Posts by Wyrdness

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

I've never tried Tim Tams, but Anzacs are amazingly good.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

I heard of a company that had two developers who always pair programmed. One seemed to do all of the actual development and the other just sat and listened. The company considered sacking the developer who appeared to be doing nothing. But then they realised that these two were achieving far more than any other two developers were able achieve individually.

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

Re: Not bought a Macbook

They're not shoddy at all. If Apple sell millions of a product and half a dozen fail, then some greedy knobs will start a class action suit to try to extract $$$$$$$ from Apple.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

The Sin of Gluttony

She was supposed to be fasting for Lent, and instead committed the sin of gluttony by eating McDonalds. If she'd been smarter, she'd have eaten some pie instead, since the sin of pi is always zero.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Re: Did I miss something?

I'm left wondering how large is his basement?

IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

"I bet the vast majority of that is mobile phones." - I'm not so sure. My home broadband and mobile phone are with Sky (who have millions of customers in the UK). The home broadband uses ipv6, whilst mobile uses ipv4.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Re: Here at Signal

My assumption what it was either tongue-in-cheek or a clever way to spot candidates who are lying about heir experience. Or maybe a bit of both.

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

I plug my Macbook into my Dell monitor using a USB-C cable and the monitor charges the Macbook. So I'm only using a single port for both video and charging.

I can also plug in a cheap (£12 off fleabay) USB-C hub and have monitor, charging, ethernet and USB-3 ports whilst only using a single laptop USB-C port. I don't find the lack of ports disturbing.

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Re: Worth ?

"...never interact with the rest of humanity again"

Surely you mean "never interact with humanity again"

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

I used XFCE (on Fedora) for years as KDE seemed too bloated and as for Gnome 3...

I moved to Cinnamon on Mint last year and it's pretty good. Cinnamon did seem very buggy and I was having to restart it at least once a day. It's become a lot more stable recently and restarts are a thing of the past.

Australian Federal Police hiring digital evidence retrieval specialists: Being a very good boy and paws required

Man's best friend?

They say that dogs are man's best friend, but cats won't grass you up to the feds.

RIP Spencer Silver: Inventor of the Post-it Note, aka the office password reminder, dies

Re: RIP Spencer

A career in adhesives sounds like a sticky situation to be in.

Namecheap hosted 25%+ of fake UK govt phishing sites last year – NCSC report

Re: "a 28.8 per cent share of known UK government-themed phishing sites"

"a 28.8 per cent share of known UK government-themed phishing sites" leaves the question of who is responsible for the other 71.2%

Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage

In addition to the comments above, I can't see anywhere in the article where Bill Gates is referred to as a philanthropist.

But can it run Avid? The Reg hands shiny new M1 MacBook to video production pro, who beats it with Blender, Handbrake, and ... Hypercard?

Re: Multiple monitors

It's a bit annoying that they don't support more than one external monitor. I opted for an ultra-wide monitor, which is preferable (IMHO) to two screens. Other people have reported that DisplayLink adapters work well with M1 Macs and that there is native support for them, so that might be an option if you don't want to replace existing monitors.

India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

According to Google's IPv6 monitoring, the take up is approaching 35% of all internet traffic globally. In the USA, it's almost 45%, whilst in India it's now a surprising 56%.

So 'poor take up' isn't really an argument against IPv6. I would have generally agreed with your sentiment until I started using it myself. Once you've taken a little time to learn about it, it's not as complex as you might think.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Re: 11 stone..

From the article: "On July 17, the developer(s) working on the check-in application "adapted a piece of software, which changed the title of any adult female from Miss to Ms automatically."

So if they don't have the passenger's date of birth, how are they able to change the title of adult females in the application. And if they do have date of birth, why didn't they use this for the weight calculation?

The only conclusion that I can draw from this is that they have some exceptionally dumb software developers. But then, pretty much every airline website I've ever used appears to have been created by exceptionally dumb software developers, so perhaps this is standard for the airline industry.

Facebook says dump of 533m accounts is old news. But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years, Zuck

Re: I need to look this up

"After several attempts to create an account they told me that they told me that they would sue me if I tried to setup an account again."

You should have let them try to sue you. The court filing would have been hilarious. "We're suing you for attempting to use a fake name which, coincidentally, just happens to be the same as your real name".

AI recommendations fail fans who like hard rock and hip hop – official science

Spotify's spotty recommendations

I never bother with recommendations. Spotify (which I don't use any more) used to recommend either music that I had never heard of, or music that I did know but hated. Given the latter recommendations, I never dared listen to the former.

Cherry on top: Dell shoves MX keyboard into its Alienware m15 R4 ultrabook

FTA: The mechanism consists of two opposite-facing “wings,”

These "wings" - they wouldn't happen to resemble a butterfly, would they?

