Posts by theOtherJT

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Feels a bit late now...

I'm broadly in favour of the whole small, modular reactor idea, but it does at this point feel rather like something we should have started doing 25 years ago. I'm glad they're doing it at all, I suppose - there's always going to be the need to do rapid-ramp-up generation to fill in the gaps caused by inconsistent sources like wind and solar, so I'm struggling to imagine a world where we won't need these at all... but we'd be in a damn sight better place if we'd started building them before replacing all the existing infrastructure had become something of an emergency.

Not just deprecated, but deleted: Google finally strips File Transfer Protocol code from Chrome browser

Re: Soon HTTP as well?

That whole blindly type "thisisunsafe" into the browser thing for self signed certs is the most fucking infuriating thing ever. No. No it's not. It is not unsafe. I am debugging a webserver! It is MY webserver! This is about the safest connection I ever will make; seeing as it's going to fucking localhost!

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Re: Screen bloat...

Which is why, frankly, all UI elements should have been moved to vector graphics at least a decade ago so that they could scale according to user requirements and available screen real estate.

Screen bloat...

...appears to be the new memory bloat. Not content with every new version of a thing requiring inexplicably more memory to do the job than the previous version, we're now on a path where each version requires for some reason more screen real-estate.

I installed Windows 98 in a VM the other day and was shocked when the default 800x600 resolution it came up in was actually... fine. It was fine. I didn't need to make it any bigger. I opened a few applications and everything fit on the screen just the way it was.

Look at that ribbon bar. Measuring from the top of the window border to the bottom of the ribbon it's 380px high. On a 1280x800 screen that would be very nearly _half_ your vertical screen real-estate just to show the controls - and that's not even _that_ low a screen resolution. You can still buy cheap laptops with that sort of screen res.

This shit absolutely has to stop.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

Re: It has a notch!

Oh man, that's going to drive me _nuts_ when watching fullscreen video if they aren't kind enough to black-bar at the top of the screen.

I say "Going to" because I'm due one of these things next year from work, and since I'm required to support the blasted things I'm going to have to have one.

I kinda like it too... or I did until mine stopped being a touch screen and just became a touch. I can sort of remember where some of the things like volume and brightness are, but it's a damn pain for everything else. I got it repaired the first time it happened... and then it did it again. We've got about 200 of the damn things at work, and I'm far from the only person this happened to.

It'd be a nice thing to have as a configurable option - but to be honest I reckon they did the right thing by dropping it based on my experience with the thing.

Ubuntu 21.10 brings GNOME 40 debut and a focus on devs

I think the numbers speak for themselves...

"There are 10 million systems actively using Snap every day"

I'm sure there are Mr. Gibbon. Because you package a load of odd things using it by default that no one would ever notice until it suddenly does something weird. And then you snuck packages into apt that redirect to snap so when you apt something you get a snap without asking for it. Adoption numbers are no indicator of quality when something is the default option.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Re: Settings/Control Panel

Microsoft will never provide a clean and consistent Windows <pick a version number> because too much of their tech is built on massive creaking towers of legacy bullshit that no one remembers why it's there or if it's safe to remove.

I just had the good fortune to dig into some samba logs and try and work out why some (but not all) of our Windows 10 machines won't mount a particular network share. The actual answer still eludes me, but in my digging I discovered that a clean install of Windows 10 when you "net use" sends this to the server:

Requested protocol [PC NETWORK PROGRAM 1.0]

Requested protocol [LANMAN1.0]

Requested protocol [Windows for Workgroups 3.1a]

Requested protocol [LM1.2X002]

Requested protocol [LANMAN2.1]

Requested protocol [NT LM 0.12]

Requested protocol [SMB 2.002]

Requested protocol [SMB 2.???]

Yep. Windows for Workgroups is only the third oldest protocol it attempts to negotiate.

That's a clean install. Of Windows 10. I will bet real money right now that if I did the same thing from Windows 11 it would also try to invoke a network protocol that was deprecated over quarter of a century ago.

By contrast, doing the same thing from a OS11 Mac starts the negotiation at NTLM 0.12 - which frankly is still silly, but is at least better.

Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'

"He runs on carrots"

Which is all very fine and well, but if the supermarkets around there are having supply issues anything like the ones around here, you'll have trouble finding any of those either.

A crypto-trading hamster is outperforming the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Bitcoin

Proof if proof were needed...

