Posts by JLV

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: porn collection

Now stop that jivin' it's not the size that matters, it's what's stored on it.

> She gets all excited

> When she begs for my small five inch

> Record of my favorite porn

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

As a Canadian, I only live 35 km from the border. I rather like Washington and Oregon and like to take the train or drive down the coast but will be sitting this out till MAGA is gone.

It's not just political though. Think about it. Under the current circumstances you could easily run afoul of something or another and be turned back. And then you'd have an entry refusal on your US border records which would make any future trips much more problematic, even years past Trump. Including for non-trivial stuff like medical trips or flying anywhere with a layover in the US. So think of it as an investment to protect your travel capabilities, including to the US.

Wonder if El Reg counts for social media?

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

Am a-gonna hallucinate myself a safe landing procedure.

AI mania to swell datacenter capex to $1.6T by 2030 – if the bubble doesn't pop first

Re: and the winner is...

The cool thing is that as they outsource foundry work to TMSC they don't really have that much skin in the game themselves. Unlike old style manufacturers of say tulips that had to plant the damn things somewhere.

When it crashes good times will stop, but Nvidia will still have pocketed ma$$ive moolah along the way.

TMSC on the other hand apparently is a bit wary of investing into too much capacity as the semiconductor industry is famous for boom and bust cycles.

Unlike the dot com crash, I am not sure if we'll have a rich medium of dark fiber capacity to grow something more useful in the future. Those chips may not be really all that useful for general purpose computing and by the time someone knows what else to do with them, they will be seriously obsolete.

> ... the first and only rule of holes: when you're in one stop digging.

Not if you're in the biz of selling shovels or bridges tho.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

> Faraday cage to block the antenna and prevent tracking.

This is Russia, so I look forward to the experience gained with "cope cages" in Ukraine being leveraged onto pretty Porsches.

Best of luck, comrades.

'Exploitation is imminent' as 39 percent of cloud environs have max-severity React hole

Yup, a number of the JS frameworks do server-side rendering, not just React.

Motivation is mostly to lessen the user's machine's workload search engine optimization for marketing.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/SSR

Well, now you have HTMX (a very thin JS client-side layer) which takes over some of the logic of rendering dynamic HTML via JS in the client or backend.

Basically, it triggers AJAX-style calls to the server but then accepts HTML as a response and then injects the result in appropriate locations in the DOM. Very, very nice if one prefers to avoid JS as much as possible and prefers to stick to your poison of choice like Go, Python or Ruby. A little bit like the old Hypercard, deceptively powerful (though it has some limitations). It's better to think of it as enhanced HTML rather than a JS framework.

You can for example start out with a form in an initial state, trigger an event on user input to call the server and then have the server send HTML to swap out the entire form (or only part of it) with new content. Allowing you to use your server backend's stable templating technology, rather than some hyper complex JS framework moving a mile a minute.

Really quite cool and very quick to learn, though it takes a while to wrap your head about how to use it. Not how it works, because it's really quite simple, being based just on urls, event triggers and replacement targets which are specified with hx- attributes, like hx-put/hx-get/hx-target in html.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htmx

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Good grief!

Actually I agree with you there as well. Which is why I made the distinction that line managers and line workers are not the problem.

But you have a whole level of management who doesn't really know what the worker bees are doing, doesn't have the domain knowledge and in this instance, doesn't have project management/direction competency. They are far from the cheapest of the lot as well.

Of course, as you point out you have IT folk who, if they are any good, indeed ought to flee. Both for better pay, but also because mediocrity in your peers and superiors is depressing.

Does the salary grid in the UK public sector allow good pay progression based on high skills, rather than just management level and/or seniority? Honest question.

Could also be that the FANG and AI "economy" has been sucking up skilled IT to chase such important things as making Facebook feeds more shiny. Meaning public sector and smaller firms find it hard to offer competitive wages.

Re: Good grief!

Kinda, but not exactly.

Each successive failure makes the system more risk averse and they aim to "solve" the problem by having bigger and bigger contracts, specs and rules to bid on public contracts. Meanwhile, since they don't want to be "led by the nose" by vendors they've learned not to trust, they insist upon flexibility and their ability to request changes at any point in the project timelines as their God-given right.

A small business could not navigate the procurement process. Granted, that suits the big serial failers like Crapita just fine.

But it's not like you can fix it by spotting which government manager got a brand new high end Fiat sedan when they decided to buy Olivetti ( an anecdote once told to me in France ).

The systems have evolved in that direction to minimize risk, but the approach taken is not working. A diagnosis over-focussed on corruption, rather than on a fundamentally flawed approach is unlikely to help much.

