Re: Ancient wisdom
I love the chindogu of the day:
Be sure to come back tomorrow for a different page!
(Somewhat different, anyway. The chindogu above may still be the same one, but the day won’t be 18th March 2022 anymore.)
Posts by JassMan
926 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?
Friday 18th March 2022 10:40 GMT
Re: I Wish...
Last time that happened to me it was because the Relevement Inter-Bancaire showed all the various numbers helpfully grouped with spaces, my banks own examples showing that you can enter spaces but their software not accepting or auto-stripping spaces, resulting in "invalid input please try again". The most helpful bit is that you have to re-enter every single field all over again (instead of editing fields 1 at a time till you get rid of the error).
I am sure there are hundreds of thousands of brilliant coders out there, so why do banks always employ morons?
Microsoft datacenter to heat homes in Finland
Friday 18th March 2022 09:36 GMT
Re: reply to myself because I ran out of time for edit
@YAAC
Brilliant!
I have often thought about this for going off-grid after seeing a small bucket of sand driving a generator with a toothed belt to light a led. You just lift the bucket to the top again for another 4hours of light. I never realised anyone would think big enough to do it on this scale.
Friday 18th March 2022 00:49 GMT
reply to myself because I ran out of time for edit
It is a shame that this is too big an idea for the Tories to grasp. They would rather waste billions building Nuclear plants at many times the total cost even though much of the technology is shared but SPTs are much safer and cheaper.
Probably take less land area as well once you count the exclusion zone around a Nuclear plant. Also if you build the store slightly further away, it would provide great free heating for greenhouses to allow growing tropical fruit etc. in UK.
Friday 18th March 2022 00:35 GMT
What do they do with the heat in summer?
Don't know what the evil empire will do with it but what they SHOULD be doing is pushing it into a big pit in the ground. Then the next winter they will be able to provide heat for twice as many homes. It may sound counter-intuitive to build a really big centralised thermal store but for any underground store, if you double the radius, the losses only go up by the square but the amount of heat stored goes up by the cube.
If you think big enough you can have a low temperature store for low quality heat as above, surrounding a high temperature store. The high temp store could store heat from a Solar Power Tower (SPT) at the same time in order to generate electricity.
Any country such as the UK really should be investing in filling an old quarry with salt and using excess wind-power to to melt the salt so that the heat can be recovered to run steam turbines on days when there is less wind. Obvs it would be even better if you can find a quarry next to a south facing hill for your SPT.
Red Hat effort to shut down WeMakeFedora.org deemed harassment
Thursday 17th March 2022 10:15 GMT
Re: Pocock is a wanker - Not!
IANAL but having just read quite a bit of background into this story, I am struck by how thoughtful Mr.Pocock seems to be. I get the impression that the people who disagree with him, are the same as those who couldn't see the nuance in statements by Richard Stallman preceding his forced retirement (and later re-instatement) from FSF. Pocock also seems to be a very nuanced person who has taken no personal viewpoint on various recent controversies. He merely points out that lots of people wade in to discussions claiming first hand knowledge of events, when their knowledge is obviously 2nd or even 3rd hand, or possibly just heresay.
It appears that the title used by Tomato42, is based simply on the anodyne statement by a Debian spokesperson which offers Pocock no right of reply.
You can read a typical Pocock statement here. Judge for yourself whether he is a wanker as stated or whether he is just an anti-troll.
I expect I will now also get loads of downvotes from people who read the first sentence of any webpage they come across, and believe they have completely understood all the nuance and complexity of an argument they haven't even read.
We are all very time-poor these days but the world would be a much better place if people refrained from jumping on band-wagons before they find which way that wagon is heading. If you don't have time to read everything about an issue before making a statement, at least we can keep it from getting personal.
Kubernetes container runtime CRI-O has make-me-root flaw
ReactOS shows off SMP support in open-source take on Windows
Monday 14th March 2022 17:35 GMT
Re: IT OS need Versus Machine tool need @Nate Amsdem
Solves a problem that doesn't exist really.
There is a problem which really does exist, which is that many people who run linux own non-PC hardware such as GPSes and other devices which need their firmware updating, which can only be updated via Windows because the OEMs refuse to make code which is compatible with Wine or even better release a Linux binary.
Viasat, Rosneft hit by cyberattacks as Ukraine war spills online
Monday 14th March 2022 17:18 GMT 
As much use as a chocolate teacup
"We know that all impacted customers' modems will be rendered unusable and therefore we need to replace hardware," said a Viasat email to end users
Tha'ts as good as "All faults as and service errors with your internet must be logged on the service page on our website.
