Posts by Dan 55

Microsoft starts offering advice in how to code for Arm

Re: Cross platform coding

Don't forget another big app rewrite from 7 to 8 which stamped on it again just to make sure it was really dead.

Re: Microsoft offering advice on how to code?

Each developer will be given access to Windows and Office source code repositories with the advice "don't do what we've done here".

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Re: So what was the passive solution?

You really need a heat sink stuck on top of the CPU, at least.

Signal shoots down zero-day rumors, finds 'no evidence' of device takeover

Re: “turn off features that you aren't using”?

I'd think turning off link previews in messaging apps is one of the first things any self-respecting commentard would do to, firstly to stop malware from dodgy spam messages being downloaded, secondly to stop your phone number being confirmed, and thirdly to stop being geolocated from your IP address.

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

After buying Activision Blizzard for $69bn...

That money's got to come from somewhere...

From LinkedIn and the 11000 other employees fired from MS earlier this year...

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

On the date and time formats.

Re: You should be ashamed of this article

Both cases appear to have been a function of asking someone who doesn't understand statistics, to merge datasets from multiple sources.

Nope. Both cases are due to management decisions brought about by running IT on a shoe-string budget (another management decision).

Everything gets shoehorned into Office no matter whether it's appropriate or not.

Re: A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

Excel to Access? Out of the frying pan and into the fire (see icon).

Apple and Lenovo are dropping the ball for visually impaired users

Re: Whateve

The 2018 UK accessibility website law only applies to public sector bodies. The EU Web Accessibility Directive doesn't apply in the UK thanks to Brexit but if any company has a web presence which sells goods and services in the EU/EEA market then they will need to meet the same standards by 2025 anyway.

Australia threatens X with fine, warns Google, for failure to comply with child abuse handling report regs

Only because he redefined the meaning of "extremely naughty/bad" and thought himself very clever.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

Re: I see a LOT of software developers

That's a distribution restriction, not allowed under the GPL.

Ot so we were reliably informed after the RH saga.

Brit watchdog slams Microsoft as it clears $69B Activision Blizzard buy

And as if by magic, mere minutes after the announcement, the button was pressed and the trailer was released.

They didn't wait for the FTC though.

UK silicon startups to share £1.3M chump change as part of chip strategy

Re: £108k

There's also the culture and work ethic - look at the problems TSMC are having in Texas, where Americans won't work hard enough apparently, yet it's a fact Americans work longer and harder than Brits. Could you imagine how TSMC would cope with the likely workforce in say Grantham, Kilmarnock, or Warrington.

I would bet it's more down to not being able to find local people with the skills which, as the US is not a great chip manufacturer any more, is unsurprising. The solution as always is for employees who do have the skills to work longer.

So if they were to rock up in Grantham there is no amount of employee overtime that could get them out of that pickle.

Re: £108k

£1.3m / 12 = £108k

For that money you won't even find a single competent employee in the sector.

Well you can divide that figure by two because it's a two-year pilot program.

What's even the point of doing this, to pay for the cleaning staff's wages down at Infosys?

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

Well that was like reading an error report from a user

I mean, who knows what "rogue code" is.

The only thing you can be sure is if the main system fails and the backup system fails in exactly the same way, it's not the because the chances are "like winning the EuroMillions" lottery, it's because the same software failing in exactly the same way on the exactly same input.

Chinese citizens feel their government is doing such a fine job with surveillance

Re: ASPI

The survey was a surveillance propaganda exercise, the article was just a useful idiot in the wider privacy debate.

Re: Complaint

"Oh, you know, mustn't grumble."

AI safety guardrails easily thwarted, security study finds

Re: Bollocks

Rejoice, the programming language you seek is already here, and there's no need for AI. It's Rust!

Gulf states and 'The Stans' could become new tech hotspot – analyst

because he believes that the rule of law – and spread of civil society – follows the tech industry

Just look how well we're doing in the West (Europe + North America) after a decade and a half of big social media and disruptive tech...

curl vulnerabilities ironed out with patches after week-long tease

A lot of bother could be avoided with the right build environment - all the warnings are errors unless for a very good reason, all the sanitisers on, as many static analysers as you can find.

HTTP/2 'Rapid Reset' zero-day exploited in biggest DDoS deluge seen yet

Re: A cancel request?

This sounds like a feature created by an overly eager intern.

Well HTTP/2 is based on Google's SPDY so the only thing they really thought about was how fast they can serve adverts.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: If this is a simulation...

There were constant brown outs in 2020-2021 and the lizard people who are in charge of the simulation had to make us all stay in our homes as rendering long distances and interactions between simulants takes a lot of energy.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: Hanging on as long as possible.

rounded window corners which is a huge productivity boost because you can visually tell wherre one window ends and another begins. This alone is enough to make it almost as good as windows 7

It's almost as if making everything flat slabs of indistinguishable colour was a mistake but it's still too early to go back to a 3D look with colour hints as they'd lose face so they found another way almost as good which was copying Apple.

ELKS and Fuzix: Linux – and Unix – writ very, very small

Re: nxworld

For some reason it wasn't too easy find, I couldn't find the file but it was referenced in a commit. I also stumbled upon a reference in the same commit to the big brother of the cut-down Nano-X build in Elks:

Nano-X AKA Microwindows: Github, Website.

It's a windowing system for small devices with three different APIs based on Win32, X11, and Xlib.

Re: DiskDestroyer executable size?

4176 bytes in Elks, you can check online here (login root, no password).

