Posts by WolfFan

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

What’s the big deal?

Foxes, smoxes. Around here we have coyotes, lynx, bobcats, wolves, bears, raccoons, badgers, wolverines and, oh, foxes. Plus deer, moose, and assorted other large mammals. And assorted snakes, including venomous ones. I have a fence out back, where the woods start. The moose and bears tend to ignore the fence; the moose tend to ignore shotguns, but the bears know what a shotgun is and go away, grumbling. The fence keeps most of the smaller animals out, as its about three feet deep underground and goes up about nine feet (one metre and three metres, respectively) and I have some local residents who keep a lot of intruders away, notably a wolf and a rottweiler. (You wouldn’t believe the paperwork required to legally keep a wolf around here, even on a site as big as mine.)

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

Re: TL; DR

Well, yes. That should have been obvious, given the choices. You’d have been fucked if the other guy had won, too. The only question is which one is worse.

Re: *

And there’s a Kingston in Ontario. Legend (in Jamaica) has it that the reason why the Rockfort guarding the north end of Kingston harbour was built of locally quarried limestone was that the bricks for what would have been the fort there went to the Kingston in Canada by accident. Allegedly the Canadian fort had nothing much to do until it was tapped to house some students in the Empire Flying Program. Including, also allegedly, a future Prime Minister of Jamaica.

Note that I have no idea how accurate any of the above might be.

TypeScript is now a 'top 10' language – just in time for the 'feature complete' 3.6 beta

Re: My BigDic sez ...

XPS shipped with Win XP service pack 2. It's _way_ older than a mere 'decade or so'. It's not that everyone hates it, it's that very few people outside of Microsoft knows it exists and even fewer care.

Re: My BigDic sez ...

Adobe created Adobe Type Manager, later split into ATM Light (free) and ATM Deluxe (bags o'cash). Adobe also charged hefty royalties for PostScript on printers; a major reason why Apple's original LaserWriter cost $7000 when it was based on non-PS laser printers costing $3000-3500 was the Adobe tax. A combination of TrueType and 3rd-party PS-alikes such as GhostScript allowed users (such as me...) to get most of the value of PS without having to buy a PS printer. I was using TrueType, ATM Light, and GhostScript and similar to drive Apple StyleWriter and StyleWriter II inkjets for the better part of a decade; they were slow, but they gave good (for the time) output and were a lot cheaper than LaserWriters. Adobe cut the price of ATM Deluxe and added features (I still didn't buy it, there were other, cheaper, not-from-those-bastards-at-Adobe applications which had ATM Deluxe's feature set and more) and finally stopped development because a lot of people didn't buy it, but still used it; for a while there it was the single most pirated software on Macs. (For some reason people objected to being raped by Adobe. Imagine that.) Well, the most pirated software that wasn't a font, anyway. As Adobe wanted (and still does want) outrageous amounts of money for fonts ($3000 for the Font Folio! and that's a significant price drop over what it used to be!) there was and is an awful lot of font piracy. I used to work in the printing industry and for a long time when ads came in the ad company would include the fonts, we'd stick 'em on our computers, and print the ad. (Things have changed now, but in the mid 1990s I had over 8000 fonts on my computer, accessed using a font manager, plus another 2000+ archived. (No, I'm not exaggerating. Look up how many different versions of, say, Helvetica, there are. Then look at the slightly different versions of those versions from different font foundries. Ad companies would refuse to pay if we didn't use _their_ Helvetica. We were not paying for all those fonts. I hate ad companies.)

Apple found it easier to license ATM Light, but made it quite clear that if the price went up they'd just build their own. And would license it to Microsoft. Adobe's prices went down and stayed down, 'cause Apple had the ability to destroy a major part of their business. With OS X, Apple leveraged their control of TrueType and their access to 'creative professionals' to get a really good deal for the code for ATM Light and built it into OS X. They also built their very own Display PostScript code, completely independent of Adobe, and use that for all display and printing on Macs and iOS devices. They haven't licensed it to Microsoft, but they could. Adobe lives in fear that Windows will finally get a real display and print engine. All those PDF printers and PDF editors on Windows don't exist on Macs; to print PDF (or PostScript) files Mac users just click on a pull-down menu in the print dialog for Every.Single.Printer, all of them, which works with a Mac, and can do basic PDF editing with utilities which ship with the OS. Acrobat and various 3rd-party PDF editors have to offer serious capabilities and even so have limited take-up.

