* Posts by Grogan

555 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2012

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

Grogan

Re: They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

ALSA support never left, mozilla just stopped enabling it in their distributed binaries. I always enable it in my builds, because I run them on multiple Linux systems (some are ALSA only)

Arch Linux enables ALSA in their builds, other distributors probably do too. It depends on where you got your binaries.

Grogan

Listen to that posturing... really, he's got his shit in a knot over "pocket"? I've never cared much for this person's opinions. He's either preaching to the choir or full of shit.

I have many advantageous reasons for using Firefox. Not the least of which is a good build system that you don't have to be in the inner circle to use and understand (I get that most of you wouldn't think of things like that). Control over what sites get to stick in my face is another, the extension interface allows manipulation of streams etc. Also, they maintain it so they don't break the APIs and older extensions can still be updated if they break... while Google deliberately dumbed theirs down so people can't override sites and browser behaviour.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

Grogan

At this point I trust the Chinese more than the Americans... and companies like Google and meta faecesbook. China doesn't give a fuck what I do. America, on the other hand, likes to probe everyone's anus. Right now I distrust any American company, because Donald and his ilk exert control over them.

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

Grogan

Re: Why are we still receiving these people?

Indeed, once people realize that the chaos and consequences are part of the plan, both domestically and internationally, it gets easier to understand with less incredulity. The Orange Ignoranus and his annointed advisors that have his ear, aren't as stupid as they are evil.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Grogan

"Have you fixed tech with an unlikely tool?"

Why yes, utilizing both triggers of my double barreled shotgun, loaded with 3 inch magnum 00 buckshot :-)

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

Grogan

Re: Not bad

Foolish dynamic linking and inherited dependencies. That has always bugged my ass about pulseaudio, libpulse becomes a dependency for things that don't even have anything to do with audio because they link against things that link against libpulse. Now you need both pulseaudio and pipewire libraries for package dependencies on typical distributions.

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

Grogan

The stock frequency listed is one thing, but the frequency reported in your OS will vary with power management governors, usage conditions with "turboboost" and of course user settings in BIOS etc.

Say what you want about Windows (hatred!), but this is just people not understanding how things work. My 5.2 GHz processor cores are reporting "800 MHz" in my OS right now. If I start a compile job they'll ramp up to maximum because I have overridden turboboost ratios.

Judge allows Delta's lawsuit against CrowdStrike to proceed with millions in damages on the line

Grogan

Umm, read your EULA? You chose to use that stupid security software. (that's how it works)

Any time you install filter drivers you run that risk. Norton, McAfee (how many times have I had to spend HOURS hunting and poking to manually remove broken McNorton shit from customer PCs in the 2000's when I was doing that... it was more difficult to remove than most of the malware)

What about Microsoft, when they issue an update that blue screens your computers, you going to sue them too? They'll point you at your EULA.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Grogan

I was in a very similar boat. I thought to get with modern times and bought a Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse set. The keyboard was killing me, I was backspacing more typos than typing words and it was causing me problems with my hands.

I went back to my old keyboard on a PS/2 to USB converter dongle despite the occasional latency or glitch, like keypresses not registering with lights blinking instead (it's rare enough that it gaslights me into thinking I mis-pressed or fumbled)

That IBM keyboard shown is exactly the keyboard I have, one of the first PS/2 keyboards from 1986. Pry it from my stiff, dead fingers now that the strain caused by that stupid Logitech keyboard has healed up.

20% discount offer on Windows 365 expires around same time as Windows 10 support

Grogan

"Almost"? It doesn't sound like you're fully committed :-)

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Grogan

You're simple. That would be good... American companies are not well liked anyway. New services would pop up soon, and they would be free of loud, entitled, smug, IGNORANT Americans drowning everyone else out.

Congress wants to know if Nvidia superchips slipped through Singapore to DeepSeek

Grogan

The Trump administration is pissed that China derailed and de-monetized their AI cooperative, and released it under a MIT license very soon after the announcement lol

Zuckerfucker was so pissed that he lost billions, that Meta tried to ban Linux discussion groups until outrage caused them to back-pedal it as a mistake, even after telling the complainant that the ban was going to stay, and subsequently silencing him.

