Posts by OldSoCalCoder

Dems propose privacy-respecting digital dollar

Re: Bring it on.

Also in U.S., and I just checked a large bank that handles our small business. If cash deposits exceed some threshold per month they charge 0.30 per $100. They'll also charge a cash handling fee if the number of transactions in a month exceeds some other limit. I have no effin idea why they think this is ok, and agree-this is insane to charge me to DEPOSIT money they then lend out and receive interest on.

What came to my mind when I read this is the U.S. banks required to fill out Suspicious Activity Reports on any cash deposit of >= $10,000. How would this e-cash thing work then? How do you say this is going to be peer-to-peer but still observe txs like this? There are several businesses (i.e. pot stores) where I live that regularly make deposits like this.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Re: "guaranteed a job."

I thought I could learn any language out there also. I paid my rent writing COBOL against DB2 data in the 80-90's, took classes in C and Java, wrote a JSP e-commerce website somewhere around 2006, wrote a simple Android app around the same time and then, around 2019, decided to look down the dark tunnel of front-end programming. HTML5, CSS3, javascript with node.js, angular, react, ajax, bootstrap.js, jquery, json and PHP. I spent about a year trying to learn this shite on my own. I don't know at what point I decided this just wasn't worth it, but it just seemed to be too much 'cute' code - i.e., how much you can do in one sentence and not be obvious in your intent. I also didn't like the way javascript isn't type-safe. The difference between procedural and functional programming paradigms? Maybe. Or I just might be old.

Re: COBOL IS DEAD!

I was a COBOL programmer and I'm out of work. I haven't been actively (read desperately) searching but I've been getting some responses from a 'send me updates' from Indeed. The ones I'm looking at right now says 'mainframe experience 10 years required, CICS, MVS JCL, TSO, QMF required'.

I was unfortunate enough to spend 20 years writing COBOL on the wrong platforms. First for a Texas Instruments mini setup using their version of Ryan McFarland, then MicroFocus's version that ran on client / server pcs. The latter used true blue IBM DB2 precompilers, but still no 'mainframe experience'.

I'm 65+ and have no desire to move, so ya, I guess I'm just too lazy to get out there and pound the pavement to get the big bucks but please don't say if you can spell COBOL without spelling Cobalt you can get a job. It just ain't true.

India's Reserve Bank deputy governor calls for crypto ban

Re: his boss said: "no underlying asset -- not even a tulip"

Gold doesn't tarnish, is a good at conducting electricity and apparently is really good at reflecting light (as per James Webb Telescope). Please name the useful industrial properties of one bitcoin.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

What wasn't mentioned and is critical here is the fact that the Tesla was exiting a freeway, the 91 in LA, and the Tesla didn't stop for the red light at the bottom of the offramp. After driving LA freeways for 50+ years I can tell you there's no way you have 20 seconds to go from freeway speed to dead stop on an offramp.

Even knowing your offramp is coming up, even travelling in the slow lane, you're expected to keep up with the flow of traffic which usually averages at least 70 mph. You have at the best 5 seconds to merge off and start to slow down. I'm assuming the driver had been letting the Tesla accelerate and brake while traveling on the freeway. At what point is the driver supposed to assume the Tesla will no longer self-drive?

Revealed: How to steal money from victims' contactless Apple Pay wallets

Re: Need a stolen powered on iphone

How long is it going to take to de-activate your card if the thing that lets you know there's fraud happening has been stolen? I.e., they've stolen your phone. Now go home, log in to your bank - oh, wait, no one needs home computers anymore, do they? Everything can be done on your phone, can't it? Where's that banking app that lets me cancel my card? Ah, on my stolen phone.

Re: No Problem

Zero liability just means a continuation of high fees to the merchant that takes Visa credit cards. Nothing's free. Unless you're a carder, where it appears crime does pay.

YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

YouTube's 'suggestions' algorithms have truly turned to shit. I watch videos on a tablet, so I can see the main video plus some of the 'you might be interested in these related videos' either on the side or below. The suggested videos are usually better than the suggestions on my home YT page, but why does YT have so few listed? Is that all YT thinks I'm interested in?

