Posts by Ian 55

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

Re: Thank you!

100 YouTube tabs.. dunno.

About 4,000 open tabs in Firefox, including about a dozen YouTube, it manages.

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

Whoever thought you couldn't monetize an interest in 'equestrian'

.. has never owned a horse.

My favourite spotted magazine cover story was something in some pony publication along the lines of 'why you NEED another horse'.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

If only they had done this a few years earlier

Say just before unleashing systemd on the world.

Re: It's just Linux vs BSD, again

To be fair, making money off using/stealing other people's work and then getting upset when other people do it to you is a Great American Tradition.

See the history of Hollywood for a start.

Ubuntu 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' beta is here in all its glitchy glory

Re: 22 trashed my lenovo

Did you go via 20.04? Skipping an LTS version isn't the supported route.

Feds seize $112m in cryptocurrency linked to 'pig-butchering' finance scams

Re: It's called Pig Butchering for a reason

There's an advanced fee scam around becoming a male escort for the ladies.

With the occasional exception that would go out of business quickly, all the 'agencies' pretending there was a market - in reality, almost all clients for male escorts are other men - were, and for all I know still are, scams. The victim would be told there was a booking waiting for him in the next day or two, and all he had to do was pay a fee upfront for 'insurance' or 'checks' or whatever. As soon as that was paid, 'Oh, she's cancelled' and that would be the last they ever heard from the 'agency'.

Some victims rang where I used to work to see if they could get any of the money back.

I think the record for the number of times someone was scammed in exactly the same way before they called was eight. "EIGHT?!?"

Re: Where do I contact JZ, pleeeeeeze?

Depending on how good your spam filters are, you may well get emails saying "Yeah, you were scammed by that Nigerian prince or whoever, but I can get your money back.. for only a small fee".

Google boffins pull back more of the curtain hiding TPU v4 secrets

I was looking forward to..

.. a story about Turbo Pascal Units, as introduced with TP4 back in 1987.

As WP says, these were "tightly linked to the internal structures of the compiler, rather than standard .OBJ linkable files. This improved compilation and linkage times, but meant that .TPU files could not be linked with the output of other languages or even used with different releases of Turbo Pascal unless recompiled from source."

AI-generated art can be copyrighted, say US officials – with a catch

Re: Copyright-Worthy Human Element

It would help if they had the 'before' version as well, of course.

Re: Realistically this is less of an issue than people make out...

"If I take a photo of the Mona Lisa, I hold the Copyright on that photo."

It depends. Specifically, it depends on where you are and what else is in the photo.

If you just take a picture of the Mona Lisa on the wall, plenty of places will not think there is enough creative input to create a new copyright work.

Galleries selling reproductions of works in their collection would obviously prefer it were otherwise, but they haven't been rich enough to get the laws in countries like this changed.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

Re: Another one bites the dust.

You can tell a boardgame that started life on KS - if it has a pile of unnecessary moulded miniatures but no decent gameplay, 98% of the time, it's a case of KS stretch goals gone mad.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

I would have some sympathy with Google (and Amazon and Microsoft and Yahoo and..)

.. but they have made it so, so, so difficult to run your own mail server and get your email delivered to people using their services that having to pay billions to keep said services running is no less than they deserve.

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

One issue recently with the Ubuntu snap store..

.. it refused to give a large chunk of Ubuntu's desktop users the latest version of Firefox for two days. A security update was available. Users were told that there was a security update. But a combination of throttling (i.e. rationing who gets security updates) and a bug (doing a command line 'snap refresh' was supposed to work, but didn't) meant that we couldn't actually get it.

If you're gong to effectively force people to use your snap store for critical software - yes Liam, I know you can work around that, but how many people do? - at least resource it properly.

Rationing updates to a software store or Spotify.. meh. Rationing security updates to a browser.. WTF?!?!?

It's not the first time this has happened, although I think two days is a new record, but it's caused me to ditch Ubuntu.

And the really cynical part of me wonders if that's a welcome side-effect for Canonical: servers are where the money is, not desktops. That it's often (usually?) desktop users who specify Ubuntu for the servers seems to be escaping them.

Elon Musk picks fight with Apple for slashing advertising spend on Twitter

Re: In app purchase?

Tech bro doesn't understand people, shock.

That it's Elon "Pedo guy" Musk is utterly predictable and predicted.

Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal

Re: Too many tabs open at once is unnecessary.

Some of us have thousands of tabs in multiple windows - 16 at the moment, albeit not all with thousands - already.

Re: Vertical Tabs

Tree Style Tabs is what I use - and from memory, it's in the five pages of 'recommended' addons - but it has started to be a bit unstable when you have thousands of tabs.

I will have to check to see if the memory reclaiming feature means I can stop using an addon to do that.

US treasury whips up sanctions for crypto mixer Tornado Cash

Someone pays the main Tornado site's AWS bills.

Ever tried turning up at a bank with 100k in cash?

You get asked all sorts of questions.

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

The bigger problem with the app..

.. is that it simply doesn't work at many Burger King outlets.

Plenty of them in Central London, for example, but the nearest one where you can actually order via the app is Queensway. Zone 1, but the western edge of it. Marylebone is an alternative.. except that as a train station site, none of the special offers are available.

I was in another city recently. Great, the centre's store does allow me to use the app - but not at the moment, thanks to some issue or other.

I presume that it's down to the franchise model and plenty of owners simply don't want to take orders over the app for some reason (BK takes a bigger cut?? The cost of the IT??) but I understand that Mcdonalds' app actually works...

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!