* Posts by DropBear

4748 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

DropBear

I DO have a LOCAL copy of every email I ever sent or received (ehhh... sans spam and near-spam) in my Thunderbird and its backup. I use Gmail but I wouldn't trust it to not arbitrarily lock me out one day as far as I can throw them - the utter fucks at GMX did just that, and never even bothered to explain. But for me it would matter not one bit, other than having to find a replacement...

DropBear

How about no. I'm still using a VERY old Thunderbird with its traditional UI, and I have zero plans to move on to a "fresh new and exciting" piece of crap.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

DropBear

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

...so I suppose I shouldn't even try to ask where "the head" is...?

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

DropBear
Angel

EXACTLY! We need to ban CrowdStrike NOW, OR ELSE!

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

DropBear

Wait, what? No HTTPS? Or was it company-sanctionedly scuttled...?

Mozilla is trying to push me out because I have cancer, CPO says in bombshell lawsuit

DropBear

I find it remarkable that someone fighting cancer still finds it a priority to squabble over holding a public office as opposed to, you know, worrying about staying alive and what they'll be remembered for...

DropBear

There's no longer any such thing as "one of the". As far as engines go, there's Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. That's it. And I warn you, If you try to mention Goanna or somesuch other shenanigans, there will have to be fisticuffs between us...

DropBear
Thumb Down

Yes. I use that thing. Out of sheer stubbornness. It's borderline non-functional by now for viewing any actual websites, only not on the "almost" side, but on the other one...

From network security to nyet work in perpetuity: What's up with the Kaspersky US ban?

DropBear
Devil

Bah, humbug! The only one I trust is Thunderbyte Antivirus - as I have personally verified it can restore even infected files to binary-identical originals. If it has a pre-infection database, it will even cut the file length back down to the original size - but the binary content is the same, either way...

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

DropBear

Re: Language

Only in English. For instance, there ISN'T any corresponding term to the verb "to experience" in either Hungarian or Romanian. Any translation of a sentence containing it is a kludge.

DropBear

Re: "NASA wanted a specialized craft to make sure the job is done right first time."

Donnie Darko has entered the chat and started typing...

DropBear

Re: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission

No, wait, I know! Why not just ask Tessier-Ashpool whether they might be interested in buying it...?

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Can't help wondering

Sounds like the very first mistake is assuming to being able to tell what the outcome of any particular court case will be based on what "the law says". "Justice" is just another word for "Russian roulette, only much worse".

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

DropBear
Megaphone

Re: I was the problem luser

Aaaah, "wellies". Right up there with "Tannoy", a word EVERYONE knows (as long as you're Bri'ish - or at least five-eyes, presumably) and absolutely nobody else has ever heard otherwise.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

DropBear
Devil

Re: This is why we ALWAYS test new procedures on a COPY of the production database

No, BECAUSE we are old and experienced rightfully paranoid. FTFY....

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

DropBear

Re: There is an

Have you ever actually tried that...? There's no satisfaction in it whatsoever. It's a hollow victory. It's no fun unless you get to nuke that bridge from orbit, mad grin included, with maximum prejudice. Oh, and you can promise me the full worth of Elon for a single day of work and I'll STILL laugh in your face and say "no" if you pissed me off properly.

DropBear
Flame

TRAITOR! On this side of the pond it's Do (a deer, a female deer), Re, Mi, Fa, Sol...

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Delivery Tracking

What miraculous land is this you live in...? Package marked "unable to deliver, nobody home" even though you spent your entire day glued to the door. Because couriers get assigned impossible targets nowadays, and when targets are impossible you stop even trying to fulfill them and just flat out fake, lie and cheat.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Yeah

Wait, you worked on Toy Claw Machines...? SHAME...! SHAME...! SHAME...!

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

DropBear

Re: Ouch

You mean you DON'T have a moat around your garden...?

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

DropBear

Re: air CON

I would, but for some reason having my whole body covered in a thin insulator being the only thing separating it from a bunch of wiring at mains voltage genuinely scares the shit out of me.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

DropBear
Windows

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

I once wrote TSRs. Now I feel terminally exhausted at the mere thought of looking at one up close. But I swear I'm not old, nawww, not at all - it all happened a mere few years ago. Yes, in the nineties, a few years ago, that's what I said, did I not...? Those new bullet-time effects in this recent Matrix movie are pretty slick though - I've heard they plan to make it a trilogy...

