Posts by RAMChYLD

Malaysia using digital MaGIC to join the spend-on-tech-to-defeat-viral-slump club

Karaoke is still prohibited, but...

Hmmm, for some reason my iPad did a double post...

Karaoke is still prohibited

> Karaoke is also still prohibited so at least amateur warblers ruining pop classics won’t ruin anyone’s beer.

You seem to have misjudged the number of Malaysians who own a personal karaoke machine that hooks up to the home entertainment system.

Trust me, when one of my neighbor sings, the entire neighborhood (and then some) knows. And as far as the Malaysian Police are concerned, it’s not a nuisance if it happens during the daylight hours.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Re: Affinity

I'd like to introduce you to LibreOffice Draw...

You just need to let go of the memories of Photoshop. Start from scratch. I was the same when moving from Photoshop 6 to GIMP (biggest beef was that there was no Text FX feature in GIMP which allowed for quick drop shadows and outlines on text). The moment I let Photoshop go GIMP became way easier. Sure, it's still 5 extra steps, but it doesn't matter anymore, I can do that as quickly as it takes me to invoke the functionality in Photoshop now.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

Re: free version works for 10 minutes

Question tho: If you don't move towards GTK3, what are the chances of getting the code compiled if the distro of choice no longer offer GTK2 on it's repo? Is a fork of all the necessary GTK2 sources (glib, atk, pango, gtk2) available somewhere? Is the Ardour team ready willing to pick up the mantle to keep maintaining a fork of GTK2 that will still compile on GCC 10 (or even CLANG) and more importantly, patch major security bugs that may be in such dated code?

Asking from experience because building a CD ripper frontend program I used back in college called GRIP has become a hassle as the developer abandoned the project and it isn't ported beyond GTK+, let alone GTK2 (and yes, people still buy CDs. Because stupid licensing laws that indirectly region-locks online music stores. At least with CDs I can get pay friend to buy the album and then mail it to me), and most distros don't even have GTK+ in their repo anymore. Even XFCE is has gravitated towards GTK3.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

How's the page layout engine tho?

Biggest complain I get from people I try to introduce Libreoffice to is 1. Macros won't run, and 2. The formatting on Word documents run, badly.

Number 2 seems to be the biggest beef, most people complain that if they fix the layout here (or even if they don't), the formatting will invariably be damaged when the document is sent back to our clients (ie images run off the page or to the bottom, text flows are broken, table sizes wrong, etc.). Lesser complains are that the macros for spreadsheets prepared in Excel by the clients fail to run.

One more issue is related to the Office Automation engine. Lots of third party programs we use (ie PV Elite) for some strange reason fires up word and then proceed to put on a flashy show with words and pictures appearing in the document as if it's being typed out by a ghost. However only two people in the office uses that software package. It'll refuse to generate the report if Word isn't present on the system.

The only praise I've heard of LibreOffice so far is that it's darn powerful when used to edit PDF files in Draw.

We're trying to switch people over to Libreoffice at where I work. Half of them want Office back because of the above three issues.

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Ah, Git ...

How about forced obsolescence?

NForce 980a motherboard. Installed windows 10 on it. Windows 10 proceeded to try to commit suicide by installing two different version of GeForce drivers side by side until the registry got corrupted and it can no longer boot. And if you're on Windows 10 Home, forget about turning off Windows Update for drivers, they made it so the only way to turn it off is to use GPO.

AMD rips covers off 64-core Threadripper desktop monster, plus laptop chips, leaving Intel gesturing vaguely at 2021

I'm looking at it from a different perspective

Nothing says "power" like large projects like glibc and the Linux kernel compiling in seconds.

128 threads. That's technically 128 instances of GCC running at the same time (make bzImage -j 128). You could probably even push it harder with 256 instances.

This is the CPU for the impatient Linux developer.

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

Re: Amiga

You’re not looking hard enough. The upcoming Apollo Vampire standalone board is pretty much a testament to how popular retro-Amiga systems are.

