Posts by anonymous boring coward

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

I learned Swift, but it made my head explode.

All Swift learning spilled out.

Why can't you install Windows 10 Creators Update on your old Atom netbook? Because Intel stopped loving you

Re: Microsoft murdered netbooks

"If the various Linux desktop projects hadn't gone out of their way to kill XDMCP, I could simply use it as a portable X-terminal to my desktop machine."

There must be a number of ways around this, surely?

Have you googled the problem?

I have yet to find a Linux, or Unix-like system, that couldn't be coaxed into delivering remote X sessions.

Re: Never forgive, never forget, Linux forever.

"if MS won't provide them (instead just supplying security fixes for the next 5 years) then they're a bunch of cunts...."

Yes they are. They shouldn't artificially create demand by obsoleting stuff. It's bad for people's wallets. It's bad for the environment too.

This is the ONE major thing that's wrong with Apple, and MS just had to go and copy it. Just like they had to copy Google's spying model. MS just loves taking the worst of everything and bringing it together.

Re: Microsoft murdered netbooks

If performance is sub-par, that's the end user's problem. Just give them a downgrade option.

If MS really cared about the end user they wouldn't break things like web cams at the drop of a hat, with no solution in sight, just because they don't give a sh*t.

After this it won't be long until some other lower end CPU gets dropped.

MS is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers to artificially pump up demand for new hardware, now when it has become obvious that certain specs reached years ago are more than sufficient for most users.

One prime suspect called "Intel" comes to mind, but some large Laptop manufacturers would also fall into that category.

Windows 10: Triumphs and tragedies from Microsoft Build

Re: Sorry

"I wish they'd fix the basics before adding new features."

MS doesn't like doing things well on a detailed level. They still can't do colour management right, for example. In sharp contrast to Apple.

Polishing things to perfection isn't really MS's thing.

Re: Creator's Update... NOT

Still?

There won't be a new Media Center. Any 15 pound streaming device will do the job better (or almost as well), with certain restrictions (no recording, no getting terrestrial or satellite feeds, not much support for local content).

MS lost interest in WMC about 10 years ago.

Re: Putty ....

"all 500 PC's in our offices have been upgraded to Win 10"

You are a trendy lot, you!

Not trendy enough for Macs, mind.

Re: What carrot and stick approach?

"Not sure what will happen when I upgrade my son's PC, but I suspect some kind of Windows 10 licensing extortion racket will kick off."

Update: That is exactly what happened!

Luckily I had another licence key code at hand which resolved the situation. And, luckily Windows 10 accepted it as the new licence key. Some codes are better than others.

Microsoft raises pistol, pulls the trigger on Windows 7, 8 updates for new Intel, AMD chips

Re: Two words - Linux Mint

"WHEN were those statement said exactly?"

You may want to look into the definition of "ever", as in "only ever".

Radiohead hides ZX Spectrum proggie in OK Computer re-release

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way? No!

Damn you! Now I'll have to watch Micro Men again! Brilliant film for nerds like myself!

From landslide to buried alive: Why 2017 election forecasts weren't wrong

Re: @ anonymous boring coward

"Interesting. So you see Brexit as a bad thing"

I don't know in what kind of isolated bubble one must live in not to do that?

Some kind of alternate reality created by one-foot-in-the-grave Murdoch, perhaps?

Have you even followed the bad news shit shower that is coming down due to Brexit?

Re: @ anonymous boring coward

"You mean the countries which have until recently been homogeneous and is now starting to deal with open racism?"

What?

Aren't you thinking of the various small villages around England now?

"Hard brexit is a great thing in my view."

As is suicide in some peoples' views. Not much point in discussing if you come from that angle. If you get it, do enjoy. Perhaps you get to enjoy Bumbling BoJo as well.

Re: @ anonymous boring coward

Do you have any idea how far to the right the Tories are vs, for example, Scandinavian countries? A few years of course correction won't hurt. A hard Brexit with May the OCD (strong and stable) PM will hurt many times more.

Re: @ anonymous boring coward

You are comparing some dictator in a undeveloped country with extremely uneducated people (even worse than the UK), with one of the worlds oldest democracies. Chavez wasn't above stealing ("nationalising") resources. I don't see that happening in the UK. You are afraid of the Bogeyman as depicted by the Tories.

Re: Getting the wrong demographics adjustments

Making Theresa May realise that she is not, in fact, a dictator, is a big win.

We'll see how long it takes before she reverts back to playing Thatcher in a B-movie again.

