Posts by J 3

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

The final standard

It's like the "proverbial they" say. There are 12 different ways of doing this thing, so let's create a universal standard that will replace them all! And now there are 13 different ways of doing that thing...

Google promises next week's cookie-crumbling Chrome 80 will only cause 'a very modest amount of breakage'

Re: What am I missing here?

Although now answering "yes" to the Nazi question might bring you to the attention of high officials in the administration since there are always positions open there...

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Philosophically, he said, it mixes state and configuration

That particular guy talking about philosophy is pretty rich, methinks...

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: In my 25 years in IT I learnt at least one thing.

Ha! Dammit. I never read it as you did, but now I can't un-see it!

Maybe because of the previous programs UCLUST (for clustering) and USEARCH (for searching), I have always read the name of this one U-PARSE... (all very powerful and popular bioinformatics programs, by the way)

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Oh, the irony...

"The new fork springs from a discussion on Gitlab"

OK then.

I don't really care what they call it, as long as it keeps on working. In my country people don'e even know what GIMP means --and the vast majority doesn't know it is an image editor either. And I am not so sure Glimpse is much better "marketing-wise"; sounds more like the name of an image viewer than of an editor, although I suppose that is already at least somewhat better.

Re: So, that would be everyone, right?

Are you retarded or do you just play one on the Internet, el kabong? Oops, sorry, I've heard that the R-word is taboo as well...

Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card

Huh?

Gee, crappy journalism. Someone should get a stern talking to from the editors --if there are any left. The Butler Eagle story (link helpfully provided by someone above) that seems to have been the base for this sorry excuse for an article explains much better what appears to have happened.

Only question still standing there is how exactly the perp knew Latimore's DOB and address. Maybe he lied to avoid further charges, but it is obvious that he lied, since he could not randomly make all of those up and be correct.

And we're back live with the state of the smartphone market in 2019. Any hope? Yeah, nah

Meh

I only bought a new phone in May 2018 because the one I had had for about 2 years already was stolen... Otherwise, it worked perfectly fine and did well everything I needed. I strongly suspect that would still be the case today. So why spend a wad of hard-earned, then?

Also, 1.5 billion phones is a lot, considering the world has less than 8 billion people, so not sure what they are complaining about...

Dear hackers: If you try to pwn a website for phishing, make sure it's not the personal domain of a senior Akamai security researcher

Cashdollar

When I first read that name, I thought that would be the script kiddie's moniker...

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

I had forgotten...

Thanks for reminding me Bing does (still) exist! Maybe I'll try it again one of these days. Ironic to say this here, but a monoculture is never a good idea.

Re: Bing Is Not Google

Hey, Google also has a real product to sell, and so it does! That product is YOU. Well, the users, not you specifically, in case you do not use anything Google-powered.

"how many pensioners have bought PCs"

For some reason I read that as "how many prisoners have bought PCs", and that sure led to a double take...

Florida man's deadliest catch forces police to evacuate Taco Bell

Homo floridianus

The gift that keeps on giving.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Vinyl 2

Gee, Dabs must either have access to a very crappy pick up or to some very crappy disks... I mean, I am no audiophile, even less some hipster who thinks everything old was better, but I must say: my 1981 Telefunken sound system (just a few years younger than me; inherited from my parents), with my well-looked after LPs, sounds really good. Sure, there is a little (quite) pop sometimes, but rarely (I clean the vinyl before dropping the expensive needle), mostly at the beginning, before the music starts. I do not use the stuff often, digital is much more practical, but sound bad it sure doesn't.

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

Forgotten fractions

OS is "only a fraction of the cost of making a phone", says article.

Of course it is a fraction, but which? 9/10? 17/13? 1/237?

[not sure whether to use the pedant or the troll icon... oh, well]

Ubuntu sends crypto-mining apps out of its store and into a tomb

New funding possibility?

Now, I've heard of web pages that mine while you are there. Then I thought: That, if done legally and with consent from the user, full transparency of course, could be an interesting way of micropayment. And now I see that the same could go for free (be it as in beer or speech) software.

Say, the page/program asks that the user provide the usage of a CPU core and some memory (I don't know how much would be necessary, I don't do mining, so that might make it prohibitive) for the use of the information/code. In programs, it could be for a set period, say, one year after installation, or a certain number of hours used.

If you do not like to donate that CPU time/memory usage, then click "no" and be redirected to another page or can't run the program.

Any thought for/against this possibly stupid idea, oh wise El Reg community? Has anyone out there actually tried doing this?

