Posts by captain veg

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: Booting DOS?

The BIOS stuff can only be correct for the very early stage of bootstrapping since DOS could, and did, replace the BIOS routines with code loaded off the boot medium (i.e IBMBIO.COM or IO.SYS).

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Re: A first?

Windows 2000 was supposed to be the unified replacement for both the NTDLL and VMM/VxD lines, but they couldn't get it out in time to justify the millenium theme. Hence the last gasp of the 9x series, with a different Y2K-themed name.

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Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

degrees Kelvin

There are no degrees. Just Kelvin.

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One furlong = 220 yards.

The yard, since 1959, is defined as exactly 0.9144 metric metres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound

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Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Re: Disrepute

I suppose it depends on whether they can reach the letterbox slot.

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Re: Is this not "nominative fair use"?

Trademark != Copyright.

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Linux distros drop their feelgood hits of the summer

Re: The feel good hit of the summer

More likely QOTSA.

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BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Re: Iconic

> open windows and boot it

Ah yes, my first car, a 1966 Beetle, was like that. Until I replaced the rotted-out exhaust system and oil-soaked clutch.

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Iconic

IconicSounds Sport, available for a one-time charge of £99, "plays BMW engine sound inside the vehicle."

Alternatively, bounce up and down on the seat while making "brrm brrrrm" noises.

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If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Resistance is futile

I bought new a couple of years ago. So far as I can tell, it's not connected to anything. Is that not new enough?

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Re: designed not to work unless connected

Ah, but connected to what? How about an air-gapped LAN?

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Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

Always 29 February 1980 for me. I find that quite easy to remember, even though it's a lie.

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Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

Because the combination of UK postcode and date of birth is sufficient to uniquely identify you to within a hair's breadth of certainty.

Oh, I see what you mean.

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Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

the problem is...

Using a web browser supplied by an advertising business. It's like buying a car from Exxon and being surprised by the stupidly high fuel consumption.

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Microsoft to kill off Outlook REST API v2.0 in 2024 – for real this time

Re: meh

Those hoops have already been jumped through some time ago, and it works fine even with MFA. I don't see anything new there, but thanks anyway.

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meh

As long as Evolution EWS keeps working I'm good.

It will, won't it?

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Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: you'd think they could've at lease increased the ctrl-z history beyond "1"

The thing about Notepad is that it's really a very thin application layer around the intrinsic Windows edit control. The limitations, like only one level of undo, are features of that control. Similarly the lack of ability to handle Unix line endings, but with a twist: in multiline mode the Windows edit control considers CR/LF and CR alone differently. The latter is a soft break.

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Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Umm. Mainframe?

IBM referred to them as "mid-range". Later ones were powered by Intel Pentium processors and could run Windows NT. Can't imagine why.

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How to ask Facebook's Meta to not train its AI models on some of your personal info

Re: @imanidiot

Whenever anyone points a camera at me I always explain that I don't want them posting any images of me on Freakbook.

Often they treat me like some kind of lunatic asylum escapee.

It doesn't actually matter. My own parents have put pictures of me (and my siblings) on Fuckbuk already. OK, I was a child, but the point of facial recognition, a field in which Filchfuck is a leader, is that it doesn't rely on how you look at any particular moment in time.

I'm Face'd.

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Re: And why should we tell Meta anything?

I've never been on Farcebok, and never intend to.

At work we had to get some data off a Faecesbook API, which required an FB account. Naturally we made one up.

It then asked for a mobile phone number. None of us wanted to part with such PII, so we asked a European colleague (no longer working with us) with a corporate mobile. This was accepted.

It then asked for photo ID. Obviously none of us was going to provide that, but an American colleague (no longer working with us) was prepared to send a driving licence scan.

They can ask for ID, but it doesn't have to be you. So far as I know, it doesn't even have to be valid.

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Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: It's not a talent pool.

Possibly a damp patch. If you squint.

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Re: Question

I actually said that some of them might be able to "organise a drinks event in a winery". And that this was before the Brexit purges.

That all of them might might be self-serving was always a probability.

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Definition

chancer

noun UK informal

See Grant Shapps

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Re: Question

Brexit.

Among the parliamentary Conservative party, then and still in power, were, perhaps surprisingly, a fair number that could competently organise a drinks event in a winery. Because they were sane and reasonable, they had reasoned that Brexit was a terrible idea, and so had to be expunged. This left swivel-eyed loons, morons and those of sufficiently pliable morals that pretending to be converted in pursuit of (continued) high office was worth lying about it. Shapps is exhibit A.

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Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

A trademark has to be asserted by its holder. Someone else using the same mark infringes nothing at all unless the holder can show that they were attempting to pass themselves off as the holder.

There is no such thing as trademark violation.

Some territories allow trademarks to be registered. Look out for the (R) make rather than TM. It's something different.

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prevent a trademark from becoming a generic term

Quite so. However, this is a commercial imperative, not a legal obligation.

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With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

Re: snarky

The Register is a British technology news website

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expat

"Even so, whether you're an expat, an occasional traveler, or you just need to sometimes look something up in a foreign language, this is a very useful feature"

I think you will find that "traveller" contains two Ls, occasional or not.

Speaking as an "expat", a.k.a. economic migrant, it really gets on my tits when a browser unilaterally decides that I'm too stupid to understand the language of a web site to which I voluntarily navigated, often because it primarily serves the country in which I find myself. Oddly enough, living here I've picked up some of the lingo, sufficient that I can tell that the machine translation offered is decidedly defective.

