* Posts by nijam

1997 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2011

Microsoft says regulations and environmental issues are cramping its Euro expansion

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> Microsoft says regulations and environmental issues are cramping its Euro expansion.

Good.

Former reality TV star appointed NASA interim administrator

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Re: Think about what this means

> ... someone who can text the President..

...without using too manu bigly wods.

Google Cloud lands gig to make 100,000 UK civil servants tech-literate

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Re: Considering

> ...why the hell doesn't these civil servants have the tech skills needed in the first place?

Because (if anything) they learned Microsoft stuff at school. No tech skills there.

'Cyber security' behind decision to end defense satellite sharing of hurricane data

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Re: "Cybersecurity" Issue

> Last one out of the US turn off the lights, too.

Already happening, starting at the top.

AI scores a huge own goal if you play up and play the game

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> ... 'clever patter matching' ...

What an apposite typo!

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

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Re: There are too many lawyers in parliament

PPE can easiliy be summarised as "opinions".

As opposed to experience, evidence, or simply facts.

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Re: There are too many lawyers in parliament

> If you don't mess up, you don't learn.

Contrariwise, "Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Ottoo von Bismarck

Microsoft finally bids farewell to PowerShell 2.0

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> There's a huge amount of power there, it just feels like it's fighting you at times.

Like Microsoft itself (apart from the "at times" proviso).

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

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It's a tollgate.

How long before CloudFlare realise they charge what they like, for traffic from or to anywhere?

Sinaloa drug cartel hired a cybersnoop to identify and kill FBI informants

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Re: You know what will fix this

Yes indeed. A taste of their own medicine for the FBI (and no doubt other govt. TLAs the world over).

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

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In effect, the judicial decision means than VMWare is now viewed as ransomware.

Any dissenting opinions amongst the commentards, I woder?

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

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> Writing in C is like building a mosaic out of lentils using a tweezer and glue.

Writing in Lips is like building a mosaic out of lentils using just glue. Tweezers are for wimps.

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

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Re: Open Standards and Open Source

> ... open interoperability protocols. So, for example, Outlook ...

Maybe they could start with SMTP and IMAP? Yes, I know there is (allegedly) other stuff in Outlook, but what is it doing in an email program?

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Re: Better to lose the US market than the rest of the world ...

> He is a baby who keeps throwing his toys out of the pram.

Or throwing other babies's toys out of their prams.

AFRINIC election annulled after ICANN writes angry letter to African regional internet registry

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> ... China would decide to continue using those and we'd get some fracturing of the IP system...

China would love that, perhaps?

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

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> ... "any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States,"

So Trump, then.

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

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It's becoming clearer that "Wayland" is the wrong name. I propose "Waylost" as more appropriate.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

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> I guess the Web3.0 "standards working groups" need to define a JavaScript function for querying a browser's original "identity"

Absolutely not. None of their forking business.

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Re: unsupported browser

> It wasn't long ago that I ran into a site that recommended upgrading to Netscape 3.

And did you do that? Did the site work properly on that browser?

Australia finds age detection tech has many flaws but will work

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> ... “assess whether the technology works and can be deployed - not to make policy decisions about whether or how it should be used.”

...because the policy decision has already been made, without any need to consider the viability (let alone quality) of any technology involved.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

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Re: Problems

> The difference shows up in adoption rates

The difference show up in lock-in rates.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

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> "...fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality..."

Isn't that eactly how they're trained?

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

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> ... but that is about to get a great deal harder.

GNOME is becoming the systemd of window managers.

Oracle scores cloud customer – maybe China's TEMU – that wants any available server, anytime, anywhere

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> ... described TEMU as “information-gathering spyware program masquerading as an e-commerce site.”

What a good fit for Oracle.

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

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Re: promise

Once again, time to air my catchphrase (for use with bosses who think they're entitled to be addressed as "sir", or something else the believe to be an honorfic):

"No sooner said than promised".