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

DropBear
Devil

Are there official training flowcharts for that...? Because if I have to use my multiple-decades-powered experience of thinking outside the box to find and fix the problem then "HP & Lenovo" can go eat shit and I'll fully claim any resulting success and any proceeds of it as my own.

DropBear

Re: The hell that

I am greatly puzzled - if the interlocks held, why was there anything to replace...?

EDIT: for that matter, even if the interlocks FAILED, why was there anything to replace...?

DropBear
FAIL

Re: Audi electrics, oof

One evening I parked my VW B4 Passat just fine, only to have it crank but completely refuse to start the next morning. Turns out it's an openly known secret that the relay supplying the ECU (109 I think...?) has a bulk fabrication defect that WILL fail on you at some point, no exceptions. Replaced the relay, car started right up. Opened the old relay - there's this massive cold solder joint that failed to solder properly due to an obvious proximity to a larger metal bit soaking away all the heat. Jolly well done (and covered up), you VW fuckers...

DropBear
Devil

Re: had a printer with the same fault

Now, I would be inclined to take this as a personal affront if only were I not aware that (completely useless) checklist-reading tech support was equally bad regardless of physical location.

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: It is a fine idea

At some point, my old CRT TV suddenly just stopped turning on - investigation revealed that a large transistor in the PSU simply crater-exploded for some reason. I replaced it (and any suspicious passives around it), but I was the whole while scared shitless of working around an (even unplugged) CRT, for fear of touching something still charged. TV works just fine to this day, btw.

DropBear

I have that reminder permanently engraved on an old set of tailpipes (and my leather jacket). I'm still amazed that there appeared to be precisely zero nanoseconds between riding normally and sliding on the asphalt behind my bike throwing off sparks like crazy. The human brain is a funny thing, and apparently impact sensitive, even in a full-face helmet.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

DropBear

Re: Well it's clearly working as designed....

Okay, admit it - it is YOU, little Bobby Tables, isn't it...

NASA's Mars InSight uploads its (probably) final image, shares it in a tweet

DropBear

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Dang... last seen that movie as a kid somewhere in the eighties, still left its mark on me... gotta re-watch it one of these days for sure.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

DropBear

Re: Bad design

I'm still using the keyboard I got with my first 386. Still works perfectly. Zero signs of wear on the keys. It's a Mitsumi with a DIN-5 plug...

DropBear

Re: If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

Extremely questionable reliability. What you want instead is a DCF77 receiver.

DropBear

Re: Press the button

Was the allocated IP 127.0.0.1 perchance...?

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Manual is optional,

Indeed, some people very obviously flat-out refuse to learn anything they don't want to, no matter how idiotically simple, insisting the entire time that they "can't". It doesn't matter that were that actually true they should absolutely not be allowed to get out of bed in the morning - they just are these special snowflakes who "can't" learn this one simple thing.

PayPal ditches passwords, at least on Apple devices

DropBear

Yeah, well, no thanks. I have no interest in accessing anything that needs to be secured on a goddamned mobile device. Some hatchlings might find this hard to grasp, but some folks still insist on using desktop hardware for ALL their computing needs, which thankfully tends not to have any "biometric" hardware at all (much like my current smartphone, actually - it's a FEATURE).

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

DropBear

Re: For about 10 years or so now...

Better yet, don't agree to BE available outside business hours, no matter on who's hardware. Getting a company-supplied phone to be bothered on instead of my own would give me less than zero comfort for ruining my day in the first place.

DropBear

I currently use a second hand Thinkcentre M90 ultra-small form factor as my media server. By "NUC standards" it doesn't even qualify, but it DOES have room for a full-sized 3.5" many-tera HDD, and by desktop standards it's astonishingly small (and quiet). It even accommodates my PCI (sic) TV grabber card, which is a major plus for me...

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

DropBear

Re: Shut up and do your job!

There's a place and time where to mock the whole "woke" thing, fully deservingly. THIS IS NOT IT.

