Posts by AdamWill

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

Re: Vendor support is one thing...

"Have you ever tried to play a Blu-Ray DVD in Linux or *BSD? What about streaming 4K Video from Amazon? How about playing "The Division" or "Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord" or "Destiny 2"? All of these will required breaking the T&C's to work, if they work at all."

Sure, but none of them are things you need to do (or ought to be doing, if your employer is paying...unless you work for a game developer...) on a professional workstation.

I dunno, I used to care about that stuff a lot more, but a decent blu-ray player costs like a hundred bucks, and everyone streams movies these days anyway, don't they? Plus a PS4 plays blurays just fine. Plus it or just about any cellphone can stream video fine. I gave up worrying about whether I can play movies or games on my desktop/laptop computers, oh, I dunno, a decade ago or so. I have other things for doing that.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

Re: Compulsory El Reg commentary moan

I believe your objection is covered under "5. I personally only ever need to fly to New Zealand non stop with an entourage of 500 people and my race horses."

Magnix is based in the Pacific Northwest, and is working with small local air carriers. The geography of the Pacific Northwest is such that we have quite a lot of small planes doing short runs with a small number of passengers and very limited luggage. Vancouver to Victoria, for instance, is a 30 minute flight which Harbour Air runs with 19-passenger seaplanes:

https://www.harbourair.com/about/aircraft-fleet/

they run various other short flights out of Vancouver and up the coast, and there are similar operators down in Portland and Oregon running similar short flights with small planes.

Those are exactly the operations that Magnix is targeting. Their goal is not to fly a 747 at full load for several hours.

They are already working on this, but you have to jump through a *ton* more regulatory hoops to fly a brand new plane design with batteries than you do to fly an existing, extremely-well tested plane with the power source changed out. They're doing these tests with retrofitted existing planes to work on what they can until all the relevant approvals are in place for the planned purpose-built electric plane models. And to get a bit of publicity, of course.

VirtuaVerse: Cyberpunk point-and-click throwback with ace chiptune soundtrack put out by... a metal record label?

here!

"To some of you, however, all this probably sounds delightfully familiar and you're rubbing your hands in glee at the thought of donning your nostalgia goggles once more."

Bingo!

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

Re: Petty or Pedant? a definitive explanation

"Finally and definitively, NASA boffins call it duct tape and it saved Apollo 13. As boffin Ed Smylie, who designed the CO2 scrubber mod, said "One thing a Southern boy will never say is, 'I don't think duct tape will fix it.'""

Unless that quote was written down, you can't tell what spelling the boffin in question would have used, because spoken aloud "duct tape" and "duck tape" tend to sound exactly the same (you can't presume that anyone who thinks of it as "duct tape" will carefully pronounce that final t). So what you're getting is the spelling of the journalist who wrote down the quote, not the spelling of the person who said it.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Re: re: great 48 United States...

"Wot! Has Trumpo sold off Hawaii and Alaska and didn't tell anyone? Was that money going to be use to buy Greenland?"

Shh, don't tell anyone, but - yeah, he did. I bought them. I'm planning to buy a really big angle grinder and a really big tugboat and have them switch places, just for the lulz.

If it feels like the software world is held together by string and a prayer, we don't blame you: Facebook SDK snafu breaks top iOS apps

Man, it sure must be nice to work at Facebook, and have the budget for string...

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: OK, sp which password manager to plump for?

I like Bitwarden. It's open source, has lots of ways to access it, good 2FA support, and works well.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

Re: Interesting views here...

"You'll find this anywhere. It's just that Amazon is one of those places that are huge, touch many people's lives, and hence end up in the press. Google has similar issues, Microsoft has similar issues, software engineering companies and hardware engineering companies have similar issues."

Not...really. Google, maybe, if we consider all the folks they contract out their nasty grunt work (Youtube content moderation...grrk) to. But not really Microsoft, or any random given "software engineering company". They don't really have huge, poorly-treated groups of manual workers in anything like the way Amazon does, because they don't sell huge quantities of physical products.

All companies have their own issues, of course, but I don't think you're right to say that they all have similar issues to Amazon's.

Red Hat’s new CEO on surviving inside Big Blue: 'We don’t participate in IBM's culture. It’s that simple'

Re: "We are good at winning over the tech people; they are good at the C-suite."

"Our latest battle was persuading them that Satellite didn't work they way that they thought it did"

Good news! We seem to release a new major version of Satellite every week and they all work differently, so if you wait a couple months, chances are high that this will be fixed ;)

Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon

They're gas leaks. Fast-moving, high altitude...gas leaks. Nothing to see here, citizens! Move along!

