, but if you have no body then I suppose it's understandable. It must have taken ages to type that with your nose.

Is this the worst Blockchain idea you've ever heard?

Re: An immutable record, you say...

Brill!

Honeywell's UK staff mull strike action

A Honeywell appliance materialised on the wall of our Throne Room at the same time the gas boiler was replaced. I'm guessing it's a CO detector. It does give me a little frisson to see it, albeit that there's very little connection with the tech titan that was.

Part of me wants to pry the casing open in case there's an advanced supercomputer in there (hell, relative to Honeywell machines in their pomp that's probably a valid comparison) but another part of me thinks that if either my landlord, the boiler maker or the plumber felt the need to surreptitiously install such a thing in our bog, I probably don't want to know why.

British jobs for British people: UK tech rejects PM May’s nativist hiring agenda

Re: @qwertyuiop

I struggle to believe Nicola Sturgeon said anything so contrary to the narrative on which she's basing her current manoeuvring. Got a source?

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

Re: The computer Tao

I'm with you on the "negative bubbles", in fact I think they are the true phenomenon here. I say that because I don't think I'm anything special or magical, just someone who spent a good amount of spare time methodically learning how computers and things worked and how to use and troubleshoot them (for myself, at any rate). The result is I generally have a nice time on a computer, and when things go wrong I patiently set about putting them right. No hammers required (well, rarely).

My GF, on the other hand, exhibits very much your "negative bubble" concept (which I myself named "technopathy" - linguists present may freely comment on how cromulent this construction is). If something can go wrong with a computer while she is using it, it will, whatever the odds. I will watch her like a hawk and not be able to explain what I'm seeing, nor be able to replicate it. It apparently happens to her at work as well. She is no ninja but knows her way around a computer as well as most who've used one day-to-day for as long as she has; I swear the things just don't like her.

So, yeah. Not sure about the positive, but the negative? Yup.

Re: Plugs....

I've never seen a PC or lappy that had "upside-down" USB ports - seems so counterintuitive it's hard to believe any mfr. would do it (oh, hello Dell).

I'd always proffer the plug with the side where the holes don't have the contact-plate right behind them, and the join in the metal isn't (where there is a join, which is pretty normal), as the top side. Never been an issue IME.

Apart from the rise of micro-micro-thumbdrives which only have the contact-plate and no housing. Made a litany of fumbles with those bleeders :(

And then there're the PCs that put the USB sockets sideways (oh, hello again, Dell, but plenty others too). I can't imagine there's any orthodoxy within that.

Still, you know, I guess it's better than what we had before. Mostly.

Re: Depressing...

>gristly discovery

If you'd had one of those, I doubt you'd be sharing about it. Not on here, anyway.

Mm, your handle probably doesn't help matters in that regard ...

Re: "two monitors plugged into each other, a USB mouse plugged in to an ethernet port"

Heh, yeah I was incredulous at USB->Ethernet myself so likewise had to try it, and son of a gun...

Good job El Reg is responsible journalism and doesn't tell us to go jumping off cliffs ...

Re: Is it on?

Pretty sure you can nobble the User-Agent: header sent by Konqueror, change it to something more mainstream and you'd probably be golden. (Konqueror is sadly now discontinued now though, so I hope your predicament was temporary.)

I've had to do this in my Raspberry Pi with Firefox on occasion: many sites don't compute when you've got a HD screen but appear, processor-wise, to be on a phone. Sigh...

Re: Is it on?

Isn't it quite hard to play a piano that's only got one leg? A skill like that should command remuneration enough to put one well above the welfare bracket in any civilised society, surely?

Re: Is it on?

^This, and not limited to Linux either. My mum and I had netbooks around the same time (got her the same model as mine to hopefully simplify long-distance support) and quite a few apps had dialogs (or in at least one instance, main window) too tall for 600px vertical. Thunderbird account settings stands out ... Turns out "Alt+drag" is a tricky concept to grok over the phone :(

Re: Year 7

>in the UK

In Scotland (80s-90s at least):

Nursery: ""playschoolers"

Primary school: "P1-7"

Secondary school: "S1-6"

Why must people so complicate matters? Keeps someone in a job, I suppose.

Re: Bad references

>can't count to 10 without taking his/her shoes off

Anyone with fewer than 10 fingers ain't welcome in my typing pool, I'll tell ya that much :p

Firefox to doctor Pepper so it can run Chrome's PDF, Flash plugins

Pfft. Pepperidge Farm must be going a bit Nana Moon.

