Durdleurdleurdleurdleurrr
Bloody geese.
Posts by Chronos
1247 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007
Looking for the perfect Valentine's gift? How about a week of retro gaming BBC Microlympics?
helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS
Friday 12th February 2021 11:50 GMT
Um...
NEXTStep, Mach microkernel and BSD userland. CUPS was never strictly Linux, nor was Webkit. Darwin, the underlying glue behind MacOS, is closer to FreeBSD than Linux, licensing being the motivation; it all depends on your definition of "free" as, for some of us - Cupertino included it would seem, having to release your mods as source isn't freedom at all.
Meh, whatevs, ancient history.
* Long-time *BSD user, jumped ship to De[bi|vu]an when the project became infested with divas.
Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking
Friday 22nd January 2021 11:16 GMT
Oh dear!
Why do we say this every time after a good belly laugh?
Thank you, Mr Dabbs. The sweary bit made my day. I suppose I'm easily amused but, having heard the story of a 70cms repeater that was shut down because the numpties at Winter Hill couldn't unlock their cars with the keyfob (what the fuck is wrong with using the key, anyway?) I have to admit a physical switch, button, key, handle or plain old analogue hammer of last resort beats tech every sodding time.
Linus Torvalds rates his own words 'incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man'
Monday 11th January 2021 13:48 GMT
Exactly what is needed.
Linus is doing an exceptional job, let's not fool ourselves. The "problem" he has is honesty. That will ruffle feathers when he's outwardly honest but it also means he's capable of not taking himself too seriously and can backtrack and correct without worrying about "PR".
Let's not be too quick to ridicule this as it's something from which a few people in real positions of power could take notes.
Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back
BOFH: Time for the MMOCC. You know, the Massively Moronic Online Christmas Call
Saturday 26th December 2020 12:33 GMT
Re: "We've signed up to a multi-presence company”
That's impossible. What you really want is, for example, the latest remotely installed unicorn fart (Teams, I'm looking at you here) not autostarting on everyone's desktop on Monday morning, resulting in not only a glacial roaming profile share but more support calls than directory enquiries in the 80s.
Also, which bellend thought piping Chrome's ghastly notifications to the notification area in Windows 10 was a good idea? Once that thing activates, it takes focus from anything and everything else. Bastards. The OS's job is to launch useful things and then stay the hell out of the way.
Yes, as you can probably tell, I spent a good two hours running around the depot disabling Teams that day. At least its icon is purple, a tip of the hat to Bonzi Buddy, no doubt.
Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out
Sunday 6th December 2020 11:01 GMT 
As a complete aside...
...that facial fungus you're sporting, Dabbsy, is now known as the Cypher, from the Matrix character of that name. And you're a dead-ringer.
Now, try GadgetBridge and never buy any form of fitness tracker¹ that isn't compatible with it, should a piece of idle silicon with a few electrons flowing through its doped bits telling you you're a lazy, balding, obese git like me be your particular vessel buoyancy. Me? The mirror tells me ever day. I need no electronic reminder :-P
¹ The origninal AmazFit Bip was ideal for this before they ruined it by insisting you use their app to pair the bloody things, even if there is a way to extract the pairing key for GB
Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts
America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables
Wednesday 18th November 2020 11:38 GMT
Arsenoise is lacking in so many ways, yet I doubt he even knows Arecibo exists. For one thing, he'd have to understand that the word "telescope" doesn't necessarily mean a long tube with lenses in it, parrot, cutlass and eyepatch optional...
Neglect, pure and simple. Any competent metallurgist will take one glance at that picture and declare expansion and friction assisted metal fatigue in a nanosecond¹. This is a compound failure, recognised with the benefit of hindsight, to allocate resources over more than half a century. Hanlon's Razor applies.
¹ The various wires in those cables expand and contract at different rates as they heat and cool by layers. It's not much movement but, given 57 years, it all adds up. At this point, replacement is needed as the visible effects mean the invisible damage is already past the point of no return.
Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network
Wednesday 28th October 2020 13:17 GMT
Re: "Citizens should have struck first against the Corporates"
A cow-orker of mine has just bought a Quest II. I laughed a little when he said "I had to sign up to Facebook" and then it struck me just how many people are being suckered into the clutches of the data fetishists with promises of "shiny." That, and just how green around the gills he looked after playing with it for hours the night before with the disagreement between visual cortex and inner ear still raging...
