Posts by thosrtanner

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

1. It causes windows to restart itself rather than restarting the computer (so no power up self test)

2. It causes windows NOT to run things in the startup folder.

Windows Backup adds second-chance restore at sign-in

Sorry, what's that statement about respecting users preference doing in there? Since when did they start doing that? My preference would be not to log in with a microsoft account, but the hoops you have to jump through now...

Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'

"All options are on the table"

I'm pretty sure that means doing nothing and carrying on using the social media platform formerly known as twitter is an option they're actively considering, then.

Colour me surprised if nothing is precisely what they end up doing.

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Is this a windows ctrl-z or a unix ctrl-z? they're quite different, rendering the title somewhat confusing.

Claude devs complain about surprise usage limits, Anthropic blames expiring bonus

Re: ...Uni mainframe usage

I remember at Cambridge (UK) undergraduates had allocated online 'tokens'. The charging rate went up at busy times of day. We very soon learnt that attempting to compile an algol68 program at lunchtime burnt out your online tokens in about 15 minutes. As a result we did most of our online work after tea before disappearing to the college bars (which at that time closed when they felt like it rather than the closing time enforced in pubs. and of course the college bars were somewhat cheaper).

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

People have been the problem since for ever. The Roman emperors found out that bread and circuses kept the masses happy and they (or at least the ruling classes) could do more or less what they wanted. That hasn't changed much in the last 2000 years. The bread is now fast food and cheap booze and the circuses are provided by the media/social media.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

It's the "You must open an account in order to pay for something" bit that really annoys me. I'm AT the place I'm purchasing from, you do NOT need my email or my home address in order to make a delivery because I'm right here. Why should I need to open an account?

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: British spelling returns?

"I have doubts" isn't that uncommon in British English though.

Microsoft won't fix .NET RCE bug affecting slew of enterprise apps, researchers say

I can't help feeling that a class called SoapHttpClientProtocol accepting anything a target that explicitly says not to use Http or Https is a bad idea. Writing to a file is not using http.

So yeah, I sort of agree with the researchers on this one - it should either error or ignore the protocol part - preferably the 1st.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: localhost/127.0.0.1?

unfortunately "localhost" is just a hostname that by convention maps to 127.0.0.1 - if you happen to edit /etc/hosts and put a different value for localhost in there, you'll get strange behaviour on your system. Especially if there is no server at the target.

It's be interesting to know if they broke 127.0.0.1 or just (I use the word loosely) localhost.

Bun 1.3 stuffs everything and kitchen sink into JS runtime

What happened to 'do one thing and do it well'? Making it easy to get hold of the libraries you need is one thing. Ramming them all down your throat in one huge ball of mud is another.

London cops unplug iPhone crime ring said to nick 40% of city's mobiles

Responsible for half the thefts of the phones is NOT the same as responsible for stealing half the phones. If half the phones in London got stolen, there'd be a hell of a lot more of a fuss.

Lloyds Banking Group says 'digitization' will power more branch closures

banks make money from the paltry sums in your current account as well. not to mention the time it takes for money to transfer between account. it mysteriously takes 3 days for cheques to clear, during which time the banks are making money - according to a lecture I went to from the BACS people the underlying systems can do the clearing overnight

Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority

Re: Evaluating competing visions

Even Stroustroup makes mistakes. His reason for not having exceptions checked at compile time was that

float mysqrt(int a) { return sqrt(a < 0 ? -a : a); }

would never throw an exception but the compiler would insist it could and might refuse to compile code that used it and didn't state they might throw the appropriate exception.

mysqrt(MININT) anyone?

Also, to be frank, that's such an exceptional case I'd rather put the try/catch in myself.

Pretty sure that cont pointers and const refs are pretty close to viral annotations - const correctness is a PITA if some low level thing guarantees not to mutate something it is passed in the documentation but not in the API. Especially those things that have APIs where the mutating and non mutating version of the code are differentiated only by a passed flag.

Biased bots: AI hiring managers shortlist candidates with AI resumes

Although the authors are careful to say "it's not necessarily discrimination", it does seem to be a particularly pernicious form of discrimination - using a particular AI says nothing whatsoever about the candidate and their ability to learn different techniques. we appear to be moving from ageism to AI-ism

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Bullshit

Not to mention that any *sane* program will complain if it doesn't recognise any switch that it gets passed or gets 3 parameters where it only expects 2. Or 1 parameter where it expects none.

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

Re: Turd party crap

Not to mention the sites that give you the alternatives of 'agree to all' or 'leave website'. Which is NOT the same thing as informed consent.

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

I would have thought Trump would want AI to pursue the truth - in order to lock it up and hide it from people.

Linus Torvalds hints Bcachefs may get dropped from the Linux kernel

This comment reserved for Mr Humphries

Amazon's Ring can now use AI to 'learn the routines of your residence'

So what did amazon say and in what ways did the article change as a result?

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

Re: Fork it

palemoon. forked from firefox before they decided to drop support for all their existing extensions. I use it. I have my tabs how I like them...

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: Nice imagery

Guy I knew many years ago frequently used the phrase "Up and down like an 'ore's drawers" which was somehow easily memorable.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

So in my first job, I was put onto doing the programming for a completely programmable video display - so programmable you had to have a program loaded into its rom for it to do anything. And one of the things they did was decided to have a removable keyboard.

