Posts by Rich 2

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

A proper tiling wm is great once you get used to it. Oh the joy of windows not obscuring other windows and not having to constantly move and rearrange windows just to get on with your work

If you have multiple desktops and a really easy way to switch between them then leaving a window full screen or having only 2 or so windows on the screen is really not a problem; it’s an asset.

Try i3 wm for a while. Other tiling WMs are also available. Definitely don’t judge the idea by whatever debacle Gone comes up with

Re: Killer app

I find the edge snapping feature one of the most irritating UI things ever invented

Or just use i3

…. Or some other proper tiling wm that is vastly lighter, simpler, and probably works better than anything Gnome come up with

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Back in the day, i tried Opera several times. I really wanted to like it but just couldn’t. Stuff wouldn’t work (even back then), and it didn’t have anything close to the functionality of Firefox

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Re: What a pile of ...

Re x.com

I thought single letter domain names were not allowed?

Re: Watching Musk run this into the ground...

“ Now all we need is for Musk to do the same for FarceBook…”

Oh can you just imagine? The utter JOY of this would be without precedent. There would be street parties. Literally billions of zombies would re-awaken, refreshed and cleansed.

What a BEAUTIFUL event that would be.

Ahhhhhhh…….

Framework starts taking orders for 16-inch repairable, upgradeable laptop

Re: Obligatory

Morons?

Boris/Trump voters?

Re: Obligatory

I’m not sure what “International English” is. There is no such thing. Are you able to swap round the keycaps to make it work it work in a “local” English way? Ie - something usable

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

OSI

You are correct. The OSI are a self-appointed group who have no deity-given right to police what is and what is not “open source” or “free” or whatever.

Releasing code that is not subject to an “OSI approved licence” does not mean it’s not “open source”

I’m not saying whether Faecesbook’s licence is or is not open source, and quite frankly i couldn’t give a shit one way or the other, but i really object to OSI’s opinion being quoted as gospel

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

Yes but you’re from Canada and so not necessarily thick as pig shit

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

How the fuck…

…. do you spend £11,000,000,000 on ANY coms system???

Except (maybe) one that has to reach Pluto

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

“ When we're not calling it Office 361 ...”

…or just shit

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

How much?

I would ask what $450 is in proper money

But, of course, el reg is American now isn’t it?

Duh! Stupid me

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Onerous obligations

“Amazon would be unfairly singled out and forced to meet onerous administrative obligations that don't benefit EU consumers,"

Onerous obligations like not allowing the sale of obviously dangerous goods (most of which seem to originate in China), for example?

An “onerous obligation” that Amazon (at least the UK one) demonstrably fails to meet many many many times on a daily basis

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Zuk

Zuk is a disgusting individual

His company is a discussing company

EU antitrust team closer to full-blown Microsoft probe, say sources

Re: Friends don’t let friends Zoom anymore

“Windows, Mac, Linux: they are all obsolete”

Try running a network analyser in your browser. Or a compiler. Or a file browser, or a command line, or a VPN, or a JTAG probe, or a neural network, or….

I’m sure you’ll get somewhere (for a very limited definition of “somewhere”) with some of this (like an editor) but basically (and I mean this with all due respect) you’re talking twaddle.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

To free or not to free

I doubt RH will find it too difficult to close off these work-arounds. They’re not stupid

I understand why some people are annoyed with RH. But I’m also not that sympathetic either. I see the argument that RH are making use of free code that’s out there and so they should, in turn,share their “added value” (ignoring the whole GPL technicalities for a moment). But (and I think this is significant) the free code that RH use is also free to you or me. So they are not stealing anything. To those sulking in a corner because their free tap of hard work is running dry, I would say “well do the work yourself then”.

It’s been said a zillion times before but if you release your code for free (and are happy to do so) then you have to accept that it will likely get used in applications you don’t approve of, by people you don’t like, and in ways you don’t like. If you don’t like that then don’t release your code for free. Or at all.

And if it wasn’t your code on the first place then you have absolutely no right to complain at all

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: "Strong" encryption?

“ Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved.”

Sounds like a typical Teams meeting

US mulls tightening ban on AI chips to China

AI chips

I’m guessing an “AI chip” is just the same as a “chip” (remember those?) but with a different sticker on it and backed-up by some vacuous marketing literature?

