Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Downgrade rights

What they REALLY need to do (I'd like this for any product I get) is simply:

1) Downgrade* rights. That is, simply being able to find out what firmware version you have, the vendor having the latest plus older firmwares online to download, and be able to put it on the device (some devices allow this, some block putting older firmware versions on.)

2) Being able to block upgrades. SInce obviously, putting older firmware on is useless if it's just going to autoupdate itself in a few minutes.

*In this case, the "downgrade" would be more accurately an upgrade I suppose.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

So bad...

So bad... I don't blame HPE (since they didn't write the firmware.) But, honestly, besides using an inappropriately small variable type, I also see it as a flaw that the firmware didn't handle rollover. One should really try to handle every corner case even if it's "not supposed" to happen. If they'd done that in this case, I'm sure they didn't do the math to realize this counter would roll over in under 4 years, and considered rollover an "impossible" case, but if they'd handled it anyway, there would have been no story here because the firmware would handle it. Writing robust code helps in cases like this, if the programmer makes a design or coding error, it gives them a second chance to recover, or maybe consider it a safety net.

Second reason for writing robust code, it helps if someone is "abusing" your code; just extending the variable would "work", but means if someone had decided down the road to make this, say, a millisecond counter instead, then you'd have rollover risks showing up again, versus not if they'd handled rollover to begin with. People now run code that's running on systems with like 100x the RAM, 100x the CPU power, putting basically 100x the load on the software that it may have been designed for; but if it's robustly designed, it just scales right up with no drama.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Pricing

Believe it or not, pricing isn't an issue on this thing.. a base F150 in the US is like $29,000, and loads of people buy the $45,000+ "luxury trucks"... you have a vehicle that still has the poor ride of a truck, handles like a truck, but the interior's tarted up with leather, and sometimes the cab is bigger (.... usually making the actual truck bed, which to me would be the point of bothering to buy one, uselessly short.) $39,900 is really not out there for pricing for trucks here in the states.

That said, it looks rather silly and I have my serious doubts if it'd appeal to the truck-driving market here.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Guru meditation error

I thought the Amiga Guru meditation error was nice, so I put that into the gift card balance check for a site I worked on. The card processor used JSON (if I recall correctly), and return reasonable text error messages. So I had it print a custom message for invalid card number (it would also lock the page out for 5 or 10 minutes if they put 2 or 3 bad numbers in), and custom message for one or two other "normal" conditions; otherwise it printed "Guru Meditation Error" and directly printed whatever error message they sent, and then would suggest trying back in a few minutes. Not really a funny story about this, just a shout out for the guru meditation error 8-)

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Don't buy Apple products

Honestly, I don't know why Congress is raking Apple over the coals. There's so many policies about Apple I do not like. I mean, the having their software intentionally lock out 3rd-party components: sleazy. Inflated repair prices: sleazy. Charging for a high-cost warranty then still charging a lot for repairs: sleazy. Essentially lying to Congress about this: sleazy (pretending the full retail price is Apple's price to repair in order to claim loss on every repair is basically lying.) Want a headphone jack? Want a replaceable battery? Want to be able to use standard cables (USB-C these days)? Want... well, the list could go on and on.

Apple is not some kind of monopoly, at any given point, there's dozens of excellent phones on the market, dozens more cheap and cheerful phones (and that's not counting the straight from China Alibaba models... I'm not counting them since relatively few support the USA cell phone bands.) Don't like Apple's policies? DON'T BUY APPLE PRODUCTS.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Firmware downgrade and lock

Ideally this wouldn't happen.

But really, there's two abilities I would like my devices to have which would help with this kind of problem. 1) Be able to download firmware (including past versions), and load it onto the device. 2) This does of course mean having the capability to disable automatic updates, since otherwise you'd flash an older firmware on and it'd just autoupdate itself.

If the Bose allowed this, then it'd still be pretty weak to have something broken for that long, but if it had previously been working they'd be able to simply load the older firmware on and shut off automated updates.

Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation

re: Weakening evidence?