You see the same thing with the military industrial complex BTW. At least it seems like the Ukraine War has woken up some countries to the need to accept new blood in their vendors, and take smaller, faster projects on. Traditional drones cost 10x as much and are not as capable (see Switchblade).

Re: Good grief!

I don't know if it makes sense to blame "the government" here. Not because I particularly want to go out of my way to defend them, but these projects take years to spin up and flush $ down the crapper and the litany of fails stretches way past any one PM, or party's, terms.

Procurement procedures, project management, vendor picking... that's all more of a "civil service" and, well, yes, legal thingy than "the government".

Public sector IT does not know how to build systems or get them built. That's true of the UK, but it's true of many countries as well, such as Canada (Phoenix Fed IT $1.5B , Long gun registry $2B)

Maybe it would take an incredibly competent and courageous government to rip up the rulebook and force change. Probably by defanging the mid-managerial "stakeholder & consensus" culture in public sector IT and their ability to flood systems with change requests. Probably by holding vendors' feet to the fire and refusing to purchase from serial failers. Probably by reducing project contracts to more comprehensible volumes (ever heard of a 6000 page spec to replace an existing payroll system? I have).

At that point of complexity a vendor's core competency isn't about successfully delivering a project, it is about who can successfully navigate the procurement bureaucracy. And Crapita seems very very good at that

But any one government seems much less at fault than it being the result of decades of plaque getting deposited into the procurement arteries, over multiple governments and by thousands of overpaid public sectors mid-managers. And thousands overpaid can-barely-code "consultants". And maybe too much "Agile" to boot.

p.s. I am not pissing on the public sector in general. The actual line workers and line managers deliver services that are needed, under challenging conditions. But the bureaucracy a few levels above is incredible - I worked for years as a consultant in the French public sector, direct experience speaking.

Seems to me a solid start at improving the UK govt's apparently crap IT procurement would need only 3 words:

NEVER BUY CAPITA.

That's it. Just bake into your procurement rules. Now, that doesn't solve the problem, of course. But at least it gives you the possibility of solving the problem, by picking someone less guaranteed to fail.

p.s. I'm Canadian, so we'll just pretend Phoenix - IBM doing PeopleSoft payroll for the Feds, 1.5$B nuked - never happened ;-)

MongoDB talks up its AI chops by talking down PostgreSQL

MongoDB is AI scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: "intelligent athletic apparel"

Mens sana in corpore sano.

Did you mean instead to express the fact that `a fool and their money are easily parted via the sirens of "athletic" wear`? (esp. when they come in "intelligent" or "tactical" flavors)

As evidenced by $100+ sweat yoga pants?

PostHog admits Shai-Hulud 2.0 was its biggest ever security bungle

Re: Shai-Hulud

on a remote desert planet, where the locals don't matter much, preferably

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Of all the ways you cloud have done it

OMG, don't give MS any ideas here.

Re: Oh FFS -

I didn't do anything as fancy as that. But what I did do was to run a differ for all the (English) strings that our product held, comparing them to the last-translated release.

Then, along with all the other prep, I sent our translation team a list flagging the actual changes, making their life much easier than the teams doing the work on other languages who had to figure out what had changed for themselves.

( Yes, I tried to convince HQ to do this for other languages, but you know how not-invented-here gets perceived. And worst of all corporate sins, this was using an unknown hobby language named after a snake that I had picked up reading Dr. Dobbs. 1998 ).

Does sound like a bit of drama on the strings thingy, if it gets purged from release to release.

My impression of where Windows really used to bloat a system is in applying patches and them keeping them around forever in its installer directories. Having tried to emulate the Linux/Mac $HOME experience by putting Windows (7?) in a 50GB C: drive and installing everything else in D: I watched in horror as it gradually bloated itself into running out of space. I don't know if they've fully fixed that yet, been off Windows for years now. No, having to run special programs and having to manually follow internet guidance doesn't count as MS having its act together here.

Latest Servo release hints at a real Rust alternative to Chromium

Re: There's more to Rust than...

> huge swathes of code are not simply marked as 'unsafe'?

That's a good question. Hopefully not. My understanding - limited - of Rust is that unsafe is both discouraged and also not necessarily something that is unavoidable, most of the time.

i.e. for those projects with a large enough amount of eyeballs, hopefully the unsafe swathes are under scrutiny and refactored to not-unsafe code whenever possible.

Mind you, not everything is necessarily Rust-suited. I have no real idea of how valid this was, but one guy who wants to develop a new browser IIRC Ladybird said that they prototyped with several programming languages for (I guess) the GUI part of it. He claimed that Rust's approach (or non-approach if you see it that way) to object oriented programming made it unsuited to this domain, where nested widgets are best thought of as objects. Went with Swift instead.

