Posts by VicMortimer

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

Re: Proportionality required..

Because Puerto Ricans get no vote in Congress, they're exempt from federal income tax.

PR is one of the world's last remaining colonies. It's an incredibly unfair situation, and the fix is to make PR one of the 52 states (because DC should also be a state).

The people of PR have voted for statehood, but the Rethuglicans won't bring it up for a vote in the House because they wouldn't benefit, and the Senate filibuster keeps it blocked there.

TL;DR: It's because we have a dysfunctional government.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

On the contrary, this is exactly the sort of thing you do manually.

What went wrong was an idiotic attempt to automate something that would have been just fine if a reasonably competent human had done it manually. A spreadsheet is fine, because it's ultimately a smallish list of people that you're trying to use to fill positions. Just don't attempt to automate it.

Whacking together a database is the wrong approach. Scripting the spreadsheet is the wrong approach. An actual human should be looking at this, and if the numbers show every applicant is inadequate they should intuitively question the numbers and start asking questions.

Re: This is not an IT failing

Just take a look over here and see what THAT bullshit gets you.

Wait times are frequently LONGER than you have. Communication between doctors is virtually nonexistent. Most of your 10 minute appointment is the doctor typing billing codes into a laptop.

And then you get a giant bill.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

Only 4 hour wait times at the ER? Must be nice.

If you don't go in via ambulance here, wait times are frequently more like 10 hours these days. And if you've guessed wrong and go in when it wasn't an emergency insurance may decide not to cover you. Better hope the ambulance is in-network.

(At least I can get in to see my primary care doctor while I'm waitlisted for a specialist, they don't care about that. Of course, that was a 2 day wait 4 years ago, it's now about 2 weeks.)

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

My house is a bit over a hundred years old. The wiring for the overhead lights is knob and tube, fabric covered wire that runs through ceramic tubes placed in the ceiling joists and turns corners around ceramic knobs.

The gas pipes for the dual-fuel lights have long since been disconnected, but they were of course abandoned in place.

I've inspected most of the wiring, it's in good shape, and so I've deemed it safe enough for its current duty powering lights, given that they're all LEDs now.

All the rest of the wire was replaced with romex decades ago, I've added a few circuits here and there, most recently a 50A car charging circuit and a circuit for the bidet.

Re: Convenience

But without the server in there, what's going to heat the room?

X Social Media sues Twitter 2.0 over alphabet soup branding

I don't see ads on F*c*book, and that's not just because I don't use F*c*book.

uBlock+NoScript+Firefox means I mostly don't see ads at all.

That's probably good for advertisers, because if your ad annoys me (which it'll do if I see it) I'm not buying your crap product.

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

And my grandfather's 46 year old Seiko M158-5009 is still going too.

But that's not the watch I wear the vast majority of the time. And that's because all it does is tell you the time, date, GMT, and time at various airports around the world. Sure, it's a beautiful watch, but that's all it is. My 36 year old Timex Ironman (same kind Bill Clinton wore to his inauguration) also still works, but doesn't do much more.

My Apple watch, on the other hand, does that plus calculator, calendar, phone, lighting controller, compass, blood oxygen, ECG, thermostat control, finds my keys, texts, pays for groceries, tracks my mileage, lets me know if there's too much noise, finds EV chargers, identifies songs, lets me know I need to take meds, lets me read email, and tells me how much I've walked in a day.

Until this Apple watch I'd mostly stopped wearing watches at all, because something that just tells me the time isn't all that useful. But this thing really is.

(Don't get me started on how much I despise analog watches in general and mechanical watches in particular.)

Re: No doubt

This is NOT the consumers' fault.

The fault lies squarely on the manufacturers for doing this and the legislators for allowing them to get away with it.

Consumers have NO power in this situation. There is no choice when ALL products are like this.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Re: I don't understand...

I'm completely in favor of salt & vinegar chips.

What I can't stand is Brits calling fries 'chips'.

Not sure how I feel about salt & vinegar fries. Would probably be ok.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

I wonder if that would work for those of us who don't see ads.

I've been blocking ads for many years, between NoScript, the default uBlock lists, and my personal lists the web is effectively ad-free.

But I'd still be happy to blacklist products that try.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

What an incredibly stupid way to deal with the problem

The stupid, it burns! (or melts, whatever)

Instead of taking advantage of the end of Moore's Law and building more durable and longer lasting hardware, this is a not-so-concealed way to continue planned obsolescence.

We're at the point where building computers with a design lifespan of 20+ years is not unreasonable. This is just another way to keep the destructive "oooh, shiny" cycle going.

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

Re: This from a country

There is no difference between a cult and a religion.

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Re: Minix 3

It really is a shame, and is a perfect example of why BSD and its ilk are not free licenses, and should not really even be considered open source licenses.

If somebody wants to release something as public domain, they should do that, not use these pretend "open" licenses that really exist only as a way for corporations to gobble up useful code.

If you care enough to release open source, you should care enough to release REAL copyleft open source like GPL.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Let's not forget that Iraq 2 was started by the lies of the GQP, the same party that is now dominated by tRUmp's MAGAts.

Trans women are WOMEN

The objective reality is that trans women are women, and you are a bigot.

Go back to Xitter.

Re: No Joke?!

People are buying it?

You know you can go to the pharmacist and get the real stuff, right? The stuff on the shelves is just a distraction, forced to be there because of the DEA and similar.

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.