For the outliers, a right-click and choose the "translate" option works as well as can be expected. Don't ram it down my throat.

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Re: Drool

I kinda wish that Opera ASA had done the decent thing and open-sourced Presto,

I realise that von Tetzchner wasn't personally responsible for that, but, having previously overseen the creation of a very complete browser from scratch, it's a bit disappointing that he couldn't find the resources to make a new one not dependent on a rapacious ad-slinger, let alone whatever it is that the Mozilla foundation has become today.

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Microsoft whips out probe after Windows 11 users suffer the blue-screen blues

Re: undirected rambling

You are, of course, correct.

On the off chance that someone else might find themselves in same predicament, and that a particularly clueless search engine had brought them here, I had better state that the problem was down to a change in VirtualBox. If you created the VM more than a certain amount of time ago (sorry, dunno how much) then the setting for the VM's "Paravirtualization Interface" parameter in System -> Acceleration has now to be "Legacy" rather than "Default".

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undirected rambling

I just installed VirtualBox 7 and now my main Windows 10 instance won't start, instead just sitting there bleating "Preparing Automatic Repair".

I also have VMs containing Android, Haiku and a different Windows 10 installation. They all work just fine.

Bugger.

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Chinese vendor apologizes for claiming Microsoft open source code was its own product

Re: Oh, Surprise.

> the rest of the world, where reward inspires incentive, inspires creativity and invention and innovation

Mostly it rewards turning up at the office and sycophancy to the boss.

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Re: "with a small amount of modification and some functions added"

A good programmer would have, you know, actually programmed a solution.

Copy and paste is not programming.

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USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: It never went away!

> Winsock API anyone?

Still there, just built into Windows. So no more Trumpet required.

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Meta lets Code Llama run riot under almost-open terms

"Meta's "open approach" to AI is closed to competition"

I recently watched a TV documentary about llamas in the wild. Apparently a dominant male will chase after interlopers and attempt to bite them in the testicles. I should imagine that gets the point across.

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Europe's tough new rules for Big Tech start today. Is anyone ready?

deliberate misinformation is not free speech

See defamation laws, for example, or the fact that you can't market weedkiller as an energy drink.

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Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Hmmmm...

> But no, Microsoft knows better.

The trouble is that many (most?) ordinary mortals *don't* know any better. Their first, and possibly only, exposure to email came courtesy of Microsoft.

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Re: Wrapping at column 78

Opera M2 would take care of it perfectly.

Also it had the best search indexing of any mail client I've used.

I wish it were still maintained.

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Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

minimal partitioning

If for some reason I could only have two partitions I would drop swap (use a swap file instead) and keep home separate.

Mind you, where possible I prefer to have home on an entirely separate drive.

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Fauna Query Language tamed to appeal to developers

Re: One too many query languages

> What sort of a bastard offspring is that?

A bastard one.

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Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

Re: blocking off google

Probably need a sudo (or similar) too.

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Re: El Reg has possibly better ways to track anyway

I would have thought that analysing the server logs would tell you everything you want to know. TBH I've never got the point (for website owners) of GA, other than slight convenience.

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Veilid: A secure peer-to-peer network for apps that flips off the surveillance economy

There are many. All the ones that no one uses any more.

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> This means XChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Elliptic curve25519 for public-private-key authentication and signing, x25519 for DH key exchange, BLAKE3 for cryptographic hashing,

Let me know when they get to BLAKE7.

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Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Opera's mouse gestures

I got so accustomed that I still try to use them in other less enlightened browsers and get annoyed when nothing happens but a context menu popping up. They're pretty much useless on a trackpad, though, or anything other than an actual mouse with at least two buttons.

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Re: engineers

> none of them used outlining in their docs

Back in the early nineties I introduced Windows PCs to my workplace, an IBM agency producing RPG code for AS/400.

Quite a lot of the RPG-ers had been so scarred by their entirely record-oriented world that they inserted their own line breaks in word-processor documents, manually reformatting should any edits be required.

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full screen

Before I parted with money to have it removed, the free version of classic Opera, way back in time, was "ad supported", meaning that there was a banner embedded in the window chrome. Quite a lot of the time this showed cartoons, the author of which was presumably hoping that you would buy some, but that I was happy to enjoy for free. But when filled with the usual commercial dross I tended to go full screen, which removed all the window decoration including the ad banner. And, indeed, the useless vertical scrollbar that IE used to insist on showing even when all the content fitted vertically. It remained eminently usable in this mode because of Opera's mouse gestures and copious keyboard shortcuts. Never subsequently bettered for usability, in my opinion.

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Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: The best

> How many home users do you know who install firmware updates?

The painful reality is that some PCs are slapped together out of whatever junk happened to be cheap at that time and include a buggy BIOS which will only boot the preinstalled Windows. For these cases, flashing a new firmware image can be the only way to get a non-Windows system up and running.

Fortunately this seems to be less common now than it used to be.

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Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Re: 1984 all over again

Slightly more recently, Itanic had 128 general purpose registers.

Turned out that nobody wanted to rewrite their software to take advantage of them.

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Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

You'd be surprised how many UN bodies are responsible for international regulation. The ITU, for one example, or (more locally specific) UNECE.

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