Posts by Joe W

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

Re: MS 365 Personal

Why? I used to be able to buy a home version of office. Now I have to rent it. Why is that a good thing?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: "the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator"

My experience is that Ms Office (well, Word) breaks formatting between machines in the same damn company. So there's that. We are also averse to moving everything to Azure, as some stuff would not be allowed to. Then, Microsoft is now actively disabling stuff on-prem, since all and everything have to be in the cloud. Which sucks. A lot. Let's see if this provides us with the needed push.

On the other hand, most of our production machines / servers are Linux (SLES? I think....), apart from the stuff I have to work with (stupid SSRS etc.). So why not the desktop as well? I would also gladly trade in the MS SQL server for something else. Only problem is, I have a few colleagues who are learning resistent...

let me think of what I use every day, that would be problematic on Linux.... apart from the tSQL centric stuff? Nothing. LibreOffice is plenty good for what most of us do. Oh, but I have to admit that maybe outlook might be hard to replace. The whole integration of calendars, group mall boxes, etc. is pretty good (though it crashes too often on my machine). But then I have not looked too much into alternatives (evolution?).

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

emoji

can apparently have quite different meaning depending on cultural background. The "thumb up" could be something very rude (and I recall being told so by a foreign former colleague).

I always wonder about the free speech argument, and I'm pretty sure it does not apply there, I thought it applied to government trying to hinder free expression of thought. Also, "it might be not strictly illegal" is a pretty weak defense.

Yeah, I'll get downvoted for that observation, even though I did not condone Microsoft's behaviour. Weird what people read into text.

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Re: Terrence Howard?

Do you know the Tom Lehrer song 'sociology'?

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: It's not just the OS...

Another Linux user here - with the same gripes. I really loved my small and cheap and very usable Nokia Windows phone...

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

Re: Pearlman

I hope google has to cough up. Why, I hear you cry!

Well, google (and Apple) make a big deal out of how they offer such a great service with their app store, and how their 30% cut of all moneys going through their ecosystem is just fair, because it pays for that service. You know, them makeing sure we don't fall victim to fake apps, apps with malware, trojans, the stuff.

So, yeah, I'm all for Google being held responsible for allowing a f'ing fake app, delaying the removal process, dragging their feet, and not offering this great service they keep gushing about.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

Re: Incredible...

... and they sparkle?

*ducks*

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Reminds me of the old joke: "What's serial?" - "Something the Brits have for breakfast."

---->

Make mine a bitter...

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/27/charter_spectrum_murder_damages/

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Re: I'm not saying it was aliens...

Yeah, "those are not pits, those are exhaust pipes / collapsed access tunnels / airlocks..."

(because we all know that this is no moon, etc....)

Martin Shkreli, out of prison for running a Ponzi scheme, now pushes Web3 thing

Re: Am I the only one who tuned into the snark from professor mustache wax at the end?

Yup, that was a nice nasty remark, wasn't it?

In my experience especially those two journals have a tendency to publish controversial stuff as well - it generates more articles ("comments on...." and "replies to ...") and tons of citations (beginning with the words "in contrast to the work done by....", driving up the impact factor). They also have a higher number of retracted publications than other journals, if I remember that correctly.

"There's no science in Nature and no nature in Science", as people put it.

Yes, both journals publish some really cool stuff, but there are also some less great articles (cold fusion, memory of water...) in there. It is a bit of a prestige thing to publish there (I know a bunch of people who did and still do publish there, but those are in my opinion often not the best articles they wrote).

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Re: $7.3 billion for one murder

... especially if the murderer was actually employed by the govm't...

Re: Zero customer complaints

Yes, it was 100 calls with no complaints.

And then apparently quite a few where he robbed elderly customers who then complained. But that was only a low percentage, wasn't it?

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Ooh, separate home or not. My problem is that if the distros come with different software versions there is no guarantee that the files stored in /home/$USER are actually compatible. In fact I recall trashing some things. I prefer to have a /userdata partition that contains the, well, data that is not reliant to software versions. Getting everything set up correctly can be quite a faff, but ~/.config and the like are then distribution dependent, which feels quite a bit safer.

I do second the /srv partition. Helps a ton.

(and I find flatpak and snap a horrible solution and tend to avoid them)

Re: Old linux person here....do not understand......

