Posts by Dan 55

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: Hidden backlog

If you like that kind of thing you have the choice of ringing up Bupa.

All the galactic brains in NHS management need to do is roll back to the previous system which wasn't perfect but was better than this.

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Re: Well, every little bit helps

You just know it means they've cached everything they can in yet more memory.

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Re: This is where his Lordship holds his balls and dances

So let's say all those parody MP accounts get verified along with the real ones. What's the point of verification? It's not telling you anything other than the account has access to a credit card with $8 of credit.

Re: Just started twittering this week...

Elon Musk reported to have fired Twitter curation team responsible for tackling misinformation

And 5 days before US mid-term elections. Amazing coincidence.

This employee's going to get fired for sleeping on the job.

Wow... Looking at the utter lack of workers rights:

- At-Will Employment and Wrongful Termination

- Yes, At-Will Employees Can Sue For Wrongful Termination

And then you get out-of-work white MAGA men with guns wondering about upset with women and non-whites, I guess because wrongful termination due to discrimination is one of the few straws people can try clutch on to to keep their job. They shouldn't be upset with women and non-whites, they should be upset with how businesses treat workers and the lack of workers rights.

Long hours, understaffed, stupid policies, must dance for Musk to keep job

Yep, sounds like just another day in a Musk-owned business. Welcome to the club Twitter.

Re: Strange

Moderation?

Big brands urged to pause Twitter ads until Elon's learned how this all works

Re: "No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating."

I don't buy that they're working together, but I do buy that they might want the same thing for different reasons.

"No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating."

Interesting viewpoint here.

While Musk buys Twitter to take it private and get rid of those pesky woke shareholders who demand certain standards are upheld, Dorsy works on Bluesky which will be a sort of federated Twitter where it'll be difficult to ban anyone. The reasons given for their wanting to do this are... interesting... and it's also why they're pally with Putin.

Royal Mail customer data leak shutters online Click and Drop

"charged twice but not received any postage label"

Sounds like Fujitsu got the contract again and they are still seemingly unaware of how transactions are supposed to work.

Can we look also look forward to the Royal Mail taking innocent customers to court?

Singapore to phase out checks for businesses by 2025

Re: Spell checker, not cashing a cheque

El Reg has decided to use US English even though British English is the accepted version of English in Singapore. The same also happens for news from any other country - Canada, Australia, even stories originating in the UK. All dutifully reported in US English.

Even more fun can be had when US Customary measurements and dates are used in articles.

Firefox patches Windows 11 Ctrl+C hang, introduces new bug

Re: So?

Isn't that this icon?

I'm pretty sure we need an "old man yells at cloud" icon which could fill up the space left by Paris.

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

It would be interesting to be told what's been going on for the past five years from someone who believes what they do about vaccinations and the Paul Pelosi attack.

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

Then society has deemed them not acceptable in spite of algorithmic bias towards them. Suck it up, buttercup.

By the way, Musk posted a conspiracy theory over Nancy Pelosi's husband over the weekend then deleted it a couple of hours later presumably when he looked at it in the cold light of day. Isn't it great that your supposed great saviour of freedom of speech can be counted amongst the nuts and cranks peddling sheer bullshit and believed by the weak of mind and credulous because the Internet said so? I guess you also believed that nonsense that Musk posted, right?

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

But Times are a Changing, merci Monsieur Zimmermann,and they will start to swing the other way, pendulums don't remain on one side forever.

Banned British far-right figures return to Twitter within hours of takeover

And remember, this is the side that the algorithm was proven to favour.

Looks like that pendulum is stuck.

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

Yes, I too would also like Musk to restore balance to social media algorithms.

Your problem is you believe the conservative talking point that right-wing views are not being recommended by social media algorithms as much as left-wing views, when in fact the reverse is true.

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

A similar effect has also been observed on Twitter. Its recommendation algorithm tends to boost posts from right-wing politicians and news publications more than left-wing ones. Political scientists from the same team at NYU previously commented that it may be because conservative content is more likely to generate more outrage and, therefore, lead to more engagement.

We've also, by the way, noted before that it's conservative talking-point that right-wing views are routinely unfairly censored or hidden away on the internet by Big Tech. That may be because conservative political communication gets seen and flagged as misinformation more often than the opposition messaging.

