Posts by Missing Semicolon

Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'

Re: I have said this before....

GitLab can have a CoC for the staff, entirely separate to its sales policy. The staff are free to work elsewhere if they don't like it.

The point at which GiLab may change is if they can't hire enough staff.

Hands off our phones, says Google: Radar-gesture-sensing Pixel 4 just $999 with a 3-year lifespan – great value!

Data slurpers selling Wifi meshes

The snoop possibilities of wifi mesh products hadn't occurred to me until I heard that Amazon want to buy a company that makes them. You now have to pick even more carefully!

Getronics CEO on HMRC winding-up petition: An 'embarrassing' blip with cash in the wrong places

Bad management

Pure and simple. Just yelling 'cut!' and expecting things to msgically rearrange themselves is incompetent. Not having knowledge of what a company is legally obliged to do is also incompetent. Smsll eonder the credit insurers are nervous!

Stalker attacks Japanese pop singer – after tracking her down using reflection in her eyes

Re: Unexpected result of digital cameras

Your behind the times. Consumer-grade film an processing was surpassed by digital a long time ago.

Remember the dossier in a plastic wallet that some journalist read from a photo?

Private equity to gobble up Brit virus blocker Sophos for £3bn

You will soon notice

As the price goes up, the quality down, and the service to pot. Once Sophos is loaded with £3bn of debt, all the staff will get "rightsized". That's what Private Equity does.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Instant Ink

It's actually not a bad deal. If you use most of the subscribed pages, the price-per-page is much less than over-the-counter HP cartridges.

I'm surprised that HP is struggling, with all that guaranteed income.

Incoming... Trump! Notebook makers ramp production to avoid next tidal wave of US trade tariffs

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

And this is the point that the moaners don't get. The effect of tarrifs is to make the cost benefits of importing less, so the economics of local manufacturing look better. The jobs "lost" in the short term are retail jobs. The gains long term are in manufacturing.

Would you rather buy your phones made by slave labour?

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Fishy

DoH implemented and easy to turn on? Great love it, well done!

On by default? That's suspicious, right there. Especially as it bypasses the local hosts file. Very fishy.

And what about local name lookups from networks where DHCP populates the DNS server?

Business PC sales up as suits flee looming end of support for Windows 7

Re: The death of the PC?

Or just keeping the old one until it dies.

Intel wins again

And I bet these corporate boxes will all be powered by insecure-by-design Core processors, of course. Not a safer AMD device in sight.

As browser rivals block third-party tracking, Google pitches 'Privacy Sandbox' peace plan

Asymmetric liability/costs

The problem with on-line ads is that they are NOT THE SAME as print advertising. A print ad just adds to the weight of the paper. A billboard just make the place ugly. A TV ad just occupies time.

But online ads are code and can cause me actual monetary loss.

The ad industry is set up to explicitly obscure the source and liability for bad adverts, so there is no incentive for anyone to police bad actors.

I notice Google have no solution for that, as there is money in that murky market.

So, while I would love to enable advertising to sites I visit, to cost is too high.

Breaker, breaker. Apple's iOS 12.4 update breaks jailbreak break, un-breaks the break. 10-4

"accidentally reopened a code-execution vulnerability that was previously patched"

"accidentally" Yeah, right.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Re: I've been recommending it to people for years

Two things are borked on LibreOffice.

Mailmerge. It really is half-done - a bodge-up involving the LO "Base" component, badly.

Charting. Creating simple stuff like a time-series graph seems to require the entrails of several chickens.

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

Eradicating the URL entirely.

Notice how Chrome makes the Bookmark manager hidden from casual inspection. The bookmarks bar is also hidden by default. As others have said, you are supposed to ask Google every time you want a site- if you typed it in, you obviously want it badly enough to know its name, instead of just blindly clicking on something. Plus, you might click on $site's sponsored link instead!

AMD stands for Another Monetary Decline, while Apple continues to sell enough pricey kit to keep Wall Street happy

Intel still have the PC makers by the....

Given that AMD processors are faster, cheaper, lower power AND more secure, why isn't Dell's storefront full of AMD-stuffed boxes?

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Drive belts

First stop is ebay. I've got one from there, and the bag had a Farnell/CPC part code on it. No, i forgot to write it down!

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Bonneville GXP

Just googled it.A definite keeper!