How are they going to receive the email if their connection to the internet is down?
Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'
Monday 14th March 2022 16:58 GMT
Re: GDPR?
Clearview AI was fined €20m ($21.8m) by Italy's data protection watchdog for unlawfully scraping selfies
Lucky they just got $30M in extra funding last October. /sarc
Microsoft proposes type syntax for JavaScript
For those with zero trust in zero-trust networks, this industry alliance may help
Sunday 13th March 2022 11:15 GMT 
There's management speak and then there's...
stupidity? ignorance?
"The internet is becoming the new network," said Kavitha Mariappan, EVP of customer experience and transformation at Zscaler.
What does she think internet means. The definition has always been "a network of networks". How much more networky does she think the internet can yet become.
New Chinese exascale supercomputer runs 'brain-scale AI'
Saturday 12th March 2022 00:09 GMT
@b0llchit
I think you calculation of 25W /core is likely to be a bit over or else you seem to think they are using very old fab tech. The 3GHz 8 core (16thread) cpu in my PC only consumes 15W and contains an embedded nvidia GPU. Even the heavy duty version only consumes 4W per core. Mind you, I must admit that even 4W/core will result in an impressive energy bill. If they went for RISC, the power could be as low as 50mW/core for 3GHz so they would be in the low MW range.
Still, they can now run it off a gas turbine powered generator using all that discounted gas they are getting from Russia.
'Significant business growth' fueled Microsoft's emissions rise
Friday 11th March 2022 20:17 GMT
So which GHG scope does bloatware fall into
Under the Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) protocol, Scope, 1 covers emissions resulting directly from an organization's operations, Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from operations that are not wholly under the organization’s control, such as from generated fuels, while Scope 3 includes emissions generated in the "value chain."
Scope 1 Is probably pretty low because hopefully they use waste datacentre heat to warm their staff in winter.
Scope 2 sounds like emissions from using electricity to run the evil empire's coding, data and cloud centres
Scope 3 covers emissions associated with business travel, procurement, waste and water.
Its obvious that they have the temerity to produce software which uses more processing power to run and larger storage to hold the bloatware, then they blame the customers for wasting energy. A prime example is just booting into windows. My Minty Asus cold boots to login in around 10seconds the first 4 of which is the BIOS. My friends similarly speced Windows takes just under 50 unless you boot from hibernate. My system partition is 18GB, but the last time I tried to install Windows it failed because the Netbook I was using only had a 32GB NVMe which wasn't big enough for the OS and certainly no user space.
Also once Linux is running, I have neverr seen the CPU % rise above 50% for more than 1 second and mostly sits around 5% or less for general computing tasks. Everything (except some websites) seems to happen virtually instantaneously, which is far from the time I spent twiddling my thumbs when I was a Windows user.
Microsoft squashes OneDrive bug that caused files to linger after PC wipe
Wednesday 9th March 2022 20:36 GMT
The bug, which turned up in the Windows release health dashboard in February, is an ironic one, considering the disastrous October 2018 roll out of Windows 10, which infamously gave users extra disk space by quietly wiping their data.
That's no bug - it is a welcome feature. If the evil empire has just wiped your data, I think you would be extremely grateful to have a way to recover it.
Dell opts out of Microsoft's Pluton security for Windows
Wednesday 9th March 2022 20:16 GMT
Thank god, someone's got some sense
"AMD Ryzen 6000 processors will include Pluton as it's present in those AMD chips, though the feature will be disabled by default. AMD has provided an option for users to turn the feature on and off."
Just as it should be. I just hope it doesn't add too much to the cost of AMD chips.
I also hope that the evil empire doesn't find a way to subvert it so that it is always on, if the PC has Windows installed, so that it prevents you from wiping the disk and installing a useful OS.
AMD confirms Ryzen chips' stuttering performance on Windows 10, 11
Wednesday 9th March 2022 17:36 GMT
Re: Yuck.
"If you need real time software, you use a real time OS. Windows and Linux aren't that. "
Is not exactly true. While there is no Real Time Windows, there is certainly a Real Time version of Linux called RTLinux
Internet backbone Cogent cuts Russia connectivity
NHS Digital's demise bad for 55 million patients' privacy – ex-chairman
Friday 4th March 2022 16:38 GMT
Re: FTFY @42656e4d203239
Replying to myself here as I have just checked and care.data was an NHS England project. There is a common point here and that is that both projects were initiated by the Conservative government. - Those guardians of our data who recently had a "consultation" on replacing/hobbling the GDPR in order to make it easier for anyone who donates to the party to use our data in any way they see fit, as long as they say it is for research. That is "research" in any form - not specifically science.
