Posts by The Indomitable Gall

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: What I find amusing...

I think all they're saying is "not quite a millimetre each"

What I find amusing...

What I find amusing is that they're selling a device that simple geometry suggests has bigger pixels than any screen I've owned since the GameBoy Colour and trying to bamboozle people with talk of "micrometer scale pixels"

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: I see.

You wouldn't have if you'd written it using VimNanoNext 2.3.132!

My spin on that is that the existence of the likes of PanWriter in the form it's in is a failure in software development as a whole. (And therefore not any reflection on or misunderstanding of what you wrote!)

Why isn't it now a straightforward matter to take a full-fat code editor and rebuild it with a few clicks to do only a single one of the million and one tasks it does, and with that, all the now-unnecessary chrome?

I find it baffling how we still struggle with the basics of software development.

Yup, and at that point, surely a more sensible project would be to pluck everything out of VSCodium that isn't needed and rejig its UI...?

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

Re: Conflicted

Power management you say?

Well surely the solution is a radical new type of computer -- a grid network of 16 RP2040 chips backing a low power SoC "host". Full chips spin up and down to manage USB devices or specific apps.

If I want to revive mine (for camping trips) how can I get a replacement battery?

Hate to break it to you, but your b got flipped there.

Given that L33t H4><><0rz always fold the legs away, that just sounds like a handy weight reduction to me.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

Re: Still work in progress

> it has to parse the UFT-8 encoding,

Yeah, and that stray U+200F there just shows how problematic UTF-8 can be. ;-D

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Re: Maybe it's me being a bit dim

This is the quality of reader comment you won't find on the Daily Mail website.

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

Not just not neat, but you'll often hear people say "nobody uses it". You don't, pal -- different from "nobody".

And to add insult to injury, Microsoft's free Office Lens app will now let you capture a whiteboard neatly, with a minimum of fuss.

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

It was Jacob Rees-Mogg's influence that has led half of the UK to immediately think of the Tories when mandatory office-work policies are discussed.

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Re: Not the only company....

They work to the beat of the own drum.

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Re: Testing boundaries

...and I would further point out that what he's asking for isn't outside of Google's current technological capabilities: they've implemented right-to-be-forgotten for GDPR compliance, and they could (if they chose to) provide those same mechanisms to people outside of EU jurisdiction.

That's the angle I'd've been pushing if it was me: Google can take reasonable steps to mitigate harm, so they should take steps to mitigate harm. The fact that they implemented that for another jurisdiction is by-the-bye -- once the infrastructure exists, it's arguably a reasonable step.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Emoji free zone here

" I make a point of using words, speech and Emojis that align with 'my' interpretation of what they mean. As an English speaker, it's not my job or place to try to translate, or consider every possible permutation of how a given utterance could potentially be interpreted by a non-English speaker,"

If you don't want to adapt your English, then maybe you should learn their language yourself...?

Re: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes.

¯\_(¯)_/¯

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Really I don't get why virtualisation hasn't already solved this problem. It's always been possible to remote host niche apps and give users really basic workstations... or even dumb terminals.

Then you can reserve the lion's share of your silicon for the CAD users, rather than leaving most of your potential CPU cycles idle on the desk of desk jockeys who use Word, Excel and a browser...

Re: "the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator"

It's more than a little out of date -- about 15 years ago there was still a lot of software that worked this way, but practically nothing off the shelf needs admin rights now, and the problem is usually bespoke software.

Either way -- any business that still has software that needs admin rights to use is going to be something that IT have already tried to get the business to replace, and have failed. It'll be that same software that would wreck a Linux migration.

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

Re: ... these days I don't hesistate, I just take my toys and go

Indeed, like the parent who throws out your childhood memories during your first year of university...

Maybe he's saying he got shares in them himself, and that he's not an investor to be trusted...?

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

Re: A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

It was their choice in the first place.

I always felt freemium was a rug just waiting to be pulled, but that doesn't make it any less problematic when it happens.

Re: A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

Please supply a link to the GitLab repo for this highly useful project.

Re: Until...

Perhaps, but it doesn't break once a year, and their time limit here is 12 months.

Furthermore, if you're working in a relatively high-level language that's abstracted away inside another environment (eg JavaScript, Python) then version compatibility problems are mostly a matter for the maintainers of the environment, not individual projects.

