Posts by JamesTGrant

Rusty Linux kernel draws closer with new patch adding support for Rust as second language

Re: earlier statements from Microsoft

Whoosh

Microsoft makes tweaks to Windows 11 Start Menu for Insiders but stops short of mimicking Windows 10

Re: How to make Windows 10 bearable

Funny I was going to mention exploer’s constantly poor behaviour if a folder contains any network mounted drives or folders!!

Re: How to make Windows 10 bearable

And install ‘everything’ (https://www.voidtools.com/) and wonder why windows search is so slow and belligerently unhelpful.

If only I could make the edges of the ‘windows’ contrast against other ‘windows’ (like a boarder) coz that is irritating and slows me down.

And if only Defender wasn’t incredibly inefficient, debilitating (resource hog) when running and so integrated that it’s impossible to remove without borking the OS.

If only update wasn’t still appallingly slow, and prone to breaking - apt and yum are sooo much better and the source code is right there…

If only the programs and applications I install were not presented in a useless flat list and were grouped (by default) according to the program vendor or vendor name and easy to move or copy into other groups.

I could go on.. (why is copy/paste *still* broken (shadow copy, background copy before context menu is shown….) Why does Teams and Onenote knacker charcoding when you paste text into it and copy out of it….

Goodness, fixing a users Windows/Microsoft account where the users e-mail is incorrect or has changed is incredibly difficult…

Default ‘crimes against users’ include: Bing/cortina, preinstalled and hard to remove irritating paytoplay ‘games’, amazingly rubbish tile/desktop ui that’s so obviously jarringly poor that it’s amazing it was ever internally demoed let alone deliberately released, updates that break non-obscure functionality, forced updates that run when you’re in the middle of something or presenting or in a meeting etc etc etc

However you look at it - it’s amazingly crappular given the resources available to making the core ux decent. It’s UX is worse overall than Win XP/Win95 (not saying they were amazeballs not particularly stable…)

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

Re: Not Happening

Vintage wine, gold plated cars and rare guitars, surrreely? All stored in a lockup just off The Kings Road.

Alleged Brit SIM-swapper will kill himself if extradited to US for trial, London court told

Re: Internet Police

I’ll bite!

If it’s illegal to throw a rock (reckless endangerment or some such) in France then you get tried for that, in France.

If it’s illegal to break a window in Germany (criminal damage or some such) then you get tried for that, in Germany.

N’est pas?

AWS commits to update its own Linux every other year

No need to feel guilty

Trying to make the best of a situation in which you are placed (and through no fault of yours!) is honourable and commendable. To do so whilst having compassion on those who are suffering isn’t something about which (in my opinion!) one should feel guilty.

There *is* plenty to feel guilty about (are you helping the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, etc etc) however, your hardworking and ability to adapt to changing conditions is something that (in my opinion) should be a source of ‘humble pride’.

Well done and good luck to you!

The paperless office is back again! (But only because print hardware supplies are jammed)

Who would read it?

I guess that some businesses need hard copy for reasons, so the poor person WFH that gets to take the folders home would be printing a lot.

But everyone else WFH - who is going to read what is printed? I thought most school homework was submitted electronically, and I’m sure most kids aren’t organised such that their work flow includes sending e-mail to parent at work to print out their homework.

So, the difference left is mortgage applications that people used to print at the office once every two years. That’s a lot of printers at home doing not very much for most of the time apart from that, I don’t understand who would be reading all the home printed output which would otherwise be printed at the office, perhaps folk proof reading before sending electronically?

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

It’s actually all fine

systemd stuff is fine - suffers from a common name where really it should have lots of different names ‘systemd-init’ ‘systemd-time’ ‘systemd-networkd’ etc etc. The thing is, it’s ALL optional, none of it is preventing good work on other projects and some of it (systemd vs initv) is actually good and handy for many people. So, chill out - no one is making you use it - a default is only a default you like if you like the default.

Folk spouting off about systemd is so boring, it’s like complaining about the colour of your neighbour’s car.

Retreating in 5,4,3…

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Re: I've been telling you guys this.

I feel very strongly and will share my opinion on a tech website comment section but I don’t you to suggest an alternative or any way to make my situation better. I don’t care what you suggest, I’ve already decided it’s too hard. I’ve got my pet peeve, don’t you try and take it away!!

