Posts by sammystag

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Re: Play a long youtube on your phone..

Or on an analogue watch with a second hand

Re: Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

Okay but is the aim even to measure productivity? Now this seems like a shitty measurement of input for a copper anyway for all the reasons other posters have highlighted. However, suppose that this wasn't a highly dubious metric, then if I want to know if someone is at least attempting to do the job she's paid for then measuring the extent of her input might make some kind of sense.

Assuming she's actually doing some work, whether she's productive is another matter and sacking her for being bad at her job will be far from straightforward - think retraining, performance improvement plans, etc. Not being productive may suggest inability but not necessarily dishonesty. Not actually even attempting do any work though and attempting to falsify that is something you might want to detect and sack her for, particularly a copper who is meant to at least pretend to be honest.

Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers

Incompatibility

Is this just about increasing the incompatibility with MariaDB which handles vector functions differently?

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Re: For the love of God

PFE was a no nonsense text editor - does it work with win 11?

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/~steveb/cpaap/pfe/

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu – and Snap

Re: Lies, can lies, and statistics set But #1

I'm lost here. Where has Windows gone in your 2024 breakdown? I would guess it remains more widely used than Chromebooks or Macbooks

> 2024: most people use phones, the remainder use Chromebooks, and the rich use Macbooks. Desktops Macs are a rounding error.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

Doesn't work with Firefox + NoScript so that put a quick end to my curiosity. Think that tells me enough about the thinking behind it

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Strange title

"Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong"

I was expecting to read some new revelation contradicting earlier explanations about what went wrong. However, the article lists one thing that would have been wrong if I thought it (that AI was the cause). It then confirms what I already thought from reading about it here, that it was DNS related.

"it's always DNS" is a half-step away from "this outage is caused by computers."

That's not my experience. I've dealt with with my fair share of outages over the years. One or two have probably been DNS related but the vast majority were not. Off the top of my head, database deadlocks, memory leaks, careless code causing full table scans or a lack of resilience to another service being down are all likely culprits.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: Email Swamping...

This email ping-ping reminds me of the unfortunate turning on of our system to take charitable donations by SMS in the early 2000s.

It had its debut at, I think, some dog show collecting money for guide dogs. The kindly user would send a text to our number entering a multiple choice quiz and we'd reply with thank you which cost maybe a pound to receive using mobile terminated (MT) billing.

What we didn't know was that, for certain operators, the SMS gateway would receive an acknowledgement that our thank you message was received. By the time that acknowledgement hit our code it just looked like an SMS. At this point we'd reply to the user that his or her entry was not understood (from the same expensive MT number), in response to which our gateway received another acknowledgement, and so on ..

I forget the exact details of the postmortem and clean up but several users had been charged hundreds of pounds.

NordVPN open sources its Linux GUI client under GPLv3

Finicky?

Thanks, want aware of this GUI.

Surprised by the closing paragraph. I've found NordVPN perfectly user friendly. Living abroad with two kids we all use it daily on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone, a firestick and an Android tv box. The only somewhat non-trivial case is on Linux Using the the cli - 'nordvpn connect uk', etc.

Setting it up on a dedicated router is hard work though, I used it to connect the tv which doesn't have a nord client but I just use the android box now.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

Re: [Shrug]

Correction: With regard to the slow down I meant Spectre and Meltdown and the BIOS fix was just for Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 / CVE-2017-5715). Maybe it's a price worth paying for security, I'm unconvinced given the performance hit.

This is the update which did it https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=5xcdh&oscode=wt64a&productcode=xps-15-9560-laptop

Re: [Shrug]

Dell actually killed the TPM on my laptop because apparently there was some security problem with it. A BIOS update killed it in such a way that even rolling back wouldn't fix it. Not only that but an earlier BIOS update had added a warning I had to acknowledge on every start up if the TPM was missing; the one they later killed. They didn't think to remove the warning about their own vandalism. Of course I didn't know what had caused the problem at the time and assumed something had broken.

I wonder how many other manufacturers killed TPMs for the sake of our security with the unfortunate side effect that we'd need to buy new hardware now if we want to run Win 11...

After a lot of stress and research, I was able to get rid of the warning by rolling back to a very old BIOS with the happy side effect that my laptop, which at some point had gone from being speedy to sluggish, suddenly ran much faster. I'd assumed the problems were caused by Win updates but I discovered that earlier BIOS updates had crippled the CPU to mitigate the Spectre and Heartbleed vulnerabilities. The TPM is still dead though.

All's well that ends well though I suppose. This sorry debacle led me to make the long overdue switch to Linux and now it's faster than ever and a far better dev environment.