There's a difference between someone throwing money at something to keep the price down and people working for free.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: Don't know about that

Muphry's Law strikes again!

Chromebooks are here to stay thanks to COVID, even though shipments crashed: IDC

Re: School's out for ever

It was, but they seem to have found that the Chromebook needs the perception of being a "real computer" to overcome perceptions of it being a "clumsy tablet with keyboard".

They'll be hoping that the path of least resistance sees customers sticking with Google-run services and that the Linux subsystem is hardly touched, much like how parents in the 80s and 90s bought computers because they could be used for educational purposes, but all us kids ever did was play games....

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

The article mentions a previous sacking as a potential red flag. If they would not have employed him had they followed the process that they should have, then the murder would not have happened had they followed the process that they should have, and is therefore a(n unforeseen) consequence of the negligence.

Compensation based on outcome is one thing, but we're also talking about punitive damages here, not only compensation, and in the case of drunk-driving, it's 100% a matter of punishment and not compensation.

We can be a bit inconsistent on that, and I'm not yet convinced that punishment based on outcome works -- if a particular form of negligence is something you learn you can get away with, the maximum penalty in the event of the worst possible outcome is not really going to constitute much of a disincentive...

We as a society have made a decision.

In acts of negligence, punishment is related to the consequences arising from the negligence, not the potential consequences nor the reasonably foreseeable consequences.

This is why the penalty for hitting a child while drunk-driving is higher than if you are caught drunk-driving without being in an accident.

In this case, the company were demonstrably negligent, and the consequences of that negligence were extreme. They got in the car drunk, as it were.

Re: $7.3 billion for a murder ?

The reason for this massive amount is that it's a jury trial. Jury awards are always reviewed and revised downwoards.

Re: $7.3 billion is heartless and cruel

What's often ignored in stories about US court actions is that the jury always finds a massive amount that is never upheld in the end. Juries are not qualified to make a sensible valuation, but a judge can only ever revise down, not up. The jury award is therefore a ceiling, not an actual award.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Expected more

"secular"....?

From the Latin meaning "of or related to the world/physical realm"...

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Re: The title is no longer required.

At fleabay rates, or are you fond of having two arms and two legs...?

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: Exchange

Numbers, no.

But I do find that Sharepoint quickly becomes impossible to use if you consider the full file path to be naming information, because Sharepoint doesn't (seem to) treat them as such in your search.

It also doesn't show the full path/breadcrumb trail (at least not how it's configured here) so all I get on my screen is the filename and the site name. I'm looking at 10 near-identical filenames on the same site just now.

Hate it hate it hate it.

Re: Exchange

Just as well.

I remember an email going round the UK arm of a multinational I used to work in, circa 2003, stating that our Exchange servers were running out of disk space and we all needed to urgently archive or delete old messages.

We dutifully went through our inboxes deleting our unneeded messages.

Cue a snippy email a few days later saying that we were getting dangerously close to our limits so we urgently needed to delete unwanted mails.

We'd all deleted over half the emails in our inboxes, as we could all see from our quotas, but the management were looking at server reports and were convinced we'd done nothing.

Turns out that having a few thousand employees delete the staff newsletters attached as bloated Word documents to the regular emails from senior management and HR doesn't make the damnedest bit of difference on deduped storage, and all it achieved was wasting several man-years of labour.

...which would all be forgivable if it wasn't a multinational IT services company, who made a lot of money managing Exchange servers for clients.

We could have saved a shedload of cash if they'd just given the advice at the beginning that they gave us the day before email would otherwise have died:

Archive all your individual email over x months old. (Cue everyone panicking about failing to follow procedure on filtering project-related correspondence into project mailboxes.)

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

Re: Hear that distant rumbling getting closer and closer ?

I would stick with ARM, because now.

RISC V is a long way from achieving the economies of scale of ARM in general, never mind the specific economies of scale of the RPi Foundation.

Re: Debug pins

Not exactly -- if you look at the board, there's a triangle leading to a rectangle right next to the wireless chip, where the debug pins previously were.

That's a clever third-party licensed antenna that works by having a tuned resonant cavity (there's fibreglass in there, but from the point of view of RF signals, it's effectively void). This first appeared on the Pi Zero W. It's called Niche and it's patented by ProAnt.

While signal lines running close to it may cause problems, the bigger issue here is simply that there's no space on the board at that end any more.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Re: I like 7Zip.

