Posts by captain veg

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Have they tried

BRST.

I still use it to mean a hard re-IPL.

Rig Red Switch Time.

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Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Assembly is simply a notation for machine code. Once assembled the output is machine code. No bytes saved.

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Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

Re: Big corp

I think you just figuratively used the word literally. Awful.

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To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

pretty amazed...

... at some of the proposed usage patterns here.

To: is for the primary recipients. You probably expect some action from them and/or a response.

CC: is for secondary recipients. You don't necessarily expect any action from them or a response but consider that the message is useful information to them, especially if they are directly mentioned. This is a courtesy, as is the fact that the principal recipients can see that they also got it.

BCC: is for, I dunno, snitching on your colleagues? Sharing confidential information with persons who shouldn't get it? Some other random nefariousness? Seems pretty shitty to me.

If you are just sending out a bulk mailing and don't want to leak PII then you need a program intended for that, not a personal email client.

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Privacy crusaders accuse X of ad-targeting that flouts EU rules

It is pronounced "ex-thing".

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Like Microsoft, Google can't stop its cloud from pouring AI all over your heads

suggest

'"For example, a developer writing code using MongoDB will be able to ask Duet AI for Developers, 'Filter customer orders over $50 in the past 30 days by geography, and then calculate total revenue by location,' and Duet AI for Developers will then use information from MongoDB's products to suggest code to complete the task, so developers can build even faster," Google veep Gabe Monroy explained. '

Well that's fine and dandy.

Should a developer buy in to the "suggestion" then code analysis and validation should follow.

What's actually likely to happen is "a computer said so, so it must be right" and blind acceptance. Go ahead punk, are you feeling lucky?

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Final Patch Tuesday of 2023 goes out with a bang

Re: Okaaaayyyy

I seem to remember once upon a tie-bold that Microsoft thought it would be clever if Internet Exploiter were to spider all the links on the page you currently had loaded in order to assess their trustworthiness.

They had to abandon the idea because it worked pretty effectively as advertising click fraud.

Maybe old habits die hard.

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Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

> "The Earth is flat, I tell you!"

It is. Locally.

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Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Free speech is expensive.

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Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

C# includes a DateTime class.

C# also has a TimeOnly class.

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Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

Re: EDLIN?

I prefer ECHO and the > and >> redirection operators.

Best not to get them mixed up.

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Re: I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with Edit.

I used it a lot back in the days of DOS. It was fine.

It was also part of QBasic, so they would have to port that too, or perform surgery.

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Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

Re: Nobody should have been using the 32bit version of Windows 7.

Anyone with less than 4GB RAM installed had no compelling reason to go 64-bit and one very good one (executable image size) not to.

In fact if Microsoft had not hobbled PAE support I would say that most users still have no compelling reason to go 64-bit.

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Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

trouble is

This happened to me, and it took about 3 seconds to notice and delete the turd.

I just assumed it was deliberate since Microsoft has plenty of form in pushing unwanted programs on to your system, especially since Windows 10. Goodwill? Benefit of the doubt? All burned.

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HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: I actually prefer my "Instant Ink" subscription

> color laser printers cost a lot more

Do they? I guess no one told Samsung when I bought one of theirs (a CLP 310) for eighty euros brand new retail. OK, it was a few years ago, but that was about the going for a non-disposable inkjet.

Speaking of which, the only time I ever bought an HP printer it was dead on arrival. Unfortunately "arrival" was about a hundred miles from the point of purchase, so it never made it back. The round trip would have cost much the same as the replacement cost locally.

The local replacement I chose was a Lexmark S300. That did actually work, but left unused for any time and the jets block so hard that it requires 2 or three deep cleans to get working again. Which just so happen to use up all the remaining ink. I have an ecotank model lined up to supplant it.

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Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

dafuq

Who hands over PII to a lowest common denominator chocolate manufacturer?

Really, I despair.

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40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

File I/O

Pascal had the notion of file, but no way to bind it to the actual filesystem of the actual machine the program was running on. (C got round this by simply insisting that all implementations emulate Unix.)

Borland got round this by a non-standard, but essentially compatible mechanism using a special comment syntax. You could (often) compile the code on another system, but of course the non-standard stuff didn't then get executed at all which wasn't especially useful.

Well, I used TP on an Amstrad PC1512 to create my coding assignments and then Kermited them into the educational establishment's Unix box. That dates me.

The genius of Borland's pricing/shareware model was evident when in my first coding job we had to migrate a program from Pick to DOS and elected to use Turbo C due to familiarity. They must have picked up a lot of future customers while they were students.

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Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator

Re: So, Google defending the little guy

That was Larry Ellison of Oracle. You're probably thinking of this gem from Eric Schnidt: "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

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AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

Re: Surely the real ethical problem with AGI ...

Oops. No V in LLM. Sorry.

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Re: Surely the real ethical problem with AGI ...

Yes. It's like the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It's almost certainly out there, but we are unlikely to ever encounter it in our lifetimes due to the vast distances involved.

I really don't give an elevated ejaculation for what the latest LLVM can produce. It is not intelligence. From what I've seen so far, it's not even especially useful. Wake me up when co-pilot can produce something that would pass a code review*.

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*Reviewed by me, obviously.

I'd rather have a web site which lets you find useful information rather than fob you off with a wholly useless* bot.

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*Is there another kind?

Re: Unsurprising

What?

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Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP

Re: Seen it before...

I suffered Lotus Notes. As an email client it was awful.