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

This debate has been around for decades. I remember it in the 80's but, back then, it was in the pages of computer magazines. Much as I'd like this to change, if we haven't won this after 4 decades then we're pissing in the wind.

17 years since release, iMac G5 finally gets an upgrade after tinkerer shoves M1 Mac Mini inside

The Reg article says it's a 17" iMac and links to a spec sheet that says that the 17" is 1440x900, whilst the 20" is 1680x1050. Since the video says 1680x1050, I guess that the Reg has reported the wrong screen size and it's actually a 20" iMac.

The G5 iMac was 17 years ago? How the tempus doth fugit.

I bought one of these iMacs for my (then) partner, expecting that she'd use the Mac and I'd continue to use Linux (Gentoo back then) for my main PC and Windows for games. I played around with Mac because I though that knowledge of OS X might be useful (and it was Unix underneath). What I didn't expect was that I started to use the Mac for almost everything and, eventually, retired the Windows and Linux machine and switched completely to Mac.

These days, we've still got Macs at home for everyday use, plus a couple of Linux Mint machines for WFH and NAS.

Maybe because the original panel is 1440x900 and a new 17" LCD is likely to be, at most, 1920x1080. It's probably not worth the trouble and expense of replacing it, considering that it's not a vast increase in resolution.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Re: Nice article

My solution to home wifi issues was to ditch consumer kit and buy a Ubiquiti access point. I also set it to use the DFS channels, which tend to be unused by consumer routers, meaning that I'm unlikely to be sharing a channel with neighbours. The difference in speed and range is between this and cheap (or 'free') consumer gear is incredible.

It only took four years and thousands of complaints but ICANN finally kills off rogue Indian domain registrar

This happened to my domains

Some years ago, I had my domains registered with a registrar that fell afoul of ICANN. I'm not sure if this registrar was actually doing anything dodgy, it seemed more like they weren't doing anything at all. So ICANN shut them down and decided to transfer all of their domains to another registrar. In their infinite wisdom, they chose a Chinese registrar. With a website that was entirely in Chinese. That was a fun experience.

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

Re: ZX Printer

No, it was an electrostatic printer. It used a spark to burn dots onto horrible metallic paper. They gave off a horrible smell as they vapourised the thin metal layer of the paper.

There were some third-party printers for Sinclairs that did use thermal paper, which may be what you're thinking of.

Linux Mint sticks by Snap decision – meaning store is still disabled by default in 20.1

Ctrl-Alt-Esc

Handy tip for Mint users - use Ctrl-Alt-Esc to restart Cinnamon when it fsck's up. I've got two Mint machines here (typing this on one of them) and I sometimes have to restart Cinnamon several times a day, when it takes a break from it's job of managing windows.

It's particularly bad when switching users. That always requires a Cinnamon restart.

Apart from that, it's a decent Linux desktop and I'm also using it for my home server (on a Terramaster NAS).

Crowdfunded Asahi project aims for 'polished' Linux experience on Apple Silicon

Re: Why do some people feel compelled ...

It’s usually not hard you just hook up the IO to a console and monitor the output and you manipulate the device, from there you can write a driver.

At least, that's what an moron on Macrumors told me (exact words quoted above) when I pointed out the difficulty of reverse engineering the custom Apple Silicon SOC to write Linux drivers. I didn't argue with him further, as he clearly had far more experience of being an idiot than I have.

Surface Laptop Go: Premium feel for a mid-range price, but Microsoft's Apple-like range once meant more than this

Re: The same review in just a few words.

I read it as "Microsoft's ambitions were high, but their delivery of those ambitions was too poor".

Raven geniuses: Four-month-old corvids have similar cognitive abilities to great apes at same age, study finds

Bears too

It's apparently proved tricky to design bear-proof food lockers for campers to use in Yosemite National Park. The locker mechanisms needed to be simple enough for a human to open, but too complicated for a bear to manipulate. This presented a bit of a design challenge because, according a Park Ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Apple aptly calls its wireless over-the-ear headphones the AirPods Max – as in, maximum damage to your wallet

You can have custom engravings

You know that Apple's gone to far with their pricing when even the fanboys on MacRumors are doing this.

https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/screen-shot-2020-12-08-at-6-14-47-pm-png.1689736/

They're also suggesting that these should come pre-engraved with the word 'Sucker'.

Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?

Do you want fries...?

Those proper chips in your image look infinitely better than the horrible thin fries that Macdonalds serves. I'm feeling hungry just looking at them.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/06/05/chips_teaser.jpg

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Inside joke?

Back when Siemens had their headquarters in Staines, the receptionists apparently used to answer the phone with "Hello, Siemens Staines"

Re: Cubic metres? cm^3? ?? What is its abbrev.??