I learned several lessons from this

- Don't use Windows

- Don't let some auto installer upgrade your BIOS unless you know what it's going to do

- Don't buy Dell

Okay I already new that last one from years in the industry. In my defence the XPS 15 appeared with it's tiny bezel when I needed a new laptop and the competition suddenly all looked horribly dated. Ill try to be less shallow in future.

Reference: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/xps-15-9560-firmware-1192-alert-tpm-is-not-detected/647f89d1f4ccf8a8de97e1bc?page=1

Re: Lil' Help for the switchover?

I don't have a guide but the installation will involve you running Mint from a USB drive in a trial mode first and clicking something to install it on your hard drive if you're happy with it.

If you don't mind spending a little money and would like another drive for your collection you could do what I did on two Win 10 laptops. For the sake of simplicity and being able to revert, my process was

1. Buy a new drive and put the old one in an external caddy to copy files from later. New drives are pretty cheap now.

2. Fit the new drive before installing.

3. Copy files off your old drive as and when needed. I think I had to run the file manager as admin (i.e. root) to access anything in Windows user directories owing to permissions, but it will prompt you to do this anyway.

On both occasions I've used this model https://amzn.eu/d/c7P7NNh of caddy which seems fine.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: Another point of anecdata

Yes, that's basically it. That said, there is a fair bit of tooling in place now that didn't used to be there. We no longer have local admin (except by request) and updates are pushed out to us but it seems to be mostly okay for now

Re: Another point of anecdata

Except that the Windows admins manage to make any Windows machine utterly unusable. I don't use it any more but never had much of a problem with Windows at home. Work machines are another matter though. By the time the admins have finished with then they take about ten minutes to boot up, have random error pop ups about some dll or other interrupting me, run incredibly slowly and virus scan every new file on creation so compiling code grinds to a halt (you might be able to get an exclusion applied to some directory if you're lucky but it will be a hell of a process to get it approved and done).

For the past eight or nine years every job I've had has come with a Mac and it's a hell of a lot easier, though they are catching up now in terms of control freakery.

How to host a Linux-powered local dev site in Windows

This is a strange article for the reg. There are thousands of blog postings, etc out there for anyone who needs help getting code running locally, regardless of OS, and most of them would give simpler advice than this - for example, use Docker rather than creating a pet environment manually

We're number 1! Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10

Like it or not, it is a verb (as well as a noun). The OED agrees. No amount of FUCKINGs will change that

verb [with object] 1 use borrowed capital for (an investment), expecting the profits made to be greater than the interest payable: without clear legal title to their assets, they own property that cannot be leveraged as collateral for loans you can leverage your stock portfolio and diversify into real estate. 2 use (something) to maximum advantage: the organization needs to leverage its key resources.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Re: How about no...

Did you try editing the icons that appear in the main drop down? I've managed to add location to all my recent Samsungs, Motorolas and One Pluses but it's not there out of the box

Panic averted: It was just a bug in Atop after all

Beat me to it. Is she replying to herself?

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

My house is an aggregate of bricks, mortar, tiles and other building materials. This doesn't make a brick a house.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

Was it meant to be or is it planned obsolescence? The hardware requirements seem rather fishy to me. Not sure it takes a hardware upgrade to move the start menu to the middle of the task bar.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

Re: Cruel

It certainly might help. This was the push I needed to install Mint on my old but still good laptop.

The OS is increasingly irrelevant. How many users need anything that isn't available on Windows, Linux and Mac?

Moving for me highlighted just how shit Windows is nowadays. I now have an OS that can cope with a USB-C monitor with integrated hub without having to plug it in three or four times before the keyboard and mouse work. Better still, it includes a scanner tool that can handle multiple pages and create a PDF without having to search for a free replacement for the crap in Windows. I can use Docker without a massive faff involving WSL. Brilliant! There's certainly no going back.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Hmmmm...

If it were 100% efficient surely you wouldn't expect a full battery in any case. Work has been done moving the vehicle.

Microsoft remains massively profitable, investors await AI payoff

Re: A New World

XP was also alright

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

Re: "this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work"

You've asserted twice that the "vast majority" or "vast numbers" of git users have "no idea" how it works. What are you basing that on? I'm a daily user of git, so are all my colleagues, we know how it works or we couldn't use it effectively. Who are the users that don't know how it works? I would expect most git users to be developers whose job it is to understand this stuff.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: Yees but ..

