Posts by matjaggard

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Unlike when you open the MacBook when you need the Apple the wrong way up.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

@aerogems I downvoted your well thought through post on tax because whilst it seems simple to tax things where the work was done or where the product was sold it's not.

Firstly because what is the "work" and "product" for Google as an example. Hard to define because it could be where you sell the advertising or where the end users are or where the search code was written or quite a few other options.

Secondly the US would never agree to this because they'd lose quite a lot of tax revenue for massive companies like Apple who currently pay US tax for (some) EU software on Chinese hardware sold to EU citizens.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: A subscription model

I get subscriptions for some things - where a company is providing an ongoing service or even significant upgrades that customers definitely want but now subscriptions are used for software that never gets changed and requires no support. So frustrating.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Nice analogy I came across

Sadly not. All of Norfolk and Lincolnshire will drown for a start.

Terraform fork OpenTF renamed and relocated as OpenTofu

Re: Really?

What nonsense, presumably Microsoft are to blame for every bad piece of software you download on a Windows machine? Are Google to blame if you visit a bad website using Chrome?

Actually the developer time had already been pledged, support from big businesses is exactly what the companies offering that time are in need of to prove their investment is a good plan.

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

Re: Case study

We actually did do these kind of case studies. London ambulance service was one of them, I can't remember the others as I'm old now.

Re: Legacy??

Nah, Linux servers don't tend to run it, nor my MacBook.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Labour have always balanced the books

1974 was before 60% of the population were born. How is that even relevant except to learn from the mistakes which Labour appear to have done while Liz Kwarteng have wrecked inflation and interest rates recently?

Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

Re: Such a shame that we can no longer use local servers, eh ?

Someone clearly lost their data centre job and is still bitter.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: Hold Your Horses

I don't think anyone is suggesting replacing all virtual machines with this.

This will be ideal for running certain things: docker on Mac where the performance is currently awful, lots of different flavours of function as a service, containers might soon be a thing of the past since this could remove 95% of their benefit over VMs.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

I'm not sure why you got downvoted for saying an air gapped system is not fully secure. It seems pretty obvious to me. To be air gapped means it's likely to be patched less often because it's a PITA to do so, so security vulnerabilities will be there for longer. Also you have to allow storage to be plugged into it somehow to allow updates to the main software as well as patches.

I worked at a place that used CDs for this but it was a real waste of plastic so they started to allow USBs. We had specific machines only running virus checks on those CDs and USBs with virus definitions updated daily. Still we got a virus on the secure system somehow*

*it was definitely not a senior manager plugging his phone into a USB to charge it. <\sarcasm>

Netflix flinging out DVDs like frisbees as night comes for legacy business

X? Really‽

It's called Twitter, or something less polite.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

As mentioned, it's the metadata that's the issue: Pull requests, issues, releases, etc.

It's also the integrations with other systems. Github is also our identity provider for some systems.

Re: I'm sorry, I just can't dump Zoom.

The user is not the product on Zoom, firstly because they charge so much and secondly because they don't make any money out of their users other than SaaS fees.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Re: X-citing!

Rebranding is pretty common for non-top brands. Compare Coca-Cola over the years to Pepsi for example.

https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-design-over-the-past-hundred-years/

Stolen Microsoft key may have opened up a lot more than US govt email inboxes

Re: Shouldn't such keys only be issued

Not only should it only be inside Microsoft, it should also be in HSM devices which don't allow exporting the key.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Lawyers

I'm not usually one to pile hate on lawyers but this case is crazy. Not only did they work hard to ensure that justice was not done in this case, others have hardly worked to put it right and then for the compensation, they "received £43 million ($52 million) plus legal costs in a settlement. The bulk of the money, however, was consumed by the costs of funding the case." - the bulk of £43 million PLUS legal costs (which should be enough to cover the costs of funding the case surely‽) is a crazy amount of money just to gain the beginnings of some justice.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: Yet again, Mint

It certainly has inexplicable defaults - you can't tab between inputs without enabling "accessibility". I guess the semi-regular corruption of the NVRAM such that my not-sanctioned-by-apple USB-C docking station stops sending anything to the monitor could be closed as inexplicably but I think it's easily explained by corporate greed.