"I doubt the excuse given is true. "

Well, I remember hearing at the time, claims that the US was pushing for this prosecution, that the women were not interested in charges, that he was rough and inconsiderate in bed but not forcing, and about there being this controversy within Sweden at the time because they have specific laws barring political influence of the police or judicial processes (pro-Assange types said major influence, others agreed "influence" but that it was US and Swede politicians leaning in on whether Assange should be extradited to the US). I also recall hearing claims that of course the charges were true, and replys that the claims that it was all true were some smear campaign, both to smear his name and hoping if he didn't get arrested for the rest he'd be arrested for this.

Other than the Swedes worrying over political influence on the judicial process (which was not really disputed), I also recall my "BS detector" at the time going off for both scenarios; not enough concrete info to conclude even which was more likely, and very few neutral parties (people either thought Assange was some hero or downright villanous, so you did not find objective hashing over what little info there was.)

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Re: The all new Motorola Veblen

"It's ok to be taken aback by a preposterously high price, especially when the phone's namesake wasn't priced so highly (in relative terms)."

I agree the price is preposterous, and I am in fact taken aback. But actually, when the Razr came out in the US, it initially was something ridiculous like $700. That cash for (other than looking cool) was a typical "dumb phone" (although with good reception)... camera, texting, calls, that's it. My mom wanted one bad; she checked in a few months, $400 or something; a few more months, $250. Basically about 10 months after it was $700, it was like $90, the store was already wanting to clear the remaining ones out to make room for the new phones.

"What's your point? I assume you go onto Koenigsegg reviews and go saying "2 million quid for one of those? If it was 15 grand I might perhaps consider it. It's just a car. ""

Yeah but the Koenigsegg is a nice supercar; it's appearance will stand out, it's faster, handles better, brakes harder than pretty much any other car. This is a phone that folds in half, with no outstanding specs other than the folding in half, that Motorola is having a go at pricing way up. I don't blame them for doing it, if people buy a phone as soon as it comes out at any price, go for it. But it's fair to call them out for the price.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Well...

Well, to be honest, I think this guy's a jackass. And i can't see any actual good in having blueprints for a crooked-shooting, hand-exploding gun available. But strictly from a legal standpoint...

I do think it's true that banning a blueprint is pretty likely a violation of the first ammendment, and I do question using export regulations to ban a blueprint for a low-quality gun given the quantity of properly lethal, able to shoot straight, actual guns the US exports. Probably should have considered the Streisand effect too -- if they hadn't troubled this guy, probably very few would have even heard of the blueprint, or (given how poorly suited the materials a 3D printer can print are for a gun) even considered it a possibility.

I'm no Trump fan, but I do also have to question the assertion that a department within the executive branch has to consult Congress (legislative branch) before making policy changes. The legislative branch can pass additional laws on the matter, and judicial take 'em to court over it (which they are; I'm just not sure they'll be successful if "you didn't consult Congress" is their only legal argument.)

AT&T: We did nothing wrong in promising unlimited data that wasn't. We're just giving the FTC $60m for fun

the carriers here didn't all do this

"Why are you still an AT&T customer? I mean really. When you contract is up, switch providers."

But it's a *2 year* contract. Which they locked people into via fraud. So, I'm sure these people largely did switch providers, but this is no way means AT&T should not be punished for this type of behavior.

In case your wondering, this is NOT the kind of thing all providers in the US do. Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, they do not get these kinds of fines. Verizon Wireless for instance STILL has some people on old grandfathered unlimited data plans with no limits whatsoever; AT&T was getting complaints at the time (which is I think what they're finally being fined for now.) The other carriers said their plans said "unlimited", not "unlimited*"...*not really", when they started throttles and deprioritizations, they set up new plans with them and clearly disclosed them. In the present day, AT&T has joined the other carriers in just listing any deprioritization and throttles right in the plan description (not even in the fine print, right on the main page.)

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Yep

"You do realize that hard drives are not backups ? They are subject to failure, magnets, and various other risks."

Sure it is. Burning stuff to an optical disk might be better, but you still have two independent copies of your data instead of one, pushing the stats that far in your favor in terms of likelihood of losing data.

I never used laplink, but did get a null modem adapter or two that were sold as laplink adapters. I never used the parallel port one but you could rock a whole 11KB/sec over that serial laplink, woohoo!

