* Posts by Greybearded old scrote

748 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2020

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Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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Decades of Sendmail CVEs.

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Re: I may have told this one before...

They chant the legal rituals so that everything is "fair," and you can't be sued.

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FAIL

I'll always maintain that config files must never be turing complete.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

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Mushroom

I see your medical devices...

... and raise you this.

The last I heard the Royal Navy's "boomer" submarines were running on XP based Windows for Warships. Still, at least the 100s of meters of sea water they hide under most of the time prevents any crackers' access attempts.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Re: Dream a Little Dream

It was. MS did it badly, whodathunkit? To be fair (no fun!) the PCs of the time were short on resources. I did use it for college work in 4MB of RAM though. Yep, megabytes.

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Re: Hit-and-Miss

It's not close, no. We can do better now, but that was a simple example of the concept of having versioning in the OS.

As I understand it, IPFS versions through content hashing in a similar way to VCS software.

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Re: Hit-and-Miss

"Let's talk about "version control" and LISP and Smalltalk."

Needs to be in the OS layer. VAX/VMS was versioned at the file system. Trouble was, with disks being so small we had to keep deleting the old versions.

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Re: Dream a Little Dream

And another thing. The whole Apps idea has it backwards. We want to concentrate on the data, and have the system load the appropriate tools for the data type you're looking at atm. Even if they are embedded in each other.

Opendoc had the sort of component architecture I'm thinking of. But the Apple/IBM/Novell partnership gave up on the dream of displacing MS.

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Dream a Little Dream

Mine goes like this:

A BEAM compatible (Erlang VM for those who don't know) interpreter running directly on the hardware. Well, it already usurps the OS process separation and switching after all. It had to, feeping creaturitis had already poked holes in the separation and slowed down the switching.

That already gives you Erlang, Elixir, Gleam and even Lua. And parallel processing if you use processes as intended.

But we wants a visual programming language like Squeak that compiles to BEAM code. I've worked with a db that had a tile based programming language. (No names, I mostly didn't think it was a good product. Our office database was named "Godot" for good reasons.) You tended to feel silly drawing a diagram of how to constuct a sentence, but overall it was more readable than pages of a text language.

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Re: Costs and Benefits......

I think you missed the part where Liam said not to replace the existing systems, but to play with new toys until they become good enough. Just as with the Linux kernel.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

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Re: 10ms

I have, but atm only using it to keep a backup. There's a lot of more urgent stuff to teach her.

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Yes, and

Joe Armstrong (of Erlang fame) gave an excellent talk on a similar theme.

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FAIL

Re: 10ms

I have a friend who frequently complains that the computer I gave her is slow. I point out that it's fast enough play HD videos. Therefore if her web mail (OK, let's name the guilty party, Yahoo) can't keep up with her typing it's them who are to blame.

But being right doesn't sort the problem, and the newer lappie that I'm about to give her will only be somewhat faster at running the manky web mail.

50 years ago, the all-rookie, final Skylab crew returned to Earth

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Documentary about all the Skylab missions

Searching For Skylab, America's Forgotten Triumph Hat tip to El Reg, which is where I learned of it.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

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Facepalm

Re: Remind me again

You've not heard of any Free (both Libre and Gratis) operating systems then?

You can find a whole bunch reviewed on a site not a million miles away.

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Linux

Re: Remind me again

You don't even need to pay, except in time to relearn. Mostly that is, there are some use cases that the free world doesn't cover yet.

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Yeah, right

Good luck with that.

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Re: Keeps one on Edge.

And go through the preferences switching off all the 'phone home' features I can find. On both.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

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Joke

Well

That was slower than I expected.

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Devil

Re: Root Cause

The stock market was created to fund expensive startups. (Originally vessels to sail east for tea and spice, or for the foul triangular trade.) Why do they still have power after that phase? Because they are rich enough that the law of, "Because I say so" applies.

As much as I wouldn't take it literally, there's a reason why Cory's website icon is a guillotine.

United Airlines’ patience with Boeing is maxed out after repeated safety issues

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Re: The 737 Used To Be A Good Aircraft ...

That turned out to be a reverse takeover. Boeing bought up the remains of McDonnell-Douglas, but then they put the MDD execs in charge. Who thought that was a good idea?

And yes, I remember when satyrists would sing, "I believe that pigs and even DC-10s can fly."

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Re: Manufacturing

I tend to say that he diagnosed the disease very well, but his prescription turned out to be as much use as leeches.

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WTF?

Have to say

That's a really big straw.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

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Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

Not stop, but reduce the probability of catching it and the severity if you do.

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Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

Either way bloody well keep it to yourself once you know you have it. First thing we should all have learned but haven't.

