Posts by Ropewash

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

Re: Samsung quality software

If (list == null) return;

???

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Re: Its a self-supporting bubble

Your first sentences also encapsulate the basics of a fiat economy.

Interesting parallel there.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Socket != chipset

AM4 is just a pegboard and the pinout circuitry.

What you are thinking of is the chipset. B450 and X470 to be precise are the ones that need some kludging to allow for the zen3 parts. It's not really the bios size in general, just that they will need to remove a lot of existing cpu definitions to make room for the new sku's, which will result in market fragmentation and hence why they tried to avoid it by specifying only X570+.

Also note that the 320 chipset AM4 boards cannot be used with Zen2 parts.

So you still need to swap out boards for AMD as well, but at least they tried to keep it to a minimum.

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/984/

Stop worrying – Larry Ellison and Prez Trump will have this whole coronavirus thing licked shortly with the power of data

Re: Salvation from the Devil

But at least it is SUSTAINED misery.

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott

Re: Now I feel like a Luddite...

I think you are overlooking the billions of folks in the developing world.

Not many home internet connections, computers, or even toilets... but there's a shitload of cheap android phones.

Brother, can you spare a dime: Flickr owner sends mass-email begging for subscriptions

Re: "they don't keep your priceless photos safe"

If by 'physical copy' and 'optical media' you mean photo negatives and/or slides then yes. Most other methods of storage degrade or are obsolete (both form and file format) after a few decades have passed.

We're so, so, sorry you're not able to get PC chips, says Intel to everyone who hasn't gone with AMD yet

Thus always with AMD.

They usually produce really excellent hardware and then cripple it with firmware/software written by a drunken hobo smashing a keyboard with his empty wine jug.

It made the pairing with ATI seem more than appropriate as they also never produced a driver that didn't contain at least one major fault.

If the supporting software by some miracle actually proves viable the only solution is to farm the chipset production and bios off to a different company so they can destroy whatever actually worked in AMD's reference build.

I'm also dropping Intel for AMD, for the first time since the celeron 300 came out, but I'm waiting to see which motherboard maker comes out on top for reliability first. Also what's with the pricing? X570 is about 20% higher than z390 same maker, same model type... Is the shitty chipset fan really worth that much?

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

Re: Just another stupid thought bubble...

This is just it. The more they tighten their grip, the more people will encrypt and obfuscate their connections.

If the .gov had just shut their big yaps right at the start they could still be using clearnet honeypots to nab the real villains of the online world instead of chasing ghosts through the onion at great cost for limited result.

But keeping silent and doing your job never got anyone a budget increase.

Rekognition still racist, politicians desperate over deepfakes, and a good reason to go to (some) music festivals

You do know there are more Indians living in India than there are caucasians on the entire planet...

I think they warrant a bit more than 10%.

700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run

Re: can squeeze 700km from a single full battery charge

Central Canada here...

How about -40C with all heating/defrost on full?

Not that I've broken my google fingers, but I'm lazy. What is the rated charge % for EV batteries at -40? I know from bitter experience that a lead-acid lasts for about 15 seconds of starter use at that temp before dying.

Fairphone 3 stripped to the modular essentials: Glue? What glue?

Re: USB ports ?

Unless you are one of us who work in a machine shop.

My mag connects look like they're going for a full biker beard.

NSA asks Congress to permanently reauthorize spying program that was so shambolic, the snoops had shut it down

Re: The constitution is not supposed to be optional

It takes a lot of citizens with rifles to do that sort of jailing.

The 2nd amendment in that constitution is there specifically for this reason, but it doesn't seem to be getting much popular press these days.

Nvidia keeping mum on outlook for year as data centre slows, channel chokes on crypto crap

to 2080 or not to 2080

It doesn't help that software other than a few game devs didn't see any SDK's for the rtx until what? April? Of 2019?

Not a great way to launch a card, leaving out the entire workstation market like that.

I gambled on the 2080 gaining traction as a rendering card and am yet to see any payoff.

It's a great card, no doubt, but a 1080 right now is better bang for the buck until the code catches up to the hardware.

Definitely not going to plonk for the rtx quatro until seeing how much difference the rt can really make.

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Re: Apple making things easier

I love those type of solutions.

How many machines does it take to get to that process by trial&error?

This right here is why schools need these devices.

Lesson one, week three - Restoring your broken boot. Students must devise and apply a method to make their busted PoS machine run again. Pass/Fail to be determined by pushing the power switch and seeing what happens.

That is exactly what children need to learn how to do if they wish to live in a technological society.

I'm not being sarcastic either.

