Posts by WolfFan

FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

Freedom of Association.

I do not choose to associate with RMS, or with the FSF if they insist on sticking with him. I used to send in actual money to the FSF; this has stopped. I am simply no longer supporting them. I am confident that they won’t notice the pittance that I no longer send them.

I will observe those who do support RSM and FSF, and evaluate my response based on the situation. It is quite likely that I will be dropping support for other persons or entities.

This is a personal choice. _My_ personal choice. I do not insist that others drop support too. I merely point out that it is quite likely that those who don’t may get to carry on without me. No doubt my contributions, monetary and otherwise, are so minor that they won’t be missed. That is not the point. The point is that I will not support RMS and the FSF. I will, if necessary, move my systems to software which has as little to do with RMS and the FSF as possible. This may mean using commercial software rather than FOSS. So be it.

Those who take the time to look up my posting record will see that I am NOT a member of the woke SJW brigade. However, there are certain matters which I deal with on principles. Adults having sex with children is one of them. Another is zoophilia; a look at my handle shows that I quite like wolves. I even have a wolf bitch among the animals sharing quarters with me. (You would NOT believe the paperwork required for that. And while it’s not true that it’s impossible to house train wolves, it is quite difficult.) Baroness Margaret Hilda (yes, named for a certain greengrocer’s daughter) is big, beautiful, and considers herself to be the second ranking female, behind only She Who Must Be Obeyed, in the household. (Several of the cats may disagree. They don’t do that near the Baroness. Or, come to think of it, near SWMBO.) I can clearly imagine her reaction to anyone attempting, umm, ‘advances’, and severely annoying an adult wolf is a Very Bad Idea(™). Now, the Baroness is far better equipped to defend herself than many other animals, but the issue of consent remains… and is basically the same issue as with underage humans. I refuse, on principle, to support anyone who tries to minimize the issue. That would include RMS. And if the FSF supports him, that includes them.

I will not force anyone to drop support; others have the right to freely associate with whoever they want to. _I_ have the right to freely associate, or to not associate, with anyone I want to. Or don’t want to. I chose to not associate with RMS and the FSF. YMMV.

Apple begins rejecting apps that use advertising SDKs for fingerprinting users

Re: Good Apple

You did see that one was GBP and one was dollars, didn’t you?

Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave

Hirsute Hippo?

Who names these things? Hippos aren’t exactly known for having lots of hair. Or for being friendly or cuddly, despite what certain Disney films may imply. More like a tonne and a half of fast-moving, large tusked, death. They’re more dangerous than lions and crocodiles. Combined.

Admittedly there are those who think that lions are cute, and some who will play silly buggers with crocs, but Charlie Darwin usually takes care of them.

Director, deputy director, CTO of Free Software Foundation quit after Stallman installation

Re: Nonsense.

What possible context could justify those comments about sex with 14 year olds? Please be specific. I really want to see this.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Re: Let's Cancel IBM

Go for it. I gotta see how this turns out.

Microsoft 365 tries again at filtering swearing, bad behavior: Classifiers for seven languages offered

Oh, dear

Many, many, MANY years ago (damn, has it really been that long? Now I feel old…) I used Eudora for email. I was then on a medieval history mailing list. (Several of my friends and relatives, all of history nuts, were on the list as well.) One of my cousins also used Eudora, and he got a certain update before I did, and sent a note to the list filled with much more profanity than normal. You see, we were then discussing a certain Guilliame le Batard. And Eudora’s latest update included a feature called ‘Peppers’ which allegedly showed how ‘hot’ your email was and advised you to cool it down. Multiple uses of ‘Bastard’ could and did generate the max three peppers indicating a very naughty post. Those of us who used Eudora made a game of seeing how many peppers we could get with as little effort as possible. My cousin tried to get three peppers on every post.

I suspect that this MS feature may have similar results.

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

Re: Phew!

You didn’t design _an_ entire aircraft carrier. You designed _two_ entire aircraft carriers. And will be living with the decision for 30-40 years.

Come, cheer up, me lads, for ‘tis to glory we steer…

Microsoft nudges Windows 10 21H1 toward commercial customers

Re: Windows is an awful bloated mess...

You are so, so, SO wrong. Windows hasn’t been a decade without changing its underpants; Windows is a Kardasian, and doesn’t wear underpants.