Blimey! Where would we be without “AI”? That’s right - exactly where we are now (well, except for every other news item having “AI” mentioned somewhere in it)

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: "show an ad believed to be relevant to the visitor's known interests"

Well I had a similar thought. Remove all the categories except three really dull ones that nobody will be interested in advertising for - basket weaving, paint mixing, and snail keeping?

Re: Ten foot barge pole, please.

I’m sure Googlies will go to some lengths to try and stop any plugins disabling it

But I’m totally baffled as to why anyone chooses to use the chrome spyware

Just no

An API specifically for supporting advertising has no place in a browser. Or most other applications either come to that

Why would I want to use my electricity on facilitating some shitty advertising outfit’s desire to bombard me with adverts? The fundamental issue that Googlies and their ilk choose to consistently and completely ignore is that nobody actually wants their adverts popping up on their computer screens

Microsoft investigating bug in Windows 11 File Explorer that makes the CPU hangry

Details Column width

Never used 11. But in 10 the ability to change the width of the columns in “detailed” (or whatever it’s called) mode in file explorer has been removed. For reasons that completely escape me other than to cripple the application.

My contempt and anger for MS cannot be put into words.

Microsoft Azure OpenAI lets enterprises feed corporate secrets to ChatGPT

“…many enterprises are integrating ChatGPT into their operational flow

Re title - why??? What the hell do they get out of it?

All the examples seem to relate to finding stuff. If you can’t remember where you put something then maybe invest in a notepad? If it’s stuff generated by your colleagues then either ask them or invest in organising your company’s stuff better

OpenAI calls for tough regulation of AI while quietly seeking less of it

EU lawmakers

I think the correct term might be MEPs. “Lawmakers” is an American term. Used in America. Not generally used in the EU (or anywhere outside of America as far as I have observed)

The first few times I read the term “lawmaker” I wondered what the dickens it was referring to. There is life outside of the US you know, even if El Reg is determined to abandon its roots

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

There was talk about moving landfill sites 50 years ago

Capita wins £50M fraud reporting contract with City of London cops

Sweepstake

So who’s for starting a sweepstake on how much over budget, late, and lacking in functionality this will be? :-)

I’ll throw my hat in - 20x, 10 years, all of it

Europe teases breaking up Google over ad monopoly

Zzzzzzzz

Any EU action will go something like….

- Spend the next 5 years “examining the evidence”

- Pause for a couple of years because …errrr…

- Establish a committee or something to discuss the findings

- Eventually raise the prospect of a fine

- Spend the next 3 years in court arguing

- By now Google will have changed whatever business practice it was that started the whole thing in the first place

- EU sets some piddly fine

- More court arguments and Google dragging it out a bit longer

- Google eventually pays the fine by which point nobody can actually remember what the original issue was and anyone who was effected by the previous “bad business practice” has long since closed shop

- Replace “Google” with the next tech company to misbehave and repeat

Surprise! GitHub finds 92% of developers love AI tools

Kids of today, eh?

“ Asked how they are currently judged, these programmers responded: code quality (40 percent)…. etc….”

Well that sums up nicely what’s wrong with modern software development. What a load of slipshod useless f*$€rs - I would sack the other 60% on the spot.

Of course, it’s more fashionable to “release often and break things” - what a f*$€ing stupid mantra - and I’m an old git that uses vim and writes code that works (not that it counts for anything)

92%

In other news, 98% of statistics are made up on the spot. This increases to 99% when money is involved

What an absolute load of facebook

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: C H E Q U E spell after me

Why the fuck would anyone vote your post down????

An American that can’t spell, maybe?

Re: Checks?

I appreciate I have no right to be pissed off at El Reg’s move to be “American”, However, as a long time reader (20+ years)

IT REALLY PISSES ME OFF!!!!

Microsoft battles through two 365 outages in one day

Re: I despair

I have no idea what the business case was. No idea what it costs (but if it’s free then that’s still too much).

As for lost production when things go wrong, as I said, I’m lucky enough to not be too exposed to it so I couldn’t comment. Production for myself and the engineers I work with goes up when teams goes down though

I despair

We have migrated to all things MS cloudy and Teamsy over the last month or two where I work.