The silicon market is in such a dark place, Texas Instruments' revenue decline was rewarded

16% drop in embedded processing?

Look inside most stuff, and there's an anonymous 8 pin chip doing the smarts. The only consumer item I've seen with a TI device is an Oral-B toothbrush (MSP2435G, since you're asking).

Farewell to function keys and swappable SSDs in the new two-port MacBook Pro

Small, neat powerful laptop

Thinkpad X230. I5. 8Gb Ram. SSD. Win10. Just £130 off ebay. Ergonomically its the dogs. Not too heavy, made like a brick outhouse. More ports than you can shake a stick at. Maybe add £20 for a new battery. Runs Linux if that's your thing. What's not to like?

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

The end is near

Face it. The vast majority of Facebook users will be very happy. They can now share bills, lend each other a few quid, buy stuff from each other, with no friction.

The real worry is that its ubiquity causes it to be the default way of processing micropayments for web sites. Now you must be logged in to Facebook to browse the web. The end times are nigh.

UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax

selling below cost.

If the profit margin is so low, couldn't AWS be had for buying the business?

What does $9bn buy you? For Infineon, a Cypress hill of California semis

" demand from vehicle makers in China"

Ha. Selling chips to China? Best of luck with that!

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Re: If I were a betting man...

I get my facts from, er, facts: https://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/chinas-growing-coal-use-is-worlds-growing-problem-16999

Their renewable efforts may seem large, but China's energy use is simply huge.

Re: If I were a betting man...

Er, no. They are selling loads of renewable tech to the West, whilst burning vast amounts of coal. The local renewables use is a rounding error .

The anti-pollution efforts are around big-city smog, not CO2 emissions

Buffer the Intel flayer: Chipzilla, Microsoft, Linux world, etc emit fixes for yet more data-leaking processor flaws

Intel's illusionary advantage

Once again Intel's performance advantage over AMD is shown to be insecure.where's my f'n refund/buyback?

Google puts Chrome on a cookie diet (which just so happens to starve its rivals, cough, cough...)

Chromium next

At some point, not this year, but soon, the license on Chromium source will become not-quite-floss. Enough so that publishing a un-Googled version will be impossible.

Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills

Re: Ralph Nader's niece

Because we are supposed to do it better now. We have all sorts of automatic logging, and the pilots report anomalous behaviour. These aircraft weren't grounded because the available information was ignored. Boeing are "too big to ground"

As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view

Re: UK oversenstive

Ah, but such an offer was not on the table. Is was sensible,but would not be painful enough. Only BRINO was offered.

Huawei's half-arsed router patching left kit open to botnets: Chinese giant was warned years ago – then bungled it

Bad software practices

We think they have a customisable firmware set that they deploy across products. No, they just copy and paste the code to a fresh project for each product. They simply have no idea how each model's code is related. Fixing a bug across 'n' products needs 'n' teams!

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Re: Interesting

Seahouses has (or at least, had when I visited) the "Farne Gift Shop". A mixture of handicraft kit, outdoor clothing, toys, tourist tat and Pound shop. Well worth a mooch!

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

Re: RIP

Oh, and don't forget "simply withdraw".

Take Note: Schneider's teeny-tiny Galaxy VS li-ion UPS set to explode onto data centre scene

Re: Schneider Electric

Hmmm. APC and SLAs. The upses I have seen from them keep the batteries so fully charged (to meet the runtime specs) that the cells melt in a couple of years. Yes, melt, swell, get stuck in the chassis, get crazy hot. If they were just a little more conservatively charged they would last for a lot longer.

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Students

Presumably, at $200 for the whole job you don't get "professionals" you get students. If not English-as-first-language, IIT students?

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: The other extreme

Absolutely. "Indian" food in the UK does not have "the taste". I dunno what it is, but it doesn't have it. Takes a few months for your tastebuds to forget, so you can eat UK Indian food again.

Plus, some options are bosses only

In my youth, I had to drive to Bournmouth from Stevenage for a training thing. I planned to drive, so proposed this to the PTB. All was peachy, until I pointed out that my engine was 3 litre, whereupon a crappy Fiat Punto was rented.

It was probably more expensive, but the steep slope on the mileage rates by engine capacity was for the bosses in their Jaguars, not PFYs in second-hand Vauxhall Senators!