To blazes with the lot of them. Schadenfreude is one of the few pleasures left in this life because of these pricks.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Grogan

Re: Sorry, no.

I didn't mention the GPL (it doesn't speak about money) but that's what I meant when speaking about permissive licenses, as in BSD-like. At least with the GPL, you may get something back in the form of contributions.

Grogan

Sorry, but if they don't have to, they aren't going to. Don't release something under a permissive license and then complain when people/companies make use of it. Especially if you use a BSD-like license... you asked for it.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Grogan

Exactly... these are just a bunch of jumped up, small minded prigs in here. Low intellect, authority whipped tools. I said something similar. that one should be able to use AI to find sources of information, but then those sources need to be credited and footnoted like any other. They wouldn't have even known.

I find research papers using search engines. One could also use AI themselves to find information on the Internet.

Grogan

One should be able to use "AI" (or any means) to find sources of information, but then the individual sources that you use should be footnoted like any other. This wouldn't be an issue (they wouldn't have known) had he done that.

FCC probes whether it can pop a cap in ISP data caps

Grogan

Some years ago, a friend/colleague that ran a computer shop became a reseller for an ISP, and their highest tier at the time had a 300 Gb monthly limit. I said no way, I'm not putting up with bandwidth limits and overage charges. He chided me that it was an insanely generous limit, nobody should be using that much.

Firstly, I pointed out that I'd use that up in a week purchasing games on Steam and downloading shows (again, "you shouldn't be doing that!"). Secondly, I pointed out that it had the potential to cost me thousands of dollars a month in overage fees if some process used excess bandwidth for a long period of time. Thirdly, if they are going to be charging for data, then they'd best make sure it's a clean connection that doesn't result in packet retransmission, as well as network noise like packets not legitimately destined for my node.

That ISP soon dropped that idea because it was an outdated way of doing things (their words, or similar). They now offer services from 50 megabit/s to 2.5 gigabit/s speeds (depending on where you live) with no data caps.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Grogan

Here's the thing... liars and grifters (both have been normalized in the U.S. of A.) can promise whatever they like, because they don't have to follow through once they get what they want.

Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

Grogan

Re: Krazy Krazy

I never understood "lay away" purchases. If you can't afford it, lay your own money away until you can, if you have no source of credit. Buy now, pay later schemes are a much better trap :-)

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Grogan

Companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft generally LOVE things like this, because it's a barrier to entry. Only the big boys should be able to play.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Grogan

Re: Mental image

Indeed! Vivian Stanshall was my immediate thought, mostly because it's the first masculine usage of the name that I had encountered (in Canada here I've only seen it a girl's name).

"... all the beautiful people..." heheh

Another one I love is the "11 mustachioed daughters" (with his own named band "Vivian Stanshall's Big Grunt")

Grogan

Re: Mental image

Exact detail escapes me, but it was early to mid 2000's. My school teacher sister used Office 2000's PowerPoint to make a presentation and generated a 900+ Mb file. She was telling me that most of her colleagues were complaining that they couldn't open it, it was freezing their computers. I was all "hmm" until I saw the file she gave them. She could open it (made her Pentium-D with 512M RAM computer sluggish with pagefile use) but other people had older PCs. They were bitmap images... Microsoft's garbage generators, in the wrong hands, will happily let you do things like that.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Grogan

Re: So how does one turn it off?

Thumb down for stating a fact. What a bunch of jumped up pricks in here. I'd make a screenshot to prove it, but I can't be arsed. Die in a fire.

Grogan

Re: So how does one turn it off?

It's a checkbox right there in Privacy and Security in the main Settings interface.

"Website Advertising Preferences

Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement

This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more"

AI PCs will dominate shipments by 2026, but not because of demand

Grogan

Re: History repeats itself

That's what I have (according to lspci) in my Xeon based server, I was surprised to see the onboard graphics as Matrox G200. I used to buy those for Windows 98 and 2000 back in the day, they were great desktop cards. Nowadays, at least at the datacenter I use, those servers don't ever get a display hooked up. They are provisioned remotely through a web interface (choose from serveral linux images) and if you lose control of it, remote KVM console (through IPMI interface).

Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users

Grogan

Re: run Python scripts inside workbooks

Python 3.7 to python 3.8... removal of nullptr broke a lot of shit. That's one example that came to mind (because it affected applications I needed to use... had to build LibreOffice with its own python interpreter)

Also, regardless of compatibility, any x.x.y upgrade is going to break all your modules anyway.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Grogan

Re: I feel unclean...

Well... it would be different if you or I made a joke like that on social media. We'd just be called jackasses etc.

Whether it was his intent or not, it's a dog whistle coming from him.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Grogan

Re: not a solution for all

I know some fans of the "stick" approach that have come away with pretty serious contusions and skull fractures. (There are millions of people with bigger sticks than yours and they vote and pay taxes)

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Grogan

Re: Alas, no "Internet Keyboard Pro"

I don't care for those "ergonomic" keyboards either, always found them awkward.

I can't even find a keyboard that I really like. For decades, on my main rigs. I'd been using a big old IBM clickety clack keyboard from 1986, one of the first PS/2 keyboards. I first tried to use it on my new rig (no PS/2 on this board) with an i/o converter dongle, but it proved gimmicky. Sometimes latency, sometimes even missed keystrokes and one or more of the keyboard lights would blink (caps lock, numlock, scroll lock). I still have it on an older rig but I seldom sit at that one anymore (use it headless mostly now).

So waaaah is me, I can't get used to anything. It's been several months too and I still have to backspace and correct a lot of rtoubg (typing lol). I don't look at my fingers when I type and I'm forever disoriented. I've since tried a mechanical keyboard, gaming keyboards and finally settled on this plain jane logitech keyboard/mouse combo because I needed a new mouse at that time anyway. The less shit in the USB ports the better, too.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Grogan

Based on correct information. Your ignorance is not as good as our knowledge, chuckles.

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

Grogan

The list of hostile places people shouldn't go gets longer every day...

Somalia

United States

Russia

North Korea

Iran

Syria

...

... France

So he's been kidnapped for disobeying France's orders about how to run a chat service on the Internet, essentially.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Grogan

Good documentation has quick reference pages, and more detailed chapters/sections and/or common examples that follow :-)

I find some man pages awful for that reason, the synopsis alone is too silly like "foo [options] [arguments]" but then you have to wade through prosy stuff to try to understand how to actually use the program.

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

Grogan

Re: That bloke in the corner...

Yes, you have to compile with/against older GNU if you want to distribute binaries that everyone can run. The libraries are good at providing backwards compatibility, but they have symbols to prevent loading them in the opposite case.

At this time it's that, not deliberately choosing to "drop support" for older userspace.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Grogan

Back in the day, we used to mock MSKB articles with Solution: Don't do that :-)

(Not as bluntly, but some of them were basically saying just that)

There was a MSKB article for just about everything back in the late 90's. I had so many of them in my bookmarks I decided I needed a search engine for my bookmarks. That was when I made Netcape's home page "bookmarks.htm" and used the find text function. (Netscape 4.x, because it was really the only fully functional browser on Linux back then)

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

Grogan

That's right, the TPM isn't so much to protect you, it's to protect content FROM you.

I refuse to have that adversarial hardware enabled on my systems. If have to test something in Windows 11, I fake a TPM2 in a KVM

Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into Claude

Grogan

Those Anthropic "Claude" bots are intrusive, they ignore robots.txt directives (most bots except legitimate search engines do), and abusive. I started noticing them back in May, hammering the shit out of my web forum and photo gallery. We're talking like 400 to 500 simultaneous bots all coming from different IP networks within Amazon's cloud.

If AWS is going to allow that kind of tomfoolery to take place on their network, fuck em. I have blocked every single CIDR block used by AWS with kernel rules. We're talking /9, /10, /12 bit subnets etc., millions of IP addresses. I don't have to care about that, for there are no internet clients (butts in chairs with web browsers) in there. I've been thinking of dropping the rules to see if they were still a problem, but... nah. AWS can stay blocked.

It's no joke, I like to allow large publicly viewable attachments and gallery posts for my members, and these asshole bots rack up tens of thousands of downloads.

It's not even that I mind the content being scraped, it's the bloody abuse.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Grogan

Re: For once

It could be a brilliant post, with insight from a seasoned IT veteran from days of old, and it will get downvotes here. Petty, judgemental people that think they have a little power... and don't like anybody smarter than they are.