Re: Most of the Polls were Tory owned

If you can persuade one wing (say young left leaning voters) that they might as well stay at home playing PS4 games, because their vote won't make any difference, then the poll may well have been effective.

There are many ways small biases (biae?) can creep into polls to make them suit their customers.

Re: First Past the Post

"EU Commissioners are not elected. They're appointed"

Like Theresa May then?

My main surprise in this election was the large turnout, which shows that young people have realised, after the Brexit disaster, that they must engage politically right now, rather than later or never. Some constituencies had 80% participation.

How lovely if some of the old stuffy backwards MPs can be further cleaned out in a soon to come re-run!

Sure, Corbyn sometimes sounds like some Chavez Light, but given the systems in place in the UK there is no risk of an actual Venezuela situation. A mild course correction towards the Scandinavian model is about as extreme as it will ever get here.

Re: The phrase "lies, damned lies, and statistics" ...

The exit poll showed what someone who had voted (as opposed to deciding not to bother), had actually voted, after they did it (no possibility of changing their minds).

No wonder they got it right..

'My dream job at Oracle left me homeless!' – A techie's relocation horror tale

It's "have", not "of". Words have actual meaning. Use that to guide you.

Blighty's first aircraft carrier in six years is set to take to the seas

Let's just hope the carrier isn't due to be scrapped before the fighter jets are delivered...

Labour says it will vote against DUP's proposed TV Licence reforms

Re: News to me

"Left wingers think government knows best and will ensure the money goes into the right places, if you just give you money to us.

Right wingers think that once you have enough you will donate time and money to the right places to fix the issues."

That's the Fisher Price version of how it works.

I have never noticed the Tories having much of a tendency to think people know what's best for them. In reality all governments always think they know best what's right for the lowly people.

Re: I Think We Need The BBC

"Many European countries implement a licence fee, and many others (European, Non-European) have government funding in addition to advertisement."

How stupid of me then!

Because others are screwed over by their systems, it's obviously correct that we are too!

We should never reform, even when technology completely changes our behaviour.

Makes so much sense.

"but turning it into a commercial enterprise where profit and cost savings are the most important things is not the way to go"

You don't think BBC makes money outside sucking in the licence fees?

Re: Amazon and Netflix?

Every dum-dum "documentary" (that's the sound of kettle drums) has to be one hour long, regardless how trivial the subject. And it has to have stupid CSI-lighting and photogenic made-up scientists, and shaky cameras with zoom lens issues.

Produced for the AD crowd.

Re: Most of its good stuff isn't made in-house anyway.

If BBC only made stuff that differentiated them from the commercial channels, I bet the license fee could be slashed to less than half. That would be better value.

The BBC has gone so much downhill that it might as well get the coup de grace.

Most of its good stuff isn't made in-house anyway.

For light entertainment any of the alternatives will do just fine.

If I were to pay only for what I'm interested in, the BBC's production would look totally different. And younger people wouldn't want to pay at all. So I understand why BBC and the established powers are desperate to hang on to the mild and controllable (and "entertaining") BBC under the current anachronistic mandatory licensing model.

Ever wonder why those Apple iPhone updates take so damn long?

Re: no no no no no no no, Apple

"So Apple doesn't keep old hardware on hand for testing? They don't have an automated test process that would allow multiple test scenarios to play out? They don't have any sort of virtualized test environment?"

Only an idiot (MS?) would rely on that and then do a full roll-out.

Even MS, with OS as a service, have hopefully now learned that they must roll out gradually. Would you rather have 1% or your user base needing tailored help, or 100%?

There is a reason I always delay any updates as long as it takes to get feedback from those who can't wait.

Re: Most incredible feat of software development - ever

"This must be the most incredible feat of software development (call it engineering if you want) in the history of the computer industry. It is almost so breathtaking that it is shocking."

No it's not. You are exaggerating. It's neat though.

Going to the moon with the equivalent of cheap calculator as the on-board computer, that's an achievement.

Re: I say "Well done Apple."

"And your limited understanding of file system formatting"

Formatting?

Re: It wasn't as risky as the author makes it out to be

This wasn't about releasing an untested update on peoples devices, it was about Apple purposely using peoples phones as a test bed, i.e. they implemented a change, ran some tests, then rolled the change back whether it worked or not, all as part of a single 'update' as far as the users were concerned.

I actually quite like this approach, if it means they can test some aspects of introducing the file system changes in a safe way, before rolling it out wholesale.

Can't live without your iPhone for 30 minutes, even if doing it at a time of your choice?

