Posts by David 132

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Elevated moisture levels

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: Horsey takes King Prawn

Hmm… I wonder if we went to the same school? My history teacher had a very bad syrup-of-figs and a slightly creepy manner around us young adolescents…

Re: ah, painful memories...

I used to absolutely thrash my younger brother at Combat, whether it was the tanks or the biplanes.

Made up slightly for the fact that he thrashed me at everything else!

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

Security updates from an unauthorised torrent? Mmm... OK... I think I'd rather take my chances without them!

Whilst I absolutely agree with you, the reasoning you use is a little shaky.

“If they can provide 3 years of updates to win10 for $30 a year to customers, they're still producing updates. If they're still producing updates, they could let everyone have them”

Let me paraphrase ad absurdam:

“If a baker can provide 3 years of bread for $30 a year to customers, they’re still producing bread. If they’re still producing bread, they could let everyone have it”

Dare I suggest that Microsoft are only creating, testing (haha! but seriously…) and distributing the updates… because there is a revenue stream from doing so?

Microsoft cutting off W10 support and arbitrarily not providing an upgrade path is scummy, absolutely. But to say that because they’re continuing to produce patches at a cost ($30/year or lots of lovely Bing data-harvesting) they “should” provide those patches for free is not the right counter-argument for us to use :)

Terrible tales of opsec oversights: How cybercrooks get themselves caught

Re: We can laugh

Careless/dumb criminals get caught.

Smart criminals get elected.

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

Re: The joy of being fat fingered

A similar problem arises here Stateside at every petrol pump - if paying by credit card, one has to first key in the amount to pre-authorize. So, for example, if you think you're going to need <= $40 worth of fuel, you'd key in 40.

Except that every pump I've seen interprets the input as cents not dollars, so you actually need to enter... 4000.

There were occasions in the past before I was wise to this that I embarrassingly authorized only 40 cents or so to be taken from my card; I fear that if I ever encounter a pump that does it a sensible way (why would you ever need to authorize down to the cents level?) I'm going to wonder why a hold of $4000 has been placed on my card!

AIs have a favorite number, and it's not 42

Yep - confirmed here using Ollama

Running Ollama and the mistral:latest model on my slightly elderly desktop PC, I asked it to guess a number between 1 and 50.. and it came straight back with 27.

Spookily, if you assign values to each of the letters t-w-e-n-t-y-s-e- etc, and add them up, and multiply by a hidden coefficient, then add a predefined offset, you can get 42.

Brrrr. Scary.

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

Nothing will break? This is my cynical expression.

"The good or bad news (depending on your experience) is that having the same code base means that everything which worked on Windows 11 24H2 will continue working on Windows 11 25H2, and everything that didn't, won't."

Hmm, that might be over-optimistic. For example:

if (ProcessorHasAVX2)

{

if (AVX2CodePathIsFeatureEnabled)

{ UseAVX2FeatureAddedIn2022AndTurnedOffTillNow(); }

else { UseLegacyCodePath(); }

}

Just one example of how merely "enabling features" in the same source-code could wreak havoc while adhering to the letter of what the Microsoft spokesman said.

(Why, yes, I did stay up till ungodly o'clock bashing out WPF code and consequently have a brain buzzing with C# - how can you tell? Just be grateful that I didn't express my comment using XAML!)

OpenDylan sheds some parentheses in 2025.1 update

I like INTERCAL with its PLEASE and FORGET keywords.

Re: Name Parsing Ambiguity

Should have called it Batman, then.

He's famous for having no parens.

Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

Windows 3.1

FTFA: Redmond has been here before: Windows 3.1 had a black screen of death and a "blue screen of unhappiness."

I seem to recall that by editing a .INI file in Windows 3.1, the "screen of unhappiness" could be whatever colour you wanted, within the confines of the CGA palette.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Re: Still relevant?

Also very good for embedded graphical bitmap resources in software. I use it a lot in my software projects when I CBA to use a scaled vector format. PNG's Alpha-channel transparency works much better than a GIF.

Ah, thanks for reminding me of Multiview (and associated Proustian recollections of Lemmings, Alien Breed, OctaMED, TBClock, and so on...)

In a related rant, it's always irked me that if I drag a file into a Windows file dialog, the OS copies that file to the location shown by the dialog.

Whereas on the Amiga, dragging a file into a file dialog would set the value of the dialog to the directory & name of that file.

Which to my mind - maybe I'm weird? - seems more logical.

Re: What the web needs

<blink>Punch the monkey and WIN!!!!</blink>

It's actually pronounced p'NuGuh in the Old Tongue, but that tends to accidentally summon eldritch horrors (it's a known bug in the standard.)