I just got a new machine, some not-quite-brand-spanking-new Thinkpad. I put in a 1 TB SSD and it was not too stupidly expensive. There would be a ton of space on the SSD it came with - except I'm now ripping all my CDs to flac, and since my NAS is not yet up and running I have everything on the new machine...

I will keep the Windooze installation for now - though I do not expect I'll ever need it.

Cruise self-driving cars stopped and clogged up San Francisco for hours

Re: How do they ensure sensor is in middle of the Ball?

[ ] you understand offside

[x] your prediction of that AI-thingy causing more problem than it solves is likely correct (adn I share that sentiment)

The position of the ball has not too much to do with it. It is the position of the players you need to care about. And yes, that can be a matter of a few 2.5cm. The position of the ball matters when it comes to scoring not-goals (*cough* Wembley).

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

Re: 3060

It's like a €400 / $400 smartphone being "entry level"...

I'd rather buy a couple of those --->

(and @John Robson can have one too)

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

Re: Celsius has, right now, a $1.19 billion deficit on its balance sheet

Yes and no. The crypto market is "free" as its supporters always argue, and should remain free from oversight, as this just stifles innovation... (yeah, and all of the things that happened in the crypto world did happen in the banking world before there was regulation, and this is why we do have all of these pesky rules "that just serve to stifle innovation").

The point is that it was not registered as a bank and the world of crypto-whatevers is not under the regulations that cover real financial institutions. Should the same rules apply? I would think so. Laws need to be written and / or extended to cover these cases as well. Ultimately it is up to the legislative to do so. Until then it is unregulated. Anybody investing in that stuff has to remember that, and be aware that you can lose everything, like when gambling with trade options. When you do lose everything it is no bloody use crying, you had it coming.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Limited length of program code?

Not only in Sharepoint, but also for the stored procedure sp_execute_external_script (for calling stuff like R or python from within SQL). Took me a while to figure that out. The implementation is a pig's breakfast anyway...

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Too old and eyesight is too bad

Even worse when pasting code into a chat window. I did send colleagues all sorts of smileys, thankfully it was clear from the context that I was not hitting on them...

CAPSTONE mission is Moon-bound, after less rocketry than expected

The article in "BILD"

Well... that taboid might occasionally and accidnetally contain a grain of truth (the football results from the weekend, I guess), but here I find it more likely that they got their statement from NASA administrator Bill Nelson's dog, and maybe not the dog's mouth... I'd take that with a grain of salt and a fistfull of chilli powder.

$185m anti-malware patent dispute: Norton and Columbia University fight on

Re: Juries determine facts

Nope. The patent was filed earlier in this case (ok, one of the two, in 2006). This is the date that is important.

There are other things like signing lab books to generate documentation about when an invention was made (I think some documents referring to the invention of the transistor float around as images on the web). That might be more useful for generating fame in the scientific community, there are even neckties with the quantum-Hall-effect-labbook excerpt on them.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: Alternatively

I would rather not use subversion any more. It is... painful. In ways that git is not. Git sucks in other ways, sure. I cannot pin-point the annoyances then and now, but I know that I prefer git. And sourceforge is... good grief! Have you looked at it recently? Full of scripts and nasty and ugly and ....

nah. I'll pass.

I use git because I hate it less than subversion.

Re: is anyone really surprised??

I have (had...) two other colleagues accessing this repo. I would have hosted it on my university's server, but that was a bit of a hassle (and I could not use it any longer, no longer time storage etc. - you leave, you loose it - most of it, access for sure).

If it were more relevant I would actually do that. Or actually I would now host it myself. DynDNS...

Re: is anyone really surprised??

I actually was looking for a place to host a (personal, FLOSS, but largely irrelevant) project, just after MS acquired GitHub. I did not pick GitHub. It did not really matter much, since the project is not used by more than a handful of people, but I am sort of allergic to MS' behaviour.

NASA delays SLS rollback due to concerns over rocky path to launchpad

Carryall?

Use one of those, or have the Harkonnens stolen it (again)?

Old-school editor Vim hits version 9 with faster scripting language

Re: What's Vi?

I see your mistake, after all proper operating systems are case sensitive (not all proper programming languages are, because I still like FORTRAN, yes, I am weird, and maybe I'm old as well... THAT IS NOT THE POINT! geez... anyway...)

It should be

$ which vi

/usr/bin/vi

kids today...

