Posts by Joe W

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

I use....

.hadschihalefomarbenhadschiabulabbasibnhadschidavudhalgossarah

(sorry to all who now have that shitty song stuck in their head! have one of these and numb your pain ---->)

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Re: Pointless if potless

Not true, or basically wrong. I think.... Technology Connections did a test, kettles work in the US. (if I recall correctly)

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Re: Sports Futility Vehicle

It's a "soft roader".... :D

Ok, honest question: don't they have separate motors on each wheel? I thought at least some of the electric vehicles did that... I certainly would do that on an offroad vehicle, put a motor on every single wheel. Electronics are (despite what people say, and iff designed correctly) more sturdy and way more flexible than a mechanical solution (though I really do like ingenious mechanical devices). Then the computer can do the work of distributing power to the wheels.

Seoul restores smartphone subsidies because premium handsets are apparently essential

Good grief...

I mean, really? The article states that "..the cost of smartphones has climbed as manufacturers pack in more features". I really wouldnot call "moar pixels" and "moar cores" (and RAM) real "features". They are purely incremental. Most low-ish smartphones have enough of all of that, they have mostof the sensors[1]. The recent addition of "AI" is (maybe) a "feature" inasmuch as it adds something new - though AI is not a feature of the phone but the software and should run on mid tier new-ish handsets.

And who believes "subsidised" phone contracts? Don't people do the math? If you have a 24 month contract, the difference of you monthly payment for a contract with a phone to a SiM only adds up to more than the new handset price over these 24 months (usually, and when I still looked at that stuff). There are cheaper consumer credit programs, even Paypal had a zero percent interest rate payment plan[2] if you would have preferred to stretch out the payments over a longer period of time.

Ah, well. I consider it a tax on people who are bad at math, just like with lottery taxing those who are bad at statistics[3]

[1] but why do they cheap out on the compass - the sensor is likely there, just not connected. And I do not think thattis is the killer feature people are willing to pay more for.

[2] not sure if they still have it - they used to push it in a what I considered too aggressive manner. Since I have no recollection of still seeing it when I last purchased stuff using Paypl it is either gone or my brain has learned to ignore it.

[3] and state-run lottery basically fleeces the less educated to sponsor the middle class[4] lifestyle - the gamblers only get half of the money in returns, the rest pays the staff, the ads, and some of it pays for public infrastructure like libraries and pools. I'm not saying poor pople don't use these at all, but from my experience you can see a correlation between education and the kids' ability to read without using their index finger and swim[5]

[4] whoever that is... this is not really a thing in many places I used to live, and I am sort of oblivious to these things, sure, maybe I'm insensitive (and apparently my brother and I are "intellectual snobs" - we just cannot get it that some people don't know certain basic things)

[5] Apparently (i.e. I read it somewhere and cannot find the refernce, i.e. I'm too lazy to look it up) one of the nasty things a Roman could say about somebody else was that they could "neither read nor swim". Things don't change.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Curious 6000kva?

It probably has a lid on top to pur in heavy water, and a dial to retract the carbon rods...

Can I go to the pub now?

(drat, they don't open that early, this side of the channel the "pub lunch" is not a thing...)

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Re: Precious

At least they did not use Heavy Metal Umlauts :D

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Re: Seven years of support

Ahh, phone size. My hands are of a I guess average size, but trouser pockets are indeed limited in capacity. The current phone is as big as can fit (actually a tad too big for some trousers, drat!). It was the smallest non-crap-phone I actually could buy at that time. New "flagship phones" are simply too big (not big if you want to find a spot to land a light aircraft...).

My forst thought on the "handles punctuation" feature was that sometimes it does indeed matter, example:

Let's eat, grandpa!

Let's eat grandpa!

(and I am not willing to spend that mouch money (1.6k€? WTF?!) on a phone. I would rather buy a decent sized band saw.... or upgrade one of my bikes, or go on holidays in Switzerland - but hey, I'm not judging, I'm not in the target audience, I'm not wondering about what tat my favourite "influencer" is trying to push, so - meh)

Combination of cheap .cloud domains and fake Shark Tank news fuel unhealthy wellness scams

Aahh... yeah.

Like the spamvertising on YouTube - which they are of course not doing anything about, as these do pay (whatever miniscule) a fee...

Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms

Re: Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær!