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

Re: Limited resources

>>At some point there is nothing left to steal...<<

That's a nice sentiment, but there's 400,000 new things to steal born on this planet every day.

Shock poll finds £999 X too expensive for happy iPhone owners

Re: It's not just Apple

>>I wonder how a smoker on a 5ish a day habit<<

Speaking as one with an 8ish/day habit I'd think the iPhone owner was a self-regarding ponce and go have a smoke.

Apples and orang...err duMauriers.

UK local gov: 37 cyber attacks a minute but little mandatory training

Re: And the solution is

>treachery and incompetence<

I thought those were the two keywords guaranteed to get your resume looked at around .gov

I think if they started penalizing those they'd have a lot of office space to let.

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

>>No, he's definitely not a moron - they don't employ morons in the NSA. <<

Being a genius mathematician =/= Being a genius mechanic.

The NAKED truth: Why flashing us your nude pics is a good idea – by Facebook's safety boss

Re: No need categorise submitted image at all

Not my fault that hashes of my privates routinely match with the Eiffel tower.

I'm a bit put out it wasn't the Burj Khalifa.

Samsung shows off Linux desktops on Galaxy smartmobes

Re: So in theory, it'll run Slackware?

Also this. (If it ever gets past vapour stage.)

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

WikiLeaks drama alert: CIA forged digital certs imitating Kaspersky Lab

Re: Another Day Another Lie

The government cries out in pain as it strikes you.

Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs

Re: A complete wipe?

No need.

The solution is the same no matter what generation of .gov software your country has installed.

Erase the partition WashingtonDC then create a new partition and format with whatever .gov system you feel you require.

If I might offer some advice; make the partition much smaller this time.

So the 'Year of Linux' never happened. When is it Chrome OS's turn?

Re: Linux on the desktop, and printing

>>Mind you, Brother offers Linux drivers in .deb and .rpm formats on their website. But... I didn't need the .deb. It just worked. WTF?<<

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but it also raises another point against Linux in the eyes of the many.

On Apple you drop a .dmg on your desktop and a program installs. (At least that was it when I last used OSX years back.) On Windows you only have to click an .exe to encrypt your entire filesystem and let the ransom-ware folks know you're alive and well.

But on Linux...

.deb .rpm .pkg .tar.bz .etc ...It requires faith and hope to try to install anything that's not in your repo. (Faith, hope and a very detailed reading of the dependency list.) Even then the names of some of those things you need are going to change from distro to distro and versions will almost certainly be different.

This does not go over well with people who just want to do some new task in a hurry.

Yum, emerge, pacman, apt-get, etc doesn't bloody help either. Fragmentation is great for people who want to experiment and learn, but it's ass for everyone else.

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

Re: Blast from the past

>>because they have some industrial machine attached to their computer.<<

I had a disturbing occurrence of something similar last year. A machine needed it's control computer replaced and the replacement was Win10. It arrived already set up and patched with all software installed so all I had to do was re-do all the machine specific calibrations and everything was good to go.

I did not feel it needed to see the network so it wasn't connected.

One month in and the system decides it's pirated and pops up the notice continually. Plugging it into the network oddly solved that without any intervention from me (i.e. no activation needed as it had already been done before.)

Unfortunately it then said it needed to upgrade the system and drivers and dumped everything machine specific into the bin in the process, causing another re-do of all the calibrations. The new graphics driver it tried to load also buggered up the machine interface program and I had to disable it and run a fallback to get things back on the screen. I fully blame AMD for that one as their drivers are always ass, but why did my OS even try to push a new graphics driver? That is not it's damned job.

Thanks MS. Lovely new OS you've got there, makes me glad I'm not using it at home.

Now it's bugging me to upgrade again and I don't want to push that button.

Surfacegate: Microsoft execs 'misled Nadella', claims report

Re: The Stages of MS Denial

You just reminded me of one of my long-time favourite bits of reading.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/

Especially the line;

"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?"

I recall thinking at that time that perhaps ole BillG wasn't used to using Windows.

Microsoft dumps mobility from its Vision

Re: Oops, a bit of truth accidentally slipped out

I'm no expert on the GPL but what is the problem with MS doing anything involving linux?

While it is wise to be suspect of their linux efforts, what exactly do you think they'll be able to do?

Other than trying to foist another variant of systemd on the userbase there's no possible way for them to EEE the GPL. Anything released under GPL isn't owned by any entity they can buy, they can't poison GPL'd code because they have to release the source. The only thing they could do would be to try and build a whole system from the ground up while avoiding the use of any GPL code... They already have that. It's called Windows.