Has anyone else scrolled down their home YT page and hit the bottom? The place where YouTube has actually run out of ideas? This is where they've said 'We give up, we can't think of anything else we think you'd be interested in. This is the bottom. There is no more. There isn't anything else we can possibly think of to show you that you might be vaguely interested in, even though you have a full list of 'subscribed' channels and we're not showing you one of them, even though you've said 'not interested' in hundreds, 'liked' thousands, 'save for later' multitudes and have 800 Million videos in our library. YT says 'yes, we give up. We have no idea what to show you next.' This is insane.

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

I'm guessing that 49.5% of the world's compute power is spent on serving up advertising, 49.5% on malware prevention and 1% on actually getting things done.

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: El Reg becoming political now ?

Yes - just like the left wing commie rag filled with lies called the New England Journal of Medicine that unjustly said trump 'took a crisis and turned it into a tragedy'. So what if NEJM hasn't had a political editorial in 208 years.

US senators: WikiLeaks 'likely knew it was assisting Russian intelligence influence effort' in 2016 Dem email leak

Re: Deja Vu all over

'Wasting their time...' when we have a pandemic. Ya, and an election two months away. Kinda important also. What part of this are you saying is 'spurious' or 'outright fabrication'? The fact that Russia interfered with the 2016 election? Or the fact that Trump knew this was going on and actively aided Putin/Russia to alter the outcome of the 2016 election.

If you can't see the first fact there's no point in going any further, I believe the moon is made of cheese also.

How does the sexual orientation of Manning have any bearing on this conversation? Or was that just thrown in to demonize Obama, democrats?

Trump escaped being proven guilty of using a foreign government to alter a US election. He also escaped being proven guilty of obstructing justice.

Re: Clueless

That's the problem. I read this and see trump guilty of collusion between him and Russia in interfering with the election. The republicans read the very same facts (maybe altered, omitted some) and say 'see, trump wasn't proven guilty'.

Wasn't proven guilty isn't the same as proven innocent. This doesn't prove that trump had no idea what was going on.

(I really hate double negatives but I don't know how to say it without them.)

Clueless

I started reading this 966 page Senate intelligence report and kinda got stumped on page 6.

'Manafort hired... Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.'

Not 'is believed to be', not 'is allegedly connected to', but 'is a Russian intelligence officer.' Both parties agree to this fact.

Manafort 'directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnic' while serving in Trump's 2016 campaign.

Now here's the part I'm confused about.

'The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data... with Kilimnik'.

Ya, that's got me stumped too. I cannot for the life of me figure out why someone working for Trump would be passing info on the upcoming election to a Russian intelligence agent who was actively working on orders from Putin to interfere with the 2016 US elections to the benefit of the Trump campaign.

I'm just clueless.

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

Re: Sometimes you just have to be there

I absolutely agree that the hardware on campus cannot be replaced by any kind of 'virtual' classroom. I also agree that one of the greatest benefits students receive when going to school is being face to face with professors and other students and cannot be replicated online.

However, this pandemic is (hopefully) temporary and to some is life threatening. Trump et al are forcing universities to put people at risk to get votes in November. This is a short-sighted political play without regard to the safety of the population. I have no idea how to give the current crop of students the education they're paying for (foreign students paying more so), but this is a bad move at this time and is being forced on the universities without a rational discussion of options.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

hand-wringing

No comments on the last three paragraphs about the Automatic Handwashing Detection? Are you kidding me? First of all, what's the tvOS doing listening in on my visit to the bathroom? Gee, I'm really looking forward to '...get a little coaching to do a good job' from the geniuses at Apple regarding my hand washing skill. Maybe this isn't designed for adults but you're supposed to strap $500 Apple Watches to your children instead of teaching them simple hygiene yourself? I would sincerely like to tell the VP of technology et al at Apple to come up with an ass-wiping machine learning app that starts with them all shoving their Apple Watches up their collective asses. Sorry, but this just sounds like too many smart people with too much time on their hands or absolutely clueless to the meaning of 'unnecessary intrusive technology'.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

Micro Focus Cobol, used it for a decade. On pcs. Against IBM DB2 databases.