Or are you the Russian troll...?

Here's the thing... the troll factory wasn't just about getting out individual messages -- it was about changing the nature of debate for the worse. If we keep calling people Russian trolls for having views we find dubious, there can be no debate.

Re: I like 7Zip.

What in Paul's post looked like hypocrisy to you...?

Re: I like 7Zip.

The two are not mutually exclusive. I believe Blair and Bush should be put on trial in The Hague, because their actions were despicable.

Nothing the previous poster said suggested that the UK was whiter-than-white, so I don't think your apparent accusation of hypocrisy makes any sense.

Hell, if nothing else, calling out ongoing war crimes is far more urgent than discussing historical ones. This isn't a matter of letting people off, just I think stopping the killing is a different question from apportioning blame.

Giant outsourcer keeps work from home, loses tax breaks. Government says 'good riddance'

Re: Shocked

Well modern cloud computing is just network computing.

However, when it first came out, it was something different: it was network computing that the customer can't audit. Yes, literally.

I was working in a major B2B computer service company as it took off, and we had to keep explaining to our customers that the reason we didn't offer cloud services was that cloud computing left clients exposed because they couldn't do due diligence.

Meanwhile all the cloud gurus were crying "disruptive", and senior management at our clients were getting snippy about us not offering modern services.

Anyway, along came a couple of lawsuits dealing with questions of transparency and liability, and cloud operations switched to de facto data centre operations pretty much overnight, inviting clients in to view facilities, but they kept the "cloud computing" label.

And then all of us companies that ran traditional data centres just rebranded as "cloud"....

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

The last thing we want is a free market in food. Subsidies are in place because a true free market favours no excess production, leading to the possibility of catastrophic famine.

Look at how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has messed up food markets worldwide, and now imagine how utterly stuffed we'd all be (or not be, if we use a different definition of "stuffed"!) if the world's major markets didn't have subsidised overproduction.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

Microsoft decided error numbers were scary and got rid of them.

Great.

Unfortunately I found myself working in France and getting French error messages. My French was pretty good, but the error messages didn't mean much to me.

Then of course when you Googled it, you got less information because there was less people posting troubleshooting guides to the French version than the English version...

Block claims ex-employee downloaded customer data after leaving firm

I take issue with this part...

" Historically an employee would have a single account in a central authentication server like Microsoft's Active Directory that would give them access to networks and applications. When the employee left the company, all that was needed was disabling or deleting that single account.

"Today, however, an organization may have dozens of SaaS solutions in use, many with stand-alone authentication systems not tied to the company's internal authentication database," Clements told The Register. "

Historically, you'd have umpteen passwords and logins because most of the systems wouldn't connect to AD.

We're now entering a world of SSO, where almost everything can be authenticated with a single Microsoft or Google ID.

The danger isn't that we're increasing the number of logins, but that as the number of logins decrease, we're liable to get blasé and assume that one click kills all logins, when it doesn't.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

Well, most people around here are reading the Reg in the middle of the work day, so make of that what you will...

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

A good time travel should understand the problems of patenting time-travel, given the 20 year term limit on patents.

Patent a time-machine today, and I'll just pop out the back to get in one that I'll build 20 years from now in order to send back to my back garden, arriving today.

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: Concealed planning applications

"But in contrast with Amazon a datacentre, especially a dedicated one from a giant like FaceMeta, Google or Microsoft, doesn't offer much in the way of local jobs."

You've clearly not noticed that the article is about AWS -- Amazon Web Services -- building... datacentres.

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

Re: Pural [sic]

So we've got the UK, then we've got Australia, which are antipodes. That leaves 6 octopodes to account for -- where are they???

Horizon Workrooms promises a virtual future of teal despair

Re: My experience is different

Yes, and a side-effect of the pandemic is a long-overdue move towards shorter and more focused meetings, which I'm hoping will live on in the back-in-the-office world.

As for work meetings, well if I'm in a "webcams-off" meeting, I'd started lying on the floor to eliminate computer-based distraction and continue to listen, and then I moved to putting on my VR headset and using virtual desktop to stream the browser wirelessly to my headset halfway across the room. With the mouse and keyboard out of my hands, I was able to focus, despite being in a dull, uninteresting management briefing.

Oh, and some of those conference talks were monumentally tedious too.