Posts by JulieM

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Something similar happened to me at an Open Mic night at a local pub. I had taken my dog (a German Shepherd cross) with me. She was sleeping under my table, so I nipped to the loo. While I was away, she woke up, noticed I was not there and went to look for me. She jumped up onto the stage and knocked over a music stand, sending pages of sheet music into the airstream of a large fan; a guitar; and some lights. Then as I returned to the scene, blissfully unaware of the carnage that had been unfolding in my absence , she caught my scent, ran towards me, and proceeded to greet me as though I had just returned from a voyage around the world .....

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Re: Accessibility nightmare

Cloudflare have plenty of money. The laws requiring content to be accessible don't apply to them.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: Have some sympathy for the user

Braun toothbrush batteries are replaceable! There are written and video guides on the Internet.

They don't make it easy, because they'd rather sell you a whole new toothbrush; but where there's a will, there's a way.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Simple solution

Some government somewhere in the world needs to annul whatever copyright subsists in the Original Unix Source Code, and declare it to be in the Public Domain within their jurisdiction. This would enable any respondent to a plagiarism claim to state that their work was based on a work that was already in the Public Domain somewhere in the world.

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: Trap street

I always used to have a deap-seated fear that such plagiarism traps might have been hidden somewhere in a book of mathematical tables, and an engineer relying on it for an innocent calculation -- using the original, mind you, not a "pirate" copy -- would accidentally hit upon one of them; ultimately resulting in something like the collapse of a bridge, bursting of a hydro-electric dam or an aircraft exploding over a populated area.

Re: Bubble code?

Leaked source code is always of poor quality.

Those of us who write high-quality code are not ashamed to let the whole world see exactly how good it is.

The wide-scale adoption of a single machine architecture, and the flood of proprietary, caged software that it enabled to be supplied in binary-only form, was a gift to the world's worst coders.

An artificial cell with a full lifecycle has been created for the first time

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Anything made in a laboratory by scientists with book learning is unlikely to have street smarts. So the most likely occurrence will be, within seconds of escaping from a laboratory, the new life form will get beaten up by a gang of E. coli.

Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks

Unlikely incompatibility

One would have thought that the sort of person who is averse to systemd would be similarly averse to flatpak, snap and similar binary blob installers.

They are basically Trojan horses used for smuggling proprietary software into GNU/Linux systems.

It is always best to install any software not packaged by your distribution in its native .deb or .rpm format from Source Code, i.e. a git repository or source .tar.gz file. (And check the download for anything that might be a pre-compiled binary.)

Russian oligarch's financial network crashed thanks to a crank and a cleaner

"Lana Del Boy" sounds like a great Drag Queen Name, though .....

Re: Alternative

Nah, just need a bit of Super Glue and Windolene .....

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: Imitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery

VAX/VMS had full version control baked right into its file system. Every file was given a version number, allocated sequentially, and "overwriting" a file created a whole new version.

Literally everyone (except VAX users .....) has, at some point in their life, mistakenly overwritten a wanted file with an injudicious "save". If Microsoft had included the file versioning functionality of VAX/VMS in Windows NT, they would have had the killer feature.

EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project

F-35 kill switches

What's to stop someone outside of the USA from successfully reverse-engineering the F-35's remote disable feature, by the usual combination of concerted effort and sheer blind luck?

IBM tried to kill Tab navigation. Microsoft told it Bill Gates' mother wasn't interested

Re: What if

Then IBM most probably would have bought either the real CP/M-86 from Digital Research, or QDOS from whoever Gatesey ripped it off from.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

I remember a ZX Spectrum BASIC programming book from the 1980s casually mentioning that musical notation was probably one of the oldest programming languages .....

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

More ways to light LEDs

You can also light LEDs using the heat from a candle to run a thermoelectric generator -- and the LEDs will actually deliver more visible light than the candle flame! See here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy3tBv81LvI

It was necessary to exclude incident light because the aim of the experiment was to prove that the energy is coming from the tritium light source, and not from somewhere else in the environment.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: Brentry

From my experience of Thai pharmacies, the medications you have to carry probably are available over-the-counter anyway .....

Mine's the one with empty pockets, because I've seen Midnight Express .....

Sticky-note security turned gym into hall of '80s horrors

Re: Gyms

[T]he reason many people, including him, went to the gym was more about ..... checking out ..... other young attractive gymgoers in tight-fitting exercise wear

That sounds like another good reason to avoid such places.