Paris because El Reg doesn’t have a Kardasian icon.

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

The only things

On my desktop are shortcut/alias icons and folders for screenshots. And the screenshots are kept until I dump them to an image database if I need them long term or deleted if not. I got out of the habit of storing things on the desktop back in Mac System 6 days.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Bah, humbug

Do things the right and proper way.

Name: Yeshua bar Miriam

Place of birth: Bethlehem

Place of Residence: Nazareth

Occupation: Building Contractor

Religion: Jewish

Employer: Nazareth City Council

Dependents: 12

Legal Status: Son of God

British Citizen: no

British Resident: no

Do I think that this census is a waste of time?: yes

That should have interesting results…

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

The firm of Dewey, Chetham, and Howe have been retained by the Mos Eisley Chamber of Commerce and will vigorously contest any attempt to sully the good name of Mos Eisley by attempting to link the name, description, or any other characteristics, of Mos Eisley with the current board of Nominet.

Thank you for your time. Good day.

ICYMI: A mom is accused of harassing daughter's cheerleader rivals with humiliating deepfake vids

Girls…

The Kathleen Turner movie _Serial Mom_ was supposed to be a comedy, not a guide to proper maternal behavior.

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

You are Sir Humphrey Appleby and I claim my £5.00.

Apple's app transparency rules: Google's privacy labels for Chrome and Search on iOS highlighted by DuckDuckGo

And that would be one reason why

I have deleted everything Google from all my systems, Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux. Actually I did that years ago. And by ‘everything Google’ I mean to include Gmail, Maps, Waze, Google Earth…

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Hmm. The only Renault car booster I ever encountered was called Jean le Fou by his acquaintances (he had no friends) and was neither little nor cute. He was very good at boosting cars. Not so good at getting away from the cops, though. There would be a reason why he was called the French equivalent of Crazy John. He once got a Renault Megane to exceed 200 kph in a 50 kph zone. Meganes can’t usually get to 150 kph going downhill with a tailwind.

French.

Another Windows 10 patch that breaks printers ups ante to full-on Blue Screen of Death

Re: @Totally not a Cylon - "in some apps"?

Yes. Single-sided, single-density, 8”, 120 kB. I had CP/M and WordStar on one, and SpellStar on a second, and used them on a Xerox 820 system. There was enough space for a few documents after the OS, the word processor, and the spell check were installed. A total of three floppies got me through junior and senior year at a university in deepest Indiana. The grad students got to use IBM Display Writers, the peons, a.k.a the undergrads, got the Xerox. We also had a Prime mini, which had 150 terminals for the peons, and two CAD/CAM terminals for the grad students; the peons would get heaved off the Prime when the grad students needed to use the CAD/CAM, the Prime couldn’t do both the regular terminals and the giant 20” CAD/CAM terminals at the same time. We’d go back to punch cards on a GA system. We also had a Burroughs mini; we’d use the punch cards before going near it, which should say how much it was loved. The Burroughs was a gift from an alumnus; the school administration made us take down the banner, printed from the Prime, on green-bar computer paper, which read “How do you spell slow? B-U-R-R-O-U-G-H-S”. We were cruel little shits, we were.

It’s worse than that

Microsoft’s own PDF writer breaks from some applications (including minor, insignificant, ones like MS Word and Excel), doing things like creating corrupt files, or zero-length files, or taking a Very Long Time to generate the file. How long? So long that I could and did copy the file over the network to a Mac and use the Mac’s built in print to PDF ability to generate a PDF. (The Word file was 171 pages, had multiple tables, and other complex formatting; it printed to a Brother laser and to an Epson inkjet without problems, but Microsoft’s Print PDF barfed. Saving the file as HTML and opening it in a web browser worked, with some weird pagination problems, and printed to PDF without problems from Firefox and Safari but not Edge. Microsoft broke printing with their own apps… good work, there, Redmond.

Privacy purists prickle at T-Mobile US plan to proffer people's personal web, app pursuits to ad promoters

Re: They don't want me to opt-out

It’s worse than that. You can’t change the settings from the app, it redirects you to the website in your browser. In my case, it took some time to get the website to admit that I had the correct password. Allegedly it’s fixed now.

