Posts by David 132

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Must do better ...

Ah, you've reminded me of this old Fascinating Aida skit. Absolutely hilarious and a classic.

Re: Why

Garlic cloves, a Durian fruit, and a can of surströmming. You'll get all the space around you that you could ever want.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Having read this story

YOU MAY CALL ME 'BILL', MISS FLITWORTH.

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

“How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?”

Well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: one must have a heart of stone to read of the death of IE without laughing.

Re: IE has died

You missed off “…at a crossroads, at midnight.”

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Waiting for AA format

I have a mental image of pulling into the service station, flipping your car upside down, opening the battery compartment, and pulling out & replacing 5000x AA batteries, one at a time.

And woe betide you if any of them are installed the wrong +/- way around.

Or if the little plastic lock tab that holds the battery cover closed should break.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

(..."Yes, an electronic brain," said Frankie, "a simple one would suffice."

"A simple one!" wailed Arthur.

"Yeah," said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, "you'd just have to program it to say 'What?' and 'I don't understand' and 'Where's the tea?'. Who'd know the difference?"

"What?" cried Arthur, backing away still further.

"See what I mean?" said Zaphod and howled with pain because of something that Trillian did at that moment...)

>Do you believe "the average teenager" is sentient?

Potentially? After about 1pm at least, when awake and passably non-surly...

Re: The Google Combined Harvester

>So if it were to become sentient it may have learned too much from the worst among us.

At this point, Microsoft's Tay chatbot says "Hi!"

...followed by something unprintable and a racial slur or two.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Re: The dog ate it

I was about to say, wouldn't it be delicious if IBM's response was "the emails are older than a certain limit so we got rid of them"...

OVHcloud datacenter fire last year possibly due to water leak

Re: Ironic

>tell the world you're gonna learn

No, no, no. Never “we’re going to learn”. That sounds dangerously like a commitment, and sets up actual obligations.

Always use the passive voice. “Lessons will be learned”. Sounds good without actually committing anyone to anything.

Corporate Communications 101!

Re: Interesting article marred by dreadful time formatting

Blech. I hang ma tête in shame. I couldn’t think of the word and was misled by the (frankly, terrible) google translate interface, which suggested “côlon” and then helpfully defined the word underneath as both “part of the intestine” and “a punctuation mark”.

In short: I am an idiot for relying on anything google-related. If they can’t even get a translator UI correct, do we really think they have a sentient AI as per the hysterical claims in the media over the last few days?

Re: Interesting article marred by dreadful time formatting

“À la récherche du côlon perdu”?

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Re: give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.

I had to download a Windows graphics driver the other day - unusual, because mostly I just let Windows Update handle it automatically or I use an out-of-box driver.

Anyway. The driver download was 637MB.

I'm old enough to remember when a CD would hold an entire OS (OK, OK, I'm also old enough to remember when a couple of floppies would hold an OS, but that's beside the point.)

Now we're at the stage where a single driver would barely fit on a CD. If anyone still used CDs. OK, maybe I'm showing my age a little too much?

Ahem. 637MB for a driver? What the hell?

Put like that, having to devote tens or hundreds of gigabytes for the rest of the OS starts to look positively frugal, right?

Ah, yes, journalism. One of the very few career paths that is even more lucrative and sybaritic than being a Linux contributor!

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

Re: Possibility of irony?

A self-cremating one?

Re: These have had firmware protections turned OFF

> Unfortunately, some of the Chinese printers turn all this off. No idea why because it doesn't cost anything or save any money.

Perhaps it allows them to use cheaper fans that don’t (reliably) send speed data, cheaper extruders where the temp sensor isn’t calibrated, etc.

Never underestimate the lengths unethical manufacturers will go to to save even fractions of a penny per unit.

I wondered at that too. All I can suggest is that if my last thoughts were “oh no I’ve been killed by a shonky off-brand 3D printer” I’d find that pretty humiliating.

More seriously - and sympathetically - though, perhaps each of those words have very specific implications in the US civil legal system (e.g. “Pain: 1.5x damages multiplier. Humiliation: 1.4x multiplier”) hence their specific inclusion by the lawyers?

Next major update of Windows 11 prepares for launch

Re: The update is also available to "Seekers" in the Windows Insider program

Steady on old chap, I do remember the New Seekers and I'm not sure I'd describe them as having "scientology levels of cult like creepiness".