There were rendering inconsistencies between all browsers. CSS positioning rules, box model, link pseudo-selectors (shudder) without even beginning to think about the JS incompatibilities (my nurse says I mustn't do that any more) ... OK, IE gave us a lot more work to do than the others, but don't claim the rest were all singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Londoners react with horror to Tube Chat initiative

Re: Safety issue

Ick. Thanks (not so much) for reminding me of that traumatic recollection of my last trip to The Smoke.

Looking back, I think that discovery of black snot after an afternoon's moderate tube travel was the pivotal moment at which I said to myself: I will NEVER live or work here.

@Martin Re: Cabbage

"OMG I went into a public environment and some of the people therein are having the temerity to audibly communicate with each other!!!eleventyone"

It's not for me to comment on why the tube is so stressful in the first place, I'll have to take your word for that, but why does hearing other people conversing make it more so?

I ask as someone who strongly values a bit of contemplative solitude himself, but would never expect to achieve it on public transport.

Re: Cabbage

According to the Standard the guy is an NHS worker hailing from Colorado (one of the more enlightened states of the Union I'd say, though others may not), from a small town where it's common to know and chat with pretty much everyone you meet in your day-to-day life (and because they weren't living in London, they were generally having a better day most of the time so the chat was more enjoyable). My background is similar and it's a facet of rural life that I do miss since becoming an urbanite.

I may go against the grain here, but I think it's a tragedy how insular people in London seem to be, and I bet there are more people on those trains than you care to acknowledge whose misery is in no small part due to the crippling loneliness of their lives, for which this prevailing attitude is far from blameless.

I think it's a good idea. It doesn't compel anyone to be sociable if they don't want to, and it might just end up making the odd few people a bit happier. Where's the harm?

FCC death vote looms for the Golden Age of American TV

I sure hope you haven't watched any nature docs featuring any of these species, then.

Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over

@PJD Re: VinceH : People still use this!?

Hi PJD, sorry this is a bit late in the day but have you tried opening these old docs in OOo/LibO?

If they render satisfactorily, there are some format conversion options available under the hood, on the commandline - not sure if that includes batch conversion but even if it doesn't, you could likely use a smattering of shell-scripting (or possibly Python as that's what the internal scripting engine uses) to do batch conversion. Worth looking into.

Re: People still use this!?

There was growing dissent among the dev community for some time even under Sun's stewardship of OO. The pace at which changes were accepted was glacial, lots of (supposedly) critical improvements were sitting in bureaucratic limbo, and the devs were getting frustrated.

I think the Oracle takeover was just the excuse most of them were waiting for to make the fork they'd been itching to do, but hadn't out of conscientious reluctance to fracture one of FOSS's most prestigious brands.

Re: Wish LO would give credit due to the OOo contributors

Is the code (or other material) you contributed still present in LibreOffice? AIUI they ripped out a lot of stuff before even their first release.

If your contribution was in initial release(s) but has since been removed, would there still be an expectation to remain in the credits of future releases? Serious question as I don't have an inkling of the etiquette in such scenarios.

WhatsApp is to hand your phone number to Facebook

Re: I'm safe

Eat some bread in the process. It helps, trust me.

Re: WhatsApp, WhatsApp, why have you forsaken me?

Hangman, hangman, hold it a little while

I see a Zuckerbitch comin' riding many a mile.

...and we know how that worked out, don't we?

/GallowsCoat

@phuzz: This. I use FB only via web, my missus had Whatsapp for a while before she joined FB (including an overlapping period after the buyout) and after the buyout, I started getting friend suggestions of her friends with whom I'd had no contact on FB. Can't see any other way that could have happened.

So a fat lot of good withholding my phone number from Zuckerbitch did me, in the end.

Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of tribble dung

I feel your pain, Grunchy. I knew about I, Robot from the off, but I've just learnt that he's playing Deadshot in Suicide Squad. I wasn't much invested in that item to begin with, but now it's arrived at "Aw HELL no"sville.

(Okay, I'm still faintly intrigued to see Jared Leto Joker, because he has in my mind always been the-guy-you-call-when-Heath-Ledger's-not-available, so this casting was no great surprise. I expect I will forevermore watch his movies and ponder how Heath would have played it, but that's my psychosis. Oh, and a hot Asian chick with katanas is never a reason *not* to watch a movie in my book. But still, probably gonna pass on balance.)

