Posts by Greybearded old scrote

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Age verification

Why are you blaming His Beigeness? It was that other clown show that passed the law.

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

Actually, no. Did you miss all the explanations about Libre vs Gratis?

There is nothing against selling Free Software, it's just difficult.

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

Victim Blaming

So they've noticed that the OS isn't as robust and secure as its maker claims, and looked for a fix. Who to blame?

Now if only the Suits could be persuaded to abandon the sunk cost fallacy, and begin the long march to freedom.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

Can't resist

This and that.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

I hate to break the news, but the times that the Sun never sets in the British empire are over for quite some time.

Actually not. Yet.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Even if you've paid.

Blame game

Given his comments about the warehouse manager, I'm wondering if he went on to work for Fujitsu...

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

Re: Igor?

Actually, it's Beaker from The Muppets. I should have picked a file with his name in it I guess.

Igor?

This is the one true patron saint of lab techs.

Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish

Re: Lyca

Afraid I can't advise you there. I haven't been anywhere that had WiFi but no 4G signal yet.

Re: I agree

Oh, and a helpline call gets:

1) Denial

2) A list of settings to change

3) A configuration text

None of which make any difference.

I agree

Yes, Vodafone is rubbish.

I had a Lebara account until last year, which is on Voda's network, and in the places I go most often there is no useful signal at all. I tried a Voda payg sim in case they were getting restricted bandwidth and that was no better. (In fairness my sister has a good service with Lebara, she doesn't live near me.)

Now I have Lyca, reselling EE, and I have very little trouble.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

There should always be a swear box for any use of the 'J' word.

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

Well I had to flip the switch.

Here in the UK we also have GDPR (this week), but we were opted in anyway. Almost as if they know that nobody is bothering to enforce it.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Hmm

This is all.

Re: Ouch!!!

If 'are you sure' would ever work it would have done so by now.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Re: My choice for a decade

Interestingly I've had a similar situation with the opposite conclusion.

I gave her LXQT and an hour or so's hand-holding over the similarities and few differences compared to the library computers she'd seen before. Chromium is Chrome with Google's name filed off, LibreOffice does everything she might need from MS Office. That sort of thing. And she was away, with far fewer "why has it done this" calls than I'd expect from That Other System.

More recently she was panicking over homework that supposedly needed MS Office. I sat with her while we opened LibreOffice Writer and, "Oh it's the same, I can do this!"

Now this is somebody who doesn't take to computers naturally, and tends towards anxiety in fact. It just took a little guidance.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

A closer look at the record shows that the Luddites weren't against technology. They were about who the tech did stuff for and who it did stuff to.

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

Economists have no concept of latency as far as I can see.

Compared to the USian alternative? Every time.

Apple's Clamshell iBook G3 at 25 – not just a pretty case

It had a better nickname

I loved the old toilet seat Mac.

While it wasn't top of the range it wasn't really as under powered as that, compared to what else we had at $WORK at the time. Fit more RAM and it was quite up to running OS X a few years on.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Sunshine

What's that?

Over here in Britain we're having a pretty disappointing summer, even by our standards.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Not been said yet

Not exactly. We've accumulated many checks and balances, jurisdiction rules, human rights laws and other ways of protecting us all from out of control authorities.

Re: Not been said yet

Thank you for that explanation. So much better than just shouting, "Because they say so!"

Re: Not been said yet

I'm asking how and why, not simply accepting an argument from authority. What part of that seems unreasonable to you?

Re: Not been said yet

Neither, I haven't made excuses for anyone, on any side of the argument.

But I do want to know why they got to export their laws. If the US can, who can't? That is what I meant by that Putin comparison.

Re: Not been said yet

Yes, we know what he did. What is the legal justification for the USA's actions?

If the biggest bully gets to ride roughshod over international law then we are all screwed. For example, it means that Putin was entirely within his rights to poison people here in the UK.

Who wants that?

Not been said yet

Whatever you think about the man, there is still one question that ought to trouble you.

He is not a US citizen and his acts were not committed in US territory. (I believe, correct me if I'm mistaken.) So what part of US jurisdiction applies here?

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Re: The only problem with Wayland is that ...

"Multimonitor setup in Xorg."

I plug the second monitor in, and whatever XRandR config front end I have handy deals with it. YMMV.