Re: Got to give this punk some credit.

"I'm writing this on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop"

Maybe that's your problem right there. For me, at least, the crazy memory leak started with 17.04, or was it 10? Can't remember, but I think it was 17.10. Well, whatever the version it was that first ditched Unity as the default.

For some reason, Gnome 3 leaks a bunch of memory. The browsers (and it does not matter whether I'm running Firefox or Chromium) leaks even more, to the point of swapping on my 6 GB RAM home computer.

My work computer, running 16.10, has no troubles. The browsers just crash. All. The. Time. Some system library, I suppose, because when one browser starts crashing, the other starts as well. But that is (?) another problem.

Dawn of The Planet of the Phablets in 2019 will see off smartphones

Not for me

Horse for courses, and the large horse is not for me... After my old phone gave up the ghost, I got a 5.5" (Moto G4 Plus), which is very nice in terms of power and functionality. Except I wish it was 4" or at most 4.5". Carrying the 5.5" phone in pant pockets is almost always terrible. The pants I have bought recently have somewhat shallow pockets, so the phone barely fits. I nearly always wear T-shirts, so no pockets there, but I also can't see any shirt whole pocket would accommodate this phone in a non-ridiculous looking way. Unless you are a very large person, I guess.

I'm 44 but with good eyesight, but that is irrelevant, I think. If your eyesight is too bad to see well what's on a phone held a foot from your face, consult your optometrist. It might be time for a new prescription.

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

And we know, we just KNOW, that, if we throw a certain gadget/cable/adapter away today, in about a week's time there will finally come the perfect opportunity, nay, the absolute NEED, to use the damn thing...

(That also goes for coats. Like the heavy ones I brought, from my many years in the US, to Brazil.)

Two things will survive a nuclear holocaust: Cockroaches and crafty URLs like ғасеьоок.com

"finally bother to address the issue"

I see what you did there...

Re: Fix it in-browser

"highlighting characters which do not belong in a page according to the page declared language and encoding is not a bad idea"

Probably overkill too. Should be done only if said characters are in a link (e.g. external href and mailto), no?

Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming

Re: Who didn't see this coming?

My wife, who is a professional graphic designer, got fed up with Adobe and switched (well, is switching, since not all programs are ready, apparently) to Affinity programs. Old school model, pay $50 and that's it. She is very happy with the programs she's used so far, like Affinity Designer --she says it it much more light weight, does pretty much everything that Illustrator does, and in some cases more. I hope more people will try it, so Adobe gets some real competition.

By the way, I have no affiliation or whatever with Affinity. Just married to a happy customer.

Ubuntu 17.10: We're coming GNOME! Plenty that's Artful in Aardvark, with a few Wayland wails

Re: Unity, Unity, Unity......

Did you mean Synaptic is not working? (genuine question, maybe there is something out there called Synapse)

I myself prefer Synaptic to anything else, so that bummed me. There is a workaround though; run:

xhost +si:localuser:root

After that, Synaptic works, reportedly only during the current login session. I haven't rebooted yet, so I haven't tested that.

Re: anything but Unity

"nice features if you had a personal supercomputer, but the result for me was slow bloatware"

Either you are trying to run it on a Pentium II or something was very wrong with your install. Until this morning I was running Unity on a 7 year old computer; still run it on a 6 year old Asus "netbook", without problem. Admittedly, both have (cheap, consumer-level) SSDs.

Re: The year of Linux everywhere except the desktop

"switched to Windows 10 (with Cortana disabled, of course). It's safe now, kids. Come on out."

If I enjoyed throwing money away on useless (for me) stuff, I would definitely switch, thanks for the tip!

Also, I have used Windows 10 while fixing a relative's laptop; I shudder just from recalling it.

Funny how my relatives whose laptops had Ubuntu installed never call me though...

Re: Unity, Unity, Unity......

Uhm... I don't think I understood what you meant by "because I want the desktop primarily as a place to put files and directories [Unity]'s as unsuited to me as KDE would be to him", since I've been putting files and directories on my Unity desktop for many years now. At least I was until this morning, when I updated to 17.10, not knowing what awaited me... and still am, since they are still there (at first, I thought Ubuntu had just an updated Unity version, to be honest; then the problems started).

Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain...

Re: Bit academic

"most informed people have stopped using it anyhow"

I am afraid "informed people" is far, far from the majority of the populace.

Crackas With Attitude troll gets five years in prison for harassment

>Who or what is a crackas?

Isn't that one of those things that get released? I remember hearing: "Release the Cracka!" or something...

