Posts by VicMortimer

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

Re: BOFH has been going on 25 years....

Has it really been 25 years since I was working helpdesk at an ISP whose unofficial motto was "putting pedestrians on the information superhighway"?

Crap. I guess it has.

SK hynix says no Huawei its memory should be in Chinese wonder-phone

Re: "the handset's existence may therefore spur further sanctions"

China's massive expansion of coal-fired power plants DEFINITELY should result in sanctions from every other country on earth.

China has been the world's worst CO2 emitter for years now, they're more than double the US, and it's only going up.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

It's about 11¢/kWh here. It's not a pipe dream, you're just being gouged over there.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

The public AC chargers around here that have a fee at all (most are free) all charge by the minute. There isn't a kWh fee at all.

Dunno what the HVDC chargers do, I've got a plug-in hybrid, so I mostly just charge at home unless I'm somewhere that a free charger gets me rockstar parking.

Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

Terrible article

This is an absolutely terrible article. It's written like fixing your stuff to work the way it should out of the box is somehow a bad thing.

You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face

Re: ever mindful of the limits of netizens' mental capacity

My ESD-safe steel toe shoes are twelve and a quarter inches long. The foot is actually a pretty convenient measuring unit for me to use, I can get a reasonable approximation of the size of a room just going heel-to-toe.

I still support the US going completely metric and ditching this silliness - except for temperature. Fahrenheit is a much better scale for normal human operating temperature than centigrade. 0-100 being really cold to really hot makes a lot more sense than 0-100 being pretty cold to dead.

After years of fighting Right to Repair, Apple U-turns-ish in California

Re: Louis Rossmann

I disagree. It's just a bad UI.

There's no good reason a link shouldn't be detected and made clickable, the vast majority of sites that allow comments do it.

And that Louis Rossmann video is very relevant.

UK clears Broadcom buying VMware, but deal yet to scale Great Regulatory Wall of China

At least somebody is blocking mergers

Mergers are virtually always a disaster for users. We'd all benefit if our own governments would do a lot more blocking.

Arm reveals just how vulnerable it is to trade war with China

Re: Between morphng US regulations and RISC-V

China is not communist, it's fascist.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

THIS!!!!!!!!

I have no use whatsoever for webmail of any kind.

The only reason I'm ok with IMAP is because my mail is on my own server.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

The only "abusive" behavior is companies advertising unlimited service when they don't intend to provide it.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Re: Fly me to the moon

You know Youtube is Google, right? You're not gonna miss any tracking by going directly.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

Re: A possible use

Trade shows? Seriously?

Given that I work with people involved in the trade show business, no way would this be even remotely adequate.

They don't want a pop-up monitor in a briefcase. They want video walls. They want giant touchscreen kiosks.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Western Dataloss

Is anybody really surprised?

There's no way I'd ever trust data to a Western Dataloss drive. And that applies to SSDs just as much as it applies to spinny platters.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: Ink's not the only problem

You don't get the bulb from HP, and never did.

That's always been a 3rd party repair.

One of my Brother lasers has a bad fuser roller. The only part available from Brother is an entire fuser assembly, and costs almost as much as a new printer. A 3rd party roller is about $30.

Re: Epson

If you mean more than 25 years old, fine.

But HP stopped building good printers more than two decades ago.

Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out

Privacy on Chrome

You want privacy on Chrome?

Step 1: Stop using Chrome.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

I was gonna say, I'm very confused by all of this.

5 on a Friday is THE deployment time for anything big. Yeah, it means my weekend is fucked. But it means the next week I'm taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and maybe Thursday off if things went well over the weekend, and it means I've got until Sunday evening to roll everything back if it didn't work.

And of course I take a nap Friday afternoon before doing anything big. If something interrupts my nap, maybe updates get delayed a week.

Debian 12.1 released with bug fixes aplenty and excitement still in short supply

Does anybody really care about Unity/Lomiri?

Seriously? I remember when that thing came out, it was the most hated desktop ever, and with good reason. It's NEVER been usable, it was designed to be unusable, its entire premise was "how can we make a computer unusable" and it succeeded. It's worse than Gnome 3, and that's saying a lot. The protests finally got that mess removed from Ubuntu even if it didn't get rid of the nearly as awful Gnome 3, and many of us just gave up and switched to the very nice Xfce.

That abomination not being usable isn't just a bug, it's a design philosophy.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: DO NOT go on the Internet with XP

I'm confused. How would people not know about Twinkies? They have them at the local grocery. As a kid, I thought they were pretty tasty.

Cops told: Er, no, you need a wiretap order if you want real-time Facebook snooping

Re: Can we charge the police...

