Posts by Luiz Abdala

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

I am quite happy with the Windows 95 paradigm.

I don't care there are 23 flavors of desktop, that every linux distro had to make their own. There is no standard, but everybody knows what it must look like, how it must work and that's the actual standard, altough how you do them is up to you. They must have a launcher, a status bar, all the thing mentioned in the article.

But standards... they work for hardware. USB killed a bunch of interfaces, except for things that don't accept multiplexing, maybe. Some of them still exist virtually inside USB, like serial (no really, some gear still use 2400 baud 8N1 com1 serial lingo wrapped inside a usb carapace.)

HDMI wrapped video and audio together in a fashion that Holywood took no objection. I am still amazed I can potentially connect a 40 inch TV on my pc and get audio on it, because my GPU has a pass-through for HDMI. Not that single-cable is an HDMI novelty, and SCART existed long before that.

PCs themselves only exist because everybody agreed on standards, like ATX. (Dell disagrees.) The fact you can buy one piece of hardware from each vendor and everything works is nothing short of a miracle.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

I totally relate to that.

Back in the day, I had to make long distance calls to get internet, and left my whole paycheck of 15 days with the phone company.

The first ISP that offered long-range Wi-Fi with UHF antennas and literal springles' can would cost me another paycheck, but it was worth it, never again I had a phone bill like that.

(TLDR, that ISP was tinkering with WiFi range, and we managed 3 miles with 256 kbps in 802.11b, worth it.)

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Full Circle.

The first computer I ever touched relied on a CRT TV, and it was mounted under a (horrible) keyboard.

Several ages later, it had the same format under-the-keyboard once again, but with a ton of functionality on top.

Just because some ideas are old don't mean they suck, it was just the technology of the day.

I loved this.

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Can Google build...

...a full blown, WANO-regulated, 4000 thermal Megawatts PWR? If Microsoft can fire Three Mile Island up again, can Google own a Nuclear Power Plant?

It's not like they need to use the whole 1.2 GW such a plant produces, but they can sell it back to the grid. A clean, stable power source that works continuously for 18 months at a time, that doesn't rely on wind or sun, that no power company in the planet would refuse to have as provider.

How does the permits work for such a thing? How does Microsoft get permission to buy the whole power of TMI? I know it should be easier because the planet already existed and had all the permits to exist in the first place, but how hard it is to a company fund and have the permits to use the power of a plant, even though they can't touch any glowing bits inside?

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

It took a geomagnetic event to take it down?

It's beats our usual ISP blunders where the cleaning lady yanks the UPS off the wall to vaccuum the server room with an ultra-electrostatic vaccuum cleaner, that could make a Van De Graaff generator jealous.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Purge is the best one, and the hardest to do. But what if...

Well, Ubuntu (and every OS under the sun, probably) offers a setup file to be installed in a removable media, that installs an OS on a machine, and maybe runs a virtual one off a virtual memory space.

What if somebody made an UNINSTALL image? A completely agnostic, rewrite-three-times-zeroes-and-ones wiping tool that takes over and cleans ANY machine whole?

Of course, UEFI probably makes it easier, but any platform that runs off x86 (as in, any run-off-the-mill PC with a BIOS I am familiar with) should be able to get something like it. It would need firmware-level access and maybe a bunch of drivers, but you get what I mean.

So, there's probably an underlying difficulty in doing this that I have no idea, but if somebody cracks it, will make a fortune in wiping services.

If it was easy, somebody would have devised an "un-image" ready to deploy and wipe any machine clean by now, so I guess that would be the ultimate goal? You don't even need to worry about encryption, because you are triple-wiping it as well. Just deleting the encryption key isn't security (at all) enough.

I bet the ransomware folks have tools like this ready to go, and they use it against your will.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Add arcades to the washing machines.

You play Street Fighter II while you wash your clothes. Offer the arcade as you wash. Added value. If anybody just wanna play the game, the washer becomes available for free.

It's not hard to make people wanna pay for their laundry if they feel they are getting their money's worth.

It's time mobile devs started to think seriously about foldable smartphones

If the screen folds, does it mean it doesn't break?

Because I want my regular non-fold phone to have that screen that BENDS instead of breaking.

And stop giving the manufacturers any reason to buy new phones every year is always a good reason.

Fighting planned obsolescence and supporting right to repair are not that important if the thing has no reason to collapse into its constituent parts as soon as it hits the floor. Even a swollen battery wouldn't make it fail, (altough you want to fix that asap.)

TLDR

I want a screen that doesn't break, but bends, even when the phone doesn't. I will drink to that.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Can I get the "sensible install" option?

You know:

- Windows Update for actual security updates. Like it was once upon a time, with infinite reboot counter detection.

- It shows file extensions, and doesn't hide any type of files by default. (No more .docx.exe virus files).