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

BOFH

Ha, there was a BOFH episode a few weeks back that was pretty much this, but with signs reversed --users complaining about a change that they think was made, but wasn't...

Thanks someone up there for the Hawthorne effect, I now know its name. Happens a lot in academia too; bioinformatics grad students complain program is not running, blah blah, so you go sit there right next to them... and it "magically" works now. "But I did exactly the same thing before!", they say. Uh-huh, I say. :-)

US prosecutors drop demand for 1.3m IP addresses of folks who visited anti-Trump site

Ok...

Let's see how hard the DoJ will go after the Nazi organizers.

Ubuntu UNITY is GNOME-MORE: 'One Linux' dream of phone, slab, desktop UI axed

A Linux desktop with the look and fell of OSX?

Fine, as long as I don't have to use it.

Grumpy Trump trumped, now he's got the hump: Muslim ban beaten back by appeals court

Re: Such a loser...

You forgot to end with: Sad.

Life after antivirus: Reinventing endpoint security

Gee, I gave up in the middle of this text. Boring as hell PR thing, that is what it sounded like to me.

Google has unleashed Factivism to smite the untruthy

Leveling down to the lowest common denominator

As someone posted above, I also care about facts. Many people do.

Sure, quite a few people do not care, and no amount of fact-checking and/or logic and/or pleas for human decency will make a difference to them. Fine. It is always been like that, and always will. That does not mean we should then just give up our will to live, go live in a dumpster, and all that. After all, what's the point, right? No.

There are lots of people out there, all those who are not political junkies, who only started paying attention to this circus after the first presidential debate. They might have "heard" rumors on their Facebook timeline or Twitter or whatever that there was craziness going on, but they might not have really read anything until now, or paid attention to the candidates. They are NOT saturated in this like I am, for example. Maybe they do not know one cannot literally acid-wash emails -- for all they know, one can, who knows. Some might be even more uninformed and actually be ready to believe that Hillary has been fighting a less than 10 year old organization "all her adult life", even if she somehow is a co-founder of said org (huh?).

Sometimes fact-checking seems pointless, and it sure is if you pick the right scenario. That does not mean that it is without value.

But yes, "who fact-checks the fact-checkers" is a VERY relevant thing to keep in mind. Since this is all a bit new, maybe mechanisms (not necessarily tech) will pop out, or have already, to establish who is trustworthy (always under revision) and who is not, just like it is done with polling.

Unimpressed with Ubuntu 16.10? Yakkety Yak... don't talk back

Re: Have you tried . . . ?

...thinking before writing?

I know, right? Only thing I ever used the Software thing for was to immediately install Synaptic ono a fresh Ubuntu. Just today, coincidentally, this damn Ubuntu Software crap took a few seconds of my life. A collaborator brought her Ubuntu laptop over to solve a scientific problem of ours here. Long story short(er), I decided to install a program that needed Java. There was none. Searching for "java" in Ubuntu Software returned a long list of programs that depend on Java... but not the OpenJDK or anything useful like that. Not willing to spend even more time trying to figure out whether (and if yes, how) that damn thing could show everything that is in the repos, I just installed Synaptic instead.

Hopefully the new Ubuntu Software will ease that pain -- mind, I will probably still use Synaptic anyway, but at least I probably (hoepefully?) won't have to install it in other people's computer when I help them...

Days are numbered for the Czech Republic

Czechia

Interestingly, a Russian friend of mine used Czechia to refer to that country a few months ago, when I told him I was going there... Funny thing, serendipity.

FBI electronics nerd confesses: I fed spy tech blueprints to China

So...

So, this FBI employee was traveling around the world, exchanging sensitive data over unsecured channels, and all that, and HE had to disclose the info to his spook employers? Uh... I thought I heard these fed guys now know our every move and conversation and blah blah blah... But they did not catch a careless spy in their own midst? Hm, weird. Either they are not as skilled and powerful as we are led to believe, or there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Microsoft to rip up P2P Skype, killing native Mac, Linux apps

Re: Of dubious jurisdiction

"Argentina (or is it Brazil?) has an ongoing fight with Whatsapp over encrypted messages."

I don't know about Argentina, but Brazil judges sure keep trying to block Whatsapp every once in a while.

Dying! Yahoo! writes! off! half! of! the! $1bn! it! paid! for! Tumblr!

Desperation

So that is why damn Yahoo Mail is playing videos automatically on the page that loads after emptying the spam folder? I think there is a special place in hell for people who design pages that have auto-playing videos.