Is this the way the cookie wall crumbles? Dutch data watchdog says nee to take-it-or-leave-it consent

All that is necessary is honesty

The cookie dialog should say:

"Access to badgerbotherers.com is not free.

Click >here< to select a subscription option,

or >here< to continue, and pay for access by sharing tracking information.

Click >here< for information on what information we capture, and who we share it with"

There is no actual reason why a web site should be free. Since the dialog is now just about payment options, the issue of GDPR does not arise, as the information<>access trade is now explicit.

Go, go, Gadgets Boy! 'Influencer' testing 5G for Vodafone finds it to be slower than 4G

GiffGaff on 4G Manchester centre

Lucky to get 1Mbps. Or no data connection at all.

Even on Speedtest, which presumably has special prioritised routes.

Now, hold on. This may shock you... Oracle allegedly juices its cloud sales with threats and shoddy on-prem support

Re: So, to cut through the legal-ese that is inevitable in these matters....

No, Shareholders sue Oracle for failing at it's usual business model!

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: mailmerge?

Thanks for that!

I didn't realise you could do that. Now I can edit the source data without using the lame Base UI for it.

It now points out what the problem is - the merge only runs from "registered" databases. he temporary link to the speadsheet isn't registered.

This means that

1) You end up with your global database space being full of all the mail merge sources you have ever used, and

2) you can't ship the source doc and the spreadsheet to someone else for them to do the merge.

So, still massively broken.

Re: mailmerge?

Ha! yes, then actually try it.

It might have worked in 2011 when the article was written but now it's busted.

Create a Writer doc, use "Exchange Databases" (wtf?) as described. Add some fields to the doc.

Save.

Now open it again.

The link to the spreadheet is gone.

Any attempt to perform the merge crashes Writer.

mailmerge?

I find it doesn't work from calc files, only from a Base database. And the only way to import a spreadsheet is to copy-and-paste. Really. There is no"import table from sheet" option.

Basically until the merge-from-spreadsheet works, it's still a geeky mess.

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

Re: WD

Packaging.

That's the problem nowadays.

Whenever I order a spinny drive, it comes in packaging more suited to an SSD - no cushioning, no space. I once sent one back as it literally arrived in a cardboard box the same size as the drive. With a damaged corner.

Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Re: Powering the Age of Surveillance Capitalsim

"the original aim of WhatsApp"? Surely the aim was to make the founders unfeasibly rich?

Achievement unlocked!

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Re: Not sure...

Such a shame. Right up to the hairdryer they were doing the right thing....

The BMC in OpenBMC stands for 'Burglarize My Computer' – thanks to irritating security flaw

Re: WT actual living F?

The management of the PC by the BMC - that's fine, that's what the BMC is for,

But here, we have the management (firmware alteration) of the BMC by the OS on the PC. That should not be possible.

WT actual living F?

These devices have an uncontrolled, always-on way for the host machine to access and modify the BMC firmware and memory for development purposes. And it's on in production?

And the board with the chips on has no jumper/DIP switch to enable/disable the access?

Are these guys just lazy, or is the cost of 2 pins and a jumper just too much.

Once again somebody elses' convenience and profit socialises all of our security costs.

Bah!

Fake broadband ISP support scammers accidentally cough up IP address to Deadpool in card phish gone wrong

Re: Dirty Scammers

I did the shaming trick once or twice.

<slight pause>

"You do know what you are doing, right? Would your parents be proud of you for getting a job, defrauding vulnerable people over the phone? Mine certainly wouldn't"

... and such like. One said "Oh" in a small, crestfallen tone and hung up.

Normally, you don't abuse cold-callers - they are just doing a job. But anyone working in one of these places knows that they are cheating people, so whatever makes them give up is OK.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

Way too late

atdotcom.com was registered before 2000

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Re: Still useless...?

You young'uns....

Back in the day, you could not clone IDE drives using dd (bit-copying the whole drive) because the IDE firmware kept the bad-block map on an accessable, but unused part of the initial few tracks. If you did, the destination drive ran really slowly until it repaired the map - if it ever did!

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Privacy Badger?

That is now my go-to choice for ad-blockingtracking prevention. Since it effectively trains itself, I don't need to worry about downloading block lists.

If that stops working, then Chome=connect to google only.