I think New Jersey's problem may not be a lack of actual Cobol programmers but how the current load can be managed, distributed. It sounds like they're not inventing new UIs, they're just having a problem handling the volume coming in.

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

More features please!

In the 15 years I've been using MS Office products from 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 I have never said to myself 'gee, I really wish this spreadsheet software could track where my kids are tonight.' In fact I have never said 'gee, I really need (x) in this office productivity software.' I have said 'Where the hell did these assholes at Microsoft hide (x) in THIS version???' (Through every iteration I've always said 'How do you do mail merge again?')

I work at a small company with a handful of people spread over a few locations. I have never - ever - needed anything 'new' in the word processor or spreadsheet software I infrequently use.

I don't like paying a monthly fee forever for something I don't use very often. The part I don't like is the 'forever' clause. I have no idea what I paid for the Office 2010 running on my personal desktop pc, but I know it wasn't $84 per year for the last 10 years.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: Which was the bigger engineering challenge ? Concorde. Or Apollo ?

Don't forget bitcoin's contribution to the advancement of society as a whole. I mean, you've got like this number, and then it's secret, and...it's market cap is $150 billion...

Sorry, off-topic.

Count me in if we're ponying up $s to buy this thing before some asshole turns this into collectable coffee table "art".

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Re: Twinkle, twinkle.

Re 'wo is going to benefit?' Great question. Is this brave new sat connection to the internet going to be free? Are the people living in remote places going to be able to afford this? If it's not profitable, the stuff will be abandoned.

I travel to places 'off the grid' because they're remote. I don't need hour-by-hour cat videos, the latest youtube/pinterest influencer feeds or constant twitter puke.

Somehow this author is confusing pictures taken from satellites outside of earth's orbit with earth-based star gazing. I think he's trying to say 'don't bother going outside with your telescope, just look at pretty pictures on this web site. It's better!' The author also says 'it's really not going to be that bad.' That's the author's opinion and I strongly disagree.

ICANN't approve the sale of .org to private equity – because California's Attorney General has... concerns

Re: Good

ICANN ended being subject to the US Dept of Commerce in 2016, bob. Everything I've read so far suggests this sell-off of .org to a for-profit shell company was a done deal. I'm very confused in the point you're trying to make here. Are you saying the sale wasn't going to go through because someone else was going to step in with a rational voice and say this deal is nuts? Are you in favor of this deal that's blatantly a conflict of interest?

As far as your shallow view of California, you obviously haven't spent time below the Orange Curtain (Orange County, home of John Wayne Airport), Simi Valley (home of Ronald Reagan Library) or any of the lovely San Joaquin Valley or north of San Francisco, both home to oil & gas, ag, forestry and commercial fishing. Bastions all of right wing thinking.

Re: Good

To ICANN's credit, they did post the letter from CA DOJ, AG on their website. I see that ICANN is a nonprofit registered in Calif and that's why Calif has jurisdiction on this. Among the 35 questions the AG has,

"23. Did ICANN approve a removal of the price cap for registration fees for .org domains?

24. If ICANN approved the removal...provide a detailed explanation how this occurred...'

25. (provide) All correspondence between ICANN, ISOC, PIR, and/or Ethos Capital regarding the removal of the price cap..."

and lastly

"35. Your conflict of interest policy."

Now the question is what can the CA AG do about it?

(An annoying side note - I couldn't find a direct link anywhere on California's oag.ca.gov website re this letter.)

NPM swats path traversal bug that lets evil packages modify, steal files. That's bad for JavaScript crypto-wallets

Re: "...JavaScript crypto wallets..."

