Posts by Missing Semicolon

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Nohting left to do???

And then they spout this: "can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader"

Well, they'd better put someone on the Mailmerge functionality . Last I looked it was a hot mess.

Because of the heavy linkage with Base, you can't just get a merge document and a spreasheet of data, and put them together. So even if I (eventually) make a mailmerge of, say, an address list and a form letter, I could not just send you the document and the calc file and expect you to run the same merge.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

This stuff is just going so darned fast. Your net, by catching the orbiting nut or flake of paint has to change it's velocity from the very high speeds these things have to the slower speed of your net. Even though these items are tiny, the amount of kinetic energy is enormous. Punch-holes-in-steel enormous. So your "net" would not actually stop much.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Where are the backups?

So, if the users paid for backups, and they are gone too, I'd be interested to see what the liability terms are in CloudNordic's Ts&Cs about consequential losses.

Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here

Re: Being based off ...

A nice big round word, ound, ound, Ground!

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: "Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear."

Everybody keeps blaming "the right" for this kind of thing. Every Home Secretary has been in favour of increased surveillance of the populace. RIPA was enacted during the sainted New Labour era, remember?

And I don't hear the current shadow Home Sec complaining much.

Re: Good encryption by default

They don't have to fix the problem merely make the use of unlicensed, uncrackable encryption illegal. So using Veilid will be enough to put you in trouble.

Pack of GM Cruise robo-taxis freeze, snarl up Friday night traffic amid festival crowds

In other words, the secret is that they are not really autonomous - relying on a server farm back at base. I wonder if the regulator knows this?

TomTom are forever banned from my house after killing support for their Go700-series devices because they could. Lifetime subscription or no. It was the way that the PC app upgraded itself into kill mode, and ensured that future updates were not possible, and even moving and selecting map sets you already owned was impossible. Grr.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Re: Captchas, pah

Fail2ban is getting less useful. I have seen the bots tuning their request rate to not trigger a ban.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: To add to this...

Ah. I tried UrefilToner for my Brother Laser a while back. The toner seemed to be contaminated with small particles, which caused streaks on the output. The colours where particularly bad. Eventually gave up.

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Re: Bill Joy

I too tend to dislike modal editors. TECO , sed and sos lead into aedit on Intel dev boxes, and then brief on PC. But then "normal" editors became featured an ubiqitous enough that it became unnecessary to keep track of modes and cursor positions. Notepad++ was a revelation, and now it's Geany, with nano dor config file bashing.

Re: Thanks for Vim on a Fish Disk

Dissertation on Wordstar on CPC6128 CPM.

#prettyold

SAP CEO push for cloud-only 'innovation' shatters users' trust in German-speaking heartlands

Re: Yes and no.

Being "in the cloud" puts the supplier in charge of updates. You get no veto on new versions, even if a feature vanishes. Long-time sufferers from Jira will recognise that.

Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

It doesn't kown about Thelonious Monk

"in the style of thelonious monk with piano" just produces a random-walk chunk of piano noodling that sounds like Mozart on a bad day.

A similar query for "Miles Davis" sounds more like a bunch of samples from very old recordings, spliced together.

More experimentation would be needed to check it does not perform ChatGPT-levels of plagiarism.

Orkney islands look to drones to streamline mail deliveries

Floating drone

When it comes down, would there be any way to recover it?

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Re: LP - does it still mean Long Playing

Wasn't that the source of the new default that logging out killed any remaining processes you started? Purely because LP had leftover X processes on his laptop?

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Depends on screen size

Left/right tiling might be OK for a HD screen. Try a 4K one big enough to use the pixels. You really want windows to stay modestly sized, as full screen is insane.

" rather antagonistic and no-longer-entirely-accurate message[1] left over from Metacity"

Blimey that's aggressive!

Re: Killer app

I don't see the delight in windows snapping. I move a window in just the wrong way, and BAM it's taking half the screen.

Mate has the ability to define keyboard shortcuts for various kinds of tile. I use the otherwise-dusty numeric keypad to push windows to the side or to the corners (all the numbers except 5), so it happens when I want it, not when I hold the mouse wrong.

Re: Once you try this, it is rather wonderful

No, Gnome is created for its creators. If you want something that they don't think is right, tough. You want it because You Are Wrong.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: "The British government is hoping"

"The Tory ideology does not allow for anything outside the rule set of the ideology.". And neither will Labour. Who are full of even more anti-nuclear nutters, and net-zero zealots.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Yes, every time Rolls Royce talked to the Government, the Sir Humphreys shoo'ed them away. If they'd signed up for one, it would be on and generating its 400MW by now.

And the next one would be nearly done, and the following ones on order, so that multiple GW would have been available in a reasonable time frame.

But no.. Sizewell.

BT hires chartered management accountant and telco veteran as next CEO

Re: be nice if they got rid of spam on their networks

BT don't give a ****. Until liability is attached to CLI validation, it's just a cost centre that reduces revenue.

