* Posts by Dog11

134 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2010

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SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Dog11

Re: SvarDOS is not "open source"

These days, the "dancing angels" have been replaced by lawyers. And the head of a pin is ample space for dozens of those.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Dog11

If they were using cracked software, it's impossible to know what else the crack was doing.

True. Is it possible to know with any certainty how accurate/bugfree commercial software is? (Excel and the Pentium come to mind.)

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Dog11

Re: Structural problem

So you're saying the reason Western EVs have hideous prices is because Western companies don't have the skill in design, integration, and brand? I would suggest it's greed and the short-term focus that Western financial markets demand. There are some that clearly have the skill in design, but are undermined by the absolute disaster the management is. And there are some like Stellantis do not seem to have much ability in design and integration, and are in the process of destroying the brands. China has an advantage in labour costs, but labour costs are a relatively small percentage (maybe 15%) of selling price.

Google to push ahead with Chrome's ad-blocker extension overhaul in earnest

Dog11

I stand corrected. A little ad on the "new tab" page. That doesn't bother me (I don't stay on that page for longer than it takes to type the new URL in), but will observe whether it gets worse.

Dog11

Brave does serve ads, but it looks like only on the Brave Search page. I wouldn't know, because I changed the search default to DDG (doesn't everybody?) and turned off all the crypto bro stuff. Brave Shields (the built-in adblocker) says it's blocking 3 ads/trackers here at the Reg (usually I run uBlock Origin as well but turned it off just now to see what would happen). We'll see what is necessary when Manifest 3 becomes the only game for Chrome. Going back to PaleMoon (my previous browser) is always an option if I'd stop keeping so damn many tabs open.

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Dog11

Re: The trap

MS mostly sells OS to manufacturers. New computer gets you new Windows. Then you may want to get a new copy of the software you use (Office). Win for manufacturer, win for MS.

My desk computer has a 2016 BIOS date and runs Win10 fine. One of my other computers is an ancient ASUS Win7 netbook runs the latest version of Linux Mint fine. It rarely uses >50% of its 2-core CPU or more than 2G of the 4G RAM (sluggish for web browsing, though). It runs 24/7 and is on its third HDD.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Dog11

Why stainless?

Because Musk thought it sounded neat and sexy, and worth the extra weight and manufacturing headaches. BTW, it's 3mm stainless. And "bulletproof", so long as your antagonist doesn't have anything more powerful than a 9mm pistol, and doesn't just shoot you through the side window, where they could actually see you. Anyone at Tesla who took a different position probably got fired (Musk's customary management style).

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Dog11

Re: A lot of hardcore Firefox fans are now happy Chrome users.

I switched to Midori, which is a lightweight privacy-enhanced browser based on Firefox. It even runs fairly well on an old (Win7 era) 4M netbook, though that's running the Linux version. The UI is sorta Chrome-like.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

Dog11
Big Brother

Re: @Lord Elpuss - "only five percent believe this surveillance should be unrestricted"

Beria wasn't the first...

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

-attributed to Cardinal Richelieu

Dog11

A happy life?

You do realize that HP's 'for life' offer depends on exactly whose life is under discussion. Yours? HP's? The arbitrarily determined service life of your printer?

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

Dog11
FAIL

Re: speaking of usb

Ah, but if the user tried hard enough, they could get it to go in the wrong way. Then you'd have to come with a little screwdriver or similar instrument and bend the pins back straight again.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Dog11
Holmes

Re: I remember well...

We had one secretary who complained about radiation from her computer. Thing was, she'd break out in a rash on the underside of her forearms. My theory was that it had something to do with the static charge that collected on the CRT faceplate, or perhaps the dust attracted by it. We got one of the filters that was conductive glass with a ground wire, and it seemed to help (at least she stopped complaining).

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

Dog11
Black Helicopters

Re: Sue You, Jimmy!

Exactly. It's not like web designers are forced to put this privacy-invading javascript on their websites. They do it on purpose, so they are the ones responsible for the data sharing. I've had it with the attitude that "just because you're on my website doesn't mean I'm responsible for the contents, that's somebody else whose identity and privacy policy I will not tell you about".

Back in the day, it would often turn out that people who had viruses/malware regularly used yahoo. It wasn't yahoo themselves doing the dirty work, it was being done via syndicated advertising that they didn't bother to monitor.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Dog11
Thumb Up

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

I also have a Win7 era netbook. It's on its third HD, and running Linux as an online file server 24/7. It wouldn't do as a general purpose computer, and the occasional web browse is sort of slow, but otherwise it doesn't require much attention, it just works. I suppose a RPi would use less power, but power consumption compares favorably to all the other computers I've got running.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Dog11
FAIL

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Depends on what you mean by "resist better". Bit rot is a thing, and can affect CDs and DVDs, even pressed ones, as well as scratches and delamination. It can be caused by contamination (environment or manufacturing) in the reflective layer, and maybe other things. Pressed CDs are more resistant to (immediate) handling damage, but the Internet Archive is reading (and transferring) shellac and vinyl that's a century old. Think any CD maker can tout that kind of lifetime? I'd actually think that, stored properly, "vinyl" may well have a longer shelf life. Deterioration over time is a fact for almost all types of digital recording (not even considering its fast obsolescence).