Re: There's more to Rust than...

- ripgrep - enhanced grep

- sd - enhanced sed (ah, yes, mentioned already).

- difftastic - a syntax-aware diff engine

- bat - enhanced cat

- uv - a pip replacement taking the Python packaging/tooling ecosystem by storm.

- polars - a dataframe engine akin to Pandas, but with a much saner API and screaming fast.

There's a lot going on in that space. It's allowing some pretty cutting edge stuff by people whom you wouldn't necessarily have trusted to code defensively enough on C/C++ (so which would have had to be coded in lower-performance languages).

It's not necessarily end user-facing software but a lot of good stuff coming through for the developer/admin tools.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Re: So the Australian government are promoting e-waste and forcing updates...

I'll share a counter-factual to this sad story.

Years ago, Vancouver's 911 got an emergency call from someone who had been trapped, literally, in the woods of Stanley Park, within city limits, for a week (yes, it's within city limits, but most of it is a not particularly accessible and sparsely visited dense forest).

What happened is that he was homeless and sleeping in the park. During a storm some trees fell and trapped him under them, more like a cave than him being pinned IIRC. He could not get out and had no way to call for help. He did have a phone but it had been disconnected months before.

After a week he decided to try it anyway. Turns out 911 in Canada will go through no matter what (honestly, that seems more a network-side concern than something the phone should be concerned about). He managed to describe his problem before the battery died and was rescued, not much the worse for wear.

I dunno, but this seems like a massive fail to block emergency calls somehow, as long as the phone in question is still capable to get on the air for other purposes.

Google Chrome bug exploited as an 0-day - patch now or risk full system compromise

Re: In general, do not run unknown code on your computers

True, but the alternative is also to run a v1.0 internet, using html + css only. That's what you are doing, right, as I assume that means you are smarter than the rest of us and running a browser with JS entirely disabled? Lynx maybe?

My take on it is to run anything that involves money on Firefox with NoScript. And day-to-day browsing on Vivaldi. In any case, JS on browsers is pretty strongly sandboxed and sees so much adversarial pressure that is quite battle-hardened, maybe a lot more than a lot of other stuff.

Wrt to say Electron (which runs VS Code), which another comment touched upon, I remember reading that is way less secure than browsers and tends to have access to the filesystem and OS...

Re: Do I need to panic?

https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/updates/

> November 17, 2025

> This update includes a few important crash fixes and security fixes from Chromium upstream, including for CVE-2025-13223 (Type Confusion in V8), which has a known exploit in the wild.

I assumed from the V8 aspect that it would affect Vivaldi so went to update it, but this type of article would certainly benefit from flagging what's Chrome-only vs. what also affects the Chrome spinoffs.

And maybe even Node.js stuff, since it's the js engine that's involved.

Fortinet finally cops to critical make-me-admin bug under active exploitation

IIRC Fortinet regularly makes the news on the Risky Business podcast - specialized in covering cyber security.

Always for the wrong reasons... :-( and the hosts always take a poke at them

ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared

Re: How is this a mystery?

That vid doesn't really say what you think it does...

- expert about lines: ERP guy (unusually competent, if he was say a stand-in for an Accenture dude)

- dude to his left: ERP salesman, "oh, let's not be hasty in saying that our system can't do that!"

- all other 3: 2 incompetent customers with changing requirements that make limited, if any, sense. 1 incompetent boss to them who isn't following anything anyway, but speaks boardroom.

It's a funny video, true, but it mostly pins the blame on the customer side if you watch it closely. Except for the sales guy.

Re: Lack of committent / involvement from the whole org

Maybe a good solution would be an ERP implementation team that would just rotate through councils and bring them up on existing ERPs? With maybe shared customizations? A small starter team could train up people to scale up.

Mature ERPs are actually fairly robust. That by no means guarantees success when getting them up and running with an incompetent and greedy consultancy and with internal staff that doesn't really know how to manage those types of projects.

I don't know how the pay could be made attractive in the current remuneration frameworks, but at Birmingham levels of screwup$ if savings could be re-routed somehow that could buy everyone involved Lamborghinis ;-) OK, maybe Lambos are unwarranted but if you don't pay well enough, the best will well go to the private sector.

Honestly the factors that screw up #1, the ERP, would likely screw up #2 as well.

And #3 would be bit dicey, considering the capabilities/productivity of the COBOL stack to do what's table stakes in a modern IT system. And the scarcity of COBOL programmers (yes, I can code the stuff, to an extent).

