Posts by Werner Heisenberg

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Sigh

It's 2022, and they're still trying this shit.

It hasn't worked for the last 30+ years. Why do they think it will work now?

Can we please get some competent politicians? *

* I know the answer, but I still hope for some reason.

Reviving a classic: ThinkPad modder rattles tin to fund new motherboard for 2008's T60 and T61 series of laptops

Re: X330 FTW!

True. I actually did replace the keyboard, the eBay X270 I bought wasn't backlit (which I knew, but the spec and price was good). You have to disassemble everything from the bottom up to get to it. Don't recall having to remove the screen, maybe I just guessed the trick. It does take a while, just take your time and be very, very careful with the latches on the (many) ribbon connectors. They're ridiculously fragile, and probably the only way to replace a broken latch is to salvage one from another mobo.

Forgot to mention another advantage - NVMe SSD is an option. Only v3 and only 2 lanes, but still makes a hell of a difference over SATA.

Re: X330 FTW!

If you can live with the chicklet keyboard (one of the best albeit not a patch on the x220), I can heartily recommend an X270. Upgradeable RAM (I maxed mine to 32Gb), 7th Gen i7s available, bridge battery system, even a touch screen option.I've had an X220, X230 and this X270 and the latter is my favourite so far. Just be sure to get a 7th gen CPU, they did 6th gen earlier in the cycle too.

Its such a shame the newer TPs are going so ultra-thin-over-everything. They already have the X1 carbon if that's your thing, leave proper Thinkpads alone!

.NET Foundation focuses on 'issues with the community' after executive director quits

Fundamental rethink needed

As a .Net developer, I'm both fascinated and horrified in equal measure by how this is unfolding.

Microsoft, under Satya, has made great strides towards OSS. They had to, the future is services and services depend on OSS. It was the right strategic decision; the alternative was a slow descent into oblivion.

But Microsoft is a huge corporate beast. It will take a long time for the message be fully understood in every corner. Some teams are better at engaging with the community than others. Even the core (excuse the pun) of .Net hasn't got there completely - the debugger is still resolutely (and bafflingly) proprietary.

I get the impression that the DNF was heavily influenced by the lawyers at its inception, and hasn't ever managed to escape. Hopefully this will act as a wake up call, and some C-level execs (Satya?) might intervene. The idea was good, but the execution is sorely lacking.

I really hope this gets fixed, the languages and ecosystem really deserve better.

Bootnote:

I was amazed to learn that membership of the DNF has a dollar cost. That seems entirely bass-ackwards to me. The DNF should be doing everything in its power to attract and support the best .Net OSS out there. It should have an investment pot where it could (carefully, transparently, and democratically) sponsor promising OSS initiatives towards their objectives. That's not for sentimental notions, the dollar return from the network effect would far outweigh the cost if done right.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Don't get TOO far out of the way

One thing I'd quite like to know about is when my battery is about to die.

On earlier versions of Windows, there would be plenty of warning. Too much, in fact - front-and-center dialogs that I'd hit 30%, then 15%, then 10%... If I ran out, it wasn't for lack of warning.

Win10? Not so much. Unless I choose to look bottom-right, the first thing I know about it is my laptop going into hibernation. Yes, there's an icon, and it has a tiny (4px?) "critical" overlay when things get really tight. But unless you choose to look, you never see it.

Perhaps there's a setting somewhere in the abomination that is Settings? I've looked, and not found.

Microsoft: Try to break our first preview of 64-bit Visual Studio – go on, we dare you

I'd be more impressed if...

...they just gave the Start page back.

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/start-page-please-give-it-back/434456

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

Re: Poor Show, The Register

There was also a boxed copy of Visual Basic (I believe v1). Later on, in the "Into Focus" section, another bookshelf had Visual Studio 97, Visual InterDev 6.0 and (I think?) C#.Net 1.0...

Ticker tape and a binary message: Bank of England's new Alan Turing £50 must be the nerdiest banknote ever

Re: Pound Sterling

This.

Shopkeepers are not obliged to sell anything at all - the prices you see on the shelf edge are not an offer, they are an "invitation to treat". When you go to the checkout, you are making an offer to buy the goods, rather than accepting their "offer" to sell. The shopkeeper can accept or decline (more or less) as they see fit, including based on how you propose to pay*. The contract is complete if and when the shopkeeper accepts your money (consideration).

"Legal tender" has very specific meaning in law - it is any form of payment that must be able to satisfy the repayment of a debt. It has nothing at all to do with normal shopping.**

* Unless they fall foul of anti-discrimination laws.

** This is my understanding as a non-lawyer ***. I took A-level law, and got a D. So I went into IT.

*** Any actual lawyers reading, please tell me all the things I got wrong above. I realise it's (at best) a simplification.

Re: Any idea where I get one of these

"Lots of places dont accept anything bigger than a 20....."

I wonder if this will change - one reason I've heard shops give is that it robs them of change (which they pay for), but that isn't logical because it just means that the £20 note becomes the de-facto terminal denomination - a unit that is accepted but never handed out in change. Because of this, terminal denominations always accumulate, and they should never be in short supply to the retailer. Excluding an entirely avoidable edge-case (failing to start / reset with higher denominations), the actual value doesn't matter.