The truth about those claims of Qualcomm chips secretly snooping on you

Dog11
Big Brother

Re: What did you expect?

> there's been a requirement in the US for decades that phones incorporate GPS or similar to know where they are.

Sure. But what legit requirement is there to share that info outside the phone when not making an emergency call?

I've got "location" turned off, and some apps won't work that way. Is my phone still sending location data to anyone (outside of emergency calls)? Obviously the local cell towers roughly know where you are based on signal strength, but they really only need that to determine which tower has the best signal. (It's also obvious that telcos unnecessarily retain that data to make it possible to snoop later, but that's a different issue than the chipset spying.)

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Dog11
Linux

Cat (carnivore, same as penguin) food is much higher protein than dog (omnivore) food, which has a lot more vegetable matter in it. And because of that, more expensive.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Dog11
Thumb Up

Re: Don't rely on a single password

If people want to use open source, there's always Password Safe (https://www.pwsafe.org/), the program by Bruce Schneier. It's Win only, but there are a flock of compatibles for other platforms (see their "Other Platforms" page). I've been using it for 2 decades. It doesn't natively do cloud or sync, though you could have it do backups to the cloud, or I suppose put the datafile there.

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Dog11

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

"It is reasonable that it is not sold on for illegal purposes."

How about "given" or "handed over" rather than "sold"? Is it the monetary transaction that's important? Does the word "illegal" mean "against law in either my country or your country"? (Hope you lave multinational lawyers on staff.) Would it mean acceptance of liability if the data is used for illegal purposes (whether or not you had the ability, foresight, or power to guard against that)?

I'm guessing you mean, "if it's ok in my country, it should be ok for you regardless of whatever your local laws may say."

"Using the data to personalise a service (e.g. adverts) sounds reasonable. "

It might, IF I have explicitly agreed to that. (Personally, I don't want unsolicited adverts, in e-mail we call those "spam". And I want personalised adverts even less.)

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

Dog11
Thumb Up

"Bag Balm" is a brand name. Great stuff. One herd-size can will last you a lifetime! After 30 years, I've only used 1/3.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Dog11
Mushroom

RS232 upside down? That takes work. In the old days, saw a computer with 2 25-pin D-type RS232. One was for DTE and the other for DCE. Serial printer got plugged into the wrong port. Wisps of smoke and a burning smell ensued. Didn't hurt the computer, but the printer was now toast.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Dog11
Holmes

Re: I've seen worse

Re portrait rather than landscape. That's the way you normally hold the phone, and it's kind of awkward to hold it sideways (with my phone, I have to be careful not to curl a finger over the cam lens). If a building is blowing past your window, you're probably too distracted to stop and think about the best video format.

Shout-out to whoever went to Black Hat and had North Korean malware on their PC

Dog11

Re: Malware at Black Hat?

Back in the days when pickpocketing was a hanging offense, and hangings attracted crowds looking for entertainment, I understand pickpockets did work those crowds.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Dog11

Re: Hot stuff

Redundant so deleted.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Dog11

Re: Modern copiers

Maybe they can track it down if you buy new printers. All of my printers came from thrift or used-computer stores.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Dog11
FAIL

Re: The title is optional

Trade mags are often paid for by the advertisers, so their income depends on an extensive mailing list. There's one I've not only sent back for close to a decade, but taken at least one phone call from ("to update our records"). I still receive it monthly, and convey it directly to the waste bin. (I'm not dead, only my business is.)

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Dog11

Re: Nasty goings on

A check on several search engines (with nanny filter turned off), and several different browsers, gave me a (first) page of hits almost all relating to that show (which I'd never heard of). One or two dictionary sites. Even tried with a misspelling ("I before E except after C, anything else would be weird"). Purely in the service of scientific researc, you understand.

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Dog11

Re: "lean" innovation

Well, to be honest, the Sturmgewehr pretty much invented the entire category of "assault rifle" (intermediate cartridge, capable of full auto), so pretty much all countries based new weapons on it. Kalashnikov was merely the first to do so.

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

Dog11

Re: Quality vs Quantity

Europe/America/Japan (Japan is in the same boat) have relatively high standards of living and accessible birth control. The time required for education and career cut into childbearing years, not so much16-and-pregnant any more. It may be that many women are finding other things they'd rather be doing than breed.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Dog11

Re: Don’t know about you

Used by the Viet Cong, too. Just because we've got new ways to kill people doesn't mean the old ways don't still work.

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Dog11

Re: "stolen"

> perhaps he should go buy "Truth Central" or "Trump Truthful" or whatever that shit is called.

The name is translated from the original "Pravda".

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Dog11

Re: It's a curious distinction to make

> short of rolling your own hardware (CPU and motherboard included) you can't avoid propriety closed-source firmware.