By the time an open source solution arrives it'll be too late. The masses will already be hooked on - and quite possibly hypnotised by - the commercial loss-leader offerings.
MediaTek's Snapdragon-7-bothering 5G eight-core Arm chip for modest mobes jets into Europe this month
Friday 2nd October 2020 10:09 GMT
Mediatek
I'm sorry but there's a very good reason Qualcomm are the market leaders: Mediatek is just so half-arsed. If the GPS will lock without phoning home to some god-awful Chinese SUPL server, something else will be broken to the point of uselessness. Couple that with the usual bean-counter engineering, half-arsed bootloaders that brick if you look at them a bit funny and cobbled-together kernels in devices that use this dross and you have landfill mobiles aplenty.
Avoid like the plague.
Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond
Monday 28th September 2020 10:18 GMT
Lots of "OMG teh M$..."
...but very few of you are remembering the key take-away point from this: ESR is bat-shit crazy. Always has been, always will be. The chances of Linus or Greg allowing MS to Borgify the kernel is about the same as me winning the lottery.
The only grain of concern is people like Poettering who are already in an MS mindset and forgetting the "do one thing, do it well" mantra. Systemd may as well have been an MS designed-by-committee product. It has all the hallmarks. I rebooted a Pi last night with "systemctl reboot" and it felt dirty.
Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business
My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law
Only EU can help us, pleads Slack as it slings competition complaint against Microsoft Teams
Mozilla unveils $4.99/month subscription-based VPN, says it won't hang onto user logs
Friday 17th July 2020 11:40 GMT 
Meh.
Mullvad: Raspberry Pi 3B, PiHole and WireGuard in the kernel. Full wire speed minus the usual overheads through Mullvad. Same price, 5 devices, Linux, Windows, Android, MacOS/iOS and OpenWRT configurations/apps supported, totally privacy focussed.
I like Mozilla, I really do, but they're going to have to be a lot more transparent with the likes of, e.g. Safebrowsing before I'd trust them with a VPN solution.
VirtuaVerse: Cyberpunk point-and-click throwback with ace chiptune soundtrack put out by... a metal record label?
Monday 1st June 2020 07:12 GMT
Re: In fact, I found it straight-up annoying to read
The quote is from the part following Case' neural regen treatment as the author points out. Gibson's Sprawl trilogy takes a while to absorb and that quote sets the scene for the later Peter and the holo-Molly lightshow on Freeside that so enrages Molly and catalyses the encounter with the Turing Police as Case tries to locate her. Gibson's "purple prose" paints a picture in the mind's eye, not that there's anything wrong with disliking it. It's a Marmite thing.
Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps
Wednesday 20th May 2020 09:21 GMT
Oh what a tangled web we weave!
A fine change of tune from Labour after clamouring for years for every scrap of information on the general populace they could possibly get their grubby little hands on. Admittedly, Harperson wasn't in the forefront of the data fetishists but she rarely spoke up against the likes of Smith and Burnham.
Trust == 0; You burnt all those bridges during the NuLabour years and we're now all too well aware of the dangers of letting even a trusted government amass information as the regime could change in a heartbeat. In short, too little, too late and your pious bleating in favour of libertarianism now rings hollow.
Can you imagine the fall-out of Wurzel Corbyn with the power of GCHQ at his disposal? Cripes!
As for the contact tracing app, it's doomed to failure anyway. Remember those ticky-box forms about why spam control measures were utterly useless from days of yore? That.
"Your solution relies on a) everyone acting in the same way at the same time b) why should we trust you anyway?"
"Furthermore, this is what I think of you:" I dare not tick any of these given the woke thought police climate.
Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban
As coronavirus catches tech CEOs with their pants down, IBM's Ginni Rometty warns of IT's new role post-pandemic
Friday 8th May 2020 07:54 GMT
Delusional
If you think anything will change long-term because of this virus, think again. The system we have now is one of human nature which has evolved from innate greed and the desire to get as much of the pie for as little of the effort as possible. Ms Rometty may be spouting a few sound-bites but sod all of any substance. The only thing this virus will affect is the imbalance: The gulf will widen between those who actually do productive tasks and those who sit on their arses skimming off the cream. The only place middle manglers are going is up, promoted out of harm's way.