Intel totals automotive group

Re: Killing the goose

No no, see, a huge and ever-growing number of people will want incrementally-faster x86 architecture processors for decades to come, just as long as Sales and Marketing Group Accenture AI can come up with new and exciting variants on the logo and the brand naming schema. Core Ultra? Core Extreme? Core Plus Ultra Pro i11?

Apple? ARM? RISC-V? Pfffft. Who'd want them when they could have Intel®????

No-one ever got fired for buying IBM Intel, right?

---> pint for all the ex-Intel folks - who really, really deserved to be treated better than this.

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Quick, pass me my towel, we need to run after that Chesterfield sofa!

Icon -> this must be Wednesday, I never could get the hang of Wednesdays.

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

Re: new version comments

>(bloody hell, version 140! I remember how long it took to get past 20!)

Blame Google for that one, with their crazed version-number inflation - on the deranged Marketing principle of "no-one will want to use Internet Explorer that's merely version 6 when our Chrome is at version 14 16 21 33... bigger numbers are ALWAYS BETTER!"

Which of course started an arms race, and now version numbers are either meaningless or are tied to a year-month type convention ("2025.5").

Any day now we'll have to start using exponential notation - "Chrome version 1.65E15" :)

I had no philosophical objections to Pocket per se (albeit I didn't see value in it and disabled it every time), but I always felt it should be implemented as a plugin/extension for those who wanted it. Putting something like that in the browser, enabled by default, always seemed to me to be out of place.

>Many users of privacy-focussed browsers are likely to have them locked down to prevent any obvious form of tracking script running and be less likely to be regular visitors the sort of sites that might host the stats scripts, so the market share for such browsers is (as you suggest) likely to be woefully under-reported.

This, a thousand times this.

We power-users (for want of a better term) are our own worst enemies on this; we don't like being tracked, we don't like telemetry, we do everything we can to lock our software down. Which is fine and noble and I'm not criticising it. But in this modern era where the primary market / customer-satisfaction feedback mechanism is live usage data, we're thereby making ourselves - and our usage patterns - invisible to the vendors.

Which is why, I venture, we get ever-more dumbed-down features in (e.g.) Firefox and Windows, because the only feedback that Mozilla, Microsoft et al are getting is from the non-techie users who struggle to use non-hamburger menus and have absolutely no idea what "telemetry" is and need regular unprompted popups telling them how to use basic features. We turn off Pocket, Candy Crush, CoPilot etc - having also turned off the reporting mechanisms that tell the vendor we've turned them off. So, for example, Microsoft get telemetry telling them that "100% of the users in our telemetry data love having Suggested Apps crammed into their Start Menu" :)

It's a dilemma, and I don't know how to remedy it, even assuming that the vendors WANT to hear our opinions.

Re: Firefox

I did set the Sarcasm bit / markup flag on my response; not my fault if your browser doesn’t honour it and show appropriate highlighting :)

Re: Firefox

That was my first draft of the comment, but I have been swearing like a trooper recently & so decided to self-bowdlerise and use "nostril" instead, so as to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of fellow commentards.

Firefox

"This vulture didn't agree with SJVN's "Firefox is dead to me" column last week, and we're mulling a counterblast. The last thing the world needs is handing more control or influence to Google.

What Mozilla needs - in this author's opinion - is better, smarter leadership."

Amen to that. I've been using nothing but Firefox on my own PCs for the last 20+ years, and also use it on work PCs wherever permitted. Microsoft being Microsoft, with their usual shenanigans, I have to use Edge on the occasional corporate Sharepoint page but I wrote myself a little applet that registers as a browser and pops up under the mouse pointer whenever I click a link, giving me a choice of Firefox or Edge (with whitelisting for domains that I know will work with FF).

Chrome? Ugh. Why don't I just jam a Google spy-cam up my nostril while I'm at it?

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

Definitely a winning legal strategy

So now SPEX have established the validity of their argument, they just have to sue WD a further 552,999,999 times to get the sweet, sweet patent troll payday they want!

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Re: Dear Santa...

Heh - thanks for the links and the memories they sparked. My own Lego dabblings started circa 1980; I still have the 8860 and 8865 car chassis models (right here in front of me on my desk, in fact, and looking pretty darned good for being 40-45 years old). The light brick set that you linked to definitely brought back some long-buried memories; I imagine it was the one given to me for a long-ago birthday.

