Posts by CommonBloke

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

After IoT, the AIoT

Because making EVERY. FRIGGING. THING. Internet connected was such a great concept that led to incredible advances in our way of life, clearly repeating that same mistake, i mean progress, will be great for all involved.

Meta winds down NFTs but will continue token efforts

Re: We're winding down NFTs for now...

> What they're really saying is that they jumped on the latest hype again at the time, and now it's quickly gone wildly out of fashion they want to find new big hypes to profit from because in reality they are all out of good ideas.

And, unlike pretty much every other shiny new thing tm., the overwhelming majority of people saw right through NFT's "problem solving" bullshit. Any company that pushed forward on those dumb tokens after Feb 2021 was proving without a shadow of a doubt that they're led by incompetent morons who are easily dazzled by buzzwords.

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

Just because it's cheap

Doesn't mean you should be using and rolling over all of the available resource

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

Re: "How do we make the outside safe"

Except for all those corners that hunt your feet's little finger and random cabinet doors that mysteriously appear right above your head when you least expect it

Hell no

As someone who is for the govt to do a better job of regulating stuff, I'm 100% against the article's idea.

No, we do NOT need govts babysitting the internet. The only way to police the internet as suggested here would be to inspect every data packet traveling through given routes. Oh, that does sound rather invasive to privacy, doesn't it? It's because it is. And why the hell would we trust govts with doing that without abusing the data they get a look at, if we completely despise when companies use it to serve us advertising? The information they'll have access to is extremely valuable, you can bet bad actors will do their best to both work within such surveillances agencies so they can sell it, or hackers doing everything to hack it.

And that's ignoring the jurisdiction problems already pointed by other comments. Oh, look, it's that russian hacker group at it again! Good luck jailing them from another country.

GPU slowdown earns Discord weird bug of the week

Electron's the bug

It's the same thing that makes Visual Studio and Epic Games Store worse than they should be. I remember a few months back that, for whatever reason, Electron apps had problems with anti-aliasing and several fonts would look blurry for no apparent reason. If memory serves, it was a problem with hardware acceleration.

Electron needs to die ASAP

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Low specs have stagnated for over a decade

What annoys me the most is that low-mid specs computers have stagnated in the last 13 or so years. The only thing new is the processor, but RAM and storage offered are more or less the same, for the same price: Some weak Celeron or low end i3, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD or 500GB HDD.

The era of cloud colonialism has begun

Control the gov't data

And you can more easily convince lawmakers to go easy on your totally legal and not at all anti-competitive antics

Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

Why don't they just go to the local authorities to complain?

If they've been the victims of a scam, they should contact the police or something

---> see icon pic if the sarcasm's not obvious

Open source community split over offer of 'corporate' welfare for critical dev tools

Re: KDE and Gnome

Now they're fine. They weren't so much some years ago, back on their respective 3.x releases. Also makes me think of GTK and how each major version seems completely incompatible with the previous one without being much better. They're the microsoft c++ redistributable packages of Linux.

Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands

How to make twitter profitable

Limit the number of tweets, retweets and likes per day people can post, sell those on lootboxes. Maybe you'll gain another 3 tweets, maybe you'll get a golden tweet with greater reach! Or you can get super lucky and win a golden hexagon profile pic to show how awesome you are!

I jest, but let's be honest, that would rake in more money than we'd like to admit. Just look at mobile games.

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

Re: "a 0.1 percent stake"

I imagine one of zuck's robot clones will come up to that company and say "Your <company> stake does not amount to USD 1 billion. Master has bought your shares back."

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

Reports suggest the mobilization order will disproportionately affect ethnic minorities in Russia

Who'd have thought that a psychopath dictator would take this opportunity to "cleanse" "his" country of "undesirables"? I miss the times when this kind of stuff was pure scifi of absurdly oppressive regimes, like the Imperium of Man.

Microsoft highlights 'productivity paranoia' in remote work research

What gets in the way

Microsoft is "dialing up new ways to help leaders drive clarity and alignment, eliminate time-wasting busywork, and determine what is getting in the way of your people making a real impact."

