* Posts by Steve Knox

1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Steve Knox
FAIL

Re: According to Media Matters...

If you're excluding sources because of "political bias" and not excluding Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, then you're doing it wrong.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: Bollocks.

Dependent is a synonym for the technical use case here, which was previously called Slave which was actually not as good a synonym.

You're actually arguing from the general, rather than technical, terms. But hey, we can do that if you like.

If you don't understand how dependent can be a synonym for slave, then I seriously doubt you ever had parents.

No more installing Microsoft's Chromium-centered Edge by hand: Windows 10 will do it for you automatically

Steve Knox

Re: I like it

"alas, there is no Windows Exterminator..."

Actually, there are many. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

https://www.opensuse.org/

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/

https://elementary.io/

Microsoft's carefully crafted Surfaces are having trouble with its carefully crafted Windows 10 May 2020 Update

Steve Knox

Fairly Defective?

I knew it was well borked back when Windows Update told me it was "Installing update 17 of 3..."

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Steve Knox
Trollface

Re: @devTrail - What kind of opt-in was it?

Here -- you forgot this:

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Steve Knox

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

Why? Why waste such a large percentage of your document on literally nothing?

Steve Knox

A limit is not going to stop the willy-wangers; they'll just find another excuse to shove their willy in your face.

Steve Knox
Flame

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

8 width tab stops are more evil than 80 character line widths.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Steve Knox

Re: One would have throught...

There's no identifying data to retain in the case of the Google and Apple apps. There is data, in the form of fully anonymized contact records, which would be useful to epidemiologists and anthropologists, but not to marketeers.

Read and understand the open documentation regarding the underlying technology.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Steve Knox

Re: Elon Musk Is An Ass

Once again, BOMBASTIC BOB, YOU have hit the nail on the head! We ARE at war here! A clear conspiracy, and the sheeple need a wakeup BELL! I'm behind you to the END!

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Steve Knox
Thumb Up

Re: Might use that as an interview topic

My team actually did have an interview question: "What's your favorite Seinfeld episode?"

We used it as an ice-breaker rather than to eliminate anyone, but we all agreed that the correct answer was either bemused indifference or "I don't watch Seinfeld."

Vietnam bans posting fake news online

Steve Knox

I'm not sure I'd agree.

I have serious reservations regarding your standards for "correctly" and "swiftly."

Think your smartwatch is good for warning of a heart attack? Turns out it's surprisingly easy to fool its AI

Steve Knox

Re: Says more about their CNN possibly

Eventually is a very vague amount of time for a matter of health.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Steve Knox
Holmes

This IS a Conundrum...

More disgust for Ellison for his support of Trump, or more disgust for Trump for his association with Ellison?

Whatever, it's the weekend and I'm feeling generous. More disgust all round!

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Steve Knox
Thumb Down

0/10 Would Not Buy

A $350 million price tag, and it doesn't even come with cupholders!?

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

Steve Knox
Boffin

Except tigers don't have cat eyes.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Steve Knox

Why you were downvoted.

Rather than downvote you, or waste my time explaining exactly why each of your points indicates that you simply did not read or comprehend the article, I'm just going to reference David Harper 1's excellent post above.

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Steve Knox
Joke

Missed it by that much...

PS: Apple's fiscal 2019 full-year financial numbers were out on Wednesday: $55bn profit, down seven per cent year-on-year...

PPS: Apparently that $55 billion profit has been further reduced, and is now $55 iion.

Assange fails to delay extradition hearing as date set for February

Steve Knox

Personally, I think he should be declared "persona au gratin."

Remember, remember, it's now called November: Windows 10 19H2 update has a name

Steve Knox

Re: "November 2019 Update ... due to land any day now"

No, Halloween Edition was definitely last year's Fall Update.

(ref. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/16/windows_10_update/, for starters.)

Google sounds the alarm over Android flaw being exploited in the wild, possibly by NSO

Steve Knox

Re: Years Old Bug...

No, this is a regression. In other words, patched long ago, but then someone updated the Binder code for some other reason and broke the patch.

Google bans politics, aka embarrassing stuff that gets leaked, from internal message boards

Steve Knox

"creating a group of internal communication moderators to oversee internal forums"

...Wait, what? I though Google was all about the algorithm?

Shurely they just need to point their excellent YouTube content moderation algorithm at their internal forums and it'll clean everything up perfectly.

Right?

US regulators push back against White House plan to police social media censorship

Steve Knox
Trollface

Trump claimed in July to have collected 16,000 anecdotal examples of content being removed

...

The White House set up a collection page to report removals, but that seems to have disappeared from its website.

16,001!

Disgruntled bug-hunter drops Steam zero-day to get back at Valve for refusing him a bounty

Steve Knox

Re: Naive response

No, I want you (and other Steam users) to think about. Figure it out for yourself.

Translation: I don't have a cogent argument and I know it.

Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76's defenses, detect you're in Incognito mode

Steve Knox

Re: O RLY

Except in Whitespace, of course.

Or Python.

'We've done it, we've wasted further time!' Judge raps HP over Mike Lynch court scrutiny

Steve Knox
Coat

With Apologies In Advance

"Well, in that case it was both too late and too early. There we are, we've done it, we've wasted further time!"

"A Barrister is never too late, nor too early. He wastes exactly as much time as he intends to waste."

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

Steve Knox

Re: Hello from ReactOS team!

The engineer didn't say "the same": he said "the same or similar names."

All it takes to end up with similar names for programming structures is similar naming conventions and similar goals. We already know that the goal is PRECISELY the same: processing binaries of a specific format to a specific result. And while there is some variety in naming conventions, there is also a lot of standardization, specifically within individual languages. In fact, I'd bet someone at least as clever as the two of us could come up with a test which does a fair job identifying a programmer's most frequently used or favorite language just by having them name some identifiers.

Cop a load of this: 1TB of police body camera videos found lounging around public databases

Steve Knox
Black Helicopters

ALL police body cam footage...

...should be in public databases. The public paid for it, in more ways than one.

Google's reCAPTCHA favors – you guessed it – Google: Duh, only a bot would refuse to sign into the Chocolate Factory

Steve Knox
Childcatcher

Re: Favors ?

Horrour of horrours!

You should contact your solicitour.

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

Steve Knox
Meh

Re: statue

So is "statute".

Put a stop to these damn robocalls! Dozens of US state attorneys general fire rocket up FCC's ass

Steve Knox

My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

1. Change your default ring to vibrate or nothing.

2. Give each of your contacts a custom ring so you know who it is.

3. Anyone of any importance you missed should leave a voice mail next time they call you; you can add them to your contacts then.

Backup bods Backblaze: Disk drive reliability improving

Steve Knox

More detailed conclusion

"It shows a general trend of improving AFR numbers with several points clustered along a high left to low right diagonal line."

That's an OK general conclusion, but if you look brand-by-brand, it's not quite so simple:

1. First, WD has only one drive model in the study, so we can't really tell how well they're doing.

2. Second, Toshiba has gone from 0% AFR (4TB) to 0% AFR (5TB) to 0.33% AFR (14TB). This is mitigated by the fact that that 0.33% is caused by 1 drive failure -- the only failure at all for Toshiba in the entire study. So it's possibly an artifact of the sampling rather than an actual decrease in quality.

3. Third, HGST does indeed have a 2.6% AFR for their LE600 models, but that's due to 1 drive failure as well -- that might, like with Toshiba, be an artifact of the sample. Setting that aside, HGST has 0.23% and 0.34% AFR for their two 4TB models, 1.17% for their 8TB model, and 0.56% for their LN604 12 TB model. This is not a high-left to low-right diagonal line, but a hill, indicating a decrease in quality for HGST around the time they were producing their 8TB models which was (mostly but not fully) resolved with the LN604 model.

4. Finally, Seagate starts high in the high-left (1.96% AFR for their 4TB model), improves for their 8TB model (0.27% and 1.64%) and 10TB model (1.01% AFR), and then totally implodes with their 12TB model (2.22% AFR). They are the closest to a high-left to low-right line, but they lose it at the end.

So the only reason the high-left to low-right line exists is because models from different brands (Seagate, WD, HGST, and Toshiba) are clustering near that line. But since the brands have their own production facilities, this is most likely a coincidence and not representative of a meaningful trend.

Looking brand-by-brand, we see:

WD underrepresented;

Toshiba holding near-perfect but possibly having a bit of trouble with their 14TB drives;

HGST starting strong but having problems starting with their 8TB models possibly through to the 12TB LE600 model, then improving again with their LN604 model; and

Seagate steadily improving quality from their 4TB models through to their 10TB model, then getting worse with their 12TB model -- all the while maintaining the worst overall record (yes, the HGST LE600 model has a higher AFR, but that's due to a single drive failure as mentioned above, so is likely inflated.)

Microsoft slaps the Edge name on SQL, unveils the HoloLens 2 Development Edition

Steve Knox
Happy

Re: SQL technology is obsolete

I'm old enough to remember when it was NoSQL which was to destroy SQL and make it obsolete.

Now it's "AI".

I wonder what will be next to make SQL "obsolete."

It was that gosh-darn anomaly again, says SpaceX as smoke billows from Crew Dragon test site

Steve Knox

Okay, I checked for myself.

Since records of their launches are publicly available it wasn't that hard.

I find your assertion of "sweeping bad news under the carpet since the start" utterly without merit.

It's coooming: Windows 10 October 2018 Update adoption slows ahead of the next release

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: Modern tech companies don't get it any more

We had a "nothing changed" but things broke event with our last software release.

