Posts by F Seiler

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

For cryptographic hashes yes. But there are also hashes explicitly designed to give similar output for close input. What close means is application specific, but could eg be a location in space, an edit distance of text, visual similarity....

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

Now if the ecosystem companies set up an industry association to promote the paid support or customized commercial variants and the engine batch et al mentioned in those slides it made sense. That and TDF coordinating as needed. But for this to happen under the TDF umbrella seems really poortly thought out.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

If you order "with" in rural switzerland you are likely served a coffee with generous amounts of fruit spirits mixed in.

Looming ventilator shortage amid pandemic sparks rise of open-source DIY medical kit. Good thinking – but safe?

I rarely feel like upvoting you, but this time absolutely.

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Nice!

Apart from the IoT model with wireless REST HTTPS API, do you also offer a HPC variant - maybe as PCI express add-in card with freeBSD, Linux and Windows drivers and SDK with C API and python bindings?

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Re: LTSC?

still not really a valid option. As long as there is no mode how Ms would ack a mode where i run that version as a private person, it doesnt exist for me.

Not that im particularly afraid of ms or cracks, but some time ago, once i spent enough time in the industry or just got old enough i decided that i will only run sw in legal mode - most of the time it means that i prefer open source and non-commercial free, but if the commericial offer is reasonable i have no problem to pay for what i use.

...back to windows, yes if that desktop no nagging windows was somewhere maybe 50% more (maybe up to 500 or 1000 ◇), id buy it. But if they dont hurry getting their shit sorted i might have settled on an acceptable desktop working on bsd*.

*yeah pretty much set. I run freebsd already on anything that doesnt need a gui or only a minimal one. Nothing against linux, and i work with some on the job regularly, but freebsd appears so much simpler, cleaner more intuitive to me. I just havent found a desktop environment i like so far (except from windows, kind of, it also only went downhill after w2k).

Re: gaming platform

I dont know fortnite, but it doesnt appear to be a q3a class game ie no need for sub-degrè rotation accuracy in milliseconds even for beginners. As wikipedia lists switch, ps4,ios and android as platform why not just use a smartphone or get a console...

/ex pc now longtime console, but the change was made along with a shift in kinds of games i play (no fps any longer)

RISC-V business: Tech foundation moving to Switzerland because of geopolitical concerns

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

The proper home for an stgw 90 or 57 is either the wardrobe or cleaning cupboard

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

Re: Who needs a vacuum cleaner on wheels with E 0.62 / L in the land of president Trump.

While i don't know what was the point of your post, it made me LOL and left me wondering why your car needs more horse power than a WW2 fighter plane (eg early bf.109) or battle tank (eg T-34).

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Re: OK, I'll bite

German also has 3

Your server remote login isn't root:password, right? Cool. You can keep your data. Oh sh... your IoT gear, though?

Re: Trump is going to be so angry!

Now that sounds more like an ova anime from the eighties

Florida man stumbles on biggest prime number after working plucky i5 CPU for 12 days straight

Well, AFAICT it begins with a 1, but the tricky part ist probably getting the length of the remainder FFFFFF.... right

Former headteacher fined £700 after dumping old pupil data on server at new school

Re: Costs of £364.08

Likely the result of a factor applied on the total or a part.

It is for example 148% of 246 (resp. 26% off of 492).

NASA to celebrate 55th anniversary of first Moon landing by, er, deciding how to land humans on the Moon again

Re: How to land humans on the Moon again ...

Nice, made me laugh.

This may indeed be true for an American programme, but i don't think 13 is particularly unlucky in China (and 4 is past).

Hipster horror! Slack has gone TITSUP: Total inability to support user procrastination

Re: I never even noticed

Now you made me curious. What a progress.

Hexchat with 13 channels across 3 networks eats less than 0.01% (left idle, up to 6% by busily tabbing between channels) and 14mb ram, and that's on windows. Something like bitchx in its native habitat probably eats not even a fraction of that.

Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America

Re: Another wee problemette...

FB could only use the uploaded nude as an authorization token (face-checked against existing tagged photos or some such) to block all nudes tagged with your profile name on other profiles. After the outcry, version 2 would then give you the opportunity to allow select profiles to post nudes of you again.

Crappy upload speeds a thing of the past in fresh broadband 'net spec

Re: Except for mobile

Last time i saw something called "mobile" with coax plugs was in military, and we didn't run DOCSIS on it.

SQL Server 2017: What's new, what's missing on Linux, and what's next?

Re: Why would you ever want to run SQL Server on Linux?