Pathetic.

I can inform you that Android upgrades aren't exactly speedy either.

At least the i-stuff gets updates. My i-stuff that's a lot older than my LG G3, for example, still gets updates (LG won't update the G3 for no other reason than wanting to sell the latest and shiniest -don't get me wrong, I knew about this general Android problem). Having Google's own hardware doesn't seem to help that much. They just think it's natural to leave perfectly working stuff behind for the landfills.

When we said don't link to the article, Google, we meant DON'T LINK TO THE ARTICLE!

Surely the correct headline would be:

Right to be forgotten forgotten

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

My point was that for the intelligence services to get good intel they should compromise the devices of the people under investigation. Not ruin encryption for everyone, thus making it obvious to even the most daft murderous lunatic sociopath nutter that those devices cannot be used at all to communicate securely.

The extra threshold of having to do so also makes it less likely that we will all be monitored causally like in some 1984 scenario. (For which our technical capability is now way beyond what was envisioned in "1984".)

Re: What about privately agreed crypto between private parties?

You're on May's radar now mate!

Better sleep under the bed from now on.

Re: Said it before.

"That's why I have no problem voting Tory"

Like voting for Trump then?

Don't mind having deluded morons in charge?

Re: There will always be a safe place to communicate

"The idea that there is a way to stop secret communications is a nonsense. Playing whack-a-mole with whatever is used now only has one end game"

The concept of not being able to say "enough is enough" and have it work just fine is an impossible concept to grasp for the vicar's daughter.

If encryption was known to be useless, the potential "terrorists" (in reality: deluded, low IQ, narcissistic, mentally ill scumbags) wouldn't use it, would they?

So: Own goal. Worse than useless effort.

Cuffed: Govt contractor 'used work PC to leak' evidence of Russia's US election hacking

Re: Dear "The Intercept"

"Retyping a multi-page document can be impractical."

More practical than serving 10 years.

Besides: OCR.

Aren't you going to talk about Sep 11, and the fake moon landings too?

Re: "...undermines public faith in government."

If it's going to kill us or harm us, it's probably a pollutant.

If, for example, we spread table salt over the land to the extent that we couldn't grow crops any more, I'm pretty sure that table salt would be classified as a pollutant.

Re: IQ below 0

She is but one individual. Perhaps she wanted to be martyred by the system?

More alarming is that entire organisations let's single low-level individuals have access to entire massive databases of classified information -transferable onto USB drives, for example.. That truly is low IQ.

The emails came with a Word document attached containing a Visual Basic script that would run a PowerShell script to slurp information from the victim's Windows PC.

Yeah, about that issue of allowing running of things that show up in the email..

I think I said it was a bad idea around 1987?

I'm sure I wasn't the first to notice the problem though.

Apple appears to relax ban on apps fetching, running extra code – remains aloof as always

Security is one issue.

Another is modifying previously reviewed Apps to do something different than expected. (Which may be related to security, or just massively annoying, such as draining the battery.)

At least my i-thing stuff doesn't suddenly drain the battery for no apparent reason, whereas with my Android things there is no such guarantee. Apps misbehave on a regular basis -some I can't even kill with blunt force (and just the constant need to monitor their behaviour is a major pain).

Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop

"When I first used Linux, I set it up with olvwm, and just used the commandline in the little console window to launch GUI applications. "

Yeah. I played around with fvwm a lot.

MS has brought back the need to type things to launch them though, with a start "menu" that is anything but.

Amazon granted patent to put parachutes inside shipping labels

You can patent effing anything.

So now the pouch for the parachute has a label on it, and it's patentable?

FFS!

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Could someone please explain why power should "spike" when, as the story goes, all things were started at once? In my mind there could be a rush of current leading to a brown-out condition.

Perhaps it's a "power demand spike" that is being referenced?

But the idea with these statements seem more aimed at conjuring up images of dangerous voltages spikes entering the system and blowing up things, like some episode of Star Trek, or Space 1999 where CRTs tended to explode.

After a complete power failure, presumably equipment would need powering up in a controlled manner?

That must all be part of the specifications for the system, and should happen more or less automatically. It seems unlikely that all systems would power up simultaneously and overwhelm the supplies?

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

it could have resulted in both the battery supply and the generator supply being briefly connected in series to the power bus feeding the racks. That would result in the data centre’s servers being fed 480v instead of 240v, causing a literal meltdown

Sounds weird wired.

Intel gives the world a Core i9 desktop CPU to play with

Only $1000 if you buy 1000 units?