Posts by Dan 55

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

Napster died because their business model was to steal other peoples' stuff and... Profit

So their problem was they were the one of the first and weren't big enough to survive the legal onslaught.

I'm shocked the reference wasn't changed from Best to Babe Ruth.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Ah crap, I misread 1984 as 1985.

Well... this is what a pre-release Workbench looked like in 1985, that could probably have been done in a year.

I still believe it was the direction industry was going through simply because there had to be a reason for people to buy more powerful more expensive computers.

You could draw a line in the sand on the 24th of January 1985 but there were two other 16-bit machines which came out that year. You certainly couldn't see the Mac's release in January and then develop a new GUI for a new computer in about five months.

If the Mac never had launched but the Amiga and ST still had, would the rest of the industry (meaning PCs of course) still have got Windows 2-5 years later? Of course it would, it was the direction the industry was going.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Re: I am Ignorant.

If userland expects unique inodes per filesystem, that's what it should get, shouldn't it? After all, isn't one of Linus' golden rules "we do not break user-space"?

Off the top of my head, find and tar need unique inodes.

Europe forces Apple to give its citizens some choice over iOS browser engine, app store

It's all worth it for the blue chat bubbles, apparently.

Re: "developers must provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit [...] of €1,000,000"

Thank goodness Tim Apple is protecting the iOS platform from being sullied with the likes of F-Droid.

"developers must provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit [...] of €1,000,000"

Developers must also dance naked around the Arc de Triomphe at rush hour, run a triathlon, and count the number of angels dancing on a pinhead.

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

Re: The Law Has No Teeth

This is Apple's proposal even though they've announced it as if it's a done thing, the EU still has to okay it and presumably they won't as it makes a mockery of the DMA and makes the whole exercise pointless.

Re: Contempt and posturing

Indeed, China says "drop your trousers" and Apple does that and bends over as well. Are there any instances on record of Apple maliciously complying with the law in China? No.

YouTube guy says Haiku is now good enough to use as your main OS.

Well he really uses the phrase "daily drive" which should carry a mandatory death sentence, but apart from that you may be interested in this video.

750 million Indian mobile subscribers' info for sale on dark web

"undisclosed asset work within law enforcement channels"

In other words, yet more Aadhaar leaks.

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

I would say any course, CS, IT, or Software Engineering which does not cover the security of data in transit and data at rest is lacking a key part of what should be taught in the curriculum. We can't have graduates being told to put things on the internet or without any clue how to do it, or at least any clue about which questions they should be asking.

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Re: This was a 101 how not to do a conference call

Tesla is stuck with really just two volume models, the '3' and 'Y'. Everything else is just window dressing.

I read somewhere that the Roadster and the S3XY models are pre-Musk era designs from before he got his grubby hands stuck into Tesla. Now we're on models designed by him and his yes men and we've got things like the Semi and Cybertruck.

Not sure if it's true or not, but it sounds about right.

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

He did do an interview where he said that MSX was based on 5-year old technology which was rather cheeky of him considering it was 1984, one year from when the MSX standard was announced and about 5 years from when Sinclair started designing the ZX80 which isn't that different from the Spectrum when all's said and done.

These days we'd have said he was projecting and crucified him on social media.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Mac User Interface Guidelines, the Ribbon Interface, and Changes to Interfaces

The ribbon interface is now on most kinds of Windows software. Pull down menus are gone for the most part. Money needs to be made by companies!

Now you can disable the ribbon on Office 365 so MS can make more money by renting you the thing they originally took away from you in the first place.

This option is not on Office 2021 though. Again, to make more money pushing you towards the rented version.

Re: Not quite right...so never did any MacOS / Win16 programming then..

The OP is entirely right. This is the classic GUI event queue vs blocking call problem that both Windows and Mac have had since time immemorial.

Even now, on Windows 11 and Mac OS 14, a network drive which does not respond will cause Explorer or Finder to hang because the network call blocks and Explorer/Finder does not service its event queue until it returns an answer or times out.

Nowadays there are asynchronous calls and threads to solve the problem, but both these billion dollar corporations must still be short of a bob or two because they never get round to fixing the problem.

Motif?

A great article but it was a shame the one of the first Unix widget toolkits, Motif, was missed out. Sun's CDE used Motif and Windows 3.0 based more than a passing resemblance to both.

Also, I approve of the retro tech week lasting more than a week.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Re: Amazed that FF isn't used more

Install the Text Reflow WE addon.

Re: " the impact of platform rules and of relentless marketing."

Which serves to remind me why I don't use FF for web browsing.

Unfortunately your memory is pretty terrible because you forgot again before you posted your comment so nobody is any the wiser as to what you think is wrong with FF, but it can't be that bad because you keep it set as your default browser.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Re: Correction for UK readers

Courts waved through warrants to forcefit prepayment meters

Courts waved through applications by energy firms to forcibly install prepayment meters in people's homes, according to internal advice from a top magistrate leaked to the BBC.