The other reason is risk. For obvious reasons, counterfeiters will always target the highest denomination they can produce a decent facsimile of. But all of the new polymer notes seem to be forgery-resilient (at least for now) - I've never been landed with even a fake £5 note (at least to my knowledge); previously I've been stung on several paper notes. And the £50 polymer seems to have gone to town on anti-forgery devices. I'd be surprised if it ever gets convincingly counterfeited.

Of course, inertia might be a problem - perhaps people are so primed to distrust or dislike £50 notes that they never will again, come what may.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

Whoever came up with this idea

must be a prolific mainbater.

It's not easy being green: EV HTTPS cert seller Sectigo questions Chrome's logic in burying EV HTTPS cert info

Just found out

Firefox not only removed the address bar label, they nuked the site from orbit.

Groupware is not dead! HCL drops second beta of Notes/Domino version 12 and goes all low-code and cloudy

You can claim any software is good...

...by comparing it to SharePoint. That is a very low bar indeed.

I shudder at the memory of the Notes development environment. LotusScript was actually a licensed version of Visual Basic for Applications, but for $reasons it was renamed and supplied with an even worse IDE (not sure how they managed that). About the only thing it was good for was agents - I recall writing one that ran on incoming mail and silently unset the "read receipt" field. Oh, how I used to chuckle at reading "critical" emails and then pretending I never received them.

Then we moved to Outlook and grew up.

Nearly 70 years after America made einsteinium in its first full-scale thermo-nuke experiment, mystery element yields secrets of its chemistry

A possible application for Es-253

From wiki:

> The high radioactivity of einsteinium-253 produces a visible glow and rapidly damages its crystalline metal lattice, with released heat of about 1000 watts per gram.

Sounds like it would make a very effective portable heater. It wouldn't last very long, but hey - sitting in front of it, neither would I!

Pic of the manufacturing process.

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

Microsoft are on record that the VB6 runtime will be supported for the lifetime of Windows 10:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/visual-basic-6-support-policy

Given that Windows 10 is supposed to be continually updated, that could be a very long time indeed. Even its IDE (Visual Studio 6) still runs just fine (albeit unspoorted) on Win 10 if you avoid certain (now useless) installer options. I know this because I have it installed myself, as I contribute to an open source project which aims to modernise the Visual Basic editor (originally for VBA, now also supports VB6).

I recently moved a non-trivial WPF app at work from net472 to netcore3.1. It required changing one line in the project file and a recompile. Picked up all the replacement NuGet packages and built without so much as a whimper. It's now in Production.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

I for one...

...welcome our new microplastic overlords.

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

My awesome new business plan

Resell the cheapest ADSL connection on the market as "Ultra High-Speed Fibre-to-the-Premises". After all, I'm not saying it's to the user's premises. With a judgement like this, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Ridiculous verdict, I hope they appeal.

New Brit Hubble analysis finds 2,000 billion galaxies, 10x previous count

I find your lack of faith disturbing

So, this light originated a long time ago, in a galaxy* far, far away?

*Ok, many galaxies... Taxi!

Apple's new iPADS have begun the WAR that will OVERTURN the NETWORK WORLD

No biggie

There's already a couple of things that instantly rule out a phone for me:

1. Non-removable battery

2. No memory card slot

For me, lack of a physical SIM slot would simply become the next on this list. I suspect many others would have the same view if it turns out to be an anti-consumer power grab. For anyone not locked into iStuff, the market will sort it out.

TrueCrypt hooked to life support in Switzerland: 'It must not die' say pair

Re: FWIW

If you're going to accuse others of fuckwittery, you might want to be certain you've got your facts straight first.

From their main page:

"We offer the product as is, and do not claim any rights to the name TrueCrypt or TrueCrypt.org - this is not a fork but the distributon of the product under Section II of the TrueCrypt license."

Elsewhere they also state that a fork would likely be renamed.

They are hosted in Switzerland as the black helicopters don't work quite as well in the mountains.

Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer

Re: so NOT putting lots of chemicals in your body is NOT ok then?

"Everything is a chemical"

Indeed so.

Even so-called 'organic' produce contains significant amounts of dihydrogen monoxide.

Returning a laptop to PC World ruined this bloke's credit score. Today the Supreme Court ended his 15-year nightmare

Except...

Defaulted credit agreements only stay on file for 6 years from the date of default. It would have dropped off by 2004.

Reality check: Java 8 finally catches a multi-core break

Re: Wait, what?

Lambdas are also damned useful in fluent APIs, where you can't stop to set properties without breaking the chain. Fair enough they are ripe for abuse (what isn't?) but used well they can create beauty too.

I'm just wondering if they'll be done in as half-arsed a manner as generics were.

Psssst. Don't tell the Bride, but BBC Three is about to be jilted

Re: Monkey Dust

Loved Monkey Dust. The Peadofinder General rings even truer now than it did then, what with Operation YouWereOnTellyInTheSeventies being in full flight.

And yet, despite being an absolute gem, they only ever bothered to release the first series of Monkey Dust on DVD. Some of the S2 and S3 episodes turned up on iTunes though.

Go figure...

NSA: It's TRUE, we grab 200 MILLION of your text messages A DAY globally

Re: The Last Secure Option

"Me, I even encrypt my passwords (twice!) via ROT-13..."

Meh, only twice?

I always ROT-13 exactly twenty-four times - show me a supercomputer that can decrypt THAT!