Posts by O RLY

Google said to be taking steps to keep political campaign emails out of Gmail spam bin

Re: Seen this poo before

The SMS spam messages are worse, in my opinion, because of their immediacy of notification and I call for a pox on all houses who send political spam.

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

Most Python REPLs or IDEs will automate the spacing for you now, at least any worth using. Having not used Occam in a long time, nor for much at all at the time, I don't know what that language's tools' current state is.

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

Re: Whose money?

An interstellar government, since that number is larger than the GDP of Earth by three orders of magnitude.

Or are you expecting Weimar / Zimbabwe inflation to add some extra zeros?

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

The last xcode update broke my Mac. Learned how to erase and rebuild a M1 Mac Mini, though, but the time machine backup wouldn't restore. I had luckily saved my important data elsewhere, but not the config settings.

EU Apple suit alleges anticompetitive Apple Pay practices

Re: Why buy Apple kit?

Yes, they have. There used to be several virtual assistants until Apple bought what became Siri, for example, but then they were banned for replicating iOS functions. Time-based blue light reduction apps existed until Apple added Night Shift. One of those app makers, F.lux, pushed hard to be reinstated and insinuated their IP was stolen.

We can dissemble about browsers, but all browsers on iOS devices are reskinned WebKit at their core. Are they really "third party?"

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

"Sadly, Microsoft are setting off down the same dark path :("

Or returning to it. Windows Plug-n-play up until XP SP2 was usually plug-n-pray, then curse, and go hunting for a driver.

OVHcloud datacenter 'lacked' automatic fire extinguishers, electrical cutoff

Re: Strasbourg, France

Elsaß-Lothringen bleiben immer Deutsch!

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

They've had two regime changes since then - maybe it's time to try again :)

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: Executive MBA

It's like a regular MBA, but with an enhanced price tag to extract more money from the gullible, the gullible being either the student if self-paying or the student's company if the student has good sales skills.

New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space

Re: Uh

For a fun read about FOOF, here's Derek Lowe, PhD, discussing why he will never work with it.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride

America, when you're done hitting us with the ban hammer, see these on-prem Zoom vulns, says Positive

Re: I'm sure this will start a flame war

It's hard to take that article seriously as a critique of word choice when the author writes the grammatically-incorrect "thank you to whomever did."

I'm sure this will start a flame war

The correct spelling is "on-premises", not "on-premise." The latter is not correct.

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Re: Trust Google?

Amazon the store: Don't use it.

AWS: well, odds are good that many of the entities who get your custom or with whom you interact have some services in AWS. Just refer to the list of things that go down when AWS loses a region.

Same thing with Microsoft and Azure, Google and Captchas

'Father of the Xbox' Seamus Blackley issues Twitter apology to AMD over last-minute switch to Intel CPUs

Re: Final and best price

Machiavellian and Microsoft? Yup. Too many people today (not here) have forgotten BillG's old ways because he retired from Microsoft, gives to charity, and participates in Reddit's secret santa, but his actions definitely earned him his original reputation as an exceptionally ruthless cutthroat in a field full of ruthless cutthroats.

The image rehabilitation he's had over the last 20 years is unfortunate.

US school districts blame Amazon for nationwide bus driver shortage

That's the silly con valley vulture capitalism.

Amazon delivery staff 'denied bonus' pay by AI cameras misjudging their driving

Re: Too soon

A version of Iteration 3 happened in real life already in Arizona in 2018 when an Uber autonomous car killed a pedestrian while the human operator was not paying attention. El Reg reported the human may have been streaming TV:

https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/22/uber_fatal_crash_driver_distracted_police_report/

Crash story:

https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/19/uber_self_driving_car_fatal_crash/

Prosecutors charged the human, not Uber, with homicide, but the case appears to be unresolved:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/16/self_driving_uber_homicide_charge/

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/uber-self-driving-crash-arizona-vasquez-wrongfully-charged-motion-11583771

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

SEIZE THE MEANS OF TEA PRODUCTION!