Gyms

I have never seen the point in spending good money on membership of a gym and the fuel to drive there, fighting to get a parking space as near as possible to the entrance, then going inside and sitting on a fake bicycle, pedalling nowhere for an hour, when there is plenty of exercise to be had for nothing. In fact, for less than nothing, if you walk or ride a real bike instead of driving.

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue

Re: they are falling short of target

Binary compatibility has never been a design goal of Linux and probably never will be.

Compatibility is only guaranteed at Source level. A change is not breaking, if a piece of userland software still builds from Source Code.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

"Reaching out" carries a subtext of helpfulness (e.g. My first thought when I heard the terrible news was, I wish I'd reached out to him sooner).

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Wow that's a wrong title

GRUB is not an operating system.

Re: Wow that's a wrong title

Keep going, you've almost worked out what a bootloader is doing.

I remember a letter to a local newspaper in which someone made the argument that if a person has nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

It was printed; and right beneath it was a single-sentence note from the editor, saying that the letter's author had sealed it in an envelope.

Document Foundation urges EU to ditch Excel lock-in for cybersecurity law consultation

Spreadsheet formats

Whenever anyone sends me an .xlsx file instead of the CSV I specifically asked for, I always send them back an .ods file.

They can run LibreOffice. I am just one of many people who can't legally run Microsoft Office.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

That's the problem. Should have pressed f/8!

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Re: People will buy Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity stickers?

The Law of the land gives you the right to sell a licence you have purchased.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Re: Old fashioned.

Pounds are subdivided into ounces, not tenths and hundreths. Someone has obviously converted those measurements, probably with a four-function calculator, from the original kg. and mm., and not even bothered to do it properly. 0.45 of a pound is 7.2oz., and 0.66lb. is 10.56oz. A few tenths of a pound is a bigger few ounces, and 0.62lb. is 9.92oz.

Anyway, going through your examples in order, we get: 1100-1200g. while being only 18mm. thick, a few hundred grams heavier and about 2.5mm. thicker, 1.64kg. and a good couple of dozen mm. thick.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: Scary, truly scary

Well, we British have four different words for precipitation, depending on whether it was solid or liquid when it left the cloud and whether it was solid or liquid when it hit the ground. That probably sounds strange to people from drier countries .....

Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

Simple solution

If a standard is required by law, then it must be cost-free to implement.

Anything else amounts to privatisation of law.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Humans

Wait ..... Do managers think their job is harder than the workers' jobs, or something?

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Re: Almost completely unrelated...

And you're probably better off without one, especially if you have a gas cooker! Gas toast tastes much nicer than electric toast.

OpenAI introduces ads...for the people!

Re: "we also feel strongly…"

The entire business model of the Internet is "If you show a person enough advertisements for a product, they will eventually buy it".

It's inconceivable to the advert-slingers that anyone could have no money, or just not want to buy a product. As far as they are concerned, when someone says "No", what they really mean is "You'll have to try harder than that, sunshine!"

I think it's more likely that vibe coding assistants will start embedding code to introduce advertisements in their output. So you come along thinking you can vibe code a replacement for some expensive piece of proprietary software, but it will end up serving you adverts for the very software you were trying to avoid (or maybe for the services of programmers prepared to take on the task properly and deliver a hand-written, advertisement-free solution, if anyone still believes such a thing is possible). The ad-injecting code is likely only to need light obfuscation to make it hard to remove post hoc, especially when the person who asked for it in the first place was doing so for want of programming experience.

If anything, it will just serve to deepen the impression that advertisements are an inevitable by-product of using a computer.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Individual vs Collective

And that's why attempting individual self-sufficiency is actually a bad thing. You will always end up with more of something than you can make use of and not enough of something else. A much more viable strategy is collective self-sufficiency, with enough diversity to allow a surplus for one member of the group to end up cancelling out another member's deficit.

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

This is why you shouldn't use Snap

Snap, Flatpak and the like are Trojan horses, designed for the explicit purpose of encouraging people to install pre-compiled software on their machines.

Do not fall for this!

If you need a package that is not in your distribution's repositories, the proper course of action is download the Source Code directly from the developer (who will treat you as an equal) and build it yourself.