Re: never knew

Much syntax highlighting, bracket closing, auto-indenting stuff is implemented using scripts. If you ever edited the .vimrc file you actually did use that stuff. Do you need to able to write it? Hell, no! Having the script being complied and not just evaluated at runtime will speed stuff up (if you use lots of extensions). Otherwise it will be a "meh" change for you. I like it, I'm looking forward to it landing in Debian (I guess... in 2030 or so, I have patience).

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

The ogre tells us we must not be trolls

On an rpg mailinglist above gem was posted after a heated discussion. This made everyone relax and be quite sorry about their stupid earlier behaviour.

Ogre referred to the mod/list admin.

Re: Eh?

I can see the authors' point. I have seen comments like that after the main devs have reached a conclusion to do things a certain way - not the way the commenter wanted. They had reasons to do so, and mostly tried to explain them. Whether those were good reasons time would tell. At that point in the discussion this is toxic, it is entitled and arrogant. "how dare you not screw up the future of the project", they scream, "and me wants the sweets!"

I have seen these in reply to equally toxic, passive aggressive "not a bug, won't fix, closed" statements from devs as well.

The comment would make me less likely to look at the pov of the other person, and possibly future comments as well. In that regard it is toxic. It makes me just phase out of that discussion, and probably counter (if I were a dev) with "won't fix, closed". To which the commenter would react byraging about censorship etc. if I'm any judge of character.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Re: "Admins don't want command line interfaces"

Adding insult to injury, the relevant pieces of information are then not visible in the interfaces...

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

Well, since they turned off all nuclear power plants the electricity has to come from somewhere (or they'll have to buy it from French or Czech nuclear power plants). And then there's the NIMBYs who oppose everything, like the much needed power grid infrastructure (wind power from the coast / off-shore), which means they are quite unlikely to hit their targets for renewable energies. The over-availability of home generated solar power in the summer also means that they actually have to pay money to get rid of excess power. Basically they are stuck... Serves them right for not having the ample sources of free hydro power like they have in Norway!

The coal is no longer quite as bad as it used to be ("fond" childhood memories...), things have improved quite a bit in terms of filtering out many of the nasties. Another issue is of course CO₂.

It's a crime to use Google Analytics, watchdog tells Italian website

Re: Colour me confused.

Well.... The UK had their own set of rules even pre-Brexit. I think many in the EU were actually hoping for the UK to take the lead in reforming the EU after the referendum (which was non-binding, but would have been a great bargaining chip). The rest could have just followed suite then...

I'll shut up about Brexit now. It was a mess, it currently is a mess and it will remain such for a while. Buggerit!

Microsoft unboxes Exchange Online certification in bid to push customers off-prem

Re: "MS-220: Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Online" exam

Version numbers like ITIL? Where we got told that it would be a rolling update henceforth, only to be told that there was a new version, but fortunately there was the possibility to recertify...

Now Amazon debuts an AI programming assistant – CodeWhisperer

Re: Standards?

Well, since many self-anointed developers do mostly that this is no big loss....

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

Re: Yay, we have finally reinvented the terminal

Those who forget about the past are forced to repeat it.

I think I will pass on that one. I did work on an XTerm, twenty-odd years ago. Yes, it was usable. Mostly.

I have to admit that at some recent-ish project we used a windows terminal server for the development environment. This gave everybody a consistent base. No, it was not perfect. Yes it mostly did work. Yes, when the connection dropped we had to do other stuff, but that was a) not too often and b) that other stuff needs to get done anyways. C) if there is a deadline looming it causes too much stress...

Meta agrees to tweak ad system after US govt brands it discriminatory

Re: Better than nothing

Well, same with any snake oil sold to manglement: the new shiny-shiny is better than the old shiny-shiny and since Facebook (sorry... Meta) developed it and it has AI (and maybe LASERs!!) it has to be good, no GREAT, the greatest product EV-AHR! Sure, the old one was a sack of kack, but the new one is the bee's knees and the mutt's... you get the point.

Don't tell me you have not seen that in any place you have been working...

Alternatively:

- chum suggest a product / company B to manager of company A

- salesdroid of company B appears

- chum gets a hefty consultation fee from A and B

- manager of A gets a signing bonus from chum

The need of the company does not factor in.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

Re: Yin and Yang

Like hooking up an Electric Monk to a VCR?

