Posts by Greybearded old scrote

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Oh Yes

For 25 years I've been fighting the deficiencies and half implemented features of That Other One. And muttering, "I kan haz Postgres?" All the time.

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: Mach Loop - Snowdonia, North Wales

I have fun tooling round there using a BAe Hawk in the Flightgear simulator. Of course I'm not betting my life on getting it right.

Re: Interesting times for Solomon

Not so much. We almost all have a level of perceived risk below which 'peaceful' becomes 'humdrum.' There's even a physiological correlate, monoamine oxidase if I recall. We have a phrase for wanting no risk at all, clinical anxiety.

You doubt that? Thrillers and horror stories have huge audiences. Fairground rides balance a high degree of safety against feeling like anything but. News outlets that favour good news over, "if it bleeds it leads" quickly go broke.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Yes, and

Oldie but goodie.

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Re: vote reform

25 down voters who can't recognise sacasm when they see it.

The network password was a key plot point in one of the most famous movies of all time

Obligatory

Of course.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Re: Dark Mode anyone?

Your screen has a brightness control.

Re: No biggie

And another thing.

I still don't have to wait for a ton of JS which only then loads the actual text. Or whitelist several different cdns in noscript or else get nothing. It loads quickly even in my horribly over subscribed mobile cell.

Well done for doing the sensible thing there.

No biggie

OK, I guess that's not the reaction you wanted either. What I mean is that it's not exactly the end of the world is it?

I've long used "/Week" to avoid having articles I've already seen above the fold, and get straight to the new stuff. I'm pleased that you redirect that rather than 404-ing.

The mobile version is a bit in yer face on a 10 inch tablet, at least with Fennec. Who knows though? Perhaps I'll need the large text soon.

It's nice that the shouty people have nothing more urgent to get upset about. Not telling them to get a sense of proportion though.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

Well our neighbours had a really good go at fixing it, while they were making all the other measures sensible. Didn't catch on sadly, not even when arguing would have the point explained by Mme Guillotine.

Let's not try again though.

Edit: Damn, I should have read further before posting. And now I can't see the delete button.

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Bewilderment

I meant enlightenment. It's not easy to theme that one, the themes are opaque binaries. Dog only knows what you use for those.

These days I'm using LXQT which is light and fast but not as pretty. Creating my own sepia theme only involved putting the same rgb values (one time bgr) in about 6 different places. That's the disadvantage of our component based setup.

Re: Bewilderment

Well I always liked how it looked. Up until it went flat like everyone else.

Google Chrome lacks protection against one of the most basic and common ways to track users online

Useful illustration

Panopticlick

It usually tells me that I have strong protection. Then that my browser fingerprint is unique in the last 30 days of traffic.

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak

Har, Har!

I'm highly amused that, after taking everybody else's IP for training data, they are upset at others studying theirs.

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Re: Come one, this one is easy

Or until not having it suits their "not racist at all" policies. See Windrush.

Re: What's all the fuss?

What we have here is a Poe's Law failure I think.

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: television was the origin of enshittification

Or even worse, several minutes of being accused of video piracy. On a box set that I'd paid full price for. Haven't seen it on anything recent, but the otherwise excellent Jeeves and Wooster is hard to tolerate because of it. I even have to mute it, it's so incredibly loud.

UK digital ID brief quietly moves to new minister after resignation

Only because the centre has been redefined since my youth. The Mad Cow (yes, that one) once said that Tony Blair was her greatest acheivement.

Because we still have a comfortably (for them) right wing government.

Google embraces third party app stores and payments to put Epic Games case behind it

Not convinced

So how does this square with Google's recent plans to make developer registration compulsory?

Re: As usual

Here you are.

Lovable-hosted app littered with basic flaws exposed 18K users, researcher claims

A bad workman blames his tools

But then, a good workman buys from Snap-on not Wilko.

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

Re: I'm reading a disaster

I what way is BSD commercial? True, not having a copyleft license leaves the potential to be moved to a proprietary license. But the free licensed code will still be around.

Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands Police chief quits over AI hallucination

Re: Idiocy

It would require a modicum of understanding. Non -techies are going to believe what the salesthings tell them, and what else would you expect? I know for sure that I don't have enough relevant knowledge to perform as a copper.

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Unintentional truth.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: Bollocks. Utter bollocks

What money? Idiots are spending orders of magnitude more than they could ever make.