Astro Pi 2: New Raspberry Pi hardware with updated camera, sensors to head to the ISS this year

Re: Pinky and the Brain !!!

I thnk so, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size!?

I'm feeling lucky: Google, Facebook say workers must be vaccinated before they return to offices

Re: wrong place?

Did you log into El Reg instead of Twitter by mistake?

About half of Python libraries in PyPI may have security issues, boffins say

Re: You rang?

I was picturing Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, myself.

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

I had a LaserJet Series II that finally kicked the bucket after more than 1 million pages (came from my office) and I couldn't find a replacement drum. Its SCSI interface ran to an old Mac Clone since the last PC I had with a parallel printer died well before the printer.

Loved that thing, except for its power usage and noise :)

Bezos v Branson: Battle of the wannabe Space Barons as Virgin Galactic cleared by FAA to start flying customers

Yeah, he'd learn quickly the FAA has a lot more teeth to its enforcement capabilities than does the SEC...

Agreed. I could totally see Musk announce right as he boards for his departure that he's defeated both his billionaire rivals. I could see that happening tomorrow or next week. I would be unsurprised by either. I would also not be surprised that he waits and just goes to Mars.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

What about the other Deathly Hallows?

Who's making the Elder Wand? Raytheon, Lockheed, or BAE?

Is there a Resurrection Stone in the offing from Big Pharma?

All jokes aside, I'd love to see this cloak. Or not see, I suppose, but experience it.

Remember those wacky cyberpunk costumes in Hackers? They're on display in London this week

Re: The Net

I used to put pi in the corner of the my personal website on geocities. I had intended to use it like webrings (remember those?), but ultimately just pointed it to the imdb site for The Net before removing the letter entirely. I think I deleted the website before the great geocities purge finally did.

Firefox to adopt Chrome's new approach to extensions – sans the part that threatens ad blockers

Re: UNclear

And then they made things worse with the abomination that is AMP.

Be careful, 007. It’s just had a new coat of paint: Today is D-day for would-be Qs to apply to MI6

Re: After yesterday announcement

Yeah, the guy whose style and business practices emulate a Bond villain now owns the Bond movie franchise...

Icon for the end of modern Bond movies.

App Tracking: Apps plead for users to press allow, but 85% of Apple iOS consumers are not opting in

Re: May not be directly related...

Pi-Hole doesn't do a good job of blocking YT ads, unfortunately. It's great for everything else, in my experience.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-block-ads-on-youtube/253

Can you share what you did to tweak your blocklist?

Thanks

Just one in 5 Googlers plan to swerve the office permanently after COVID-19

Re: Remind me not to apply to work at Google

I know you meant "union", but I am just picturing Larry and Sergei destroying onions in the style of Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEZVdxhB9J8

Hacka Löken!

Beer because Friday.

Ex Netflix IT ops boss pocketed $500k+ in bribes before awarding millions in tech contracts

Re: "His actual sentence, however, will be balanced by US Sentencing Guidelines"

This is federal court, so it's a United States Attorney, not a District Attorney.

The US Sentencing Guidelines have a long document that indicates more stringent penalties when related to drugs, terrorism, sexual explotation of minors, and, in the case of money laundering, sophisitication of the money laundering scheme. I'd wager the US Attorney will push for a long sentence based on the shell company. See page 326 in this document here.

Overall federal sentencing guidelines page:

https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines

Apple's macOS Gatekeeper asleep on the job: Exploited flaw put users 'at grave risk' of malware infection

Re: Mavericks

Yes, Mojave has a new security patch as well released. It's been 14 hours since your message, so I suspect you've already seen it pop up in System Preferences, but if not, I hope this helps.