UK regulator set to ban ads depicting bumbling manchildren

Re: you are a 1st world problem

>>People don't need protecting

>Yes they do. From products that will harm their health.

Fuck right off. I'll smoke if I want to, drink if I want to and stay up late eating fucking crisps if I want to.

>>children should be taught how to think, not what to think

>Impossible under capitalism

Last time I checked, parents were still parents no matter what system they live under. It's their job to teach the children.

>>Go out and do something, be the best you can

>The proletariat don't have the luxury of choice.

Yes. Yes we do. No-one is forcing us to make shitty decisions, we do that all on our own and often refuse to learn from the mistakes. That's our failure. Every person who ever worked their way up from nothing to have a decent life is proof that the choice is there.

>>ignore them and got on with our lives

>Our lives as consumers right?

I almost agree with you there... But I dare you to live without consuming anything for a week. Being alive means consumption, no way around it. If you'd said hyper-consumers then I would have been on side.

So what is your solution to these ills if I may be so bold as to inquire?

If you suggest socialism I'll point out that Venezuelan real-estate is really cheap right now. Go buy yourself some and live in your utopia. Personally I'll pass.

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

re : "I use p2p for nix based distros."

Damnit...

When are you *nix pirates going to learn. Your freetard ways are robbing the hardworking software writers of their livelihood. Without the support brought in by a measly $0.99 per-program-per-update every time you use apt/yum/pacman/whatever these poor struggling artists are going to have to go try to earn their living busking software edits in subway stations.

Heartless bastards.

Microsoft PatchGuard flaw could let hackers plant rootkits on x64 Windows 10 boxen

On the upside...

Maybe it could be used to block telemetry at the kernel level.

Poison can become a medicine and all that.

Costa Rica complains of US govt harassment over Pirate Bay domain

As usual.

These thickheads don't really get it do they?

There was a functional list of IPs for filesharing "pirates" right there. They really didn't care that you could see them since such a low percentage ever got C&D letters, let alone lawsuits.

No. That wasn't enough for you. Gotta try to take down the whole infrastructure to show you're properly kowtowing to the Hollywood money. Try to force your laws onto other nations. Why not also pressure ISPs into filtering torrent traffic so that even perfectly legal users suffer and/or start obfuscating their traffic.

So once it's all moved onto TOR or similar and they have no access what-so-ever to a handy list of IPs to sue what are you gonna do? Try to make TOR illegal? Probably. Will it work? No.

Good job.

Need any ammo for your other foot?

FOIA documents show the Kafkaesque state of US mass surveillance

Re: To Constitute or not to Constitute...

At least in a communist society, the sociopaths will easily be identified and Promoted.

FTFY

Ransomware scum have already unleashed kill-switch-free WannaCry‬pt‪ variant

Re: Inevitable

FSB & PLA

I can't be the only one who wondered what the frontside bus or a programmable logic array had to do with this story.

Bot you see is what you get: The cold reality of Microsoft's chat 'AI'

Re: ymmv

@ dbtx - "It bothers me that smart people are trying to "rescue" the less-smart people from having to do it, and teaching each other that it is a worthy goal."

True. The smart people that repair car engines "rescue" the less smart people from having to learn how to do it. The smart people who know how to apply roofing materials correctly "rescue" the less smart people from having to learn (and also from leaky roofs). The smart people who can use a bulldozer to build a road grade "rescue" the less smart people from having to drive to work on a roller-coaster.

Knowing how to use the sed command does not make a person more intelligent than knowing how to make a tree fall in the direction you want it to. (Also, the errors in tree falling make for better .webms than the sed command errors)

Rich professionals could be replaced by AI, shrieks Gartner

Re: In five years we could have Triage AI

@ Rattus Rattus - "I'm not sure I want to be part of an operation that requires a surgeon's sense of taste."

Can't see how wearing flared trousers has any effect on surgery...

It's been two and a half years of decline – tablets aren't coming back

Surface3pro

Got one to use as a cheap Cintiq knock-off. A job it handles well enough for a non-artist such as myself that can't justify the Wacom price but still likes to see where he's making marks on a drawing.

It has one major advantage over the Cintiq in that it doesn't have to be tethered to a computer to work.

It has one major dis-advantage in that it's vastly less powerful than the machine it would have been tethered to. Still, it's a decent little machine that runs actual graphics software, even if it does it slower than I'd like.

I would like to replace it with one that has more grunt, but Microsoft have decided to go down the Windows10 route and I can't stomach using that system so I won't be replacing this thing until the battery explodes.