Hancock was also a tragic waste of a good premise, but I only give him a small share of the blame for that trainwreck.

Re: Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of dung

Thanks for the background, Ian. That pic of Kirk standing disconsolately in a veritable ball-pit of them would be rendered quite horrendous by the notion that they were all crapping all over him all the while.

.

.

.

(Horrendous but undeniably tittersome. I am a bad human being.)

Silently clicking on porn ads you can't even see – this could be you...

Re: PORN-A-CHU, I CHOOSE YOU!!!

Yes, and Pornhub have reported a massive spike (ooer) in searches for the said genre since the game's release. I'm now wondering if the two are connected ...

Oh wait, no. I just remembered what people are like. No further analysis necessary.

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

Re: David Davis vs. David Davies

>he has been a Eurosceptic for years before Brexit made it fashionable

You mean he's a Euroskeptic AND a hipster?

#WurrDoomed

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

Re: Wow

><role credits>

Why just the role credits? Don't the crew and the catering truck deserve a mention too?

Or did you mean "Roll credits"?

(Agree with your thesis though.)

Theresa or Teresa May? Twitter confuses nude model and new PM

Re: New PM

Isn't "the mid-term Brown appointment" one of Teresa's videos?

Cycling paramedics in epic rush to save patient who ate stale sandwich

Own up:

You latched onto this story as it gave you an excuse to make (and photograph) a double Decker fried egg and ketchup sarnie, didn't you? Or do you expect me to believe you had that on file waiting for the perfect story?

#Need a "chinny reckon" icon

Gun-jumping French pols demand rapid end to English in EU

Re: Bah!

I'm up for inventing a new language. How do we do it without falling into these traps of the mind, so we can flog it to all the lingo-stakeholders of the world? It would make life so much easier, and mean Google would've wasted quite a bit of cash.

Ursprech (or Oor sprech if you're Scots). Who's up for it?

Smut shaming: Anonymous fights Islamic State... with porn

Re: Frankly,

What 6pm news are *you* watching? I've seen plenty of that on ours.

Get this: most people away from the battlezone don't *care*, or not enough anyway, until it's their town or someone they care for that gets bombed or shot. And when that happens, the response isn't all that constructive but is along the lines of "Let's fly over there and bomb them some more! BOMB ALL TEH BOMBZ!!!!!one" because they're angry.

Until then they're too busy getting angry about "tidal waves" of immigrants and how that's imagined to affect their own immediate environs, without sparing a thought for realistic resolution of the issues that are causing it. The culmination of this is that, as now starts to look worryingly likely (I've been trying to deny this until now), next Thursday we'll do the society-level equivalent of taking our ball home and saying "fuck all y'all". And it won't have the desired effect in the slightest. Bunker mentality and kicking the can down the road.

If I felt that our elected representatives were doing anything of greater merit to undermine Daesh and/or stop the same thing happening again a year or two later anyway, I might join you in slating Anon's campaign. But I really don't. Shame.

Linux devs open up universal Ubuntu Snap packages to other distros

>I can't honestly see much advantage for things like Libreoffice.

Well for starters it'll mean I can actually install the bastard on my unstable Gentoo lappy - more than I've been able to do for a loooong time because I don't have two days spare to compile it and the prebuilt binary version is perennially ruled-out by DLL-hell (OK, SO-hell but you get me).

I'm not sure who I blame more for this: LO devs for linking to flaky bleeding-edge libraries, or the devs of those libs (icu, poppler and harfbuzz seem to be prime offenders, whatever the hell they are for anyway) for breaking their ABIs with every fscking point-release (grr).

DLL hell can be a real PITA for some packages on Gentoo, so I'm not surprised their devs have been all over this.

Spam King sent down for 30 months

It's a start I suppose

However, why do I get the feeling that

(a) he'll only serve a fraction of that time; and

(b) he'll find a way to get around the probation restrictions?

Jaded, moi?

The Microsoft-LinkedIn hookup will be the END of DAYS, I tell you

That was a popcorn-tastic read!

So is the typist his next wife, or do they all play as well as work together?

I HAVE TO KNOW!

Google doesn’t care who makes Android phones. Or who it pisses off

Re: Don't blame the OEMs

Funny you should mention Tizen as this timely burp from Samsung makes me think they have an opinion on this...

I'm not sure how much it'll appeal to other OEMs though, unless they can ensure Sammy won't be in a position to wield just as much influence with it in underhand ways as Google can/are with Android.