Posts by 9Rune5

Hidden Windows Terminal goodies to check out: Retro mode that emulates blurry CRT display – and more

I'm stuck with server 2012r2 for the foreseeable future

I have come to loathe 2012r2. Last year I had a problem where ssl connections would sometimes break.

Turns out that 2012's cipher suite configuration is a little bit obsolete. Just enough to cause random issues.

We upgraded to 2016 and our "mysterious" problem vanished.

Windows comes with its own ssh client these days. I have Terminal configured to open a ssh connection to a handful of different servers -- all with a nice little graphic in the corner so I can easily tell 'em apart. Works a treat.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

then the upper decks will be permanently closed.

I dunno how things are down under, but up here we are told to keep a seat (or two) between us when we travel by mass-transit. (some virus lark or something)

So.... Shut down an entire deck and then throw overboard those who are standing too close to their fellow passengers.

Win-win.

Unexpected Porthcawl in the borkage area: Riding an indoor Power Truck to nowhere

Nice little error code you got there

And good luck googling your way out of that one. My googlefu was certainly not sufficient to find any authoritative answers.

I'm guessing the CMOS setup experienced a power failure and needs to be reconfigured.

Or somebody forgot to plug in the keyboard. :) Always a classic.

Either way, here's to nonsensical error codes and the people who write them. (see icon)

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

won't somebody think of the developers?

Where I toil away the days as a programmer, we have started to abandon the Windows platform in favor of the web. The reason is that nobody seem willing to want to install any binaries these days. Security and all that lark. (or possibly just laziness -- difficult to tell)

The irony of another wave of "let us see if we can make the browser a more capable platform for running your code" has not escaped me. Meanwhile, the quality of the tools involved is just not up to the standard I have grown accustomed to. IMO both developers and end users end up with the short end of the stick.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Re: took his hammer and smashed it to very tiny pieces

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/541417186425156447/

Thor's hammer, screwdriver and crescent wrench.

Backup a sec – is hard drive reliability improving? Annual failure rate from Backblaze comes in at its lowest yet

You rate Toshiba as #2. Aren't they very loud? I have a pair of HDWN180 in my closet, and it sounds like there is a gang of dwarves in there mining for gold. They share a wall with the bathroom, so when I take a bath (or reign the porcelain throne) I am tempted to file a noise complaint with the local constabulary.

I'm gonna replace them as soon as I win the lottery.

Re: The bastards messed up Joe's billing

That seems bizarre.

It isn't as if they delivered a 200 inch TV in the middle of a forest to some guy with a beard and a dodgy looking credit card. They're in a position where they can revoke their service if they detect credit card fraud.

I'm thinking it might be their upstream credit card broker that has f..ked up. Plus there seems to be some EU regulation thing going on, because I notice that being a Norwegian living in Sweden means filling out quite many forms whenever I deal with my bank connections (on both sides of the border). Questions like "Are you going to funnel your drug money through this bank account?" and "How often are you going to pay for black labor out of this account?" gets asked every year. (I am assuming it isn't just for me, but I could of course be wrong)

Which isn't an excuse of course. Your situation should have been handled much smoother! :(

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Re: China

@Tom 38, so I followed your link to Biden's web page.

Then I hit ctrl+F and searched for "trade" and finally "China". This is the only hit:

The world is facing inescapable challenges: a rapidly changing climate, the risk of nuclear conflict, trade wars, a rising China and an aggressive Russia, millions of refugees seeking shelter and security, and attacks on universal human rights and fundamental freedoms. The next president must repair our relationships with our allies and stand up to strongmen and thugs on the global stage to rally the world to meet these challenges. We can reclaim our longstanding position as the moral and economic leader of the world.

This is an excellent example of what I was getting at. If Joe has any ideas of his own, it certainly does not show!

"risk of nuclear conflict" -- FUD.

"repair relationships" -- sure, but _how_?

"meet these challenges" -- again: _how_? So far, meeting the challenge of e.g. climate change, seems to involve more unemployment

"economic leader" -- so, reinstating NAFTA again? Or are there better ideas floating around?

