Posts by ScissorHands

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: Also

You mean there's two of us?

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Have you tried switching it off and on again?

This is rich, considering the article is explaining how everything being a file (a POSIX concept which the main author of NT railed against on the record) prevented Optane from being really useful because it HAD to be a file and HAD to be handled as a filesystem (secondary storage).

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: Appeal

Civilized counties don't extradite to any countries that have the death penalty. Period,

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

"Shell of an Idea," the Untold History of PowerShell

https://powershell.org/2020/01/book-shell-of-an-idea-the-untold-history-of-powershell/

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

Re: history lessons

Good thing then Fuchsia is using Rust in earnest.

Re: Fashions

You mean 75% of the Rust code being initializing and setting up the HAL environment so your logic can remain the same if you swap RP2040 boards? Not worth it in this case, since the logic is so small, but have a larger thing to do and you can port it by just swapping values on the "bloat" section.

Write well, write once.

Toaster-friendly alternative web protocol Gemini attracts criticism for becoming exclusive clique

Re: Simplicity

Blazor = porting .NET to WebAssembly so it runs in the browser; writing webapps in C# instead of JS(+NPM+Angular+React)

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

Re: I would like to say No.

More like no phat capacitors on the printer, since it lacked a CRT...

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Re: Another Work Experience Placement

Like vi, it's the power of "what's in all boxes by default when you sit in front of someone else's computer"

If it's 32-bit, you can still run EDIT.EXE (it's supposed to be in there somewhere).

For 64-bit, I still haven't found anything better than gvim's standalone executable (there's also joe).

There's hope for Tilde, if someone ports it to Windows...

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Re: "VERY different"?

Well, they followed CUA but the radioactive-green checkmark on "OK" and the lipstick-red X on "Cancel" were totally a Borland thing; they show up in an old app and I go "Hi, Turbo C!"

If you used Windows standard controls (and later MS Foundation Classes) you could get the same look between apps. Of course, since MSFC took too long to show up, Borland beat them to market with its own UI widget classes which were VERY different from basic Windows.

Re: Great, a replacement for gvim on Windows

That page is very, very old. The more recent source I based my experiences on is https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/02/15/wanted-console-text-editor-for-windows/

Great, a replacement for gvim on Windows

Because although Microsoft is moving to the command-line, and supporting SSH administration of Windows Server, a good CLI text editor for modern Windows is 404 in the base install. Which means I usually have to resort to gvim; and I've tried everything:

- YEDIT: not a real installer, not a self-contained executable, and not signed. The same author wrote what is by far the best alternative to CMD.EXE (YORI).

- Open Watcom VI: still exists in GitHub, unbundled from OpenWacom, but doesn't support UTF-8

- Kinesics Text Editor: needs Admin permissions to install, no UTF-8

- FTE: needs very old MSVC libraries

- Thomson-Davies Editor: no UTF-8

- Micro: Go port of Nano - but that's Nano, not CUA

>checks Tilde website

>no Windows binary

aw shucks.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

Oh the humanity

Image that, Windows users can't use nano and have to use gvim.

Amazon Appstore melts over Android 12 'Snow Cone'

Oops, I broke it...

Microsoft agrees to have the Amazon App Store on Windows 11 to enable Android compatibility

Google breaks the Amazon App Store.

There is no relationship between these two events. I'm sure of it.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

You're the one that broke RFC 1122 by one byte and since the BSD TCP stack was (is) the de-facto standard, broke everyone that foolishly followed the RFC, aren't you? Own up!

AlmaLinux Foundation chair says he stepped down to highlight value of community status

I hope there's room for both Alma and Rocky

Because none of them have set the world on fire but Rocky has the celebrity, the hardware vendors and it's american; the survival rate of European Linux has been less than a snowflake in a flamethrower (with the exception of SuSE).

How Windows NTFS finally made it into Linux

Re: Is this for systemd?

You mean Microsoft's equivalent to Apple's HFS Resource Forks? From 1985?

It's amazing, a company tries to support advanced functionality and because everyone else can only think in flat files the advanced functionality is a mistake.

It's like UNIX "everything's a stream so just hack at the bytes" vs NT "everything's an object and you should use methods to handle them" - idiots try to hack at NT objects because that's the lowest effort option and get surprised when they blow up in their face, so that's *obviously* Microsoft's mistake.