Some of them may be deserved, including for myself, but it's a piss off that there are people that sit here and go "nope, nope, nope"

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Grogan

Re: That is an absolute dick move

I used to have a few youtube videos. Nothing much, just some game captures of funny things. A few thousand views and a few comments etc. I deliberately didn't choose to monetize them, I don't like ads and I wouldn't subject other people to them on my behalf (not a single one on my web site and forum etc. No sponsors, no affiliate links, no begging for money... I just don't do that shit).

First, I don't know why, but one of my videos got flagged for copyright. Google then put ads on it. I was annoyed, but not murderously pissed yet.

Then another got flagged for adult content. Cartoon nudity, because I showed some naked corpses because I had this skyrim nudity mod. They made it 18 only and, you guessed it, stuck ads on it.

That was it. I deleted everything I had on youtube. If I want to post a video I'll just host it on my own fucking web server. I have a shit tonne of monthly bandwidth.

Small CSS tweaks can help nasty emails slip through Outlook's anti-phishing net

Grogan

Re: Email is for text

I use a mail program (Sylpheed... pry it from my stiff, dead, fingers) that strips out most of the crap in html messages and gives you plain text, or a html alternative with hyperlink text and stuff. If you really need the original message, it's still there in the encoding, it can be saved as a file (or view message source). Between all that, there has never been a message I couldn't deal with (I've been using this since 2001)

I don't like html emails.

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking algorithms used by landlords

Grogan

Re: I suppose...

Hey you downvoting simpletons... we have rent control in Canada, and I like it. Rent increases are controlled. Municipalities also regulate by not rezoning property so people can just build more expensive apartments and condos when they aren't what's needed, to encourage affordable rentals. You high school civics parrots would change your tune when it's you that can't find a place to live. So fuck you.

Grogan

Re: I suppose...

You can't homogenize rent prices across the board or anything like that, but rent control is necessary in a civilized society. I'll bet they don't let landlords jack up the rent as they see fit in Sweden...

US sends cybercriminals back to Russia in prisoner swap that freed WSJ journo, others

Grogan

They should have surreptitiously stuck them with a tiny pellet of Polonium before releasing them, so they'd rot and die within a few weeks of getting home. In other words, "out Putin" Vladimir Putin.

I wouldn't seriously want them to do that, but because these are computer criminals, releasing them to Putin does have consequences (v.s. some other type of criminal that is never going to be in the U.S. again)

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

Grogan

Re: chicken come home to roost

It makes me fucking sick, what distributors are doing. Merging those directories and leaving symlinks in their place, because they are expected to be there at those paths. It's silly

Dumping everything in /usr is messy... people suck.

Kaspersky says Uncle Sam snubbed proposal to open up its code for third-party review

Grogan

It's not unexpected at this time. Later they will be interested in this, but for now, they simply are not going to trust the government that Kaspersky (the company) operates under, or its personnel at this time. Regardless of what they may think of Eugene Kaspersky himself.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Grogan

Re: Good riddance

I detest those fucking things. I teach people to HOVER over links before clicking and those URL obfuscating services make a mockery of it.

Probably the most ominous thing about them is, neither you nor whatever site or service you posted the link on, have control over what that link may redirect to in the future.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Grogan

Re: Good

What a small minded simpleton, that you can't handle having the choice. You'd rather have the nanny state cripple your vehicle.

Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years

Grogan

I don't care about the red underlining type spell check where you can take action to correct it, if I choose not to ignore it. That can only be helpful even if it doesn't have an entire language with all its made up words and vernacular in its dictionaries.

What I hate is spell checking that I have to fight against, that automatically corrects deliberately misspelled words (or auto-completes). I have to turn all that bollocks off on my phone.

I'd have to say that would be pretty useless to me in a plain text editor, though. Every sequence of characters separated by spaces would likely be underlined in the type of file I'd be editing with Notepad on Windows. (script, .inf, .ini type configuration files etc.)

Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

Grogan

This doesn't apply to ride sharing, as you need the infrastructure, but if you're going to do gig work, try to get your own gigs. I can't stand these middle men that take your money and lock you in with non-hire policies for the companies they send you to. I refuse to be controlled like that.

These agencies exist BECAUSE of and only because of, your work. They do nothing. Fucking parasites.

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