Cheesy, yes, guilty as charged. I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony) is a pleasant ditty in a MOR early-70s vein but hardly the last word in genre-busting bad-ass rock and roll, although it does make me crave a coke, of course. And no-one ever had a pool cue busted over their head to the strains of Come Softly To Me (as far as I know...)

The worst that I'd say about them is that they were a pale echo of the original Seekers.

Re: Win11 22H2 hardware requirements will be relaxed

Pretty much correct.

And for those that aren’t aware, ark.intel.com is a good way to look up details of any Intel processors - first ship date, clock speed range, cache size, codename, instruction sets supported, that kind of thing.

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Re: I don't get it.

It's the 21st century equivalent of "BEST VIEWED USING INTERNET EXPLORER 4".

(The icon is for Google's behaviour, not your perfectly correct point, BTW)

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

>I like the original USB. No bloody A, B, C -or- D.

Channeling Scotty there, I see!

Re: 32A commando in the garage

> WTF! Did they have a small data centre in the corner; next to the lawnmower?

Ahem. Obligatory XKCD.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Re: Digital Cameras?

IIRC when they worked they were optically quite good, just that the consistency of quality fell short of what Marxism-Leninism was aiming for.

"The quality of all lenses is equal, but some are more equal than others"?

Re: Intermediaries

They could probably buy these PCs and mainframes!

Microsoft seizes 41 domains tied to 'Iranian phishing ring'

"Stealing information"

FTFA: Additionally, Bohrium corrupted "Microsoft's applications on victims' computers and Microsoft's servers, thereby using them to monitor the activities of users and steal information from them," according to the court filing.

There's a cheap jibe to be made right there, along the lines of "That's what really sunk the crime gang. They were copying Microsoft's idea and activities..."

But I'm better than that. I won't stoop to that level.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

Re: A start

I was about to say, if California can rule that bees are fish, I'm pretty sure that Apple etc will find a way to get their phones & computers legally declared as "home appliances" for the purpose of skirting this law.

46 years after the UN proclaimed the right to join a union, Microsoft sort of agrees

Re: Personal experience

Ah, now how did I know before I even clicked it that your link would be either Carry on at your Convenience or I'm All Right Jack?

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: Why the HELL Nuclear

and then big red splashes appeared on the blades, lubricant seal failure would be my guess.

Lubricant bird would be more likely. Don’t get many seals at that altitude.

Azure Active Directory logs are lagging, alerts may be wrong or missing

Well yes, but the difference is that if this was Microsoft's support site, you'd get a standard template response along the lines of

"Hello, my name is $NAME and I am a Microsoft customer support engineer.

Please try the following..."

...then describes processes for running SFC /scannow, a Defender virus scan, and a check for updates, as if those have ever resolved the kind of problems people post to the support forums.

"Hi, for some reason Windows 10 now displays some shite at the top of the Settings window about 'Rewards', I don't want this how do I remove it?" "please run SFC /scannow..."

"How do I stop Windows from incessantly installing crapware that I don't want, if I remove Candy Fucking Crush Sodding Saga one more time I will go postal" "please run SFC /scannow..."

Renegotiating a Salesforce software agreement? It could take up to two years

Oh, really, it's perfectly simple. Gartner aren't using the XKCD Universal Ratings Scale, is all.

If it helps, think of them as saying that Salesforce's overall rating has fallen from "S" to "Grande".

China’s top court calls for blockchain to record vast number of transactions

Re: But... why?

Well yes, but we're talking blockchain evangelists on the one side and the CCP on the other. I'm definitely feeling a wasp/scorpion "don't really care who gets stung" vibe on this one.

Re: Blockchain instead of a server

You've reminded me of the running joke in Interesting Times, where in the China-analog of the novel, all records are kept by scribes highly-trained in poetic calligraphy. This leads to issues such as, for example, the minute-taking for a meeting actually taking hours ("..How far have you got?" he asked. The eunuch coughed politely. "How softly the bloom of the apric..." he began. "Yes, yes, yes" said Lord Hong. "Could we on this occasion dispense with the poetic framework please...")

Perhaps this blockchain initiative is the CCP hankering for a high-tech equivalent to exquisitely rendered calligraphic record-keeping?

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

It's very on-brand for modern-day IBM though, isn't it?

Official company motto, "If You're Older Than Your Thirties We Hate You™"

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

From elsewhere on the globe, you should try Surströmming.

For an unbiased opinion of it, see the quote by food critic Wolfgang Fassbender in the “International Opinion” section :)

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

Re: Will it finally fix the bluetooth HSP/HFP issue

Oh, lord. Really?