Second thing is, we should be drafting public health regs concerning ventilation of public and work spaces. Using CO2 levels as a proxy measure.

Both of those will reduce the misery and time lost to colds, flu and any future surprises as well.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

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Re: How many

We really need to push them to make kit that is durable, repairable and practical to upgrade. The result will be much more expensive, if only because the producers will get paid less often. But those of us currently buying cheaper not cutting edge tat can spend the same on older and still perfectly good devices second hand instead. (My current phone is a 3 year old from Backmarket, practice what I preach.)

The whole planned obsolescence, linear consumption model must go. As you said getting the manufacturers in line will be a non-trivial problem.

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FAIL

Need to make it easier

My area's red recycling bins are marked that they accept household electronics, but then add, "no screens or batteries.'" How useful is that?

More generally, the recycling rules vary from place to place and the general population are expected to know and understand them. (Think which type of plastics are taken where.) The companies should be accepting any sort of recyclable waste and doing the sorting there. If they can't handle some type themselves pass it on to another firm that can.

Then it's important to encourage use of recycled materials. It there is no market for the product then it doesn't matter how much we send to be recycled.

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

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Re: Nope

It's more destructive, so make it harder to do.

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FAIL

Nope

If training could help then it would have done by now.

"Are you sure" doesn't achieve anything, not one of us can say that we don't click the OK button out of muscle memory. Even if you didn't click automatically, you are sure right up until the Ohno second when it becomes clear that you shouldn't have been.

It needs to be a UI issue. No mail client to accept more than one address in 'To' and the CC field to be at least two clicks further away than BCC.

Unite the union claims Vodafone and Three merger is about 'corporate greed'

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Devil

And in other news...

Water still wet, etc.

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

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Devil

Breaking up doesn't mean destroying. Just makes the various divisions operate independently. Linking up the data from all those services is about as evil as everything MS do, to the point that they got jealous and imitated the practice in recent Windows versions.

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Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

About the only things Google ever created that succeeded are search and gmail. The rest they bought in.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

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I suspect

Was your colleague who grumbled about the graphics quality too young to have experienced a 486 with 1/100th the clock speed that we get today?

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

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Devil

Re: Missed a trend

More bullying than marketing, convicted monopoly abuser remember.

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FAIL

Missed a trend

Not so much missed as failed miserably, over and over.

MS had been trying to get the 'hand held' market since Windows CE (nicknamed wince) in 1996. Never made it. Destroyed Nokia along the way.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

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Re: How to teach people the wrong thing

Well if they learn that the government is thick, perhaps they will manage to vote more intelligently than their seniors.

I'm not going to be holding my breath, mind.

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Re: "facial age estimation"

They will keep thinking that adding silicon can make phrenology work this time.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

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Re: Mmmm.....

Far enough then. He's about as far left as a '70s tory.

Do we really need another non-open source available license?

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Re: If Only

To make the sound of hollow laughter.

Have you met people?

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Re: Isn't there an obvious flaw?

Not really, that's why we have Git et al.

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Facepalm

If Only

What the world needs is a license that allows you to do anything with this freely donated code except make it not be free any more.

Oh.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

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Re: Adverts on sites are so easy

Yes, and a few years ago it was found to bring in more income. The ad duopoly are taking 51% of the advertising fee after all.

Hey ElReg, fancy having a stab at doubling your profit?

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The mobile vesion of TVTropes is a shocker too. I don't see the consent form on my desktop somehow.

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About time too

Has the ICO just aquired a new boss or something? One who knows where their gonads are?

To me there is no excuse for any more than a session cookie if you are logged in.

Then let's remember that GDPR is about tracking, not just cookies. How do we detect and punish the passive tracking?

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

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That Melania moment

"I don't care."

I put up with their ads for a long time despite their attempts at tracking. (I have several methods of screwing that up all active at once.) I installed a specifically YT ad blocker when they got too greedy and were interrupting videos every 3-5 minutes.

Now they can Go Find A Warmer Place.

OpenAI staff threaten to leave if ousted CEO Altman is not reinstated

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Never threaten

JFDI

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

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Mushroom

Possibly expecting too much

I think we are comparing a new machine with the reliability expected from the established boosters. There is ample footage of past failures to show how hard it is to get there.

Come to that if your first flights are perfect your ship is over engineered and over weight. And you don't know where you can sensibly save weight.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

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Unhappy

Sadly

No amount of logic is likely to achieve very much.

Google bins integrity API that looked more than a bit like horrible DRM for websites

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Re: This has only two purposes...

I've seen claims that the adblocker blocker only works if you're logged in to Goggle. I've certainly never seen it. Is it worth trying a 'clean' browser session?

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

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Joke

Re: EMACS

Also

Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow

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