Open wide, very wide: Xerox considers buying HP. Yes, the HP that is more than three times its market cap

Crazy

Crazy that a company could even consider buying out one that is over 3x their size. Honestly.

£1bn Brit court digitisation scheme would be great ... if Wi-Fi situation wasn't 'wholly inadequate'

Nice

Nice. So, a nice high tech solution is in place (that may or may not work otherwise), without making sure the technology actually exists at point of use to use it.

I.e., systems that need internet access expected to be used in areas with slow or no wifi; and electronic document systems expected to be used in locations without access to a computer.

Brilliant!

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

loads of countries

Loads of countries and other political unit based domains have no restriction on actually being based there to get a domain there.

US customers kick up class-action stink over Epson's kyboshing of third-party ink

Sue away!

Sue away! Selling a new model that won't accept aftermarket inks? I sure wouldn't buy it, but people can know what they are getting.

Updating a printer that did accept third party inks to no longer accept them? Nope. Software updates for a physical product like this are to fix bugs and add features, not to remove features. They really owe these people a new printer (if they don't release an update -- VERY QUICKLY -- to make these printers functional again.)

"Surely better to try _compatible_ cartridges or try refilling the OEM cartridges rather than just go straight for a new printer."

Nope!! A) Refill? I doubt it. Once these printers go evil and start reading out the chip, they also make sure the cartridge is non-refillable by having it check an estimated ink level off the chip, and refusing to print if the chip says it's empty. B) The OEM cartridges for the last several inkjets I've seen are SO expensive, the cost of 2 sets of cartridges is higher than buying a new inkjet that can take proper cheap cartridges, and multiple sets of cheap cartridges.

Regarding print quality using the cheap cartridges -- one brand we tried did have substandard quality results. The ones we've gotten after that look just like the OEM quality. On the last few inkjets we've had, neither OEM or aftermarket had problems with jet clogging; (we had a inkjet several years back that had clogging problems, but it happily clogged right up with the OEM cartridges too.)

Nothing's certain except death and patches – so that 'final' Windows 10 19H2 build isn't really

Anti-cheat software

Anti-cheat software specifically tends to be closely related to DRM (so-called "digital rights management" i.e. "digital rights restriction") in design, in that both have some features of a debugger, tend to try to hook kernel calls, poke around at the system internals, troll around the other processes memory, etc. Some of this is really similar to what spyware or viruses would do. In both cases, this is essentially to make sure the software the DRM or anti-cheat is watching is running as intended and not being poked at by the end user. But, in both cases system changes that would affect zero software that's following normal operating procedures, can easily break software that's trolling around through the system internals, directly hooking calls and trying to directly patch into another piece of software.

As for the "final" non-final version of 19H2? That's weird.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

Re: Floppy Emulators

What they generally do now is have a device that uses USB or SDcard to store the disk images, plugs straight into the floppy cable; it's real jankey since it's pretending to spin a motor, keep track of a "head" spinning over the "disk", and sending FM pulses down this cable at the rate a read head would be reading the data off the physical spinning floppy disk. But... apparently they work great.

Side note, you know how those 3.5" floppies are a bit higher desnity, and hold somewhat more data than a 5.25"? Apparently 3.5" drives originally were duplicating some 8" disk formats (in terms of number of tracks and sectors per track), intentionally with the idea that a 3.5" floppy drive could be a drop-in replacement for an 8". Never heard of anyone replacing an 8" with a 3.5" though.

Might need some customization; I'm pretty sure the stock "USB to floppy" presents a fixed set of tracks and sectors per track (like probably just 1.44MB and 720KB 3.5" and 1.2MB and 360K 5.25" floppies). But there's probably just a table in there that can be adjusted for whatever tracks and sectors you want.

Re: So

"Incorrect, bob. 64-bit Linux uses 64-bit time_t ... I predict that twenty years from now, all "modern" systems will have been using it for at least 5 years, probably 10 or more "

Yes, but I was shocked to read, just within the last year or 2, someone went over the Linux kernel time handling code, only to find that the system would lock solid when the real time clock rolled over. Quite a few RTCs roll over in 2038, and the code that was put in around 1999 to supposedly handle this only handled a few uses of the timer while not handling others at all. So, for example, a call to get the current time would handle the rollover and work fine; but a timer put in 1/10th of a second before rollover, to fire a few 10ths later, for instance, would never fire since the clock rolled back to zero. It all used 64-bit time_ts internally but the hardware would let it down.