The explanatory email that went around from the IT department to everyone explained that this was because it was (and I’m not joking here) “best in class” plus some other comments that were cut-and-paste from the MS sales literature.

Oh the temptation to reply with a company-wide email correcting this utterly misplaced thinking…

Thankfully, I only have to use Outlook and Teams (OMFG!!!! What a heap of utter shit) so am probably spared the rest of the cloudy goodness. And quite frankly, I look forward to an outage to give myself some peace from Team’s incessant pings and popups and general bollox-ness

UK government proposes legislation to regulate umbrella companies

Re: Government creates red tape to fix IR35 mess of its own creation.

I’m no fan of the tories that have buggered up so much over the last however-many years.

However, remember that it was Blair’s government that introduced IR35 back in the day

So they are all equally culpable

Eating disorder non-profit pulls chatbot for emitting 'harmful advice'

Comical

This is a story line worthy of W1A

Just how brain-dead stupid can they be?

A - Quite a lot, apparently

IR35 costs UK Research and Innovation £36M – the same it spent funding tech projects

I don’t understand the logic of fining a publicly funded body (for whatever reason, not just IR35)!! All it does is take money away from said body so they can’t do their job as well

Your timeline is way off

“ It came into force across the economy in April 2021…”

No it didn’t!!! IR35 was introduced by Tony Blair’s government back whenever

The way it was implemented changed relatively recently, but the basic fuck-up - sorry, IDEA - has been about much longer than that.

UK told it must double low carbon investment to meet net zero targets

Re: What’s the point?

“Carbon trading” is a joke worthy of Dr. Strangelove

Re: What’s the point?

Nothing to do with catastrophe-mongering as you put it.

Species extinction is racing to the finish line - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.

We continue to poison the air we breath and the water we drink - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.

Sealife (to take just one ecosystem) is in desperate trouble in so many ways.

While I’m pleased if you optimism keeps you happy and save, I feel it is unfounded

What’s the point?

We’re 95% the way to total ecological collapse anyway, so any further lacklustre half-arsed attempt to do anything about it (which is actually just a plot to avoid the issue completely) isn’t going to make any difference.

And yes - I AM that pessimistic - I’m very frightened for my 6 year old son!

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

RAR - the compression utility from hell

The ONLY use case I have ever seen for RAR file compression is to make it impossible (or at least such a pain in the arse that one gives up) to decompress anything with it.

RAR should have been strangled at birth

That Meta GDPR fine is €1.2B. Plus biz must stop sending EU data to US

That will be when they spoke/wrote proper English too then?

6 months to comply

In my mind the most ridiculous aspect of this is that Meta are being given 6 months to change their ways

So they are being granted 6 months of continuing to break the law!! Free, gratis and with the EU’s blessing!!!

Do you think if I was caught robbing a bank, I would be given 6 months to stop doing it?

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Re: Dystopian

I have no payment method at all associated with my iPhone account. And I’m quite happy to leave it like that.

I appreciate this doesn’t work for everyone though.

Re: Dystopian

I don’t understand the excuse (if indeed there is one at all) for not implementing a global payment lock on all iPhone/iPad/Android accounts that needs a SEPARATE password to unlock!!

It’s a pretty blindingly simple solution to this problem that has been about since “smart” phones were invented.

Even for an adult, it is way too easy to accidentally buy some vapourware on one of these devices through an application

AT&T warns T-Mobile US, Starlink may disrupt terrestrial cellphones

Satellite comms over 3/4G

“… and to achieve this using standard phones.”

I’m definitely no radio expert so can someone explain how a “standard” phone signal is going to reach a satellite?

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

Shrug….

I’m surprised anyone can get even vaguely excited (or even just vaguely interested) in a phone these days.

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

MS - king of the anti-Midas touch

I’m constantly surprised by how MS with all their enormous resources manage to turn everything they touch into utter shit.

They are doing it with GitHub. They did it with Skype, plus several hundred more applications over their long and illustrious history.

A lone Nvidia GPU speeds past the physics-straining might of a quantum computer – in these apps at least

Re: "no more than two weeks to solve"

Try this….

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs

Ignore the headline of the video (“Quantum computers will kill the internet”) - buried in it is actually one of the clearest and most useful descriptions I’ve found of how a quantum computer actually works