Academics: We hate to ask, but could governments kindly refrain from building giant data-slurping, contact-tracing coronavirus monsters?

I hv no dea t u ean

omnt pstd y lutoth

How generous of GitHub to slash prices and make all its core features free. So what gives? Oh right, GitLab

Re: Open Source != Public

that's what I said, so I'm not sure why I got six downvotes for saying the definition of "open source" is the Open Source Definition written by the Open Source Initiative. Reading comprehension issues? Ah, well.

Re: Open Source != Public

No. The definition of OSS is the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd

you will notice that doesn't say "if the public can download the source, that's it".

Feeling hot, hot, hot... in British Columbia? In December?

Metrotown

"Strong work, since the outdoor temperatures tend to be somewhat on the low side in that part of the world during December."

Well, Metrotown (same thing, it's officially called 'Metropolis at Metrotown', but everyone calls it Metrotown, no-one calls it Metropolis) is a (pretty large, and *extremely* popular) *indoor* mall. And, to the point, one at which management for some inexplicable reason keeps the HVAC set to "freaking tropical" all winter. The fact that probably about half the people who are there got there on transit and thus had to deal with the outdoor temperature and thus are probably wearing three layers they can't easily take off and carry and thus are melting in the 25 degree heat doesn't ever seem to have made it through to them.

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

Re: Salvation from Commentards

"Most people recover. Is that anecdotal?"

No, it's a universally-reported fact. Just about every jurisdiction reporting stats on COVID-19 includes a 'recoveries' number. It is invariably significantly higher than the 'deaths' number. Wikipedia's current worldwide count is just under 2 million cases with 128,011 deaths and 500,996 recoveries, so 4x as many people are confirmed to have recovered as are confirmed to have died. (The recovery number on any given day is also a substantial undercount compared to the death number, as you can't be counted as 'recovered' until like two weeks after you leave the hospital, but you can be counted as 'dead' pretty darn quick...)

Re: Salvation from Commentards

"Five days on hydroxychloroquine saved my cousin's life and got him out of the hospital after he was weaned off the respirator."

if your story is true, I'm happy for your cousin. But you have no idea whether hydroxychloroquine saved him, because you do not have (I'm presuming) an in-all-other-respects identical cousin who received the same treatment but without the hydroxychloroquine, and died.

If you get sick, go to the hospital, and eat a bag of M&Ms every day, you will either a) get better or b) die. Whichever happens, the M&Ms probably didn't cause it.

clearing house

"Ellison asked Trump if a clearinghouse existed for real-time data about treatment efficacies and outcomes. Trump said no."

So, I presume this means there definitely *is* one, right?

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

shocking

"And that doesn't just mean enduring the keynote sound system booming the audience into an impersonation of enthusiasm at 8am as a CEO bounces onto the stage to declare a golden dawn in their computing dynasty. It's not about sleeping through the 4.15pm breakout session addressing the intricacies of data transformation in R."

*ahem* I'll remind you that this is El Reg, and here we sleep through the *keynote* and make sure we're awake for the intricately detailed technical sessions, thank you very much!

...okay, okay, who'm I kidding, we drink our way through both.

IBM veep partly blamed Sopra Steria for collapse of £155m Co-Op Insurance Agile project

Re: Poor user documentation?

Well, sure, but as you say, this is all perfectly normal and par for the course and the expected experience of anyone who deals with bug reports from anywhere. It seems a bit rich that IBM are effectively claiming it's an entirely unexpected thing and a significant factor in the delayed deployment of the software...

It has been 15 years, and we're still reporting homograph attacks – web domains that stealthily use non-Latin characters to appear legit

Re: Surely the answer is

No no, don't be silly! Not OCR. A giant matching table that's carefully hand-maintained, obvs.

Or, you know, it's the 2020s so I guess vaguely promise to teach an AI to do it?

Re: A þorny problem, to be sure

I'm not sure, but I think it makes a faint 'whooshing' sound.

Microservices guru warns devs that trendy architecture shouldn't be the default for every app, but 'a last resort'

Re: All-or-nothing deployments

yeah. This bit struck me:

"Newman sees great value in continuous delivery, where software is automatically built and tested and therefore already ready for release."

It made me think, wait, he's been dealing with people trying to do microservices *without* CD? Like you I sort of thought that was the whole point...