It just wasn't meant toupee: Bloke nicked at Barcelona Airport with €30k of blow under wig

Re: There's worse wigs out there...

That’s not a cat, that’s a dead muskrat.

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

I need a new laptop

What timeframe is expected for fairly good, not too expensive, laptop units? I don’t want to pay more than $1000, total, so a top-end CPU is out. I just want a mid-range machine which can last the six or seven years my old laptop did.

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

Re: Ann Widdecombe

She took the banjo with her.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

Re: Par for the course

Kobo has DRM on at least some books

Re: Oh no?

If there’s no DRM, then copies can be made so that if the official copy goes away you still have a copy. Stick it in calibre, for example.

It won't affect those who don't have DRM on their books in the first place.

DRM should be banned

The first thing I do when I get an ebook is to de-DRM it, usually using one of the tools available for calibre. I then make an EPUB version in calibre it it wasn't EPUB in the first place, and I copy the EPUB to the Books folder I created on both DropBox and OneDrive. I now have _three_ copies of a DRM-free EPUB. There are multiple readers which can handle EPUB for iPad and Mac and Windows; calibre itself works on Mac and Windows, but not on iPad. (GPL3, I think...) In the event that the original, DRM-infected, copy goes away, I have at least three copies elsewhere and simply don't give a damn. Disk space is cheap and ebooks don't take up much storage.

In addition, I usually don't buy DRM-infected books in the first place. Most of those DRM-infested books are technical books; books for entertainment, I usually get from publishers or authors who go out of their way to NOT have DRM on their books. I reward them for their behavior with money. It is trivial to get de-DRMed books online; certain USENET groups are full of them, for example. My current Strategic Book Reserve has enough books from legitimate sources to last me another decade at my current reading rate, so I have no need to steal books, but I could if I wanted to.

Why are fervid Googlers making ad-blocker-breaking changes to Chrome? Because they created a monster – and are fighting to secure it

Re: The title is no longer required.

Other than the fact that he’s a troll?

Microsoft's Edge gang pops a head above the parapet to give Linux fans a strong 'maybe'

Listening to U2 will cause that...

UK Home Sec kick-starts US request to extradite ex-WikiLeaker Assange

Re: Oh, the irony !

They call themselves 'communist'. Are you saying that you know better than they do?

Bad news. Asteroid 1999 KW4 flew by, did not hit Earth killing us all. Good news: Another one, Didymos, is on the way

Re: Mitigate?

I just used Imperial College London's impactor page to estimate a hit by this thing on London. https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/cgi-bin/impact.cgi?latitude=&longitude=&LocationSelect=1&CraterSelect=0&diam=1.3&diameterUnits=2&pdiameter_select=0&pdens=&pdens_select=3000&vel=&velocityUnits=1&velocity_select=17&theta=&angle_select=45&wdepth=&wdepthUnits=1&tdens=2500

It made a mess. There would be an 18 km diameter, 700 metre deep, crater where London once was. There'd be secondary weather and climate effects, felt for several years. For speculation about possible long-term effects of a big impact, see among others S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. (Warning: Mr Stirling ain't called 'Buckets of Blood' Stirling for nothing...) See also Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Fav scene: the surfer dude riding the tsunami into Century City. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein, had a lot more much smaller impactors. They did manage to remove Cheyenne Mountain, though...

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Re: Brilliant idea

Floods On Rainy Days, that’s what it really means. 1970s Escorts and Cortinas especially would die on certain roads notorious for the way water would run down them, particularly in the Caribbean and East Africa. Guess how I know.

Comcast – the cable giant America loves and trusts – confirms in-home health device to keep tabs on subscribers

Re: "Loves and trusts"?

You are far too kind.

Re: "Loves and trusts"?

Comcast used to be the #2 most distrusted and hated cableco in the US. Times-Warner was #1. Comcast bought Times-Warner. Do the math.

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

Re: What's the point?

That part of US 441 is FL 7.