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

Re: If Your Business Depends on a Single Platform

Linux devs don't have to wonder; unless they keep up to date with the dependencies, their programs break with the next version of each distro. There was a time where you couldn't compile Samba from source on RHEL7 because of a missing library that had been marked as "deprecated" and "WONTFIX" by Red Hat. Samba!

Re: Toy extensions won't mess with their revenue stream.

So said the users of the original Opera and even of Edge. All you lot had to say then was "not my problem". Now it is your problem as well.

Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04

Re: Linux phone

Where were you when the Nokia N9 needed users, back in 2011?

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Linux on the desktop

Of course it doesn't suck. Gnome 3 blows.

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

Ubuntu != Debian

If you don't install the "desktop" option in the initial installer or in taskel afterwards, NetworkManager and systemd-resolved aren't active.

Again, not if systemd-resolved is off, which it certainly is on a Debian install where you don't install the desktop/GNOME options (my Debian installs always start with only two activated options on tasksel, SSH Server and System Tools, the rest I'll install myself, thankyouverymuch)

Imagine that, a system where there's a common sensible configuration framework that allows you to apply the same principles to several system administration tasks.

No it isn't [/Cleese]

There must be something missing with your .conf, whenever I edited my resolv.conf the change was immediate.

In fact, for all the gnashing of teeth about systemd, base Debian netinstall is free of NetworkManager and Systemd-resolved out of the box, you have to go out of your way to activate them.

Of course, if you pile up "Desktop" and "GNOME" (phear!) in tasksel, all that cr*p starts to come to the surface...

Open Compute Project to design open silicon and optics in Strategy 2.0

The scale issue cuts both ways

OCP hardware is so different from anything else in a datacenter and needs so much specialty support that it only makes sense if you're deploying several rows of racks or you have a greenfield deployment; if you have just two or three racks it doesn't make sense, and Inspur won't return your calls anyway.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Can you elaborate, AC?

Horses for courses, but twins

Given their backgrounds, I'm expecting AlmaLinux to be popular in the webserving/VPS role, and Rocky on the HPC/Scientific/hardware integration role.

VMware’s incoming CEO promises to change ... almost nothing

I've heard that before...

It must've been at Kodak. How's Rochester, these days?

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Good idea, badly communicated and implemented

Mob rule is amazing. It's opt-in. It has been clearly stated and disclosed. Compared to Microsoft, Muse Group has been a model citizen. If you're worried about being silently activated after you opted-out, do you audit the source code of each and every patch you apply? Well, you should then. Might find that's all you do, and unless you're being paid to do just that, you won't get anything else done. Enjoy your bugs. Fix them yourselves, it's open source! Fork Audacity. Fork it from orbit. It's the only way to make sure.

Even a pop-up offering to send a report after a bug doesn't catch many categories of bugs, and most people hit Cancel on those anyway.

About the Google and Yandex integrations, they leave me uncomfortable, but should Audacity, which survives on contributions, spend contribution money creating an analytics platform?

Where's the open source and free as in freedom analytics platform with a worldwide CDN, guys? Isn't open source the solution to all problems?

Re: opt in issue solving

It only happens 0.0001% of every bug occurrence, because 99.9999% of users don't report bugs. Makes it hard to know about bugs, which is the first step in solving them.

A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it

Re: I remember

That 70% percentage I quoted of vulnerabilities because of memory/data-race/side-effect? Microsoft et al. That's why they are firefighting it right now with Rust and have sponsored the Rust Foundation while developing an in-house equivalent codenamed Verona.

Apple is working on a Rusty Swift and although Google went to the trouble of hiring the best minds in language development to create Golang, they're still using Rust inside the Fuchsia kernel.

Re: Rust to the rescue?

Look around. You may think all that software was reliable but how stringently was it tested, really? Did you have fuzzers back in the day like we have now? If you need to recompile it today, how much of its behaviour was defined by the choices of the previous compiler about what to do on the several places where a language has "undefined behaviour"?

Re: Rust to the rescue?

Rust (or any similar language) can't help with errors in code logic. But it definitely helps with 70% of existing errors, which are of the memory/data-race/side-effect variety and that usually can't be caught in development, only in production. Rust ensures, at least, that if it compiles, it's mostly free from those.

