Posts by David 132

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

The Debian installatiøn røutine once bit my sister.

Re: Ice Cream flavo[u]rs

Stretching your (well, Sir Pterry/Neil Gaiman’s) analogy perhaps too far, I wonder what the Them would make of the Goats’ Cheese, Marionberry & Jalapeño ice-cream I bought from the somewhat hipster-ish Salt & Straw last week?

Copper shortage keeps green energy, tech ventures grounded

Re: RTSC

Also used - in the past at least - in domestic wiring. My house in Oregon, built in the early 80s, has aluminium wiring for several of the circuits. And there are special (galvanically not electrically) isolating connectors widely available for bridging it to copper.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

My first PC - in the pedantic, “technically it stands for Personal Computer so includes just about anything smaller than a mainframe” sense - was a Durango F-85. I never could find a CP/M-80 boot disk for it, so the poor thing never did more than boot to a flashing ‘_’ prompt. Shame, because it was an impressive piece of hardware - built-in keyboard, 2x 5-1/4” floppies, and daisywheel printer, with even a little monitor too.

Re: 128 Mbytes!

Obligatory XKCD :)

Liam - commiserations on still waiting for your Spectrum Next. I’m in the same boat, as the Aug 2021 release date has faded into memory due to so many factors. Still, the frequent updates on Kickstarter from Henrique, Alvin, Jim & others are keeping my anticipation alive.

Fingers crossed that the Release 2 machines - complete with new FPGAs and re-re-re-tweaked motherboards - will ship before too long, eh?

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: Nice Car...

And it doesn’t even have warm buttocks while doing so.

Upvoted.

However, my own beloved Volvo is currently en panne, having suddenly and mysteriously and without any warning whatsoever lost all its oil at 60mph on the highway. If the garage ever get back to me with a diagnosis - or post-mortem, I suspect - I will be facing such a large bill that I could cosplay as a pelican :(

Re: That's a nice Beemer you've got there

Minor point of order: after years of referring to the cars as Beemers, I learned quite recently that among aficionados of the brand, that nickname is reserved for BMW bikes. The cars are, apparently, “bimmers”.

Not sure if I personally care enough to respect the distinction, but there you are.

No, what you have bought is a licence to use the car for a limited period, subject to the manufacturer’s terms and conditions which can be changed at any time without prior notice and which you agreed to when you opened the car door.

*Your* car? What a quaint idea. Like trafficators, floor-mounted headlight switches or hand-cranked engine starting.

Icon: have a beer. At least we’re all used to only renting that.

Re: Heated seats?

Yeah, but you fellas have to pay instead for ‘roo bars, spider-proof window seals, and drop-bear insurance, so don’t get too smug…

Re: Nice Car...

You think you’re joking but there was a kerfuffle a few months ago - sorry, CBA to look up the details - about a motorbike jacket with a built-in airbag, where the airbag functionality had a monthly subscription to enable it.

Come off your bike and are flying through the air towards a telephone pole? Welp, better have your credit card ready to renew that airbag subscription…

Re: Dave at the garage can sort you out

> the pin number

…if you brought him cash from the ATM machine?

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Re: Raise the Jolly Roger!

A neighbor of mine has a ‘71 Camaro with a 350. Yes, fun is the word.

Re: Raise the Jolly Roger!

Don’t forget the whole “let’s put EVERY vehicle control on a touch screen, which has no tactile feedback whatsoever and is really difficult to prod at accurately without taking your eyes off the road when you’re in motion on any road that isn’t glass-smooth”, which is my personal pet-hate-du-jour (ok, and long-sentence-du-jour, touché)

Icon… that’s me, that is.

What no-one here seems to have picked up on..

(unless I’ve missed a comment, in which case my apologies)

…is that this allows BMW to reset the feature/subscription when the car changes hands. *You* might have paid the $400 or whatever for “lifetime” heated seats, but I’m sure the seats will be deactivated as soon as you sell the car. See also the similar recent incident with a Tesla.

So it’s basically, perpetual revenue for BMW. It’s all aligned with the move in our own beloved IT industry towards <whatever>-as-a-service. Why sell your customer something once, for a one-off payment, when you can milk them for ever more, and for even more, on a monthly basis?