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Re: Word of warning

It appears to be a VirtualBox thing. Parallels and VMWare, including the free version of VMWare, appear to work here. Haven't done in depth testing, though, there hasn't been time.

Re: What about AMD cpu's?

The researchers did test with AMD and ARM: "they were unable to replicate any of their attack primitives"

Yet. They used tricks that worked on Intel chips, and those didn't work. This says exactly nothing about whether or not there are tricks which do work on AMD chips. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may be that they're just not looking in the right spot. It took years to spot Spectre and Meltdown with Intel chips, and more years after that to spot the current problems. Give 'em time.

Air Force intel bod Daniel Hale charged with 'leaking top secret drone documents' to journo

“No-one has ever been convicted of killing civilians with drone strikes”

That would be because drone strikes ain’t illegal. Not according to the USAF, anyway. Icon for obvious reasons.

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

Re: Wag the Dog?

Which one was the goat?

Close Solitaire and open this: It’s everything-Microsoft's-up-to-that-isn't-at-this-year's-Build

Re: Change, change, change [sic] - Chain of fools

I can see your corporate logo change and raise you. About 20 years ago I had reason to go to the main post office in Kingston, Jamaica to see about a parcel to be cleared from customs. I was given an apparently newly printed, I say again, NEWLY PRINTED, customs form headed in big block capitals 'BRITISH FOREIGN AND COLONIAL POSTAL SERVICE'. More than THIRTY BLOODY YEARS after Jamaica was, ahem, independent. Apparently the Jamaican Government Printing Office couldn't be bothered to change the forms and simply supplied forms with the old logo. For well past 30 years. No, they didn't charge customs duty in line with what prevailed 30 years prior, unfortunately. That had been updated. Perhaps someone at the GPO really wanted Missus Queen back. Those Britons who want to get rid of her, you could do worse than send her on a nice Caribbean vacation and decline to take her back.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Re: Hmm... nothing here

And we're back after the update. All add-ons are still working. Will check the home boxes and see if there's any change there, but not for a while.

Hmm... nothing here

I have FF 66.0.3 64-bit installed on this very machine, with 66.04 pending in the queue right now, but my adblockers etc still work. I have, at last check, 66.0.3 64-bit installed on my various home machines, Mac and Windows and one Ubuntu, all add-ons worked over the weekend. As soon as I finish typing this I will update to 66.0.4 which will, allegedly, fix a problem that doesn't seem to be happening around here.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

You had plastic?! Luxury! We had wood! (The other wood. Pine.) It was straight from the saw mill, all splintery and sharp edges! And we didn’t have diesel, we had a steam engine, coal-fired!

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Re: What is the risk?

He never stopped. And he never will.

Arista cats far from purring despite shifting plenty more switches in Q1

Miracle worker

Someone is giving a cat a bath and has NOT been introduced to fangs and claws...

Owner of Smuggler's Inn B&B ordered to put up a sign warning guests not to cross into Canada

Re: Just waiting for the inevitable

Parisians are worse than ordinary French drivers. Parisian taxi drivers are worse than ordinary Parisian drivers. The only thing worse than a Parisian taxi driver is a Mexico City taxi driver. Parisian taxi drivers will drive over you if you get in their way. Mexico City taxi drivers will drive over you, pause long enough to sacrifice you to Huitzilopochtli, and then drive on. The only time a Mexico City taxi driver is not supersonic is when they're in the middle of a sacrifice.

Re: Just waiting for the inevitable

Canada would be _happy_ to pay.

I'd help pay, if it would just keep those damn Quebecois snowbirds on their side of the border. It's not true that Quebecois drive like Frenchmen, only in very large American cars; they drive like _Parisians_, only in monster SUVs. Where's the anti-tank rocket icon when I need one?

Daddy, are we there yet? How Mrs Gates got Bill to drive the kids to school

What I want to know

is... does she take responsibility for the single greatest cock-up in Microsoft history: Microsoft Bob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob The horror. The horror. Anyone who _wasn't_ married to Bill would have be fired from Microsoft forthwith for that one.

And, always remember, Comic Sans was created for use in Bob. That alone is enough to condemn Bob to Eternal Flames. And Melinda with him.

