Posts by alain williams

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

Use tools for what they are good for

PDFs are great for making something that will look the same for everyone.

If you want something that adapts to the viewing device then do not use a PDF; this is something that HTML is good at.

If you want a form completed and submitted why use a PDF ? Some do that as a way of preserving their existing documents but just doing it over the web. If you want to do it over the web then HTML has got excellent forms ability, just please do not make it unusable with too much Javascript.

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

The metaverse is not real

the profits that it will generate will be just as real

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

General Election

If the new government (led by whoever Prime Minister) followed roughly the 2019 Tory manifesto then I would be content to not have a GE. If they do not then a GE should be mandatory.

(I will accept changes mandated by unforseeable events like Covid & Putin's war.)

I pity satire writers - they must be struggling to keep up and find that events are more surreal than they could invent.

Junk cellphones on Earth would stack higher than the International Space Station

Longer support times

and operating system/firmware updates would cut waste - but this would hurt manufacturers' profits so is unlikely to happen.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Survey missing option

"I don't give a toss".

I am very happy with LibreOffice.

Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold

Would it not be great ...

if software vendors behaved like this when some dangerous flaw was found in their products.

Juno what? Jovian moon Europa is looking rugged

Did they spot ...

a little island to the west that is splitting off from the rest of the planet ?

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

One person's 'red tape' is another's protection

More sound bite legislation from an increasingly vacuous government. Just look at the 'success' of their 'well thought through' economic announcements of the last fortnight.

Cult leader meets the Pope: Apple CEO chats to Francis

An apple led to mankind's downfall ...

in the Garden of Eden.

Does the pope not remember?

What is Tim Cook planning ?

Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty

Strategy means long term planning

But in the UK politicians are incapable of looking beyond the next general election.

How one Ukrainian software maker planned for survival as invaders approached

Emotional state of employees

Nice to see a CTO thinking about that.

Oracle pays $23 million to SEC to settle bribery charges

Re: Small fines = getting away with corruption

The fines must be matched by life changing fines on the individual Oracle execs show knew about this.

This will only stop when the execs can no longer afford to send their daughters to pony club.

Ukraine fears 'massive' Russian cyberattacks on power, infrastructure

Re: WTF .... SNAFUFUDBAR

I assume that you live in Europe, as do I. Like many of us you will have grown up in a peaceful environment, one where wars did not happen, wars were a long way away. The result will have led you to question why there was so much spending by our governments on defence - it was not needed.

Putin has shown us why this spending is needed and has been a wake up call for many (me included) to now understand that peace cannot be assumed, you need to be ready. This has happened at the country level as well, the backing of NATO has got stronger as countries have realised that without it they might be vulnerable to an aggressor.

Spending on your local fire station is a complete waste of cash ... until a house catches fire.

The only thing that a bully understands is someone who is stronger than them. The way of dealing with a school bully is to have them visited by the rugby club.

I do not like spending on the military but do understand that the consequences of not spending might be awful.

How much spending and what on ? A hard question that can only be answered with hindsight.

Grand Theft Auto 6 maker confirms source code, vids stolen in cyber-heist

Grand theft source code

A great new game for us all to play!

Microsoft rolls out stealthy updates for 365 Apps

Microsoft is catching up with Linux

I often update my Linux boxes while running the applications that are being updated.

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

Should we be making lots of airplanes ?

What with the effect of aviation on the climate.

HP pays $1.3m to settle dispute over printer security chip

€95 is easily not enough

How much time wasted trying to diagnose what turns out to not be a real hardware issue ?

What losses through not being able to print important documents on time ?

HP has got off scott free.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

My dad was an officer who gave/awarded driving licenses. One day he thought that he would like one ...

Guess who taught me to drive.

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

"the world's largest publicly known particle collider"

Is this suggesting that someone has a private particle collider ?

Would this be in a volcano on an island owned by someone with a penchant for white cats ?

Newport Wafer Fab sale to Chinese company held up again by UK.gov's probe

Do not sell to the enemy

Sorry to be so stark, but China is increasingly showing itself to be a country that is acting against us and our friends; it is throwing its weight around more & more - look at the firighteners that it put on Taiwan last month.

Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

Summary: abuse personal data as you wish

one that is designed not for Brussels, but for the people of the UK,” said Dorries

Wrong: it is designed for those business that do not care about privacy of "the people of the UK".

EU proposes regulations for tablet battery life, spare parts

"spare parts for at least five years"

1) this is not long enough, many devices are easily usable for longer. 10 years would be good

2) "from the date of the device's introduction to the market". No: the date should be from when the device was sold new in a shop

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

A flood of enquiries will result

from this announcement.

This will make a splash in the hosting market.

Oh no, that James Webb Space Telescope snap might actually contain malware

Re: Again, a bloody attachment

Yes, b b but I thought that the JWST pic was of some cute kittens!