SpaceX wants to slap Starlink internet terminals on planes, trucks, and boats – but Tesla owners need not apply

Re: This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs

Making Elon Great Again?

McAfee to offload enterprise business for $4bn, focus on consumer security

Re: Like a large anchor on a small boat

It was an excellent video. I particularly liked his take on backing up.

Facebook uses one billion Instagram photos to build massive object-recognition AI that partly trained itself

HAL 209

I’m sorry, Dave, but you have 20 seconds to comply.

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

Many years ago

I read a SF story set in what was then the near future (the date in question is now in the past) in which the author had Roomba-like Artificial Stupid devices which sufficiently annoyed users that researchers did a bit of genetic engineering on assorted rodents, felids, and canids because it was easier to give them thumbs and training than to get the AS devices to work properly. The researchers failed to consider exactly what rats and cats with thumbs might get up to. Mayhem ensued. (The dogs behaved. It is possible that the author was not a cat person.)

'Meritless': Exam software maker under fire for suing teacher who tweeted links to biz's unlisted YouTube vids

I trained as an electrical engineer, at that time the university I went to didn’t have a separate IT degree. This meant that in addition to computer-type courses (FORTRAN, PL/1, C, programming logic, networks, etc.) I had to take the likes of electromagnetic field theory and electrophysics. Emag FT was extremely annoying. We were allowed to take a cheat sheet in (actually, up to four pages) with stuff of our choice which we thought might be useful. But… if you knew where to look for the correct what’s it, odds are that you already knew the correct what’s it, and looking it up just wasted time. And the tests were written expecting that we would have certain items either in our heads or on the cheat sheet, so that’s more like _required_ than allowed. I will say that knowing how antennae behave (and what an antenna is, it’s amazing how few know all the things which can be considered to be antennae… hint: that USB keyboard cable is an antenna….) made tracking certain network problems down easier. I still have the emag FT textbook… (I dumped the ephys text within five minutes of getting out of the final…)

Malware monsters target Apple’s M1 silicon with ‘Silver Sparrow’

Re: This cannot be true!!!

It’s 17 downvotes now. And no-one has so far seen fit to say why, or to address the point. I’m not holding my breath waiting.

Re: This cannot be true!!!

30,000 installs out of how many millions? Yeah, the sky sure is falling.

The wastepaper basket is on the other side of the office – that must be why they put all these slots in the computer

Re: We kept an enormous paper clip (suitably bent) in our toolkit.....

I had that happen to a car CD player (remember them?) which was a six-disc unit. A disc broke up in the machine, freezing it so it couldn’t move to the next disc. The car was still under warranty so I took it to the dealership, they removed the entire device and gave me a new one, and sent the old one off to the repair center in California. About a month later I got a package in the mail, one CD in about a dozen pieces, and five good CDs. All CDs were CD-Rs that I’d burned myself, the one which broke was the only Maxell, which might/might not have been significant.

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

I don’t see what the fuss is about

The Oz government said that FaecesBook would have to pay to show Oz news, FakeBook declines and kills Oz news _on their site_ instead. FB ain’t carrying Oz news no more, and doesn’t have to pay anything. Oz residents who want news given choice: use FakeBook, get no news, or don’t use FB, get news. Seems simple to me. Oz news sources still get zero cash from FB, are in same position as before, except not getting traffic driven to their sites by FB listings. Oz government stopped FB from listing Oz news without paying. Life goes on.

Note that I have never had, and never will have a FaesesBook account, and am not an Oz resident and simply don’t give a flying drop bear.

Microsoft kills broad entry-level IT certifications, replaces them with all-Microsoft curriculum

WinXP era certs for me. The full boat: XP, 2K3, Exchange, etc… I’ve seen no reason to move beyond those certs. Now I almost certainly never will.

France's cyber-agency says Centreon IT management software sabotaged by Russian Sandworm

They actually named it that?

The first thing I thought when seeing that acronym was that someone had misspelled Anansi and I wondered where the spider was… Anansi comes from West Africa, including the likes of Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and other bits of Francophone Africa, so they should have known this… being associated with Anansi is, perhaps, not the best look for a security organization.