Fun (?) trivia fact of the day... I learned only a few months ago that "Forever Autumn", Jeff Wayne's iconic track from War of the Worlds sung therein by Justin Hayward, began life as the jingle for a 1969 Lego radio advert! Listen to the Lego advert here and compare with the War of the Worlds version of a few years later. So now the next time you're, say, captured by mad gunmen and threatened with violence unless you can name a connection between Lego and War of the Worlds... you'll be safe, and can thank me for it. No, really. :)

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

X11 over network connection

"The Reg FOSS desk has been installing and supporting Unix boxes since 1988 and has never once needed or used X11 over a network connection."

Until about 6 months ago I'd have been in agreement, but now I find myself in a situation where I need to run some quite complex design software remotely on a cluster in a datacentre & control it from my Windows client machine. Colleagues use various VNC-alike solutions; I run an X11 server on Windows and forward everything, and I have to say it works brilliantly. Far snappier than VNC and allows merging/management of the X application windows alongside the MS Windows ones.

"... but along with blocking his account, as Phoronix reports, the X.org team has been busily reverting lots of his merge requests."

Which seems, on the face of it, petty. If the merge requests were initially accepted, why revert them now? Smacks of Stalinesque "un-personing"; are they also using a scalpel and airbrushGimp to erase him from all photos?

Ugh. Politics.

Anyway. Thanks for a great article, Liam!

KDE Plasma 6.4 ships with major usability and Wayland improvements

...with decades of experience in spottting tipos.

To anyone who can still spot tipos, I say "bravo". I could point out the multipla errors in documentation I've read, but I don't want to panda to my inner perfectionist...

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Credit where it's due - and believe me, saying nice things about Microsoft is not a habit of mine - I am still using a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro from '99 as my daily driver, and it's still going strong. The unpowered USB1.1 port is adequate for my wireless mouse dongle, although I admit that the wrist-rest has lost its plastic attachment clips after feeling the force of my wrath once :)

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: POS Systems

I remember in the early 80's working on registers from Data Terminal Systems that would lockup a on sale over $32,256.00

$32,767 seems like a more obvious failure point, although I suppose it depends on how it was encoding the cents fraction! Might you have misremembered? I know I struggle to remember things from last month, let alone the 80s. Which were 20 years ago now (shutupshutupshutup...)

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Getting rid of a laptop to reduce the number of wires

Very relevant Hackaday story from earlier this week.

Re: It took mine a *month*...

It's almost as if "do unto others as you would have them do to you" should be taught to people... maybe carved in stone or something!

In a previous role I'd frequently do tradeshows and conferences. Our sales teams would be there too, to glad-hand the customers and pursue leads.

There were two types among the sales team.

1) Those who pitched in when setting out the demos on the booth, and stuck around after the event to help get everything loaded into flightcases, coiling up cables and neatly packing everything away.

2) And those who rolled in 30 seconds before the event opened, spent their time quaffing drinks & nibbles and ignoring us, then disappeared to the airport the very instant the show closed.

Funnily enough, when any of them would ask me in subsequent months to dive in at the last moment and help prepare a demo or briefing or code for their customer, I would always make time for the former type - working till long past midnight on more than one occasion (overtime? that was a mythical concept) and they'd love me for it.

The latter type of salesweasel would find that I took a week to reply to their **URGENT REQUEST**, or that I had 101 more important things to do that day (picking lint out of my navel, painstakingly cataloging my /tmp folder, that sort of thing.)

Campaign on that manifesto and you'd sweep to power in a landslide.

Where do I sign up?

Re: Did you think it had a nuclear battery ...

"especially if you could make it go bang remotely."

Many years ago, I was at a tech conference in - IIRC - Amsterdam, running demos and technical briefings on our company's new product which was a Computrace-like anti-theft system for laptops. Essentially it was firmware & software that phoned home periodically to ask "am I stolen?"; if it got a "yes" response, or the watchdog timer wasn't correctly reset at intervals by the software, the laptop would go into semi-bricked "lockout" mode.

Well, I was briefing a couple of potential customers who were showing a lot of interest in this product and hanging onto my every word, until a little later in the conversation I realized that

a) the customers had "Swedish Defence Ministry" on their conference badges, and

b) perhaps I should have described the lockout mode using a phrase other than "the laptop can be disabled remotely", when talking to gentlemen for whom the term "disabled remotely" implied explosives. I had to reverse-ferret and explain that no, we weren't putting an ounce of C4 into each laptop :-)

That said, in light of the recent IDF pagers operation to which you allude, perhaps we could have stolen a march and claimed prior art...