Before you go off thinking I'm some sort of militant socialist, I'm actually a libertarian¹ and I include the bloody unions in this formula.
¹ i.e. that one should be able to forge one's own path without let or hindrance within reason, which includes not having the vast majority of your productivity syphoned away by lazy arseholes.
BT suspends shareholder payments as folk forgo pricey sports TV deals for matches that won't happen anyway
What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you
Friday 8th May 2020 07:33 GMT
Millisoft
They're a order of magnitude or three bigger since they pinched DR-DOS but you still need a magnifying glass to see their contribution to general purpose computing, unless it's the interminable wait for "Windows Updates" (Evergreen needs to die in a fire) and then the downtime in man-hours can probably be seen from space. Most of their "innovations," including that of the current business model of "data data everywhere" have been begged, borrowed or outright stolen from other innovators. There's a thought: The Borg. Your stuff will be assimilated.
It is often quipped that should Microsoft ever make a vacuum cleaner it would be the only thing that didn't suck. This is probably a bit unfair; their hardware is generally, excluding the RROD X Boxen, quite good quality, especially their input peripherals. Not a patch on a decent Cherry brown or Model M, of course...
Sun shines on ServiceNow amid pandemic storm after belated spree of $1m+ deals
Samsung says it has the future of DRAM sorted after success with new EUV process
Taiwan collars coronavirus quarantine scofflaws with smartphone geo-fences. So, which nation will be next?
Tuesday 24th March 2020 23:13 GMT 
What about...
Those of us who aren't slavishly attached to our 'phones? You know, the few people who can go out and not be bothered at all by not being in immediate, incessant and aggravating contact with the rest of humanity? There are those of us who don't feel the need to FaceGram our lunch or check the messaging app every three seconds in case our latest faddy "influencer" farted another rainbow.
Please, won't somebody think of the Luddites? :-)
European electric vehicle sales surged in Q4 2019 but only accounted for wafer-thin slice of total car purchases
Monday 16th March 2020 10:52 GMT
The point
Everyone is fixated on range (which changes as the car ages) and initial purchase cost.
The real point of this cynical exercise in Being Seen To Be Doing Somthing™ Gretaism is ongoing cost, that of replacing the cell pack when it fills with rocks and stopping your goolies catching fire when the battery does. Ecological it ain't (the batteries die just about the time you break even on ecological cost of manufacture) and it's an awful lot of faff.
Hey, friends. We know it's a crazy time for the economy, but don't forget to enable 2FA for payments by Saturday
If it's Goodenough for me, it's Goodenough for you: Canuck utility biz goes all in on solid-state glass battery boffinry
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband
Wednesday 26th February 2020 10:21 GMT
Never mind the tea towel or the fibre
It's those hand "dryers" that need to die a death. Bloody things. We have them in our bogs and they're akin to being coughed at by a moth with cystic fibrosis - when the damned things deign to turn on at all. All in the name of hygiene, which is to say your immune system never gets any bloody target practice.
Then they wonder why we keep getting diseases. Tossers and beigists, the lot of them.
That said, who remembers the old Initial towel machines? Guaranteed to need three pulls to get the bugger to move and the loop was just big enough for one fingernail...
Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?
Instagram influencer fools followers into thinking Ikea photoshoot was Bali holiday
Tuesday 18th February 2020 21:54 GMT 
Good grief!
I usually ignore these types of story because the word "influencer" is a euphemism for self appointed marketer. I thought I'd have a glance at this one, though, as the idea seemed to have a bit of cerebrum behind it. Perhaps, for once, one of these new media types has a good wheeze at the expense of their mindless followers.
As soon as the video started, I regretted it. Anyone lasting past the first minute of this, erm, person's outpourings and uncoordinated gesticulation is clearly missing a few cards from their deck. In short, nobody cares where they go as long as it's not near us.
After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky
Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device
Tuesday 4th February 2020 11:15 GMT
Not to mention the impromptu meetings various people seem to have right in front of the milk/butter/eggs section which are so important you must wait for the one item you really need until all angles of Doris' latest foray into extra-marital sensuality have been examined in minuscule detail or that one kid who absolutely must have a Kinder Surprise (the surprise is how they manage to sell half an ounce of chocolate and some plastic tot for that price) or it'll scream until it goes blue and every other rational human being within range becomes permanently murderously intolerant or anything under 5 years of age.
