Posts by Dan 55

BBC voice assistant promises to summon streams even if you're just a little bit Brahms and Liszt

Re: "The BBC is selling Beeb as a privacy-friendly option"

And probably linked to your iPlayer sign-on.

They missed a trick, they should have called it Auntie Beeb though. Makes a nice change from Big Brother.

As Twitter blocks white supremacists posing as anti-fascists, FBI appeal is flooded with images of cop violence

Re: not the colour of the people doing them.

I can only assume a goldfish with a seven-second attention span and no memory covering decades would agree that it's not a race issue, everyone else would beg to differ.

Re: naughtiness on all sides

What "naughtiness" have peaceful protesters done? What naughtiness have people just going about their daily lives done?

None whatsoever. There is no "naughtiness on their side" but you're tarring them with the same brush because the title is "naughtiness on all sides".

Why? Only you would know. At the very least, your title is completely wrong.

The campaign also allegedly used hacked legitimate accounts to push past Twitter’s monitoring systems. That was a riskier proposition – because people tend to notice when their own account suddenly starts tweeting messages they didn’t write

Not if they left Twitter ages ago. You can usually tell when it happens, messages that sound like they came from a normal person peter out, then a few months later they suddenly re-appear, only it's politics all day every day.

Re: naughtiness on all sides

There is no naughtiness on all sides, this is a false equivalence. You are mixing peaceful protesters with a bunch of opportunists and calling them one side, then when the police or National Guard on the other side attack peaceful protesters or just people going about their own business it doesn't matter because there were also opportunists. It also fails to take into account years of "naughtiness" from the police to get to this point.

It is also straight out of the Trump playbook, if you remember when he said that there were "very fine people, on both sides" and "hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides" over Charlottesville. It could be argued that it's technically correct, and yet it's complete nonsense.

Also after seeing things like the National Guard firing at residential areas I think the US is dangerously close to the edge. It only needs a small push to move from constant false rhetoric and the army firing on their own citizens to cancelling elections. Once there, how do you find your way back out of that?

I really do think an authoritarian such as Trump who can't stand losing surrounded by sycophantic yes-men that he's put in place could go there. All because of the nonsense rhetoric that he's whipped up over the past four years hasn't been challenged the way it should have been and the "bunker boy" taunt that pushed him over the edge.

Re: Confused

I believe Germany struggled with the same problem before WW2 (Weimar Republic) but they certainly don't struggle with it now. But would anyone like to argue that modern-day Germany isn't a democracy or is oppressive?

Icon is a history teacher.

Building society caught in middle of high street sharing a little too much on TeamViewer

Re: TeamViewer....

Well they could make it reveal for just a few minutes by clicking on it, if you wanted to see it again after that you have to click on it again.

The bank's BOFH should have every remote PC saved in the TV account for passwordless access anyway (if the bank's paying for it).

(I didn't downvote.)

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: "the concept of saving face"

There is law and then there's guidence:

Did Dominic Cummings act "Responsibly and Legally"?

Why there is law and then guidence is something I'm not entirely sure about, when other countries have managed to have codified it all legally.

Re: "the concept of saving face"

They're all national-level politicians, the list of international-level politicians is vanishingly small.

They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

Re: Long Live Private interprise!

Don't mind him, he's a Ferengi. The rest of us moved to a new world economy.

Visual Studio Code finally arrives on ARM64 Windows. No, you haven't woken up in 2017, sadly. It's still 2020

Re: Oh, why do most people want Windows?

Well, x86/x64 on Win32.

Yay, ARM64 support is finally here

Now we need to wait another year for the C/C++ extension to be ported.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: the US military should open fire on people on American soil

Odd how he manages to drop these 'dog-whistle' quotes (not for the first time) in his tweets yet somehow it's explained away as meaning exactly the opposite.

Where does the phrase 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts' come from?

"There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight. I've let the word filter down: When the looting starts the shooting starts," Headley said, according to a New York Times report from 1970.

On Friday afternoon, Trump tried to defend his remarks, tweeting, "Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night - or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means...."

He probably doesn't want to see it happen in the same way that John Gotti doesn't want to your family get hurt, i.e. it's a threat.

I actually agree with Trump

He's doing it for all the wrong reasons, but social media sites pouring a constant stream of effluent into society has to stop somehow. If those helps that happen then I'm in favour.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Re: Did they actually

But third party Covid contract tracing apps still should receive stricter Play/App Store reviews. Google and Apple are supposed to go over them with a fine-tooth comb.

Re: Did they actually

I don't know if we should trust that much in Google's and Apple's app store review procedures that much:

Qatari contact-tracing app 'put 1m people's sensitive data at risk'

Did nobody tell them about the lockdown? Logitech releases new 'luggable' mechanical keyboard for LAN parties

Re: No numpad

Four keys longer makes it too unwieldy to carry?

No numpad

No sale.

Linux-loving Windows 10 May 2020 Update squeaks in with days to spare before June

Re: Fools, and I, rush in...

The only feature I'm interested in is WSL2, and even so I'm going to be waiting a few months.