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

No, he's not disagreeing with the thing that was actually said, he's under the impression something else was said and now a year later he's upset that the thing that was not said has not happened.

Where did he get the idea that the thing that was not said was really said? Odds are it was a social nework upholding a free speech policy which allows anything to be said without any grounding in fact or reality.

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

A year ago you weren't listening.

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

Ah, America, where yelling "fire" in a crowded cinema is a daily occurence, and absolute right, and has absolutely no downsides to it at all.

So let's see how the great algorithmally-driven echo chamber social (media) experiment goes just before election time comes round again. Nothing could possibly go wrong at all.

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Re: Seems like a spurious argument

Of course it does. If a piece of FOSS is useful to society it will continue in one form or another.

If Microsoft decides to knock Windows 7 on the head, that's it it's dead, if you want a supported Windows you're getting Windows 10 whether you like it or not. Likewise for Windows 10, when that reaches EOL and you want a supported Windows you're getting Windows 11 whether you like it or not. Also your computer is going to landfill and you're buying a new one if it doesn't have TPM 2.0.

"no FOSS equivalent of Azure or AWS or Google Cloud Platform"

But these are just several pieces of FOSS software lashed together with a proprietary API and billing software aren't they?

And sometimes if a piece of FOSS software used by a Big Tech corporation in is cloud is very lucky it will get a few pesos thrown in its general direction as recompense for contributing several billion dollars to its quarterly profit figures.

Apple boosts bug bounties but may not fix some bugs in past operating systems

Whoops, that should be OCLP.

You can already use Dosdude's intallers or OCFP to run newer OSes on machines which Apple refuses to support any more purely due to a management decision.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

You might have access to a Linux terminal on a Chromebook, but...

If you run a £350 Chromebook (i.e. something like 2GHz MediaTek with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage) and install Libre Office or Visual Studio Code you're pushing your luck. One thing open at a time to stop stuff suddenly disappearing. Also the keyboard is non-standard enough to trip you over, there's fun to be had with caps lock and copy-paste.

Sure, it works great as a tablet with a keyboard for your nan to browse or as a way for Google to indoctrinate the next generation of schoolchildren, but don't kid yourself that it's anything more than that.

If you degoogleise it and put a lightweight Linux distro on it you might get more out of it, but then you're really just buying a chassis - hopefully the one you've bought will allow proper Linux to be installed on it, some don't.

Microsoft realizes it hasn't updated list of banned dodgy Windows 10 drivers in years

I meant to say they lost interest in both of those before EOL, finding excuses not to release security updates that were released for 10.

Also I don't think they ever fixed that thing where you had to install updates in just the right order otherwise updating took hours in Windows 7, even though Windows Update updates itself first before anything else so it should have taken one update to put everything right.

Like they lost interest in maintaining Windows 7.

And also 8 but who can blame them.

Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

It's a shell that _doesn't run in a terminal emulator_ so comparing it to maybe the oldest terminal emulator around is missing the whole point...

The point was if I run "xterm &" I get another window with another shell, and if I run "open" I get another window with music, an image, or a video, and it works both locally and with a remote X connection.

The real big thing here is not the shell, it's the display manager that permits it. This is also what permits a window manager that can be controlled from a shell.

Window managers and display servers are a dime a dozen in Linux, you can pick and choose whichever you want.

So a custom shell couldn't clear the screen, open borderless windows, fill them with text/images/video/whatever, and send events to them to control them based on commands the user types unless the machine is also running Durden and Arcan? Maybe I'm missing something but I have to say that seems like a bold statement.

Also if this new shell throws out the terminal emulator and depends on a display manager then how does this work remotely?

Finally there are also terminal emulators like Kitty that have taken a different approach, but still offer similar functionality to Cat9, using X11.

So it's a text-driven window manager, where new windows also show mostly text-based stuff. It's... different. The suggestions don't seem very useful, the user wants to type "find" and it suggests "forget" every time. It looks like it's a convoluted way of using "xterm &" and "open <filename>" from that video but maybe there's much more to it than that. Fantastic UI for the next Hollywood film though.