Spent a year in S'toon, we had -50 (yeah, -50°C, I guess that's -60F? at some point you stop caring for the units, it's bloody cold, that's what it is) for a week (and when I arrived in late summer it was still a nice +35°C, or thereabouts) - did not really matter, people can work with that ( I also lived in Norway, so I second your comment title).

GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered

Yeah?

" it is a modification: for instance, a near-identical copy that contains only semantically insignificant variations of the original Licensed Materials"

So changing the variable names removes any and all copyright? Good to know... I was under the impression that me porting code e.g. from Matlab to R would be minor enough changes to retain the original license. And now they tell me I can just rename variables and switch to tab indentations and I'm in the clear?

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Modules...

I sort of expected the company to pay for pron when the module was called fans-only...

Tea and coffee

Our workplace has no tea and shite coffee. Make of that what you will.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

most nutritious food program

Yeah... nuts et c. are really high calory food.

Cannot do that diet and neither can I read his stuff, 'cause I'm allergic to nuts... (citation needed: the PFY - go and find the BOFH episode yourself).

Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Re: Enshittification continues

Oooh... "si, amigo". As a user of Duolingo I can totally confirm that effect. Shoddy sentences, along with their inability to recognise proper English (sorry, we did learn proper English, with the proper words - "pants" are underwear, you usually mean "trousers", in school - and I can assure you my spelling in my native tounge is as shoddy as in English, not sorry, schools not to blame on this) has bothered me for a while - but the last year had an increase in shoddy sentences and inconsitently applied rules (you can use that word here but not there, even if the sentences are essentially the same, you can omit ther personal pronoun here but not in the exactly same sentence structure there (like you can in Portuguese or in Japanese)). They leave it to the users to flag problems, they also removed the "discussion" pages - but those had been littered by people trying to be funny rather than discussing problems with the exercise.

They do agressively try to put you on the paid tier, but I sort of understand that - they probably do not make that much from ads, and somehow they have to pay people. I do not use it often enough to 1) properly learn any language and 2) justify spending money on it. Some friends use it, and apparently it can serve as a nice additional source of materials when taking a language class.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

Re: “ the $3 million, which is the statutory maximum for the six felony offenses”

Nope, it was one offender - eBay - the others have been charged separately (from my understanding of reading the article). Also note that this was not the case that determines how much eBay has to cough up in damages to the Steiners, that one is still ongoing (last paragraph in the article, or thereabouts).

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

I got an MFC-L2700DW - cheap toner, no worries machine, scans via xsaned under Linux, prints, just works. Would happily buy another Brother machine should this one break. It was one of the cheaper laser units at that shop, only downside is that in the new house we cannot put it in a sensible place, it is just about 3cm to long to sit in that gap. I'll eventually figure something out, it currently still lives on the floor.

If I want to print a photo or ten I go to the drug store downtown. Or order them from one of the many places on the interwebs (I cannot be arsed to sit around for our year-end-clip-out-pictures-for-a-calendar-print-run to finish bevore the heat death of the universe).

Just don't let it sit on the window sill, over the heating. My boss at uni did that (usually a bright guy, but this time... sheesh!).

And Brother's devices mostly (I only have experience with... four? two printers, an inkjet all-in-one and a laser all-in-one) have linux drivers. Yeah, they need to be downloaded from their website, but the stuff works. And (much to the chagrin my wife) more reliable than under windows (ok, I should look at her machine...).

For the (currently installed) BW laser all-in-one we have so far only bought original toner, but the stuff is priced ok, not really more expensive than what we saw from competitors. Shopping around a bit helped (we had to buy... dunno... something like a washing machine or a tumble drier or whatever anyway and were at three different places, two general electronics outfits, one specialiesed), so we just picked up two or three cartridges then - and still have to use them up. And since we do not print that much (obviously), and since it is only b/w, this works for me.

Microsoft kills off Windows app installation from the web, again

Re: How Come Microsoft Can’t Get It To Work?

The AC above likely does know.

The bloody software company doesn't, apparently.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Re: A 'formal assessment of the MSSP's work'

This is why we have very slim SLA with our partners (essentially we are all a big lump of different... let's call us companies under a big umbrella. I am the service level manager,and my power and penalties end at raising my finger and telling them to "please never do this again". I'm fine with that, provided I don't ever have to shout and rat on people....

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Re: Clippy on steroids

There's a BOFH for that one....

Four in five Apache Struts 2 downloads are for versions featuring critical flaw

Programmers...

There's a language Rock Star - so, while not being a Competent[tm] programmer you can totally be a Rock Star developer...