Friday 4th March 2022 16:19 GMT
Re: FTFY @42656e4d203239
I agree. I read the sentence "Doing away with an independent statutory body in NHS Digital, charged with defending patient rights, is itself, unfortunate. " and thought it was a statement designed by Putin's media mis-information team.
NHS digital were the ones trying to sell off our "anonymised" data and still have a page on the intertubes allowing you to opt-out. Which by the way is non-GDPR compliant in that it has the analytics and social media boxes pre-checked.
Mind you care.data was just as bad and it was NHS England
Saving a loved one from a document disaster
Friday 4th March 2022 09:16 GMT
Re: Imperrfect
I totally agree. There are so many apps around now which force you to use the mouse when a simple hot-key would work just as well.
Also I am pretty sure that RSI didn't exist until the mouse was invented. The shape of mice (even so called ergonomic ones) is not conducive to making hand movements consistent with human skeletal structure.
Intel creates lite version of vPro management tech
Thursday 3rd March 2022 17:16 GMT
The Essentials package is a subset of full vPro – which is now known as vPro Enterprise.
I wonder if Tesco are going to claim trademark infringement over this. Also if they had done the industry standard "Lite" version you could differentiate with vPro E & vPro L, but now you have to do it in full each time you add it to your asset register.
UK government starts public consultation on telco security
Google blocks FOSS Android tool – for asking for donations
Thursday 3rd March 2022 13:17 GMT
Since when have Google and Apple been charities
If people make a charitable donation to a starving programmer who is offering free software for the good of civilisation, what right do the mega corps have to steal that small donation.
At he very least they should allow the first say $50K to be across all apps by an author.
Harvard, MIT, Berkeley are still fighting over genome-editing patents. Now another ruling
Maxar Technologies: The eye in the sky tracking invasion of Ukraine
Tuesday 1st March 2022 18:14 GMT
Re: Eye in the sky until blinded
Putin – DGAF!khuylo! <-- FTFY
Even has its own wiki page as you can see.
Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies
Tuesday 1st March 2022 00:26 GMT
Re: That is in the same category as "We stand for freedom of Ukraine but forbid RT at home"
They should allow RT to continue, but be forced to permanently display a banner (in an easily legible font) stating "Everything you see here should be fact checked before consumption"
It mostly works on farcebook and twatter, or so I have been told - I have never used either.
Banning RT altogether is an excuse for Pooty to kick western media out of Russia again.
Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!
Friday 25th February 2022 11:11 GMT
Re: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
WTF? The originator was smart enough to hide files, and thought that burying them deep in a "operating system" directory tree would mean they were invisible to every one else.
What support team gives users the rights to enable write access to the OS directories?
A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again
Friday 25th February 2022 10:04 GMT
All part of gullability testing
"The first one is always Were you satisfied with your buying experience? Then comes Would you like to write a review? If you are foolish enough to comply with this request, you get another asking Were you satisfied with your review-writing experience? This is rapidly followed by Were you satisfied by our previous email asking about your review-writing experience? and Were you satisfied by our previous email asking about our previous email asking about your experience of receiving emails asking about your satisfaction with the emails you are receiving?"
I don't know how effective it really is, but I always do my shopping in a private window with all the usual protections. It seems to reduce the requests to make a repeat purchase. I presume that eventually advertisers will eventually work out how to make private windows non-private (as far as cross-site cookies etc. are concerned) and there will no longer be any reason to use private windows.
As far as reviews are concerned I always put that I am disappointed and put "I am pissed off with surveys" as the reason for being disappointed. I don't have much hope that they will get the message but it is somehow cathartic.
Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup
Friday 18th February 2022 23:26 GMT
Re: @vincent himpe
I'm sorry but I run an OS (which just happens to be Mint XFCE) and then I chose the best app for whatever task I have at the time.
But, as you say, some stuff is windows only. It doesn't stop you running it in Wine which is supported by virtually all flavours of Linux. OK, if it is a genuine MS app you will need to run a version from before they started deliberately inhibiting running on Wine, but apart from FlightSim there is usually a better 3rd party app to do the same job.
And who knows, eventually ReactOS may work as well as the real thing.
Friday 18th February 2022 20:19 GMT
Re: we are all slaves now.
