Posts by David 132

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face a credit card being debited for recurring subscriptions... forever"

Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars

Re: AI-synthesized stump speech?

And according to Jemima Goldsmith, <checks wikipedia> Reham Khan, and Bushra Bibi… he has bowled a maiden over at least once.

Ah, this seam of cricket puns does crease me up…

Re: AI-synthesized stump speech?

Well, he didn't get out on bail... so he had to prepare his pitch another way.

More seriously though, I do hope he's realized that if he can use AI to deliver a convincing-enough "Imran Khan" speech... so can his opponents. Putting words into rivals' mouths in 3, 2, 1...

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: Paper trail and zoom recordings win!

redundized

ISWYDT!

Re: azidoazide azide

Upvoted, and upvoted the correction too, just because you referenced the ever-wonderful Things I Won’t Work With blog. His FOOF piece was a modern classic.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: Dog bites man, water is wet, cryptocurrency operation is "hacked"

Ha, found the butthurt crypto investor.

Dog bites man, water is wet, cryptocurrency operation is "hacked"

Crypto "investors" got hacked and lost money?

Oh no!

Anyway. Here's James with news about the Dacia Sandero.

China’s e-commerce players commit to broaden overseas

Oh, goody.

More generic tat on Amazon from companies with names that look like players' letter racks in a game of Scrabble.

"Hmm, do I buy this "geniune Leenovo" laptop battery from HWUIVOZ, or from EWRTERO, or from JIKCVUL? So hard to choose..."

Hey, Amazon, how about you focus on improving product quality and employee conditions, rather than funnelling as much Chinesium crap as you can into our homes?

Missing tomatoes ketchup with ISS crew after almost a year lost in space

Re: they were discarded

"...thereby upgrading its structural integrity and build-quality considerably."

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

Re: Sulphurous Satan? Bombastic Beelzebub? Dancing Devil?

Well that DEPENDS on his COMMUNICATION STYLE and whether he CAPITALIZES random WORDS, surely?

(Pint for BB 'cos I hold no grudge against him)

Or as I've heard it rather more pithily expressed to me by American friends - "in 1776 we declared Independence and got rid of U"!

The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech

The FAANGs offering us email / social notice-boards / discounted shopping coupons, and then mining our data, is the Internet Age equivalent of the New World's "Greetings O Chief, how about I give you these nice shiny beads in return for all your land?"

Re: They're NOT Selling Your Data!

Man, other Pokemon are bad, but Chorizozard is the wurst!

GM, Komatsu partner to build hydrogen-powered monster mining truck

Re: Platinum

“What was that? A bug? A rabbit?”

“Nah, a Passat.”

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

Re: Credentials after leaving

> WHY NOT GIVE IT A TRY!?

Take off that red costume with the horns, and stop sitting on his shoulder. It doesn’t suit you and you look ridiculous.

Re: Amazing!

They came with porn pre-loaded

Damn, I knew I was missing out by not springing for the full Microsoft 365 Enterprise Pro Classic Ultimate level subscription!

HCL modernizes Notes by adding 2023's hot new item ... mail merge?

Awwww

It's unnerving, and yet strangely reassuring in equal measure - like discovering that there are still companies out there making Trilby hats - that Lotus Notes is still in active development.

And I don't mean that as any disrespect to Notes.

Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations

Re: Larry's turnaround plan

Oracle is one of the few companies whose written communications to customers giving details of price rises are composed of single letters & words cut and pasted out of newspapers & magazines.

Also, "Kind regards" or "With best wishes" may be cliché, but either is preferable to "OR ELSE"...

Linux Mint 21.3 and Zorin 17 are beta buddies

Hypnotix?

I adore Mint - it's my daily driver and powers my NAS - but it's interesting that the article calls out improvements to Hypnotix, the IPTV player app.

In my experience I've never been able to get Hypnotix to work, no matter what country or channel I use, VPN or no. It just spins and times out.

So "improved" in my view could mean as little as "now will at least play Albania's 8th-most-popular paint-drying channel".

Still, a pint for Clement & the Mint team.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

…and a Lenslok?

Or was that only on the Spectrum version?

Hey, some of us STILL play BF1942 now.

Cooperative LAN play, just me and a few friends against bots - good fun.