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Ha! That quote is reduced to the last sentence almost always,which completely distorts and hides the meaning...

Have one - - >

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Just... Wow.

If you look at the data, then the general message of the Hasselmann article (from the seventies, if memory serves me) is unchanged (and that is a fucking energy balance model!), as are the results from the (I think it was).BP sponsored study (also 70s). Everything else is just details. Sure, we might care about how much changes in wetlands fuck up things, but the general CO2 emissions based greenhouse effect is there, and for fifty years we have done zilch. I know what I'm talking about, I have worked in that field. (yeah,I think Mike Mann is an idiot, but that's just a personal opinion about this type of alpha male behaviour - most gals and guys I met are a decent bunch, and not bought by BigScare).

This comment section just makes me angry and pretty sad, I thought ElReg readers would be less anti-science ... apparently I'm wrong.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: is 10x $$$ normal?

And if there is an SLA, there are penalties attached. And yes, you can drag them into court...

Re: Problematic pattern recognition

I had a... cow-orker.. who was proud of his ignorance in terms of data analysis.

Yup, this fell back on him.

We had told him so: two statistical physics PhDs, an MSc (statistics), an MSc (biostatistics) and an MSc (meteorology).

Boy, felt good... :D

(one of us told him by email: this is exactly what we discussed last year - and yes, all five of us do remember, and this is the fix we told you about, "in case you forgot")

(I admit he has great organisational skills, but other... shortcomings, thankfully he is now more in an admin role in a different part of the company)

The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech

Re: They're NOT Selling Your Data!

They are not selling the data.

They are merely renting it out.

Why buy a cow if you just want milk?

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

Re: WiFi - what ?

Ah, yeah, that sucks. A lot.

I usually blame systemd (but that's more like a reflex). The main problem are drivers for the stupid versioned slightly differently than what the kernel expects cheap chip sets, at least that is my take away (anecdotal evidence). And, to be perfectly honest, if it does not run under Ubuntu I'm usually pretty much f'd, as they seem to have the most complete driver selection. My laptops all run Devuan, so... I got lucky (two are so ancient that the drivers are just there).

Oh, what can work is getting a slightly less stable version of the OS (or the most recent kernel), and run that. I also had to compile the WiFi card drivers by hand for a few machines running Ubuntu when they were new, so that might be an option. It was not difficult, just annoying.

Have a pint of mulled wine, enjoy the quiet season, And good luck!

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

That's the state of, eh, "the states"... from the outside it sort of sounds like he could get away with it.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

Mate, you are not in a union, but you certainly do the job they should do...

Also, things work a bit differently in the Nordics than in the UK - it seems a bit less of a mess (looking at the UK from the outside, just a general feeling).

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Of course

I'm actually OK coming in twice per week. There's a bakeholic on my floor, and she usually has something to eat...

Joke aside, meeting my team once a week face to face is not a bad idea. This of course means we have to coordinate those days. Works out every other week. I also get a chance to chat with my fellow greybeards.

To get work done I prefer my own cave. My tea is quite nice.

UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images

Blimey....

"Exploits bypass most secure boot solutions from the biggest chip vendors"

Yeah.

Great.

Bloody brilliant. So.... why do we insist on the bloody mess? F' that.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: bullshit detected

The phone line has only two leads anyway - so having all of these extra pins is just way overkill. Only the two central pins are actually used.

(yeah, I know, there's other standards, but this one is most common here - and then for different speeds you need different types of cables, but that's networks, CAT5 and upwards...)

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Re: NerdRageQuit

Also quite a d'oh moment for the IT department of that school. Why is their account still active after they had stopped being employed? No, I do not blame the victim, but that was a stupid thing to have happened. If you sack somebody you need to disable their f'ing accounts... Jeesh!

Still, not a cool move.

And the bofh would not have been sacked, and not found out. Instead it would have been pinned on the head of systems, helpdesk and IT.

Japan's digital minister flamed and shamed for using his smartphone in Parliament

That's really weird... I mean, getting work done on a tablet is pretty much impossible.

Get me one of those -->

Yeah, it's morning, but I already had too much stupid to deal with and it feels like going home time already...

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: Firefox and YouTube shenanigans

They are also removing the ability of content creators to disable midroll ads (apparently..).

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

... and all of us hope noone sees it.

I had the urge to klick on an underlined text.

In a printed document. I spend too much time on teh intarwebz...

Need one of them --->

Let's head for the next watering hole and leave the lusers to their misery

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

Wow, innovative!

