Posts by yetanotheraoc

Ubuntu 22.04.1: Slightly late, but worth the upgrade

Re: The new standard in bloatware sadly

Entirely agree your points. However, while it's easy to criticise OS makers for favoring their own developers over performance, their problem is real. In fact it seems you stuck with Ubuntu Desktop for so long for a similar reason, so you tacitly agree (at least somewhat) with their reasoning.

I think the lesson is that in the short run we can get away with taking the easy path, but that path is a trap and gets progressively harder. Eventually there is no choice but to turn back. There is no escape from work. Working hard early keeps things manageable later.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Microtransactions?

"at least in the US you can't take delivery of a new car without insurance"

In some places this is true for all new cars. Where I live in the USA, it's only true if the car is financed.

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

`"A discretionary optional service charge of 12.5% will be added to your bill." For one thing discretionary and optional are a tautology.`

No, discretionary modifies optional, so whether or not it is optional is at their discretion.

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

Minus one pedant point for letting kink slide.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Re: Quite contrary!

Thanks for helping out with our beta testing. (and code review, and alpha testing, and ...)

Re: "Just be like me"

I can't stop laughing...

Re: It’s your TVs fault, sir

"searching all English and Welsh visitors for stolen water"

People are usually 60% water, make sure you stop any that are above that.

Microsoft: Outlook desktop app crashing due to missing identity setting

Still using the desktop version means local account?

"We do not know why the EmailAddress key is not being set properly,"

Wrong question. Why is the EmailAddress key being set _at all_? If it has a value, which one presumes it did as of yesterday, just use it.

My guess is MS is looking for the domain account -- this is 2022 after all. Not finding one, MS dutifully inserts the null email address.

So that's like three logic errors in one bug. Good work.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Nope, never

"Every been faced with a seemingly insoluble networking problem, only to find the solution sitting in a conference room, eating cookies?"

A little charitable to be calling the loose cannon the _solution_.

Re: colour me sceptical

Follow the loose cannon around, and marvel at the various "sockets" which get tried for connectivity.

Could have been longer

Probably someone asked to borrow his computer for a minute and only then was the lack of networking noticed.

There can be only one... Microsoft Excel Champion

Re: Sports?

Maybe it's: eSports ~ /^e/

In the non-case-sensitive Windows world, Excel matches.

Leaves me wondering if eBike racing is also an eSport....

UK wants criminal migrants to scan their faces up to five times a day using a watch

Re: Technical question

"I presume the face scan is so that you don't just leave the watch at home."

+1

Or, if you are supposed to be somewhere else, let someone else wear it. False negatives are "no problem", since a visit from immigration will be (from one perspective) a nice opportunity to reinforce the desirability of compliance.

Re: What has immigration status got to do with criminal punishment?

"In no case, however, should the criminal's race, nationality or immigration status be allowed to be considered in the decision."

I don't think you quite grasp the us-vs-them wedge which is needed to pry people away from their morality.

FauxPilot: It's like GitHub Copilot but doesn't phone home to Microsoft

Re: Flying pigs build ice rink in hell

"Programmers will not be replaced by AIs with no understanding of the problem converting natural language into code."

s/will not/should not/

Software architects have been replaced by project managers with no domain knowledge and/or no understanding of business requirements. Since the software is unfit for purpose, maybe an "AI developer" would be a way out of the mess. No?

Do something, as long as it doesn't cost much.

DuckDuckGo says Hell, Hell, No to those Microsoft trackers after web revolt

They would say that

"Police use of [Seifan] was solely for the purpose of preventing and solving serious crimes, and subject to court warrants, and that no intentional actions were taken in contravention of the law," the Israeli Police said in a statement to Haaretz.

That's all right then.

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Getting away with it

"That's the kind of sneaky language places like using."

Maybe if they got sued then they would not like it as much.

Lawyers = bad, My lawyer = good

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: The guiding principle

True Booleans (ha!) are useful. True/false/undefined, while not "Boolean", are also useful. It seems your rage is spent on people not using a correct label? We need a new term for true/false/undefined. I nominate Booolean.

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

U-turn?

Seems more like a swerve to avoid a squirrel in the road. From the beginning GitLab must have planned an undelete function, this sounds like they are modifying the "deleted" archive to make it visible.

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Who is your customer?

Upvoted for "unoccupied".

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

fork it

I predict net negative savings when $HIGHLY_USEFUL_PROJECT at 364 days of inactivity gets cloned and relinked by _every_ project that links to it.

Financial exchange's efforts to replace core systems with blockchain founder – again

Re: Blockchain?

When they said they needed a fresh set of eyes, they were hoping for someone a little less skeptical.

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Reproducibility?

If a black box can't be reproduced exactly, and yet a patent is granted, then in litigation how will the defendant prove that they did _not_ infringe the patent? -- No doubt the lawyers already thought of that, but they charge by the hour.

NASA to send prototype robot surgeon into space

Re: "The near-term mission for MIRA, however, isn't learning to perform surgery automatically"

"a surgeon needs a well developed ability to understand" ... and ... "we don't understand how understanding actually works"

Maybe we need an equivalent of the Turing Test, this time for understanding.

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Lucky streak

I've heard this before: the odds of getting hit by space junk are higher than the odds of winning the lottery (jackpot, one presumes). Yet various jackpots have been won multiple times per year, and space junk has hit individuals, by my count, zero times. (I have only seen reports of near misses, and not many of those.) So what exactly are the odds of getting hit by space junk?

