Posts by hittitezombie

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Linux on the desktop

Not sure what your apps are butt I'm 100% on Linux desktop and very rarely have had issues.

OK, I don't use iTunes but then I don't use Apple products either so its a win-win.

Re: Linux on the desktop

Will they finally deliver on "One app, one screen, one button to click and that's it" promise? I hope so!

Google's newest cloud region taken out by 'transient voltage' that rebooted network kit

Re: Harden the F up

New Zealand, on the other hand...

Just watch Black Sheep.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

Shit, flashbacks to mouse cleaning days..

Actually it hasn't gone fully away since I'm a trackball user but LED+motion sensors made the cleaning a much easier thing.

Subcontractors working on CityFibre's £45m Derby rollout threaten to 'rip up tarmac' in dispute over payments

"You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons."

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Good riddance but the sentence should have been longer.

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

RTFA: "The 787, G-ZBJB, was scheduled to operate a cargo flight on 18 June."...

Twitter U-turns after conferring society's highest honor – a blue check mark – on very obvious bot accounts

Re: World Bollard Association

This is truly a crime.

I was fired for telling ICO of Serco track and trace data breach, claims sacked worker

Re: Jackpotcomics Ltd to work on Serco’s national NHS Test and Trace scheme

It is very much legal.

See File on 4 expose here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57021128

Re: A stench more pungent than the odour of any stink bomb a comics shop might sell

Good luck getting the director registered in Philippines sued.

Interestingly mods here blocked my comment about the same tax dodge being used elsewhere for NHS.

Audacity is a poster child for what can be achieved with open-source software

Quite an achievement

This article must have broken records in 'This didn't age well' category!

NYPD puts down $94k robot canine contract after outcry

One positive, if they shoot the robodog no real dogs will be harmed. Cannot say the same about anyone in the house they raid.

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

Re: Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

It was designed for it from day 1.

Re: Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

At least one of favourite mangas would have a chance to become a reality (Planetes).

Delayed, overbudget and broken. Of course Microsoft's finest would be found in NASA's Orion

Senate Launch System is not going anywhere

It's OK, Orion will never make into space on top of an SLS so the world is safe from the windows crashing.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: A poor use of volunteers' time

You must have missed the custom CSS craze of mid-2000s.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: I don't get it....

I'm dealing with thousands, not hundreds, not one, instance. I need reliability, I need repeatability. I need consistency.

Which "version" of Stream any of my instances are running? Who knows?

Re: Doing the math...

You are very likely going to get "audited" once you give your details.

The longest suicide letter I've read for a long time.

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

Re: the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action

Very likely they're violating the law by keeping them. Who is going to enforce the rules if no one is checking.

Another possibility is that 150k records are for the last three years - now that'd be even worse.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Having two company provided Max-buzz step counters I understand. Only compatible with their own app, which has a limited shelf life since the free account company provided didn't last more than a couple of months each time, rendering each completely useless because I can't set the clock for midnight. What a pain!

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

Re: We have politicians dumb enough to do this

We are already taxed on blank media because "Home Taping Is Killing Music" somehow.

Re: Tax failure to consume

The dead should be taxed because they are no longer providing funds for private health care.

Radio Frequency fingerprinting of aircraft ADS-B transmitters? Boffins reckon they've cracked it

Exactly! Fine tuning your detection based on a cherry-picked data doesn't mean you can do the same when you have hundreds of thousands of data points.

My eyebrows went into orbit when I saw the number of aircraft they were working with. This is a very unreliable paper.

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

I truly miss pre-9/11 and immigration bullshit days.

Many times I walked into Stansted arrivals by just waving my passport, not even opening it. Everything changed after 9/11 and then once more after Farage-brigade started to make more news noise.

Re: Tel Aviv

Flights in and out of Tel Aviv was never fun nor easy for me. Very lengthy questioning every single time. I must have been triggering something with the behaviour-monitoring-shit-that-doesn't-actually-work guys.

IBM Ticking Bomb Edition

20 odd years ago, once was in a tiny German airfield which had a single "terminal" building flying back to England with an IBM POS till which had a backup battery as big as a motorbike one which looked very peculiar in the X-ray machine. That caused me being questioned with armed guards around me for about 15 mins. Quite hairy for a hairy young tech guy. This was pre-9/11.

Saying that once I was arrested and questioned by the anti-terrorism squad in Turkey because my BBS had a copy of the Anarchist's Handbook. That was definitely not nice.

Apple seeks damages from recycling firm that didn't damage its devices: 100,000 iThings 'resold' rather than broken up as expected

You can't go to jail for violating a contract unless it is fraud - those idiots broke a law.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Re: HP

You rarely buy a MFP these days, you lease it and pay by the page printed. It's a scam in many ways and we don't print as much as we used to 10-15y ago. The most used part of our office MFP is the scanner bit, direct to PDF and email. Why not buy a decent scanner instead but then I'm not paying for the IT budget.

Re: HP

My laserjet 2, 3 and 4000 were all dumpster-diving survivors and lasted many thousands of prints. I gave away all of them one by one as newer replacements arrived and finally had to move to a wireless setup at home. The Brother works well but it doesn't feel as good and well-built like the HP stuff.

I must have printed over 30k-50k pages on my 4000, and it was as good as new when I freecycled it.

I admit 30k is nothing for an office printer but is rather decent for a modern home printer where it's not expected to print more than a couple of thousand pages in its lifetime.