Yup. They've got you by the short hairs, so smile and bend over.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Dog11

Re: Density

Could be. But a DD disk could be formatted and used at 4D, if you had an appropriate disk drive and software. Granted, that's still short of HD capacity.

Dog11
Boffin

Re: I've never seen (or heard of) hard-sectored floppy disks before

By the time of the IBM PC, disks were mostly soft sector. But before (and overlapping) that, there were a zillion disk formats. I had software (UniForm) that could do many of them, and there were a lot of hard-sector formats listed. Before that, I used IBM 8 inch, and those were soft-sectored. Never did run into hard sectors, think by the early 1990s they were not common. There's a list at stackexchange but I remember there being more.

Zlib crash-an-app bug finally squashed, 17 years later

Dog11

Re: FOSS community

You always have the option to choose closed-source software, where the publisher can arbitrarily declare no more support, goes out of business, or is eaten by the borg. For example, if it runs a multi-million dollar machine whose manufacturer went out of business two decades ago.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Dog11

Re: USA change its date format ...

> USAians are genetically predisposed to mis-understand times, dates, timezones, and anything else about localisation, which is odd because they have enough of their own timezones.

Timezones are a little confusing, but we can figure them out. It's the concept that there are other countries (Canada doesn't really count) that throws us for a loop.

Dog11

Re: USA change its date format ...

MM/DD/YYYY? When I was programming, I used big-endian YYYYMMDD (internally at least), since then a numeric sort put it all in order.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Dog11
Windows

Mac usability is only better if you already are part of Mac culture and, I think, use only officially approved software that was originally written for Macs. As a Win (and some Linux) guy, I always had immense difficulty getting Macs to do what I wanted (where are those network parameter settings again?). And then, there's that "if you can afford it".

Dog11
Big Brother

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

Exactly. Kaspersky worked as advertised. Is Kaspersky susceptible to direction from the Russian government? Certainly. Are other AVs susceptible to pressure from related governments? Also certainly (this applies to OS software as well). I use Kaspersky because I am confident there is nothing about my computer (or my life) that the Russians would be interested in. I am not sure I can say that about other AV producers and their respective governments.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

Dog11

It's not the Woke that's the problem, it's the Asleep, the ones in the Nightmare World.

Dog11

But if you've read the History of WW2, you will also see that appeasing a mad Dictator, also doesnt end well.

Sure. But the question is, is maintaining the .ru domain (etc.) the equivalent of appeasement? What would the 1930s equivalent have been? Blocking mail service to/from Germany?

Even during WWII, mail service continued via neutral countries (I knew soomeone n the US who received mail from a German relative... yes, the letter was presumably read, and the envelope endorsed by both German and US censors).

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Dog11

Not very common in most areas for residential or small commercial structures. Standard in places like Chicago, where building codes required it (due to Great Chicago Fire of 1871), and in areas (e.g. New Mexico) without many trees for lumber. In most of the US, wood is the predominant building material.

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

Dog11
Alert

Re: It is an all out war on ownership by the bilionaires

Lawmakers' only job should be to make laws, and the potential targets of those laws must not be allowed any influence.

The problem is, that might be you, objectiing to a proposed law that would require demolishing your house. It's very difficult to construct the right dividing line. Should your council be allowed to advocate to lawmakers that all houses in your area be painted green? How about object to plans to replace them with a toxic waste dump?

Dog11

Related to #5, you've got to trust that the server will not do an update (perhaps a "security update") that in any way changes the algorithm it uses to generate results.

Dog11
Big Brother

Re: "the marginal cost of sharing and making copies of things is pretty close to zero"

30% is the traditional retailer mark-up. For goods that the retailer must first purchase with their own money, without being certain the goods will sell. For retailers who maintain a bricks & mortar store and perhaps a warehouse to hold their stock, hire sales clerks, buy insurance, deal with recalls, and collect and submit taxes (in LeftPondia there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of differing and sometimes overlapping tax jurisdictions, yes of course that's inefficient and confusing).

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Dog11

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

> According to my Iranian friend Iran’s not as stable a country as everyone would like it to be either.

Since 6 January 2021, we've seen that the USA isn't as stable as everyone would like, as well.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Dog11

Re: Colour me impressed...

Depends on what you're comparing NTSC to. For OTA antenna video and marginal signal strength, it just degraded, where digital would have been completely unusable. (I grew up with B&W TV down in a valley, with 2 TV stations visible through heavy snow. It was still good enough to watch Emma Peel.)

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Dog11
Facepalm

Re: Despising the company/customer loyalty

Ah, Virgin has adopted the American way. Our big vendors of consumer services (in this arena, ATT, Verizon, Comcast, CenturyLink or whatever name they're going by this week, etc.) are pretty much all like that. Your only hope is to find a small company that has not yet achieved monopoly or arrogance.

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Dog11

Re: Hands On

Translates for Left--Pondians as "Vice-Grips".

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Dog11

Re: For the record...

Non Tesla owner question. If you have the keycard, what's the benefit of a paired phone?

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