Previous guidelines required careful scrutiny of warrant applications, but new advice to courts deems those rules "disproportionate".

I hope we're all reminded of the law being changed in 1999 to assume that all computers and computer software operate correctly unless proven otherwise by the defence and the consequential shitshow that was the Post Office's Horizon and the effect that had on people's lives.

By the way, there was talk of social energy tariffs as used in other countries but that's been quietly dropped:

Social energy tariff plan that would have slashed bills 'quietly scrapped' by Government

Can we spot a theme about who the justice system is serving?

It reduces visibility of warrantless searches.

The police could have always gone trawling to Ring anyway.

Tech world won't have long to fall in line when EU signs off on AI Act

Re: @Kev99

Cars for steering assistance and even parking for you.

Tesla Vision Parking update (no parking sensors) does it work yet?

This title follows Betterage's law of headlines.

Datacenters could account for a third of Ireland's electricity by 2026

How to fix this

Have a data protection commissioner that doesn't let big tech do what the hell it wants, then it won't be so attractive for them to put data centres there.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

Perhaps he said tyre because wheel was too horrible to contemplate at that moment.

Major IT outage at Europe's largest caravan and RV club makes for not-so-happy campers

Re: What does CAMC run on

IIS doesn't run on Linux, so either it's running on IIS/Windows or it's running on something/Linux. Hopefully the second.

Should have gone Dutch

Dutch legend has been running his campsite since 1986 using an Atari ST

Nobody's getting past his custom software and air-gaped security.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Re: HoloLens was successful?

And if El Reg was more interested in historical accuracy than erasing Apple’s achievements, the QuickTime VR panorama would have rightly been praised as paving the way for Google Street View.

Nope, that was Domesday.

The problem is Apple fanbois have too much disposable income. This is Tim Apple's effort to rectify that.

Re: No Love For QuickDraw 3D?

The Amiga could palette swap though which was how the 3D spinning effect was achieved on the bouncing ball. The Mac's OS worked against you, for a change.

The usual reply to the perennial ST v Amiga 3D argument is using the blitter to fill 3D polygons, at least in demos and games. I assume this is what the article is referring to - hardware assisted polygon drawing.

United Airlines’ patience with Boeing is maxed out after repeated safety issues

Hot off the press: Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff

Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff

According to a preliminary FAA notice, none of the 184 passengers or six crew members aboard were hurt in the incident.

The report said the aircraft was lining up and waiting for takeoff when the “nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill”.

If it's Boeing, you ain't arriving.

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

"all subsidies should be eliminated" - Musk

What's the problem, isn't this one step towards what he wanted?

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Re: It's still happening

So not a profession, then, because no responsibility to check their own work. It's very clear how the Horizon software came to be so bad.

If you read the evidence you would see there were no processes in place for unit testing, QA, or CAT. Is that the developers' fault too?

Re: It's still happening

I would hope you'd be asked why you - or your colleagues - were writing such buggy code. The programming community seems to accept it as axiomatic that they will produce terrible code and that the role of a good manager is to give them time to fix their own mistakes. Other industries do not work like that.

So this post tells me you have no experience of a legacy codebase and what that means and also you spend more time looking to blame someone than prioritising the bugfix.

Meanwhile, it seems you haven't familiarised yourself with the Horizon evidence where it was that half the team were unsuitable (management had to replace or allocate work according to their skills) and decisions were taken by management to not address bugs.

Something tells me the projects you are/were involved in aren't going too well?

Re: It's still happening

The developers created the bugs. The IT world really needs to stop blaming managers and clients for its endemic inability to produce secure and effective software.

I don't know about you, but if I went round the software I'm responsible for programming swatting bugs as I saw fit without bringing them to anyone's attention first I would be asked what the hell I was doing. After 25 years we can be sure managers in Fujitsu and the PO have had these problems brought to their attention and they saw fit to ignore them. A reminder that the cash account module required mere weeks for a rewrite and here we are 25 years later (feel free to follow links to the transcript and the original report written two decades ago).

If the development team had many poor developers and management decided to keep them on, that's a management problem. If there was no process for dealing with bugs, that's a management problem. Management can't simply not take an interest in the suitability of their own workers for their projects or their own processes then blame developers for the inevitable failure.

I see a theme here. End users and developers get the blame, management and board are somehow above it all and are free of any wrongdoing.

Cult-like faith in the notion that harsh sentences will deter further miscreants, an effect that has pretty much zero proof of existance.

Any sentences at all would be a start - that would make people think twice. At the moment the worst decisions imaginable receive gongs.

One said Ms Vennells was being rewarded for taking a tough approach to the scandal in an effort to keep costs down for the Post Office, including refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing towards postmasters.

“This was her reward for bending her conscience and holding the line,” the source told the newspaper.

