* Posts by Drishmung

14 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Dec 2020

That cyber-heist of 2.9B personal records? There's a class-action lawsuit looming for that

Drishmung

GDPR?

If there are ANY EU citizens involved, this surely merits a company wrecking fine.

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Drishmung

El Reg has misquoted. It's microseconds, not milliseconds. (According to the linked PDF anyway).

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Drishmung

Alas, since it has got noticeably slower every release for the past few months (with this touted release being an exception), I very much fear and expect that it can get slower.

Drishmung
Flame

Re: Well, every little bit helps

I am on mute because my fellow inmates are a noisy bunch. I need to speak. I press the [Unmute] button. Which does not change its icon. A second or two goes by. Did the click actually happen, or did Teams silently eat it? Click it again.Time passes. I am on mute. I wasn't, briefly, but now I am on mute. Or maybe I'm not, it depends on when the queued up clicks of frustration finally arrive, and are processed, in due time. In the computer's good time.

Apparently I am in the hands of the Allied Mastercomputer. Except I do have a mouth, and I very much want to scream. But I am on mute. So no-one will hear me (except my noisy fellow inmates). Or maybe not.

When I click the button, show that I have clicked the button. If, for whatever reason, that action hasn't quite happened yet, then show some intermediate status until the action HAS completed. It's elementary human interface design...oh wait, stupid me. I assumed you knew about such things. Or cared.

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Drishmung

Attracting unwanted attention

There has already been much speculation that it is Lufthansa's apparent predilection for losing temporarily misplacing customers' baggage and poor handling of this that has prompted the ban. Since the reasons cited for the ban so far are obviously specious, any attempts to find some strict interpretation of the rules which does justify a ban are not going to work in their favour.

The sane, and reputational damage limiting response, is to reverse the ban ASAP, because otherwise this is going to blow up all over the Internet (I mean, more so even than it has already). Otherwise, very, very soon we'll be seeing BBC segments looking at how often Lufthansa mislays baggage, and RyanAir running ads saying that at least they aren't as bad as Lufthansa :)

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Drishmung

Re: Wow

This sounds like a job for Gil Hamilton

Source: IBM disguised Watson Health layoffs as a 'redeployment initiative'

Drishmung

IBM = I've Been Moved

That appears to be a fundamental part of IBM's DNA. I recall being told that way back when IBM was the behemoth vs the BUNCH (Burroughs, Unisys, NCR, CDC, Honeywell), and no-one was ever fired or made redundant, that when IBM wanted to get rid of someone they would post them around the country ("I've Been Moved") until they got the hint and resigned of their own accord.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Drishmung

Cross-compilers.

For example, the Burroughs Large System (B6700 etc, which has evolved to Clearpath), was always written in Algol. There was never an assembler for it. A compiler which emitted B6700 code was implemented on a B5000 (different architecture, different instructions), and the output of that compiler was used to boot the B6700. And of course, the compiler was written in Algol, so once the B6700 was running, subsequent compilation could be done on the new system.

Looking at the source code for the MCP, and the patch history of it, there were in fact some lines which dated from the very first iteration.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Drishmung

Re: "COBOL-2002, which introduced object oriented programming"

Aka ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Drishmung

Re: Ad blockers are as immoral as tracking

If El Reg, or any site, wants to show me ads, just put them up as static content on the page. I'll see them. What my ad blocker does is stop the trackers and the things that could be trackers, including all the dodgy JavaScript.

By analogy with a newspaper, there is space on the page that the newspaper sells to advertisers.

Instead, too many sites sell through a broker, with the whole real-time bidding thing. I don't consent to my data being tracked in that way. So, that particular method of selling advertising doesn't work. It doesn't mean you can't show me ads, it's just that you have to do it by serving the content yourself

Drishmung

Re: Just a thought...

No, but I think I'll go and buy myself a new Feckle Freezer.

(From Pohl's The Tunnel Under The World. Also about advertising, and compared to which the world of The Space Merchants is positively Utopian).

Drishmung

Re: Just a thought...

Go read The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth some time. Written in 1952. Pohl actually joined an ad agency as research for the novel. As the Wikipedia article says:

"... businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them."

To say that Pohl's opinion of Advertising was low severely understates the case.

"You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it."

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Drishmung

Assnet

The Anti-social Network. Add an extra "s" for shitty (and euphony). Ass-net. Or Antisocial, Rapacious, Stupifyingly Evil Network, if you want a more detailed description.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Drishmung

Greybeard/early adopter

I was a very early adopter of gmail. I have just my surname as my email address. (surname@gmail.com). People register for gmail as first_name.surname, and when they make an error and type "," instead of "." (I'm guessing) when signing up for other services, it is I who gets the details of their latest car purchase, travel itinerary, etc..

I have a form letter that I send, but of course, so many are noreply@clueless.example.com so I have no way to inform them. If I am very lucky, I might be able to unsubscribe. On even rarer occasions I have managed to sleuth out the real email address and contact my presumably distant relative.