Microsoft lifts some Windows 10 blocks, checks its notifications and polishes some Python

Re: python extension proves popular

I think that you'll find that it's Sheila who polishes Bruce's python.

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

Re: 1.2M or 1.44M?

Iomega Zip drives were bad. SyQuest drives were much worse. The place I was working at during the 1990s started out with a lot of 5.25" SyQuest drives, which quickly became a few SyQuest drives, despite dead drives being replaced on a regular basis. We called them SyPest drives and hated them. Zip and Jaz drives were much better behaved. When they arrived, we binned the SyPest drives as quickly as possible (we had to take data from outside which usually arrived on a SyPest disk; we introduced the other parties to Zip and Jaz drives, and lo! the number of SyPest disks fell to near zero inside of two-three months, that's how hated they were.

I had a beige PowerMac G3 which shipped with an internal SCSI Zip drive at the office. The internal Zip worked very well until the Mac was replaced by a new one, which didn't have a Zip; I bought the old beige off the company at the depreciated value of near zero, and used it at home for years. The Zip drive lasted for years at home, well past the time that the office stopped using Zip drives because the newer, cheaper, more shoddily built (gee, I wonder if there was a connection between those last two items...) external Zips broke so easily. Even at their worst, though, they weren't up to SyPest standards of breakage. The beige G3 still works; Apple said that it could have a max of 192 MB (that's megabyte) of RAM, three 64 MB sticks. In reality it could have 768 MB, three 256 MB sticks. It could run OS X 10.2 fairly quickly and is still my go-to machine for running certain older software (that would be spelled 'games'). The Zip drive doesn't work any more; I yanked the old Zip drive and replaced it with an UltraSCSI drive attached to a PCI card, which speeded up the machine noticeably. But I haven't seen a Zip disk for a very long time.

'Tugging on stiffies', 'right up his alley'... Do you know something about Dabbsy and/or MMe Dabbs (could be that her name is, oh, Lola?) that we don't?

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

Re: You'd have thought...

I have one simple rule for all adjustable items in my, I say again, MY, car. It's very, very, VERY simple: Thou shalt NOT touch. The only one who can adjust anything in MY car is me. This includes the seat settings, the audio system, and especially the AC. I have the settings in my car set the way I like them. It took time and effort to get them the way I like them. If you mess with them I will hurt you. If you do not like this simple rule, you are free to get your skinny arse out of MY car and walk. Thank you for your time and attention.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

I have a four-year-old iPhone which still works just fine. I have no intention of replacing it for at least another two years.

I recently saw someone replying to obvious troll-bait on USENET. This particular troll-bait was more obvious than normal, as it was cross-posted to Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac, and Linux newsgroups. The idiot I'm thinking of replied from a Linux group; he insisted that cell phones, all of them, should have replaceable batteries and blasted Apple and Samsung for gluing down batteries, as well as having very expensive phones. He said that he wanted to keep his phone for more than 2 years, and required a replaceable battery as after two years his battery was dead. He further stated that lithium batteries are good for only 2000-2500 full charges, which is why they die in two years. Hmm. 2000-2500 full charges... hmm. If I do a full charge every day, that's 2000-2500 days. That's 5.5 to 6.8 _years_. According to his own figures, he had to be doing at least three complete charges on his phone _every day_ to kill the battery in two years. My four-year-old iPhone 6 (not a 6S, just a 6) usually has between 60 and 75% charge left at the end of the day. If I've been using it especially hard, perhaps as low as 40%. I could usually get away with charging every second day instead of every day, except in times of heavy usage. In times of light usage I could charge once every three or four days. Some people are clearly abusing the hell out of their phones, which is why they replace them every two years or even more often. Me, I want that expensive pocket computer to last a long, long, _long_ time.

Re: Next!

Well, if the self-driving car finds the proper cliff-edge, it can be both self-driving and flying.

It'll be self-driving up until it finds the edge. It'll be flying afterwards, though not for long. Sir Isaac Newton will be doing the driving.

Re: "Pholdable"

Hmmp. I beseech thee, in the bowels of Crom, to think it possible that thee may be mistaken.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

You play rugby or hockey, don't you? I've lost count of the 'accidental' meetings of gonads and sticks or pucks or rugger balls that I've seen.