Re: Linux on the desktop is an oxymoron

Helpfully you can do that with ChromeOS so ✅

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

It's not as simple as that. Firstly you can make a job description biased very easily and accidentally. Secondly these people did not apply at all, if you read the article you'll see that companies are asked to contact candidates on this site. How many women are signed up and how many are shown in search results is more relevant but if they company is producing reports like this, they should have their own biased algorithm sorted already.

Multicloud isn't necessary, says Gartner … until it is

Clouds help with this

The cloud providers help to make it difficult or expensive to use more than one cloud by charging for data transfer and making APIs different. Still, we're using AWS for most stuff but Big Query as a data warehouse because all the equivalents on AWS are crazy expensive for the same or less functionality even taking data transfer into account.

'Strictly limit' remote desktop – unless you like catching BianLian ransomware

Re: Passwords

I manage the IT for a small group and we do have RDP straight on the internet. I do what I can in enforcing complex passwords and keeping the system patched but what else can I do? We have no money and limited time to implement whatever it is, the people using it are completely non-technical and the system is on an only-just-better-than-home network.

GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

Re: Most code is copied, anyway

This is nonsense. Most code is original, even the move-data type projects have quite a bit of original data mapping and the like. The most commonly used data structures are provided by the languages we use. If you're finding yourself rewriting code that already exists then maybe you should be using a library.

Re: Not at all

It's not that simple as I hope you're aware. This is somewhere between blatant copying and someone using open source to learn programming.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Fond memories of 1-2-3

My parents still use SmartSuite on Windows 11 and for that reason, I call BS on the original story.

Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

Re: Geo blocked?

If someone is looking at your DNS cache it's time to move on.

Apache Superset: A story of insecure default keys, thousands of vulnerable systems, few paying attention

Very difficult. If you do that then every instance that starts without some shared state will be incompatible with every other one. Restarted an instance in kubernetes? All your users are now blocked. Got two instances running? Users moving from one to the other can't have access.

What's the difference between "secure defaults" and "requiring them to take deliberate actions to be purposefully insecure" they sound completely identical to me.

DoJ, Treasury accuses 3 men of laundering crypto for North Korea

Re: Why is this news?

It's news because of the conversion to real currency, also because of the sheer quantities of money involved.

I recommend listening to the podcast The Lazarus Heist.

Brits start 'em young with 20% of tots 'owning' a smartphone

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who got Portal back up for the kids

Can't you just automate the sending of an SMS every month to keep the prepaid SIM active?

Re: "by the time they are 12 it's something like 97 percent"

Nope, things can happily be made appropriate for the screen size. Also they tend now to write coursework in class (and do research and new learning at home) to prevent plagiarism and getting AI to write it for them

Welcome to open source, Elon. Your Twitter code just got a CVE for shadow ban bug

Re: Man, Am I Glad

I wonder how many people use it like I do - exclusively to publicly shame companies who give bad customer service.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: "What else would ChatGPT do to protect itself from being discovered as a liar?"

The writer of the article has understood perfectly in my opinion. Just because the model can be viewed as a massive database doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about what it "wants" - the desires of the model are defined by its training data, goal definitions, etc. but that's too much to understand at any one time and also we don't know exactly how much of any one behaviour is based on any one input so talking about what it wants makes perfect sense.

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

What's the difference between "AI" and "a language statistical model" and why does it matter? ChatGPT easily passes the Turing test, it provides what look like intelligent answers - and most of the time they are. What exactly are you looking for before you're willing to call it "AI"?

Maybe it needs to actually understand what it's saying? Arguably it does - if you ask a human what they meant when they said something then they'll likely tell you in different words - and ChatGPT will do the same, it "knows" that one phrasing and another are roughly equivalent.

