* Posts by Gene Cash

5697 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007

Kick Google all you like, Mozilla tells US government, so long as we keep getting our Google-bucks

Gene Cash Silver badge

Well, they've got to pay someone to remove all those features.

Is Google fudging search rankings to benefit pages that embed YouTube vids? Or is this just another ‘bug’?

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Benefit YouTube?

Try to find a page that hosts a Vimeo video. G'wan, I dare ya.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

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Pint

I'm getting OLD

I remember when Visicalc came out, and the first time someone showed me formulas that were related and how it recalculated.

My brain exploded and my jaw rattled around on the floor. It was about as earthshattering as the time someone explained exactly what pointers were in C.

We need an "old man rambling on about shite" icon...

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

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If a company is in such financial difficulty that the fine will massively increase the number of job losses

Then perhaps they're so ill-managed they should go out of business.

ESPECIALLY when they say shit like "credit card data breaches are an entirely commonplace phenomenon and an unavoidable fact of life”

Every last one of them should be selling pencils on the street corner.

If you can see this headline, you're certainly not reading it on Twitter: All tweets, notifications vanish

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almost 0100UTC and still borked

At least here in Florida. I can see stuff, but I can't tweet. Not that it's a horrible thing.

Nvidia signs up for an Italian Job: Building for Europe the 'world's fastest AI supercomputer' by 2022

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The question is no longer "will it run Crysis?" but "will it edit a Slow Mo Guys video?"

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

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will drop PPD file support soon

OK, what do I do with my 4 year old Brother laser then? It's certainly not getting IPP support.

I guess go back to LPRng then?

"this relies on the printer manufacturers implementing the protocol correctly"

Right. And they expect that to actually happen, do they? I have some bitcoin to sell them...

BBC Micro:bit with boosted specs and onboard mic to go on sale from next month

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Re: One question

As to the addition of a microphone by default this to me carries the reeks of amazon/google style listening in

Did you actually READ the article?

"the microphone is a Knowles MEMS sensor, which is accompanied by an LED light. This, the BBC said, is to help facilitate classroom discussions around privacy."

Time for a virtual love affair: ESXi-Arm Fling flung onto the web for peeps to test drive with Raspberry Pi 4, other kit

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They're so expensive... where ever will you find the budget?

SpaceX breaks run of scrubs with Starlink launch: Darth Musk finds your lack of faith in on-time launches... disturbing

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Don't see what Musk hopes to improve

The Florida weather is always iffy, unless he gets that weather-control system working.

The automated abort system that SpaceX is using removes a ton of the traditional constraints. It saves so much time & money, the range is pushing Boeing and others to use it, or provide funding to continue to use their legacy system.

A system limit is set by the engineers, and you have to have faith as their manager that they're setting them appropriately.

With rockets, sometimes the shit stacks up, and you stay on the ground. Or you push it and take the good chance of a fireball. Just like airplanes.

Reno4 Pro 5G: At this price point, OPPO's latest phone for the UK market ought to feel better than a mid-ranger

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How many people actually impatiently wait for their phone to charge on the go whereas plugging it in when its convenient. How often is it going to be needed anyway with a monster battery?

I do. There's never a convenient time to plug it in. My Moto G6 Play has a monster battery but sometimes it goes for 3-5 days and sometimes I'm on the phone A LOT and it goes only a day or so.

> How big is the proprietary charger to support fast charging?

My ANKER one is 5cm x 5cm x 2.5cm. It's smaller than the battery packs I have.

Massive news, literally: Three super-boffins awarded Nobel Prize in physics for their black-hole breakthroughs

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"black hole" in Russian

I remember Isaac Asimov once remarking that "black hole" is a very vulgar term in Russian, and Russian astronomy was having a difficult time with it.

Infosec researchers pwned Comcast's voice-activated remote control so it could snoop on household chit-chat

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This has nothing to do with InternetOfTwats... this is a simple insecure RF link.

A freshly formed English council waves £18m at UK tech industry, asks: Can somebody design and run pretty much everything for us?

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£18m?

That's an arbitrary figure. Did they look in their accounts and that was the total cash-on-hand?

FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

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Re: Stallman's absence

> it also attempts to drive ALL software into becoming "open"

That's basically Stallman's life goal though. Read up on how he started out. He's had to be rather unyielding and controlling because everyone wants some sort of compromise or easy way out.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

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> one can inadvertently invoke autofill with a clumsy mouse drag

As someone with the motor skills of a dead cow, I say "fuck that shit" - I'm so tired of unexplained strange actions from GUIs.

That is still broken behaviour. I would not expect any such response from Excel.