Seriously, people, there are more appropriate places. Anywhere else, in fact.
Those scanners are a blessing: They mean you can skip the queue and the aforementioned murderous intolerance of someone else's crotch goblin having a eppie and be out of that hellhole much faster.
Arrays in a mangler, need new storage bed: Huawei and the US tech block
Sunday 2nd February 2020 10:56 GMT
Re: Cutting off nose to spite face
Humble pie time!
Re: the footnote, looks like I was dead wrong about Mr Johnson. Loose cannon he may be but having heard him speak on issues he cares about, I suspect he's a genius in motley; perhaps not even in motley, since "scatterbrain" has always been an outward indicator of a rapid, agile and astute thought process. I'm now mildly optimistic about Bozza's premiership.
Perhaps I should re-think my opinion of Trump, although I find my distaste for egomaniacal, bigoted braggarts is still intact and still "trumps" anything he may be getting right. A weakness of mine allowing emotion to overrule thought? Perhaps...
Top tip: Using AI to detect alien civilizations is dangerous because if it spots anything, even just a blurry blob, people are going to go nuts
Wednesday 29th January 2020 11:17 GMT
Re: AI could easily spot things we miss
AI doesn't exist [...] What's called AI is only a computer program and a database created by humans selecting data and labelling it.
I wish I could up-vote you more than once for this. This really is cheapening the definition of intelligence and, by way of an aside, blurring the lines for when someone does eventually create an intelligent system. It's a bit dangerous, that, as it'll be received with a shrug and a "just another database backed decision engine" attitude and, left to evolve, a true AI could be the best thing that ever happens to humanity or the most terrifying thing in the Universe.
You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that
Wednesday 29th January 2020 11:06 GMT
Never mind all this tot...
Is that Seven of Nine in the background? It would explain a few things.
One wonders what all the exported USian kit with NSA installed firmware mods will do in such a case of Arsenoise actually finding a small enough keyboard for his hands and shutting down Unimatrix Zero.
Huawei? Pah. Amateurs. You will be assimilated. Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
One also wonders if Boris knows more about IT and resilient networks than his mad, half toff half bloke all clown facade would suggest. He certainly seems to have the heterogeneous vendor mix right.
Remember the Clipper chip? NSA's botched backdoor-for-Feds from 1993 still influences today's encryption debates
Tuesday 28th January 2020 11:42 GMT
The point
The argument boils down to simply this: They (collectively) have an abysmal record with keeping anything secret and any backdoor would compromise a static system to the level of the vigilance of the lowliest .gov spook with an IQ in double figures, an appointment with Ms Whiplash and a pen drive left in a taxi.
It. Won't. Work. You either have total (to the extent the current technology allows) encryption or you have none.
We also don't trust 'em but that's not a technical reason. Remind me again how many rozzers/CSOs have been found misusing the PNC and then try to tell me that this proposal would not be used on anyone whose face doesn't fit - before it falls over, leaks and ruins everything anyway.
Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard
BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?
Friday 24th January 2020 13:05 GMT
Ugh, surveys. (sweary)
If they were honest, there would be a 98% rating for "For fuck's sake, I can't be bloody arsed with this bollocks right now! How did you do? You buggered off afterwards and I hoped never to have to call again which, to my mind, was the most positive outcome."
It's like those puggers (poll muggers) in the street. The most popular answer would be "Fuck off. I work all hours $DEITY sends just to eke out a living and I'm shopping during a rare moment when I actually allocate my own time. This is already a low point in my miserable, mediocre life without you bastards boring me closer to death with leading questions."
Oh, and how do I like my car part I had no choice but to buy? It didn't fall apart immediately, which probably means I was astute enough not to buy Quinton Hazell. Will that do?
US hands UK 'dossier' on Huawei: Really! Still using their kit? That's just... one... step... beyond
Wednesday 15th January 2020 12:17 GMT
Re: It's cute
I don't get this clamouring for a trade deal with the US. All we'd be doing is borrowing a world of hurt when Arsenoise gets it into his tiny mind, waves his tiny hands and opens his tiny mouth orangutanesque that we need to honour their way of doing things, which will immediately "sour the milk" for any other potential trade partners with whom we may wish to do business. This Huawei debacle is a case in point. To borrow a pith headline, "No, no mitigations, it's our way or the Huawei!"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