And you would still be at risk of screwing up as in #1 and #2, even on #3.

The only real risk you avoid with #2 and #3 is if the purchased ERP system is straight out bad/immature, out of the box. Or unsuited for your requirements.

Not letting your directors get taken out golf tournaments by vendors, limiting their intake of cool aid, buying mature ERPs that have a few years under the belt and a record of working in your industry peers goes a long way on the ERP-only side of the risk. Don't buy ERP systems that have only been used with much lesser throughput requirements than yours is one classic to watch out for. Sending out 500k invoices a day is not the same thing as 5000 a month and the system may not be able to scale the processing up. Don't buy an ERP payroll that has never been used with unions if you run a union shop. Don't consolidate 23 union systems into 1 without thinking it through (the Phoenix fiasco, Canada).

I'd also say avoid some well known screw ups in the big consulting firms for implementation. Again, that's not very platform specific - they will fail just as well on #2 and #3 than on #1. Easier said than done though.

This.

I did work for decades for an ERP vendor, bit of consulting first, then staff developer, then free lance consulting.

Most businesses need to ingest data, support some business requirements and then put out some more data. Take HR + Payroll, for example. People have to get paid, benefits tallied up, taxes dealt with, hires, etc...

IF you choose your ERP wisely ( hurdle #1 and a big one) it should be able to accommodate your legal and contractual obligations. Not always (one vendor sold a system designed for a given billing throughput to a multinational with a 10x-100x bigger bigger requirement and that bankrupted them as they signed contracts based on improved efficiency projections).

But, it may not work exactly the way you are used to. At this point, hurdle #2 you need to triage: do you adjust the ERP? do you adjust your business processes? Hey, the consulting company doesn't mind if you adjust the ERP: ca-ching, ca-ching.

Let's say you go the route of adjusting your business processes? Does the ultimate owner of the project, have the authority to push it through? That should probably the HR director in this case. If not, months or years of bickering about the color of the bike shed.

OK, next hurdle. You're replacing your ERP and there are many things your old ERP did not do. Thankfully the new one can do everything!

Arrgh. You need to go live with a MVP of your new ERP to replicate your business processes, on whatever scope you've picked, test thoroughly and minimize risk. Doing all sorts of new things is not minimizing the risk. Again, the consulting firms will not mind billing you up the wazoo. Business transformation!

You really need to have consultants that know how to parametrize, not develop (I was always the latter), on the ERP. That means people who know the business domain, know what the users are asking for, know what they don't need, know what they need, know what the ERP delivers easily, know what needs coding and aim to minimize that coding.

One conversion I saw was moving a measly 200 person business unit. But, as they were unionized, they did not want to change the paper paysheet. The ERP vendor could output the exact same numbers - normal, table stakes. What it couldn't do was to replicate an AS400 based layout. Their idiotic consultancy got busy reverse engineering the printout engine, using coders who barely knew hte language it was coded in. Heck, the only thing that team could do, barely, was to code COBOL. I taught courses on that reporting language, but after looking at the printout engine for a week or so, I was not much the wiser on how it worked (that ERP vendor never puts comments in their code). This is the type of engine that takes years to build with a dedicated senior team.

This is why this whole line about not needing to adjust your business processes is silly. If you have that attitude, buy a compiler and a database and getting coding. Good luck replicating a payroll system in the 2020s in-house ;-) Jokes aside: many ERP system do allow you to get down and dirty and to start coding, often using the same tools as the vendor's developers. People look at a requirement and say: oh, sure, we can do that using the ERP vendor's toolset! And they are almost always wrong when it comes to customizing core functionality. If by miracle it works it will make future updates miserable and typically result in staying on obsolete releases of the ERP. But I have seen that happen many times.

Then you need to have a very good plan on training and selling the whole shebang to your line workers and little worker bees. Often the customer's representatives aren't line workers, they are their managers. A payroll clerk knows how the payroll runs. Her manager may or may not, her manager's manager won't. And in my experience, I rarely encountered the line workers, or even their first line of support and business operations experts, it was mostly paper pushers and "architects". Can the new system actually allow them to do their work? Have they been trained? Are they being listened to?

Of course, as you get bigger and bigger organizations the risks multiply.

So your first line of defense is to have someone who knows when to say no to the business (nice to have vs need to have), who smells the bullshit from the ERP vendor and the consultants and is draconian about minimizing risks and customizations and enforcing solid training and end user support. That is not a PM, that is a very senior project director who has the support of the highest level in the hierarchy and has several ERP implementations under their belt.