All at sea: SAP was barely out of the port when it sank its 'social responsibility' voyage

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scourge of licence-abiding software sailors

Complete miss of the opportunity to mention something about pirates...

TalkTalk marches OneTel users into a brave new email world

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Re: Begging for Trouble

> As opposed to what, GMail, Outlook.com, Yahoo?

As opposed to Fastmail, which I'm actually paying for.

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

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Re: Closest I've had to that ....

they "found" a secret NATO communication line.

Ah! The best application of "unplug it and see who bitches"

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Re: Closest I've had to that ....

Holy crap, it's Big Clive! He's awesome! Cool sparky from the Isle of Man! I've been a fan of his for ages.

Have a look at the MBC (Manx Beard Club) gathering vids.

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

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Enjoying "I told ya so"

My friend poo-pooed my concerns about sending personal data to the cloud, and what if Google has issues or shuts it off?

Now he's getting dozens of phantom rings and is asking me how to turn it off.

I suggested a sledgehammer, and he's angry I can't magically fix someone else's server issues.

What price your home delivery? Amazon accused of hiding real injury rate in its overworked warehouses

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Re: Stop buying your stuff from them

I'd love to buy local.

Unfortunately "local" doesn't stock anything. Not even the basic stuff.

FYI: Mind how you go. We're more or less oblivious to 75% of junk in geosynchronous orbits around Earth

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This is decades-old news

This sort of stuff left deep pits in the Shuttle windows. They did spectrographic analysis and determined it was other spacecraft fragments.

It's also been known this is below the softball or golfball size of stuff you can track with radar.

Bad boys bad boys, what you gonna do? Los Angeles Police Department found fibbing about facial recognition use

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Sigh.

This is why LA has massive riots, and why everybody here says "ACAB"

I'm old enough to remember the days you'd ask a cop for directions if you were lost. Today, I probably would get shot.

It's powered by a mega-corp AI, it has a Liquid Mode, but it's not a T-1000. It's Adobe's PDF auto-reflow for mobile

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Re: Just unfit for the purpose

Fuck Jakon Nielsen.

PDFs are perfect for things like instruction manuals, where things need to be laid out properly and clearly, without web-style stupid shit like the image on one page and the caption on another.

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

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Flame

Destination Host Unreachable

Hopefully the fact the node in the tail is not responding doesn't mean the tail fell off!

And now for something completely different: Ultraviolet aurora spotted around comet for first time

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"The glow surrounding 67P/C-G is one of a kind"

How can they say this? I'd think the best they could say is it hasn't yet been detected somewhere else because we haven't observed anywhere else so closely?

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

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Upkeep and repair

Tesla is the reason I haven't bought a Tesla. I hear that keeping them running and either not becoming a pauper in the process or losing your sanity is a major accomplishment.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Gene Cash Silver badge

Firefox has turned to absolute shite but there's not really anything better. For example, Pale Moon dropped things like fine-grained cookie control as well, so it's not a replacement.

Before you buy that managed Netgear switch, be aware you may need to create a cloud account to use its full UI

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Cisco Linksys scandal

Real link:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132142-ciscos-cloud-vision-mandatory-monetized-and-killed-at-their-discretion

The Slashdot "story" is just a list of links.

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

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Re: No back light on a black keyboard?

Actually, I would be buying it because it has no lights.

If your room is so dim you need lights on your keyboard, may I suggest you invest in these newfangled things known as light fixtures?

Thunderbird implements PGP crypto feature requested 21 years ago

Gene Cash Silver badge

No thanks

With current Mozilla developer levels of skill, I'd expect Thunderbird to send my private keys directly to China. I trust them to be about as competent on security as Trump is competent being president.

iOS 14 suffers app preference amnesia: Rebooting an iThing resets browser, email client defaults back to Safari, Mail

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Re: Ha ha ha...

Yup, especially since Android 11 is now blocking access to the camera, so you can no longer use 3rd-party camera apps.

Feeling bad about your last security audit? Check out what just happened to the US Department of Interior

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Nice picture

So did they also worry about getting shot for "carrying a bomb"?

In this part of the USA, that device in the left hand picture would get you instantly shot, no questions asked.

Internet Archive's way cool Wayback Machine gets way more websites in Cloudflare fail-over pact

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Daaaaaannnnggg

Four hundred and sixty eight billion webpages. That's almost half a trillion pages. That's an accomplishment that doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

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Re: The easy solution

> Don't buy Apple devices.

The problem... as an Android owner... is that Google/Android sucks just as much, and there's not any real competition to the current duopoly since Microsoft has proved exceedingly incompetent at phones.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

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Re: 11Oct16

> unambiguous

Not without at least a 4-digit year. So is that the 16th of October 2011? Or the 11th of October 2016??