...that the vast majority of trading - be it in crypo or anything else - is basically random chance and anyone who claims to really understand the market is almost invariably lying.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: I have a facebook and twitter but have no idea how to log in

This is true, but telling police officers to fuck off, especially in America, tends to lead to people having unfortunate "accidents"

BrakTooth vulnerabilities put Bluetooth users at risk – and some devices are going unpatched

Excellent news to get...

...right when the pandemic tracking apps around the globe are mandating that everyone turn their bluetooth on all the time.

Arms not long enough to reach the plug socket? Room-wide wireless charging is on the way

Never mind the humans....

...I'm wondering what effect this sort of thing will have on other electrical devices that weren't designed to have random electromagnetic fields projected through them. We've all experienced the weird noises that you can get when mobile phone signals randomly couple with speaker wires.

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

"Support for init systems other than systemd is significantly improved"

Good.

I have no problem with people using systemd as an init. There are a bunch of cases where it's obviously the right choice. What I have always objected to is the amount of pointless integration forced on us where if you're not using it it a bunch of utterly unrelated things break because of the hateful level of scope creep in the thing.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

The Americans in WWII...

...is kinda how I see chrome in this analogy.

I think you're being a little harsh there, because it probably struck the killing blow against IE, and was certainly instrumental in the whole process, but yes. Firefox was fighting that battle for years before they got involved.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Jump on the Windows 11 bandwagon...

Yeah, I'll be honest the title threw me here too.

I was expecting the little teams anecdote to be an opener into "How do Microsoft keep dropping balls thrown by other members of their own organization?" (Because they do, all the time) but then the author just sort of wandered off and talked about how bad teams is at dealing with multiple user ID's in a single login session... and... yeah. I mean. It is bad at that, but I'm not sure what that has to do with Windows 11.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

Re: Does anybody

Not by choice, but yes. You kinda have to.

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

Re: Traditional Apple.

I know exactly why they do it. What pisses me off here is trying to pretend that the Air is a different product line rather than a slightly defective pro. It's the same reason we got those 3 core AMD chips a few years ago, but at least those were legitimately really cheap.

Traditional Apple.

They have a history of this sort of thing. They very deliberately cripple bits of their product line in order to justify the cost of the more expensive ones. We all know that the whole "It has a whole extra GPU core!" on the pro vs air thing is complete bullshit, and there's no way they couldn't find the _room_ for two more thunderbolt ports like there are on the 16" pro - they just didn't want to do it because it makes for a more delineated product line.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

Re: A fully functional cloaking device

Take your upvote and get out.

Say helloSystem: Mac-like FreeBSD project emits 0.5 release

Re: Menus and application windows

No, I agree. MacOS has always been 100% wrong on that one IMO. The only reason for it was to save space on a 512x384 display and that reason long since ceased to be important.

Security doesn't matter...

...until it does.

I've lost track of the number of things I've written over the years where I said "Eh, it's fine, it's just for testing, no one is going to deploy this." and gone on to hardcode passwords, assume that all user accounts have the same access level, and god knows how many other terrible security decisions only to have someone turn around to me a few months later and go "Can you get that into production by the end of the week? It's basically done already, right?"

Well... no. Not right. It works on the understanding that it's never allowed out of the test lab because in the wild it would be a massive liability. Fortunately no one ever gave enough of a shit about any code I wrote for me to get massively stung by it, but no one knows what's going to happen down the line. "This won't be big and professional like GNU" until... oops. Most widely deployed OS kernel in the world.

That's not to take a dig at the Linux security model, but things that don't seem important now can cause massive headaches down the line. C.F. The assumption that the local user sat in front of the keyboard is root that plagued Windows all the way through the 9.x era and that we're still cleaning up the fallout from today.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Too much to hope...

Sure, I never need to do that with my linux boxes either, but that's because they don't throw in random UI changes along with each kernel version update :/

Too much to hope...

...that they'll stop this nonsense and go back to the previous model where you actually had half a chance of knowing which version of Windows the confused and angry person on the other end of the support call was using? Or that their version might bear some relation to the one you had because they hadn't mysteriously moved half the options and settings around between the Q1 and Q3 releases this year without telling anyone?

Protip: If Joe Public reports that your kit is broken, maybe check that it is actually broken

Last time I was involved in hardware design I put the serial number of the kit behind a door that couldn't be opened with the thing plugged in.

"I need the serial number to log the job. Can you please unplug it, open the service door - yes sir, it's designed like that so no one can accidentally pull the fuses while it's on - and give me the serial number?"