These are American cops we're talking about. American cops are all criminals.

The death of the sysadmin has been predicted for years – we're not holding our breath

iOS may be UNIX, but it's not Linux.

Tesla batteries went from fully charged to fully disabled after botched patch, lawsuit claims

Re: Taxes

My home EVSE has an ethernet port but it's not connected to anything, because I couldn't see any reason I'd want that.

I intentionally got one that didn't need any connection to a network. If it hadn't been possible to buy one that didn't, I'd just roll my own with something like OpenEVSE.

The local utility board can't tell the difference between a car and a dryer.

US changes rules on tax credits for electric cars to cover American-made only

Not only is it not the EV people want, for a lot of us it's now the EV we won't own.

Between the elongated muskrat's antics and Tesla's abysmal build quality, it's just not an option.

Oh, and they're hideously ugly cars, with the Y being the worst offender.

Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

Re: SSHDs aka hybrid drives

And they were unbelievably awful. I don't think more than about 10% made it past the first year, I haven't had one get past warranty yet.

Taiwan asks US if it could chill out on the anti-China rhetoric

Re: Current day Democrats

Every Rethuglican accusation is a confession.

And you're not fooling anybody, Ruzzian shill.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Re: 30 years or 800 years.....M$ supplies 5 minutes!!!!!

Nope, it's the old formats.

Some years ago, they broke Word's ability to read its own old formats. Unless they've since fixed it, in order to open an old Word document you have to first convert it with LibreOffice - at which point, you don't really need Word any more anyway.

I'm not really sure exactly where it broke, but early '90s files is probably about right. And don't forget nobody put .doc on the end of Mac files back then, file identification was based on the type/creator codes, which really was a better solution.

America ain't exactly outlawing gas cars but it's steering hard into EVs

Re: Change can happen quickly...

Meanwhile, I will never own another car without a touchscreen.

And since most new EVs come with touchscreens and I will also never own another car with a gasoline engine, I'm probably set.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Re: Why would anyone leave these turned on?

Most of us turned off the POTS line decades ago.

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

Re: mac user

I've got a few Extended IIs and old ADB - USB adapters. They're stored someplace, because the Extended II was the 4th best keyboard Apple ever built.

1st is the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad. That's right, the current production keyboard. It absolutely stomps the Extended II's ass.

2nd is the Magic Keyboard with numeric keypad. Yep, also still available brand new.

3rd is the Apple Keyboard with numeric keypad. The wired version from 2007, nice and flat with USB ports on each side.

Why do those 3 others win over the insanely great for its day Extended II? Because they're flat, quiet, and extremely easy to type on.

Loud keyboards suck.

And when the first flat keyboards came out, I just knew I'd hate them, they looked like the evil chicklet keyboards of the '80s. And I was wrong, so incredibly wrong. They're amazingly good, better than anything that's come before. They've got just the perfect amount of key travel, they're so low on the desk that I never have to throw some asshat's wrist rest across the room because they're too low for said asshats to use wrist rests, they don't have those stupid little feet to put them at the wrong angle, and they look good.

So no. I'm not bringing my Extended IIs back into use for anything but my vintage Apples.

And those horrible IBM keyboards were never any good for anything but improvised LARTs.

Australian bank stops handling cash at the counter in some branches

Re: Government decisions

OOOHHH, look at you and your "Nothing smaller than 5¢" coins.

We've still got pennies in the US.

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

I know, right? My first few cars had really nice, soft, velvety cloth seats, not like the horrible vinyl seats on the '70s low end cars. And then leather showed up everywhere, and it wasn't as nice. And now vinyl is back, and you can't even get cloth any more.

Why did they think anybody would want vinyl seats?

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Nope, not the ISDN I knew.

Where I live, ISDN was cheap. Really cheap. Cheaper than a regular phone line, and you got 2 phone lines. I don't even remember exactly how much it cost, but it was less than $50/month for ISDN service.

ISDN "dialup" 64k internet service was $20/month, the same as 56k dialup. 128k was $35/month. It wasn't "supposed" to be always on for normal customers, but I wasn't a normal customer, and my internet service was free, along with a 5-pack of usable static IPs.

So my ISDN was always both channels up unless I was using a channel for voice. It would auto-drop a channel if I picked up a phone, reconnect it when I hung up.

I kept it until I got 1.5 megabit DSL.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Cat ... bag ...

It's the same in the US. Lots of us have been so gerrymandered that for most elections our vote doesn't matter at all. Vote against the Orange Menace? Of course I did, both times, but my vote didn't matter at all because my state was going to the tiny-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon no matter what. My vote counts in local elections (we've even had a city council election decided by a single vote in the last few years) but effectively doesn't at the state level.