I would expect them to have isolated the platform specific code parts, as the Sos thing seems to imply. So their core is presumably the same, but this of couse does not prevent them from neglecting the "tuning" on Linux

Re: ''Various flavours of Linux''

Not sure where all the downvotes derive from. At least in my industry, static linking as much as possible (ie everything but libc+pthread/msvc*) is the sensible thing to do. But thats a highly regulated industry where post final build, a new version can take weeks to months and i guess six or seven figure monies until it can be shipped in any market. After that it should be frozen, but with the bad bad internet you still have to accept that turning off o/s security updates is probably not the best option and hope for the relevant authorities to accept the o/s somewhat changes underneath (bar APIs, i hope).

So, upvoted

Citrix swats Sweet32 bug by just turning off old ciphers

Re: Just because the bugs are fixed...

Your post holds for about every single patch, but it can't be stressed enough.

Theoretical patch/updateability may actually be counter-productive where it really matters, because it may be an incentive to carelessness or cost cutting at release while critical systems often cannot "just update" without considerable costs and interrupting service. Ianal, but something might need to be recertified, years and milions spent.

Larry Ellison today said really nice things about rival Amazon's cloud

I have only worked for a year with an oracle db and generally are not a db guy (more image processing, physics simulation, hardware control etc), but what i gathered back then was oracle can be a beast in db performance. Features ... errr, dunno but in my eyes they are all about being fast at relational queries.

A) how do you brag about that other than comparing to how others do on that very same field

B) i can see them actually doing extremely well in /that/ field also in the cloud, but hypy things like big data seems to be about unstructured data.

dunno why; the things i would guess the most valuable for business intelligence, where probably the money lies, /should/ be structured to have value. IOW, if oracle manages to offer relevant help at BI also with "AI" (tho i still shudder at the thought of "pretrained" AI models to use in BI) they should be set up good to help others make money (in contrast to sink money into hype).

Disclaimer of course i'm no expert on any of this, just seeing +/- from the sidelines what some few companies in one very specific field (medtech) are interested in/struggle with, apart from the -inherent to that field- "how do we remain or even get compliant to the gazillon and ever changing regulations".

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Re: Let me get this right...

That last sentence there is pretty golden.

Reddit meltdown: Top chat boards hidden as rebellion breaks out

Re: *yawn*

http://www.ircbeginner.com/ircinfo/m-commands.html

The "action" command. It deducts one point from your soul per use.

Stress me, test me, vex me ... boffins seek Hall Effect in frustrated magnets

Re: I don't know about quantum stuff, but I do know about frustration

Not sure if those were not already used to power Marvin.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 3.18 as 3.17 wobbles

Re: Its the kernel

I'd have thought software engineers typically escaped that war, only having left the energy to mock the systems they use themselves.

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

Re: CTRL+C

Well, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Break are not exactly the same. From memory so may be be not fully correct, but something like one will only cancel the current call or loop iteration while the other will abort the entire script.

Europe: Apple could NOT care less about kids' in-app cash sprees

Re: Use gift cards.

>> Last Modified: Jul 14, 2014

Too late, Blighty! Samsung boffins claim breakthrough graphene manufacturing success

Simply buy it for yourself. Then the cat will use it.

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Re: Are you insane?

I'm not going to vote either way, but think the "synchronization" list filled with functions that deal within the same process. As such they better not actually switch to kernel mode to do their magic and thus can be implemented by anyone else without additional win API support. I prefer to use the C++ language features (where available, and newer versions really add a lot of useful stuff in that regard) than bolting myself onto the win API very firmly. Of course MS's stdlib may or may not use the win API calls under the hood. Or the win API functions use their stdlib under the hood, who knows.

Are you for reel? How the Compact Cassette struck a chord for millions

Re: recording prevention tabs etc.

you know just a bit of scotch tape over the holes would have done the job as well (and can easily be dis/reengaged as needed)

Battery-boosting breakthrough grows on trees – literally

Re: Scientific research is shit

i suspect the sceptical reactions are more out of frustration that the advancement here is not as fast as the doubling everything every few years software people have been spoiled with. And that this now limits how wasteful you can be on mobile gadgets.

Windows 8.1: So it's, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft's Plan A

Re: @ The Axe

..or 4 versions of visual studio, each complete with half a dozen links named the same for the most part. Well except if you started with "v", you lost because although the folder and all other links might start with "visual studio", the main IDE itself is named "microsoft visual studio XXXX".

Sony sucker-punches Xbox on price, specs, DRM-free gaming

Re: "a slight catch"

the "catch" on the camera sounded so obviously sarcastic i'm not even sure it wasn't meant as is

Big browser builders scramble to fix cross-platform zero-day flaw

Re: I explain the graphs as MS making a much more secure browser this month

"primarily intended for use in phishing attacks rather than giving access to full systems"

OK maybe i should wait until details are out, but "phishing" sounds like a bain attack, not a system attack.