Hey, I can tell you the answer to that bolded part myself, free of charge: it's the higher ups. It's always the higher ups

NIST and uni friends to design open source research chips, Google to bankroll the fabs

Re: Funny I thought fabs fabbing college designs had been a thing since the early 80's

Or somehow fumbling the whole thing before even releasing anything and having no idea what went wrong

Student crashes Cloudflare beta party, redirects email, bags a bug bounty

Pretty low reward

I do think he deserved a good 15k instead of a paltry 3k, for pretty much catching a very dangerous spying loophole and phishing treasure trove

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

They don't even know how to support their products

The mere fact that Googlebet loves to spend money turning their good ideas into bad products (Stadia, the infinite messaging apps, Google Pay), or just flat out force bad products onto customers, then promptly abandoning said projects because they're too stupid to listen to feedback and fix problems, is enough to make a lot of people not care about their work. "This 10 year project is going to be canned within 6 months of launch"

That upper management STILL doesn't have the slightest idea that that might be a problem is just unbelievable

Re: Here be brainstorming...

You're right! Quick, fire 12 engineers and hire another Chief Whatever Officer! That's clearly what the company needs!

Windows Start Menu not starting? You're not alone

Re: "its rich tradition of fixing one thing and breaking another"

Microsoft is actively breaking what they already had fully working. I guess they're counting on the profits they might get from telemetry + ads being worth the constant breaking of stuff that has been working as expected for 5+ years

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

You don't aim for top performance if you want to sell in bulk

The reason why intel celeron, despite being one of the worst processor lines, sells so damn well is because it's cheap and produced in bulk. It's also why the vast majority of laptops come with it and whatever shit integrated graphics intel threw together at the last second.

Now, graphics cards like these have their use both for gaming and more serious work, such as render farms, 3D modellers and various CAD users. For the serious work, intel is possibly in a better position than nvidia to make bulk sales of "work ready" stations, something I don't know if AMD already does and, if they do, how profitable it ends up being.

Telegram adds paid tier as it cracks 700 million users

Re: I'm curious

You'd be amazed at the things you can find in some channels

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

Eh

I don't like the Atom editor. Maybe I'm unlucky, but every version of it that I used was a terrible resource hog (thanks, electron) and had loads of visual problems, like fonts being blurry for no damn reason (other than being a known react bug)

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

Re: Sowing Division

Used to be European, but I guess now it's just Selfpean

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: Software Junk

It should probably work well with SliTaz (the .iso is around 50MB), though last I checked, the built-in browser fails to render "advanced" sites. I think it's not HTML5 compatible

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: Screen size will always be the limiting factor

Don't forget that on-screen keyboards always take roughly half the screen whenever you have to type anything.

For coding using a phone, you have the extra problem of having to either deal with autocorrect "correcting" what it shouldn't, such as variable and function names, or with the screen thinking you pressed N instead of M, K instead of L and so on...

That won't fix the web

Simply because, as a few others stated, we're relying on POS sites developed with a "SHINY NEW JAVASCRIPT TECH" mentality.

Chrome on Windows/Linux/Android is an absurd resource hog, even frigging Edge isn't as resource hungry!

Webkit no longer being enforced on iOS won't fix that problem. Nor will it fix the boatload of sites loading >5MB of crapscripts to "enhance" the user experience

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Re: Russian politics aside

Good luck convincing companies to stop outsourcing production to China.

Here's the TLDR

Attempting to choke Russia on the tech sector will just boost China's own and might (big if there) accelerate Russia's tech independence from the west.

The rest of the comment is how imposing all those sanctions against China years ago only sped up their own tech independence, mainly due to a loophole with their ARM company. The next step is making RISC-V stuff, which is 100% free from outside interference.

Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses

Re: In all seriousness, people still use WhatsAPP?

It is the de facto messaging app in a number of countries, including Brazil and India, for instance.

Telcos fear Big Tech will bleed them until they can’t afford network builds

Here's an idea to increase profit margins

Fire 90% of all directors and C executives, cut down their salaries and remove all those bonuses from "making the company profitable".

Hey, you'll only have 100 idiots complaining instead of 80k for the same amount of money saved! And, let's be honest, they're much easier to replace than the actually skilled workers.

Infusion of $3.5bn not enough to revive Terra's 'stablecoin'

The only downside

To this dumpster fire is that it only temporarily plummeted the other coins' prices. Would've been really interesting if the other "stable" coins also had to face their actual real value.

Trying and failing to update Visual Studio? You aren't alone

How to recover after uninstalling

Why, you just install from the offline backup installer you have!

...

That's no longer a thing? The installer is just a 500kb package that downloads the whole actual program? Oh... Well, good luck.

iOS, Android stores host more than 1.5 million 'abandoned' apps

What about shovelware?

