Posts by Ian 55

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Re: Been there done that

If you're talking about the mail client, that's quite impressive given that the first version wasn't released until 2003.

Re: "We found it notable that it was all done remotely"

I doubt Ian runs Windows on anything that needs to work - he just hosts PUTTY for Simon, along with Simon's games programs and assorted other stuff for assorted other people.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Call me old

"When people read single-board computer, they may think of the Raspberry Pi"

Erm, I think of the Apple 1 and Nascom-1 and...

Ex-Coinbase manager charged in first-ever crypto insider trading case

Re: Small time

The problem is that there's no easy way for anyone without a few billion (and thus presumed to be a sophisticated investor) to short Tether.

Yes, it's an obvious fraud, but the ways of shorting it that exist come with an even larger counterparty risk, as shown by the way that various exchanges turned out - to no-one's enormous surprise apart from the idiots who have been using them - to have been sending client funds to ponzis.

Re: Just few bad actors?

Where do we start?

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

It's true that various versions can be not entirely compatible, but it's still much easier to have a separate /home rather than having to tell everything that the stuff that's it expects to be at ~/.wherever is actually at /userdata/possibleusername/.wherever

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

Re: Preferably with some bug fixing

That had some bugs too.

Print enough copies of something, and the alphanumeric characters disappear in ASCII order one by one.

Preferably with some bug fixing

When is the port of the *ix version of Borland's Sprint happening?

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

And Ian Jackson for giving us dpkg.

Re: Devuan

One problem is that there are several Debian devs who refuse to let 'their' packages use anything other than systemd, to the point of actively removing support for anything else.

This is clearly against the intentions of the original vote, but It's a bit like the way that Brexiteers decided the referendum was an unarguable mandate for the hardest Brexit we've got.

Re: Debian

Went Mint when Unity happened, went back to Ubuntu when Ubuntu MATE happened because Mint kept breaking..

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

.. to do major version updates.

Currently still using Ubuntu MATE, even if upstream Ubuntu keep doing things to try and reduce the number of pesky desktop users.

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

LOL

"the company made what, in hindsight, proved to be certain poor asset deployment decisions"

Yeah, it held cryptocurrencies.

Re: Celsius has, right now, a $1.19 billion deficit on its balance sheet

Sure, we could have looked at what was in those CDOs before we bought billions of dollars of them, but the financial crisis is the fault of all those households that stopped paying the mortgage...

The latest trend in the Ponzi / cryptocurrency world is to deposit a load of shitcoins as collateral for a big loan of something you can convert into actual dollars and then never repay the 'loan'.

The real world equivalent would be a lender accepting a billion dollars of Imperial Russian bonds at face value and letting someone borrow half a billion dollars. 'But the loan was over-collateralised, how could we have known it would go bad' they will cry.

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Re: What a cheery spin, on a $hitty, proprietary "database"!

True, but also a workaround for the 64KB limit on the size of the critical shared .ini files everyone used before.

Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

Borland Sprint

Vastly better than WP (spit) or Wordstar, while being able to emulate them both.

Re: HHGTTG

.. runnable with any Z-machine interpreter on almost any hardware for years.

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

Is this the bunch that

Only required two out of something like nine digital signatures to steal the money?

Ah, yes, it is.

Still, they've increased that now. I wonder if they revoked the previous ones?

Re: "Stolen"

Feature, not a bug.

US senators seek input on their cryptocurrency law via GitHub – and get some

"What's the worst that could happen?"

Given that cryptocurrency is a never ending series of people finding that out, it's apt that this hasn't gone so well either.

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

Re: "emergency powers to liquidate its largest customer account"

You would be pissed, but in this case the whale dumped a load of what they saw - rightly - as shit and were allowed to borrow - in comparison - gold.

They were never going to want to repay the 'loan'.

The only reason they might object to the shit being sold privately is that it won't completely crash the price in the way that trying to sell the shit publicly would do: virtually all of the project's non-shitcoins have gone and they were never going to come back.

Because you realise that the coins you put in are shit, but the coins that they will let take out are - in comparison - almost as good as real dollars.

You would have big problems - especially now - selling that much of the shitcoin for dollars, but converting what they took out will be much, much easier.

This was never a loan as far as the whale was concerned, this was cashing out with a vengeance.

The real world equivalent would be somewhere that let you hire a new Lamborghini by just leaving them with ten junkers that the hire company reckons are worth twice as much... and nothing else, including no proof of identity or driving licence. That Lambo ain't coming back

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: Same issue as many other successful businessmen

A tremendous amount of self-belief and being a micromanager would describe most dictators, yes.

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: A truly dreadful day

On the plus side, his lawyers' attempt to argue that removal of a condom without asking isn't rape did lead to the Supreme Court saying 'yes, it fucking is' (slight precis) so he has done some good.