This is a politician who has clearly forgotten how to treat his (potential) voters.

I suspected the situation was bad, but not this bad. :( A blank vote might be the better option here.

China

Whitman and co's opposition to Trump seems unrelated to the Trump administration's heavy-handed tech policy, especially towards China.

Do Biden and his guys have a stated opinion on China?

My perception of Hillary was that she focused on belittling Trump, and did not talk much about her own alternatives. I hope Biden will be different.

Ink tanks park themselves all over the lawns of Western Europe as orders flood in

Thanks Alan,

Yesterday I printed about 360 pages. There was a little bit of red on each page... And the magenta toner that came with my printer dropped like a stone.

I wasn't aware the wastage would be _that_ noticeable.

I'm curious: Is the chemical composition of e.g. magenta toner similar between various OEMs? Could they put in a cheaper substance somehow to reduce the cost of production?

I picked a Swedish supply store at random.

I notice they also sell toner for C200, which I assume is the colour version of the KM Bizhub 200.

TN-214K (for the C200) costs 1044 SEK (24000 pages at 5% coverage)

TN-210Y (for the 200) costs 568 SEK (17500 pages -- coverage ratio not mentioned)

I _suspect_ that the C200 toner coverage estimate operates with less coverage, since more of the page will presumably be colored, hence less need for black...

Even if that was not the case, you get 35000 pages rather than 24000. So roughly an increase in page cost of about 30%.

Oki, a black only printer will be cheaper. But I do not believe having a separate ink-printer for colors is the way to go, unless you need to print photos. A rarely used ink printer tends to waste ink because it will end up cleaning its nozzles with every print you make. YMMV! :)

I'm curious about your math there.

I bought a Lexmark CS410dn for $100 (includes 25% VAT). Replacement toner is expensive, but I rarely print color and the black third party toner I got works just fine.

Re: Even so, the Printer Manufacturers will still zap you . . .

I had a similar experience with a CANON! (name included, because I _want_ them to sue me as I won't mind the publicity)

Manual clearly states that the print head can go 'bad' in case I print after ink runs out.

But, since I wasn't printing anything grey, I assumed I could wing it. And I thought there would be some streaks or noticeable print artifacts as the ink gradually ran out.

Not so. Just "okay, you ignored us, so until you send us off to the service spa, we're not going to talk to you nor your computer anymore". Fine... I can accept that, but how about just let me scan this here one page? "NO you heathen! Getteth away from us!"

The sad part is that I'm somewhat of a Canon fan. I love their EOS cameras. But this... This printer scam is just too much to stomach.

Bought a cheap lexmark color laser instead. The 3rd party replacement black toner ran me about $100, but it will print thousands of pages it says.

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

Re: Reputation

But Teslas are only a small portion of the car population. Plus many of them are driven by fleshbags.

Plus, we do not know how many miles other cars have covered. I suspect Tesla know how many miles their autopilots have covered, but we'd still need a number for comparison.

Docker shocker: Cash-strapped container crew threatens to delete 4.5 petabytes of unloved images

Re: 4.5PB? Is that all?

Shirley someone out there will have used Docker Hub as a distribution center for pirate activity?

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Re: Don't forget...

The doofus that wrote the Norwegian subtitles for that movie, got the word "invincible" confused with "invisible".

Rather confusing to watch.

If you own one of these 45 Netgear devices, replace it: Kit maker won't patch vulnerable gear despite live proof-of-concept code

Alternatively: One of us should collate this information and create a --it list of vulnerable and unsupported devices, grouped by manufacturer. (and reviewers could then consult this list and say a few words about what the consumer can expect)

OTOH. I do not care if some 10BASE2 gear from the 90s no longer receives any security updates. Then again, OEMs ought to publish sufficient information so that the open source community can have a fighting chance of providing support should the need arise.

At historic Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google CEOs hearing, congressmen ramble, congresswomen home in on tech market abuse

In Zuck's defence: When you've screwed over a few thousand competitors, it becomes increasingly difficult to recall specific instances of having done so.