Turns out what had changed was that the QA tester actually looked at the error log this time. What "broke" had been broken for at least a year and nobody had noticed.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Steve Knox

Re: 5,000,070 signatures

...and 5,217,484 six hours later.

That's an average rate of 6,039 per minute over those six hours. If that rate keeps up (doubtful, but if...) then Leadsom will have her 17.4 million respondents in a day and a half.

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Steve Knox
Joke

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Simply put, the systems operate in various "Laws" or modes whereby the systems will attempt to protect the aircraft from being flown outside its envelope.

The Laws of Aerobotics?

Steve Knox
Happy

We've downloaded some updates for your plane.

Pick a time to restart your plane to finish installing these updates.

Microsoft 'welcomes dialog' over HoloLens use by the military, but doesn't have to listen

Steve Knox

Re: Have they thought it through?

Have you thought it through?

The primary purpose of the military is not, actually, to kill people. It is to stop people from killing (hurting, stealing from, etc.) you. Note for example, the justification for the US military in the Constitution: "to provide for the common defense".

The best military technology prevents conflict by either allowing you to avoid it or by convincing your enemy to avoid you. So there is real justification for wanting to support your military by providing that type of technology, while not wanting to work on projects with specific goals of "lethality".

Now, fair play to anyone who wants to respond with "that's not how the US (or the UK or any even slightly Imperialist power) have used their military", but I see that more as a failure of command (i.e, the governments involved) rather than an argument for a different definition of the ideal purpose of a military.

Watchdog asks UK.gov to reissue freedom of information guidance after councils are told to STFU about Brexit plans

Steve Knox

"We can neither confirm nor deny whether or not we have been asked to change our policy of neither confirming nor denying whether or not we have that information..."

Accused hacker Lauri Love loses legal bid to reclaim seized IT gear

Steve Knox

Re: Innocent, guilty not relevant

...whose friends and admirers can spare the time (off work? not working?) to attend the hearing and make obscene comments, but not to sit down with Mr. Love and advise him to seek legal counsel.

What does the nature of his friends have to do with the merits of his case?

"Guilt by association" seems an all-too-relevant description of your argument here...

Steve Knox

Re: Moral

Legal Aid is quite restricted in what it's available for these days, though consult a lawyer for reliable info......

But would that be covered by Legal Aid...?

After outrage over Chrome ad-block block plan, Google backs away from crippling web advert, content filters

Steve Knox

So why change the API?

"Users need to have greater control over the data their extensions can access,"

It's SUPER-simple to give users full control over the data their extensions can access without changing your API.

Just add a new page to settings with a dropdown of extensions and a list of every class of data, with checkboxes. Have the API fail gracefully for any unchecked combination of extension/data. Problem solved.

Or do you really mean "Chrome needs to be able to restrict the data extensions can access 'on behalf of' users, making their decisions for them in a way which is, of course completely impartial and has no ulterior motive whatsoever."

Never mind that naked selfie scandal... Brazil lights the, er, kindling, dot-Amazon saga roars back into life

Steve Knox

No Wonder

...Amazon promised to give the governments millions of dollars of free Kindles...

No wonder they couldn't come to an agreement, with a threat like that looming overhead...

Big Red's big pay gap: $13,000 gulf between male and female Oracle staffers – reports

Steve Knox
Facepalm

From the article:

"This found that women were paid on average $13,000 less than men, even after controlling for various factors such as career level, performance review scores and office location."

LEARN TO READ.

Steve Knox
Holmes

Re: All else being equal...

If Jane and John have equal productivity but Jane's wage bill is $13k less, why would a company employ John?

Because they can make at least $0.01 more off of John than John costs them.

At 900k lines of code, ONOS is getting heavy. Can it go on a diet?

Steve Knox

Xinu Is Not Unix!

[Was to be a joke, but that's what XINU actually means. ]

This July, Google will weep for there are no more worlds to banhammer: 'Bad ads' to be blocked globally

Steve Knox
Mushroom

So Google considers the following to be perfectly fine on desktops:

Prestitial ads (without a countdown)

Pages with more than 30% ad density

Flashing animations

Poststitial ads that require a countdown to dismiss

Fullscreen scrollover ads

Fuck you, Google.

Encryption? This time it'll be usable, Thunderbird promises

Steve Knox
Holmes

Re: How To Do Encryption IN THE REAL WORLD

Normal people won't cope with asymmetric ciphers. But they understand the concept of key sharing.

You don't spend much time with normal people, do you? Normal people don't really get the concept of encryption keys, period, let alone key sharing. It's not because they're incapable, mind. It's because they couldn't give a flying fuck.

Encryption, for normal people, is stuff the techies are supposed to sort out.

Fake 'U's! Phishing creeps use homebrew fonts as message ciphers to evade filters

Steve Knox
Paris Hilton

Or..

Just disable web fonts by default in e-mail clients, as many already do with images.