Isn't node.js server side javascript? Don't you want to use that ultra-bitchin language everywhere? C'mon, a simple jobs search will tell you "everyone" is building their critical applications using javascript everywhere. And, according to one website,

"Node.js frameworks are mostly used because of their productivity, scalability and speed, making them one of the first choice for building enterprise applications for companies."

Doesn't that make you feel better?

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

Re: Because an open and transparent auction wouldn't have maximised the value at all!

Taken directly from Mr McCarthy's article written Nov 20 2019

"Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.

As such it appears that the plan to purchase the .org registry was predicated on the price caps going ahead and that those behind the deal had intricate knowledge of ICANN’s internal processes."

So someone's getting rich off of this, and the process involved 'inside information', a financial transaction based on information not known to the public beforehand. Isn't that illegal in the U.S.?

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

off topic

Dear Mr Kieren McCarthy: Thank you for your rant re facebook. While a little off-topic, I sincerely appreciate the continued illumination of a truly screwed up, asshole driven and morally corrupt company.

Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

Re: Hardly representitive!!

What gets reported as 'the most popular language' = what shows up in 'wanted, experience in ...' = what gets reported as 'the most popular language = what shows up in ... wait, am I repeating myself here?

I like languages that have been used for years to do really hard things well. I like languages that have tools that work, a development environment that's not cobbled together bits and pieces and that will let me find out what's wrong fast.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Re: Built-in-obsolescence

I bought an HP 6110 from Costco some 17+ years ago and it ran forever, chewing through anything. Fast forward to about 2015 and I found myself with five one year old HP printers ranging from the $69 basic to a $300+ model, all in various states of won't-print or prints-like-shit. All, of course, had brand new HP labelled ink cartridges installed, some with duplicate brand-new cartridges in standby. I remember distinctly watching the ink level of one of these printer cartridges drop by 1/4 as it puked out the third shittily smeared and streaked color print test page. I remember distinctly waiting for hours through their driver loads that installed a ton of useless software, muttering 'c'mon, all I want to do is print a fucking word doc. No, I don't want software to Organize My Pictures, nor Track My Lovely Moments.' Never Again, HP, never again. I hope the whole HP printer team goes to a very special place in hell.

Oh Snapd! Gimme-root-now security bug lets miscreants sock it to your Ubuntu boxes

Re: snapd and systemd

All the OP wanted to do was a simple task. Now you have him spending how much time compiling source from scratch? C'mon, a simple 3 minute task (update vlc from this to that) shouldn't be some mission to mars. You may do this every day but some people have jobs outside of building OSs.

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

How'd they do that?

Somehow the update 'broke' chrome on my desktop. I click on the chrome icon, it loads, spawns other chrome tasks, and...no chrome window drawn. I've wasted an hour and a half this morning uninstalling, re-booting in between, waiting for the cleanup forced update to finish, etc.

I've battled ms's forced update for years. I sincerely, truly hate the idiot that thought this was a good idea. The previous forced update (July 2019) happened on a work pc 120 miles away. Cost me 36 hours of work Fri AM to Mon PM, 460 miles of driving, 8 hours travel. Wound up just buying a new pc. What bothers me - a lot - is this was a perfectly functioning pc before the update was forced upon it and which I had no say whatever in applying. (The person using this pc called me up and said 'the pc just sits and reboots itself over and over.')

The only "feature" Win 10 (all versions) needs is an 'I'll decide when and if I want to install this patch' option. Period. There is nothing else the OS "needs". No cute almost-like-a-phone icon charms, no 'search from anywhere', no windows app market crap. I don't want my pc to be almost like something else - I just want it to work.

Brit software giant Micro Focus takes a bath after share price crashes 30%, sales tank

Re: Anyone surprised?

Back then they also had a software system called Dialog that would gen (non-standard to say the least) COBOL that let you do drag & drop front end development for pcs. Unheard of. I never - ever -had a time when I said 'Gee, I really need (x) to get my job done. It'd be great if COBOL had (x).' It just worked.