GitHub starts publishing roadmap of future features

I fail to see how the grass is any greener over at GitLab.

Actually, for commercial projects, you want neither. TFS beats the combination of GitLab+Jira. TFS (using git for vcs) is cheaper and better. (unless you can somehow manage with the basic version of GitLab, in that case you might break even)

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

Reliability, security and all that tat

I have to wonder about the reliability of their competitor parts.

There is little reason to speculate. Instead you can read up on meltdown and spectre and simply extrapolate from there.

TL;DR: Intel's shortcuts caught up with them.

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

Because the human body doesn't have a radio receiver, right?

Read the article you're commenting on. They will start repeating the nonsense about billg's evil plan of implanting receivers into people.

if 5G is dangerous at 200 milliwatts

Not that it matters all that much, but: Up to 20 Watts for a "metro cell" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

The 5G standard seems to include quite many different frequency ranges. Are all of them comparable to radar?

Last winter I ran into a 5G nutter who redirected me to a 5G "facts" site. Unfortunately I could not be bothered to do much research (how to prove a negative anyway?). Especially not after the first story on their fantasy page was an obviously made up story about an office building used as a 5G test site reporting all kinds of health issues stemming from the "experiment". A buddy of mine happens to be working at that site, and when I put this story to him he replied "yeah, we're all wearing tin foil hats to work".

I have no idea how to combat such silliness. Eventually I replied that not only was I planning to extend my private wi-fi mesh network, but I was also going to offer up my garage as a site for a 5G site. Lead by example and all that. *shrug*

TL;DR: If I had billg's fortune, I would totally be implanting you all with tracking technology. billg wouldn't, but I would. A good 7% of all the people I have met over the years are bad uns, and I feel justified tracking all of you so that I can keep tabs on those 7%. But again: That is me, not billg.

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

A while back I verbally abused a JW who showed up at my doorstep. Later that day I noticed my wife's car had a one inch nail scratch. Could be a coincidence, but I should perhaps invest in some firearms.

AMD pushes 64-core 4.2GHz Ryzen Threadripper Pro workstation processors

...or Intel continues to not respond, in which case AMD wins.

And that is 100% okay with me.

Hang on...

That there CPU contains more cores than there are cards in a deck of cards. Surely that must give some sort of boost to your game of solitaire?!?

But yeah, your comment echo my own thoughts. I would love to have that beast on my desk, but putting all those cores to good use is a headscratcher for sure. Can it play Crysis?

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

I'm glad you feel you have proper support.

Years ago, in the nineties, a friend of mine lost his brother. Heart-attack the family said at the time.

Then, five years ago, my dear friend suddenly passed away. And during the service I learned two things: 1) Suicide. 2) ...just like his younger brother.

About two years before that, he told me he had checked in to a psychiatric clinic. He met a woman there who seemed fairly okay. I tried keeping in touch, but he had a habit of not returning my calls, so I figured I would give them some space. And he became a father again. Besides, we lived 400km apart at that point, so it wasn't as if I could just pop over to check on him.

I honestly thought he was doing okay. I did hear a rumor that he maybe had split up with his gf, but I didn't take that rumor seriously, and figured he would give me a call when he felt up to it. I was about to build a house near the coast and had already told him to pop by when it was done.

I dunno. I miss the guy a lot. So if any of you are thinking of doing something similarly stupid, think of those around you first. Try reaching out. And please do not assume people automatically realize something is up. My friend was one of the most brilliant people I have ever known, and I assumed he had everything sorted.

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Re: "COBOL programmers of the 2030s?

Maybe we could automate Linus .... a swear bot and a punching robot should do the trick

Bender from Futurama?

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

You do know that multi threaded programming has been fully possible in C right from Windows NT 3.1,

...and do we want a file open dialog that spins up several threads each blocking on I/O? No, we do not want that.

NT 3.1 included async I/O from the get-go too. But I suspect many of us stayed away from those functions because quite frankly they were a lot of hassle. Plus, the number of devs that do multithreading in a safe and effective way are in a minority. (also a management issue -- manglement rarely let developers do a job properly)

Things look a lot different now, because with modern dev languages we can finally do async operations in a more natural way while the coder staying productive. You know, if you really want to get down to the metal, there's always machine code. But you won't get much done that way and the result would be much worse.