- Windows Defender is there, but STFU if everything is fine.

- No adware.

- No collection of data, unless you explicitly turn it on, and never nags you to turn it on either.

- And all that OOBE, er, out-of-the-box.

I know, it takes 1 hour at most for some of this to be setup, but it should happen automatically.

I'm not saying it should fit in a DVD, but yeah, a removable bootable media size of 8GB at most would be nice.

Notice the troll icon.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Doom, anyone?

There´s the occasional tale of a late night match of Doom (or was it Quake?) that was only caught because the game was installed and uninstalled every Sunday, with a corrupted copy of a .DLL that came with the game overriding the Windows original, that was promptly restored on Monday, except when a script failed to run.

(Memory is sketchy, perhaps it was a BOFH edition, I don't remember anymore.)

Instead of playing IN FRONT of the datacenter, playing INSIDE it, was never disregarded as an option.

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Let the enthusiasm phase pass.

As soon the enthusiasts let it go, the AI will reveal its true utility, but you gotta let people throw it around and see where it sticks.

Computers themselves, and lot of other tech had that same psychology trigger, people wanna use it for everything, even impractical things.

Tablets were the tools of yesteryear, for example.

Having a calculator on your wristwatch made a full comeback 40 years later, on a worse solution, a watch with a battery that lasts only 48 hours at most, instead of at least 2 years, but that's the symptom of "look, I can cram a smartphone cpu and screen on my wristwatch".

Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos

Can I get Aero Glass back?

- Please? Pretty Please?

- And hooking up the Start Menu to any corner?

- And an original bootable media that can't be infected, that comes in a box?

- And no Ads?

- And is compatible to WHATEVER I got, from a 486 to the last Ryzen.

- And runs all the Windows stuff I throw at it, from any era. Not a single .ini or .conf file in sight.

- I will pay for it.

- Match those and I will pay, no matter if its called Windows 12 or Linux.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Curiously...

I got a 100 mbps soho router that wraps around in 2020, and goes back to 2000 or something like it. The calendar on it was artificially capped to 2020.

Yes, it should be in a landfill, but it still works.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

Re: I don't get it.

This is exactly what I wanted to know. People call them AI but they are not "hard AI" as defined in sci-fi. I'm so happy to hear that. Carry on.

I don't get it.

Any AI could objectively determine if it can beat another AI by measuring how many moves per second they can evaluate if they decided to play against themselves and then ask about any benchmark if possible. Or maybe they can throw themselves any specific subset of challenges, and see how long they take to evaluate all the moves.

The other AIs never had that idea of asking "how many moves can the ATARI AI analyze per second?" or maybe ask about the algorithms used. Which means they lack fundamental instructions.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

What kind of information to train on an AI...

I'm suddenly glad nobody posted nuclear launch codes, eh?

I wonder if you input enough cd-key codes, will it be able to make a keygen for them?

"Find all the rules used on the creation of these non-random string of letters, and generate one code following those rules" kinda thing.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Let me guess...

I was alluding to a video where a man was riding a chariot in front of a Tesla, and it couldn't decide what to display in the center monitor, but yeah, that would be an appropriate response, and wonder why a Wyvern or Dragon would be sitting in traffic, would be the next thought in sequence.

Let me guess...

Waymo has LIDAR, while Elon refuses to use it.

(Ironically, Starlink uses a technology used in AESA radars, while they refuse to use that in their cars.)

Last time I checked, a lidar can understand a semi-truck and trailer tipped over as an obstacle, or knows there's something ahead, regardless it is a man with a horse and a one-axle cart, or 2 men, or 2 horses, or a dragon, or a wyvern.

Meanwhile, the fact some Luddites, or illegal immigrants, or whatever, MAY have torched some Waymo vehicles had nothing to do with their poor performance...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/09/la_protest_waymo/?td=readmore

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Gotta admit

Sysinternals made some tools that should be part of every OS (and it wasn't part of Windows for some reason).

Listing all the IP traffic, or list every file every executable is accessing were key to solve some issues I was having.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Windows cut the hard drive swap setup screen for years in some languages.

Windows had, up to Windows 10, some screens in setting Windows Media Player, or hard drive swap files, that broke completely when you used another language. I mean, the kind of thing like the button disappearing down the window because it had no auto-resize or scroll bars.

If even "small and limp" can let such mistakes go into production, I wonder what anybody else pressed for time and with lack of QA would face.

It's not always user's fault, but something gets in the way, like screen resolution, or big icons ruining a layout. Manuals are good and all, but nobody can predict when something like that happens.

Ever tried a Windows 95 with too many program entries and low resolution? Some of those never show up in the Start Menu, and the scroll icons fail to appear in some modes you had back then.

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

What do you mean, there is no RC version of it?

Ok, a first glance on google showed no RC version of a 747 with a shuttle on top, in flyable toy version.