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

right or wrong?

Is the AI right or wrong? There are many black people in the us who will say "what up nigga?" or whatever to each other and apparently think nothing of it. (I guess? Locally there are many immigrants from both city of Chicago, and the Sudan, and i've seen nobody use this kind of language.) But there are plenty of others who think it is deeply offensive and that those who say this kind of thing should cut it out immediately. And honestly, if you have phrasing that is ok to say if you're black, but offensive if you're white, clearly that says something about those phrases.

Talk about a calculated RISC: If you think you can do a better job than Arm at designing CPUs, now's your chance

I did not know that

I did not know that ARM actually prohibited adding instructions. I just assumed the vast majority of ARM licensees simply didn't want to trouble themselves. I mean, I wouldn't.

"Basically, chip makers will be encouraged to come up with libraries and APIs that access their special instructions in a standardized way, and provide these frameworks to developers who then purchase and use the system-on-chips."

Very smart. This is like the "C intrinsics" for Intel CPUs; these are a special set of headers that let you use MMX, SSE (/SSE2/SSE3/etc.) while still having portable code. You want to use "MMXdofoo(a,b,c)" in your code? OK, use the header. If you're building for Intel (and not something like a 486...), inline assembly for MMXdoofoo is put into your code (so there's no overhead from using this type of header compared to putting inline assembly in yourself.) If you're building for something else, a C loop that implements MMXdoofoo is put in. Interestingly, I saw a few years back an ARM port of the Intel intrinsics... so code using Intel intrinsics to use MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 instructions would use the ARM NEON equivalents; instead of merely being able to run some MMX-using code, it could actually run it with the equivalent speedups.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

Dumb

" In this documentation, Microsoft in fact says Win32 and COM APIs "are part of the Universal Windows Platform", noting that they are implemented only "by some Windows 10 devices" so developers should check for their presence before calling them."

That must be the dumbest thing I've ever read. a "Universal" Windows Platform that is not in fact universal*? I mean, it'll let some executive at Microsoft brag about how many more UWP apps they have (maybe), but will make UWP completely pointless when you have so-called universal apps that aren't actually universal.

*I mean, it never was "universal" but at least was supposed to run on all editions of Windows 8 or 10.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

identity theft

I would charge lcx with identity theft. Possibly slander for those whose names were used to indicate they support a position they oppose. I know I would feel slandered if one falsely claimed to the fcc I opposed network neutrality.

You are faking it! No, you are! No, AT&T is... Verizon, T-Mobile US execs form 5G circular firing squad on Twitter

current state of 5g

5G in the US at present...

First short background. For 5G, the bands are considered Low (like below 1ghz), mid-band (up to 6ghz I guess) or microwave. The 5G standard on low or midband is supposed to get about a 20% speed improvement over LTE, and supports the usual 5, 10, 20mhz channel widths like LTE. The microwave bands are very prone to singal reflection, and have a small coverage areas (like 2 or 3 blocks from what I've read). They also use much smaller antennas, so the cell sites for microwave bands use like 64x64 MIMO (multiple in multiple out) antennas to take advantage of those signal reflections and such to increase the speed as much as possible. The microwave bands also use 100mhz channels which of course increases speeds.

Verizon Wireless ran/runs a pre-standard 5G network at 28ghz, that they started testing a year or so ago. This gave these lucky beta testers multi-gigabit home broadband through a hotspot. This was to get real-world RF data. 100mhz. As far as I know they might still be running it, the plan would ultimately be to replace these people's hotspots with a standard one (assuming it can't be firmware updated.) This covered a few blocks in a few cities.

Verizon Wireless's current 5G network, 28ghz, 100mhz channels. Galaxy S10e supports it, and one or two other phones, and a few hotspots. The phones all use 4G LTE for the uplink, don't now about the hotspots. Indeed if you get the maps up, the cities this is in typically the coverage is like a 10x10 block area or so, if that. From what I've read, they're running a cell site every block in these 5G areas. This gets crazy speeds, people on howardforums post well over 1gbps speeds on their phones, but running a cell site per block is just not happening in a lot of areas.