There are many ways of getting Explorer stuck. I eventually remembered Mark Russinovich's exploration of one such phenomena: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/markrussinovich/the-case-of-the-intermittent-and-annoying-explorer-hangs

I haven't tried Rust yet. I hear good things though and it would be interesting to see it used for kernel type work -- if only to be able to compare apples and apples.

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

We have SEEN the results of "this kind of thinking": WINDOWS

Last time I checked, the Windows DDK was C all the way. It would be strange if the Windows Kernel used a completely different language. (The DDK changed names a few times, but I believe it is still C)

How long does it take to open up a "File Open" dialog box these days?

How is that relevant to kernel development?

That said, I pressed CTRL+O here now. The common file open dialog box popped up in less than a second. I perceive it as slow, but you know what: Had it been developed in a modern language, there'd be async calls to enumerate drives, put the right icons on the special folders, etc. It'd pop up instantly, but possibly not be fully populated right away.

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

Re: Deep-rooted prejudice

I found a Time Magazine article which hints that Satya Nadela is not a vegetarian.

So not a very stout Brahmin then?

In any case, those delicious tandoori dishes -- what caste is associated with those?

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: This is a problem in general

I tried with safe search turned off.

Looks okay to me. I would not mind if my sons brought two of those girls home for dinner. I'd even bake 'em a cake. Probably chocolate cake since my wife doesn't like apples. Apple cake is my favorite, but I can go for chocolate too.

Re: the dataset includes ...pictures of Black people... labeled with the N-word

I bet the researchers labelled the pictures by hand based on their own artificial understanding of the world.

Hats off to the brave 7%ers who dived into the Windows 10 May 2020 Update within a month of release

half and half

My laptop got the update a while back, but my desktop machine is still 'on hold'. The update screen says I have to wait. Wish they'd give me some links to whatever issues they feel I have. (hmm, might be in the update logs I suppose?)

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

Time's up

"We can manage with the changes but we think that it is an unnecessary burden to our community and we should give more time to them to build their SSL automation, perhaps two more years."

Let's encrypt has been around for quite some time now. Just how long do these jokers need to get their --it together?

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

Re: Oh Jesus, why?

I sort of agree, but I notice many people struggle getting the hang of this. (they seem to struggle with all aspects of life, but that is another discussion)

And even when they finally get the hang of joining, you can bet they will sit through an entire meeting with their microphone unmuted -- even though they don't utter one intelligible word throughout the ordeal. (For fun, put the microphone down, leave the room and your microphone amp will automatically be turned to 11 trying to pick up any sound you make... Everyone on the call will be bothered by the extra noise)

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Re: Damage the hard drive?

Presumably some people would be so enraged after borking the OS that they would thump their desk so violently as to cause the r/w head to crash into the disk platter. Repeatedly.

In the 80s, given a MFM drive, the OS could play around with the interleaving (while low-level formatting the drive...), which might cause extra stress on the drive? But it would be very obvious if the OS started doing that. I'm sure some of us would remember that happening.

Re: Stores might suck, proprietary protocols are the real killer

my university IT team claim IMAP is not GDPR compliant!!

I.e. they cannot be arsed to configure their IMAP server to require TLS?

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

What OS use two exclamation marks?

Looks more like a phishing attack of some sorts?

Re: There's a reflection in the screen.

@Dan 55, I just spent the last ten minutes trying to find that scene on youtube. Brilliant. (the TV show was brilliant -- my youtube search skills much less so)

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

it ain't json

Last time I checked, the json format does not support comments.

It is good that there exists exceptions to that rule. :)

(they might be using hjson: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22537629)

HPE chief Neri: I've got COVID-19 and am staying home for the next fortnight

The Register in decline

I'm very disappointed that the phrase "Typhoid-Neri" did not figure in the article.