In spite of all the naysayers between here and the post by Omnipresent, there could still be value in finding out which flavours are the most liked. Developers tend to write for whatever flavour they are using at the time and generally are open to switching if they can see advantages in doing so. I certainly think Ubuntu have lost their way with putting virtually everything into snaps and flatpaks. Thank <deity-of-choice> for Mint and its derivatives. I tried the latest Ubuntu for 1 day and decided they were trying to out-bloat Windows.
I find that apps packaged in .deb seem to generally work in Mint regardless of which other flavour they were designed for, as long as they have a proper dependency list built in. I have always wondered why no-one has written a VirtualFlavor (similar to a VM) shim, to allow users to run apps written with alternative libraries to run, if the target machine is a completely different family. A lot of the functionality already exists within Python and Qt to allow for different versions to exist on one machine. This would save a lot of memory (and probably disk space) compared to flatpak, snap etc.
Any survey should also have a like/dislike/meh option for various aspects of the chosen flavour such as systemd, gnome, gtk, qt etc.
Friday 18th February 2022 19:36 GMT
@not Irrelevant
Not a good idea to over-generalise. There are plenty more OSes than just Windoze, iOS and 'droid.
I have never read of any flavour of Linux needing an internet connection except those embedded in IoT devices.
RiscOS still works even on the latest Pi. I don't believe that MorphOS needs the internet nor does OpenVMS.
If you insist on being able to run Windows executables, you can always try ReactOS.
File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did
Friday 18th February 2022 12:23 GMT
Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines @45RPM
This is true. But even reading data can be dangerous - although I’m don’t know of any vulnerabilities in file off the top of my head.
Only if you live in Missouri and not in the way you thought.
Food for thought on the return to the office
Friday 18th February 2022 12:08 GMT 
Sure, they hated it at first and complained bitterly at the vast personal expense of keeping their laptop battery charged.
I solved that one by telling the ACPI to only charge to 50%. According to the interwebs this also means the batteries have a much longer service life.
Obviously you don't need to use xed [I'll probably get loads of downvotes for not using Vi], and if you want to use something other than 50% you need to change the ExecStart line. I think this is the first time I have found systemd to be useful.
$ sudo xed /etc/systemd/system/battery-charge-threshold.service
==================Start of content: system/battery-charge-threshold.service==================
[Unit]
Description=Set the battery charge threshold
After=multi-user.target
StartLimitBurst=0
[Service]
Type=oneshot
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'echo 50 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold'
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
=================End Content=============================
$ sudo systemctl enable battery-charge-threshold.service
$ sudo systemctl start battery-charge-threshold.service
We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior
Wednesday 16th February 2022 23:58 GMT
Re: confused
"PS: all my answers to account recovery questions are made up, and usually using alternative and creative meanings of the question themselves - and different for each site."
Same here - all my fake details and responses to their spurious questions are stored in pwsafe. Every single website I use has the longest most complex password that pwsafe will generate and still get me into the website.
Wednesday 16th February 2022 23:50 GMT
I don't know if the above are in the UK, but I registered for online access as soon as it became available. I was not given a choice of provider and I rue the day because they blatantly tell you that all your info is shared with their "partners" but don't give you the chance to opt out. As a result I have online access which I never use.
My partner was recently offered online access with a choice of providers, so I checked out all on the list for her. It seems the only one which promises not to sell off your info is Patally, which I assume is a truncation of "patient ally". My GP claim they don't know how to arrange for me to change provider. Guess I will just have to keep badgering them until they find out and implement it.
Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'
Wednesday 16th February 2022 01:00 GMT
How did this law ever get drafted
(5) Accesses a computer, a computer system, or a computer network, and intentionally examines information about another person;
By this definition you don't even need to decode anything. The moment you read the From field at the head of an email you have broken the law.
It sounds like the entire legislature are idiots, not just the govenor.
Wednesday 16th February 2022 00:47 GMT
Re: Wondering if some monetary damages would make sense. The "american way"
Because most countries have a system to prevent idiots achieving legislative power.
Obviously the UK is not one one of these. Otherwise the man in charge wouldn't insist that he was not at a party when all around him were wearing tinsel, while there was booze on his desk and the police are in posession of photographic evidence
Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts
Tuesday 15th February 2022 17:42 GMT
Re: Yes @Duncan Macdonald
Being a bit of a pedant, but I think "sufficient for 80%+ of pages on the Web" is a bit of a fake-fact. Pretty sure that the billions of pages in Asiatic and African fonts make up considerably more than the remaining 20%. Mind you I can't read them on the occasions when I accidentally fall into them which is why I have suppressed 90% of the default fonts installed by Linux.