Lightweight Linux distribution Slax rides again with v11.2

DropBear
Facepalm

Please do excuse my late reply - sorting this out was nowhere near the top of my list of priorities. However, new developments suggest the problem (as usual) wasn't on my end - there is aparently a closed bug on the Slax bug tracker attributing this problem to, uh, "blkid" simply not noticing nvme partitions (until pointed out to it by explicitly running it with those as arguments (!!!)) in spite of the rest of the distro/kernel having zero problems with nvme on any level. It's as nice a demonstration of "only use any Linux variant if you LIKE having problems all the time" as I've ever needed or have seen.

Semiconductor average lead time breaks half-year barrier

DropBear

"Grew"?!? WTF? We've been getting year-plus delivery terms on some fairly common ICs even back in January...

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

DropBear

Re: LibreOffice, for example, is every bit as good as Microsoft Office

...and more often than you'd like - it's ONLY available as source. And frankly, screw that.

DropBear

Re: LibreOffice, for example, is every bit as good as Microsoft Office

Except MS doesn't control or own most of the apps REAL LIFE FOLKS use.

DropBear

FYI

Loophole: Windows AME.

DropBear

Re: Simple? My arse!

XnviewMP. With absolute authority. It's so well established, it's one of the few image viewers that already has plugin support for the brand new QOI image format...

DropBear

Re: ... and to a racing driver, F1 isn't hard, either

WTF? I absolutely CAN re-arrange my Win7 start menu just fine. Well, yes, it's actually "Classic Start Menu" but why on Earth would anyone use anything else...?

DropBear

Re: The joys of Linux

HAHAHA. No. My boss won't even let me work on my PC unless I absolutely have to, or gets out of his way to turn the damn thing on LONG before I need to use it, because the win10 on it - not powered on every day - wants to apply updates EVERY TIME IT'S POWERED ON, and every time it prevents the machine from doing anything user-facing for any number of dozens of minutes. No, the machine isn't a many-core beast, but it isn't exactly obsolete either - this is just the nature of "YOU DON'T NEED TO WORK, I HAVE MORE IMPORTANT STUFF TO DO NOW" win10 updates.

DropBear
FAIL

NO.

Sorry, you're objectively wrong. And Linux is not so much hard to use, it's a **bitch** to use.

See, you're referring to the "appliance" use case. Let me browse, play some music, edit a document in Libreoffice - yeah, chances are you can do that with zero fuss on any hardware, any distro. The problem is, the SECOND you try using Linux AS A COMPUTER, IT WILL FIGHT YOU FOR AS LONG AS YOU KEEP ATTEMPTING TO USE IT. And I don't care about your counter-arguments, because whatever they are, they are invalid, full stop. Or maybe you'd like to explain how come one can't even check a file hash recursively with "rhash" on ANY distro currently seeing as how ALL releases bar the unreleased Github master branch are utterly broken...? And yeah, that's just the latest punch in the gut - as someone who does, in spite of all this, try to use Linux, I know for a fact that the number of those punches is legion, and they NEVER stop. Yeah, Linux is a sharp tool; but it's for card-carrying masochists ONLY.

EU, US close to replacing defunct Privacy Shield II

DropBear
Facepalm

NO.

I am basically forced by financial circumstances to "live in my mum's basement", and I can't afford to buy food without looking at the sticker price; yet I am supporting NOYB because this bullshit HAS to stop somewhere, and right now they are the only ones doing anything about it. That's all. Oh, and fuck whatever new "agreement" they manage to come up with.

Microsoft says hello again to China, goodbye to Russia

DropBear

Well, if all else fails I guess there's always ReactOS...

Intel energizes decades-old real-time Linux kernel project

DropBear
Facepalm

...and this is why I still MUCH prefer a GRBL firmware running ON A MICROCONTROLLER (a humble Arduino Uno) to a RT-enabled LinuxCNC running ON A PC. You want real-time? Stop fooling the fuck around and use actual hardware fit for the job (which admittedly the quoted Arduino example is NOT the best example for in 2022, for that particular job (CNC) - even though it's still doing it in a quite honourable fashion...)