Toyota wants 'closed loop' EV batteries in its future cars

Re: "a closed loop battery manufacturing process"

Having the batteries more or less endlessly recyclable would be great! I totally agree. If money can be made form that it will happen. What the effect of that might be on consumer prices will remain to be seen. Some companies rent out the batteries and give you a new one after so many loading cycles. For those companies it would make a lot of sense to have a recycling plan.

Coal is an issue, yes. Though having the photovoltaic installations + EV would be useful in many places and reduce the need for burning fossile fuels - that is, if you have a parking lot close to the house.... and you do not live up North. However, it is mostly water power in Norway anyway, and they have tons of EV on the road. Electromobility is so successful they are phasing out most incentives in the bigger cities (as far as I am aware... have not really followed that in a while).

Meanwhile in Germany, small electric vehicles that make great commuter cars (for shorter distances on more rural roads, from the suburb bereft of public transport to the city) do not benefit from tax breaks or subsidaries, only the bigger cars do. I have friends who still own such EVs, and really enjoy them. For my commute they would not work (distance, limited maximum speed < 80km/h), so they are not for everybody. A Twizzy (or a similar small vehicle) takes up less space and uses less energy than, say, an electrifed Porsche (which is subsidised...).

For a few days earlier this year, rogue GitHub apps could have hijacked countless repos

Re: Am I glad that I'm not in this circus

The Notes/Domino world has a lot of advantages

Callback!

I beg do disagree: having your own git repository (or whatever you use, subversion, mercurial...) hosted in-house gets rid of the problem as well. This is not exclusive to Lotus Notes (or that "pizza"[0] place)

[0] I find the product they call pizza just plain horrible. Better to nip down to Kafe Spesjal (or your own local pizza place).

GitHub's AI code assistant Copilot takes flight. And that'll be $10 a month, please

Re: Anonymous Indian

c|n>k

thanks. oh so bloody much.

(coffe piped throught the nose to the keyboard, in case somebody wondered)

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

Put in a fiver in crypto -

and lend five and a penny

convert fiver to $(crypto)

Repeat.

At some point take the pennies and run. You do not need 100M in the bank to pull this off in an unregulated and intransparent market, I guess.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Re: Chroot jail work...

delete all of the hidden files in your linux home directory, recursively. Hint, it is not rm -rf .*

Inverse Finance stung for $1.2 million via flash loan attack

Past tense

Note the use in that statement; "The developers of the DAO believed they could eliminate human error or manipulation of investor funds by placing decision-making power into the hands of an automated system and a crowdsourced process."

I could write that one was born every minute or somesuch (note the praeteritio)...

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

I think he did try and run the contractor off because said contractor told Google he did not want to be part of the church (and complaining about the hiring practises you describe).

RSAC branded a 'super spreader event' as attendees share COVID-19 test results

It's a super spreader event among those who sat in crowded rooms together, breathing the same air... yes, bars might have been involved, but not all rooms in the Moscone Center are huge (especially in M-North and South, though it depends on how htey did set them up, I recall the rooms in M-West to be quite flexible, ceilings are also higher there... I think).

Well, one has to factor in that the quick tests are pretty... well... insensitive to the current strain (though manufacturers might have reacted finally), so a negative test does not mean you are negative (unfortunately). On the other hand, the lower virus count this might indicate as well (in addition to being symptom free) makes you a tad less likely to spread the stuff. But then the current strains are even more effective at infecting others (symptoms seem to be - on average - less severe, though I do have some colleagues who finally caught it - not in the office - and they do/did feel really sick).

So, I think the numbers are likely to be quite a bit higher, but there is no way to know it. The conditions, tons of people in closed rooms, all breathing the same air, which is agitated to keep aerosols afloat and actively distribute them through the whole centre, were pretty effective for spreading SARS CoV 2...

Thunderbird is coming to Android – in K-9 Mail form

Lightweight?

Will the result still be as small? Let's hope so...

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Digital transmission?

Do you know the youtube channel "Techmoan"? He reviewed that turntable as well, similar conclusion, as far as I remember. The chap has got a very down to Earth view, is really into older tech (especially tape, both reel-to-reel and MC), and also has a good idea of what can be expected from HiFi components at certain price points (at what "diminishing returns" are...).

Re: Digital transmission?

Ok. Harsh ;)

I meant the recording sucks. Big time. Plus I sort of disagree with some of the interpretation, but that is as much taste as inability on my part (Hilary Hahn's renditions are great, as are A.S. Mutter's).