Posts by buserror

It's a fullblown Crysis: Gamers press pause on PC purchases, shipments freeze

Gamers aren't waiting for new GPUs. they are waiting for the release of the new AMD CPUs before replacing the machine!

A LOT of people (myself included) got a pretty good PC due for replacement, and just on the trigger of building a new one.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

Re: Command/Control channel flag?

Huhn seriously? more than complete amateurs would put a third party company in the loop FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER for their devops needs? It's not like they need the storage or anything, they could EASILY run a VPS and not have that single point of failure.

It's not 'account pulling from them' here, it's 'machine pulling from a repo, kinda like... a virus would'. I can understand automating stuff, but using what is basically a cloud server for 'half the internet'?

Giggles.

Command/Control channel flag?

Given he says he has several nodes pulling from his account automatically, its likely some sort of automaton at github decided this was a command and control channel for some sort of bot, and pulled it down, possibly 'pending review' -- and they did review and restored it. I can understand that easily enough...

He might be better of having a VM somewhere to so that sort of schemes, he'll have official sources on github, and mirror on the VM, and the automated nodes pulling from there. Extra backup layer thrown in.

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Re: primeOS mail

Ah, I had written a complete replacement in 1990 or so, inspired from 'elm' the unix fancy client of the time (mutt din't even exist :-)). It even made it into the wild, as I've got an email about 4 years ago from a happy user. Who knew :-)

I was a system engineer on Pr1mos when I was a baby

Ah, I was a sysadmin on a few very big primos systems when I was a baby -- I wrote system tools, cool APIs and so on.

One day, I was making a new tool tool that was using shared memory; on pr1mos, there wasn't ANY ACL on shared memory, so you had to be a bit careful about what you were doing, thus ME, the trusted wizard, making APIs for it.

Anyway, my test program was taking a very very long time to start for a bizarre reason, and and I control-C'ed it, the phone started ringing with people on the same system complaining their their application was crashing and it seems the whole shared memory segment (for everyone) had been erased...

Of course, being the all wize admin, I blamed a glitch in the OS and/or a bug somewhere else and/or a cosmic ray..

But on that day, I learned to use parenthesis on *every* *single* *macro* and every *single* expression in my header files, and I've never stopped doing it.

Whoops.

WebAssembly: Finally something everyone agrees on – websites running C/C++ code

Not a webhead but...

Seems to be most of the time is wasted in frameworks and DOM thingies on most webpages, very few pages try to 'compress video on the fly' or other smoke-induced ideas they just came up with.

The cycle will be as follow:

+ Webassembly thingy is here, rejoince! Fastness the world over!

+ Wait, why have our BROWSER code in normal code, wouldn't it make more sense to have it in Webassembly so the base browser is SO simple to maintain and all the rest is webassembly?

+ Ok we've done that, now our browser is a real fat(tter) dog, WHAT CAN WE DO?!?!

+ *I know* ditch all the webassembly thing, we'll rewrite the core in plain C/C++ and life will be GOOD!

Seen that before? Remember mozilla (all *javascript* man, it's going to be sooo cool and.. and cool!11!) and then... firefox.

Chocolate Factory exudes Nougat as Android 7 begins rollout

Quite frankly, I'd prefer 3+ years of security updates to 'major' updates that break half the funtionality, change stuff for no apparent reasons than to confuse the user, sometime entirely remove features and/or brick the device with no way to save it afterward.

My first gen nexus 7 was completely bricked by google at the last update. They never either acknowledged the problem, or provided a fix.

Vodafone bins line rental charges as it moves onto TalkTalk's turf

Now, what about BT?

This is really a racket on the BT side; they keep telling you how WONDERFUL the FREE features you get with your landline package are, knowing perfectly well nobody use them. There isn't even a phone plugged in the socket anymore at my place, hadn't had one for years.

This is literally a racket, and they know it perfectly well.

HMRC's IR35 tweaks have 90% of UK's IT contractors up in arms

Doesn't really reflect what the market wants..

To me this goes against what seems to be the future of employment. Who can even think that 'permanent employment' still exists? Whats the usual turnover for the typical employee? 4 Years?

Personally I'm all done for the corporaty lure of a 'culture' and associated bullshit. I've seem so many times every time I now see an executive haranguing his 'family' I want to vomit.

What I want is to be able to do as I want, I particularly enjoy playing the mercenary as a contractor, I embrace the fact I can hop on a project, have an impact, and then leave. That doesn't mean that some projects can't be longer than a couple of years, the spirit stays the same, I'll still go when it finishes.

The cruel bit is, as an employee, I was the exact same over-competent guy, and more often than not my opinion was completely ignored as I was drowned in the corporate politics. Now as a contractor, I'm paid so much people actually pay attention! People try not to waste my time with idiocy, people think twice about inviting me to meetings, and take notes when I make recommendation.

I don't want to have to be rolled back into a corporation. I'm happy to pay my taxes, but my taxes must reflect that I don't get any of the perps permies do. On the other hand, yes, I'd like to be able to have a way to differentiate myself from the typical contractor-typist who's been at the same desk for 10 years; the worst bit is, it's his agency who's making the money!

Skype: Nearly half of adults don't install software updates

Well, skype is "special"

I usually update all my software **but not skype** -- because skype has introduced "upgrades" that rendered the software almost unusable with their idea that the window needs to take 60% of the screen, and of course the reason later appeared in the form of adverts.

So, skype stays at a 2 years old version here, and when that one stops working, I won't use it again. Google Hangouts are already covering a lot of the cases where I needed audio/video calls.

Seems the questionnaire lacked the "user knows what the update does and doesn't want it, thanks" answer.