Re: Oh, Thank God!

What Start Menu? I would have thought that to Open/Classic Shell or Start10 was an obligatory requirement to be part of the Reg comentariat.

Apple promises third, no, fourth, er, fifth time's a charm when it comes to macOS Catalina: 10.15.5 now out

There is no version that has no bugs, but some releases are lemons which are best avoided (Lion, Sierra, Catalina).

And Catalina is the gift that keeps on giving:

APFS Bug in macOS 10.15.5 Catalina Impacts the Creation of Bootable Backups

Marketing has forced them into a yearly major upgrade cycle.

It'll still be buggy and it still won't run 32-bit software. So no, I still won't upgrade.

Turns out Elon can't control the weather – what a scrub: Rain, clouds delay historic manned SpaceX-NASA launch

But I hope the docking computer isn't like Elite's.

Re: Lightning

I just can't see an equivalent today happening with those touchscreens. They look very 'no user serviceable parts inside'.

Airline-chasing lawyers leap on Easyjet for £18bn after 9m folks' data, itineraries nicked

They also have your address and phone number.

'I wrote Task Manager': Ex-Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer spills the beans

Re: Why wasn't it in by design?

The Microsoft POSIX subsystem did though.

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Re: What UI framework was used to develop Teams?

It's Electron so it's guaranteed to bring your computer, whatever CPU it has, to a grinding halt.

The day ReactOS is up to Win7 level is the day we can stick a fork in MS.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

Was it any different from C64 BASIC which needed pokes everywhere to do anything remotely exciting?

The only reason IBM/GW/Quick/Q BASICs got anywhere on the PC is because hardware was so simple and multitasking was non-existent at that time so it wasn't expected to do much.

Re: If you're looking for the Z-80 version

Most of the code in their Z80 BASICs is just the 8080-compatible subset, i.e. the Altair code hacked about a bit, and it's easy to automatically convert 8080 or Z80 source to 8088 or 8086 source and then hack about with that.

Re: Only 45 years late?

Kemeny and Kurtz liked MS' BASICs so much they wrote a book detailing everything they didn't like about them (Back to BASIC 1985).

Naaah, it's probably a three-way tie between BBC Basic V, QL Superbasic, and SAM Basic.

Re: Please no

What do you mean you don't like the Headspace skin?

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Re: I tried to put in a GDPR data request

I have an account from ages ago and wasn't notified by EasyJet. I haven't flown with them in years and no flights appear in the flight history, so after trying and failing to find the button for deleting my account and reading that same nonsense instead, I just decided to fill it up with random data and point the e-mail address to mailinator.

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Re: Is it wrong to be in favour of this?

Classic Dom.

Re: Bye, HCSEC!

As we have seen just this weekend, every decision is a political decision, it's just some of them have experts to back them up and others fly in the face of every expert in the country.

Re: Is it wrong to be in favour of this?

Tell me AC, which IT news site better covers where you are on the political spectrum?

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

iWork might not be that good, but is there anything that isn't a fact in what I wrote?

Apple committing code to a free open-source cross-platform competitor is just not going to happen, they have their own Office suite, they don't have to answer to anyone about how they develop it which suits them just fine, and their committing code to LibreOffice will probably push the project in directions that people don't like.

This does not mean I hate LibreOffice, I use LibreOffice, iWork, and I also use MS Office. I don't use OpenOffice if that makes you feel any better.

There is an export option.

Re: Why not use an existing Package Manager?

You mean The Microsoft Ways... Windows Update, Software Center, Microsoft Store, this new package manager...

Why? They've already got iWork.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: £350 for a keyboard

It's Magic.

Re: A pokey terraced house in Middlesborough for a month

I'm just wondering how long an iPad Pro with fancy keyboard will last in a student house in the Boro. Probably not even as long as the parmo.

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Consistency

They should be adding missing languages in the other iOS applications.

Hooray! It's IT Day! Let's hear it for the lukewarm mugs of dirty water that everyone seems to like so much

Tell that to yer kidney stones.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Re: Highly sophisticated

I'm starting to believe the UK is a full-fledged kakistocracy and there's no way back from it.

New Zealand releases Bluetooth-free COVID-19 tracing app

Re: IQ downward spiral...

I think many people in many other countries would look at their nation's their own Covid-19 response and sign up for the kind of idiocracy NZ has in a heartbeat.

Project Reunion: Microsoft's attempt to tear down all those barriers it's built for Windows developers over the years

So let me get this straight

They've just done it yet again, thrown out Xamarin Forms (sucks if you ever used that), and come out with a new thing. And this is supposed to be a good?

We are getting to the point of a new framework every 2 years.

Just stick with Win32 and we'll see who blinks first, the huge mass of Win32 developers or MS trying to bork Win32 in Windows 10.

Apple's MagicPairing for Bluetooth fails to enchant after mischief-making bugs found hiding in the stack

Whenever I have some BT headphones within range of more than one paired device with their BT on, it's pot luck which one they connect to.

So forcing pairing with every Apple device you have doesn't sound like a feature I want, although I'm sure Apple have done something Magic so connecting is better too.