ISTG one of these days I am going to lock myself in a room and not come out until I have written a tool for automatically determining dependencies, downloading them including any necessary -dev / -devel packages and building the package.

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

Re: Well.....I'm Racking My Memory.................

Yep. Nearly 30 years ago, I had an idea for an improved gas multipoint water heater that required neither an electrical supply nor a permanent pilot burner. No-one was interested in developing it (and I had connections in that industry in those days).

Several years and a change of jobs later, I found a Continental manufacturer selling "my invention".

In this country, no-one cares about a new idea unless it makes the already-rich even richer.

Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google

Re: They can't be paid for, right?

The apps don't have to be paid for by the user. They just have to include advertisements for the developer to earn out of them.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

If I had a pound for every time I've appended "Don't ask me how I know this" to a piece of advice I've given, I wouldn't be in this God-forsaken office .....

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

Not impressed

I gave this "vibe coding" lark a try, but I really don't think it's for me.

I ended up in a terrible state; eyes going funny, voice hoarse, and it took me awhile to get my breath back. Not to mention the questions from co-workers about what I was doing taking a laptop into the toilets. And I didn't even get much code written .....

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

Thank you for travelling with Bloggs' Buses

You are making a huge assumption that the content users are seeking is available anywhere else that's not enshittified.

It's like the signs they have on buses, thanking passengers for travelling with this particular bus company to a destination that is not served by any of the other bus companies.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: A bit fucking late

Actually - what would you do once you were on the Moon ? Take the totty and join the 250,000 mile high club ?

I would send a text message to a bunch of mathematicians about to announce how many digits of pi they had calculated, reading "355/113 was good enough to get us here!"

Re: Churlish

That the existence of fewer billionaires is a net benefit for the rest of us, is how I read it.

Re: Fools

I'm not sure.

I'd be perfectly happy with the rich getting scammed as long as the money ended up going towards some cause that seeks somehow to repair some of the damage done by the marksunwitting donors in the first place.

When it's merely the rich scamming each other for personal gain (and as likely as not without the full amount of VAT being paid), I can't really summon up much enthusiasm for it.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

That's literally how the gutter press work. Whatever will get attention has always been afforded a higher priority than what's strictly accurate.

There used to be a time, though, when stories had to be at least vaguely plausible.

Now they know no-one is going to be able to test how true the story is, *and* they have plausible deniability that they fabricated it out of whole cloth.

Re: Knickers in a twist?

It doesn't just make things you could do before easier. It also enables things you could not do before.

If some sicko wants to look at a publicly-available picture of me (which will definitely include clothing) and imagine what I look like undressed while he's having a Thomas Tank somewhere in private, well, that's obviously extremely distasteful; but there's nothing I can do about it, because all the bad stuff is going on entirely within his own imagination -- and the inside of a person's head is the most private space there is.

The moment the aforementioned sicko does anything that exposes what belongs in his imagination to the world of reality, though, a line is crossed.

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote

Apple Mac motorised floppy eject

At University, many years ago, I witnessed two supposedly grown adults decide that, in the absence of any obvious way to eject the floppy disc from the Apple Macintosh computer they were using before inserting another, the correct course of action was to insert it anyway.

All my instincts were screaming at me to high-tail it out of the room and minimise the likelihood of being either (a) asked for help with the entirely-foreseen (by me, at any rate) consequences of this, or (b) "Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc"-ed for them.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Glad I'm using KDE, and keep your hands off Firefox!

I do that all the time in Konsole, when (e.g.) I'm assembling a command or SQL query by pasting a bunch of things into it!

I'll copy what goes between two things using ctrl+insert (to paste with shift+insert); then highlight each of them in turn with a left-drag (to paste with a middle-click). The shift+del/ctrl+ins/shift+ins and highlight/middle-click paste buffers are independent of each other, so the separating phrase doesn't get lost each time.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

Dragging over text with the left button held down, then positioning the mouse over another text entry element and pressing the middle button is how you paste text!

It was bad enough when they decided it wasn't good enough for a text entry to begin accepting text straight away, as soon as the mouse pointer was over it, and you had to click on before you could begin entering text.

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

The security of the inter-process communication is not for your benefit! It's for the hardware supplier's benefit, to ensure you have to buy stuff from them and they don't get upstaged by some third party figuring out the communication protocols and creating a better alternative.