Did get defeated once by someone who in an astonishing feat of forward planning had written all the serial numbers down in their inventory management, but it helped several times.

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

Re: Bitcoin analysis (stolen from Twitter)

Best explanation of bitcoin I have heard to date.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

It'll be alright...

...they can just do what they've done at all the roundabouts around here and just put traffic lights on them in the name of "Traffic calming" so they operate exactly like a 4 way stop anyway and screw up the traffic flow.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

But Email isn't secure...

No email service is secure. It's not a secure transit mechanism. You want "secure" in your email you encrypt whatever you're sending before you send it.

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 now includes AMD options for biz customers, boasts up to 19 hours of battery life

Re: Runs Windows.

It'll only be a matter of time before someone manages to get a less annoying OS to boot on it tho. Hardware wise these really do seem quite nice. Edging in on Macbook nice, if not quite there yet.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

Shame

I've had a couple of LG phones and they were both really good. Cheap, simple, did everything I needed from them... and as such probably had absolutely paper thin profit margins compared to the "We've put this 4k display into a 6 inch device so we can charge you $1000 for a 'feature' that you can't possibly make any use of." brigade. That's got to be another problem - my current (LG) phone is 4 years old and I see absolutely no reason to replace it. It does everything I need it to do. "Smart" phones look increasingly stupid from where I'm sat, and I'm sure it's not just me.

New systemd 248 feature 'extension images' updates immutable file systems without really updating them

Why. Just why?

It's an overlayfs. That's all it is. Just a less good one that's forced to target specific parts of the tree. If I wanted to overlayfs /usr/ I can already do that. I don't need another stupid bloody systemd specific way of doing that!

Mac OS X at 20: A rocky start, but it got the fundamentals right for a macOS future

Best bit about MacOS...

While Windows has undergone multiple UI changes, macOS has largely remained mutually intelligible with its predecessors

While Apple has many faults the fact that they've resisted the urge to fuck about with the core UI design concepts is very much to their credit. It's not perfect by any means but unlike windows I can't remember any point in the last 20 years where it just took a massive step... well, if not backwards, then certainly sideways... for no obvious reason.

Bell Labs transfers copyright of influential ‘Plan 9’ OS to new foundation

Given that there's been no development on Plan9 since 2015...

...does it even matter any more?

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Re: Cryptocurrencies should be banned.

It really isn't. A traditional currency is effectively a promisary note backed by the government of the country that issued it. It might not be worth anything specific but it is tied to the strength of the country's economy. As for a musical instrument it's worth something because it has a purpose. You can play music on it. It might also be worth more because it's a particularly rare example or something, but even without that it's worth something above and beyond it's speculative value. You can even place intrinsic value on a work of art in as much as it can be appreciated by the viewer. Unless you're really into recreational mathematics it would be hard to argue that a cryptocoin has aesthetic value. You'd certainly be hard pressed to hang one on your wall.

Cryptocurrencies should be banned.

There. I've said it. And I'm sticking to it.

Sure, lets build incredibly expensive computational devices full of valuable and rare materials, then blow gigawatts of electricity through them annually in order to "discover" some numbers which we will then arbitrarily assign a value to.

It's insane. The waste of electricity alone is horrifically environmentally unsustainable, not to mention knock-on effects like this here where no one can actually _buy_ graphics cards since they're all being bought up by miners. To anyone with an ounce of sense it's obvious that these damn things are a speculative bubble. There is no _use_ to a bitcoin. It's not like gold which has some intrinsic value. Neither is it like a dollar or a pound which has a central issuing authority backed by a government and represents some fraction of the value of that countries economic output. The entire value of a crypto-coin is based on the fact that other people expect it to go up in value so it's worth buying one now so you can sell it when it does. The second that stops happening this whole thing comes crashing down.

They're waste for waste's sake.

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

In the immortal words of Sully O'Sullivan...

"We can't undo the damage that's been done to that word. It's too late."

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

Re: a critical destabilising impact

Majikthise: "You'll have a national philosophers strike on your hands!"

Deep Thought: "And who would that inconvenience?"

Terraria dev cancels Stadia port after Google disabled his email account for three weeks

Re: Fascinating

Anyone else in this thread played Virtuaverse?

Starting to feel a liiiiitle close to home.