Cue everyone complaining that Rust is hard and the compiler is slow...

Re: Yet another uncomfortable truth

Several forests have been decimated to produce MITRE code standards, but nobody follows them (Minimal Viable Product is the law of the land, security be damned) and even following them to the letter, C and derivatives should be classified "Unsafe at any speed", even (or especially) legacy code. Rip it all up and start again with GC/RefCount/RAII languages.

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to make sure.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

It's verbose, but logical... usually...

PowerShell demands a different way of thinking, and since Windows is based on API calls and not on text files something "shell-y" like cmd or even bash would never work. Unless you want to go back to VBscript syntax as a shell. Do you? I don't.

I'm finding it very *discoverable*.

PS> Get-Something --> receive objects, objects have properties and properties have values

Want to see only some properties?

PS> Get-Something | Select Property1, property 2 ! Format-Table

Want to filter by value?

PS> Get-Something | Where Property -eq(*) value

(*) almost the same comparators as bash test

Found what you want to change?

PS> Set-Something -Name thingamajig -Property pants -Value leather -Enabled

It's not much different than using sed and awk to filter data until you get information. You just have to know how to look for what you need, instead of memorizing netsh, net, netdom, and all the other stuff. Because cmd, without those other utils, is hopeless. And those utils still work in PowerShell, for now.

Started from the bottom, now we're near: 16 years on, open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape draws close to v1.0

Ahhh, Inkscape. The GIMP of vector graphics and with just an asinine UI.

'An issue of survival': Why Mozilla welcomes EU attempts to regulate the internet giants

First they came for...

Every time I complained about sites not following standards and breaking Opera 12, all I heard, especially from the Firefox crowd was, "git gud, no-one cares about a browser with single digit market share". And when Opera complained about it to the EU, it was "sore losers, can't win in the market".

The only thing preventing me from exploding in schadenfreude is that I don't want Firefox to be left for roadkill. Monocultures are bad, even when they're from "cool" Apple or "nerd" Google and not "evil" Microsoft.

Huawei to the danger zone: Now Uncle Sam slaps it with 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, theft of robot arm and source code

Re: Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud (two counts)

You need to take more fibre with that joke

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

Time to go to ftp.opera.com and download the whole kit-and-kaboodle, since pretty soon you'll need Opera Presto to get to it...

The winners and losers of infrastructure clouds revealed: AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba get fatter

RIP Joyent Public Cloud

Good luck with Oxide, Bryan.

Opera hits back at 'short seller' whose report claimed its 'predatory' microloan droid apps could hurt, er... investors

Re: What is this ?

Opera is dead. It has been dead for years, and became an eldritch abomination after the Chinese buyout.

(This message was posted from Opera 12.17)

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Re: Who remembers when....

Aahhhh, I think I still have the "Bork Bork" Opera installer somewhere...

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

Did you try Sailfish? It's a lot closer to desktop Linux than any Android, but has good telephony support.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

Re: The more I think about this, the more it's broken

The browser is the only application you need for email and Usenet. Why transfer KBs when you can turn that into MBs *and* serve you ads **and** know everything you're doing?

What do you mean there are protocols other than HTTP? /s

IEEE tells contributors with links to Chinese corp: Don't let the door hit you on Huawei out

Re: Ho hum

There used to be something called the ITU, that had lots and lots of technical documents and specifications about communication protocols, but then geeks took over and started swapping RFCs. Geeks start with the best intentions but totally fail to see the big (political) picture: cf. Facebook, fake news, and the death of journalism.

Insiders! The good news: Windows 10 Sandbox is here for testing. Bad news: Microsoft has already broken it

MS keeps forgetting they have "Slow" and "Release Preview" rings...

I'm on the Slow Ring and for the last two flights, I only start getting preview builds less than two months before release... There used to be an initial build two months after release of the previous version, one pre Bug Bash, one post Bug Bash, and one near release.

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

Sprechen sie Deutch?

The link to the Frederic Vachon presentation is the german-dubbed one. It all sounds like a killer joke to me.

If you go to the official link https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9561-first_sednit_uefi_rootkit_unveiled , you can choose between audio versions and listen to the original audio on CCC's video player .