And those are about as frequently found as honest used car salesmen.

(After you are up and running on a successful V1 of that shiny new ERP, you have a lot more experience and flexibility to enhance your business processes from a solid starting point.)

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

Re: Lots of flowers, only two signigicant

We'll agree to disagree on spit and polish when getting basic stuff right like touchpads and hibernation tuned is a struggle. Well, at least gone are the heady days of diving into the xorg.conf (?) files by hand.

Look at my Python example: precisely no one told devs of less popular web frameworks to stop working on them. What happened instead is most of the general user base settled on only recommending the mainline ones. No one in the Python ecosystem has been saying "let a 100 flowers bloom" or "evaluate them for yourself" for at least 10 years. No one much misses that time and everyone realizes how much stronger Python's web story has grown as a result.

FastAPI btw is a relatively recent addition, based on new tech, so the system remains capable of accepting newcomers. It has just stopped chasing diversity for diversity's state.

Linux has all the technical depth and robustness to become a wonderful alternative to Windows (which is not without obscure registry-based foibles). It just needs to tell a more compelling story to people between the hardcore users and the stereotypical granny whose PC was configured by a family member sick of dealing with Windows crap.

Marketing, simplicity and a welcoming and tolerant community.

Plenty of other examples where fragmentation is harmful.

- JS frameworks. A new shiny is always coming out. React is more less or the de facto standard, now though. Not necessarily because it is the best, but because at least it brought some consolidation. Still, no one else is able to replace it because the rest is so fragmented and so much in flux. If there was a stronger #2, maybe people would remember that mixing HTML into JS goes against many computer principles about mixing code and formatting/markup.

- Unix, pre-Linux. Asianometry has a long and detailed YouTube on how things went wrong as each vendor insisted on their own flavor, no interop.

There was, long ago, 80s?, a short SF story, (Bruce Sterling?) about someone driving in a world where none of the roads, signage and bridges were the same and it all depended on which company "owned" the area. As a deliberate allegory to the computer industry's lack of standards.

No. It remains the path to irrelevance.

- New users are overwhelmed with choice. Which people don't like in domains they are not familiar with. This is what happened in Python with its web frameworks, of which there were easily 10-12 of them, none with clear dominance. Eventually things settled down to 3 big ones with clearly established roles: Django for batteries included, Flask for simple and mix and match your tools, FastAPI to serve json. But until we got there, Ruby on Rails got a lot of traction for new users, even though Django came out less than a year later. I remember years of noobs asking "What framework would you recommend?" to which they got answers like "Define your use cases, then research the frameworks individually". That's pretty much "use Ruby on Rails", to me, unless you already know Python well. 23 desktops? Use Windows/Macos. Python never got a solid story going with a GUI framework, for exactly the same reasons.

- That also extends to pre-installed Linux on laptops. Buy 2 different pre-installed laptops and you'll have 2 very different experiences. From System76 to Framework to Dells. That's hard, at least to people who are not primarily computer folk. Article stated, what if we had 23 different VI clones? And it got some pushback that there are plenty of vi clones, from vim to neovim to... But they all use more or less the same core vi keymapping, so acquired knowledge is easily transferred. That's just not the case with desktops. It can't be.

- Documentation. Documentation is hard and usage knowledge is fragmented. How do you mount an external drive? Well, /etc/fstab is clear enough, if a bit hardcore. It is however, unified. Not so the user friendly GUI way when each desktop brings its own GUI widget to do this task. And then sometimes changes things from release to release, just for the sake of change. Like Apple is wont to do with its Music app. But the problem is that, to many people, who are "using Linux", they're not sure what flavor of DE "helpful guidance" on the internet refers to when trying to google how to get something done. Or package managers. Lots of them on the backend, from apt to rpm. But now you compound that complexity by each desktop delivering its own apt frontend. "OK, OK but what applies in my case???"

- Robustness and polish. With so many desktops blooming, each flavor lacks critical usage and developer base to really nail things down. Human interface hardware is hard, especially on laptops - mice, touchpads, audio, batteries... Typically you get a comparatively glitchy touchpad, compared to a Mac where it mostly just works. To tune it in on Linux, it seems you have the Synaptics approach, involving juggling a lot of numbers. Or there seems to be another way as well. This is where a nice unified GUI app would shine. Not happened yet. Power management? My Linux-compatible laptop, which officially supports 2 distros, doesn't really really want to hibernate. It's unclear why. Driver issue? Hardware issue? Distro issue? Kernel level? One user, defending the situation stated: "Well, you know, I use it plugged in all day, so I don't really worry about the battery". I.e. "you're holding it wrong". I mean, it is quite possible there is an actual optimal way to configure that laptop to hibernate, but that gets very lost in the noise of 3 people making 4 different suggestions on how to do it.