AT&T Wireless -- microwave 5G planned. I assume it's imminent.

T-Mobile -- planning 600mhz 5G. Current phones don't support this band, so it's not being used for anything yet, and will allow for widespread 5G coverage. They've already announced they plan to "convert" their 4G to 5G too.

Sprint -- has a huge block of 2.5ghz spectrum (over 100mhz in most areas), and plan to run 5G in there. They've started doing this in some markets, getting like 150-300mbps and apparently can peak at 800mbps or so. There are merger talks between T-Mobile and Sprint.

One thing, the phone radio vendors have apparently figured out how to share a 4G channel with 5G, the channel can switch timeslice-by-timeslice between 4G and 5G operation depending on actual amount of 4G versus 5G traffic. T-Mo explicitly said they're rolling this out ASAP, and I'm sure Sprint, AT&T, and VZW will too since it means their existing 4G gets (over time) a 20% boost as 5G devices come out.

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

Re: Not poetic enough

Well, I'd love the drawing and quartering, dismemberment, etc. These assholes illegally robocall everyone in the country numerous times a day, harassing literally everyone in the country. They are truly subhuman.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

this kind of thing

First off, he's 100 percent withing his rights to do what he's doing. Definitely inconvenient but *shrug*. I must admit I would not want ICE using my software either. They could handle things a lot better than they are.

That said, this kind of thing does make me nervous... pip (for python), npm, etc. where there are piles and piles of layered dependencies. (I use pip3 a fair bit and it really pulls in a lot of dependcies). I do realize linux distros like debian have layers too, but they maintain some control over things so if they will not yank a package until they've made some allowance to having it not massively break dependencies.

Class-action sueball over refurbed iThings will ask Apple what 'as good as new' means

battery problems

Battery problems are the problem. Would I care if the rest of a device were new? Not really. Would I care if the battery was new? Given the high difficulty and cost of replacing them plus apparently short life, yes I would expect a new battery. Since apple made the battery so hard to replace of course they're probably shipping out refurbs with (if it's a few year old unit) few year old batteries in them. Apple created this problem for themselves by making such an important component so hard to replace.

You know SAP's doing a great job when a third of German users say they 'have no confidence in it'

Difficult

I recall hearing horror stories like 20 years ago about how difficult SAP rollouts are, how plenty hit a dead end after spending several million on the attempt, and expensive (both expensive rollout and very high recurring licensing fees.).

Congratulations! You finally have the 10Mbps you're legally entitled to. Too bad that's obsolete

Rural roaming

I'm spoiled here... Verizon Wireless has almost blanket LTE, even rurally, *and* roaming off US Cellular (in my area, several dozen roaming networks nationwide) if I do lose service.

But, I wonder how much rural roaming would help? So you can roam if you lose service; this in no way means you can roam when your carrier has some rancid old 2G coverage while a roamer has nice 4G.

How long is a lifetime? If you’re Comcast, it’s until a rival quits a city: ISP 'broke' price promise

dirtbags

Yup Comcast really are a bunch of dirtbags. Hopefully some of these people kept a copy of their contract, because I'm quite sure (allegedly) that they'll find the company's copy of the contract will have magically updated to have no mention of "lifetime" even if the one they agreed to did.

Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up

passed the test

Looks like the courthouse passed the physical part of the pen test. What a collosal fuckup though...

You know, our local media does such a lovely job on news coverage... I live in Iowa and this is the first I've heard of this!

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

Try this in Iowa

Try this in Iowa. After (before my time...) those (music) record clubs started sending people unrequested records and told them they have to pay if they don't return them, Iowa passed a law that in the case of unrequested items, you get to keep the item and don't have to pay a penny for it.

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

Re: Two COBOL Memories

"I've always (well, very rarely, but whenever someone mentions it), wondered why bubble sort is so often taught as "my first sort algorithm""

Actually, when I took compsci back in the late 1990s, surprisingly the info both in textbook and by prof amounted to "You may have heard of Bubble Sort. DON'T USE IT", and skipped directly to (if I recall) merge sort.