Millions of people's data stolen because web devs forget to check access perms

Liability is the key. At the moment, for large organizations with huge piles of data the cost of a data breach is negligible,and the consequences for those making the decisions zero.

Until actual board -level directors are uninsurably liable for failing to follow good practice nothing will change. If you have planned and paid for quality systems, correctly maintained (i.e.,paid for enough staff to be good enough and knowledgeable enough to know what needs doing, and have time to fo it) you should have nothing to fear.Talk-Yalk levels of malfeasance should be actionable.

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

Re: Usual rip off

Why do we need water meters? We never needed them before, and there was plenty of water. Are you telling me that the water companies get better ROI on installing meters, instead of improving the infrastructure? Say it ain't so!

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: My variation

Or it arrives, and you put it on the shelf. Next to the ones you bought last time.

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

Re: A drop in the ocean

The cost of lawyers is irrelevant. The principle is what's important, and that principle is "We always Win". IBM does the same thing.

Remember Ford spend way more than the cost of fixing the design of the Pinto defending the lawsuit, as the principle that "the manufacturer is not responsible for any accident in a car" was far too valuable to lose.

MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ individuals

Not free.

Experian £7/month. CFAS £25/2 years.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Moron alert. Again

Give it time. Threads will be just as toxic soon.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

Are they the bought ones, or recorded from the radio? With original music!

Beijing wants to make the Great Firewall of China even greater

Here in the UK

The penalty for "mis-information" is to be debanked.

Google tightens Play Store dev rules while becoming more blockchain tolerant

I guess Whatsapp will be setting that one!

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

Re: 4 cents?

The comical power pricing system is less about lining the pockets of cronies (though that may be the effect) but about making "renewables" look like they are cost effective. If the market priced energy at the cheapest offer price, green energy would never be used.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Re: All I can say is ...

Wasn't this when Azure was new, so MS had to stuff the word into as many brands as possible?

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

CSD

I get the idea that Wayland insists on CSD, explicitly not supporting SSD. That is a massively arrogant and F you decision.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Re: "Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development."

For Ubuntu, try the Mate flavour. Unless you need Gnome for development. Being Ubuntu, it's properly integrated, and you get a sane desktop.

Make sure that off-the-shelf AI model is legit – it could be a poisoned dependency

Editable models

So the publicly available chatbots are as susceptible as search results are to manipulation for commercial or political purposes.

Re: Before you do data science, do data engineering

Yeah, but source data curation is expensive. Can't justify the outlandish VC valuation when the production costs are so high.

Post-Brexit tariffs on cross EU-UK electrical vehicle imports still going ahead

Agenda

The EU also had an agenda. "Nobody leaves alive". There were many sensible compromises available, however all were rejected. The only solid "proposal" was the status quo, but slightly worse. The only "trade deal" offered by the EU was de facto membership.

Re: Reality

The manufacturers have been working hard on reducing that pesky longevity. Modern cars can now fail in expensive to fix, expensive to diagnose ways. So a £1000 car can easily become scrap by a module failure, or by requiring a dealer-only diagnosis. ODBII? Does the legal minimum, and you can't run the active diagnosis and test processes.

Re: Fuck business. They really meant it.

You think the red-rosette and yellow-rosette Oxbridge graduates will do any better?

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

Not the same

If you download RHEL, downloading Centos Stream source and building it does not make you a home-built RHEL.

Chinese malware intended to infect USB drives accidentally infects networked storage too

anti-cheat

It sounds like it drops malware that looks like the anti-cheat drivers some gaming companies install. Which hide themselves from the user.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: Ten foot barge pole, please.

They will provide a JS library that detects it is not working for websites, that they can use to inhibit the loading of content if the Topis API appears not to work.

Re: Ten foot barge pole, please.

Because for many sites (particularly payment or booking sites) simply don't work (or don't work properly) in anything else.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

CSD is evil, and should die in a fire. It imposes the app developer's idea of a window on the desktop, when the best solution is for the desktop to make all windows the same.

CSD came out of the hopeless aping of Windows8/MacOs by Gnome. These guys will not be told how unfunctional for non-expert users.

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

Re: Ideas..

And yet I don't remember any Labour Home Secs being any the less rabid. It doesn't matter which party is sitting in parliament, the power lies with the Home Office.

Microsoft's GitHub under fire for DDoSing crucial open source project website

Rate limits everywhere.

That's what is needed. Unfortunately it will make some dorks not use the project because it's "broken" instead of preventing their CICD infrastructure abusing free resources. ClamAV does it, so one simply creates a mirror.

Cisco buys SamKnows to give ThousandEyes a look at millions of endpoints

Re: Will this be the end of the Sam Knows "white box"?

Shame. I got one to encourage Vermin Media to up their game in our area. It seemed to work. However, I suspect the results are now gamed, as it misses the 1-2 minute outages I get occasionally.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

At O'Hare airport

Sign over the entrance to immigration. Along with "no weapons", and other prohibited items, was "no jokes".