I really don't give a crap about the "100 flowers" or the "self-fulfillment of the unpaid volunteers scratching their itch" arguments. Linux is big money these days. I want to quickly configure my laptop, not read docs for hours on end. I want to use the boring vanilla desktop that just works, not marvel at rounded button corners with alpha transparency shadows. Then I'll spend time, in the terminals, browsers, Postgres and on my editors, doing what I enjoy: coding and configuring systems. And yes, reading docs for hours on end :-( Not faffing around with my desktop which just needs to be usable, fast and easy on the CPU and batteries. I.e. do its work and get out of the way. People who want to scratch their itch? Good on them! Doesn't relate with me.

I LIKE Linux mind you. But mostly once I am on the command line.

Definitely the voice of reason though I would have left out the comparison to Windows 95. Not because it is a bad comparison, but because a lot of the commentards went off chasing that particular rabbit rather than focussing on how the needlessly sprawling Desktop ecosystem could be rationalized a bit.

Short of that actually happening, my wishlist would be an underlying unified configuration system actionable through the command line. That way, you don't have to rediscover how each DE is configured by clicking through its apps and dialogs. And another would be much more emphasis on user-friendly touchpad management as well as power management. For the rest, I spend most of my time in the terminal, editors and web browsers so desktops specificities don't hold any great attraction to me as long as they remain responsive and light on the CPU.

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

Be careful what you wish for.

Some of the more sober financial analysts sounding the alarm are also pointing out that there has been so much investment into AI that it would be quite a painful crash. Esp. as the AI boom has been masking a lot of the Trump slump.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

You know, the funny thing is the lack of variety extends to non-pop stations. Our local Classic Rock one plays all the oldies but goodies.

Rush, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Eagles.

Guess what? That means Tom Sawyer, Wish you were here, Stairway to heaven, Sharp dressed man and Hotel California. Or the band's second or third most popular songs at best.

OK, maybe I am making it up a bit with Stairway to heaven and Hotel California since those are well known to be so extremely overplayed. Immigrant song and Life in the fast lane then.

But the gist remains that from bands having a dozen or so albums, they can only be bothered to rotate 3 or 4 songs.

People don't actually like variety that much on the radio, that's what radio people seem to know. I read a book claiming that with Outkast's, Hey Ya! they knew they had a hit. All their pre-AI software and focus groups told them so, it was off the charts in metrics. But it kept on tanking on the radio. So they deliberately sandwiched it between the same very well known (pop) songs over and over again, until it became more familiar, took off and became a massive hit.

No, it don't matter if you like Outkast or not, the point is people in general didn't until they were Pavloved over their distaste for novel songs.

Re: Country Music

Anyone remember that, in the original Sim City, you'd always get Godzilla rampaging a more or less short time later - but not right away - when you demolished a church?

Yup, it's just that top 40 pop stations have pretty much always sucked. Unless by happenstance we happen to be going through an exceedingly rare period when something un-poppy is flavor of the month.

Then you have the tendency, as people get older, that they romanticize what they heard when they were 18-25. That's such a well known phenomenon that commercial buildings like stores will pipe in music keyed to their customer demographics's ages.

They now remember only the cool songs. But all the warmed up crap that was actually playing on the radio back then? Gone and forgotten, for the most part.

Hence, "back in the days, we had much better music".

One genre that doesn't seem to be seeing much renewal is Classic Rock. Where are the new Bob Segers, ZZ Top, Steely Dan, Yes, Zeppelin, Blue Oyster Cult and so on? Most of that has been subsumed into alternative rock but that genre doesn't seem as widely listened to as classic rock bands were in the 80s. Metal has become very niche too, it seems, unlike hard rock.

Re: Country Music

Not all country is crap. At the local pub, I chanced upon a good one using Shazam, Devil Makes Three. Their eponymous debut album in 2002 is pretty awesome and latest one, Spirits, in 2025 is pretty good as well. Style is more bluegrass - 2 guitarists/banjos and a double bass. And they are refreshingly non-country in their lyrics, sometimes reminding me of the Grateful Dead, for example in "Hard Times" on Spirits. Fair bit of social criticism, often about poverty, often subversive. Meanwhile "The Plank" seems like the love child of gangster rap lyrics with old sea shanties.

Sample lyrics, but they range widely and are usually quite clever ...

