* Posts by RAMChYLD

723 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2010

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Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

RAMChYLD

Re: Way to go : Tan

Agreed. Look into migrating to KVM or Xen.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

RAMChYLD

Re: DisplayPort is better, but the consumer experience is mostly worse

I also see that the DisplayPort switches don’t support features like Adaptive Sync while the HDMI ones do. Also many of these switches are still stuck on DP 1.4 while having moved on to HDMI 2.0. Infuriating.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

RAMChYLD
Linux

Re: What does "stream an app" mean?

And that still can be done for now, as long as XOrg is still bundled with most Linux distros.

I just forwarded gedit running on my FreeBSD server to XWayland running on my Linux desktop a few days ago. The area my FreeBSD server is in only has standing space and I really wanted to be comfortable.

Once XOrg goes away I'll miss being able to do this. They say Wayland can do this via Waypipe but I've yet to work out the specifics.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

RAMChYLD

ACS Membership? Try their stupidly impossible IELTS requirements

As per the title. I got into the ACS no problem. My big issue is with their seemingly impossible IELTS requirements: Eight across the board. I flunked because I got a 7.5 for listening (not my fault. You try doing listening when the sound system used is a cheap Chinese CD player that made sounds akin to fingernails scratching a blackboard whenever the dialog speaker raised their voice. Even worse was that I was actually down with the flu on the day). I actually scored an 8.25 average but as my misfortune would have it the Australian Immigrations Board had just changed their IELTS requirements from a more reasonable 8 average to the aforementioned 8 across the board.

Ukraine claims Russian military is using Starlink

RAMChYLD

I believe all of them already have this functionality built in, otherwise one would be able to simply take a terminal on vacation and it'd still outright work. But as it stands, one need to pay a separate roaming add-on fee to be able to take the Starlink terminal on holiday.

Honestly, I don't see the point of Starlink since I can get decent internet on 4G. The only benefit of having Starlink is if you're going to a place that does not have meaningful cellular coverage.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

RAMChYLD

Well, at least Iomega was kind enough to replace the drives for free even if it was out of warranty. Shame that I lost a lot of stuff that were on zip disks tho.

RAMChYLD

Re: God I feel old....

I remember my college years. The IT staff were either daft or clueless, USB drives (then still pretty new, 256MB was considered huge and 1GB was something that could last you a lifetime) were banned and everyone had to use a floppy disk. To make sure you suffer they actually disabled USB in BIOS and put hot glue over the USB ports. Really idiotic in hindsight since the floppy disks were unreliable and woe be upon you if your assignment disk decided to develop bad sectors.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

RAMChYLD

Re: Teams/Outlook users driven over the Edge

Techies have been calling it "outhouse" for over 20 years tho.

I prefer the term "outhouse" myself.

Personally, I use Evolution. On a KDE desktop. Because I'm chaotic like that, plus KDE doesn't have a decent mail/calencar/contact/tasklist program.

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

RAMChYLD

I thought all Japanese robots already do.

Memtest86+, the little RAM tester, flexes FOSS muscles with v7.0

RAMChYLD

Memtest86+ is definitely a very useful engine

I have it on my Ventoy too. I use it whenever I try tuning the memory in my current AMD machine which seems to have developed a weird flaw where the RAM becomes extremely unstable if I try to run it at 6000MHz.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

RAMChYLD

Re: This far down in the comments

"I even have a plan for how to write a 32-bit DOS memory manager that lets DOS boot on UEFI machines."

Do it and donate it to the bods running FreeDOS.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

RAMChYLD

Re: Windows is no longer a necessity...

You obviously have no idea how many people I've come across that refuses to ditch Windows because Adobe Premiere/Photoshop/Illustrator, AutoCAD or Solidworks or Microsoft Office aren't available for Linux.

Or that Valorant won't run due to Vanguard wanting Ring 0 access.