S is for Sandbox: The logic behind Microsoft's new lockdown Windows gambit

Re: S is for Spyware

@Dave 126

You know... Last time I browsed the Windows store it did not seem to have autoCAD available as a UWP application. I highly doubt there's any CAD/CAM, circuit design or, in fact, ANY engineering or manufacturing software of any sort on the store.

So what "third party applications" are these "engineers" using that the S version of Win10 could possibly offer them? A dictionary? Maybe a new alarm clock? Do they do their design work solely within the world of Minecraft?

Why wouldn't these folks just buy a real windows machine to actually get work done on?

I'm certainly no engineer, but I still prefer Win7 on a full-fat desktop complete with a vidcard you could brew coffee on and an uncanny ability to run any Windows software from any source.

It's Russian hackers, FBI and Wikileaks wot won it – Hillary Clinton on her devastating election loss

It's odd how they don't mention

The fact that THEY wrote those e-mails the "Russians" made off with.

Not once did I see Podesta or Clinton say that those were fabricated documents spread by her political enemies. Nope. That bit just got whitewashed by screaming Russians!!! loud enough.

The existence of emails in general wasn't the issue. It's what was in them that matters. The DNC wrote what was in them. The "Russians" only made it available to the public.

I think the American people should probably thank the Ruskies for a job well done and encourage them to hack the shit out of all the presidential emails so the people can keep tabs on their leaders.

After all... Their leaders certainly do spy on them.

Post Unity 8 Ubuntu shock? Relax, Linux has been here before

In many cases yes, in others...

Not so much.

Blender has grown so far from the 2.4 days that when upgrading to the 2.6 & 2.7 versions I was amazed at how intuitive and easy to use it has become. I now use it as a primary meshing tool on both my windows and linux installs.

GIMP... Not so much. Though I do use it for a couple of file formats it has plugin support for, it's not my primary software. Especially not on the Surface where it's menu driven interface fails hard for me and my big, fat fingers. So for content creation that's a 50-50 split free vs commercial.

As for operating systems I have one dedicated windows machine, one dedicated linux machine and my gaming rig has both installed as the tie-breaker. I try to buy and run any games I want on Steam-linux to show a little support, but realistically most of my gaming is still on the Win7 install. So that probably tips things to 45-55 in favour of the commercial OS given approximately equal usage time for each machine.

Free software is definitely a much bigger part of my life than it was 18 years ago (my first Linux install... Redhat5.2 bought at a big-box store on a whim), but it can't cover all the bases. So commercial software on a free base would be the next best thing.

I've been saying that for all of those 18 years though and it still hasn't happened.

Don't install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft

"On the other hand, it is seriously weird that the biz has been hyping up an operating system release that today still isn't ready for the mainstream."

Since July 2015 at least.

(You can't) buy one now! The flying car makes its perennial return

Re: Why not

Precisely.

The helicopter IS the flying car. The reason you won't be able to pop down to the shops in your 'flying car' is the same reason you can't do it in a helicopter. You'll blow the neighbour's dog through his basement window, clip the telcomms lines off your home, snag a high-tension cable by the highway and come crashing down right in front of a 40ton freightliner. If you're sober.

It'll get messy after a few pints.

The license, training. airport and flightplans all exist for a really good reason.

Oh... and screw automation. Once you've got a few hundred thousand fliers in the air around a big city you'll get to see the three dimensional version of gridlock with the added bonus of falling out of the damned sky. How would the central control (there would need to be a central control for a city or you'd have absolute flaming chaos) for that many aircraft actually work?

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

Re: My 2 cents regarding ditching Unity

Ditto on the compiz here. Always one major regression away from being usable.

I tried unity when it first came out and was sort-of getting used to it when I noticed something up after an update, my fans were on while watching a video. Why? The system was using 25% processor to run an 8-bit vid, and 70% to decode hi10p. On a quadcore...

Swapped to my ever-present fallback UI openbox and those numbers were 2% and 15%.

Filed a report to the unity devs and got the reply it was a compiz thing and they would look into it. I installed Mint instead. Never went back to Ubuntu and though I departed from Mint quite a few years ago, I've never left cinnamon behind for long.

Machine vs. machine battle has begun to de-fraud the internet of lies

We're all stupid, get used to it.

It's all relative...

Welders know little of the physics of welding and those who study physics can't weld for shit.

A "fake news" filter could easily be installed client-side to filter out anything in direct conflict with the users bias and it would be 99% accurate. To cite the current example in this thread, I'll venture that a vanishingly small number of us have even been to Syria, let alone seen any of the conflict first-hand. Therefore we all spout our opinions based solely on what we've been fed by our sources of choice. Were any of the reporters even there, or are they just relaying third-hand information to us after writing in their own editorial spin?