> But in a moment of clarity, I found еverybody staring

> Like therе's something wrong with me

> But it ain't no sin to think your skin

> Is covered up in bugs

> Oh my god, I love doing drugs

Not typically a big country fan myself, but these guys + gal are good. Icon cuz that's a frequent theme of theirs.

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

Re: "a useful feature when an update inadvertently leaves a system in a broken state"

Regular Windows users are the QC department, suitably surveilled thru Telemetry.

Works fine for MS, despite the occasional lamentably bad press: rather than paying for their QC, their QC is paying them and watching their ads.

Apple probably has about all the market share it will get at its prices and without a clear enterprise model. And the year of Linux desktop(s) - 23 of them according to El Reg - remains 2-3 years away, like it has for 20 years.

Barring an international realignment due to digital sovereignty concerns in the Age of Trump or a major crash wiping out its investments in AI, MS is sitting pretty.

Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0

The following is not a popular opinion, I am sure...

I'd love to see some consolidation of the Linux DE space. Having 2 or 3 really solid ones with distinct use cases and good theming/customization capabilities would surely be better than this hodgepodge.

For one thing, whenever you are trying to configure Linux, more often than not, the answers to what you are looking for are desktop and version dependent, even when it concerns generic stuff like mounting a disk or configuring a touchpad.

(It's rather odd, on the consumer Linux user side of things, there is very little emphasis on using the terminal for configuration in answers and posts).

A long time ago, Python was all aglow with the warm glow of multiple, multiple, web frameworks. If, as a noob, you asked "Which framework should I use?" you usually got something unhelpful like "You need to look at your use cases and compare (all 20 of) them". (Some of them being real shit btw and still having a dedicated fan base, cough, TurboGears, cough). Along with the general opinion that diversity and multiplicity of choices was a strength.

Whereas, with Ruby, the answer would be: "use Rails".

Guess what a noob wanting to code a webapp and deciding on Python vs Ruby would pick?

Eventually most of that went away and consolidated into Django, Flask and FastAPI. And you know what? That is a much friendlier situation to newcomers. For power users, it also ensures that the frameworks have sufficient traction that they get a lot of spit and polish.

Now I am not saying Cosmic should be anointed here. If anything it's more like https://xkcd.com/927/ In the case of Cosmic, as outlined in the above post, it would also give some extra advantages to one particular laptop vendor, which may not be a desirable situation.

It's nice to know this, thank you. However, may I suggest adding when you did this? This isn't a final product yet and if you tried say a year ago, that is quite different from doing it 6 weeks before GA, i.e. very recently.

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

One thing about being a big Sci Fi reader is trying to project into a reverse Connecticut Yankee situation. Imagine you're a tech-savvy 1950s dude(tte) who went into a coma and has just been revived with the wonders of modern medicine...

What is this article about? The words are English but make little sense. What is "hacking" and once you understand the term, what on earth does it have it to do with Halloween masks? Why would someone computerize a Halloween mask? Probably with more computing horse power than the Space Shuttle? Why would someone hack it?

Jump forward to 2150 and think about the sweet summer children of the early 21st century that allowed unprotected computing nodes to proliferate. A hacked mask could do all sorts of things, including eavesdropping on nearby Bluetooth emissions and reporting back to far-removed surveillance nodes via other hacked consumer devices in a mesh.

Much like late 1990s folk who would send each other meme .EXEs via email for entertainment. And run the ones they received.

Think tank decries science friction between countries, demands global cooperation

Re: @JLV - yours is a nice try too.

LOL. Another Putin apology by someone who doesn't have a clue about military history.

You are comparing apples to bacon. Guerrilla wars - like the US in Afghanistan - are notoriously hard to win. The "gold metric", of sorts, being Malaysia in the 50s.

Remind us again, who also got their asses whacked in Afghanistan? Hint, the name starts with either Ru or So.

The Ukraine war ain't no such thing as a guerrilla war, though if Putin had any clue in military affairs, he'd be dealing with that stage after invading his much smaller neighbor with the "world's 2nd strongest army" (TM). But he ain't. He's dealing with a quagmire in conventional warfare against a laughingly less powerful enemy.

And before you go on about "funded by hundreds of billions USD, a lot of it in cash", many governments have tried to prop up their allies with $$$, without much success. Come to think of it, Afghanistan is a useful metric, again. If people aren't motivated, money won't buy a victory.

Nukes aside, Russia has been burning the candle on both ends wrt conventional warfare. About their only service which hasn't embarrassed itself is their air force. Mainly because it's been chickening it out, asides from bravely launching bombs and missiles from deep within Russian rear echelons. Their tank park has not been "decimated", mostly because that is the wrong word to use past 10% losses. The Black Sea fleet? LOL. Russian infantry? Honing cannon fodder tactics for the last 3 years. Drones is about the only thing they seem competitive on.