Recovery time objective missed by four weeks, but Parler is back online

Re: Disqus's turn nex

Disqus still exists? Who knew? I bailed on them years ago. So long ago that my login was a Gmail account, and I haven’t had a Gmail account for a Very Long Time ™. I bailed because I noticed that I was seeing a lot of posts from just a few posters… and that posts refuting those elite few seemed to just vanish softly, silently away. Not just my posts, either, I would see a post and when I came back later it would be gone. But the post it had been a reply to would still be there. And there would be more posts supporting it. I concluded that they weren’t interested in a discussion and left. I did not try to moan about it to the mods; their site, their rules. I did not try to moan about it elsewhere; this is my first and last post on the topic. I just bailed. And I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to, I no longer have that Gmail account. And unlike some, I won’t be generating a new account to try to get around moderation. I just left.

Hmm. Perhaps some might profitably follow my example.

No egrets: Ardent twitchers fined for breaking lockdown after bloke spots northern mockingbird in his garden

Re: And here I was..

Downing St. Is full of tits, but none of them are great at anything.

Forgot Valentine's Day? Never mind, today marks 75 years of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

Re: ENIAC, the reference defining how far we've come

ENIAC had guys pushing shopping carts with spare vacuum tubes in them around the site. Dead tubes would be replaced while the machine was running. Calculations would be run three times; if you got the same answer twice, that was probably the correct answer.

And science fiction stories about giant computers with lots of vacuum tubes proliferated; Asimov’s MULTIVAC stories are probably the most famous, ending in the religion-destroying “The Last Question”. Clarke had two religion-destroying stories, but only “The Nine Billion Names of God” used computers, and he didn’t specify how the computers were built. (Note that the ‘AC’ in MULTIVAC stood for ‘Analog Computer’, digital computers were considered second-rate.)

I have all of Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet shows around somewhere; I still remember the astonishing speed of the ‘latest French supercomputer’, from the first episode of _Joe 90_, which could retrieve one byte in 5 nanoseconds. And it used lasers, not transistors or vacuum tubes… And the way that BIG RAT depended on magnetic tape. Lots and lots and lots of magnetic tape.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

I drive a Toyota

We don’t need no stinking AI, we use rubber bands and gaijins from Texas and Mississippi? And maybe some Koreans. Banzai!

This scumbag stole and traded victims' nude pics and vids after guessing their passwords, security answers

He faked letters to the judge, using a computer in violation of the terms of his bail? O-kay, he’s an idiot. The judge will throw the book at him. Kiss bye-bye to sunlight, boyo, you ain’t gonna be seeing it for a while.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: This is why they should be banned.

Yes, before he perpetuates another culinary crime against humanity.

Re: Wasn't stupid.

Basic firearms safety rules:

1 it’s always loaded. Even if it’s in pieces, it’s loaded.

2 don’t point it at someone unless you mean to shoot.

3 don’t shoot at someone unless you mean to kill

4 aim for the centre of mass.

5 keep shooting until the target goes down or you run out of ammunition.

You do not just wave the gun around, guns are not magic ‘I’m the boss’ weapons which force people to bend to your will, and ‘brandishing’ is illegal in most jurisdictions. You do not fire ‘warning shots’, that kind of thing is illegal in most jurisdictions precisely because the bullet has to go _somewhere_ and you will be responsible for what it hits. You do not ‘shoot to wound’, if you do you are risking angering the other guy. The one, in this case, with the butcher knife who is closing on you. That’s a good way to get stabbed. Besides, either you were justified in shooting or you weren’t. If you’re justified, shooting to kill is legal. If you’re not, then _you_ just committed assault… and the prosecutor will have an easy time convicting you, as by _your own admission_ you were not justified in shooting.

The shooter brought a legal firearm and used it legally. If the site was posted ‘no weapons’, that would be different. However, in Tennessee a site posted no weapons would be cutting out a significant number of possible customers. People carry guns to _church_ in Tennessee. And West Virginia. And Kentucky. And Alabama. And Georgia. And Florida. And Texas.

The YT idiot really should have considered the possibility that the victims of the prank, or one or more bystanders, would have been armed. And then there would have been security at the site, who definitely would have been armed, plus the odds that there might have been a cop or two in the area. Hell, the security might have been off-duty cops. The Publix supermarket up the road from me used to have off-duty State Police, in uniform, standing around until they hired private security. The state cops had their issue firearms. The private security does, too. And a lot of the customers carry, you can often see the pistols holstered or in a handbag. (Yes, girls carry, too, it’s not a guy thing despite what some say) If you try to ‘prank’ in there you _will_ get shot.