Distorted light from ancient explosion when the Universe was 3 billion years old helps point astroboffins to intermediate black hole

Re: hy-phen five, not

"Hyphen free" should, ironically, be hyphenated.

https://www.gsbe.co.uk/grammar-the-hyphen.html

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/hyphen_use.html

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Re: predilection for active verbs.

Or "Memento," Nolan's better work.

Amazing

Having done freelance stuff, I felt this piece in the parts of my soul not yet killed by these interactions. Nicely written!

It reminds me, also, of the importance of the lessons imparted here

(same link here, just not hyperlinked)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

America's Supremes give Facebook nothing but heartaches: Top court won't stop '$15bn wiretap' lawsuit

Re: The Impossible Wall

How does a FOIA request work against a private company? The Freedom of Information Act, to my knowledge, applies only to the Federal government (although most states have a similar act for their governments).

Blizzard brain: Snowflake doubles revenue. Market takes a look, goes slushy

Re: Translation needed

Except the bookmakers are required to post odds and don't get to change the rules arbitrarily.

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

Re: How is this possible?

"Programs must be written for programmers to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

Especially since 34 days is more than a month...

I expect his account is banned at 1201 ET Jan 20th though.

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Re: HPE have history in TX...

HP's Houston history included the large Compaq campus/HQ in northwest Houston, not many miles from Spring.

How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers

Re: Long term, I think we will see expansion options

Don't forget Intel was ALSO paying Dell $1 billion/year not to sell AMD-based systems at that time. Dell, the company, and Dell, the man, each paid small fines. Dell, the company, restated earnings for several years, their CEO resigned and several CFOs cycled through to clean up the mess. Hopefully Intel isn't cheating this time.

Network driver issue shaves 12 more hours off Microsoft's '365' infrastructure, and yeah, it was Exchange Online again

Today's reminder that cloud = "someone else's computer." You'd think MS would be better at drivers than the average punter by now...

State of Iowa told no, you can’t use $21m coronavirus federal aid to help fund your $52m Workday roll-out

Re: This is endemic in (local) goverments...

If it's widespread, perhaps it's pandemic in governments...

Microsoft tells staff work-from-home is now ‘standard’ – with caveats galore

Bing image searches are way better than Google's, especially if you don't subtract the pinterest domain from the Google search.

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

Re: What is the Author actually asking for?

Windows 10 VMs on VMware Fusion (note VMware is not "VMWare") or Parallels run really well. Catalina as a VM on VMware Fusion or Parallels is dogshit. It's uselessly bad. I have VMs for every macOS/OS X version that supports running in a VM and Catalina has never run correctly in a VM in any version, beta to today. Native Apple applications (e.g. Music, TV, News) take minutes to respond. I thought it was intentional, but macOS 11 Big Sur beta runs pretty well in VM. Catalina is just terrible.

Re: Even if it was a good idea, now that's been asked by The Register...

Apple sell 210M iPhones a year. They sell ~20M Macs a year. Most iPhone users are not Mac users.

Huawei set to exit server, storage, networking business in the UK

Re: Hasta la vista

You are US Rep Eric Swalwell and I collect my £5.

Here comes an AI that can predict hurricane strength. Don't worry, NASA made it so it probably actually works

Re: Predictions are useful

"this was anticipated but the interesting thing is that Laura stayed at hurricane strength much further inland than any hurricane has done for years now - a swath of Louisiana will not get power or water until the end of the month if we're lucky. That was not predicted"

Wrong. That was predicted. See Advisory 24, among others, here: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2020/LAURA_graphics.php?product=5day_cone_with_line

It is also common for major hurricanes to stay hurricane strength well ashore when moving as quickly as Laura. Major hurricanes making US landfall is what is not common, but when they do, they stay hurricanes for awhile. Camille in 1969 made it almost to Tennessee as a hurricane after coming ashore at the Alabama coast as a Cat 5.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30 per cent come from?'

Unrelated to the rest of the thread, thanks for the Pythonista recommendation. At least, I'm assuming it's a recommendation because you called the app out by name.

Cheers