I recently started to look at the wonderful world of web development, which means knowing HTML5, CSS3, bootstrap 4, javascript, jquery, php, ruby, python, functional programming, the use of chrome's debug, visual studio code's debug, then spend 10 days trying to get any version at all of netbeans to debug and still no drag and drop front end. (Yes, everyone says they have a 'drag and drop' tool but the people who actually use those tools wind up saying 'Just open up Notepad and do it yourself.')

Who needs 4th July fireworks when there's a new Windows 10 build?

Re: "Build 18932 is all about accessibility.."

I DO understand why he's smoking mad, and you don't.

I was called Friday afternoon on Jul 5th and was told that the main pc at an office 'kept booting'. I knew what it was since I've dealt with it before - an update from Microsoft that was forced on the pc and failed. Great - 6:30am Sat I made the 120 mile, 2 hour drive to this office, walked in and watched this pc 'rolling back update, please wait, boot, installing update please wait, fail error flash for milliseconds, rolling back update, please wait... Fast forward to Mon 8:30pm after spending the weekend trying to get this pc in any reasonable state, buying a new pc, sitting on phone while business application people installed needed software.

The point is I'm down 480 miles in travel, 8 hours sitting in the car, 36 hours of my time, cost of a new pc and an expensive software reinstallation charge ON A PC THAT WAS WORKING PERFECTLY DAYS AGO.

I have NO say in whether or not this update happens. There is NO 'skip this forced update'. If you know of one, please let me know.

Pissed off and ready to use a lot of uppercase typing? You bet. If you haven't been through this experience you don't know. Microsoft's forced update policy has wasted my time and money and I'm pissed off about it because there's nothing I can do about it.

You're not still writing Android apps in Oracle's Java, are you? Google tut-tuts at dev conf

Re: K&R Braces

Ya - it's way too much to type a { and }, and it really screws up my cut/copy coding style. I just can't take the time to see if my logic's structured correctly and all the new ultra bitchin languages let you slopshit CIP all you want! (CIP - Code In Panic)

This move by Dropbox will reduce users' files to tiers: Rarely, regularly accessed data now kept separate

Re: Youve blown it - so long dropbox!

For the price (free), I can't complain about dropbox. I don't use dropbox as the final resting place for any file because I've learned over the years any company can go down the tubes (AOL, Yahoo), be sold or change stripes (LastPass > LogMeIn > ??). Ya don't get something for free, forever. Wasn't there some concern re Google being able to scan photos, files according to Terms of Service on Google Drive? Wouldn't Microsoft, Apple have similar TOS?

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

Re: Why has it been made so difficult?

I was stuck in an infinite loop of 'Please remove your last item' / 'Please scan your next item' / 'Please start over from when you walked in to this store' when I said out loud (or maybe kinda loud), "Oh, F**K you, you piece of S**T'. People nearby looked at me funny and an employee of the supermarket quickly came over to do her reset/scan of magic card thing. She then showed me that there's a 'mute' button on the screen. I still truly hate these things.

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

The Inverse Relation

The person with the smallest amount of desk space always needs the most hardware, all hung off of a laptop with insufficient USB ports. This of course means hanging a hub off in thin air, which will get dragged out of the USB port when the combined weight of the attached peripherals and each of their 9 feet of zip-tied power cords all fall in a pile behind the 500 lb desk.

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

What's taking so long?

I'm guessing that 50% of page load time comes from these shit tracking scripts but what hasn't been mentioned is the other half (well, 49%). I propose that the other part of the equation is security, mainly SSL/TLS handshake, authentication cert download, multiple session encryption renegotiations. This depends on the website, but a lot of mainstream websites need good protection. HTTPS is a good thing but it comes at a price.

As for 'it's your fault, developers' I don't know about that. If you want a quick and dirty website you'll go to Wix or some canned wordpress theme and ya gets what ya get, no tweaking allowed. I got off the phone with a Google Ads rep yesterday after she stepped me through changing my paid ad campaigns. I'm not using tagged advertising but it's pretty easy to see how someone could have a lot of slop code running on their website without knowing it.

Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs

Re: correcthorsebatterystaple

Smartphones are a problem, and will be as banks, credit card companies and retail stores push towards their use. Entering long passphrases with combinations of <shift> keyboard special char, long hold-select is cumbersome and error prone. A few websites have started to have an option of 'show password text', but on mobile apps? Umm, no. I still don't know where or how passwords are stored on these phones, but it's convenient to check 'yes, store this password for future use'. Multifactor authentication on smartphones is even more cumbersome since (I'm guessing) it involves task switching, selecting a text string, copy, task switch back and pasting. Hardware authentication like Yubikey? For a while Apple wouldn't even give the outside security firms specs so they could design something that would work with their products.

Is there one magic bullet solution to online security? I haven't seen one. But, articles like this are good if it gets us to change how we protect at least one high value asset.

IBM to kill off Watson... Workspace from end of February

Blockchain. You forgot to add 'blockchain'. That'll sell it.

Ding dong merrily on high. In Berkeley, the bots are singeing: Self-driving college cooler droid goes up in flames

Re: Human Error, eh ??

Why not just replace the human with a battery installing robot?

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

What's a computer?

At the beginning of the year Apple ran an ad where some 12yo girl finishes a productive day of doing stuff on her iPad, and asks 'what's a computer'? I thought to myself ah - so if you're a 12 year old girl the iPad is your go-to compute platform. I guess that means anyone who's further in age than a 12 year old and has a job where they actually need to get something done should use a real computer.

I tried replacing my 6 year old Samsung tablet with a newer Win 10 tablet. The cpu on the Win 10 tablet is forever stuck trying to install a (seemingly) infinite number of Win 10 updates as to be completely unusable. The Samsung tablet won't update at all but does a great job of running YouTube, a Kindle reader app and a wifi analyzer app. That's all I want it to do and it does exactly what I want.

Flash price-drop pops Western Digital's wallet: Surprise revenue fall with worse to come

I have 2 pcs literally sitting side by side. One running on a 4 year old i5 intel booting win 10 off of hard drive, another 7th gen i5 intel booting linux Ubuntu 18.04 off of WD ssd. Both have 8G of mem. Is the linux box incredibly, mind-blowingly faster? umm...no. I just installed Netbeans IDE on both, and I don't see a difference in the IDE startup times. If an application depends on internet speed the determining factor will be how fast you're getting data off the wire and there's nothing you can do about that. I was at Fry's yesterday and saw a 1TB WD ssd for $299. How much for 1TB of hard drive? Max $50.

As to the article - this really shows the retail pc market is still tanking. I can see how the consumer saying 'spend $800 on a smartphone or buy a new pc?' is almost a no-brainer if all they're doing is surfing the web and watching cat videos.

Have all the big guys (FANG) built out their storage silos, saying 'Nah, we're good for now'? I don't get that. We're storing more consumer activity from more (IoT, etc) sources than ever. How is business demand going down? The other reason FANG business storage demand should be rising is the use of cloud storage from the consumer smartphone. All those pictures of Uncle Fred's 80th birthday have to go somewhere.

jQuery? More like preyQuery: File upload tool can be exploited to hijack at-risk websites

I followed the link by Mr. Cashdollar of Akami to the Apache 2.4 docs. Maybe I'm missing something here, but the doc doesn't say that .htaccess isn't being used any more. It strongly suggests not using .htaccess files, but I don't see it saying 'this is no longer used'.

Silent running: Computer sounds are so '90s

The good old days

Ah, I remember, but not too well. The sound of a 250 lb 40M CDC 9760 drive on a metal pedestal running sorts at month end (boom da da boom boom, da da boom), the sound of a chain printer warming up to go through a box or two of greenbar. I included the weight of the drive because I've moved a few of them up / down a few flights of stairs.

Google kills AdWords!