Of course, Amiga has had multiple chances of catering to those wanting retro-Amiga action. Except that their kits are often overpriced (seriously, the marketroid who came up with the idea of pricing the X1000 the same as a Mac Pro should’ve been sent to an asylum)

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Re: You are in a tunnel. There is an echo here ...

It was far more mundane. All they did was stuck an AMD motherboard with an embedded APU on a 3D-printed custom case and called it a day.

So yeah, it was something that they could’ve actually put into production by now.

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

Old news

This has been a problem with ride-sharing and even public transport for years. Even before Lyft and Uber, this has been happening to people using Taxis.

And the government wonders why people distrusts public transport.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

It just called me by a nonsensical word

It just called me a “syndic” -.-

British ISPs throw in the towel, give up sending out toothless copyright infringement warnings

I'd vouch for this. Heck, a lot of shows aren't even released on DVD anymore. I'd gladly buy DVDs without a second thought if I'm a fan of the show. But as it stands, there's no DVD release, and the region coding nonsense means that even if the show turns up on Amazon Prime UK or US, there's no guarantee of it turning up on Amazon Prime Malaysia. It's really frustrating.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

You’re looking at this the wrong way

It’s to let cash-strapped people run software that won’t run well or at all under WINE/Proton and use devices that are not natively supported in Linux.

Yes, One can use Wine, PlayOnLinux, Lutris, etc. to run Epic Games launcher, but the overhead makes games perform worse than running under Windows 10. Also, Blizzard is an a*****e that tempbans users who try to play their games in WINE/Proton.

The difference between October and May? About 16GB, says Microsoft: Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB of space

Re: I was looking forward to Paint again

Or you could always whisk a copy of Paint from Windows 7 and run it in Wine.

Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update

I would think it's the way Avast works that is at fault. It certainly didn't like it when I installed Visual Studio 2016 on my machine and started locking the system up at boot. Getting rid of it for Avira solved my issue.

As Alexa's secret human army is revealed, we ask: Who else has been listening in on you?

Just Import?

Plenty of dumb TVs from Sharp over here in Malaysia. And because we're a commonwealth, our TVs are guaranteed to work in the UK, right down to the DVB-T2 tuners and the 230v 50Hz current. They all also come with a world-multi analog video input just in case you need to use a old Japanese games console. Just be mindful that they may cost a pretty penny tho- the 32 incher I picked up last fortnight cost me a good chunk of my salary, and isn't even 1080p.

PS: I think the main reason they don't make "dumb" TVs in the UK anymore is because of Auntie Beeb's Red Button requirements?

No, Microsoft's not buying Adobe. ADBE is its edgy take on a smarter network storage gateway

Didn't they buy off Malwarebytes as well?

Kept seeing "Microsoft MBAM" being deployed on new PCs in the company network.

So about that Atari reboot console... you might want to sit down. It's going to be late, OK?

Re: WTF

Well, I blame those unsatisfied nutters who were complaining that the CPU and GPU architecture being 8 years old, not fast enough for their shiny Steam games, etc. Look it up, posts by those naysayers (along with those blatantly wanting the console to fail) appear in the comments whenever this console is mentioned all the time.

Western Digital deploys heatsink on remodelled M.2 to tempt gamers

This is a problem...

Most motherboards nowadays come with their own heatsink for m.2 sticks. So why would I want heatsinks pre-applied on them?

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

Re: Lojax exploits a known race-condition in Intel's flash memory controllers

Not if it uses intel flash memory anyway- a possibility even on AMD platforms. I recently built an AMD ThreadRipper workstation and the chosen motherboard (Asrock X399 Taichi) had Intel flash memory iirc. It also has Intel Wi-Fi, Intel Bluetooth and Intel LAN much to my annoyance.

Re: Hanlons razor ...