Re: Appeal

Well, most of the 'yes it would be rape' guy's imprisonment was because of skipping bail and hiding in an embassy for years before annoying his hosts enough that he ended up being actually imprisoned for skipping bail..

Inverse Finance stung for $1.2 million via flash loan attack

Re: this oracle implementation was reviewed by a competent third-party team as well

"It is worth noting that this oracle implementation was reviewed by a competent third-party team as well"

.. just not very well.

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

Well, the guy who held the brush that made the marks is pretty famous.

So is the provenance of the painting.

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

I have a URL that currently links to an image of a bridge that you might be interested in buying...

Re: New approach to an old piece of fun?

Yeah, but you didn't own the copyright of those either.

Not a GNOME fan, and like the look of Windows? Try KDE Plasma or Cinnamon

Cinnamon vs MATE

I went for the latter when Linux Mint became the goto for Ubuntu users who hated Unity, and stuck with it when Ubuntu MATE happened and Linux Mint had annoyances of its own.

Where's a good guide to the differences now?

Re: Similarly, if you have a touchscreen

At least one bank here has touchscreen ATMs.. Santander?

A complete pain to use, but...

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

Celsius has the wonderful business plan

of lending out at less interest than they pay depositors.

Can't see what could possibly go wrong with that.

Apparently they make up a big chunk of the difference by 'investing' in Luna, and with a name like that, it has to be going to the moon!

Re: Inflation hedge

There's a limited supply of my shit too - I am not going to be around forever - but that doesn't mean that it's a viable currency or store of value.

Re: Bitcoin, ETH, etc is a SCAM

Not quite true. I wouldn't touch it with the proverbial, and most have / will lose everything, but it's more than just the scammers who have made a profit.

Just as in a Ponzi.

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Destroyer, not battleship

It was a lot easier and safer to use a destroyer to ship the valuable Dutch people (and the prime minister who later suggested a Vichy-style accommodation with the Nazis before being fired) than a battleship.

The Dutch royal family left on another one.

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

Re: Historical practice..

M286 risks people remembering the Intel 80286 though, which they wouldn't want.

Farewell to two pivotal figures: The founder of Inmos, and the co-creator of MIME

We name the guilty men!

Enabled HTML email?

For shame.

OpenSea staffer charged with insider-trading of NFTs

That tweet..

.. is how OpenSea "discovered" that the person who was picking which URLs - sorry, NFTs - the site would feature was buying them first.

Either they had no monitoring in place, or they knew and didn't care until someone outside noticed.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Can someone get the Unix version of Borland's Sprint?

Be good to have that - the DOS version was the best, most flexible, word processor I ever used.

Re: Don't forget As-Easy-As...

VP-Planner 2 from Paperback Software was better...

Amazon Appstore melts over Android 12 'Snow Cone'

Still not working properly

The fsckers have had a version of their own Appstore that works on Android 12 for nearly two months now, but there are still hundreds and hundreds of apps they haven't reDRMed, so are still unavailable.

Re: Testing? Amazon hasn't heard of it

It's also worth remembering that Android 12 was specifically said to change how third party app stores worked on it.

Did Amazon actually test that, as the owners of one of biggest? Nah, couldn't be arsed.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Re: "the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

"Ethereum is scheduled to switch this year" - that's been 'true' for at least a couple of years, hasn't it?

Even if it ever does make the switch, it still fails in every regard in desirable aspects of a currency, unless you're a scammer or a hacker.

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Re: Old Nicknames

Anyone who bought them "back then" probably lost the keys or lost the planet-destroying useless currency in an exchange hack / 'hack'.

Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel

Re: My cynical side thinks this is no accident.

All I'll say is that I'd like his pay package.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: 20 or 80 Years?

Looking at it another way, she defrauded rich people and they are the sort that contribute significant sums to US judges' election campaigns...

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

Re: re: If unix text editors were military aircraft:

The best version was the Borland adaptation of FinalWord - as in it finally emulates Emacs, unlike MINCE (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs) - sold as Borland Sprint.

They had a *ix version to go with the DOS one, and developed a Windows version that showed the results of its very powerful markup language wysiwyg-style, but abandoned it before release.

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

Re: Just one more thing

Which you can do, provided you don't slap the CD logo on the discs.

Re: About Sony...

Stole? Didn't it turn out that the author of the Sony rootkit had been asking "Hey guys, how do you create a rootkit" on Usenet or whatever the stackexchange equivalent was then?

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter planning move to blockchain. How will it work? Your guess is as good as ours

Re: "Faster horses"

Until the big boys lose money, in which case it's "We think we better think about it again" and they do a fork back to the old position.

See Ethereum and the DAO.

GPU makers increasingly disengage from crypto miners

Re: miners

You fuck with the US Dollar, and the forces of a state with very large conventional armed forces and nuclear weapons is going to come after you.

You mess with a cryptocurrency, and people are going to laugh or write blogs about how unfair it is.

Hmmm, which to trust?