I've been using AdWords on and off for 10 years for our small service business. Somehow I was able to use the geolocation part to target my ads to cities where we have physical locations, set min bids to what we could afford (not much) and...watched sales drop. Yes, the interface is very confusing. I can't remember if Google called me or I called them but I've talked to their AdWords support a few times, went from less keywords to more keywords, let them tweak my ads and...watched sales drop. Quit AdWords advertising for a few years(!), went back in a year ago targeting just smartphones and watched sales drop. I still don't know how 'the other guys' target ads to people who part their hair on the left with genetic disposition to compulsive toothbrush buying on Tuesday evenings living in green houses. Our best performing advertising? Our phone number painted on the windows in six foot letters on one of our closed sites.

Farewell, Android Pay. We hardly tapped you

Ya, but it looks really cool to walk up to the Starbucks teller and tap your iWatch. Until it doesn't work, which happen in front of me at a Starbucks a few months back. Note to all you cutting edge/young ultra uber cool people - it really looks good when it works. Until it doesn't, and then you look like a fool. And you're in my way.

I had the Starbucks Pay app years ago and it kept falling asleep while I was in line. Screw that.

If I can walk by your phone sitting on a table and tap it with my hidden Square tap-to-pay credit card reader and it doesn't wake up or send any kind of 'are you sure?' message please, please let me know where you hang out.

US shoppers abandon PC makers in hour of need

Re: everyone replaces their PCs

Thank you! 'For us business types trying to get some work done...' The problem is the world is bending towards doing everything on a tiny screen that you carry in your pocket (well, not really - does anyone carry an iPhone+ in a pocket? Don't you need a manpurse for one of those?). More and more websites are being designed primarily for the mobile browser. If you're using a regular pc to look at these sites you're s.o.l., you dinosaur.

I actually have work to do, and need a full screen and enough compute power to get the job done. The last thing in the world I want to do is scroll an excel spreadsheet on my phone. I use command line scripts to offload data from SQL databases and run the results on my work pc. I have a job to do, not tweets to send or cat pictures to forward.

All the companies out there from big banks to journalistic websites (thankfully not El Reg) see that 80% of their traffic is coming from smartphones so they change their design to accommodate, leaving the full screen format to rot. It's sad, it's 'progress' and it will only get worse.

Re: Market Saturation

If you do all your web surfing/emailing on your smartphone you're not even booting up your Win XP, Win 7+ pc. Why would a consumer need to buy a new pc? Death of the pc was because of the smartphone for millions of home users. The business market just can't fill the demand gap.

Amazon: Intel Meltdown patch will slow down your AWS EC2 server

Re: maybe it's time to re-consider server-side inefficiency

The Meltdown paper I read specifically mentions Docker as being exploitable.

Re: maybe it's time to re-consider server-side inefficiency

OP isn't saying coding is more secure in C. He's saying C is more efficient, has less overhead than a scripting, interpreted language that loads a lot of unused functions. How many js coders say 'let's throw this in there because we may need it later'? You don't think the interpreter unpacks this shit? You don't think there's overhead involved in this?

Guess who's now automating small-biz IT jobs? Yes, it's Microsoft

Re: I totally love those solutions

Yes - I remember a decade ago reading how Oracle's latest release was going to do away with all db admin jobs. How'd that go, by the way?

Avast urges devs to secure toolchains after hacked build box led to CCleaner disaster

Re: CC Cleaner is an enterprise tool?

Yes, in a business environment where the only thing that should be on the pc is whatever IT put there, CCleaner would suggest a user trying to 'fix' a business pc they might have accidentally infected.

However, for the home user or a 1 pc business CCleaner is suggested as a final step when trying to recover a pc when nuking is not, or is the last, option. Doesn't happen? Wanna bet? You've never been called to look at a friend's home office pc that's running some ancient accounting software, no idea of where any of the original install software is, unknown/nonexistent/untested backups and the complaint is 'it's acting funny'?

I used CCleaner on my home pc just last month - it's running Windows 10 and the forced update made it unbootable, I restored from a drive image and wanted a text printout of installed programs. There's a tool in CCleaner that lets you do just that - export a list of installed programs. Which I did, before nuking the drive and reinstalling the os.