Btw - CentOS/Alma/Ubuntu/Mint/Elementary/PopOS any easy to come-by, are totally fine and much easier to install than you might imagine. I dare say you might enjoy the experience, you could try them out booting off a memory stick in most cases. Personally, I work on a Windows 10 machine and agree that Windows is bizarrely uneven throughout.

Sym link?

Can you rename edge executable and create a symlink to the browser exe of your choice? I assume the api that passes in the url is pretty standard and they don’t do anything special if it’s edge: prefixed?

System at the heart of scaled-back £30m Sheffield University project runs on end-of-life Oracle database

£30million though??

Let’s say I’m terrible at negotiating and I pay all my team £100k per year let’s say I have a team of 10 people, it’s not 30years work to do this?

Suuurrreeellyyy you’d be better off in-housing this and write off years one and two whilst you built a team and got some solid requirement capture done. Then smash it out in a few years as agile as you like. I’ll do it in 6 years for £25million - hit me up!!

Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts

Postal

I guess the postal service is a good analogy, ‘we just deliver what folk post’. You don’t sign the letter - you’re anonymous. There are laws governing the letter contents, idk if they are the same as a fb message. But sending letters requires effort and FB trolls are a whimsical bunch, for a start you have to know what to put on the envelope. Perhaps it’s the financial cost of posting letters that puts people off, also probably more so it’s the effort and delay.

Anyway, this specific problem is trivially easy to solve - whitelist(allow list) corespondents: ‘you have a message from a new corespondent: ‘Anon Meanie’ would you like a preview of the message (it likely contains unfriendly content)? Or shall I bin it?’.

Quantum computing startups pull in millions as VCs rush to get ahead of the game

Re: Flogging a dead cat @Anonymous Coward

Has @amanfrommars1 been upgraded? That’s 3 comments in a row that make sense and comment coherently and contextually (enough) on other folk’s postings - even suggesting a consistent bias across posts. Perhaps amfm is now based on GPT3 quantum neural net blockchain?

Perhaps he could be unleashed onto other comment boards - or maybe write content for aggregation/ recycled story sites?

Perhaps he could be a judge for ‘xfactors voice got talent in the jungle’?

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

Aahhh thank you!

My grandparents (long since past away) had a electric iron that had a small push/twist light bulb socket-shaped plug on the end of the attached braided (not very) flex. I never realised til right now that it wasn’t due to my grandfather’s creativity. It’s genius!!

AWS Lambda was already serverless, now it can be x86-less too

Re: Serverless?

Perpective you say… ;)

Attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol endpoints have exploded this year, warns ESET's latest Threat Report

Re: Rds on the internet

At the least connect via VPN shuurrrly… or just run a Teamviewer daemon… (mostly joking, mostly) Internet connected RDP Windows is maadnesses

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Title…

Was hoping to read about AI Systems ashtray.

Am disappoint.

Et tu, Samsung? Electronics giant accused of quietly switching SSD components

Hits the advertised specs so it’s all good

If you’re reliant on a non-published spec of a product and the manufacturer changes the ingredients such that they are still meeting their published specs then you’re taking a risk, even between batches of the same model. I think Sammy’s actions are almost totally fine, but.

It’s a royal pain for folk trying to maintain homogeneous infrastructure or replace like-for-like. So, put an additional number at the end of the model number, how hard can that be (SAP be damned).

EVO960-blah-b

EVO960-blah-c

Still hits all the searches, the marketing material is all still good, avoids this sort of ‘are they trying to dupe their customers’ vibe.

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: I've got a suggestion...

My Uncle… is clearly referring to my uncle.

Omitting the ‘my’ causes Uncle to lose his relationship with the author, could be anyone’s uncle. So

‘my Uncle Jack’ is perfecto if you call him by the name ‘Uncle Jack’.

‘My uncle Jack’ is perfect if you call him Jack and he is your uncle.

The sentence is perfect in the examples given, no commas needed.

Also, this is an amazeballs example which made me snort out loud so thank you.

Google's newest cloud region taken out by 'transient voltage' that rebooted network kit

transient voltage at the feeder to the network equipment

RCA1: ‘problem with electric supply, voltage spikes made our routers unhappy.’