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Re: Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation

Supersingular - what a nice buzzword. It's not just singular, it's _super_ singular. It's more singular than the number one. With overtones of saving the planet.

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

Re: Rant

"the link to the paper just takes me to the standard paywall"

That about sums it up.

Google asks workers for ideas on being 'more focused and efficient' in internal survey

the trick

https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-10-26

Bot army risk as 3,000+ apps found spilling Twitter API keys

Re: But who's at risk here?

You missed the phishing risk when Joe Public trusts a compromised account.

Re: But who uses Twitter ?

A "group of loons" is called an asylum of loons.

WhatsApp boss says no to AI filters policing encrypted chat

Re: Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse

"terrorists, drug dealers, CSAM, and organized crime, and whoever else comes along."

They call it the Four Horsemen to disguise their intentions in re the fifth horseman.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

pedant alert

Since when is CVs the plural of CV?

Re: So?

"able to write coherent sentences without emojis"

Ageist version: Qualified applicants will be able to write coherent sentences using only emojis.

Data brokers amass profiles of pregnant women – and, of course, it's all up for sale

passively pregnant

One who is not buying the shit in the adverts.

Re: I used to be nice to christians, not any more

More Catholic than the Pope!

FTFY

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Why would it be so good to not have files?

"If files did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them."

From the article: "To get to the heart of this, let's step back for a long moment and ask, /what is the primary function of a computer file/?" And, the article immediately gets into *storage*, as if file and storage are inextricably linked. Not so. The primary function of a computer file is a collection of bits, with a beginning, an end, and a known sequence (which can be represented by a hash or signature). That's it. The storage angle from the article is a rather Unix-y view of a file as a collection of bits *on-disk*. Once we realize that the Optane memory also has files, it's a short step to seeing a need to sometimes persist a file to a disk. Having persisted to disk, then we would sometimes need to load from disk, and now we can see that Optane is indeed revolutionary, but in a different sense: "to everything there is a season".

I took a look at the comments to the linked Phantom OS article. All of them could legitimately be copy/pasted here.

Need a flower icon

Tomb of the unknown commenter.

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Re: Hot cloud

"... panicking they did a mistake and cut off all the DCs in the region?"

Cooler heads did not prevail.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Fitness Center Lifetime Memberships

About 40 years ago, in the part of the USA where I then lived, there existed a fashionable business model:

* open a new non-chain fitness center

* at grand opening have a limited-time (hurry!) lifetime (sic) membership for "only" about 4 or 5x the monthly membership

* sometime within the first year of operations the fitness center would declare bankruptcy

* shortly thereafter the fitness center would resume operations "under new ownership"

* notably the 2nd owners did not honor the original lifetime memberships, nor did they offer any such lifetime plan for their new members

Clearly the lifetime memberships and indeed the entire first "ownership" were just a scam to pay off the fixed cost of the equipment. The second "ownership" bought the almost-new equipment for pennies on the dollar and only had to pay operating costs. Needless to say that business model made me deeply suspicious of anything advertised as _lifetime_.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

ambiguous

"one of the secretaries at the company pulled her aside and asked if there was any way her existing typewriter could be connected to the computer"

Silly me, I read this as -- use the Selectric as a keyboard! Using it as a printer makes just as much (sic) sense. Maybe the ideal setup would be a sandwich -- two Selectrics with a computer in between.

Re: Not the same sort of crime

No one ever got fired for ... Oh, wait.

Garuda Linux 'Talon': Arch, but different. Dare we say it? Better

Rolling release... who cares?

Techies know whether it matters to them or not. But a casual user ditching Windows would very likely be doing it to escape the heinous updates. A rolling release distro would have them asking why they bothered.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Re: get-aduser | set-aduser

"There was then the 2 day password retention rule that prevented anyone changing their password for a couple of days afterwards."

So for two days everyone's password was the same (except for those few who had recently changed their password). Then for another two days everyone's password could be easily phished. How many days would it have taken to update the password retention rule?

Re: get-aduser | set-aduser

Agree, noun_verb() for the win. The MS style guide specifically recommends verb_noun().

Microsoft resorts to Registry hack to keep Outlook from using Windows 11 search

Re: Called off the search due to bad weather

"the free version search has never worked once for me"

Sounds like the free version just delegates to MS Search in the background.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

Re: It's not a snippet / search engine

"it's not copying people's code - it is learning how to code from examples"

The "it's copying" camp simply have a lower opinion of Machine "Learning" (ML) and Artificial "Intelligence" (AI) than you do. To whit: it *is* copying, and the heuristic just determines based on context which piece of code from its massive database is the most likely to fit the context. The intelligence is in the heuristic, but the copying resides in the database. That's not at all the way humans learn, calling it learning and intelligence just dodges the issue.

Re: Yuk-k-k-k-k-k!!!!

It's ridiculous for a human to do that. For a piece of software, it's not necessarily ridiculous. Compare the effort of mining the attribution (i.e. mentioning the source as well as mentioning the credits from the source) to the effort of mining the code itself. It seems quite do-able to me, but they didn't even try.

Union tells BT: Commit to pay rise talks next week or else

Re: Proposal for a New Law

"if they had all teeth, did they have matching watch"

Can't have a CEO with amalgam fillings and a gold watch!

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Re: Direct your ire...

They are evil, just be thankful they are also incompetent.

Re: Direct your ire...

"They knew he was unfit for public office."

They knew he could throw a good party.