Also wise to remember that the "stupid" people you talk down about here (those who don't confirm your current views on what makes a human intelligent) not only vastly outnumber you, but also perform tasks of equal or greater value than you and won't even notice if your contributions as a highly evolved paragon of humanity cease to exist tomorrow.

Unless you're the guy who fixes potholes in the road. They are a blessing upon this earth and should be appreciated as such.

Put down your coffee and admire the sheer amount of data Windows 10 Creators Update will slurp from your PC

Re: Fighting back?

Every so often I try to find a flak generator for the modern internet, some little program I could piggyback to the browser that randomly pings various sites off some whitelist of millions constantly in the background. I always come up empty handed and forget about it by the next day. It's easier to go the VPN route than to try and mess the system about for fun anyhow. Though I've always wondered what sort of ads would show up. Probably just as effectively targetted as the ones I get now... Not at all.

Seems similar would be a good idea for telemetry. Just a hook into a valid channel that injects a little trickle of nonsense, like 500,000,000 handwriting examples from some OCR database somewhere fed into their system one line at a time. Anything disruptive would be helpful (or at least fun).

Respond first, read thread later.

Strangely, if you enter "The Windows 10 Creators Update is a significant step forward, but by no means the end of our journey," into google translate it comes out in english as "Bend over and clench your teeth, because here it comes."

I have never.. Ever.. been so damned happy I decided to turn off updates and purge my system during that GWX onslaught. My Win7 desktop and Win8 surface are doing just fine thanks. Doing things I want them to do that is, not things I'm told to do by the OS developer. I don't need you to look into my workflow during one of your many application crashes to see if there's anything you want to sell to advertizers, steal, or have me sued for stealing... <cough>... I mean, anything you can use to determine the cause of the crash... Yeah. Fuck right off.

Luckily my Linux machine doesn't require this level of developmental input from me. The folks responsible for the various programs seem to be able to fix most issues without needing to know what music I was listening to at the time and what my signature looks like. Thanks guys, that's why this machine is the one actually connected to the WAN.

I actually liked Windows. It was a decent enough general purpose platform for all sorts of uses, but this is just a step/mile/lightyear too far. Open note to Microsoft, if you quit shitting all over your users diskspace I personally promise I won't do the same to the lawn outside your corporate HQ.

Good day.

Startup remotely 'bricks' grumpy bloke's IoT car garage door – then hits reverse gear

Humbug!

I can see a great use for this internet connected tat.

Go on vacation and get your mother-in-law or whomever you don't like much to housesit on a few known nights. Log in and fuck with the place until they shit themselves and call an exorcist.

That's the only use case I can come up with though.

As Trump signs away Americans' digital privacy, it's time to bring out the BS detector

This should be fun.

I do wonder at the mindset of the government bodies sometimes. They bitch and moan about how encryption and tunneling are making their law enforcement (spying) more difficult and then they go and put in (or remove) rules that make it so more people who otherwise would never have bothered are going to encrypt and tunnel.

I wonder if they'll wake up soon, or if it will only happen after 90% of the network is dark.

I'm looking forward to the next decade or so being a good horserace between business/government and the folks writing new encryption tech. Place your bets now.

Web smut seekers take resurgent Ramnit malware from behind

Any Adbackers still out there?

Not long ago on this very site a thread like this could be relied upon to bring in a few shills to remind us that without easily exploited advertising systems the whole internet would go bankrupt and collapse into fiery oblivion, dragging us all along with it. Any attempt to actually make anyone accountable was a grievous blow to the free market economy guaranteed to doom the entire world to an internet with zero content.

(mild hyperbole)

Anyone still feel like stepping up to defend these plague spreading rats?

Anyone at all?

I'll restate my stale, old opinion. Ads should go back to how they were long (not really that long) ago. The site that hosts the content hosts the ads and accepts responsibility for vetting them. No middleman, bullshit script linking. Until then my blocks on all ads, trackers and scripts remain fully enabled. Even if half the links I click show up totally blank, at least it's a safe(r) blankness.

Bloke cuffed after 'You deserve a seizure' GIF tweet gave epileptic a fit

How...

...How did these folks survive the Geocities era?

Welding helmets?

Linux on Windows 10: Will penguin treats in Creators Update be enough to lure you?

@hans1

Well it IS free software. That doesn't mean it's free for everyone except Microsoft.

As long as they don't violate GPL I don't see the issue.