No, the move to UEFI was paid for by M$ As an effort to get a tighter grip on the x86 platform. The smoking gun is right there- why would Ubuntu and Red Hat be forced to pay M$ to sign GRUB (and the kernels, and the kernel modules) so it can boot? Why can’t Ubuntu or Red Hat generate their own keys, put it on the DVD image, and why can’t the user just instruct UEFI to install those keys? Why must it’s be M$’ keys?

Re: UEFI = ?

> Unix Exclusion Firmware Interface

This. If you have to pay M$ to make your kernel bootable on the machine, then it’s a bad firmware.

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Running backwards ?

One scenario I can think of is that the clock is sensitive to the AC cycle of the power supply. For why it runs faster, I can think of one plausible scenario- you live in the UK and the clock is attuned to 50Hz power, but the generators were running at 60Hz for some reason- this makes more sense if the clock is analog and depends on spinning motors (for example, one of those old alarm clocks with a flip-over display). Alternatively, it could be that the generators were putting out a little more than 240V which is well above the acceptable range of some equipment, but still not enough to cause them to blow up immediately in a spectacular fashion. I've seen this happen with poorly made generators in the past, they'd pump out 260v of power despite being listed for 230v, and yet all the equipment connected to them seem to be running fine despite the power being 20v above acceptable range. Solution for the latter issue is to plop a AVR between the clock and the power supply. I don't know if there's any solution to the former issue except to build a converter to change 60Hz AC to DC and then to 50Hz AC.

Pewdiepie fanboi printer, Chromecast haxxx0r retreats, says they're 'afraid of being caught'

Re: What TheHackerGiraffe has accomplished

> I now consider him and his fans to be actively harmful attackers.

I've considered him and his fans to be actively harmful attackers ever since he got some randos to carry cards calling for the extermination of Jews a few years ago (remember that?)

Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit

Re: Something on TV wasn't real: shocker!

> Personally I am surprised they had to put someone inside. CGI / deepfake is so good at

> producing realistic stuff that a completely virtual robot (and probably the whole show) could

> be whipped up on a render farm.

Well, it has to appear before the studio audience and interact with them. I don't think holographic technology is perfect enough yet. I'd be really worried if the Russians have holographic technology that surpasses those used in other parts of the world tho.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Re: Just go Linux

It not only those on Insider. It affects those who bought a machine with the Home version of Windows then upgraded to Pro via an upgrade pack key.

Re: It all makes sense now

At least you only spent half a day. I didn’t sleep last night because this was affecting my laptop (bought a Pro upgrade pack back when it was running 8.1 because the stupid thing shipped with Home and I needed Hyper-V for development purposes). Was up all night running through the thousands of scenarios in my head pondering why my license had become counterfeit all of the sudden. Now I feel terrible.

Re: Just go Linux

Well, if your intention of keeping windows around is because of games (especially those from asshole Linux-hating companies like Blizzard and Ubisoft), going Linux doesn’t really make sense.

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

Re: 2GB?

Indeed. Sounds like 1995.

Microsoft claims Office 364 back to business as usual. Oh no it isn't, say suffering sysadmins

Office 364?

Is it cheaper than Office 365? If so, how do I downgrade?

When something's weird in your ImageMagick upload, who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

This cannot be good

One of the web enterprise apps I developed uses Ghostscript.NET to convert PDF files (alongside Bitmap, GIF and PNG files) to JPEG for storage in SQL Server, and do the reverse when the user requests a "photo album" of their JPEG images, which the app will grab the relevant JPEG images (in this case, digital copies of issued certificates for the customer), compile them into a PDF, and let the customer download it. Removing ghostscript would completely break this which is one of the main functionality of the program.

Although, as it stands only authorized employees are allowed to perform any image uploads at all. But I shudder to think what will happen if someone manages to steal the credentials of one of the employees.

Why is Ghostscript is allowed to be so daft tho? They've been alive for over 30 years, and have plenty of time to implement input sanitization.

Ass-troplastic! Printing parts from p.. er... human waste

Why am I not surprised

> polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB)

Can't stop giggling.