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

Re: emacs

Don't give either of them ideas! The last thing we need is systemd-webbrowserd - and before anyone says "You don't need a daemon for an obviously client facing process like a web browser" I reiterate DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS.

emacs

They really need to stop trying to turn their web-browser into an operating system. I already have one of those.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

I wonder how old this complainant is...

...because not so very long ago I remember all too well that pretty much every machine came with a CD with Windows drivers on it and you could be pretty much certain that a clean Windows XP, 7 or 8 install would come up with VESA graphics and the odds of the wifi working "out of the box" were close to zero. We should probably give Microsoft some credit for the fact that that's no longer the case - but it's not the case in the vast majority of Linux distros either. Debian is still more aimed at technically adept users than the average layperson. If it weren't, there's be no need for things like Ubuntu or Mint. I really don't see that it's a problem in it's current form - and if it is the only thing they need to do to fix it is change the "DOWNLOAD" link on their website from the netinst image to the full install DVD.

(And if they do that let's be clear - it'll just annoy people who will go "But why is the installer so large? Why not just download it on the fly?!")

Linus Torvalds rates his own words 'incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man'

"Why would you say that?!"

...the words that immediately follow statements like: "It's working perfectly." or "This project is going really well." or the perennial favourite: "How hard can it be?"

Nice to see it applies to the father of Linux too.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

And they're going to do what about me doing this?

echo "Not this bullshit again" | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -iter 10000 -e -k <password>

Do we make maths illegal next, is that the plan? God I hate this one so much.

Sod Crysis, can the 21-year-old Power Mac G4 Cube run Minecraft? The answer is yes

...thanks to its passive cooling

It also used to immediately overheat if looked at funny.

The Ghost of Windows Past gains spooky second wind as the October 2020 Update nears double digits

Re: 1909 was little more than jumped-up cumulative update to 1903

I thought that packed up some time during windows 8's tenure.

UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details

Re: It's only gone really wrong when...

A chocolate one, given this government.

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

Depends what you're trying to do I suppose. I'd still rather write PHP than python if I'm doing webapp type things, but I'm sure everyone has their go-to language for a certain task.

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

I was told to do this by a - I was going to say "grey-beard-sysadmin" but she was a woman, so maybe we'll skip the beard, but a senior unix admin anyhow - I met many, many years ago when I was still at school. It was one of the better bits of life advice I was ever given and I wish I'd started doing it earlier.

Hundreds of Facebook moderators complain: AI content moderation isn't working and we're paying for it

"There should be no question over either of those"

But neither of them are the case, believe me. I've had some very limited experience of this. Many years ago between college and landing my first IT gig, I was a temp who got assigned to work for the police doing criminal records checks.

Yes, that's right, if you were applying to work with children back in the mid 2000s, your background check was done by a bunch of burned out 23 year old temps because there weren't enough police officers to do it. I say "Burned out" because the longest anyone I met there had managed to stay on the job was about 4 months before it totally broke them and they quit.

I don't actually remember how long I worked there now, It feels like about 30 years, although it can't have been more than a few weeks, but just having to read some of the things I read there would have stopped me sleeping - were it not for the fact that I was doing the 10pm to 6am shift, so sleep was something of a rarity anyway. I don't think I would have lasted that long if we'd had to see video and picture evidence too, but if we ran across anything that came with details like that we were required to flag it to go to an actual police officer and move on to the next one.

The summary text records were enough for me. There is no amount you could pay me to get me to go back and do that again.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

"All my stuff is gone"

Ah yes, that one. Had one member of reception staff at one place I worked who called in with this one every couple of weeks or so. We had 3 buildings, and in reception for each building there were at least 2 computers on the desk. She was part time and did a funny shift pattern where she'd be in Monday -Thursday one week, then Tuesday - Friday the next week. Throw in a few days off here and there and you were never really sure if she was on shift or not or which building she might be in if she was.

She would arrive at work, log into a computer, open stuff, move it around and then just leave it like that until her shift ended - which if it was one of the ones that crossed a weekend might be 12 days from first login. Of course the first day she's off one of her co-workers would come in, find her session open sitting at a lock screen, and then reboot so they could use the machine.*

Next time she's in suddenly "all her stuff is gone" because she's now logged into a totally different computer, possibly in a different building. She just could not get her head around the idea that although she was using the same credentials on every desktop they were somehow not all the same machine and open programs would not follow her from one machine to another.

* Obviously this would also frequently lead to her losing work because she'd leave things open without saving them.