Re: @JLV - yours is a nice try too.

A nuke is a nuke... when it works. Sadly, Bubu has failed most of its tests to date. But, yes, overall nukes, at least the regular, non-vaporware kind, are what buys Russia's place in the world. Nothing else.

> Dismantling Ukraine in a few weeks is what the West says Russia wanted.

Sure. Their invasion, and subsequent failure to get it done, really contradicts my statement and supports yours ;-)

Reality is, some people had their doubts about the mighty Russian military, but if you had told anyone in 2022 how this would play out to 2025, people would have laughed at you.

That's not to say they can't win in the future - like with Finland in 1940, the odds are stacked against Ukraine, as long as Russia's totalitarian leadership can just throw more of its people to die for its Dear Leader's pretexts. But neither Russia, nor Putin, are looking all that clever at the moment, Putin apologists notwithstanding.

Tovarich, I hate to break this to you, but ... Russia ain't a member of the OECD.

And state of the Soviet, sorry, Russian nuclear weapons have a long history of screwing up. Including on Russian territory. Not least your precious Bubu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyonoksa_radiation_accident

Good try tho.

LOL. Russia can't even "dismantle" Ukraine after 3 years trying. Wonder how well it would fare against NATO...?

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

Dear Research Agency for the Internet,

We'd like to express how impressed we are with your Brave campaign on our behalf, especially as fronted by beast666.

It does wonders to discredit Brave when such people "promote it". Much better than direct criticism.

Yours, truly,

The big browser corporation which is NOT a monopoly.

Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached

Re: To those anti DEI: it's not discrimination (in the positive sense)

3. ...

When I got started in computing it was porting COBOL proggies from one mainframe/OS to another. The idea conceptually simple: a) auto-convert much of the code b) gather sufficient test data to hit 70% of code. keep the input file (s) and the output file(s) c) throw lotsa lil lo-pay interns (yours truly) to tweak the converted code so that you got the same data out as previously. Then you more or less have a converted program. That's also why I have a fascination with diffing-based approaches to testing and development.

Well-oiled, no BS.

Well, the weird thing is the great big head that had dreamed up the whole conversion and diffing framework was about 3 feet tall and with stubs for his arms, from birth seemed like. I don't know how he did it, we only saw him once in 18 months when he visited and even the bigwigs were on their best behavior. But I honestly have no idea how someone with massive handicaps to quick typing did this in the 80s.

In this profession, we are supposed to respect people for their technical chops, not their looks, race, political views, sexual orientation or gender. Doesn't mean I particularly care to be lectured about patriarchies or alternative sexual mores or whatever. Not interested. But also not interested in government diktat out of sheer pettiness and intolerance.

Good on them.

Yes, there are sometimes over-woke organizations. Not saying that is the case at the PSF, which seems to do a pretty job of actually being inclusive, rather than cloying. Notably in promoting coding to women.

But regardless or not of the merits of a particular DEI initiative in companies or organizations: it is an effin' free country, dudes.

And, 10 yrs from now, when the dust has hopefully settled, those who collaborated with the Trumpies' coercive measures on companies and organizations will have egg on their face. Simple as that.

Just like swallowing the blacklisting guidances of the McCarthy area left a whole lot of people looking like bellends after it ran its course.

Cyber exec with lavish lifestyle charged with selling secrets to Russia

Re: Oh please, what a load of bollocks

There is one problem with this analysis. Enrichment gets way more efficient as you ramp up the numbers. Going from 0 to 20% is a lot more strenuous than 60 to 95%. They apparently have good deal of 60% refined. You all that money spending you've talked up so impressively? Mostly has happened already and has limited civilian uses.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment

Look at the "Uranium enrichment and uses."

The plutonium from depleted uranium pathway is from reactor spent fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium The problem for Iran there is that it is probably easier to monitor what comes out of those since their location is pretty well known.

Anyway, all that chatter about Iran's nuclear intentions being harmless is unconvincing in the extreme. And that is not from any great amount of sympathy for Bibi's Israel. Israel may have very questionable behavior wrt Palestinians. And US behavior wrt Iran may be questionable as well. But Iran is by no means a blushing innocent damsel.

All depends on how palsy they are with the Trumpsters.

An open letter to DOGE https://www.l3harris.com/newsroom/editorial/2025/01/letter-leaders-doge as early as January 2025 was already deeply burrowing their proboscis into the appropriate orifices - "Dear Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy..." so one would guess ...

> "nothing to see, citizen, move along".