Re: No need for the nuclear option

Just be sure you are out of the building before they all get together for the next full Board meeting

"Last year's executive Christmas party became a Criticalmas party."

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Matron?

Cottage hospital?

Saw you immediately?

Dare I infer that this was not within the last 20 years or so?

Re: Rowies

Although as Captain Jack Aubrey reminded us in Master and Commander, in the Navy, “one should always choose the lesser of two weevils”.

AI's the end of the Shell as we know it and I feel fine … but insecure

Re: "any thought to security or bad actors"

All too many developers…

“Does it compile? Yes? Good to ship! What, it runs too? Bonus!”

Re: I generally avoid the newest shiny thing until it becomes unavoidable.

No need for Sark-asm.

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

Re: It is amazing ...

To quote the meme, ¿Porque no los dos?

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

Re: Wallpaper and taskbar?!

The desktop reloads a lot faster from blank.

ISTR that there was a bug in Windows 2000, that caused the boot process to take a lot longer if your desktop used a solid colour rather than an image. The reason was that the boot process waited for the image decoder routine to signal that it had finished, before the rest of boot continued. No image -> no decoder -> no “finished” signal, so the boot process hung waiting for a signal that never came, until the (30s?) watchdog timer triggered and booting was forced to continue.

Re: 2Gb available to games

I think my attempt at humour nay have either a) been too feeble, or b) whooshed over both your heads. I know the (apocryphal) quote is 640KB. I was attempting to update it for a world where the OS has (an extra) 2GB… oh, whatever. It’s not worth trying to explain.

Re: 2Gb available to games

Yes, I did a double-take at that too.

OTOH, "640MB should be enough for any game", right?

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

Re: The AI coding fallacy

...or INTERCAL. Don't say "please" enough to the compiler - or say it too much - and find that you don't get acceptable results.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Get out your copy of Petzold

Replying to my own post... as is my wont, once I started hacking away in VS I got way, way too far into it.

My little Notepad.exe replacement for Windows 10/11, which started life as yes, a simple wrapper around the Win32 TextBox control, now has:

• OS-native toolbar
• user-specified font
• dark mode support and optional custom ink/paper colours
• full-screen mode for distraction-free typing, with or without keeping the taskbar visible
• showing of non-printable characters (line break and whitespace)
• easy conversion of unicode markup (e.g. \uxxxx) to the equivalent character
• word-wrap by default
• line numbering
• bookmarking
• search (and Replace functionality is on my to-do)
• merging of files
• character/line counts
• realtime MD5 hash calculation for the text
• automatic insertion of newline '*' bullets for basic list creation
• high DPI support
• loading/saving of preferences
• No dependencies; fully portable; a single executable of ~300KB

I hate everything-but-the-kitchen-sink applications; I'm trying to keep this small and only give it the features that I find useful (YMMV). Currently I'm working to replace all the ugly Win32 MessageBox warning dialogs ("Exit without saving?" and so on) with more elegant (and OS native) functionality.

If anyone wants the source, and promises not to laugh, reply here and I'll try to throw up (that terminology is apt!) a Github page for it.

Re: Get out your copy of Petzold

Inspired by this article and motivated in part by your comment, I fired up Visual Studio this morning. 45 minutes later, starting from scratch I had a bare-bones text editor with load/save functionality; a couple of hours after that it had a toolbar, supported user-specified fonts, dark mode (or optional custom ink/paper colours), full-screen mode for distraction-free typing, showing of non-printable characters, word-wrap, bookmarking, search, merging of files, character/line counts, automatic bulleted-list mode, and loading/saving of preferences.

No, I haven’t implemented CoPilot, tabs, or anything else :)

What I’ve written is no Notepad++ by any means, but it demonstrated to me that the basic core of what Notepad is/should-be is very, very simple.

Re: it doesn't play well (read: at all) with the clipboard

OneNote? OneNote? What is this, 2010?

I think you mean "[Highlight] > [Right-Click] > Send To CoPilot To Be Analysed And Rewritten And Hallucinated".

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Oops, caught out

"We are in discussions with Google to address a potential miscommunication regarding the application of their policies," a Meta spokesperson told The Register. "Upon becoming aware of the concerns, we decided to pause the feature while we work with Google to resolve the issue."

In other words, "whoops, we got caught out trying to violate the spirit if not the letter of Google's policies".

Can there have been any thought-process behind this mechanism other than "how can we continue to ID users within Google's constraints"?

Hands up anyone who will believe Meta next time they claim to take users' privacy seriously.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

“Never buy priests’ socks from an ordinary shop, Dougal.

They’ll shaft you every time.”