OK, peons, we'll obey the law and let you talk about politics and pay packets, says Google

wel...

Well... having a discussion is one thing. I see people with both main us parties who think they should keep browbeating everyone around them with their political views though; get a few of them bickering and this could go on for months, rapidly turn into a unproductive pain in the ass for everyone around them.

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

updating python 2.7 code

Updating python 2.7 code to python 3 is not difficult. A couple functions were renamed (and you can load a compatibility header to take care of them rather than updating them), and a few syntactical details changed. So you don't have to really rewrite code so much as replace a handful of lines with ones with identical functionality but slightly different syntax.

The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network

old switches

My friend had some pretty old switch, when the activity lights did not light up a half second or second at a time, but flickered with activity. You could easily tell apart interactive telnet/ssh, some ftp type file transfer, some samba or nfs style mount, apart just by seeing how it flickered (ftp of course pretty well lit it up solid). They vendors quit doing that (in favor of updating maybe a time or 2 a second) because apparently the leds responded quick enough to at least read back 10mbps data off the light flickers.

Interesting though, you may not get the password directly but i'm sure that timing info can greatly reduce the search space at least.

tcpdump

A tcpdump type of utility can give you drstination address and port, the ssh content is encrypted but (unless youre forwarding multiple things over one ssh connection) that'll probably do it for throwing out irrelevant packets for timing analysis.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you: Biz sneaks out Friday night rule change

but that was not the agreement.

I found I was ineligible anyway... but that was not the agreement. The $125 was not to reimburse for another credit monitoring service, it was to provide an option for a cash settlement for their negligence. They really should have no reason to demand proof of having another credit monitoring service to cough up cash since that is not what it's for.

Acer and Asus unveil some of the world's heaviest laptops ... and some of its lightest

Nice light machines are nice

"Writing this using an Acer Cloudbook which uses an Intel N3060 -- no fan at all, passive cooling -- no user maintainable parts at all in the box. Cheap, cool (pun intended!), recommended for anyone wanting a cheap, light, portable laptop."

I can second that. I had a Acer Chromebook 13 with Tegra K1 (quad core 2.2ghz arm (and a fifth 1ghs low power core), and roughly GTX670 GPU ), got Ubuntu onto an SDCard, even got the nvidia driver going including CUDA. 18 hour battery life.

There's something to be said about a sub-10W TDP setup (the N3060 is 6W TDP), no fan needed, just a little heat spreader. The chromebook would maybe heat up 4 or 5 degrees if I had it running all 4 cores at full load. Nice and light, and either a light battery with decent battery life, or "normal" sized battery adding a little weight but ridiculous battery life.

notebook

That's why (at least in us) most are sold as notebooks and not laptops; there were a few lawsuits about people usoing laptops on top of their lap... after some ran so hot they risked burning peoples legs (and umm...lap... apparently some lucky person got like 2nd degree nut burns, supposedly with pants on) the vendors here switched their terminology unless they knew it could keep it's cool.

And... creative professional or not, $5000+ is crazy for a notebook computer.

New York City sues T-Mobile US over 'abusive sales tactics'

might be a regional thing

Might be a regional thing. Around here, MetroPCS and other cell phone service dealers are likely to have used phones for sale (in addition to new ones) but don't try to pass them off as new. Some independent dealers impose their own activation fees etc. but i've never heard of one trying to pass them off as taxes.

No it's not Russell Brand's new cult, it's Microsoft's Office crew rolling out their Save Experience

Re: Consistency

I see this in programming languages and packages too. Tensorflow is what I encountered most recently.

Scenario 1) "warning: doing this is deprecated, do it this way on new projects.". Code keeps building or running as the case may be. Tensorflow DOES NOT do this.

Scenario 2) " Error: this name is deprecated and you must use the new name.". Why make this an error? This is what tensorflow does. In each case the i've seen the new name *is* sensible and "better" than the old one. BUT, each and every old function, you have code to print the error and abort, why not generate a warning and run the new function, turn it into scenario 1?

JACK OF ALL TIRADES: Twitter boss loses account to cunning foul-mouthed pranksters

tweet via sms

Tweet via sms requires going through a 3rd party? Funny since originally the whole reason for the tweet length limit was because you could have a feed sent to you via text, and send tweets via text.