Climb every mountain, wsl --mount every Linux disk in latest Windows Preview

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Re: Not till hell freezes over.

Considering the last time Windows looked at one of my Linux filesystems and it trashed it, I agree.

Australia starts second fight with Google, this time over whether app stores leak data, gouge devs, steal ideas and warp markets

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Go

Thanks

Thanks to Australia for at least asking the hard questions. Nobody else is even really doing that.

China launches and lands its first re-usable spacecraft

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It's tiny

Apparently it fits in a standard payload fairing, meaning it's tiny, and certainly can't carry people.

OTOH, it might be 3 wheeled and easy to flip. Anyone seen Clarkson lately?

Taiwan tightens rules around local tech firms sharing tech with China

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Re: Remember when people were afraid of the balkanization of the Internet ?

Well, I personally think when you give up local production, you've really harmed yourself. When the US stopped producing steel, it turned out to have a ripple effect that ended up being a really bad day.

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Gene Cash Silver badge

I'd like to stop buying from Amazon

But that would mean I'd have to stop buying anything, as local stores stock almost nothing I need.

The local auto parts place doesn't stock jack oil any more, for car jacks. Nor does it stock anything but the shittiest of gas cans or oil drain pans.

The local Best Buy doesn't stock wired mice, video capture devices, USB microphones, ethernet switches, or SSD drives.

Nowhere stocks a decent size bench vise, or decent brands of pliers, like Knipex.

When I wanted a decent motion sensitive night-light, so I didn't bang my shins going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I went to Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, Bed-Bath&Beyond, and a couple other places. They had shitty Chinese stuff that wasn't all that motion sensitive, or just stayed on for 10 seconds.

It's so bad, I don't even try any more, even though the Best Buy is only a block away.

The article starts off with "Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of surveillance and stress"

I'd think they go hand-in-hand.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Gene Cash Silver badge

Is setting up a non-shitty email client really that hard?

It boils down to people being lazy and impolite.

How about people stop the goddamn top posting?

How about email clients having a plain-text version of the email instead of a choice between HTML and fuck-you? A true modern email client should be able to provide plain-text email by checking a preference. If it can't, then it is broken.

The advantage of plain text is that you can search it, and quote it, and thread a conversation in an archiving page, and do a lot of things that HTML breaks.

Why should I have to deal with parsing the shitty HTML a lot of mail clients (including Thunderbird) put out?

gmail and the Apple Mail do a lot of shitty things. For example, I regularly get work emails at home because Apple Mail just puts "Gene Cash" in the address, and people can't tell if that's my work address or my home address. People don't give a shit to the point that I've had to stop responding to these emails from home.

Why are people focusing on the HTML wrapper instead of the message inside it?

If you can't configure your email client, do you really belong on the LKML or writing kernel code?

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Stats

> Where I live we can have alternative for the same price so why bother with the fast food

Well where I live, I'm fucked. I have either shitty hole-in-the-wall dives that serve hair-in-the-eggs and sweat-in-the-coke or I can go to a chain where at least corporate sets SOME sort of minimum standards.

That's what I get for moving to a town of less than 45K where I can drive around the whole place in 25 minutes.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

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Re: The elevator did it

We used to have Thanksgiving dinners in the '70s, where everyone would be gathered around the TV watching whatever parade and/or sporting event.

Then grandma would use her electric knife to carve the turkey, which would completely kill TV reception.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

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OR we could fix the root of the problem

Can we turn domain hijacking into a privacy issue or something? Something we can sue ISPs over?

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

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Sigh. I went from "what a cool stone fronting, I want a better look at that" to "ffffffffuuuuck, they sure turdulated that."

You there. Person, corp, state. Doesn't matter. You better not shoot down or hack a drone. That's our job – US govt

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Re: Hypocritical

Or as my grandfather used to say: "I have 210 acres, a swamp and a backhoe. You'll never be found"

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

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Arecibo is borked

Arecibo was the main asteroid spotter, and with it out of commission... well, we miss some.

Farewell to notches and hole-punches? ZTE expected to announce mobe with under-display camera next month

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Re: I would be happy with a no camera phone

I use my phone camera an absolute fuckton for documenting things.

For example, I used it to capture how the right switchpod of my bike looked before I disassembled it, and then various stages of that disassembly. I only needed the pictures for about 3 hours, but they were invaluable when I was putting it back together.

Friday I took a picture of where a router was supposed to go, to demonstrate it wouldn't fit there to the boss.

Phone cameras are worth their weight in gold.