There's gall – and then there's the security director who stole and resold 41 government-owned networking switches

Needs a new defence lawyer

The money was just resting in his account.

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

Here we come ; Enterprise Licenses

I fully expect Oracle to buy it and then put per-core enterprise licenses that forces your phone to a single-core chip for cost reasons and will blast scary-looking advertising stating "if you don't buy our licenses we will come and audit your phone" and then have a fit when you only have a gallery app.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: mythical Year Of Linux On the Desktop comes

Linux support by Microsoft is fantastic during the last two years.

SQL Server on a Docker container running in Linux? Why not? Just pay the licensing cost.

Teams? Runs 100%.

Windows 365 on a browser - why, it works as good as, and in some cases like collaboration, way better on Chromium browsers on Linux.

Visual Studio Code? Works brilliantly even on a Chromebook.

I still hate WIndows with a passion but MS is not the old MS.

Re: Quite an upgrade...

Only a year later I had purchased a 386Dx40 with 1MB RAM with no hard disk, 720kb floyy drive and a 1200 baud modem. Slowly I built it up to 4MB and first 10MB, then 20MB, then 50MB hard disks.

Unfortunately my talent level is nowhere near Linus.

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

"If Assange contracts COVID-19 and dies..."

Well, there's always an upside to a disaster.

Stop us if you've heard this before: Boeing's working on 737 Max software fixes for autopilot, stabilization bugs

Re: Flying less

They are already flying. They never stopped.

I monitor ADS-B traffic above me, and the amount of small private jets along with the cargo flights create most of the flying right now. Location? 25mins drive to Heathrow, outside M25 circle.

General passenger flights are significantly down (more than 90%), but private jets are thriving.

Microsoft's latest cloud innovation: Printing

Re: Wunderbar!

Late 1992, Uni 3090 mainframe. I remember spooling my entire month's worth of quota in one go, 30000 lines! The printer admin usually would put it in pidgeon holes. All I had was a note to go and see him.

Quite scared, I did so. He handled me a massive stack of paper and said "I hope it was worth it".

Errmm, it wasn't. I had managed to print the entire contents of alt.sex.stories....

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Try 39 Parkside, Cambridge CB1 1JG.

A lot congregate there.

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Re: Complete the migration to DAB+ before faffing with FM

Great, so my now-quite-old-but-works-perfectly 1st Gen Pure Evoke-1 will be obsolete?

Since the wide-band FM standard came out there has been only one generation of it - an FM radio from 60s work perfectly even now. Unless the radios are patchable and upgreadable, changing protocols every decade is going to piss off a lot of people.

You should read on FM radio when they switched to stereo and not to piss off anyone w/o a stereo unit, and how incompatible upgrade to FM radio failed.

If at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again: Boeing to repeat CST-100 test, Russia preps another ISS taxi

Re: "Not enough pressure in the LOX tank ullage to maintain stability"

I can't believe it even happened - you'd expect the engineers to object to this test, they should now how much each tank would weigh full and what the stress levels and limits are.

On the other hand, I have a suspicion the clever guys are working on the Falcon, and he's literally using boiler and water tank welders for this particular scam.

Oracle teases prospect of playing nicely with open-source Java in update to WebLogic application server

Re: What?

Right now we have two decades' worth of running software and libraries out there. Shifting to a brand new thing is getting easier but you still have to deal with this crap for a long time.

Regardless, right now for a brand new project using an Oracle JDK is an idiocy.

The shelves may be empty, but the disk is full: Not even Linux can resist the bork at times

Re: This can't be Linux

That is a somewhat recent(!) development, as in about a decade or a bit more... If this box is using LILO, not GRUB, then the Linux it is running is very likely to be over a decade old.

Re: This can't be Linux

... because it's no longer actively looked after by anyone more intelligent than a hamster?

Out with the old and in with the new as Java 14 arrives, bringing with it first Project Panama enhancements

OpenJDK or bust.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: That $11,000 valve story

Medical supplies are always expensive, especially in the US!

There's a very simple solution. Federal Gov lawyers take over the defence. The lawyering time becomes virtually infinite, and the cunts can only give up before the cost bankrupts them.

Patent trolls win because the other side cannot afford for the lawyering time, not because they are right.

It doesn't work like that.

Post Office burned £100m in UK taxpayer cash on Horizon IT scandal legal fees, MPs told

Re: Yet more shittiness

Most called the helpline and the helpline told them to settle as is and it should balance itself eventually, which never did.

Worse, helpline was being run by Fujitsu and had an incentive to "not to find any faults within 30 minutes" so that the call could be closed and Fujitsu didn't have to pay any monies to the PO as penalties.

It's a very shitty story from end to end, the only people who are completely blameless are the victims, the Post Masters.

Re: Disgusted of tonbridge wells

It is worse than you think. Post Office has the right to bring prosecutions themselves - these cases didn't go to the Police and CPS, in fact when the Post Masters tried to call the police, they were told that it wasn't in Police's remit and PO must do the investigation themselves!

Along with many Private Eye articles, this is required listening: BBC Radio 4 - File on 4 - Second Class Citizens: The Post Office IT Scandal https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f5hb

Note: listening to this programme WILL make your blood boil. Guaranteed.

This is simply criminal neglience. Someone must do time for this. A lot of people must do time for this.