The interesting thing is that these ideas have been around for the better part of sixty years. I have several versions of spacey books for kids, back to 1969 (the moon landing was just about in it!). And especially the early books are full of enthusiasm about interplanetary travel and nuclear powered warships spaceships. Basically "yeah, we'll reach Mars within the next decade". Fun stuff!

Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

I really do not get this...

"It's also ahead of Ubuntu in the number of editions with alternative desktops, with 11 official spins."

Yeah... why do you need that? Why can't you just install a meta-package to pull in the DE of your choice, or jut an easy way of getting th packages installed? Why does there have to be a separate "spin"?

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Nail, meet head!

Now you are thinking of the content creators - their bottom line is irrelevant for YT / Alphabet.

But I wholeheartedly agree: show me relevant ads! I'm actually good with that (ok, mostly). Don't show me crypto scams, pyramid schemes, irrelevant stuff - instead, when I'm looking at, say, a video on repairing some bike stuff, show me ads for a cycling rag, or a bike parts dealer, or maybe even some equipment like jerseys, or maybe even nutrient supplements for athletes (I'm not interested, but they might be relevant for others in my position).

The current system is broken.

On purpose.

Never attribute to the incompetence of Alphabet what can be explanied easily by greed and malice.

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

Re: The Beatles – or what remains of the band

Yeah, the last one (was it "Free as a Bird"?) was bad enough already. Let the man rest in peace.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

Re: What happened to .....

The car-carriers (the Ro-Ro roll on, roll over) variant is quite susceptible to taking water when the nose breaks off - which then sloshes around in the car deck, leading to listing and the ship keeling over.

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

Re: Not Holding Junk Debt

Nah, CxOs are not rated on their performance, success of the company, intelligence, or even wisdom.

Dontcha read the news?

Don't overthink it. They get a fuckton of cash and that is what matters.

The plan...

... as per his Muskiness (as far as I understand it) is to turn TCFKAT into a "general communication thingy" (basically everything should go through that... app-thingy), so yes, moving all those Farcebook direct messages and WhatsApp voice calls to TCFKAT was the reason for the rebranding.

Or maybe he's just making things up as he goes and Xitting all over the place.

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Let's put it that way....

One of my mates, who is a genius[*] (and a nice guy), once told his boss during a similar discussion:

"Look, I can be a genius not more than eight hours a day."

I think that for me the limit is about six hours, but I start at a way lower level of intell-uh-djence. So working only part time (young kids & stuff, and stupid "back to the office at least 50%, no matter if the colleagues you are working with are in the same city, or even state") actually is a pretty good deal for my company. I'm pretty sure I achieve pretty much the same as when I was working full hours. Except when reading ElReg[+]. Ok, back to work, slouch.

[*] not the fruity tat merchant type, but a guy who actually has both a high IQ[#] and can actually apply his genius-ness (I'm not a genius, so I'm allowed to make up words) to real world problems - yeah, he is a genius (or at least quite a bite more intelligent than I am).

[#] he kept quite stumm about it, but we found out, his wife (who is a physics professor) mocked him about it in front of his mates (many do have a PhD in a real science, so not humanities or arts, so I guess it is pretty ok to mock him about it in that group - it is not bragging, that's what I mean)

[+] I am keeping abreast of recent internet technology, as the PFY once put it... and if reading ElReg is not part of your job you got the wrong job.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Re: ...dull grey, one size fits all goo.

"or" not "xor".

Sheesh, basic logic (boolean and philosophical, which uses the same notation and is maths without maths....)

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

how?

I mostly import data from files or need to copy stuff from other programs - the last time was copying and pasting from SQL Server Management Studio into Excel.... did not work. Half of the numerical columns got converted correctly, half didn't. No clue why...

More X subscription tiers could spell doom for free access as biz bleeds cash

Re: Free speech.

"Free speech"...

look up what that means, and who is not allowed to censor what you say.

He is totally allowed to do that!

(not that I actually find anything of this great, reasonable, or satisfying) - f' em.

Re: Personally, I don't pay for ads.

ah, there's the problem....

... I don't use Ubuntu anymore, not since it turned out to be "brown windows" (as a friend pointed out, both ease of installing and pushing you to other stuff...)

meh, I don't particularly dislike it, I am good with them having a commercial offering - good luck to them. But please don't push amazon ads (and... I won't start any of the discussions regarding the pulseaudio guy's stuff)

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Also interesting: "Well, There's Your Problem"...