That's true and I've seen Java code that had to be restarted every day to avoid OutOfMemoryErrors. Almost always as a result of caching in my experience. I've not seen it create a security problem though, rather reliability problems

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Re: Everybody forgets Informix

Cheers, sounds like we weren't the only ones then

Re: Everybody forgets Informix

I used Informix on a project in the late 90s as a whippersnapper. It seemed fine until someone from Informix had to come out and fix the database for us armed with a magic floppy disk. It had run out of storage and it was apparently impossible for us to fix ourselves because any operation, including anything that might have freed up space, required it to log that (maybe it was the rollback logs, this was all new to me at the time) and it couldn't - there was no space to do so.

No doubt there was incompetence on our part involved, and probably someone here can explain why that's all bollocks and that we could have fixed it, but that's how it played out. We stuck to Oracle and Db2 after that.

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

As teenagers we installed Doom on a friend's family PC. The born again Christian mother was so horrified by the demons and inverted crucifixes that after uninstalling the game, the PC has to be taken to church to be prayed over by the congregation in some kind of exorcism

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

You'd have to mad to pay that kind of money for an 8GB machine which presumably cannot have more RAM added in what is almost 2024. I have a 16 GB Mac from work and it still ends up swapping.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Victim blaming

So a customer who fails to have adequate backups deserves to have criminals attacks its IT and destroy its data? You actually think that? All the hobbyists running little niche websites in their spare time to support some community or other deserve to have it all destroyed and lose all their email because they didn't have the money, time or expertise for off site backups? Yes hardware failures can happen but they are relatively rare and the storage, one would hope, would be resilient and replicated. People make a choice whether to accept that risk or not. Doesn't mean they deserve to have criminals destroy it on purpose.

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Re: Licence

Thanks, makes sense. That's unfortunate

Re: Licence

I'm not sure that's right. It might be, I'm not a lawyer. My understanding is that I could fork the Linux kernel and distribute my fork under a licence with additional terms as long as it complies with all the requirements of GPL2 . If that's true, wouldn't if follow that the main project could change licence for future releases requiring source of any derivative works to be published openly to everyone?

Licence

Perhaps a silly question but if the Linux community is so outraged by Red Hat's actions, can we expect a license change to the Linux kernel along with the multitude of other upstream components Red Hat uses forcing them to make their source code freely available if they want to make use of any future release? The options for Red Hat would then be release their source code or maintain their own fork of today's latest version of whatever they use.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Bit klunky, but...

Martin, it's all very complicated which is perhaps why you don't know what you are talking about here.

Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

Re: Well, you're working for the Evil Empire, you deserve it

I think that's a bit unfair tbh. Aren't the Empire grunts conscripts?

How important are tech and other contractors to UK? PM candidate promises tax review if elected

Another shitty policy unless she's going to also look into Yorkie bars

Sony Interactive Entertainment pulls PlayStation from Russia

Re: In a word....PR!

Do they make money from selling the consoles? Certainly back in the day Sega as Nintendo didn't. Would expect most of the profits come from selling games to existing owners with a bit from expensive controllers and so on

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: I second that request.

That's the stupidest shit I've ever read on a Reg forum, which is no mean feat

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

Re: "and in a few short years we were liberated."

> Try finding an Android that doesn't have Google Play, Gmail and a variety of other Google apps bundled in

Kindle Fire

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: Credit where it's due

To answer your answer in one single word - bollocks

While it has its risks, cloud providers have massive advantages of scalability, expertise, etc. An in-house team of sys admins is unlikely to be able to keep up in the same way, be available around the clock, not be ill, not go on holiday, not be a bit shit at their jobs, be up to date on every patch and new feature. I've had far less trouble on AWS than I used to frequently had with teams of incompetent DBAs, Unix admins stuck in the eighties, etc - all blaming the devs of course and putting up roadblocks to getting to the bottom of things

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

On the bright side

The bewildering number of choices for my next desktop or production distro just got smaller now that I can ignore CentOS, Fedora and RHEL

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

Re: Great

This article is quite interesting in explaining the problem https://insideevs.com/news/376037/tesla-mcu-emmc-memory-issue/

Tesla's response has been woeful - eventually owning up to the issue but only agreeing to fix it once the car is broken and if it's done less than 100k miles. https://electrek.co/2020/11/09/tesla-emmc-failure-touchscreen-offers-extended-warranty/

Re: Great

Because the screen blacks out and the audio fails. Camera is on the screen, chimes are audio, defoggers are operated via the touchscreen

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Re: Team America: World Police

The UK doesn't extradite its citizens if they face the death penalty. Having said that I seem to remember May and Javid bending the rules on that