Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Adding up your timesheet

0730, ... until ... 1630 ..., 8 hours later.

Hmmm.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Re: To recreate the ‘green-screen’ olden days in your terminal/console window:

I mean, I upvoted, but I have Konsole set to use 12pt Hack font in green-on-black and that's olden enough for me. I'm afraid Terminus is just a step too far back in time! Next, someone will introduce phosphor fade...

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Innocent victim in cross-fire

First of all, "Tell us Once" is 'a service that lets you report a death to most government organisations in one go'. It doesn't belong to the Department for Work and Pensions.

Secondly, it is in fact an attempt by The Bureaucracy to alleviate the pain of the bereaved having to call many elements of the government to report their loss, and in general it is a Good Thing. I say this as a relatively recent user.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

The bit of the brochure which gives me the shivers:

> Stored program operation means greater flexibility as all programs may be internally self-modifying.

Self-modifying code *can* be very space-efficient, with small op-code sets like this, I suppose, but all I can say is that I tried it once (6502 assembler) and it almost scrambled my brain.

Alright, which one of you at the back said "Almost?!?"

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Ah....backups....

> No-one said anything about restore.

Similarly, I was firmly told that I needed to ask for permission to undertake some course of action I wanted to take (can't remember the details). When challenged later, I said "Well, I did ask for permission. No-one said anything about waiting for it to be granted."

Yet another UK government seeks to reform GDPR

Re: BS.

Well, what I get bored with is endlessly clicking 'Reject All' on cookie checks, followed by 'Object All' for the amusingly named 'Legitimate Interest'. If I don't get the option, I'll just have to manually delete the ****ing cookies, I suppose.

Pixel perfect Ghostpulse malware loader hides inside PNG image files

Windows key...

This is where the telephone scammers fail first when they start down the road of trying to get me to install TeamViewer or similar RDP software - "Please press the Windows key and R".

Me: I don't have a Windows key. (My keyboard is now forty years old)

Scammer: ???

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Re: Inter-Sheet

> Before the PC

I had a spreadsheet on my Commodore 64, but I can't for the life of me remember what it called itself. I remember loading it from cassette tape every month to check my payslip, which was calculated with bizarre additions and deductions. I've probably still got the tape somewhere...

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

"Computer" is indeed an important word, it's right there in the title of the Act, and *nowhere* does it give an indication of what Parliament thought a computer actually is. It gives the impression that they might have been thinking of digital electronic computers, which would have been a good start, but as it stands it probably takes in everything from nomograms and slide rules to AWS/Azure data centres.

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

Repurposing

Don't forget the magnets, too. They can come in handy.

>checking...<

> I probably don't need the number of working hard drives I have.

$ lsblk | grep -E "^sd[a-z]" | wc -l

9

Some of them are mirrors, though!

re English terminology, please?

Newport's in Wales, so a well-known translation app suggests "safle tirlenwi".

Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware

Air gapped still needs the gap bridging, sometimes

OK, you have a risk profile for your IT that means it should be air-gapped from the Internet. Great. That stops you being affected by some widespread zero-day. But you have to build and maintain the operating systems on the "safe" side of the air gap, and get operational data in, and products out. That means that the air gap isn't just some fresh air - it's a carefully managed interface to The Great Outside. The operational data coming in must be sanitized, on trusted media, and the products out must not give away attack vectors to bad actors who might get hold of it.

If part of your careful management is to carry data over the gap with USB devices, then gluing up the ports isn't useful. Perhaps a USB driver stack that works only with specific whitelisted device IDs, and special control measures on how the whitelist is managed? Big Red Klaxon for when a black-listed device is plugged in? ==>

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: A sense of priorities

Absolutely. I did put "e.g.", rather than i.e. I have myself been known to refer to KDE/GNU/Linux when I wanted to make clear what was running the GUI.

Re: Even if British, up close and personal are things more passionate than passive impersonal ‽ .

Whooosh. Dr Fowler was quoting something written in or before 1926; even if he had made up the illustrative sentence, it would only be relevant for its grammatical structure, not for 21st century geopolitics.

Re: I'm British...

For all the people wanting to catch up somewhat painlessly, even entertainingly, with English grammar, I recommend buying a copy of 'A Dictionary of Modern English Usage' by H.W. Fowler. First published in 1926, though mine is a 2nd edition, published 1968. So, correctly named for certain values of 'modern', then, but it has been issued in several new editions since.

Having the book, you can always look up a particular topic, or you can open it at random, and enjoy whatever your eye lights upon.