And yes, arguing with them is like bashing your head against the wall, they'd say that Cinelerra's UI looks like crap, GIMP lacks features, FreeCAD is confusing and they will claim that they will lose friends if they stop playing Valorant.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

RAMChYLD

Re: HP Toner

I had a Laserjet 5M and it worked great for many years.

What failed was the plastic case, it became brittle and broke into a million pieces when I took it down to give it a clean. Also, the fuser pretty much gave up at around the same time. Obviously using trash can plastic isn't doing HP any favors.

WINE 9.0 improves ability to run 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit-only xNix

RAMChYLD

Question: Does this affect 16-bit Windows support?

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

RAMChYLD

Re: BASIC

What is this DEF you talk about?

There's only DIM for arrays.

Variables with a dollar sign indicates a string or char, while variables without are numbers (integer or float).

RAMChYLD

Re: BASIC

List 30

look for typos (ie. double apostrophe instead of a quote, goto being spelled gtoo). You're welcome.

Honestly, I love basic because loops are so easy. Recursion feels very Kafkaesque to me, but Goto number? Easy.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

RAMChYLD

Re: Apologies

Most likely Dipsy. I vaguely remember that Dipsy has darker face skin color than the rest? Certainly fits nutella's lineage...

RAMChYLD

Windows Defender was an optional component in XP as I recall it. It only became bundled with Windows 7. The original XP came out before Windows Defender was a thing, and Service Pack 3 rather rationally did not bundle it. The only time you get Windows Defender preinstalled is if you buy a prebuild.

Speaking of which, I find Windows XP great because how easy and quick it is to slipstream (ie merge a service pack onto the disc intself). No faffing about with DISM and waiting hours for the image to decompress, update and then recompress, and then repeating again and again for every SKU the image supports.

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

RAMChYLD

Re: GANs and Pop Music

The last person who did that in real life ended up with the song "Rudolph, the All-gracious King".

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/christmas-carols-get-butchered-by-ai/

Yes, MPreg and cannibalism. In a Christmas song. By an AI trained on Christmas carols and then given a 10 second snippet of Mariah Carey's unspeakable Christmas megahit and asked to finish it. And yet it's surprisingly catchy.

Wireless priesthood begins blessing Wi-Fi 7 hardware

RAMChYLD

Re: 40Gbps

I won't say watching TV over ADSL is impossible, but it's like watching your neighbor's TV through a foggy window from your own house with a low-powered telescope and trying to listen to the TV via a tin-can phone.

I tried to watch Kimba The White Lion off off a US cable channel that streamed to the internet via Realplayer back in the early 2000s. Those were the days, when IP geolocking wasn't a thing. I wish that would still hold true, I'd rather watch a blurry 160x120 15fps mess than not get to watch a show at all.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

RAMChYLD

Re: "If a printer is connected to the internet, the update downloads automatically"

Packard Bell was purchased by Acer wasn't it?

But yeah, sad that it came down to that. Then again, the PC market has already evolved. Only corporate would buy prebuilds, most of us prefer buying parts and building our PC like a legos.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

RAMChYLD

Sadly tho, it seems that most HR software are written by HR people who learnt programming from a very outdated copy of "MFC for Dummies". I had to deal with a piece of timekeeping software in my previous workplace and the software was so badly written it needs to be running 24/7 as admin or it just won't collect the punch-in and punch-out data from the networked readers all over the building. Yes the hardware is impressively modern with NFC cards being used to punch in for work and punch out after work and being wired up to the company intranet, but the software looks like it was written in the Office 2003 era and even then not using services and requiring admin rights to use is just idiotic.

I could cacls the directory but it needed to start Firebird SQL as admin. Dunno why Firebird isn't running as a service.

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

RAMChYLD
Pint

Re: Aaaaaargh!!!

Keep your hands off my Shandy you uneducated swine!

Beer taste is subjective. Just because you don't like the citrusy tinge of lemon and lime doesn't mean others don't either.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

RAMChYLD

Re: This is why I prefer unrestricted offline-capabilities

I think we should remember that not all games on GOG are DRM-free tho. Third party games may still be subjected to DRM.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/zo6dhb/with_gogs_recent_trend_of_releasing_games_with/

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

RAMChYLD

There is one thing here that infuriates me tho.