Re: Extremely poor

In a world where you still never see an iPhone without a knackered screen,

Hmm... I've owned four iPhones over a period of 7 years. Exactly one has ever had a cracked screen, and that cracked screen was on my very first one, and got repaired in under a week, and all iPhones I've had since then (including the one which had the cracked screen) have had screen protectors precisely because I will never again pay for the repairs on a cracked screen, and I won't use a cracked screen either.

Old-school cruel: Dodgy PDF email attachments enjoying a renaissance

Re: My latest batch of...

I got a few of those. I thought that they were really funny as:

1 the only machine I use which has a camera built in is my laptop, which I use exclusively for business, not cruising for le pr0n. The desktop machines might have a USB camera attached, but only when I'm about to use it for something like a video call or some such. The camera is usually unplugged when not in use, and I just have the one camera which moves around as necessary. It's _impossible_ for _anyone_ to have video of me watching le pr0n.

2 the email address and password in question was a throw-away Yahoo account, which hasn't been used in five years. And which was set up to be used on places where I didn't want to use a valuable account. (Like, oh, El Reg. I use a different throw-away account here. I've got plenty.) I suspect that the Yahoo account was one of the x billion accounts revealed upon the world in the Great Yahoo Hack. I don't care. I do find it funny that I had three throw-away Yahoo accounts, but only one is ever referenced in these kind of attempted extortion. It's as if the twits are too lazy to dig all the way down to the bottom of the admittedly big pile of leached Yahoo accounts.

3 because that was a throw-away email address, the only items in the contacts list are places that I don't care about. Even if they did have real pix/vids/whatever, they could send 'em to those places and I simply wouldn't give a damn. If, for example, someone sent some p0rn-watching vids to El Reg, I'm pretty sure that the only reaction would be envy. (Hint: I don't usually watch p0rn alone...) Now, SWMBO might be a tad upset. As she has been known to state (accurately) that she is somewhat to the right of that pinko commiesimp Genghis Khan, who was much too soft and needed to be shown how to really make his enemies pay, (now you know why she must be obeyed. And why le p0rn-watching is what _she_ likes...) this might not be the best idea. Just a thought.

All-in-all, those little notes are excellent sources of amusement.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

Re: 5 people who still care about the iPad

The NFL has a contract with Microsoft. They don't use iPads, they use Surfaces. Much to Microsoft's annoyance, some people, including certain coaches, have been known to refer to the Surfaces as iPads.

Re: Well...

The main problem with Civ VI is that it crashes a lot once you get past turn 250 on a 500-turn game. Worse, the crashes increase in frequency the further you get, so that by turn 425 it crashes Every. Single. Turn. This is a known bug, introduced with the December 2018 update, and unfixed as of today, 17 April 2019. Civ VI's ratings in the Apple Store have tumbled since the crashing started, with large numbers of people screaming and handing out one and two star ratings.

Now, when it works, it is very good and very addictive. Which causes so much more irritation when it crashes, not saving your latest brilliant maneuver to finally crush that noxious git John Curtin or that arrogant ass Frederick Barbarossa. Or, especially, that annoyance Gandhi, I usually make a point of getting rid of him first if he's in the game.

Absolute mad lads are teaching physics to AI because how else will it learn to solve real-world problems (like humans)

“Fallen on hard times”?

More like “should have bloody owned the desktop but didn’t due to gross incompetence and arrogance”, surely?

Brit Watchkeeper drone fell in the sea because blocked sensor made algorithms flip out

Re: What was the spec? Desert Warfare by mistake?

Their _hot water_ break, if you want to be dogmatix about it.

Re: Hmm

Two of them. _Thunderball_ and _Never Say Never Again_.

Amazon boss snubs 'expensive', 'sub-optimal' relational databases. Here's looking at you, Larry

Re: 'Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen...'

ITYM 'plenty of well-deigned, well-built, Belgian projectile weapons'.

Re: 'Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen...'

a replicator would be lovely though

Oh? One of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Stargate) Admittedly, I'd like a copy of Replicator Carter, but I'm pretty sure that Amanda Tapping wouldn't go for it.