Posts by achillesneil

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Small Screen Estate

I find tiling managers like SpectrWM quite useful on netbooks which tend to have small screens. Very little screen real estate is wasted. And they tend to be very lightweight which reduces power consumption.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: Yearling - BBC?

I did. I remember when I stole a laptop from work in the 90's (it was going into landfill) and installed FreeBSD on it via a floppy disk and modem. Happy days.

It had a hard disk of 325MB and 4M of RAM. You had get inventive then. I had a kid and little spare money. You make the most out of what you have.

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

Re: Clueless

But they would have to answer the phone first....

Clueless

I have to admit that my girlfriend, who was worked for the NHS for years, knew nothing about this.

I did get a response from NHS Digital, but I assume that the forms that went to my GP just got filed in the bin by one of their rude receptionists.

Biden warns 'real shooting war' will be sparked by severe cyber attack

War with China

I don't think China, or Iran for that matter, has ever been successfully invaded. They would be on a fools errand to try it.

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

skipping bail

It is highly unusual in the UK to spend so much in prison for voiding bail terms, unless you are a total psycho.

I've been out on bail before for a long time. With hindsight, he could have relied on the useless and ineffective probation service not to do their jobs.

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

Re: Debian 11, also known as Bullseye

I wouldn't mind if the next Debian distro was called Pot Noodle. Or Velvet Pantaloons. As long as it works,

Re: Debian 11, also known as Bullseye

Or a darts tournament when all the competitors were pissed out of their gourd. 1980's. Golden age of crap TV.

Re: tmux firefox-esr ssh rsync rxvt awesome

Well things like tmux and ssh are originally OpenBSD applications. You could just use OpenBSD instead. To be honest, I use OpenBSD and Debian, and to be honest, I have very few issues. Unlike that toy operating system known as Windows 10.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Healthier Options

How about a Kurious Oranj ?

It's that time of the year when Apple convinces you last year's iPhones weren't quite magical enough, so buy this new 5G iPhone 12 instead

Why ?

Why anyone would want a phone that is so locked-down and restrictive baffles me.

Fintech biz Wirecard folds into insolvency like two pair against a flush. Good luck accessing your chip stack

FCA are using a hammer....

Having worked in financial services in the past, I have seen so many financial scandals where the FCA sat on their hands and did nothing, even when people were warning them for a long time. By the time they took action, the horse had already bolted. This time, they come down like a ton of bricks on Wirecard and prevent hundreds of thousands of people accessing their money, often the only money they have, without any alternative solution to put in place. They are just not fit for purpose as a regulator.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

> PHP really is an awful language.

Well, I can think of languages which are far worse.

As many have pointed out, it is easy to write duggy and insecure code in PHP, but if you have a good understanding of it, you can write some robust web apps, especially if you build them on top of great frameworks like Laravel. You can easily write buggy code in Python, but do great things with it too.

I have no intention of stopping coding in PHP, just because it isn't the most fashionable language right now.

From Zero to hero: Why mini 'puter Oberon should grab Pi's crown

Interesting... I was looking at these GreenArrays chips. 144 cores on a single chip. If they were mass-produced, we could all have $10 computers running on FORTH. FORTH isn't difficult. It's just so different. And solid.

TalkTalk attack: 'No legal obligation to encrypt customer bank details', says chief

TalkTalk say they are victims of crime. That is true. But if I left my windows and front-door open and some people came in and stole all my stuff, the cops wouldn't do anything. Probably tell me not to be so lax.

I think TalkTalk was been very lax here.....

TalkTalk CEO admits security fail, says hacker emailed ransom demand

I reckon they they have stolen all the personal data, but probably not the bank account details.

I had a new TalkTalk line put in a couple of weeks ago, hardly gave anybody by new phone number, and I just had a scam call. Somebody phoned me up asked for me and said he was calling from TalkTalk, asked me, he knew my exact name, then asked me to confirm my name and User Id. I said if you already know my name, why they hell are you asking me that question. Then he hung up.

I hope they salted our bank details. Or else this will be a major f**k up of all proportions. Even I know how to minimise SQL injections.

Stripped to the core and full of Xfce: Xubuntu Linux loses it

I've recently been using Spectrwm running on top on OpenBSD on a netbook that I use when I am out and about. Very usuable once you got the hang of it, and it doesn't suck up lots of battery power because there are no pointless things I don't need running in the background...

Enough is enough: It's time to flush Flash back to where it came from – Hell

It will die a long slow death...

I've been using OpenBSD quite a lot lately where Flash is not available due to the security implications, which is quite sensible.

However, you still have sites like the BBC iPlayer that still require you to use Flash to watch anything, so I suspect it is going to be around for a while yet...