Re: Bollocks. Utter bollocks

I'm not kind enough to sack him. Demote him to constable and put him on the beat. "Pour encourager les autres."

Apparently the Home Secretary doesn't have the power to sack a chief c*ntstable, for quite sensible reasons. There must be somebody "watching the watchmen" though.

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Half way already

It's a much smaller job than that Airbus comparison suggests, because there is all that highly capable FLOSS to pick up. Working on integration and fit and finish will go a long way.

The bad news is liberating all the data that the incumbents are holding hostage is tricksy. Especially since we all banned reverse engineering, under threat of US sanctions if we didn't. But hey, they broke their side of that deal didn't they?

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Plus ca change

I remember one journalist predicting that the new Pentium processor would cause a return to writing efficient code, because programs that fitted into the 32kb cpu cache (a new feature on desktops then) would be blazingly fast compared to those that didn't.

Before that Windows 3.0 was going to save masses of disc space. After all, applications would no longer have to ship with their own set of print drivers.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: Yeah, right

German comedy is no laughing matter.

Interesting thought

D. Richard Hipp manages to run a viable business by getting sponsored to work on public domain SQLite. Just as well, since you'll be hard put to find a computer that does anything useful without it these days. Most won't even boot up.

I wonder how he can where others can't?

Re: Yeah, right

Aw maan! Pass the ear-vermicide.

Yeah, right

Please remember when to use the joke icon.

Two paths to Enlightenment: AV Linux 25 and MX Moksha step forward

Why the forks?

I've long used original Enlightenment on Debian. What are the advantages of the two forks?

Not criticising, just wondering.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

For very small values of "everyone."

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Avoid plain biometrics

Don't even need a finger, when you leave your password on every damn thing you touch.

This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet

This

This is why Brendan Eich should have been drummed out of our community many years before his political views got him cancelled.

Trusting code from any rando you encounter was the dumbest idea.

Re: my local rag causes NoScript's list of domains ... to fall off the bottom of the screen

If you've configured noscript to temporarily allow scripts from the same domain. Then very likely examined the list for whatever cdn(s) they are using. By the 2nd or third attempt I decide that their dribblings aren't that important to me after all.

It's still less hassle than letting everything run, but I can't recommend it to my non-techie friends.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

As has been pointed out elsewhere

Nobody had to be forced to use the early spreadsheets.

Re: Linux for Luvvies

Oh, do be serious. Do you think somebody whose expertise is in drama should have a tinkerer's OS inflicted on them?

OTOH, I'd be all up for guiding them through a switch to one of the "beginner's" distributions. Done it before, with a decent outcome. Mint is my preferred one. But "other easy systems are available" as they say.

Re: Self-inflicted problem

Mate, a latex wife has much better functions.

The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation

WTAF?!?!?!

No telemetry is not, "an essential part of life cycle management." It's an abusive practice that needs to be stamped out, hard.

One more good reason to use the FLOSS. You know that it's good hygiene.

Re: Open letter to Microsoft

Given how the Luddites were concerned with justice in how technology should be used, I would call that a compliment.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Thanks, Bezos!

"Hopefully, now all the people using AWS as an infrastructure rethinks their choice."

Such optimism. You can't possibly have been paying attention.

British govt agents demand action after UK mega-cyberattacks surge 50%

Anything of substance?

So what you've reported can be summed up as, "Oy you, do something!"

Did the report include any real advice, or have you declined to repeat that part?

Exchange Online will start archiving your oldest emails before your inbox bursts

Re: Timely

Sounds like the last thing he needs to me. Messages will be magicked away from where he expects them to some other location.

Sounds like you've screwed up his workflow to me.

See above.

Re: Stupid cognitive model

I don't care. Exposing the implementation detail like that is poor design.

Do you still fiddle with a "mixture" lever on your car? I suspect not.

Stupid cognitive model

So you have no space in Inbox, but ample in Archive? How about you just take the pointless limit off the Inbox?

Storage is cheap, data is precious. I delete very little other than one-time codes.

So what if most of it is never needed again? Computers are very good at searching, so long as they aren't coded by complete idio...

Oh

India’s IT minister moves to Zoho’s spreadsheet and word processor, urges 1.4 billion people to do likewise

Re: If it hurts Microsoft, it must be a good thing

Nadella era? I have a long memory, they've always been like that.