Google's Alphabet to review every project after $6bn decline in profits

Working at Google was always going to end up like this.

Re: If that's an economic slow-down

Mainly used for music, now that YouTube Originals is dead.

The headline features are you can listen to music in the background, it's ad-free, and you can download music for offline listening. So remarkably like NewPipe apart from the price.

Re: Headcount

Perhaps it's time the corporation was split up with an anti-trust measure or two.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

This entitled gobshite is now moving them on to the Extinguish stage. First with the systemd cancer, now this bollocks?

That's what he's getting out of joining MS, he can finally Poeterrise the kernel.

He'll probably trap it in some pincer movement between secure boot and systemd, requiring code of his at each step to verify previous and next steps, then once he's got his foot in the door he can start with the feature creep.

From the Great Resignation to demand for more overtime

Re: Overtime?

Ok, just £4bn, a bargain.

And how do you explain people's mortgages and pensions, the pound falling, and inflation rising?

Re: Overtime?

I dunno, just read a newspaper or something. It was in the news and everything. For some reason I CBA to Google stuff for you and repeat it here, I wish I had that much free time.

I do totally get you want to blame this guy for all the recent economic turmoil instead of the 5-week wonder IEA sleeper cell, so you can feel seen, as the youth say.

Re: Overtime?

Oh no, she just tanked the pound and caused the BoE to bail out bonds and guilts to the tune of £65bn. Which did further raise inflation and mortgages.

Re: Overtime?

Sure it was Sunak's mistakes? In Truss you trusted.

Government IT provider UKCloud goes into liquidation

Re: What?

Well it looks like some agreement's between the little bits has been made somewhere. First four hits from Google:

Migration to AWS - GOV.UK Developer Documentation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration and Implementation Services - consultancy wouldn't sell it in the marketplace if government weren't buying

alphagov/govuk-aws: The GOV.UK repository for our Migration to AWS

AWS for the UK central government | Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Re: What?

gov.uk already started a mass migration to AWS and this probably precipitated UKCloud's downfall.

I vaguely remember there was someone from Whitehall who went to work at Amazon or vice-versa a few years back and then the migration started, I tried to search for it for about 10 minutes but failed to find it so it looks like it's lost to the memory hole.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Easing of Visa requirements for Indian travellers?

We do have unilateral free trade. Import controls are practically non-existent and when they were tried out for 24 hours, it wasn't a pretty picture.

The UK is known as a place to offload substandard food because it's known that there are no customs checks.

Re: Easing of Visa requirements for Indian travellers?

I can see that going down well with the conservative party membership, who would have voted anyone but Sunak if it came down to two finalists, same as last time.

Tice is probably already making plans to take the Reform party out of deep freeze to keep the tory party so far right that it would be impossible to make make migration any part of a trade deal with India.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Generally agree, with Linus, but just last month we were commenting on features for the Atari Falcon being updated in kernel too. A very much more deceased platform!

68K didn't have a crazy architecture though and is still in use in embedded with ColdFire.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Re: German-American pseudo-English.

El Reg went after the crucial Amish IT market that nobody else had laid claim to, a unique growth opportunity.

Wikipedia has the final word on this matter (whatever that is).

If we claim purple and yellow as ours, the one true English language has surely won and El Reg has joined the minority.

Re: Icon required

Brick through Windows.

You're definitely not a real USAian or someone who learnt US English, you used "learn" instead of "learnings".

As I understand it, if someone want an international audience you should use UK English, as all non-US English variants use UK English or very similar.

Likewise most of the world uses metric measurements, even in the UK which is hybrid metric measurements are understood by a science and engineering audience.

I think you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater here.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

The human race could be safe after all

Pressing the big shiny red nuclear button might be too big a hurdle for the current crop of world leaders to jump.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

At last, a benefit of Brexit

The Tory party eats itself.

Icon is a Johnson thumbs up, unfortunately or more likely fortunately missing the gurning face behind it.

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

Easy one this

People who put off restarting to install updates don't have time to close down each program, wait for Windows to update, restart, wait for Windows to update some more, log in, and open all their programs again because they have actual real work to do. They're usually younger employees as opposed to older managers.