Posts by petef

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

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.

Lurve is colour blind.

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

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

Re: duodecimal my arse

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

Re: duodecimal my arse

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

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

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

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

Is this PC gone mad?

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

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

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

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

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

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

Re: MFA

I refer to that as 1½FA.

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

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

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

Re: The leap second has been around for fifty years

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

Re: Fuchsache!

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

Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap

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.

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

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

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

You've got my brand new combine harvester,

You can't have the key.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

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

Non-semantic versioning

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

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

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

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

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

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

Post Office

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

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

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

As long as you have your tin foil hat on.

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

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

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.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Good while Authenticator works

This afternoon my broadband dropped out twice for a few minutes at a time. Openreach are rewiring the cabinet round the corner from me. On both occasions I could not reconnect to my company VPN because Authenticator failed to respond. I reset the phone which seemed to jolt it back into life.

So the data centre's 'getting a little hot' – at 57°C, that's quite the understatement

Reverse situation

I used to provide field service for systems in the deserts of the Middle East. There was one fault that was annoyingly intermittent. My approach was to turn off the AC and bake until the fault persisted. I was then able to diagnose it and so effect a repair.

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

Google News

Despite using RSS for many years I will not miss Google Groups. I rarely use that directly but it remains the prime source of spam into mailing lists that I read using RSS via gmane.

I do however have a couple of RSS feeds from Google News searches. I wonder how long those will survive?

Google says Pixel 6, 6 Pro coming this year with custom AI acceleration

Re: ?

It's just the new Clippy. With added AI.

On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

Re: Facilities are to blame

I had noticed a problem with our "help" desk and also knew how to fix it. When I called them to report that they would not talk to me without taking my cost centre. It stayed broken.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

Re: "and in a few short years we were liberated."

I've been using Teams native on Linux (Tumbleweed) for a while now since the web app decided that it would pwn my display. While it is woeful it seems no worse than the Windows version.

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

Re: designing a T-shirt to celebrate 30 years of the software

Inscape should be able to import all three of those formats.

The phantom of the Opera is here... unveil R5 (just don't let the boss see)

You say Oslo-based but the ownership is Chinese since 2016.

First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups

Eternal September

The signal to noise of Google originated USENET content has been really low for years. So I am not sorry to lose their traffic.

Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

Show me the money

I am a long time consumer of RSS (and indeed NNTP). The abandonment of Google Reader was a shock but I found that Feedly filled the gap.

RSS/Atom is a great way to disseminate content. It is poor at tracking personal user data and delivering ads. I genuinely wonder why Google choose to reinvest in it now.

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Microfiche

I still have my portable microfiche reader. You just peer through a lens and hold it up to the light.

Half of Q1's malware traffic observed by Sophos was TLS encrypted, hiding inside legit requests to legit services

In my experience most features that enhance security are adopted more quickly by the bad guys.