Grrrrr.

Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope

Re: yeah, and there's

“But he’s a liar and I’m not sure about you”

RIP Kirsty :(

Re: Obligatory reference...

Typical. You wait ages for a bus and then 1,026,141,663,954,876 of them turn up at once.

Microsoft tests CD ripping for Media Player in Windows 11

Re: Do you remember the first time?

Around that time, I had Doom on CD-RW. I wrote a tool that automatically erased it and replaced it with Quake.

Now that was a game-changer.

(sorry)

Cell, Wi-Fi can work for Windows 11 on Surface Duo

Re: And there's the cast . . .

It’s definitely a vast, untapped segment of the market isn’t it? A mobile device that fuses together the respect for user privacy of Google, the reliability of Windows, and the pricing of Apple…

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

Well, he was doing it wrong.

The preferred, “approved” way to install Linux these days is on top of Windows using WSL. That way, Microsoft can ensure that you get the best possible Linux experience.

(I couldn’t decide whether to go with the Trollface icon, because I worried that people might think the above comment is serious…)

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

Re: "Dawn Raid Manual"

> I was pondering who else would have a "Dawn Raid Manual"

Anyone who has to simultaneously use Dawn dishwashing soap and Raid fly-spray, obviously. That’s all it was. Perfectly innocent.

Indian tax authorities raid offices of Chinese smartphone maker Vivo

Re: Gold?

That poor boy was supposed to go to Lourdes!

(Icon: DRINK!)

Vendors are hiking prices up to 30 percent and claiming 'it's inflation'

Re: To be fair...

>(So you can obviously save money by inventing a compression algorithm that turns all your 0s into 1s.)

public byte fCompressionForDef(byte input)

{

return (byte)1;

}

There. Boundless savings! I am prepared to licence this on very reasonable terms...

Re: It's shit like this...

> engage with your supplier regally talking

OK, I know you meant to type "regularly" but thank you, or thank your autocorrect, for a lovely mental image.

"One is not happy with the service one is receiving from you. We are not amused. Off with your head!"

Microsoft splits up Windows Beta Channel Insiders

Re: Of course!

Well, obviously. That’s what the letters on a 0-9 numeric keypad are for - you just have to spell out someone’s email address using the telephone keypad and the resulting number will connect to them.

I admit I’m not sure how you dial a ‘@‘ symbol, but I think you can dial the Email-From-your-Landline helpdesk at 999, and ask the nice person who answers the call to walk you through the process.

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

“A HANDBAG?“

-also Lady Bracknell, albeit less relevant to this discussion…

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Re: who made this comment

Could be worse. If we’re not careful, they’ll build systemd support into GTK5.

Or maybe vice-versa.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Re: +1 ExplorerPatcher

Right now I’m trying to find a working method of getting rid of the annoying “header banner” in Windows 10 Settings. You know, the one that tells you how you could be earning Microsoft points or whatever. Useless waste of space.

There was a method that got rid of it, using a powershell command, but it seems that since a couple of recent Windows Updates, the header is back and there’s no way to remove it.

That is very Microsoft. They want to shove a feature in front of you? Well by Jove they’ll keep doing so, and bypass any of your attempts to avoid it.

Which is why I’m not wholly excited about the new version of Rufus the article mentions. Rufus is a fine tool, but once it gets into the sphere of modifying/bypassing Windows restrictions, it’s dancing on quicksand.

Re: Desktop on OneDrive by default?

Funny how the suggested defaults always seem to favour Microsoft, isn’t it?

Would you like us to spy on you? [X] Yes

Allow apps to access your location? [X] Yes

…etc, etc.

And their pathetic clingy attempts to stop you switching away from Edge to a proper browser are infuriating, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Re: Tim

Well you say that, but how do we know it’s really you? If only there were some sort of agreed standard for confirming people’s identities. Preferably decentralized.

Re: You know something's wrong

> Yes, that would be progress /s

Ah, I see you’re still using DOS. The cool kids are on PowerShell now, so in this case it would be

Progress Set-CommentTone sarcastic

:)

Apple's guy in charge of stopping insider trading guilty of … insider trading

Re: Rounded corners

Space Gray™️.

