* Posts by petef

200 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2010

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Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

petef

Reduced battery life

The lifespan of the car battery will be lessened by the extra charging cycles.

It is also a waste of energy compared with a Powerwall type solution. You can apportion some of the car battery's weight to V2G and it is not efficient to be lugging that around with you.

Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe

petef

I'm no Microsoft apologist but in my recent firing up of Windows 10 (22H2) I notice that Settings has stopped bugging me that my browser settings are sub-optimal. I forget the exact wording but the essence used to be that M$ thought that I should be using Edge instead of the preference I had set for Opera.

I'm referring to the top panel of Settings whose three remaining buttons are OneDrive, Windows Update and Rewards.

The computer in question is dual boot and spends most of its time in openSUSE Tumbleweed / KDE Plasma which I find to be an altogether more pleasurable experience.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

petef

I recall the advent of spam on USENET in the 90s. Early on I found that my list of 40 odd domains sufficed to filter it out. Happy days.

I'm still a regular user, Gnus/emacs to Eternal September and gmane since you ask.

Toyota Japan back on the road after probably-not-cyber attack halted production

petef
Coat

Perhaps they entered a French flight plan while NATS got a spanner from Toyota.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

petef

For me the worst aspect of the ZX81 membrane keyboard was that your fingers moved a bit leading to you pushing at dead space and then being eaten by Rex. We mitigated that somewhat by taping things over the keys but that only improved the action marginally. As others have mentioned programs could come to an abrupt end when the 16 KiB (count 'em!) RAM pack perched on the back was breathed on.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

petef

Guilty as charged. I have more experience under my belt now. I'll accept your bhaji, though.

petef

Many years ago a colleague ask me to clear my files to free up space on their workstation. I duly removed my /home but left an entry in /etc/passwd so that I could still login but with a home of root. After I'd informed the owner they blindly followed a remove user script, part of which was a question that asked are you sure you want to remove the user's home? A box full of floppies was needed to reimage.

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

petef

When I was recuperating in a hospital bed after surgery I was glad that I'd the forethought to buy a longer USB charging cable for my phone.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

petef

Even now my optical mouse occasionally does not move as I would like. Not wildly but just annoyingly. Inverting it for a second or so recalibrates it into compliance.

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

petef

The GitHub blog instructions said that there might be one RSA line in .ssh/known_hosts to delete. I actually found half a dozen because the name github.com resolves to several IP addresses.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

petef

Apps make encrypted communication convenient. There many ways for the bad guys to encrypt and then send via other channels.

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

petef

Re: The key question maybe?

Real time does not mean that it responds quickly but that the time is deterministic. The OS provides guarantees that an event will be processed before a time limit is reached.

It is not something that you would want in a general purpose desktop.

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

petef

After some deeply unrepresentative search it turns out that roses are #e4011d and violets are #a24fd2. That might have complicated the rhyming but for 2 and you. Scansion then goes out of the window.

petef

Lurve is colour blind.

petef

Roses are #FF0000

Violets are #0000FF

All my base

Are belong to you

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

petef

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

In this case it is Oracle pointing their middle finger at you.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

petef

Re: duodecimal my arse

I don't have any Spanish Fascists on my fingers. They do have 3 phalanges each though ;-)

petef

Re: duodecimal my arse

If you put your mind to it you can count to 31 on each hand.

petef

20 US fl oz is 4% more than an Imperial pint. A British pint in a brim glass may contain 5% head. This is making my head hurt, I need a beer.

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

petef

Same old

This software is similar to the older practice of time and motion monitors with their stopwatches and clipboards. Yes it does provide metrics but at what cost to employee motivation.

Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu

petef

Removing all shortcuts and apps will leave your PC more secure, albeit at the expense of usefulness. It leaves the elephant in the room of the Windows OS.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

petef
Coat

Is this PC gone mad?

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

petef
Coat

So can't teachers use AI to spot the AI?

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

petef

SIMD is not just for number crunching. Humble operations like strcpy() use it too.

petef

I'm happily running KDE on Tumbleweed on a Sandy Bridge Core i5.

Zoom adds email and calendar to its apps, to relieve the crushing burden of ALT-TAB

petef

Zoom Spots immediately led me to the shorter Zits.

Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next

petef

Re: MFA

I refer to that as 1½FA.

petef

To mitigate against DOS they could use greylisting instead of the blunter lock out after X rejections.