Super Cali goes ballistic, Starbucks is on notice: Expensive milky coffee is something quite cancerous

Make up your freaking mind, scientists!

First you say coffee prevents cancer. So I started consuming more of it because stomach cancer runs in my family.

Now you say coffee causes cancer.

Make up your freaking mind!

OK, deep breath, relax... Let's have a sober look at these 'ere annoying AMD chip security flaws

Re: It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway

"reflashing firmware should wipe the keys."

Wouldn't doing that render, at very least, lost of access to DRMed files (assuming the BSAss, MPAssA and RIAssA mandates that the OS stores decryption keys for the DRMed media you bought off Google Play/iTunes/Windows Store on the TPM if one is available) and at worst, lost of the content of the entire hard drive (assuming the user encrypted the entire drive and the key is stored on the TPM)?

I think leaving the TPM untouched is more for the convenience of the user. Who has the time to go through reformatting an entire PC and deal with data loss just because the firmware was updated?

Although, imo, the world would be a better place without TPM. The only thing TPM does is it gives big corporations even more control over your own PC and what you have installed.

Are you taking the peacock? United Airlines deny flight to 'emotional support' bird

Re: Marketing opportunity?

Couldn't you just get one of those from Build A Bear Workshop or something? I'm pretty sure you can choose what sound you want to put into one while buying a bear from there.

YouTube turns off cash tap for automatic video nasties

Re: *checks YouTube channel stats*

> Number of subscribers: 972.

> Awww.

You think that's bad? Try a channel with only 44 subscribers and less than 300 views a month. Up until this point I have nothing interesting to offer tho.

I decided that my new year resolution for 2018 was to finally get serious with my Youtube channel because the shitty Malaysian economy overall had left me almost a pauper (price of goods going up, but my pay had not changed over the last three years- company's official stand was "business was bad"), but just as I start to put some elbow grease and started producing videos, Youtube waltzes up and move the goalpost farther away. All so those successful channels like Markiplier and Linus Tech Tips can continue raking more money at the expense of making it harder for newbies like me to break into the market...

Apple macOS so secure some apps can't be easily deleted

Re: Move along, nothing to see here.

> I, and Apple, and others, firmly believe the average user does

> not need to install KEXTs, ever.

Then, add frigging touchscreen support to Mac OS Already. Or at least allow one to be recognized and operated as a generic mouse.

I have a Dell ST2220T display hooked up to my Mac Mini. Can't even operate the touchscreen without installing an expensive KEXT from Touch Base. Linux can use the touch portion of the screen upfront without any need to install anything.

And to top it off, Apple wants to merge iOS and Mac OS apps. That's a bad enough idea as is, but explain to me how I'm going to use iOS apps without pinch-to-zoom gestures?

BlackBerry won't kill BB10 until 2020, pulls regular Priv updates

Re: Refusing to update their own software on their own hardware...

> We shall see how long they support my mothers DTEK60 (gorgeous phone). Then I shall

> wipe it and put LineageOS on it...

If you successfully do that, let us know. Allegedly the bootloader's locked, and BB won't unlock it.

Same here. Really saddened to hear this, I've been using a Priv for a little over a year. Good phone, you don't find phones with a world 4G radio and a built-in hardware keyboard on the same package really often.

Hopefully Blackberry would start offering a way to unlock the phone? Better to drop LegacyOS onto it or try to slip Oreo Go Edition onto it than destine it for the landfill given how much I paid for it.

Microsoft hits new low: Threatens to axe classic Paint from Windows 10

Naff and underpowered?

It takes 10 seconds to fire up paint, paste the screenshot into it, crop it, and then save the shot as a JPG to use in technical documentations. People might not miss it, but I will. The Gimp is great, but that's for serious art sessions, not quick screenshot work.

Smash up your kid's Bluetooth-connected Cayla 'surveillance' doll, Germany urges parents

Re: 'They could just remove the batteries.'

If you want to go the extra mile, you can take her apart and rip the microphone, camera and circuit board out, then put her back together.