Fixed that for you.

Re: It's exactly what you'd expect.

<Rimmer>

ALPHABETTI SPAGHETTI?!??

</Rimmer>

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

Re: Pounds?

> Indeed, and in the US, it would be $6 + sales tax

Which here in Oregon, at least, isn’t a thing. It’s nice to pay the price of an item, rather than California-style (price of item)+(state sales tax)+(city sales tax)+(tourist tax or whatever else local politicians see fit to add)

City-killing asteroid won't hit Earth in 2052 after all

Obligatory Pratchett quote…

‘Ye gods,' he said, under his breath. ‘The Mayor of Quirm has been struck by a meteorite . . . again.'

'Can that happen?' said Sacharissa.

'Apparently. This is from Mr Pune at the council offices there. Sensible chap, not much imagination. He says that this time it was waiting for the mayor in an alley…'

"Come, friendly bombs asteroid and fall on Slough...

...I haven't practiced its pronunciation enough."

OpenSSL 3.0.5 awaits release to fix potential worse-than-Heartbleed flaw

Re: AVX512 -- Available on exactly which Intel processors?......

FYI for those wondering it's simple to find answers like that on Ark.intel.com. That link is directly to a search for "processors with AVX-512".

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Well said, albeit badly HTML formatted :)

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

As good as admitting guilt

Given that IBM's Nazgul legal team are on retainer and it's not as if any potential legal costs would deter them, nothing says "we're guilty as hell and don't want to establish that in a legal precedent" as much as settling pre-trial.

A pint for the plaintiff anyway, even if it's not the definitive spanking for IBM that we'd hoped for.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

"$10K over MSRP. Ran when parked. No low-ballers. I know what I got."

So, this Tesla has been wrecked, caught on fire, doused with water, caught on fire again, (repeat etc.), tipped on its side, dropped in a pit, and submerged in thousands of gallons of water.

In today's used car market it's probably, after all that, still worth about $10K over the new retail price.

I wish I were joking...!

Microsoft pulls Windows 10/11 installation websites in Russia

Re: Putin, got one name for you mate....linux

>Nah. Everyone knows it was Steve Jobs that invented algorithms,

It was Al Gore. And then he named them after himself. Because he got sick and tired of people arguing over whether he'd really invented the Internet or not.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: The more they overthink the plumbing,

Automatic upvote for any Scotty quote.

And it's closely followed in the movie by one of my favourite Bones/Kirk exchanges:

"Nice of you to tell me in advance."

"That's what you get for missing Staff meetings, Doctor..."

Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio: Too edgy for comfort?

Well played, Sir/Madam.

Shades of the old National Lampoon car-buying gag when the salesman tells Clark "You think you hate it now, but wait 'till you drive it..."

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: Invented by Sir Philip Bin...

Damn, you beat me to it. Curse you, Mr Gently-Benevolent!

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: My advice for Biden

"Which one was it that was attacked by a giant swimming rabbit?"

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

Re: Yet again

>MICROS~1 have heavily implied on a number of occasions that all new sysadmin functionality will be, if not "Powershell-first", then at least available to PS via cmdlets or modules at the point of release.

Well yes, but that was more than a couple of months ago, and like so many companies in this industry, they have the attention span of a squirrel.

Plus, now we're in SatNad world, there's the bigger issue - that they haven't figured out how Powershell can be monetized on an ongoing basis. "Pay-per-use cmdlets? Hmm... not subtle enough..."

Re: Hours wasted by Microsoft

There are few things in our industry more soul-crushing than clicking "shut down" before you grab your laptop and run out of the room to lunch/dinner/whatever... only to see those dread words, "Windows is installing updates. Do not turn off your computer. 1%.... 1%.... 1%...."

Re: So clearly the Mk 1 is about to sink into the swamp.

And the rest of the system will be completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute?

US must adopt USB-C charging standard like EU, senators urge

Re: USB Charging-only are an abomination unto Nuggan

I absolutely agree, but would have upvoted you even if I didn't, purely for the "abomination unto Nuggan" reference. File them alongside shirts with six buttons, cats, the colour blue and oysters, I guess?