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Re: an account number was accidentally entered into the payment amount field

With a large transfer to a new account I will first transfer £1 and ask the recipient to tell me that they have received it.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

Re: Still work in progress

"café" can be four or five code points, but it is four characters, and they should be considered the same

Unicode equivalence is a pain, it allows different byte sequences to represent the same character. In the above example the 'é' can either be U+E9 (a single code point) or 'e' followed by a combining acute accent (U+65 followed by U+301). Searching algorithms are thus more complicated.

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

Zuck has been listening to too much Eagles

Does he realise that Hotel California was only a song ?

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Should have stopped before 2011

which is when Gnome 3 was released.

Thanks very much for the Mate fork (of Gnome 2) which provides a usable version of Gnome.

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

Unilateral variation terms

Far too many contracts contain this, often with the burden on the customer of finding out that there has been a change - expected to check a web site and notice that some wording is different.

This sort of thing should be blanket banned with limited exceptions for things like inflation linked price changes.

The trouble is that they are all at it so it is hard to find a supplier that plays fair.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Other car manufacturers are available.

Just say no & buy something else.

Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $6.9b as Twitter lawsuit looms

Musk's sofa

It must be nice to have a sofa in which he can find such loose change ...

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

UN Member states

The UN should grow some balls and recognise Taiwan as an independent member state.

While they are at it they should also recognise Palestine.

IBM puts NIST’s quantum-resistant crypto to work in Z16 mainframe

CRYSTALS-Dilithium

Encryption Jim, but not as we know it.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Whack a mole

Yes: just count seconds since the epoch and things become simpler.

Put the complexity on converting epoch seconds to a form that a human will understand. That is already quite complicated as it has to cope with time zones and daylight savings. This can have 1.30 am happening twice on some days or not at all.

Part of the problem is that POSIX defines a day as 24 x 3600 seconds, it does not allow + or - 1. Fixing this would be hard (lots of legacy software to check), then the conversion code but would then let us count seconds.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Re: negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

℃ is U+2103 "DEGREE CELSIUS = degrees Centigrade"

℉ is U+2109 "DEGREE FARENHEIT"

K is U+212A "KELVIN SIGN". Kelvin is never referred to nor written as a degree

negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

Oh come on el-reg ... Fahrenheit in a scientific context is stupid, if you want to give a different scale try Kelvin - much more meaningful when close to absolute zero.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

What privacy safeguards ?

What guarantees that the data will be kept in the UK and away from Uncle Sam and the Patriot Act.

Rocky Linux 9 and its new build service enter the ring

I have just installed it ...

went easily (under qemu under Debian). Seems a bit jerky (slight delay on terminal character echo).

Runs waylan (not a problem) but Gnome 4 - which I hate - I'll need to find a usable desktop.

How quick to release ?

I am not bothered if it takes Rocky a couple of months to get the first version out of the door. What is more important to getting security updates out quickly.

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

Re: Strong arming doesn't work

Doing this with only two months notice is extra nasty.

And at a time of year when people are going to be away on Summer holidays - so, in practice, less time available.

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Re: 6 here!

"Your granny's radio had maybe 10 transistors"

My granny's has 6, (1 RF, 2 IF, and 3 AF).

My crystal set had just one diode.

James Webb Space Telescope looks closer to home with Jupiter snaps

photographing a turtle

So NASA has now let slip the real reason of the JWST: to try to snap an image of Great A'Tuin.

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

It will give me a whole new selection ...

of images for my desktop background.

Thanks NASA!

Meta accuses data scrapers of taking more than their share

What about the data that facebook collects ...

on non facebook users - people who have not agreed to facebook taking their information ?

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Crappy security

at this data center.

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Not much comment on patient data

Most of the write up was about the money.

The point is that de-identified personal data has all to often been re-identified. So where will this data end up ? It has value so it may well be sold. When put together by some organisation that has a lot of other personal data: bingo - they now know more people's heath problems.

Were strict limits put on how the data would be used ?

When a company goes bust its assets are often sold to the highest bidder and original "use agreements" ignored or deemed unenforceable ?

Sensyne Health is a UK company so subject to the GDPR (the Tories have not abolished it - yet). I do not know if de-identified data is still subject to the GDPR -- it should be.

Sensyne Health has not (yet) gone bust but may be bought - possibly by a company not subject to the GDPR.

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

Sourcing everything from the UK

I approve of that - it is barmy that we drag a lot of stuff ½ way round the world when we should make it here. Reducing dependence on an increasingly aggressive dictatorship is also a good idea.

Unfortunately stuff from China is often cheaper. Is this just that wages are less there ?

Tech companies ready public stances on Roe v. Wade

What when helping a women get an abortion is criminalised ?

This is what will happen in some states. Helping pay for a flight or even driving someone to an airport to go get an abortion will open you to criminal proceedings. Will these nice sounding policies survive an onslaught like that ? I hope so, but ...

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

So when one of these things is junked ...

should it not it be standard procedure to disconnect/remove the battery ? I do realise that this might not be very easy if the EV is all bent & twisted after some accident.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: More than just their users affected

An important idea within DNS is to have multiple servers so you should have had slave servers with other providers. 8.8.8.8 would do nicely or even have a few your own, it is not hard.