If this thing is anything like those Smart Toys Mattel put out tho, the battery is non-removable. You may need screwdrivers with a proprietary head as well as a pair of wire cutters to gut the thing.

Re: @ Dwarf

since when is a laptop not a "innocuous household object"?

IT guy checks to see if PC is virus-free, with virus-ridden USB stick

> Paranoia? You bet!

More than that, it sounds shady.

You sure said director isn't embezzling money or selling company secrets? Personal equipment like that shouldn't be allowed on company network.

China announces it wants more immigrants, better diplomats and science-led industry

Re: okay, but...

Let's not forget their ridiculous Internet censorship and surveillance. Get rid of that and maybe we can talk turkey, China.

Hacker: I made 160,000 printers spew out ASCII art around the world

Re: Holy crap!

My big beef with these printers is that they don't come with programming manuals anymore. I remember when I got my first printer, an Epson LQ-100, and it came with a nice, thick book explaining all the escape sequences one can send from BASIC. Spend enough time on it and you could practically draw really nice graphics.

Those were the days.

Also, back in those days you could practically get ISO/A2 printers off the shelf - I have a NEC P6300 with the color kit installed. It could do ISO/A2 color prints. Can't do that without spending big bucks on a large format printer nowadays.

Microsoft's DRM can expose Windows-on-Tor users' IP address

Re: Is it just me

Well, there are still several drawbacks on Linux:

Firstly, the fact that there are not many game companies supporting it. Steam is nice, but even then half of the games on Steam aren't available on SteamOS/Linux. And that's well, Valve is pretty much the best company when it comes to Linux gaming. EA and Activision-Blizzard don't give a hoot, and the latter even actively ban users caught using WINE to run their games. EA is slightly better in that they don't care if you use WINE, but a lot of their games are hard to get working in WINE anyway. Also, sadly, there has been no port of EA games to Linux ever since Loki Software folded.

Secondly, hardware support. Linux devs need to listen to their users more. Last I tried only Ubuntu supports hardware RAID. The excuse that motherboard RAID isn't beneficial is not valid. A lot of modern motherboards also enable caching when RAID is enabled. Also, I've said this many times before, but the anecdote that the CPU is handling the scheduling just isn't true on certain chipsets- for example, the NVidia NForce chipsets has an ASIC to handle the RAID arrays and offload the task from the CPU. The distro developers shouldn't be all smug and tell users to just stick to AHCI - there are valid reasons to support motherboard RAID.

Additionally, Radeon support on Linux still lacks CrossFireX/Dual Graphics support and even basic functionality like stippled and smooth primitives on certain cards. Ever since FGLRX support was dropped, many rigs went from competent to unusable. I was forced to convert one of my rigs that ran Ubuntu back to Windows because it FGLRX no longer supported it, and said rig happened to use a APU+GPU dual graphics configuration (1).

Don't get me wrong, I still do have several Linux boxes dedicated to the cause. But losing FGLRX and being stuck with Ubuntu because it's the only Linux distro that supports motherboard RAID is pretty frustrating.

(*1) https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

Re: What? you mean

> 192.1.0.1 ?

> Isn't that what most home PCs use?

Nope, the valid class-C private address is 192.168.x.x, anything 192 but not 192.168 is still fair play iirc.

Trump's FBI boss, Attorney General picks reckon your encryption's getting backdoored

Re: {ë2s¦^@]~JÕ1~Bó^M·^R^@sÙBna^V_~@<«ò2UÆ#NAç>

Looks more like a baud mismatch.

True story. I once tried sending serial data at 115,200kbps to a 9,600kbps thermal printer with handshake and parity off. The output was more or less something like this.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Spotify serving malware, no escape from reality

Re: Thanks for the reminder to Uninstall it.

If on Windows, check the appdata\roaming directory in your user folder. Not sure about Mac/Linux, I don't have Spotify on my Linux boxens and my I don't have access to my Mac at this time to check.