Or RCA2:… there’s a zoo keeper who has to keep the network beasties fed and watered and they got tazed/electrocuted so they couldn’t tend to said beasts which then got grumpy and wouldn’t perform at the datacentre zoo. Hopefully they’ll be ok with some burns treatment and some rest and the zoo will arrange cover for them to prevent the network animals getting too hungry again in future.

38 million records exposed by misconfigured Microsoft Power Apps. Redmond's advice? RTFM

A wonderful set of words, selling the dream!

‘Low code’ is a term that sounds like it was invented by Marketing and picked up by ‘fake it til you make it’ folk who have become responsible for ‘making stuff happen’ in an organisation dispute a good enough track record in the relevant areas.

A decent set of market requirements, a decent set of engineering requirements will guide the design and hence the most suitable tooling. But it seems the implementation paradigm is chosen very early. Also, seems that the engineering testing phase and documentation simply is crud in these projects - like ‘is data accessible from outside the system, test all the API endpoints as a non-authenticated user/getter.’

My guess is that a lot of these low code implementations lack proper development processes or governance and are put into service when they ‘work’ and IT supports it and that’s the end of the project. The users don’t know if it’s a mess of licenced blobs thrown together, and IT aren’t responsible for auditing the design or implementation of systems they are ‘given’ to support. And so the company bumbles along never checking how much technical debt or risk they are accruing until the wheels fall off completely in a totally inevitable way.

Playdate handheld game system torn to pieces, crank and all

Fishing, wells, car starting

Perhaps it’s a controller for the following fun games:

Pro bass fishing

Vintage car startup

Competitive well pail pulling

…erm…

School hall window closing

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

Re: Elevators?

Daleks. The good thing is that they have about 25years of BBC documentaries on thwarting wheely determined robots as research material. Stairs and steps or even gravel would be interesting to see. Perhaps they can fly? (But would have to wait a few seasons to find out)

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

License per interface

You sure can! Even about 8 years ago Foundry/Brocade had a very annoying scheme where the SFP+ card was licensed per 4 ports. Always very annoying that.

I always liked the Juniper ’trust-based’ licensing model. You could used any unlicensed feature and it’d tell you that it needed a licence. It’d work just fine though. Excellent for quick changes where paperwork can catch up later.

Japan's aerospace agency hooks up with Boeing to make planes quieter when they land

Re: Oh dear

Jaxa little harsh don’t’cha think?

Re: Arrestor wires

Can’t see any down side to this - you could even make the landing runway 30deg steep and the aircraft wouldn’t have to slow down before getting snagged. Big fuel saving - could turn the engine off and coast the last little bit.

If it went wrong it’d be in slow motion anyway so no damage would be done…

Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

Re: Yay, second life is back

This guy!: https://youtu.be/b-VCzLiyFxc

And he works for a tech company and they still didn’t realise!

Also, what’s the point if no one looks like themselves, there’s surely no point?

Asahi Linux progress: Apple Silicon OS works – though it's 'rough around the edges' and has no GUI acceleration

Re: I can't see the point in it

It sounds like very hard work. I wonder if it’s all done in ‘free time’ and then I think; ‘how does some one get THAT good unless it’s their job, and then presumably they’d be doing something that their paymasters wanted, rather than this which seems to be a passion project’. But then I think; ‘who’s paying for that dev effort?’ Makes no sense to me - but I’m all for it!! Maybe El Reg could interview these folk and find out what makes them tick?

The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and Microsoft has pulled support for Internet Explorer in Microsoft 365

Re: "stop updating its Microsoft 365 product line for the ageing platform"

And updated Windows 95 to add Active Desktop with shell integration with, and reliance on, ie. And then argued in the antitrust law suit that it wasn’t possible to separate Internet Explorer from Windows without making Windows ‘unstable’ -which, if you think about it is a defence that says: ‘we can’t make changes to our own software without breaking it all, and our testing is such that if we tried we wouldn’t know if it all worked properly or not’. A sort of genius/ridiculous defence which sorta worked out well for them - and badly for Mozilla.

Is this indeed the light-house top I see? Microsoft updates its container Linux, CBL-Mariner

Flatcar though…

I wonder if the Flatcar folks are worried… seems odd for MS to have/finance two distros both aimed the same sort of users. Do they have distinct enough purposes?