UK.gov: Huge mobile masts coming to a grassy hill near you soon

We have the "giant towers" here

Iowa is the land of the classical "giant cell towers". Don't know what the height limit is but a few are tall enough to have tower lighting on them to let aircraft know they are there. The countryside has plenty of farmland with a (as far as I know) non-functional wind mill (I assume to literally mill the corn?), silos, etc, there's poles for power and phone along almost every road; really the occasional tower blends in OK with this. It's pretty sweet to have at least a bar of LTE coverage almost everywhere statewide.

As for 5G? There's really 2 modes for it... one runs at high microwave band (like in the US it's 24, 26, 28ghz bands), this is the mode where they run 100+mhz of it and get the huge speeds the carriers all tout. This is line of site and is expected to have a range of a few city blocks. The other runs in existing LTE bands (or whatever, unused bands that could be used for LTE but a company puts 5G in there instead), it is expected to get about a 20% speed boost over LTE. Interestingly, a few cellular equipment vendors have worked out how to share an existing LTE channel, it can run some timeslices LTE-style and some 5G-style so 5G-capable devices get that bit of extra speed, the channel just kind of shifts between LTE and 5G depending on actual traffic.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash put $30m apiece into ballot battle fund to kill gig-economy employee benefits

No-fault insurance is dumb

"I live in California and have for many years. I've seen some good ballot measures that would help people (no-fault insurance, for example) "

I'm sorry but no-fault insurance is dumb. Don't know if you have this in UK, but in a few US states that have it, it means you can be stopped at a stop light, or even parked or in your driveway, some jackass rams into your car and it's 50% your fault because they automatically split fault 50/50. The insurance companies love it because they don't have any of those arguments over whose fault it is, but it's pretty bad because in the many cases where fault is obvious, the fault is not properly assigned, bad drivers end up double-raising everyone's rates (raising rates in that general sense, and raising rates specifically because stuff that is no-one's fault but their own is assigned 50% fault to innocent bystanders..bydrivers?)

Coin-mining malware jumps from Arm IoT gear to Intel servers

More processing power

More processing power, that's for sure. They DO make pretty fast ARMs, but the NAS boxes, wireless access points, and so-called "iot" stuff will largely be using the low-powered sub-ghz models.

Developer reconsiders npm command-line ad caper after outcry

Have they thought of making it voluntary?

Have they thought of making it voluntary? DON'T make "funding" a dependency, but mention that it exists, and use it if it is installed. I don't use npm, but (I know debian would be HIGHLY unlikely to do this...) *if* aptitude got an option to promote packages and throw some money to advertisers, I'd go for it.

Brit software giant Micro Focus takes a bath after share price crashes 30%, sales tank

surprised it took this long

I'm surprised it took this long. I've been to places with old old software, but they don't go around looking for updates for it; and they were generally keeping the old old versions of windows (or dos!) to run it. I'm simply surprised there's enough sales revenue in most of these product lines to support a company still selling them.

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

Re: Why exactly is Perl any worse than Python?

Python allows for pretty elegant code. Don't get me wrong, C is faster and allows elegant code too.

As for perl6... didn't even know It existed, if TFA is accurate (no reason to think it's not) then renaming perl6 is perfectly sensible.

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

Re: Bring compatibility problems to Window, not the other way around

"The example of OS/2 deciding to become Windows compatible and thus sealing its own fate is cited fairly often, particularly when the topic is something like whether Windows phones should have been made to run Android apps or something like that. I don't personally think the decision to make OS/2 run Windows software sealed OS/2s fate as much as it failed to rescue it. OS/2 was already in trouble when they decided to make it run Windows software... that was why they made it Windows compatible."

Just wanted to back you up on this; you are correct sir. I ran OS/2 a bit back in the day, and indeed by the time later OS/2 versions came out with Windows compatibility (actually just including a copy of Windows and modifying it to run it's stuff seamlessly on the OS/2 desktop), by then OS/2 was basically down for the count. It probably increased their sales above the approximately 0 it would have been otherwise but I doubt by much. ("Approximately" 0 because there's apparently still some ATMs and such using it...)