It's still happening

25 years later, it's still happening.

Not one damn manager in Fujitsu or the PO saw fit to prioritise getting these bugs fixed in a quarter of a century.

There's a problem all right, but it's not with the developers.

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

Re: Confused

If the washing machine itself spams the API every five minutes then there's no difference.

If it doesn't, then they basic security practice says they should reject connections from logins/IPs which repeat faster than the washing machine would do.

Confused

Given the amount of money involved because they decided to go with AWS so they can draw a little cloud symbol on the box and in the app, have they never heard of rejecting logins and IPs which spam the API?

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

No, they want you to buy their hardware where they make the real profit and where they lock you in. Then they want you to pay them a 30% fee on all your software/music/avocado-toast/black pullovers.

Imagine if you could try the OS or the Logic Pro free trial, find out it's not as good as it's made out to be, and leave whenever you wanted. No good at all (for Apple).

Meta accused of enrolling undecided EU users in ad-sponsored platform

Meta can simply cite the "Pay or Okay" model which has sprung up on European news websites and which national regulators have permitted.

They would argue that the user is already using "Okay" for cookies, that consent came from okaying their initial use however many years it was ago, and all they need to do is go to the cookie options page to toggle from "Okay" to "Pay" (or something similar, I don't have either Facebook or Instagram).

ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 ships out, chip shortages be damned

I am happy to report Hungry Horace at 28MHz is just as unplayable as it is at 3.5MHz but at least the game is over faster.

Re: Everything old is new again

Cell2Jack is marketed as connecting your landline to a mobile phone but it really just turns it into a Bluetooth headset so it could connect to Teams on your laptop too (unless Teams objects to it for unfathomable reasons as it is known to do for certain headsets)... however I doubt your 1905 phone has an RJ11 connector so you're going to have to get your hands dirty there.

Re: SAM Coupé compatibility, anybody?

That was the Timex Sinclair and MSX 8x1 attribute mode as used in Sphera.

As European publishers ported Spectrum software to the MSX there hardly anything to port to the SAM which used it, supposing they wanted to publish games for the SAM in the first place.

In some ways the timing was just right because no sooner do they get them built after the component shortage and shipped than the shipping's screwed up again.

There's a lot of things included, some of their own, some incorporated from other homebrew projects - improved BASIC, faster CPU an editor with syntax highlighting, improved CP/M over the +3's, Timex screen modes, full-colour screen mode, hardware scrolling and sprites, Megadrive joypads, a snapshot button, 2M memory, two DOSes (one based on the +3's and one based on exDOS), UNIX-like commands from exDOS, FAT-formatted SD cards, the keyboard and shell... and other stuff that I still need to find out about.

I can see why they want to get a critical mass of interest in the platform, be it Next, N-Go, or XBerry Pi, to keep the Spectrum going. I manage to find an hour here and an hour there to mess around with it but like most of us I don't have the time to sink into it now that I had 40 years ago. Even so it's more fun than an hour with Windows, Mac, or Linux so that has to be worth something.

As the first version had a blue box and the second had a has a box, the third version has to have a magenta box. Maybe it could have a built-in power switch too to incentivise repeat backings? :)

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Re: Vultures?

Oh, I welcome it.

Perhaps then the software profession will stop making software out of balsa wood.

Perhaps then bugs will have to be fixed instead of being left unfixed for 25 years.

Imagine the law is changed so there is no presumption that computer systems work correctly unless proven otherwise. This has ramifications for the client, the consultancy, and the project.

The project might start implementing best practices, deadlines might be actually take into account reality, developers will have to professionalise, and it will be possible to push back against constant feature creep with immovable deadlines.

"people of ignorance in the court of public opinion" - since when does anyone have the right to write or force software to be used which ruins lives?

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: Retarded, or What?

I guess HP's CEO has been sniffing the same glue that Ubisoft's has (customers should be comfortable not owning games).

Re: Sadly, there's not much choice out there for printers...

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.

I have an HP, my idea was to use it until it breaks and then get a Brother, but the bloody thing never breaks. I assume that's because I never updated the firmware and never connected it to the Internet so it hasn't received instructions from HPHQ to stop working when it detects a third party ink cartridge.

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Re: The problem with Notes

I first met Lotus Notes in 2004 and whether or not it would win a beauty contest never entered my mind.

I first met Lotus Notes 4 and it had a face like a smacked arse but what was worse was the UI didn't follow standard conventions, it was as if it was deliberately designed to be different but that just made it more difficult to use.

All they had to do was make a first-class email client.

Re: Have fun with the Exchange server that can't manage more than 500 accounts.

http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/ was the website for cataloguing Notes' UI fails.

As so many users only used Notes as an e-mail client, they should have split it into two clients, the best e-mail client they could manage which shamelessly ripped off Outlook's look and the usual client without e-mail.