NY Attorney General warns Apple, Google to police COVID-19 tracing apps in their souks – or she will herself

Datatilsynet in Norway is the only government agency I'm aware of that has been under qualified management for a longer time-span (since at least 1989).

They have a stellar track record afaik.

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

Re: Terminate

It doesn't autolaunch here. And I got 2004 several weeks ago.

So I'm inclined to believe it is a problem affecting a very small minority.

Re: Fawkes?

Zaphod did not say that. It was said _about_ Zaphod.

'Gag Halfrunt was the private brain-care specialist of Zaphod Beeblebrox. He became famous for saying in interviews "Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"'

https://alienencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Gag_Halfrunt#:~:text=Gag%20Halfrunt%20was%20the%20private,zis%20guy%2C%20you%20know%3F%22

Re: Terminate

I am a little bit surprised that you guys are bothered so much by the browser.

I never did anything and use Chrome just fine. Never been bothered by Edge.

However!

They keep resurrecting the bloody Beep device driver. AND they activate hibernation.

I even have a little powershell script I run after each feature upgrade of Windows:

$job = Start-Job -ScriptBlock { Stop-Service Beep }

Set-Service Beep -StartupType Disabled

powercfg /hibernate OFF

if (!$(Wait-Job $job -Timeout 5)) {

Stop-Job $job

}

(a vain attempt to do the service shutdown in the background -- a few versions ago they even made it impossible to shut it down cleanly just to annoy me further)

I'm also bothered by the sticky keys asking to be enabled whenever I rest my finger on the shift-button. Oh, and as a foreigner I'm haunted by, I think, left-shift + ctrl. That switches the input keyboard language! I have become popular with several colleagues after telling them why they suddenly are typing away on a different keyboard layout. This "feature" has been that way since at least 16-bit windows.

But that Edge icon on my desktop? Not a bother at all. Not compared to the bigger issues mentioned above.

Re: Remember when...

Uhrm....

The Start menu appeared with Windows 95 along with the startup folder.

Windows NT, released in automn 1993, already had e.g. HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run at that point.

Services was also part of both NT 3.1 and Win95. Nothing new there.

COM might have arrived later, but it builds on OLE that was introduced in 16-bit Windows (3.1?).

Login-scripts for domain users harkens back to the win16 glory days. (possibly a WfWg 3.11 feature? Although msft had some Lan Manager or similarly named product before that)

The ability to replace the user's shell I think predates Win95 as well, but it was certainly present very early on.

DevOps to DevOops: Docker Hub proves so secure that 430 Docker images out of 2,500 have no vulnerabilities

Wait... They did not limit their analysis to the latest versions posted?

w.t.f.?

Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service

Re: Exchange On Prem

And these days, is e-mail your only communication platform?

My employer uses both Teams as well as Slack. And Yammer and Confluence and lots of other platforms where some form of communication can take place independently of Exchange.

I'm no business manager, but 99% availability for e-mail sounds plenty good to me.

Wait... An outage?

Unfortunately I was not affected.

How I know?

Well, a co-worker dispatched no less than 20 (perhaps even 30) meeting invitations for our daily standup meeting. ...and she did that while I was busy clicking 'No, bloody fcking NO!' on her previous batch of invites. Watching the new avalanche of invites was surreal.

A mutual colleague tried giving her some pointers the first time this happened, and her reply was something along the line of setting up rules in outlook to filter incoming e-mail. Which he did. So he no longer reads anything dispatched by the mistress of mail missive avalanches. He also decided to move to another division of the company, making sure that his and her paths would never cross again.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Right to Repair... Jon Johansen's life.

And that was only stopped when a US judge quite rightly pointed out that the laws concerned do not have ANY validity in the country where Mr Johansen lived.

...where they then tried to put him on trial for mail fraud (being about the only law that came somewhat close).

As I recall, the prosecutor promptly lost that case, but still landed a cushy job with the Norwegian equivalent of MPAA.

I'm confident there was no corruption involved. The prosecutor went on a fishing expedition just for the fun of it.

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Re: you can try and help

Before you make me choose: Which side produces the most bacon?