OK, I don't think there is such a silly thing as hell, but it is at times like this that I wish there was.

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

Re: Netbooks

Er... I wouldn't use such blanket statements. My circa 2011 Asus netbook has an Atom (N550) processor and it has been happily running 64-bit Linux distros from the very beginning.

Not smiling for the camera? Adobe's Creative Cloud suite can fix that

Mouth...

OK, mouth "control" to get more smile. Hm. Assuming it works, a smile that only involves the mouth (or will this also automatically change the rest of the face, specially eyes?) will not look creepy and/or forced at all. Sure not. Uh huh.

Google to kill passwords on Android, replace 'em with 'trust scores'

Very hard to imagine scenario

Except for the facial recognition part, how would the following, very unlikely (not) scenario play out?

Your phone is there, sitting on the coffee table at home. So it is near all the Wifi, Bluetooth whatevers you have. It is connected to a known network, of course. Location says it is home, obviously.

Then your 6-year old comes along and decides to play with your phone... What could go wrong?

Or worse, someone mad at you comes along and finds the phone... With malicious intent. Could a photograph of you fool the facial recognition, by the way, or is that already solved?

Would the typing pattern criterion take care of this? How? Would we have to provide typing samples every time to authenticate? Sounds very practical (not).

Edit: forgot about the voice recognition thing, too. So this scheme would have to use everything to be secure? Well, we'll see how this works in real life (because in marketing land it will always be rainbows and unicorns).

Got a Fitbit? Thought you were achieving your goals? Better read this

And it's not just heart rate either...

I have had a Charge for about 1.5 years now, and it is very prone to "false positive steps", lets call them. When you are actually walking, it is accurate. But ride the car/bus with it on and it will measure hundreds, if not thousands of steps. Tapping your chairs arm also counts steps -- sometimes I get the vibration signaling 10,000 when I'm sitting down, and had been for a while.

OK, I understand that it might be hard to differentiate vibrations due to walking from those of car riding (although regularity of steps would be expected in the former but not in the latter, I expect), but their app, which is far from stellar too by the way, should obviously have a function where you can log such things (as you can many others). Say, two hour car trip? Then zero steps from time X to time Y. Same thing if you were sitting down for a couple of hours, etc. Very simple, isn't it? To me, it goes to show that the guys who make the device do not actually wear it.

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

Wait, what!?

"Discovering without any surprise that my nine-year-old username and password were still valid, still granting me admin rights that I had no rights to any more"

You remember your password from nine years ago!? I believe that was the most (the only?) amazing, unbelievable even, part of this story... I can barely remember passwords I had to create last week!

Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows

Re: Embrace....

Embrace and extend, sure, possible. But how can they extinguish free software?

Gnome shrinks the upgrade footprint with version 3.20 release

installed when the system's not running

Wait, what?

Malware menaces poison ads as Google, Yahoo! look away

To be fair, I'm paying at the moment by not blocking adverts too aggressively

I was too, until recently. As said in the bootnote to the article, and I agree, these sites need some revenue source. But I got fed up with The Register locking up my Firefox browser, sending RAM usage through the roof, stuff like that. I don't visit the site too regularly, so I can't estimate when it really started, but I first saw it happen in mid-August, I believe. If I loaded an article an very quickly pressed ESC to stop the loading, whatever code that was going to be loaded did not have time to load, and I could read and not have the browser lock for minutes at a time (until it showed a dialogue about that, which was useless). If I wasn't so agile, then I was screwed. In all article pages here.

So I installed NoScript, and that problem disappeared. The footer bar right now says that it blocked 20 scripts. Really? WHT? I know some are for El Reg's own operations (the page looks and behaves differently in some little aspects), but come on...

My daily online newspaper of choice (where this locking problem sometimes also occurred) is even worse: I see between 50 and 80 blocked scripts reported by NoScript. This MUST end, really.

"The Register for its part goes to some length to pull ads from reputable entities."

OK, but even if they are "reputable", in the sense that they are not serving purposeful malware... do they know how to code, or are their scripts going to lock my browser if I have the misfortune of trying to read an article here??

Apple's iPad Pro: We're making a Surface Pro WITH A STYLUS over Steve Jobs' DEAD BODY

Re: Value?

Yeah, but it is an APPLE keyboard, so people will buy it, and then rave about how so much better than anything else it is.

Budget UHD TVs arrive – but were the 4Kasts worth listening to?

pick this screen up for £500 on Black Friday

Ye folks over there in Blighty celebrate Thanksgiving like the colonials, who'd have thought!