Posts by herman

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Constant change is here to stay

Hmm, sendmail forever.

Re: Bewilderment

Fluxbox? Try Blackbox.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

This story doesn't make sense though. Being a Bluetooth tracker, what on the ship, was it connecting to, to send its position out? That is the real security problem.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: ISO certification VS security

That is OK, if you had a process defined for that!

Fission impossible: Uncle Sam wants nuclear reactors in space by 2031

Maybe the most honorable general was referring to tar sands?

Re: Nukes in orbit by 2031?

Protesters aplenty will be down here anyway.

Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint

Re: Inconvenient Balderdash

Geological changes actually happen fast enough that one can observe some of them in a human lifetime. Continents drift at a rate of about 2cm per year. Over fifty years, it becomes noticeable when the pools in the sea where you played as a child are now 1 meter deeper or shallower.

In other places old famous harbours may now be dry and a few km inland, like Troy or Cesarea - or under water like Cleopatra's at Alexandria.

These slow, but inexorable movements eventually alter the sea currents which can cause sudden changes in climate.

Note that we are currently still in an ice age. The Quaternary Ice Age will only end when Greenland and Antarctica are melted and the whole globe has become tropical again, as it normally is. Ice ages are brief - a few million years, while the warm periods like the Mesozioc lasts hundreds of millions of years. Our whole human existence has been in an Ice Age.

Inconvenient Balderdash

It is time to move on and find a new, more profitable hoax.

France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead

The EU Commission is very open to Linux. I have no issues logging in to the systems in Belgium using either Mac or Linux.

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Re: The character is not entered into the string.

European banks do not accept čeks anymore.

Re: Case of acute cleveritis ?

Hmm, that is why my user names and passwords are all Apple. ;)

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Re: I want one

So you don't want emergency personal to be on call. That is fine, till the day you need it and 911 doesn't work.

Re: Incomprehensible

Hmm, just ban all signal waveform generators and transmitters. It will be fun see how a receive only cellphone works.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Sure, if you can find a flat globe with the US in the middle.

RAF eyes cheap drone-killer as Typhoon jet tests laser-guided rockets

Re: Cannon

It already exists. Optical tracking guns mounted in helicopters are used to shoot UAVs down.

Re: Cannon

There already are optical tracking guns that can do this. For example the Bullfrog gun: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/LwNtjRH4PJA

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

To make up for the added red tape, accounting and software expenses, these small businesses will now have to do even more off the books cash work.

Sticky-note security turned gym into hall of '80s horrors

Re: WTF

On a treadmill you are not actually moving your body and you are not actually going up or down hill. Only your legs are moving.

Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

Unprovoked

El Reg's idea of 'unprovoked' leaves much to be explained. Who has been yelling Death to America and Death to Israel and attacking and killing for decades? Shame on you sissy Limeys.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: Freezing in an Aussie summer

In a Calgary meeting room directly underneath the A/C equipment it could reach a balmy minus thirty Celsius in Winter - a whole ten degrees warmer than outside. We went in there with parkas on.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

That law was already passed. EU systems have to be local.

Mars coughs up another maybe-life clue in the form of nickel compounds

Re: Mars retrieval mission may have been superfluous anyway

Okay, so you're a rocket scientist

That don't impress me much

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

PCLOS

The Boomer distro. No Poeterware and no SELinux to slow it down and definitely no Artificial Ignoramus. It gets 12 miles to the gallon and that's the way I like it.

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

Lenny

I wonder how will senile old Lenny do against an AI call centre?

Iran war drives urgent need to counter underwater attack drones

Re: Might I propose?

Old wooden trawlers with fishnets?

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Re: just wondering

Landing craft - flat bed ships - are sometimes used as unmanned aircraft carriers.

Re: Didn't the US deploy lasers aboard against drones in their ships?

Lasers have limited range. The beam is absorbed and scattered in the air.

Re: Ukraine has been using German Gepard since 2023

Ground based AA guns have their useful niche, but only have around 10 km range. Put a gun with fragmenting rounds in a helicopter or a slow fixed wing trainer and then you can fly to where it is needed, so that is another way to it.

Re: This report is bizarre

Yes, there is a lot going on, but anything defense related is 'need to know' and nobody on this forum needs to know.

Russia is ten times bigger than Ukraine, but fortunately also ten times more stupid.

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

Re: May not be a racial bias at all

It is a crappy camera bias. Multispectral cameras work much better.

Re: This isn't the real problem

Rubbish cameras with rubbish photos. Multispectral cameras work better - meaning that they need multispectral pictures to train on also.

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

PCLOS

PCLOS does most things right. No poeteringd to mess up the basics, no Wayland to mess up X and no SELinux or AppArmor to slow it down. A minimal install with KDE or XFCE and a rolling release. Simple and blazing fast, like Linux should be.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Re: ternary?

42 of course

Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus

Re: "a persistent stare capability"

For persistence, donkeys are much better than goats.

Apple’s MacBook Neo turns out to be its most repairable lappy in 14 years

How did you upgrade the RAM? On my 2012 and 2015 the RAM is soldered in.

Geez, don't destroy the guy's excuse for buying a new lappie. What if his wife reads your post?

The double sided tape on the old Macbook batteries were not hard to remove - I just pushed a plastic spudger in there a few times. Apple Macbooks never die - sometimes you just wish they would - to finally have an excuse to buy a new one.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

Re: A rehortical question:

Yes, for a very small value of honest.

Osborne

Sounds like an Osborne III

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Remote exploit

Did he find a remote exploit in the 75 baud modem code? Oh, the horror!

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Ukraine is using fragmenting bullets in autocannons mounted in helicopters to shoot at Shaheds. With the Shaheds at 3000 feet and the heli at 5000 feet shooting down at it.

Re: RFI?

And ships generally have a 9 G shock requirement. When you are floating in the water and fire a torpedo or depth charge, the shock wave comes back to you too...

Re: You owe me a new keyboard!

Oh, no, the colour will take years to sort out!

NASA’s asteroid defence mission slowed targets by 1.7 inches per hour

Inches per hour?

In a real human understandable unit of measure that is 0.07 furlong per fortnight.

60 years since humanity first touched the surface of another planet

Re: Odd

Wow, Venus is a real hottie.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: .....................it's already here, as a service company

Ali was a psychopath. These people are just ordinary inconsiderate assholes.

Unmodified license change

'Modified code must remain under the LGPL?'

So, first fork it and release it under a new license, then modify it.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

I am 65 and my 13 inch retina display macbook work just fine thanks.

Re: Never look a gift-horse in the mouth

You can get a new battery from iFixit for about 80 dollars. It takes a couple hours of careful fiddling to install it. I just fixed up two 2012 Macbooks with new batteries. The second time is much quicker of course.