GCHQ's infosec arm has 3 simple tips to secure those insecure smart home gadgets

three handy tips

"GCHQ's infosec arm has 3 simple tips to secure those insecure smart home gadgets"

1. Unplug it

2. Hit it several times with a hammer

3. Take it to the recycling depot

OK, OK, I kid (kinda). I actually have robot door locks and a robot garage door opener now! Never thought the day would come. On the one hand, I'm sure someone sufficiently dedicated could hack them over the internet while wearing a hoody and mumbling "I'M IN". On the other hand, I eventually decided, someone sufficiently dedicated could also just chuck a rock through the large window that's right next to the door, and being able to check whether I remembered to lock the damn door when I'm ten minutes down the road (and open the garage door without remembering to take the annoyingly chunky remote out with me) does turn out to be handy...

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Re: COBOL

From the article:

"Redmonk's biannual survey of programming language popularity makes no pretense at being a definitive ranking of worldwide popularity or overall industry usage. It's simply a measurement of available data that provides a sense of language trends."

so, yeah, that.

Re: But true masochists...

pfah, try doing it in wikicode...mediawiki with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions is similarly close to Turing-complete, but has the exciting bonus of significant whitespace! no indentation for you, sucker.

(OK, so then they invented https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto , but that's way less 'fun'!)

Time to svn commit like it's the year 2000: Apache celebrates 20 years of Subversion

Re: Fond memories

git was designed for developing the Linux kernel. That's all it was for. Calling it a 'problem' is a bit odd when that was the whole idea; if you want a tool for a specific job, why would you try and write it to solve everyone else's problems?

It happened to still be better for a lot of other projects' needs than anything else around at the time, and so it got adopted by a lot of projects, and edged over a threshold for a network effect where it's now kind of The RCS For Everything and everyone uses it even if they say they hate it. But it was never designed for that at all, it's just an accident.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

Re: Drying

There's research that Conclusively Proves (tm) that hand dryers are better, and there is also research that Conclusively Proves (tm) that paper towels are better.

I bet you'll *never* guess which research is commissioned by the dryer companies, and which research is commissioned by the paper towel companies...

it's surprisingly hard to find research in this area that isn't funded by either, but what there is tends to suggest that it barely matters because a) all public areas are pretty much aswim in Nefarious Little Things all the time yet we all get by surprisingly okay anyway, and b) the biggest problem with hand drying is not how you do it, but *whether* you do - it's much much worse to walk away with not-fully-dry hands, and that happens sufficiently often that it's a much bigger issue than the paper-towel-vs-dryer angle.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: Package management systems

No, it's definitely not. It's not worse than a lot of things, really! It's only just kinda bad.

Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport

Re: No beer on the train?

Beer on trains: fine. You can drink a beer on an Amtrak and no one is gonna mind. Beer on the subway/commuter rail: not really. Dunno why it's that way, but it is. Same everywhere I've been, that I can think of...

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Re: Binding Micro usb

You're sort of looking at it *exactly* the wrong way, though. 51m *is* the right figure, because that's how much actual waste there is. The whole point is "heck, there are a lot of people on this continent and most of them own phones, so even if each one only throws away 100g of phone charger, that adds up to a *lot*".

'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown

Uh, I think you misunderstood. Neither I nor the person I replied to is using Gandi for hosting, or asking for advice on hosting.

ditto - I like their web UI and their early adoption of 2FA and dnssec support and stuff, but this is pretty poor. Also interested in recs.

GSMA report: Sorry, handset makers, 5G is not going to save the smartphone market

Re: Still can't get 4G in Supermarket car parks

Why don't you give your wife a hand and someone to chat to?

Re: For a mobile device, 4G is more than fast enough for me.

Exactly this. Just don't need it. Additionally, since the 4G rollout we passed a sort of tipping point for most people where their phone went from 'cool gadget they love upgrading' to 'annoying and borderline creepy thing they secretly kinda wish they could live without'. Upgrading your phone is now like 'upgrading' your toilet or something - yes, maybe there's theoretically a whizzier (pun absolutely intended!) model around now than whenever you got yours, but that still doesn't mean you're going to rush out shopping unless it actually breaks.

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

'leakage'

"For business travellers, leakage is a problem on two separate fronts. Firstly, it disturbs those around you. If your cans are constantly leaking noise, you are guaranteed to cause some tutting from fellow passengers in the quiet car. Leakage also allows noise in, which can detract from the overall listening experience, which is crucial for a pair of £300 headphones."

These are really two somewhat independent properties. You can build headphones that don't let a lot of sound out, but *do* let external sound in; Sony's old Eggo series was intentionally designed this way, allegedly for Japanese train travellers who didn't want to annoy other passengers but did want to hear announcements. I can't think of any which isolate well but leak a lot of sound out off the top of my head, but it's probably possible...

Re: Rechargable? No thanks.