Here is the 5th entry under passive disturbances, reproduced for your pleasure:

5. The impersonal passive --- it is felt, it is thought, it is believed, etc. --- is a construction dear to those who write official and business letters. It is reasonable enough in statements made at large --- It is believed that a large green car was in the vicinity at the time of the accident. / It is understood that the wanted man is wearing a raincoat and a cloth cap. But when one person is addressing another it often amounts to a pusillanimous shrinking from responsibility. (It is felt that your complaint arises from a misunderstanding. / It is thought that ample provision has been made against this contingency).

The person addressed has a right to know who it is that entertains a feeling he may not share or a thought he may consider mistaken, and is justly resentful of the suggestion that it exists in the void. On the other hand, the impersonal passive should have been used in For these reasons the effects of the American recession upon Britain will be both smaller and shorter than were originally feared. Were should be was (i.e. than it was originally feared they would be).

Re: A sense of priorities

Yabbut, for Linus, Linux === kernel. Userland is foreign. This is why the pedants among us will refer to, e.g. GNU/Linux.

Re: Simple Perfectly Rare and Raw Uncommon Sense

> nicely put

Up to a point. 'to clearly not misunderstand' is an egregiously split infinitive, and there's a mismatched single-quote, too. Someone needs to tweak the prompt template.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: No security updates

Well, I upvoted that post before I saw the joke icon. You keep the upbovote, but IMHO it's not a joke, at all. A server connected solely to clients on an internal network, as here, is pretty damn secure. If you don't need any new functionality introduced by updates, then updates are nugatory. Finite state machine just goes on changing between one of its finite states and the next one ...

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

Re: Your mileage may vary

Here in the south-west of England we have a lot of single track roads. Not wide enough for two cars to pass, and there are few passing places, and stone-built overgrown hedges 6-8 feet high on each side. The frequent bends are such that you have no clue there is an oncoming vehicle until it appears 20 metres in front of you. Reversing is frequent; one journey I undertook recently, admittedly on back lanes and to avoid flooding elsewhere, involved a total of at least half a mile of reversing.

On the other hand, it won't be a problem for Cybertruck. It wouldn't fit between the hedges.

Re: Steer by wire

Everything on a fly-by-wire aircraft is at least double-redundant, and inspected every few hundred hours of operation. I don't know if that is the case with steer-by-wire/brake-by-wire automobiles, but it probably should be.

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

Re: Opportunity

In what way, do tell? This is just like the

3. ...

4. PROFIT!

meme. Wasn't funny for very long back then, either.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Re: been there.... but not really there

If you've ever actually given a manager a bollocking for breaching security regulations, we'd all love to hear about it. I came across plenty of opportunities, but I can judge the pros and cons of that course of action.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: ... almost there....

Huh. Used to be Lycopersicon esculentum when I had a job that cared about these things. Bloody taxonomists moving my mental furniture around!

Cards Against Humanity deals SpaceX a $15M lawsuit over Texas turf tangle

Don't be koi, now

... it's not likely eel do that, is it. Brill idea.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: vi vs emacs?

EVE - the extensible VAX editor. I liked it a lot. It was extensible because it was written in an accessible language of its own, the Text Processing Utility (TPU). This meant that one could write arbitrarily complex or specialized processing routines right inside the editor.

Cops across the world arrest 51 in orchestrated takedown of Ghost crime platform

Re: 200kg ? Is that all ?

I asked "Who gives a stuff about market prices?", and apparently the answer is you, @elsergiovolador. Anyone would have thought you had a vested interest.

Re: 200kg ? Is that all ?

Who gives a stuff about the market prices? This isn't some effort to manipulate the market price, it's an effort (seemingly somewhat successful) to dismantle the supply of drugs, and the violent criminality that goes along with it.

Cybercrooks strut away with haute couture Harvey Nichols data

Re: once again fully secure

You beat me to it. +1

Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line

Re: The Stasi ...

I guess everyone here has read The Circle (see review of the movie version on El Reg). The revulsion that the novel produced in me made it impossible for me to watch the movie. I got a bit of vomit in the back of my mouth just now when reading about this Ellison farrago.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Easy fix

In any foreseeable situation where the USAAF is trying to fly an F-22 into Chinese airspace without being detected, the proverbial has already hit the fan, and Starlink has been turned OFF.

AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords

re shockingly good at organic chemistry

Somebody let Beilstein into the training data!

Die Beilstein-Datenbank ist eine Datenbank für organische Chemie, eine der größten Faktendatenbanken der Welt und ein Standardwerk der chemischen Literatur. [emphasis added]

When I used Beilstein it came in dead tree form, and was measured in metres of bookshelf required. It once took me literally half a day to re-order the volumes on the shelves when the collection had been untended for a while.