Speaking of, can anyone recommend any modern games that support co-op LAN play against bots? Everything multiplayer these days seems to be online, and I have no desire to play against foul-mouthed kids on the other side of the world, or submit to the whole ridiculous ELO rating thing (it's a game FFS not an application to Harvard)...

Re: Found my box set

“I need tree fiddy.”

Re: Ah Doom

Frak (or Frak! technically I believe) was a platformer game. I fondly recall playing it on the BBC Bs in our school’s computer room. The music was a jolly sailor’s hornpipe… which, I only learned many years later, meant that ours was a pirated copy, the developers having sneakily put in some primitive anti-copy code that did little more than change the music on illicit copies :)

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Honestly. Who uses the Microsoft Store, except ironically?

The born again Christian mother was so horrified by the demons and inverted crucifixes

Good job she never found out what happened when the installation CD was played backwards!

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

I feel your pain. Putting all those DIP ICs into their sockets, and being careful not to bend any pins, is just so tedious. Especially when all you can get is Rochester 2102-1N parts - takes quite a few of those to get to 255GB.

Re: Merging /bin with /usr/bin and /sbin with /usr/sbin

this is **NOT** something that systemd has any business mandating.

Part of me wonders if there's a Bloody-Stupid-Johnson type thing going on here, where patrons keep funding Poettering out of morbid fascination as to what he'll screw up next.

Systemd 258: now controls mouse cursor management & appearance

Systemd 265: contains the necessary graphics drivers for your desktop. But only for the GPUs that Poettering runs in his personal systems. All others are, by definition, unnecessary. #WONTFIX.

Systemd 280: Now includes the system firmware layer. Will only boot during Poettering's office hours.

Systemd 281: All system directories and files now merged into a single binary blob named PAGEFILE.SYS. "Vastly simplifies my workflow" says Poettering.

I couldn't decide which icon was appropriate - so many to choose from. Fail? Trollface? Facepalm?

Went for Beer in the end because alcohol is an appropriate response to this idiocy. Cheers.

Google's Project Ellman: Merging photo and search data to create digital twin chatbot

Bruce Willis? Actually it was Arnie as Quaid in Total Recall that came to mind for me… I wonder if Project Ellman’s slogan will be “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”?

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post [...] Far cheaper than downloading...

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes hurtling down the highway" :)

(that famous quote is also a good way to introduce people to the difference between bandwidth and latency, of course)

Anyone else remember BT Friends & Family, the billing add-on in the mid 90s that allowed you to choose 5 of your most frequently dialled numbers as favourites, and get low cost calling to them?

And I recall the slightly exasperated BT spokesman explaining that while, technically, they couldn't stop you add your ISP's dialup number to that list, "we didn't think anyone would be sad enough to nominate their ISP as a friend or family..." :)

Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs

Re: Oh goody

Upvote for the Dorothy Parker reference!

Messed up metadata could be to blame for Microsoft's Windows printer woes

"Go Stick Your Head In A Pig"

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

Re: Disappointed

Clearly we're all a bunch of sleepers with one track minds.

OK, who else Warsaw that one coming?

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Priorities

One critical thing missing, which is an estimate to resolution (even if very finger-in-the-air estimate multiplied by pessimism factor)

The Scotty approach. "It'll take six hours Captain. But as we dinnae have six hours, I'll have it ready in two."

"Wait. Mr Scott, have you always multiplied your estimates by a factor of three?"

"O'course, Captain. How else can I maintain my reputation as a miracle-worker?"

Re: Yearly tasks....

I use the same methodology for scheduling my showers!

Re: Wallace

You just edam that anagram up on the spot didn't you?

Still, gouda nuff for me. Cheers!

Google releases fix for missing Drive for desktop files

Re: Trust the Cloud, they said.

>'Don't mess with things until we figure this out' is sound advice. It is pretty much the thing the resident geek tells family members when they report a problem to them and request it be fixed.

Often heard subsequently in my family, variants on: "But I did what you said and didn't mess with it! After we spoke I just followed this one YouTube video that had lots of views, and it didn't work, and now I don't get Windows on my screen, just some message about 'boot sector not found'..."