I still use QC25s as well (don't fix it if it ain't broke). I used to think Bose would be the sort of company that would replace worn-out non-user-replaceable batteries (they certainly make enough margin for it), but nope, apparently the Bose answer to 'my QC35 batteries wore out' is 'send us $250 plus shipping and we'll send you another pair', or in other words, "fuck off":

https://community.bose.com/t5/Around-On-Ear-Headphones/Bose-QC35-I-Battery-shut-down/m-p/185027#M34378

For what it's worth, Sony at least vaguely nods at the possibility of replacement:

"If the usage hours of the built-in rechargeable battery decreases significantly, the battery should be replaced. Consult with your nearest Sony dealer to replace the rechargeable battery."

https://helpguide.sony.net/mdr/wh1000xm3/v1/en/contents/TP0001703138.html

Ever wonder how hackers could possibly pwn power plants? Here are 54 Siemens bugs that could explain things

Re: So reassuring

In my department we call 'should' the 's-word', and you get raspberries for using it like this...

HPE to Mike Lynch: You told either El Reg or High Court the right version of why former Autonomy execs won't testify

Re: Privilege

"Both are outside the UK jurisdiction so cannot be forced to attend by HPE," quoth the article. (as another commenter points out, since this is a civil case, there's no criminal justice interest in using the power of the criminal law and/or the Crown to compel anyone to appear either).

Internet jerk with million-plus fans starts 14-year stretch for bizarre dot-com armed robbery

Re: May have been something more serious

You have built a lovely house of logic there, but you've built it on sand: you started from the premise that criminals only do things that make sense.

This is, as absolutely anyone involved in the criminal justice system in any capacity can tell you, very very much not true...

Xerox woos HP stock owners with talk of layoffs, selloffs and cash payouts post merger

Re: ah, takeover math

yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. :)

ah, takeover math

"Visentin and Co have bid $33.5bn for HP, inclduing $17 per HP share in cash, plus 48 per cent of the merged company worth $14 per share, or an implied/aggregated value, by Xerox's estimates, of $31 per share – HP's stock is changing hands today for just over $20."

Of course this only works if you accept their $14/share valuation of the extremely highly-leveraged post-buyout entity. Or, more to the point, if you believe the *market* will accept their $14/share valuation of said now-debt-ridden legacy duck attempting to swallow a legacy turkey...

Co-op Bank online and mobile banking goes TITSUP*

alternative acronym

Total Inability to Transfer Spondulicks Using Phone?

Take a Big Blue cheque and go: IBM settles 281 UK age discrim cases

well no

well, no. that's what *confidential* agreements generally tend to entail.

alternatively...

"The alleged sack-all-the-oldies plan was supposedly given the internal codename Operation Baccarat, according to lawyers who successfully forced IBM to produce emails from CEO Ginni Rometty herself which referred to a project by that name. Baccarat is a card game played in casinos. In the North American variant's gameplay, "each player's moves are forced by the cards the player is dealt," according to Chambers Encyclopaedia."

Alternatively, the reference could just be that only old people know how the hell baccarat works :P

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

too late...

...the Japanese invented it already:

https://lostinanime.com/2019/07/kanata-no-astra-02/kanata-no-astra-02-35/

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Re: Not got much hope

SMS-based 2FA is not useless, because it *does* protect against attacks of the 'attacker somehow figured out your password' type, like credential stuffing. But yeah, it's no use against SIM swap or SMS hacking attacks, and banks really should've got that message by now. (They haven't in Canada either, though; one of my banks doesn't do 2FA *at all*, good grief, and the other lets you pick at login time to receive either an SMS or an automated phone call...)

HP scores $176m win in CD-ROM drive price-fix case – after one biz emailed rival with 'Price Fixing' as the subject

sending mails with "price fixing" in the subject...

Looks like another bunch of idiots who forgot to read the first page of Doing Crime For Dummies...

IBM: Why yes, Red Hat is doing great. Thanks for asking. The rest of Big Blue? Sure, wait – someone's at the door...

Re: paid $34b for redhat

That figure is artificially low because of merger related adjustments to how deferred revenue is booked. RH's quarterly revenue before the buyout was I think around $800m; accounted the same way this quarters revenue would've been higher.

Telstra chairman: If those darn kids can earn $5m playing Fortnite, why can't execs?

Re: One difference

Yeah. The thing that really irks me is not so much "top management gets paid a lot" but "top management gets paid a lot *even if they're really fking useless*". That study from a couple of years back which looked at the correlation between executive pay and company performance and found out there basically wasn't any - even the CxOs who were literally running their companies into the ground were still getting paid millions - is the sort of thing that's really the problem.