The cow-orker that "gave" him the USB drive and told him it contained the pirated movie is still prancing around the bank.

I don't doubt that this engineer did the wrong thing by inserting that USB stick into a laptop issued by work, and then trying to retaliate for getting fired (he should've taken it out on the one cow-orker, and not the whole bank), but said orker surely should be fired as well? This smells like a setup.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

RAMChYLD

Re: nano

Can confirm. Installed MingW-W64 on my PCs just to get Nano.

RAMChYLD

I'd prefer Pico or Nano. There's already a Win32 build of Pico many moons ago. I fondly remember using it on my Windows 98 PC back in college alongside Pine.

That said, Nano can be installed by installing the MingW-w64 layer and then doing some fun stuff with your path environmental variable...

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

RAMChYLD

Re: Beware the beehive

*cough* https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

Posers.

Gotos are your friend and line numbers are awesome.

If it can't be done it fortran do it in assembly. If it still can't be done, it's not worth doing.

Now AWS gets a ChatGPT-style Copilot: Amazon Q to be your cloud chat assistant

RAMChYLD
Facepalm

Q Huh? I'd trust it as much as I trust Discord (which is: not at all, I hate Discord and am using it only because I have to).

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

RAMChYLD
Coat

P*? You mean PlatinumGames?

(spoiling the joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlatinumGames - look at their logo).

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

RAMChYLD

Re: Fun with tie-wearers

Eh, sounds just like my mom.

As much as she got me into computers, her go-to program (we don't use the word "app" around here) back in the 80s was Lotus 1-2-3. For letter writing (her excuse was that the cells made it really easy to position text when it comes to writing formal letters and such. This was when 95% of printers were dot-matrix and uses a fixed monospaced font, and only exactly 80 characters could fit on a single line on a sheet of A4 paper, so you learn to keep track of things like that), for managing her budget... pretty much everything.

She switched to Excel in the late 90s, but the excuse stays the same. She doesn't use Word, only Excel. It's the only thing that mattered to her where productivity is concerned.

Now I managed to switch her to LibreOffice Calc. So far she seems to be fine with it, but she only uses LibreOffice Calc.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

RAMChYLD
Facepalm

Re: Beware the law of unintended consequences

I'd like to believe it's more of on the other end of the spectrum. They've had too many cats that the toxoplasma gondii virus has gotten to their brains and rewired them...

Source: https://healthland.time.com/2011/08/18/crazy-cat-love-caused-by-parasitic-infection/

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

RAMChYLD
Terminator

Re: Or...

Given what happened at Nokia. I strongly believe this as a possibility.

Also, from what I've seen, Microsoft doesn't put a hand in the day to day aspects of all of it's subsidiaries. The game companies that they bought and put under the Xbox subsidiary gets a surprising amount of freedom. No doubt that those ex-OpenAI staff will be treated to the same thing if they join Microsoft.

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

RAMChYLD

Re: This, coupled with YouTube's recent blitz

Well, if the bank wasn't mandated by the company I work for- they will only bank my pay into that specific bank and mandated I open an account with them. I would've preferred sticking to the same bank I keep my life savings in anyway.

RAMChYLD

Re: This, coupled with YouTube's recent blitz

Because some websites (including one banking site I used) dropped Firefox support several versions ago. That, and other websites written in Angular/React/whatever works wonky on my beloved SeaMonkey suite- data wasn't loading up, links were not working, etc.

I want to stay with Seamonkey but my hand was forced.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

RAMChYLD

Re: @Doctor Evil: Clicking on "close window"

And to think that on Windows 3.1, the "close" button is not only on the /other/ end of the window's title bar, it needed to be /double-clicked/ to signal a close.

Windows 3.1 had so many things right. It's like every subsequent version of Windows got more stupid.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

RAMChYLD

Now let me set snap to not keep old packages at all and I'll accept it (begrudgingly).