Re: nxworld

Looks like this is the chap:

https://github.com/ghaerr/elks/tree/master/elkscmd/nano-X/demos

New release of Fuzix just in time for the 2nd Spectrum Next

Now all I need is a time machine to find the time to bodge one of Fuzix's Spectrum versions to use the Next's features.

In rare bout of generosity, Oracle extends free support for Database 19c

Good news for Birmingham

More time to get off Oracle.

Unless it comes with strings attached like you must update to 23c... It's Oracle, of course it will.

Kaluma squeezes JavaScript onto the Raspberry Pi Pico

Re: Why, $deity, why?!?!

Dynamic typing is probably the last thing you need on a microcontroller. And of course it's JavaScript where 2 + 5 can be 25 and 2 - 5 is -3.

Re: Why, $deity, why?!?!

I guess the practical use is providing work for security researchers. As the website says "A JavaScript engine for Internet of Things". I doubt you could find two worse things in modern-day IT to put together.

"JavaScript also enjoys a wealth of support, documentation"

Usually the more documentation you have the better, but that's not true in JavaScript's case.

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

if you’re expected to produce a docx instead of a pdf, you can only guarantee uniformity if you put up with Word

But not uniformity between different versions of Word.

Oh now come on, just how many nights have you laid awake, unable to sleep, haunted by the thought of “I don’t know how to find my files?”

When the file I want to find is in Sharepoint.

FEMA to test emergency alert system US-wide today

Re: My only question is WHY?

What the fuck major disaster could possibly occur which would require a national broadcast to EVERYTHING?

In case of in case of alien invasion, Will Smith would have got out of bed and kicked alien butt earlier if he had a phone with emergency alerts.

Microsoft kills classic Azure DaaS, because it isn't really Azure

Re: Confusing naming?

This appear to have got worse over the last decade, it actually makes me miss the Microsoft of old.

What?

It seems MS been inspired by Google lately.

Google doubles minimum RAM and disk in 'Chromebook Plus' spec

Nice spec for Linux netbooks

I assume some effort will be made to lock down the bootloader then...

Re: Nice, just one question

The guarantee started 2 years ago when someone first thought of it and will last until you try and get into contact with Google support who will say it's a hardware problem and re-direct you to HP and HP will say it's an OS problem and re-direct you to Google support.

Re: Simple Computer Standards: it's the 1980s, Again

Chromebook 128GB+2 in grey, Chromebook 128GB+3 in black.

I hope they don't use non-standard USB ports.

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

I'm sure Lineage could spin up a version for Jamboard but they'd need time, and they're having enough trouble keeping up with e-waste being churned out by multinationals as it is.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Kept for competition reasons

The real deal is Google will fund Mozilla to claim there's competition, but nobble Firefox on their own web properties to push people to Chrome where they're busy building in more and more tracking features (Google login, "privacy" sandbox, web attestation...).

Re: Why I Use Vivaldi

The problem with XUL and XULRunner was it was horrendously documented so nobody could write apps with it (I did try myself). If they had documented it better, they might have even done themselves a favour because apparently one of their reasons for dropping it is they didn't know how to maintain it any more.

Every time? Isn't this a one-time settings change in Settings > General > Applications for PDFs?

Also, what other things usually done by external programs have been built into Firefox apart from PDFs recently?

The Australia Chrome-like theme in Firefox 29 annoyed users and was a driving force behind Pale Moon

That sentence was auto-incorrected... I remember reading a while back that Mozilla's UI mock-ups came before Chrome's UI change, but Mozilla took such a long time to execute that Chrome got there first with the same idea (either copied or independently), but don't ask me to find the source now.

Which is also Mozilla's problem today, they take such a long time to execute, probably due to lack of resources and having to dedicate the resources they do have to following Google's latest mad idea as it's the de facto standard. Other browser developers can make minimal changes to Chromium where most of the work is already done.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Would love to upgrade my RPi 400.

I don't see why they couldn't sell a bare motherboard which fits in the 400's case, apart from perhaps not wanting to have too many SKUs.

Re: Expensive

Zeros and Picos were less powerful, there's the CM versions, the 400 was a different form factor, and some updates to the earlier models were released with the same thing in a smaller size or sometimes with less memory or only added wifi or more GPIO pins.

The official power supply now delivers up to 27W even though Tom's Hardware could only make a Pi 5 use 7W when stressing it and changed the configuration so it drew 0.05W when in standby.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Jira is the single source of suckage

Over 16 reasons why Jira and Confluence suck

Jira is not as good as project management software for managing projects and not as good as bug tracking software for tracking bugs, it's just an event horizon of stupid user interface choices coupled with crazy backend design which makes it impossible to revert mistakes (and we do make mistakes because we're only human after all). Once a company realises their provider or end clients also use Jira then all bets are off, they connect up their Jira instances in the mistaken belief that it will make working with Jira easier and the fail grows exponentially as comments get sent externally that people didn't mean to send and workflows don't match up. The only thing that makes working with Jira easier is ripping it out and using better tools for the job.

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

Previously, I liked mobile Firefox on Android, but they yanked that out from underfoot and it's a shitty Chrome back end browser too now.

No, Firefox uses GeckoView instead of WebView or Blink.

Also, the extensions I was using with mobile Firefox are GONE (Can't do that Dave... not in this browser engine)

They're removing restrictions on Android extensions in December.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

My Toyota from about 10 years ago reboots the media centre more than I'd like, all it has to do is play music and it can't even manage that without it getting its knickers in a twist. I shudder to think of new cars which absolutely rely on software.