Obviously a terminal without a keyboard is going to be hard to enter data on. So, I made the code able to detect various conditions including keyboard being removed/added. On removal it flashed up on the top line "give my keyboard back, you thieving basket" and then replaced that message with "thank you" when a keyboard was detected, which message went away after a short while.

This was apparently so impressive it got demonstrated to customers as a feature of our system. and it was several years before someone complained about the content of the message!

CISA mutes own website, shifts routine cyber alerts to Musk’s X, RSS, email

Re: Big up RSS

I use palemoon browser (http://www.palemoon.org/) and inforss news reader (https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/inforss-reloaded/) (NB I may be a bit biased about this as I maintain the latter)

Watch out for any Linux malware sneakily evading syscall-watching antivirus

Either something is disabled or it isn't. that's a LEVEL. It's badly named. I see rather too many badly named things in the computing world

"thing.disabled = 2" to disable it? That's pretty inspiring. Most booleans are set to 0 or 1. Why would anyone use 2? Or is 2 even more disabled than 1? And by how much>

This looks like the True/False/File_Not_Found boolean type much beloved of DailyWTF readers.

Apps-from-prompts Firebase Studio is a great example – of why AI can't replace devs

Agentic? Sounds like a nasty biting insect

I had a problem.

I decided regexes and threading wouldn't help so I used AI

Now I have loads of problems.

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

I'd be more happy with this if cloudflare hadn't recently decided to randomly block the browser I used because it didn't behave identically to the latest chrome engine and it wasn't until a report appeared on this site that they actually contacted the makers of affected browsers

Re: Captcha misery

In respect to your point 2 - CAPTCHAs are ugly in reality, so I see no reason to dignify them by treating the name as a noun. Make them stand out as horribly in text as they do on web sites you're trying to visit.

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Where is this "Known" exactly? (And IIRC Disable Autoplay is a chrome extension, and not applicable to palemoon for instance)

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

That's a fairly loose definition of improve if it goes faster but has more bugs in it. Or am I being difficult if I expect 'improve' to not include 'more bugs' as a result?

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Close enough

+1 for referencing C S Lewis

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

This bit: "High-speed readout is demonstrated with a fidelity of over 99 percent, according to the boffins." doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. How many parity diamonds are you going to need to get something a bit more usable?

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

a) Wow

b) Where's the IT angle?

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

still waiting for a version of tabmix plus that doesn't require arcane installation instructions.

i use it for most of my day to day stuff at home. seems to render the majority of page fine. It even goes as far as letting me write these posts.

"using the last truly FOSS cross-platform web browser standing" nowhere says 'which uses multiprocessors in such and such a way and provides sandboxing of pages'. So.

I think your definition of cross platform FOSS software might need a little working on. https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml is open source and cross platform.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

My level of trust in the cloud is quite low for some reason.

Huh? If m/s have decided it's a good time for bad UI to die, why aren't we going back to the windows 7 UI? Because that was so much better than windows 10/11.

What this article means is microsoft have decided everything should look like a dull and lifeless web page and to kill of usual visual prompts, but aren't actually dealing with what needs to be dealt with - such as storing user settings outside of the registry so that when you update your machine, reinstall your favourite gam-err-software and restore everything from backup, you don't have to go through various voodoo rituals to get things working again.

And it's not like settings actually makes it easier to find anything. Because it doesn't.

I'm not sure what the author of the article is drinking, But it should probably be prescription only.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: Decades ago...

My grandparent's phone number ended in two 9s. One day I dialed a 3rd one. My excuse is I was only 7 and the operator at the other end of the phone was very kind.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Sadly, initial intel machines had 4 rings, but nobody used them and they've apparently been dropped. maybe we should all go to older hardware - we'd get rid of all the problems with speculative execution side channel attacks then as well.

Re: Canary releases?

Err. How does doing canary releases suddenly give attackers a detailed schedule of your rollouts? Especially if you keep moving the canaries around?

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Very much the opposite problem

Re "So, one day I was dropping the kids at the pool in the MDs loo, ". The mind boggles. That was one heck of a posh loo if it came with a pool.

Microsoft to intro checkpoint cumulative updates for Win 11

Re: I'm not sure

Urgh. The registry is evil. It stops you being able to back up your settings and restore them on a new machine. I can understand this for *some* bits of the system, but every damn application uses this for all of their settings, the vast majority of which have no relationship to what the machine you're running on is.

Glastonbury to turn festivalgoer pee into eco-friendly fertilizer

", the peepee will be profiled".

That gave me pause. Where I come from (Somerset), that is the the organ males use to produce the perr. I had visions of waist level cameras in all the loos.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Re: Predictions

Pretty sure they'd convert syntax errors into runtime errors...

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Re: In tape we trust

If they were that concerned about duration of data, they'd print it on vellum

Critical Fluent Bit bug affects all major cloud providers, say researchers

Deep thought

Dammit. -17 is not a factor of 42. Bang goes a Deep Thought joke.

Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike

Re: Eh?

Pretty sure 'fair use' doesn't cover deliberately duplicating someones voice in order to pass of something as produced with that someones permission / support