Re: It's OK to traumatise adults?

And ‘The Lion King’. And ‘Dumbo’.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

You are Donald J Trump and I claim my 10 bitcoins.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: Lacks the Polish?

Yeah, LO opens Word files just fine. It even saves small, not overly complex, Word files as DOCX without serious problems. Large, complex documents are an entirely different case. On several occasions around here LO has mangled the job of taking a DOCX file, making changes, and saving it as a DOCX file. I simply no longer trust it to round trip DOCX files. I _must_ be able to send DOCX, and usually receive DOCX. We tried to go all LO internally, but we can’t control documents from outside, which are almost always MS Office formats. Hell, we use Pages, despite its faults, for certain types of files and export to DOCX… and Pages doesn’t screw up the format, so it can be done. LO either can’t do it or doesn’t want to do it. Either way, they’re off the list of office suite replacements for MS Office. It’s a pity, really, they did a lot of things very well indeed, but we just can’t live with the round trip problems. And as long as we have to do business with people who use MS Office we will have to do round tripping. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can round trip, with very few problems. LO, not so much. At least not in our experience. If this changes, perhaps then LO would be considered. Until then, it’s MS Office and Apple’s suite for us. Mostly MS Office.

Re: Lacks the Polish?

No, Writer is NOT better than Word. Style support is not as good as Word 2003; Word style support has improved with every new version, so Word 2019 is _considerably_ better at it than Writer. Table support is improved over what it was, but still isn’t up to Word; LO’s problem is that Word has had good table support since 1986, LO has a lot to catch up on. At least they’re better with tables than with styles. (Yes, I spend a lot of my day with tables, and use styles a LOT, I don’t use Pages because I hate the way it does styles, and, to a lesser extent, tables.)

Worse, the suggested ‘save as ODT, export to DOCX’ causes problems. Part of it is that DOCX is a moving target. Part of it is that some LO features are not available in DOCX, including lots of stuff to do with styles and tables, and this appears to be deliberate; things under the hood are not quite compatible. Exporting causes complex documents to have serious problems. (Guess how I know) And because some features are not available in DOCX, you _must_ save as ODT and export… and then spend time fixing the problems.

The majority of my documents go to MS Office users. It’s simply easier to just use MS Office and have done.

I don’t care about the Ribbon. I really don’t. I do care about my documents. I can generate documents my way with MS Office and minimal effort, while it takes effort to do the same in LO, and more effort to fix the exports.

And, one more thing: there are MS Office versions available for iPad. No official LO for iPad. I can touch up my MS Office documents from my iPad, but not any LO documents. Being able to fix things on an iPad has been a lifesaver more than once. Not having an official iOS version is a significant handicap for LO.

YMMV.

Re: Lacks the Polish?

Gdansk you for that…

If you really must have Edge on your Apple M1 silicon, there's a compatible stable build for Microsoft's browser

Re: Its got to be better than Safari

Edge is considerably worse than Safari. I use Edge when I have no choice. I use Safari on a regular basis. As has been noted elsewhere, could you elaborate on the ‘rubbish’?

In wake of Apple privacy controls, Facebook mulls just begging its iOS app users to let it track them over the web

Re: Google next?

Hmm. I’m using Safari right now. Where do I ‘sign in’? I have never signed in to Safari for anything. At least not so far as I know. Perhaps I’m missing something.

Of course, I’ve never signed into YouTube, either. If I encounter a video that requires me to sign in, I merely move on to something else. I no longer have a Gmail address, and have never given YT _any_ address.

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

Re: Phone for the living room

I use mine all day. It doesn’t run out of battery. I use it for:

Maps and music in the car; the iPad display is easier to read than the display in the car, and the iPad can play from its playlist over the car speakers.

Network admin apps; it’s good for quick a overview of the network, detailed work means going to a desktop. I used to haul a laptop around, it’s smaller, lighter, handier.

Notes. It has Pages and Word and Teams and DropBox and OneDrive and iCloud and (shudder) Excel and OneNote and Zoom. And a keyboard, a real keyboard, not the stupid not-a-keyboard virtual keyboard. I can type stuff, enter things in (shudder) Excel, access files remotely, and do the distance collaboration thing.