Maybe it needs empathy? Again, its programmed to try and do that - it also learns from responses it gives about what works and what doesn't. Humans show empathy in the same way. I guess the key word there is "show" because obviously the machine doesn't really empathise but often a human might show fake empathy too.

I get the massive mathematical models that make this work are just big matrices but I don't think that means that anyone has "grossly misunderstood the tool" at all.

What's really up with data disconnects in the deep blue sea?

I want to up vote AND down vote this comment!

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

Re: AWS is looking old

Sure, costs are higher and profits are high for some clouds. A lot of cost is due to investment in software for keeping things running at scale - some of this you won't need but some you likely will. There's enough competition in the market that running on a cloud is not some 10x more expensive thing for the same product - your workload might be one that's much cheaper self hosted but it might not. Clearly AWS is not the cheapest option out there even if you do decide on cloud but it's unlikely to be the worst value for money either.

Nonsense. Not getting stuck on a single cloud is a good plan but there's enough competition in the market that this massive increase won't happen unless there's a massive increase in costs which would affect on-prem too.

Gartner: Oracle probes orgs for Java compliance after new licensing terms

Re: LibreOffice is nearly free of that infection by now

I disagree. There's no need to get rid of Java for that reason at all. They likely included a fully free version anyway

Re: Oracle is targeting users on Java compliance after new licensing terms

No need to avoid Java, it's actually pretty good and getting better. I code in quite a few languages, including supposedly more modern ones but I still like Java the best - it's got just enough boilerplate (and much less now than older versions) that you can tell what every part is doing. Groovy is the worst - there's no telling what's a method call or a reference to an object or a function in that.

Re: Is there still _any_ reason to run Oracle-branded Java?

Literally nothing. Even the support is better from other vendors.

What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

They also attempted to copy Google Maps and learned their lesson on how hard it is to start copying these types of products.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

Re: firefox & pdf24

I think Edge currently uses PDF.js which is used by Firefox and was developed by Mozilla. You can still use it in a Chromium based browser just fine but it doesn't work as well as Acrobat, especially for complex or unusual PDF files.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Make at least sure you have your own domain

Nonsense. I have my own domain but of course I don't need it - Gmail will run for a very long time. Using a hosted account is SO much easier than running stuff yourself and Gmail is the best option. Most people would be fine with changing their email address 4 times a century or so anyway.

Re: I'm a typical Alexa user

Can't you just play white noise on Bluetooth, or actually write an Alexa app to do it for basically nothing?

Need a video editor, FOSS fans? OpenShot and Kdenlive both refreshed

Re: Openshot has been perfect for me.

Davincii Resolve is free as in zero money and there is nothing OpenShot does that is only in the paid version of Resolve - no annoying limits on resolution or number of clips like some free versions have.

Re: Resolve ?

I came here to post this. I edited 2 weekly videos with OpenShot for about 9 months. Then I discovered Davincii Resolve and have never looked back - it is so much better that it's a whole different league. Masses of keyboard shortcuts, works on Linux, although I use it on a Windows VM in the cloud now to save money on a beefy machine for editing. Parsec handles low latency control of that machine although the colours are off a bit, but that doesn't affect my type of editing.

Not all vendors' Arm-powered kit is created equally, benchmark fan finds

Re: Really to get wider adoption....

I'm not sure you can make these systems more modular without a significant trade-off. One of the ways that Apple have got this performance is the very tight coupling between parts of the system. The RAM necessarily is very physically close to the CPU, GPU and other parts.

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

Re: Appropriate complexity

This is exactly what I thought. Some VPN company pointlessly getting advertising. Shame on the Reg for sharing this. Everyone uses simple passwords for things they don't care about don't they? I get pretty irritated about sites with no data requiring long passwords. I know my passwords for some sites have been pwnd and I'm just fine with it. Go ahead and login, view my zero balance on a gift card, I just don't care.