Then they made us use Exchange and Outlook. So far as I can tell this is actually meant to be an email system, among other things. Somehow it was far, far worse in that role than the godawful Notes (/Domino) thing.

Some achievement.

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Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

world wide web

Any chance of a link to the report itself?

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Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

> all it is really is a bunch of scripts that uninstall unnecessary Windows Store apps

It creates a bootable installer which does not install the crap in the first place. It's not for post-installation removal.

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> I don't think there will be many people who want to install W11 on something really ancient and low-powered!

It won't be long until that will be your only choice other than jump to Linux.

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Re: Icon =======>

I put the Windows 10 version of same on a EUR99 (brand new) laptop sporting a whole 32GB of soldered-in storage, and it worked a treat. Why? Our corporate VPN is Windows/Mac only, but once connected I can use the device for SSH tunnelling.

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FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

Re: Heaviside brought back memories

I assume that K.A.Stroud is the Ken Stroud of Coventry Polytechnic, where I was a very poor student.

I work now with a very competent mathematician who, presented with my Coventry textbook by Stroud, (Engineering Mathematics) declared it to be the best tome on the subject she had ever read, and is now inflicting it on her son. Poor chap,

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Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

Re: BBC Micro -Lisp

Nearest I got was Logo. On a Tatung Einstein.

Having been jealous of my childhood contemporaries getting Spirographs at christmas, it was great.

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Re: You /what/ Liam?

> I find Ada quite readable, myself.

COBOL is eminently readable. Horrible to write.

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Re: lore

Apart from the syntax. And the name.

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Re: lore

Kind of ironic given that JavaScript was supposed to be like Scheme.

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Re: lore

I meant the fact that the notation is constructed from S expressions. Just like LISP.

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lore

I recall some wag suggesting that LISP stood for LIterally thousandS of Parentheses. In which case it probably should have been spelt LITHP.

No mention of Web Assembly, Liam?

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UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Re: Oh, the irony

Another irony is that, because I configured my browser to chuck away all cookies on session end, I have to perform this malarkey every day.

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Re: Adverts on sites are so easy

Additionally, and not coincidentally, the publishers had to insert the ads themselves. This gave an opportunity to ensure minimum production values and that the content fitted editorially.

Online advertising, as currently construed, gives precisely zero control to the publisher over what is embedded in their publications. Can you tell?

Publishers should go back to selling ad space themselves. They should serve it themselves, and assume responsibility for it. In return they can take back control over their ratecards.

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Re: Adverts on sites are so easy

Tracking lets them see that you've been to one of those specialist sites and then show you adverts somewhere that's cheaper.

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too many words

See what happens at The Daily Mail, in my opinion one of the worst.

You can leave it at that.

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Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

Re: AI????

Well, experience to date would suggest that Capita is short on natural intelligence.

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needed

"Capita has scooped up a ten-year £239 million ($298 million) contract to oversee the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) on behalf of Britain's Cabinet Office, giving the under-fire tech services biz a needed boost."

What's needed is death by fire.

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Rocky Linux and Oracle Unbreakable Linux also hit 9.3

Re: RPM dependency hell

Same here.

My first proper foray into Linux was Red Hat (after a Slackware dabble), but I really couldn't get on with Gnome, so I jumped to SuSE which was big on KDE in those days. I liked KDE a lot, and YaST too, but all too often it just gave up on resolving package dependencies and insisted on manual intervention. Which is understandable, but annoying. Much more than annoying was that version upgrades almost always ended up with no GUI at best, or an unbootable system. So I tried the emerging Ubuntu thing, and APT seemed, by comparison to be completely indestructible. I've moved to Mint and Debian now, and can't see any reason to ever go back the the RH ecosystem.

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MOVEit victim count latest: 2.6K+ orgs hit, 77M+ people's data stolen

Re: What is this MOVEit?

According to Wikipedia, yes. Using FTP. But first it encrypts the files, so that's all right then

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Re: What?

Not in the slightest bit weird. I've never heard of it, and you have precisely zero knowledge of my professional obligations. But since you're interested, I'm not in any of the countries or industries mentioned in the report linked from the article. Neither am I professionally responsible for any kind of system administration or data security oversight.

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What?

"Quick show of hands: whose data hasn't been stolen in the mass exploitation of Progress Software's vulnerable MOVEit file transfer application?"

Never heard of it.

Next?

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Double Moon crater riddle solved? Spent Chinese rocket booster carrying mystery payload crash landed

Re: "When you get there you're all alone!"

Pee poo pu pi pi pyou pu.

Pooh.

Gobble obble obble obble oble ubble ibble obble.

Poooh.

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Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

Re: Asking for a friend

Is this some oblique reference to telephone porn?

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Re: the special characters chosen are too special

In my CompSci student days we were still working on dumb terminals connected to minicomputers. I read an article on password security which, among its practical tips, suggested that if your system allowed it, include one or more control codes. So I tried it. And, to my slight surprise, the program for changing passwords did indeed allow the inclusion of control codes. Unfortunately the program for actually logging in didn't, so I had just locked myself out.

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for the love of your IT team's sanity, don't reuse passwords

When my IT team isn't involved I generally use the same password everywhere. It's the only way I'm going to remember it. But I change the login email address for each one.

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a long, random string that's harder to guess than 123456 – or even UNKNOWN

How about 12345678UNKNOWN then?

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Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

oust[er]

"Altman, an OpenAI co-founder, was ousted after the board carried out a probe and concluded he had not been completely honest and forthright in his conversations with the directors"

Come on, in the new Reg linguistic configuration the substantive is "ouster" and the past participle must therefore be "oustered".

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