Static displays, you got both for the 747 with Shuttle and the Antonov 225 Mirya with the Buran on top, though.

Apparently, there is a Space Shuttle RC on its own, but no 747 attached for mere US$26.95 (https://www.museumofflightstore.org/).

That would be interesting.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Babbage rule...?

Exactly, the main reason to not allow AI being used to write terms. The students must reach any conclusions by their own reasoning.

Babbage was right, regardless, as you agreed. That's the whole point I was trying to put accross. No matter how good the models are, the data input sanitized/curated, the AI can reach a statistically sound research, but the whole thing will be bogus, and nobody learned nothing.

However,

AI can become very good at picking up plagiarism for the same reasons you gave. It works with patterns and statistically similar wording. (I just googled one named justdone.com.)

Babbage rule...?

Remember the Charles Babbage rule: garbage in, garbage out. (If you never head of it, people asked Charles Babbage this famous quote: "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?")

So, yeah, if you load AI with the wrong stuff, it will spit out the wrong answers...

BUUUUT....

...most AI was trained with a lot of right stuff, so no matter students ask the AI, it will spit out the right answers. It kinda proves Babbage and disproves him at the same time, IF you consider how the AI was trained... or not.

The students are putting in the wrong figures, but getting the right answers *because the AI was trained on most subjects with valid data*. So yeah, you have to consider it cheating, but I find it amusing AI can subvert Babbage in a sense.

The whole situation is hilarious, and AI has to be banned for this purpose.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Can you spoof a webcam filming lava lamps?

Just asking. The lava lamps are a true RNG, but the camera filming them is definitely hackable... or not.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Percussive or gravitational maintenance.

When the gear is fine, but the people using it need the maintenance instead...

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

I'd have nuclear batteries.

Even if the batteries can't supply the whole current during usage, but they recharge the lithium ones slowly. Just power it off and let it recharge over night. Even cellphones, too.

Fallout be damned.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Ironical.

My old man has a programming book for Cobol, I believe. The book is intact. The punched cards at the back of the book were intact. The included floppy disk - 5 1/4" - was sadly unreadable.

Another ironical place to store eletronics is a salt mine. The same brine that could destroy eletronics that can rust away is impossible inside an ultra-dry salt mine.

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Ace Combat 7 Skies Unknown made real.

Ace Combat 7 depicts full-sized containers hiding (large) drone launchpads.

Life imitates art.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Notepad++

I've been using Notepad++ forever. It understands most languages and scripting tags, like C and XML.

It would be infinitely more useful if notepad came with a hex viewer, and could identify programming languages source code tags and such.

It doesn't need formatting tools.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: I just wanna game.

Veering slightly off-topic, GTA should be a veritable mess, not so much the game itself, but Rockstar Launcher, so I agree with that assesment of PUBG and Destiny 2. I guess Marvel Rivals should be on the same shelf.

As for everything else, I need to cobble together any old machine to verify everything, but that's me, so I will thank you for the solid advice there. An Ubuntu running Gnome should be my starting point, it seems, some of the things in the article mentions Gnome.

Good job. Thanks.

I just wanna game.

Steam Proton and Bottles got me curious now.

I assume that whatever runs on Steam Deck with Linux should have a shoe in Proton and should work OOB.

I also assume that Doom and Quake should also work out of the box and natively on Linux, just because these had the source code made available.

When the time comes, I am coming back here and doing research on my own.

Honestly, if I get Steam working with most games, I would be inclined to ditch the crude mess of Windows behind me like it was a wartime PTSD.

On the other hand, fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys left me with a bad taste in my mouth 20 years ago, and if a single Linux Distro forces me to open a .INI or .conf file or whatever to tweak stuff manually, I'm gonna scream profanities into the wind.

I'm gonna wait, and see what happens.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: What an interesting omission in that talk: recycling.

I never heard someone saying: "oh how easy is to recycle this without lead-tin solder! (ROHS)! Look how more profitable to recycle these boards are!" Said no one ever.

In fact, to reuse these boards in any fashion in 3rd world countries, they would probably have new capacitors soldered to them using tin-lead solder in the first place...

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg...

... but if we all upgrade to windows 11 it goes to 33kg.

Windows reports two CPU speeds because one would be too simple

Overclocker's wet dream...

Consists of:

"Intel blah blah blah @ 1.5GHz"

and then...

[CPU], clocked at [4.5Ghz....]

while something like SuperPi is stressing the CPU.

Latest patch leaves some Windows 10 machines stuck in recovery loops

I still wonder...

...Are the same mistakes being made over and over since Windows XXXX to cause ALL the bugs, and they manifest at random in future versions? Like nobody bothers to check all the old bugs and coding habits that led to the bugs, and just pack them up in a new box with a bigger number...?

...Or are these genuinely new bugs?