"It's probably used in construction, mining, forestry, freight or something similar"

Forestry? By lumberjacks? Leaping from tree to tree? As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia?

CodeWeavers' CrossOver ran 32-bit Windows Intel binary on macOS on Arm CPU emulating x86 – and nobody died

@karlkarl

I only have one AS Mac so can't try this. But I have disproved your assertion above that it's not possible to build and run code on AS.

One of the articles you linked to even states:

"This new behavior doesn’t change the long-established policy that our users and developers can run arbitrary code on their Macs"

@karlkarl

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I've just tried the following on my Apple Silicon Air:

me@Air ~ % uname -a

Darwin Air 20.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.1.0: Sat Oct 31 00:07:10 PDT 2020; root:xnu-7195.50.7~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T8101 arm64

me@Air ~ % gcc -Wall hello.c -o hello

me@Air ~ % file hello

hello: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

me@Air ~ % ./hello

Hello, world!

I ain't signed nuffink and it seems to compile and run "Hello World" just fine. Can you explain what you think that the problem is?

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

Re: The Truth?

Trump doesn't care about the truth. He just wants to stay in power, whatever it takes.

Geekbench stats show Apple Silicon MacBook Air trouncing pricey 16-inch MacBook Pro

13" Pro scores the same

The 13" Pro is showing identical Geekbench numbers to the Air. People are speculating that the passively cooled Air won't be able to sustain this level of performance for too long, whilst the fan-equipped Pro should be able to. Anyone who was considering one of the faster Intel Macbooks can now get more performance for far less money. Of course, Apple being Apple, something has to give and these new machines are limited to 16GB of memory and only a single external display - not really 'Pro' specs IMO.

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

Re: no homebrew?

It's still *nix, so homebrew stuff just needs to be recompiled. Apple demoed Docker running on the dev kit when they announced it in June. There's also experimental support in Docker to run x86 containers on ARM. I tried it on a R-Pi 3 and got 32-bit Ubuntu up and running. That could be usable for dev work, just not for production environments.

Apple cracks down on iOS terminal apps because they can download code

Apparently, they've backtracked on this

According to AppleInsider, " the [iSH] developer advised they had received a call from the App Review team apologizing for the notification, the appeal against the takedown was accepted, and that iSH would not be removed from the App Store."

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Re: Logistical Challenges

You're right. I don't expect that they've thought about this at all. </sarcasm>

Uber drivers take ride biz to European court over 'Kafkaesque' algorithmic firings by Mastermind code

Self-fulfilling

It's no big secret that Uber is working on self-driving cars. This is their ultimate goal - to have cars but without human drivers. Therefore all Uber drivers are working towards their own redundancy by financing Uber's R&D.

Ubuntu 20.10 goes full Raspberry Pi, from desktop to micro clouds: Full fat desktop on a Pi is usable

Re: Why bother?

"A minimal Ubuntu server (no GUI) would usually be more practical, in my terrible opinion."

As the article states, this already exists.

"Canonical has offered a Raspberry Pi image for Ubuntu Server for some time"

Can't quite remember the name of the song stuck in your head? Hum it and our AI will take a guess, says Google

English?

"It only works with English-language tracks at the moment."

So you have to hum in English?

Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many

I'm probably working harder from home than when I was in the office. The flip side is that I gain an extra 2 hours from not commuting. This is time that I can use for myself - such as sleeping until 8:30, instead of leaving to go to the office at that time.

Also, what with restricted socialising in the pub etc. I've more free evenings, so if I'm busy and want to work later then I can. Fortunately I've an interested job so don't mind doing that on occasion. I wouldn't want to make a habit of it though.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: Postscript

The OS X PDF printing bug is still there. I ran into it a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I'd been sent a .doc version of the file too, so printed that from LibreOffice.

Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'

I'm enjoying the ML Resume generator:

"Bug fixes and maintenance of mainframe based Cobol" at Gitlab. That certainly explains a lot.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

I once worked at a very old, well-known, traditional corporate company where absolutely everyone wore suits. Except for this one techie who always had goth makeup, fishnets, New Rocks etc. I always assumed that he was so utterly brilliant at his job that they couldn't do anything about his appearance.

Re: Inappropriate garb? Me? Probably daily ...

I've been to a couple of job interviews in full bike leathers. The first time, I explained that I commute to work by bike and the only way that I could get from my current workplace in Central London to the prospective employer (Basingstoke) was by bike. I got the job.

The next time I did that, was with a former employer where the manager was keen to re-hire me. Unfortunately an HR-droid decided to sit in the interview (very rare in this company) and didn't like the leathers, so she vetoed him employing me. He hired me shortly after, with no HR involvement.