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> It's a pyramid scheme, always has been, always will be...

In that regard, if no other, it's just like real life.

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Re: Search

Brings to mind Cyril M.Kornbluth's store "The Marching Morons".

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Re: "Understanding when and how to leverage AI effectively"

Disney is the very best reason to abolish copyright now. Sure, a few innocent authors, artists, and so on would suffer[1], but worth it to rid the word of Disney, or more specifically its lawyers.

[1] Anyway, don't they always say they suffer for their art?

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

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Re: Perhaps the Cisco boss is going all in with Rust

> ... which might require AI to decode the (current) syntax and ...

... introduce completely new (but syntactically correct) algothmic or architectural bugs.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

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> ... banned over the US for civilian aircraft since ...

... no American manufacturer had a product to compete with Concorde.

US govt login portal could be one cyberattack away from collapse, say auditors

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Re: Say what?

> I'd guess that the real magic is how the site exchanges credentials with innumerable agencies.

Simple, just the name and password. No need for the encrypted version, just use the plain text one that they have stored alongside it.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

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> The term PC or Personal Computer existed long before IBM joined the club.

Yes, as in "Plug Compatible", i.e. one of those mainframes that *weren't* IBM but sort-of worked the same. Not to mention PC Plod.

Trump tariff turmoil hurting global smartphone market, but hitting US hardest

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> ...the one economy Trump is trying to protect...

Hmmm. Are you sure about that? His best hope for re-election (yes, I know, but how long can the constitution last against his destructive tirades?) is to get tnhe country even deeper in the shit, and he'll be lining up a long list of countries (and anyone else he dislikes) as scapegoats.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

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> ...how to properly address a national emergency.

Still, Trump 2.0 is clearly a national emergency.

Victoria's Secret website laid bare for three days after 'security incident'

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> ...down for three days.

That's just pants.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

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> ... if [bosses] can’t see their personnel, they can’t be sure what they’re doing...

They already don't know what they're doing. Ah, wait, you meant "they don't know what their personnel are doing." Then again, probably not that either.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

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Re: Is that even legal?

> The law is irrelevant if nobody enforces it.

Anyone who enforces it will be fired. That seems to be his strategy for dealing with anyone doing things he dislikes.

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> "I have long ago informed ..."

Dreadful grammar. No surprise, I'm sure.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

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Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Sounds ideal, since I use neither Gnome nor MSWindows, it won't affect me at all, because I won't use it.

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

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> You need a separate user account for root and the sudo command doesn't work by default.

A good thing, in my view.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

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Re: 1998

> ... no Linux drivers and never will be.

That's the manufacturer's fault, then, because they've found (or think they have) some way to prevent people writing drivers.

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Re: 1998

> ... can_someone_explain_why_linux_is_bad/

Evidently not.

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Re: 1998

With MSWindows, the correct fix is to turn it off and NOT turn it on again.

I know, it's been said before. But it's still true.

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Re: Bloatware Linux

In my experience the Average Joe wouldn't be able to install MSWindows properly at all.

Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

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I know there's a lot of dislike for Google here, but Bing has always been in the "pathetic" category compared with Google Search. So I don't care.

Tough on DDG, though,

Go ahead and ignore Patch Tuesday – it might improve your security

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Re: Tell that to compliance (and ultimately the law)

... and a much smaller value of "known".

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> Patch only for vulnerabilities that affect you.

At some time in a previous millenium, that was good advice. Nowadays, which of the thousands of vulnerabilities (most of which you never heard of) will affect you. Or already have.

Everyone's deploying AI, but no one's securing it – what could go wrong?

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Re: Conflation of issues?

> ...in that more code vulnerabilities will be discovered sooner.

But only by adversaries, I expect.

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

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> Good luck getting a real job then when you don't have any basic knowledge.

It's gone well for cronies of Florida Man!

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>... replacing traditional search engines like Google ...

No problem with that part, but AI (which I take to mean Artificial Stupidity in practice)? No thank you.