Alert: 15-year-old Python tarfile flaw lurks in 'over 350,000' code projects

petef

It is not always that obvious. I had a real instance of that happening some years ago (the resulting system restore involved fifteen 5¼" floppies). A colleague had asked me to release my storage on their machine. I deleted my home directory but then modified my home to be / so that I could still log in. I informed the machine owner that I had cleared my disk usage. Unfortunately they then opted to remove my user account. Part of that procedure was to remove the user's home directory. Tears ensued.

I raised an issue with Sun who at that stage had become the owner of Interactive UNIX. They declined to put protections in place. I wonder what became of them?

Critical hole in Atlassian Bitbucket allows any miscreant to hijack servers

petef

It's a good thing then that I migrated my repos away from Bitbucket when they sunsetted Mercurial.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

petef

Re: The leap second has been around for fifty years

And before that the rubber second was like smearing, though over the full year.

petef

Re: Fuchsache!

There is only about six months warning of a leap second coming up.

Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap

petef

I agree that PCS offer a good route to Linux. Skipping Windows saves of the order of £100. But there is a difference between supplying a PC with LInux that is certified to have working drivers and a barebone delivery that is the end user's responsibility to manage.

Not all PCS machines are Clevo. I've been happy with that but my more recent Akstron purchase has had recurring problems.

petef

Dell

Dell are a rather bigger name who ship Linux boxes and also "no OS" (FreeDOS which can be overwritten).

The new generation of CentOS replacements – plus the daddy of them all: RHEL 8.6

petef

EOL

IMHO the biggest sin by CentOS was reneging of the end of life for CentOS 8, cutting short support by 8 years.

Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts

petef

Compounded by JavaScript being enabled by default. One of the first things that I do with a new install of Acrobat Reader is to turn off that preference.

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

petef
Coat

You've got my brand new combine harvester,

You can't have the key.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

petef

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

I've had no problems with WhatsApp on Linux. It is one of the message integrations in Opera though I'm sure that there will be other implementations.

Outlook works fine in the browser, Teams less so the last few times I tried. Those, of course, are just for work.

Microsoft brings Cloud PCs and local desktops together in Windows 365

petef
Coat

Non-semantic versioning

M$ skipped Windows 9, now it's 12 to 364.

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

petef

Computer says no

The problem may not be due to Epson (discuss) but surely they could keep the accounts active pending the bank snafu being sorted out.

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

petef

Re: Does not have to be a time sink

I think of my program as a helper rather than a solver. For my word list I started with /usr/share/dict/american-english. There are some diacritics in there that need to be stripped. Be aware that there are 266 words in the 2315 canned wordle answers missing from that dict. I took pains to avoid looking at those, just counting them. A bigger dict derived from SCOWL was only missing one of the wordle answers.

Never mind the Panic button – there's a key to Compose yourself

petef

Re: Special Characters and Windows 11

WinKey + V is for the clipboard history. WinKey + . (or ; period or semicolon) pops up a panel to select symbols, emoji and so forth.

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

petef

Teams is popular

I fear you are conflating many people having to use it with it being popular.

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

petef

Post Office

This has shades of the sub-postmaster "fraud" debacle. How can a computer possibly get things wrong?

petef

AI 101

"the quality of the data used to train the model is important"

Er no, it is essential.

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

petef

1½SV

This is likely to be 1½FA in practice. If your phone is compromised, e.g. stolen, then it will likely be able to disclose emails, texts, etc. So these "extra" factors are nothing of the sort.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

petef

As long as you have your tin foil hat on.

petef

Works both ways

This idea would get more traction if Facebook and co. see the benefits too rather than relying on regulation being forced upon them. Users marking up their own preferences should be more valuable than what algorithms alone can glean.

I cannot be alone in being hit with "targeted" messages in the vein of "you have just bought a washing machine, here are other washing machines that may interest you". Those are irritating and it would be commercially useful to improve.

Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters

petef

Re: four months since Apple comms last provided proof of life

Or sending the enquiry from thE regIster?

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

petef

I was called upon to make a 6,000 mile round trip from Scotland to the Sinai. Once there I swiftly resolved the problem by reseating the cards in the minicomputer. In addition I had just made it home from my previous assignment at 9 am and was in my first taxi at 11 am.

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