I've just checked, and it hasn't been published in book form since 1998, when it had reached 503 volumes with 440,814 pages.

Source: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/about-us/history/

Re: "Best to just suck it up and master Delvish"

>clatter< >clatter<

... I can see that we are going to have to work on this relationship ...

Russia's top-secret military unit reportedly plots undersea cable 'sabotage'

Late to the party

Sorry for the delay. I think the downvotes (none from me) might have been to do with the perception that your comment advocated less dependence on the renewable power generation that entails the vulnerable transmission infrastructure.

There's a threat from hostile disruption of the infrastructure, and then there's the global threat from fossil fuel generation. The balance of responses to those threats is difficult to strike.

Re: which nation spans oceans?

The Republic of France, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland immediately come to mind.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

> a way to print a bunch of symbols to represent swearing like they did in the old Asterix comics...

Did you know that there is a word for that 'bunch of symbols'? The string of characters is a grawlix, plural grawlixes, probably pronounced "%*&!@~"

Intel Arrow Lake to be made elsewhere as 20A process node canned

More power to their elbow...

... well, current, anyway. Twenty amps is a mighty flow of electronic goodness, I can see why they would want to drop it to eighteen amps.

Ohhh, right. You meant to say 20Å or better still 2nm, which someone will now point out sometimes means two nautical miles.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

vi ~/.bashrc

:wq

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Trivia

I think you missed the entire point of the article. Ah, well.

Testing the tone...

I read it as sardonic rather than mean-spirited, and indeed it *might* reflect some purchasing decisions in certain households.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Re: Copilot accuses reporter of crimes

Yeah, pretty impressive. The middle minifig appears to have three hands... or perhaps a prehensile knob? Don't remember that in the original series.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Pub at Fridays?

I think you probably meant ...local pub at brunch-time on Fridays.

See you there.

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Re: Priorities?

> we are now at the stage where we are doubting even legitimate emails.

...aaand you're trained. Congratulations, collect your certificate at going-home time. You should doubt all emails initially, and know how to identify the legitimate ones to eliminate reasonable doubt.

Deadbeat dad faked his own death by hacking government databases

Re: If he's declared himself dead

He was charged with aggravated identity theft. Perhaps, in addition to impersonating the medical staff, he also attempted to acquire another identity? I haven't read the DOJ article linked to in TFA, just guessing. It's equally likely that he just didn't think it through. => icon

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

Root causes should be at the root

From the PDF:

> As we enter this code, the address of the 20-input pointer array is held in register rax, and register r11 indicates that the input to be retrieved is at index 0x14, i.e., the 21st element.

Surprise! The 21st element does not point to valid memory, and global misery ensues.

However, that does not seem to be me to be adequate for a document calling itself Root Cause Analysis. How did r11 come to hold an out of bounds index? That would seem to be a rootier cause than jumping through the pointer that doesn't exist.

Disclaimer: the last time I tried to work out what the hell was going on by means of referring to assembler listing, it was MCS 6502 code. I'll get me coat, if I can remember where I left it.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

+1

upvoted for the nostalgia prompt for Quattro Pro. I see that it's still being sold in some form as part of WordPerfect Office.

Re: Speed

> a way to make it run as slowly as it did on my Z80 based CP/M machine?

Yes, there is. Well, maybe not quite as slow as CP/M on a Z80. I've just compiled and installed dosbox-x in order to have a play with the WordStar archive, and there is a CPU>Emulate CPU speed menu setting, the lowest of which is an 8088 XT 4.77MHz.

We may have slashdotted Sawyer's site at sfwriter.com, though. Currently downloading the WS7 archive at less than 200 KiB/s - unless that's all part of the retro vibe, of course!

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: Missing the point?

So, that would be "something almost, but not quite entirely, unlike C"?

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

Linux re-boot [was Re: BSOD Screensaver]

Alt-SysRq-B will instantly reboot many Linux boxes (depending on the kernel configuration). You can achieve a more or less controlled reboot by remembering the word BUSIER, but using it backwards, i.e. by pressing Alt-SysRq-R, Alt-SyRq-E ... Alt-SysRq-B. Leave a little time between each invocation for the kernel to do its thing if you're not working from a console.

All you need to know: Documentation for sysrq.c

Firefox's Mozilla follows Google in losing trust in Entrust's TLS certificates

Re: "not meaningfully different from the previous commitments [..] given in 2020"

Troll duly fed.