Books, including tech books. I have my entire tech library parked as de-DRMed EPUBs in Marvin, an excellent ebook reader (which is not, repeat, NOT like Kindle or Apple Books/iBooks/whatever they’re calling it today. It’s actually usable.) and I can quickly grab what I need when there’s a tech problem. Again, I used to do this with a laptop, but the iPad is a _lot_ easier to use for reading. I also have several thousand books available for reading for entertainment, all de-DRMed. (Yes, several _thousand_ books. I have been reading ebooks since the 1990s and have converted lots from DRMed crap and scanning them in and OCRing myself. Fuck Amazon and Apple and their DRM.)

General web stuff. It’s faster and easier to look stuff up on the web with the iPad, as it’s usually right there and ready to go. I’m using the iPad to write this right now. Same with email and texts and the like; Apple has made it easy to have texts intended for my phone show on the iPad as well. Outlook and Apple Mail do an acceptable job with multiple accounts running IMAP, POP, MS Exchange, and more. Gmail used to moan that I needed to use Google’s Mail, I solved that by dumping Gmail. Fuck Google, harder than Amazon and Apple.

Remote operations. I can remote into Windows, Mac, and Linux devices using assorted tools from Apple, MS, and 3rd parties. The iPad can do most things that, for example, MS Remote Desktop can do if I was on a desktop. If I really have to I can use desktop tools that I normally use an a desktop, but I usually go to a desktop with a nice big display and a full-size keyboard for that, I use the iPad only in an emergency. Having it has saved my ass several times over the last few years.

Entertainment. I am currently playing as Victoria in Civ VI; Poland declared a surprise war on me, and the mighty British Empire (none of that ‘Commonwealth’ nonsense) crushed the attack and counter attacked, taking several Polish cities, whereupon the dastardly Georgians and Aztecs entered the war. After two nuke strikes the Georgians dropped out and the fleet is reducing the Aztec coastal cities to rubble. The Poles are trying to sue for peace. I’m driving to render them extinct, they really shouldn’t have attacked me. When I’m done with the Poles, time for the Aztecs. Rule, Britannia! Betchya Queen Liz wishes she had my fleet! Movies and TV live on the desktop, not on the relatively small iPad screen. Seriously, I just do games and books for entertainment on the iPad, I never have seen the attraction of a small display for movies.

Apple clinches Q4 smartphone shipments top spot as US sanctions elbow Huawei out of the major league

Re: Most iPhone upgraders ever, per the Q1 results call

My aged iPhone SE 1 is now 5 years old. Battery health shows 86%, meaning that it now lasts a day but not much more unless I charge it, and when I charge it I get messages about “will be fully charged at 09:00” because it needs to “conserve the battery”. I got the max 64 GB when purchased, and there’s under 10 GB available; not so limited as to cause problems when updating, yet, but the end’s in sight. It will be replaced by an iPhone 12, probably a Mini, probably a 128, Real Soon Now, probably by the end of March, definitely before May. Five years is a good run for a phone. 5G isn’t widely available around here, but if the new phone lasts as long as the SE, will be available for most of the run. My iPad, upon which this is being typed, is a year old and does 4G; by the time it’s three years old, 5G iPads will be available and I’ll swap it for one of those. For now, it has 170 GB out of 256 available, and the battery is good despite the abuse I do to the tablet. (Lots of high-battery usage apps, constant usage from when I awake to when I sleep, hauling it about in the car...)

Microsoft Edge goes homomorphic: Nobody will see your credentials... but you'll need to sign in to use it

Re: badassword

No, it’s “badBorisJohnsonWord”.

Give 'em SSPL, says Elastic. No thanks, say critics: 'Doubling down on open' not open at all

I don’t use it

But if I did, about here is where I would be looking to replace it.

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Re: But there would have been no Intel success if Don Estridge had not decided to cut some corners..

Ah. Someone who does know the classics.

Re: They should rebrand themselves as Penelope...

‘Penelope’? Seriously? I’d be too busy looking for the old beggar with the bow and no sense of humor. And I’d be really careful about doing anything which might be interpreted as drinking from a handy cup.

The youth of today, no education in the classics...