You know, like making a new plane without ever reading any NTSB reports on mechanical failures of planes, and make new planes with all the same defects?

When a Windows 12 come out (oh sweet summer child do you think they won't do a 12?), will these bugs happen again? Ad infinitum?

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

In another 50 years...

... I hope mankind reaches a dilemma:

- Do we swing by Voyager 1 using our first FTL drive, pick it up and put it in a museum;

- Give it an overhaul and put it exactly where it was retrieved and let it continue its mission;

- Let it die as is...

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: Coconut Team Fortress 2 moment.

Addendum:

- Yes it is a game.

- The file is encoded inside a texture pack and is labeled coconut.vtf, and you'd need a interpreter to find and open it, since it is encoded inside game assets. There is no hidden steganography on it.

- Technically the game doesn't need it to run, but Steam will run checksum and file integrity checks before running ANY game, so again, technically, you need it just to pass file verification tools. Should you delete it and run Steam's integrity check, it will download the file again, just to match the registered files upon version checking the game.

- The whole thing is a joke, but a solid foundation one. I wish more software kept checksums and failsafe tools available for when you try to run them in a corrupted state. Steam is commendable on that account.

A little unwarranted research explains the myth.

Coconut Team Fortress 2 moment.

There is a picture of a coconut (coconut.jpg) on the TF2 install files. Remove it and the game crashes or doesn't install. It is just a 256 x 256 bitmap, but it doesn't work without it.

There is no explanation why.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

No, I bought it from a stand where it had the Office logo copied in black and white on a piece of paper inside a clear plastic envelope, with a Dr. Hank CD-R media inside, and the serial number written on the back of that piece of paper with a felt pen, and also the same serial written on the CD-R itself.

Later they added a serial.txt to the CD itself, but that was years after the first versions.

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

It's not even for authentication or DRM purposes.

The most damning are the games that claim DRM purposes / authentication, when in fact a one-time call upon installation suffices.

Such was true, that some of those could turn to a one-time auth at setup, and never call home again, and did so.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Loved that lift.

I want a lift equipped with a disposal device now...

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

El Reg knocked out of the park on this one.

That was beautiful, I want that one. Take my money.

The time-bombed versions are here, though... for the Brazilian version.

https://www.microsoft.com/pt-br/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise

Windows 11 stops freaking out over wallpaper customization

I miss AcdSee... and apps that worked DESPITE Windows.

I miss that tiny app that would take your picture, and add a calendar to it. No widget taking memory, just a 200kB JPEG (back then) rewritten everyday with a calendar added to it. The whole app took 50kB or something. Of course you could rotate the picture in the desktop every x hours, something Windows itself would eventually do. And stop doing.

And Wallpaper Engine is very good at putting VIDEOS as desktop wallpapers. You can throw your own videos at it, or it will animate a lake effect over a marked surface of water on your choice of picture, and´put it in a MPEG file that can be looped.

This app will tax your graphics cards, but otherwise it is mostly harmless, never had an issued with it.

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Homer in the bar...

I haven't seen Homer in a bar surrounded by Ghibli style characters...

[0.003 seconds on google..]

Aaaaand there it is...

https://www.reddit.com/r/simpsonsshitposting/comments/1jmickx/this_ghibli_ai_on_socials_disgust_me/

I think it is wrong. It should pay to Ghibli studios for. every. single. image.

This one is ok though, made still in Simpson style (the image can be update at any moment, hence a description of what I saw):

https://imgflip.com/tag/homer+bar?sort=latest

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

9 track tape?

I'm just happy the Government DOES backups of stuff, and that they work (or at least they should).

Now, if they should be using LTO 9 or newer (they should) and some near-online caching on newer media (probably a good idea) I'd leave to the experts, not DOGE.

As long it isn't on reel-to-reel 9 track tapes anymore, I'm ok.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

No wind to spread dust.

One thing that bothers solar panels heavily on this planet is the wind picking dust up and covering them*. Even if they are less efficient being made from moon stuff, let's say that real estate and dust will be no issue.

*No really, I read about some LARGE solar projects that were ruined because the panels needed dusting. Several square kilometers of panels that could not be watered or dusted in any automated fashion. Not to mention the panels were not at human reach heights; ladders or access to said panels for manual dusting labor was also unfeasible.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: start ms-cxh:localonly

I was looking for that one.

Adding an email you are basically putting your PC in an MS Domain. Instead you want to login in your own domain, which would be nice to use the same login in any machine in my house in a centralized way.

This is brilliant.

Re: Meh

I created one fake Hotmail account to allow Dirt 2 to save local progress (Windows games, remember that crud?) with the zip code of Manhattan, so it would be "supported".

I still have that around somewhere.

Re: start ms-cxh:localonly

Apparently that original workaround still works if you add this, before that link you posted goes down:

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /fshutdown /r /t 0