GitLab admits IT ineptitude in finance reporting is ongoing

Honestly, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the published numbers. Losses in Q3 of $285M, on revenue of $148M… just what are they doing?

Code hosting, right? And they make a big play of being all-in on remote working, so one presumes they have little to no real estate overhead.

Where does $435M of spending go, then? Payroll? Maybe, even if I highly doubt that all 1600 employees (yes, I cheated and checked their Wikipedia page) are being paid at Silicon Valley rates.

Genuinely mystified.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Re: EMACS or death

ITYM "the text editor that's built into systemd".

Before you explode in rage, note icon :)

Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction

Re: Pbbbbt

Well yes, but only one of them features a god-like superhero who single-handedly saved civilization.

And the other one's about Superman.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: Well, HP lost me as a customer.

I had a Laserjet 4 years ago (like, turn of the century). I always believed it was a rebadged Brother, or maybe it was vice-versa.

Was I mistaken? Canon?

Re: Honestly....

I've told this tale around here before, but... my previous employer habitually issued Thinkpads to employees. Proper, IBM ones, rock solid, could be used to batter rabid elephants to death if need be.

Well one year - this would be around 2008 - our IT dept was experimenting with alternative vendors, and issued me with an HP Elitebook of some sort.

It seemed OK, reasonably well put together.

Until I was at a training conference in San Francisco, seated (like the goody-two-shoes Teacher's Pet that I am, on the front row right in front of the instructor), typing notes, and a key flew spontaneously off my keyboard with a sproing!! sound and landed on the instructor's desk right in front of him. True professional that he was, he picked it up and handed it back to me without missing a beat :)

So yeah, I insisted on Thinkpads after that one.

I always knew the rot had set in at HP when they ran that mawkish advert a few years ago, gushing about how they were building on the heritage of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, "and look here's the actual garage they started in, etc etc."

When a company starts telling everyone about its wonderful "heritage" and "values"... run.

Re: Honestly....

"Smart" - smart tank, smart ink, smartphone - these days seems to be a marketing euphemism for "gives us a backchannel to the customer's wallet and recurring revenue".

Scribbling limits in free version of Evernote set to test users' patience

Re: The whole "freemium" model seems pretty screwed up

I have a Freecell game on my phone. It has annoying adverts; when I’m at home my Pihole blocks them, but not when I’m traveling (which is when I tend to play Freecell… killing time waiting for planes, etc.)

The game offered me a chance to pay and remove the ads. Fair enough, I thought; I get enjoyment out of this, and it’d be perfect without the ads. $5-10? No problem.

$6.99 per month. That’s how much they want to remove ads from a flipping Freecell game. Almost $90 per year.

And so my copy of the game still has ads, which I ignore, and the makers get very little, if any, revenue from me.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: Every single time

> of course, it was the last one I tried.

Just to be a complete pedantic ass… of course it was the last one you tried. You were hardly likely to keep trying more ports after you’d found the right one :)

(Yeah, I know what you meant. I’m just being obtuse.)

Re: Every single time

I used to work for Evesham

Did you happen to know a guy named Robin D.?

Just curious. Worked closely with Evesham in years gone by, and he was my main contact there. Lovely chap, super friendly.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: No problem

Or will pass it as long as it has a suitably Motherhood-and-Apple-Pie backronym, or even just a cute name that doesn't have to bear any relation to the content of the bill. See PATRIOT act, etc etc.

"The Fluffy Kittens and Snuggly Ducklings Act 2024" (inc. rider vii.sec ix: "authorization of deadly force against people with an 'R' in their name")

Or maybe that's just a thing here in the US.

Meta goes to war with FTC over right to profit from kids' personal data

Re: re: Up until the FTCs over-reach, nobody needed or wanted to.

Are you possibly getting confused there with the FCC?

UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images

Re: Is this only UEFI?

Yes, my understanding is that machines starting in legacy BIOS mode - bootsector, etc - aren't affected by this vulnerability.

LogoFAIL, if my reading of this article's correct, relies on a malformed image placed in the root EFI partition on the boot drive. This images is loaded & parsed by the EFI firmware during boot, before the firmware hands over control of the boot process to the OS on its partition.

So if you're not using UEFI boot, and don't have an EFI partition (NB - these are normally hidden), you should be OK.