A browser can't really defend against that *unless* it phones home all the time in order to block what its home base considers insecure.

Not exactly what i want my browser to do.

(I use varous versions of FF at home, as far back as 3.0.x {ofc always with NS and AB}, use IE at work, but chrome? uuuuhhh)

Re: How about the REST of the "Browsers"?

uh, why exactly are you using an "internet security" package? is it like "anti virus", i.e the same kind of cycle burner?

Door creaks and girl farts: computing in the real world

Re: insist on the Source Code?

there are both cases of course. It's apallingly clear that you can't force such a company, but it's doubly blind if you don't insist on the code where you actually could, just to save a few bucks or have easier negotiations in the short term.

Re: RE: what else do you want - parallel printer ports?

yeah it's funny how how some "tech" people think how computing is reinvented every two years. Funny again how most of the most fundamental algorithms and protocols i actually make use of were developed mostly somewhere around 20 years before i was even born.

Re: RE: what else do you want - parallel printer ports?

upvoted, not because i'm an "open source" advocat, but because buying binary can lead to some unfortunare circumstances where you are forced to a) hack around failings in the manu firmware and b) are either forced to threat them to kill if they dont give out source/permission to hack or b2) buy the company as a whole.

All because someone thought it was ok to buy in custom drivers without insisting on the source code and the manu is incapable to fix the problems by themselves (i.e driving multiple cards in the same device; not related to parallel ports but close).

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: Irfanview

Irfan View: more of a viewer with limited editing

(fast start, can set minimal interface, walk folders with space/backspace, crop, rotate, adjust curves/gamma/brightness, *no* drawing (lines etc), supports something like 9000+ formats e.g. also custom specified raw interpretation)

Paint.net: more of a lightweight editor ("mini-PS/PSP")

you know what it is

I use

-Irfan for viewing, batch conversion, simple stuff like rotate and resize photos

-PDN for labeling stuff on screenshots, collages (at work)

Samsung outs 'retina display' ARM chippery

OTOH, often-used antialising does render at higher-than-screen-res, then scale down (interpolate) to make the jaggies less visible.

If your screen has twice the pixel/mm you can probably dial down the AA-ing by a factor 2.

So you render at the same resolution as before, have a little crisper image at the risk that people might be able to make out the jaggies a little better (or just not so, because the single pixel is too damn small and looks exactly the same as the larger interpolated value pixel before).

Muvizu animation suite

i cannot conclusively deny that there could be a use case for this, but my first thought after a hope of "bender for the lazy" on the title was "3D clipart".

Java's 'Steve Jobs' moment in 2012?

If only the hipsters stopped inserting random silly featlets everyone will have forgotten about in 5 or 10 years, it might someday become almost as respectable as C.

/not so sure about whether i should add the joke icon too, or i'm actually serious.

Give me 10 gig Ethernet now!

@trevor

I was downvoting AC, not you.

Probably should have made that clear.

Since i downvoted your post i feel the need to explain.

I'm not a backup guy, but i can assure you that a decent network link will provide you with close to spec transfer rates for gigbit/s links. We have cameras on 1Gbit reliably transferring somewehre around 110 to 120 million bytes per second (~90-95% of spec) of payload (pretty incompressible image data) over a single gigabit link (on "prosumer" intel/pro PC pci-e cards and windows xp).

One thing to be *very* aware of is however collisions. If you have a dedicated point to point link this is fine. But as soon as you have anyone else interrupting, throughput crashes - like divide by factors, not just subtract a bit IME.

Scientists devise 260GB CD-size glass disc storage tech

oh, a title

If the US experiments with jumbojet-sized lasers for such, i doubt a shoebox device (LED laser source?) is sufficient. Of course there is a possibility they choose to use the big ones for show effect.

Nokia posts massive loss, blames 'ambiguity'

thanks for clarifying this

Sometimes with english texts i'm unsure which symbols are used for decimal and which for thousand seperators.

So, it wasn't immediately clear to me whether their income came from the coffee machine in the break room or whether they once sold a sandwich to a visitor while coffee is free.

Wireless networking without paying The Man, man

not read into it

but i'd have assumed this standard is physical or at most link layer, not network layer (IP) and up (TCP).

LulzSec pwns pron site

oh, a title

>I don't think they should have to explain anything.

Probably they should not be using their job email for it, rather random webby or private (unless of course their interest in porn is professional).

Antimatter hangs around at CERN

oh, a title

i think we can safely assume the CRT existed before star trek

PS3s overheat after firmware update

indeed

i cannot completely rule out my PS3 ate the pet rabbit one of my neighbours misses since yesterday while updating to the new firmware, since that also happened yesterday.