Posts by Lazy Jack 14 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2015
Reading ESRs rant on why UPSs suck, i think he gets right that he protocol and the GUI suck big time.
But the other, I'm not sure. It's easy to bash EEs about the protocol, but the matter is that EEs still do better job at electronics than CS people at programming. I think his views on battery chemistry, battery management, etc. are overly simplified and based on little in-depth knowledge.
It's 2018 and there are companies that still produce stuff with hardcoded password backdoors (and sql injection, and buffer overflow, and etc.). Can't we just take the executives to forced labor, dissolve the company and donate its assets to animal shelters?
I don't know what else would help.
Well, if you look at how Spectre works, then you'll see that they are talking about using tailored compilers to compile the run-time environment (js engine, OS, sandbox, whatever is to be protected). See the latest Google paper on "retpoline".
So it's not about outlawing compilers, malware authors are still free to use whatever they want.
man breaks automated tests at 00:30
Why would any sane person need a voice mail? I have disabled it like 10 years ago. There was just absolutely no reason to keep it. There are dozens of ways to reach a person via phone, all kinds of messaging, heck even Facebook Messenger, if you are too old.
You are so right. Businesses don't care that you can choose from 3 desktop environment and a gazillion window managers, all with different features broken or missing. They need one, to standardize on. This is what the FOSS movement does not understand. I know it is fun coming up with the nth window manager or whatever, but they should really concentrate the effort on the ones we already have and fix them.
On LibreOffice, I unfortunately have much worse experience than you. I use it on my private computer and it works really fine for what I use. But in work, even though we are a small company, we use quite advanced features of Excel for example. LibreOffice just does not cut it and I'm not even talking about macros. Just pivot tables, large amount of data, analysis etc..We tried OO and LO and we failed. Office 365 is very good, and that is what we standardized in work. Cost was the least of the problems. It was features and reliability. We lost much more on lost productivity that what we pay for Office now.
So what is good for home use is not necessarily good for critical business work.
The phone can get pretty good location fix from the phone network and from the list of nearby wifi networks. For example, having a wifi named "mcdonalds free wifi" is a pretty good indication of where the user may be. So don't expect that turning GPS off will make it harder for the phone to locate you.
This is a pretty much false assumption. NAT does not make anything more secure, as you can achieve about the same effect with firewalling. NAT and especially all the associated kludgery of applications trying to traverse NAT, makes the whole setup much more complex and hence insecure.
So what should those unfortunate souls do, whose fathers don't have middle name? It's not usual in every country.
BTW. You know that a site is designed by Americans without the slightest idea of what is going on in the rest of the world, when it insists on filling out the 'middle initial' and 'state' fields in a web form.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