What's the useful/useless ratio of apps in those stores? By useless, I mean stuff that works as little more than a vehicle for advertising and/or that barely works as claimed

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

"Defending" more than its borders

Is what the USA has been doing for almost a full century now. It cares more about its own commercial interests, either by direct use of force (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq), or violence through CIA proxies (Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan back in the 80s).

It's not like anyone outside the USA proper believes the "we're bringing democracy!" mantra, given how much the govt coddles friendly tyrants, such as the Saudi monarchs.

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

Good luck

Selling those things to some greater fool. Anyone paying for that haul deserves to be separated from their money.

Beijing approves first new video games in nine months

Sorry, all those c-execs can't hear you over the sound of all that sweet, sweet Chinese money they're pocketing

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: But but but....

But they are good!

Just not for the consumer.

Who woulda thunk outsourcing your data would ever become a problem, eh? One in a million chance!

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Re: Registry, ugh

It was user error, I did something which triggered a registry change for every executable, or a registry change to how WinExplorer treated .exe. What I did that caused that, I don't remember, but the fact that the only way to fix it was by downloading a registry changing script and praying it wouldn't bork my machine further shows how problematic the whole thing is when it's borked.

Re: Registry, ugh

I thought the bugs tracked MS, not the other way around

Registry, ugh

I did have a problem with the windows registry very recently. After installing Nim (programming language) and Geany, messing around with "open with default application", somehow, windows decided that ALL .exe files should be opened with Geany. It was the weirdest thing to ever happen, I couldn't run any programs by double clicking the icon or their shortcuts, so no Firefox, Chrome, Blender or Windows Explorer!

However, files with associated programs still opened them, so while I couldn't start a browser from its own shortcut, opening a desktop web link would fire it. I did come across a registry fix script, which now I keep in a bunch of separate backups, just in case this happens again.

The metaverse of fantasy worlds is itself still a fantasy

Re: It's amazing

> Just... that cybercash thing seems to work

Money is already mostly digital. In many places, the majority of transactions happen via credit/debit card or bank app transferences, which makes a value in an account go up while another goes down.

Cryptocoins, however, didn't solve any real problems so far.

It's amazing

It's really amazing how peddling Second Life 2.0 or VR Chat by FaceMetaBook straight to the profit seekers is generating so much hype. You never see any company giving a single thought about "who's actually going to be there?"

Who are the users and when are they coming? Truly amazing that everyone that boarded the hype train forgot to ask this question.

And then the small detail that every company will want their own siloed metaverse because F you, competition!

Much like cryptocurrencies, it's all talk and zero actual use. Hell, at least cryptocoins have some use: money laundering and ransomware payment.

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

Re: Best of luck with that mate

So they'll have to start from step 1: create the universe

SerenityOS: Remarkable project with its own JS-capable web browser

Re: "Just for fun"

Self publish on Amazon, maybe separate a number of chapters into different books. Unless you only want an actual print, then that's going to be much harder to achieve without any previous recognition.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

It's a feature, you guys!

That's a totally intended for feature, not a vulnerability! If you ever need to lend your car to a family member, friend or someone else that lacks your keys, they can do so. See, car sharing feature!

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Bad definition

Hence the -almost-. And a program or game taking over the whole hardware/shutting down the OS was already rare some 20 years ago

Oracle's compliance cops now include Java in license audits

Re: Larry, the Putin of the biz software world!

Also, their support is pointing to the manuals.

Have a problem? Read page 30.

Want to optimize your database? Read page 52

Some weird error you couldn't find on google? That's on page 111.

It makes Stack Overflow seem friendly and caring.

Lockbit wins ransomware speed test, encrypts 25,000 files per minute

Honest question, how feasible is it to create a script that frequently scans the running processes and kills anything that's running file encryption? Put simply, detect any process running file encryption and immediately kill it.

I mean, I understand that if whoever's attacking managed to get root access, you're 100% fcked. But when it's a user's fault for running a compromised program, this could stop the problem before much harm is done.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

Re: Irritation and security flaws are an intentional feature

It's not like they see a difference between corporate and free alternatives

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Re: @Richard Speed -- Wait...Wha'?

When >90% of the application's size and RAM usage comes from running a packed version of chrome, yes, it matters.

If you still think that's not a problem, let me write a 10GB program that eats 14GB of RAM that just tells you the current time. I mean, it's not like you're using all those 16GB of phone RAM for anything else, right? Efficient resource usage? Pah! If it's there, we're supposed to use ALL of it!