My main problem with snap is that when it install a new version of a software, the old version is kept. Up to three previous copies are kept by default, you can cut it down to one, but never none, and for me that's not good enough.

I want zero old copies to be kept. As in, the old version gets vaporized for disk space immediately after the new version is installed. As far as I'm concerned the old copy is a vulnerability waiting to happen and if it's dependent on a server (ie Spotify), paperweight hogging precious NVMe disk space since it will no longer work anyway. Currently I need to have to run a manual script to clean up (can't figure out SystemD since there's no more cronjobs) but that is not good enough either.

ZERO old copies or no way.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

RAMChYLD

Re: I was gonna say...

Can confirm. I once ran a two VMs including a trial database on SQL Server 2008 on a laptop to simulate our production server so we can have a live demo of the software at a venue. Needed 16GB of RAM and even then it's slow as molasses.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

RAMChYLD
Facepalm

Meanwhile the other killer is allowed to walk free?

Seriously. BH should be arrested too for attempting to kill another lady over a two timing boyfriend spat.

And so should that boyfriend, he should be arrested before he goes on to break more hearts for being a promiscuous multi-timing asshole.

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

RAMChYLD
Coat

They should've called the snarky personality "Marvin". Also bog it down with depression because why not.

Coat with fluff in the pocket. Because.

Western Digital execs vote to split biz in two: HDD and flash

RAMChYLD

Re: So the two new companies will be HGST and San Disk right?

I don't know about you but if the hard drive business gets renamed back to HGST, they'd be losing my business.

Enough firsthand bad experiences with them. Especially the DeathStar.

China uses Alibaba's Euro logistic hub to spy on stuff, Belgian intelligence fears

RAMChYLD

VSSE?

Shouldn't they be going after the Starlink network instead?

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

RAMChYLD

But if Chromium and thus Blink is a fork of webkit...

Will it truly matter in the end? Since it's all Webkit?

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

RAMChYLD

Re: So.......2G will be here for while and 3G will disappear almost immediately...

Don't they take your ID when you buy a prepaid sim?

My fear isn't that tho. It's psychotic ex-bosses who cant let go of their ex-employees and employs a PI to track and listen in...

RAMChYLD

Re: So.......2G will be here for while and 3G will disappear almost immediately...

They're just doing this so it's easier to spy on you.

2G has literally no encryption. 2.5G aka EDGE brings only 56bit DES encryption that can be cracked in a matter of seconds.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/your-phone-vulnerable-because-2g-it-doesnt-have-be

Sysadmin and spouse admit to part in 'massive' pirated Avaya licenses scam

RAMChYLD
Boffin

This story doesn't add up.

I read in the story "The Biggest Boon-Dongle in the World" that Avaya uses Sentinel HASP USB or Parallel Port keys (or an equivalent) in addition to serial numbers. So surely the keys alone doesn't do much and needs a complementary HASP dongle to work?

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

RAMChYLD

You should reclaim this domain name and form "The Mutiny Foundation".

I just twatted the project to Unknown Worlds, Massive Monster and Miju Games. I am hoping that as word spreads, we can get more people to work on bringing the engine back up to shape.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

RAMChYLD

Re: Should this be so easy?

The joke is more and more North American homes have at least some 230v outlets because they have discovered that HVACs, water heaters and ovens work more efficiently at 230v. And yet they still stick with 120v for everything else even when 230v is the superior and more energy efficient voltage of the two.

(the 230v is actually two phase tho. Most North American homes receive two phase power totaling 230v two phase. But Electroboom has proven that it is possible to get the raw 230v power to work with European devices by jury-rigging an adapter that connects the live wire to one of the live phases and the neutral wire to the other live phase).

RAMChYLD

Re: Should this be so easy?

I've done the opposite before tho.

Dad's friend gave him the old printer after upgrading to a new one, but didn't give him the power lead with it.

The kettle lead fitted just fine.

I was just 10 at the time tho. And it was my dad who encouraged me to improvise.

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