Why the f**k don't Linux distributions ask if you want 200+ non-western fonts installed. I'm sure loads of people would appreciate the reduction in install time. [Maybe windoze installs equivalent fonts as well - I wouldn't know since I haven't used it for 15+ years]
UK regulator 'broke international law', says Facebook
Tuesday 15th February 2022 16:53 GMT
there was "global concern" about the CMA blocking the merger.
More likely there is global concern that Meta think they are above the law of any individual country. On balance it seems that all the concern comes from Meta so technically as a global corporation they are correct but this is a half truth at best.
Facebook exposes 'god mode' token that could siphon data
Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians
Friday 11th February 2022 18:31 GMT
Except in Australia
Stand on the wrong ant ants its mate will jump on your leg and bite. If you're lucky it will be a variety that only feels like someone covered your leg in burning petrol. Jack Jumper ants in the south are even worse. If you are very unlucky you could end up dead.
France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US
Thursday 10th February 2022 23:00 GMT
Re: Confusing GA with advertising
It’s fairly obvious really, but sometimes the obvious is difficult to see. Total internet advertising spend in the U.K. is £16bn. Total e-commerce revenue was £693bn. Advertising is just 2.3% of total e-commerce. It’s a rounding error. But if you effectively ban internet advertising by making the terms too onerous, you don’t just lose the £16bn (which a lot of people would cheer), you also lose the £693bn.
Are you saying that everyone who blocks adverts never buys anything? I don't think so.
I for one buy what I need after researching several review sites, checking a manufacturers reliability ratings then finally comparing prices. I NEVER buy anything simply because I saw it advertised. In fact I usually refuse to buy things which I see advertised unless it really does turn out to be something I need at the time (rather than something I have just bought a week earlier), or if I do need X product, that the advertised one actually has some USP which is worth its while.
Thursday 10th February 2022 17:53 GMT
Re: Where is the UK in all of this ?
Considering we have a government running gov.uk which has GA turned on, and on many pages is listed as necessary, I'm guessing they are not going to enforce the UK version of GDPR. However it seems that each department has their own set of cookies on gov.uk so our glorious leader should do a bit of leadership and tell all his ministers to clean up their act. [As if.]
The more worrying thing which needs testing is, if you reject cookies on one part of the site but then view another departments pages, is it then turned on for for pages where you have previously rejected cookies.
The root gov.uk certainly has "essential":true and claims to allow you to turn off "measurement" which is says uses GA but on other parts of the you can't turn analytics off. According to my cookie manager I have visited 15 different subsites within gov.uk and they vary between 1 and 15 cookies but I have never been given the option to turn of more than 3.
Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone usage
Thursday 10th February 2022 18:09 GMT
Re: Also no audio on Ubuntu Snap Zoom-client
I have resurrected an old laptop for use with zoom and teams. Clean install with no useful data, contacts lists or calendars or even apps (unused) other than the minimum install. Anyone wants to zoom me they send an email with plenty of notice and I open the laptop as required then download all latest patches before connecting. Call me paranoid, but I would rather go for a sanitary laptop than trust to a tinfoil hat.
UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok
Wednesday 9th February 2022 00:27 GMT
simple answer
The government should just give an anonymous randomly allocated password(ARAP)* of say 32chars to everyone on the voting register. Depending on how tech savvy each voter is they can either have it on a bit of paper or they can store it in a password manager. When you want to use a site which the government determines to be harmful, you paste in your ARAP, and the site checks with a gov.Uuk database to see it that ARAP has been issued. Only valid ARAPs get to login. Since the voter register is checked every year, a new ARAP can be issued each time and on local election day, all old ARAPs get revoked and the new ones take effect. This would slow down the ability of kiddies to copy their parents ARAP and pass it round amongst friends.
Kids could also be issued similar ARAPs, if their parents think they should be allowed access to FB etc. These non-voter ARAPs would tell the site the user is not a voter (ie. under-age) so they can still get into a non-adult version.
Obviously the database would need to check the credentials of the requesting site to prevent script kiddies pretending to be a site and trying every possible ARAP until the db said the ARAP was valid. Sites using the age check would also need to check for repeated age check requests all coming from the same client device.
*Alternatively it could use a system like "just three words" - maybe just 5 words - I can't be arsed to work out the maths.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
