Posts by thosrtanner

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: So why was table lookup done in pspSystemThread?

Totally agree with most of this (especially the insanity of only using 2 rings - kernel and user. Well, that's not fair, entirely, but proper access privileges - like device driver threads have privileges to write to *their* device pages and to read/write user memory WHERE THE USER has given permission (by making a system call asking for memory to be transferred to/from the device). Antivirus software afaics needs even less privilege than that, because, honestly, if your a/v stuff crashes - you need to know, sure, but you can carry on using your system (though disconnecting from the internet would seem a good idea).

But crowdstrikes code passed WHQL validation. And that is microsofts fault. device drivers that read files of disk and do things with them is not a great idea.

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

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Re: If your chosen editor cannot convert tabs to spaces automatically

Because having your first tab at 8 was REALLY useful on card punches when writing fortran, You *could* technically start your code in column 7, but it looked confusing if it came immediately after the whatever symbol you were using that day in column 6 for a continuation line.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

i'd rather not be exposed to failures every time I need to eat. cash has been around for 1000s of years. computer systems not so long.

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

Or we could all go back to cash like before covid. Absolutely no reliance on computer systems

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

I fail to understand why it is that it's apparently OK for deepfakes to be made involving poor (or at least not super rich) people who aren't in the public eye, but when the rich and famous are involved, it suddenly requires a law to be passed.

More than 178,000 SonicWall firewalls are exposed to old denial of service bugs

weapons-grade patch apathy

The guy who came up with that phrase deserves one of these ================>

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

A. What is a 27 inch WIDE monitor? When you look at screen sizes they give you the diagonal

B. Not going to buy a 27" wide monitor in that case.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Re: Pedant? moi?

Not sure what the 'us' is doing in there either. It just adds to the confusion. Possibly should be a 'that'.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

It also suggests the AI software is somehow not sub-par anyway, which is a claim I find hard to swallow

Microsoft offers rollback for those affected by Windows wireless futility

Nice that they've withdrawn it. Not much help for those people who only have a wifi connection though.

You're next, game devs. Now Microsoft to bring character, story design copilot to Xbox

Doritos are NOT crisps. They're tortilla chips. Please have some respect for the thinly sliced deep fried root vegetable.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Re: ...dull grey, one size fits all goo.

EITHER a OR b is precisely a XOR b.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

Hex? Wow. Luxury. I remember having to program an IPL onto a machine using a set of switches arranged so you could read them like octal (1-3-3-3-3-3)

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: Proof Of Concept Business

There's nothing wrong with refactoring and using exceptions to deal with errors in user input or other incoming data. What is wrong is not putting enough information in the exception for the higher level code to produce a meaningful message. And, let's face it, you can get that sort of behaviour easily enough without needing to use exceptions.

And as for the alternative approaches, when you have your actual code indented 5 levels and the caller needing to deal with magic return values that indicate there's been a problem. Which they don't, they just ignore them and assume all has worked fine.

I much prefer exceptions thank you.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

I'm slightly bemused that you felt it necessary to spell out 'not suitable for work' in full, then add the abbreviation.

Pretty sure no one who reads this column needs any introduction to that particular abbreviation.

Maybe you should take to spelling it out in full in all those headlines as well.

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

There's more than one sort of radiation, you know.

PLEASE. First time I read that, I thought iPhones were radioactive. If it's emitting too much Electormagnetic radiation, then say so in the headline.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: What's in a name?

Well, I was thinking the submitter was a dark ent, to be honest

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Why would I want all my windows tiled? Yes, sometimes I might want two half screen apps stuck together when comparing files. But mostly, I want two or 3 windows in full view depending on what I'm doing and the rest of them - well, I'd like to see if something has happened (or, given our network stability, something nasty has not happened), while I work on the others. AND to see my background in the rest of the space.

If they want to do something useful, please stop new windows grabbing focus. Because that is incredibly annoying. I start something because I'll want to look at it later, and then go on doing something else in the same (or different) window. And this new thing popping up after some random delay and grabbing the keyboard unexpectedly causes all sorts of problems.

Firefox 115 browser breathes life into old operating systems

XUL browsers

If you want an XUL browser, there's also seamonkey and palemoon. Not to sure about the former, but the later is maintained and has an up to date javascript engine.

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

But it's a work of fiction

It's not like people would ever do that in the real world, is it?

Oh wait - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/29/londoners-wi-fi-security-herod-clause

Capita wins £50M fraud reporting contract with City of London cops

2.3 unique visits to the website ANNUALLY?

That's impressively low...

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Ordered: 1 PP3 9V battery

Received: 6 x AA 1.5V battery

Well, I got 9v worth I suppose

Microsoft to give more than microsecond's thought about your Windows 11 needs

Clearly, by 'unrequested', they mean unrequested by apps/windows, not unrequested by users.