Disenchanted Windows user? Pop open a fresh can of Linux Lite

Re: Screwing the Pooch

I was referring to Ubuntu about the system upgrade thing. All the Linux press that I saw was saying to reinstall Ubuntu as far back as I can remember. I stayed with Debian, so I didn't see whether they were right.

Changing the distribution name and doing a full upgrade is a smaller deal than the install as I see it. (Unless like me you switch to testing half way through the cycle, but I knew what I was risking.)

I've used the occasional AppImage, so I'd agree there.

Including printers/scanners that have been abandoned by their creators.

Re: Screwing the Pooch

Can you explain the connection between proprietary drivers and needing a complete system reinstall?

'Sides, if you're keen of the "Free as in Freedom" aspect then the proprietary stuff naturally gets excluded.

Welcome to the paradox of choice.

OTOH would you prefer just one size that fits nobody very well?

Re: I Wish I Could

Importing Lightroom sidecar files is a thing, BTW.

Re: I Wish I Could

1. I can't comment from personal experience, but others can.

2. Darktable is very good for cataloguing and editing images. Expect some relearning of course. It is its own thing rather than an imitation of Lightroom. There is a Windows version, so you can try it out in advance of switching OS.

Good luck.

Screwing the Pooch

I've been using Debian, upstream for Ubuntu and therefore all their remixes, since whenever 2.0 was released. ('97-ish? Currently lacking the circular tuits to look it up.) I've only ever had to reinstall the whole OS for new hardware, upgrades Just Worked. What have they done to mess that up? Whatever it was, it goes all the way back to early Ubuntu and that should have been a warning flag.

Also, apt and snap|flatpack, take two packaging systems into the shower?! In which parallel universe does that make sense?

Hubble Space Telescope hasn't had any visitors for 15 years

Not just the ailing components

Some sod is putting a huge number of satellites in a higher orbit than Hubble. It's not just the ground based telescopes getting affected by light trails. We need it put above the musky crap.

Ransomware negotiator weighs in on the extortion payment debate with El Reg

Re: It is better to avoid a problem than have to fix it.

Thanks to the UK's "hostile environment" you do need some of that excessive employee data here, you're required to prove that they have the right to work in this country. Although those draconian regs predate Teresa May (spelling mistake intentional) coining the phrase by at least 10 years.

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

Two of them in the Six Million Dollar Man. The release shot is the HL10, the one cartwheeling down the landing strip is the M2F2. The real cause of the crash was his insistence on changing ships halfway.

BTW, that crash footage is the real one that inspired the book (Cyborg by Martin Caidin) which lead to the series.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Who's next

It would only be a Darwin award if he used a different body part.

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: "The... Maemo operating system failed to take off"

What I never understood about that was Intel and Nokia both had Linux OSes that used deb packaging and GTK+ widgets. Then Meego was going to be RPM and QT, because nothing delivers your product faster than re-engineering 2/3rds of it.

I had the first of the Maemo tablets, and really liked it. If the internal warfare hadn't prevented it also being a 'phone they could have been in the running.

I remember El Reg referring to the MS/Nokia thing as the loser's alliance.

NASA plasma propulsion project promises Mars in a flash

Re: "manned missions to Mars to be completed within a mere two months"

Or try here.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Unusual situation

Just for once the obligatory thing isn't XKCD.

Lightweight LXQt 2.0.0 updates to same toolkit as KDE Plasma 6

Let's tease

"all more or less stick to the classic Windows 95-style design"

I remember somebody complaining about that.

YouTube now sabotages ad-blocking apps that stream its vids

Re: "I have a hard time believing"

Well I tolerated the ads until they became absurdly frequent. Even if I had left the skip button alone the same crap would come up 3 minutes later.

Can't watch anything like that.

65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

Re: Believing deeply in himself

I dunno about that.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Nobody has pointed this out

People in advertising using an ad blocker is a fair definition of the word hypocrisy.

Eat your own dog food guys, because dog food it surely is.

Uncle Sam's had it up to here with 'unforgivable' SQL injection flaws

Re: Misleading paragraph

I also disagree with the claim that it's difficult to deploy. It was my default from the first db backed project I created. Damn tedious to retrofit when your predecessor (aka the nearly-technical director) didn't know/care about it.

If you're expected to accept arbitrary SQL from your users all bets are off of course.

Bobby tables

Obligatory. Also.