US officials probe Tesla's incredible detaching steering wheel

Shush, you. Don't give Elmo ideas.

Google euthanizes Chrome Cleanup Tool because it no longer has a purpose

Clean up Chrome

But the best cleanup is to clean up Chrome itself. And by "clean up" I mean delete.

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

I'll be so glad when Drumpf is finally off to prison.

Looks like the Georgia indictment is probably happening within a month or so. Hopefully they realize he's a flight risk and hold him until the trial, don't want him defecting to Russia.

Re: Why Does it Need an App

You know we don't do PIN for credit cards in the US, right?

They're just for debit cards.

Re: Of course chargers must be standard

It won't. Every other electric car in the US uses J1772/CCS (or will once the Leaf is gone in a couple years,it's the last CHAdeMO car).

Re: 3-Phase?

J1772 doesn't do 3 phase either. It does single phase 120V or split-phase 240V.

Add two pins and you get CCS.

And it's non-proprietary, everything but Tesla uses it. Elmo can suck it, he's about to get told to ditch the proprietary connector in the US just like Europe already did.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Here, have an hour of nails on a blackboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13d5d6LVEpU

It's actually kind of relaxing, maybe I'll leave it on to go back to sleep.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Absolutely correct, unless you order a bottled beer the sizes can be quite arbitrary.

It's pretty obvious what that is - an American recipe converted to metric - and done quite badly. 6.35mm means it wants about 1/4 inch pieces of potato. 1.42 grams of salt is about 1/4 teaspoon, 49 grams of flour is about 1/3 cup of all-purpose flour (because American recipes don't use weights for salt, pepper, spices, or flour).

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Re: KeePass

"Somebody else's computer" is as true now as it ever was. You think it's "getting old" because you don't like the truth.

There is no "cloud". The "cloud" does not exist. It is now and always has been somebody else's computer, a computer you do not own, do not control, and which WILL eventually get hacked because it's a massive target.

Your bank isn't safe because there's any chance it won't be compromised. Your bank is only safe because government insures your money when the compromise happens.

For your password storage, you're a fool if you put it on somebody else's computer.

KeePass is a far better option than keeping your passwords on somebody else's computer.

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

Re: NASA therefore spent $15 million on Oracle software it didn't use

They should be doing annual forensic tax audits anyway. If you've got that much money, you're definitely a crook, the only question is how much you stole and from where.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

When I was in school, we typically got three or four bomb threats a year. It was always assumed that it was somebody wanting part of the day off, but it tended to work. They'd evacuate the school until a few minutes after whatever time the bomb was supposed to go off, then let us back in.

The phone system in town was too antiquated to actually trace a call unless somebody happened to be at the switch while it was connected, which was almost never, and the callers were never stupid enough to stay on the line longer than was needed to call in the threat.

Nobody was ever all that alarmed about it, after all none of the schools I went to had actually been blown up since 1958, and then it was just the one, and the racist scum were at least considerate enough to do it in the middle of the night.

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Re: rebooting the system

I even get that from my girlfriend. "The WiFi's not working!" shouted across the house.

I'd test WiFi, reset a few access points for the fun of it, verify that yes, it's functional. She insists it's not working. I look at her phone, verify it's working, and ask for a more detailed description of the problem.

Yep, it's an internet connectivity issue. "Why didn't you say the internet wasn't working?"

I've finally learned to test, then just say "WiFi's fine, the internet connection is down." - which of course annoys her, but I'm already annoyed anyway, so we're mostly even.

Of course, then I have to deal with Comcrap, so I get even more annoyed.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: God botherers strike again!

No, it's a group of women who were brainwashed into the christofascist concept that women should be controlled by men.

Here's a link that shows just how disgusting it is: https://voicesfromtheblogs.com/submitting-to-husband/

And it gets worse from there, some christofascists condone marital rape and physical abuse.

Rivian abandons electric van partnership with Mercedes-Benz

Re: DeLorean.

Ugh, no. Space Karen is a dirtbag, and Rivian has a MUCH better product than Tesla could ever dream of.

Pretty much any other car company would be better.

OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

Re: "30 percent tax"

I much prefer the legal approach. Apple should be required to allow app installation from any source, not just their own app store.

Once that's fixed, I don't care if Apple charges 99%, but until then they should only be allowed to charge reasonable processing costs, not an extortionate 30%.

I don't care about Twatter at this point, though. I deleted my account and deleted the app from all my devices, and it'll stay that way until Space Karen is no longer involved with it.