Reality once again out-ridicules parody.

I grasped around for some aspect of the modern computing process that there was no way systemd would have infected. Something as far away from its nominal initial purpose - init scripts - as possible. Something that has been settled and a done-deal on the Linux platform for a long time, with a mature toolset that just works. Partitioning! Yes! That's it! I'll use that as my hyperbole example!

Bugger.

Re: A new Linux standard?

I do notice that there's only one standard XKCD cartoon that gets referenced each time in any standards-related discussion.

Maybe someone should create another comic image, with other use-cases included?

Re: Will it finally fix the bluetooth HSP/HFP issue

>The pulseaudio team have been rejecting patches to make it work for at least a year now.

Well, yes. It works perfectly on Poettering's setup. Therefore: 1) there is no problem with PulseAudio, 2) the patches are not needed, WONTFIX, and 3) he can go off to work his unique magic on some other aspect of Linux.

Disk partitioning, for example. Why is that not handled by systemd? It would make sense, right? Right?

(Please note icon. Tongue firmly in cheek.)

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: "you can expect it to feature in the next version of your preferred distro."

If you feel like fucking swearing, then fucking swear!

Belgium.

Microsoft shows off Windows updates at Build dev event

Allow me to translate.

FTFA: The Store is less popular than its rivals, but nonetheless Microsoft boasted of a 50 percent year-on-year growth in desktop apps and games for the first quarter of this year. It would not, however, confirm the number those apps have grown to.)

2 apps total in Q1'21, 3 apps total in Q1'22 would equate to 50% YoY growth. Just saying.

"Any app," it said, "that runs on Windows, including C++, WinForms, WPF, MAUI, React, Rust, Flutter and Java, is welcome in the Microsoft Store."

Could they sound any needier? "Pleeeeease! Anyone? You have a "Hello World" you wrote in VB3? We'd love to have it in the Store!!!"

...the tech, powered by Microsoft Advertising, will "help developers surface their apps to the right user at the right time..."

Yeah, no, I'm too busy retching at that shameless perversion of the word "surface" to offer a comment on that one.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Re: Uh-oh!

Bonus points and an upvote for

> Gonna be busy over the Memorial Day weekend

…being in the US and yet…

> Load Linux Mint on SWMBO’s laptop

…knowing the SWMBO acronym.

Bravo, Sir.

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Re: 6502

Yes, but it only has a puny 8-bit bus to the rest of him.

Unless I’ve misinterpreted “Byte my shiny metal ass”…

Inkscape adds multi-page support with v1.2 update

Re: Inkscape for watch dials

Indeed, I also have huge respect for horologists… assuming that’s the right word and I haven’t just insulted OP!

If you think the screws that hold a modern tablet/laptop internals together are small, then watchmakers will laugh scornfully at you…

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Re: Busted

> I really liked Web 1.0

<blink>Me too!</blink>

(This comment best viewed using NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR at 800x600 resolution! Under Construction! Check back soon!!)

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: So technology works as intended...

Java's perhaps not the trendiest framework at the moment. All the cool manufacturers are using Flutter or Python.

Heck, British Leyland and Fiat were way ahead of the curve... even in the 1980s, they were shipping cars built with Rust...

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

You mean, ask Roy and Moss if you can borrow the Internet for a few days?

Windows Subsystem for Linux gets bleeding-edge Ubuntu

Not as crazy as it sounded even a couple of years ago. Microsoft have made it very clear that their old model of one-off revenue from perpetual licence sales isn't enough any more. They want monetization, ongoing revenue and are shifting to SaaS for client and server. I can absolutely believe that to them, it's no longer about what OS the client endpoint runs. It's now all about how many Microsoft services and subscriptions can be layered onto it. From their point of view, not switch to Linux - or something built thereon - and offload the bulk of the maintenance, security and support costs to others?

Counter-arguments?

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Oh. My. God.

> > where it’s being logged is unspecified

> You don’t want to know..

As ever, Randall has this one covered.

Re: Cancel

"How do you confuse an idiot?

...Lean two shovels against the wall and tell him to take his pick."

Re: Effect and "impacted"

>The one that boils my piss is 'loose' as a verb.

Ah yes. Far too many people on the Internet "loosing their temper".

Rogue/Rouge is another one that people seem to have trouble with.

You may enjoy reading Reddit's /r/BoneAppleTea, which is a home for such perversions of the English language. Don't blame me if it superheats your piss though.