Re: Let's talk about the Register for a moment
"I have a little silver badge next to my name. I can't recall why I got it, but I must have done something by my presence."
https://www.theregister.com/2012/03/23/el_reg_forums_faq/
Posts by Pirate Dave
1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
Page:
I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value
Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands
OpenPrinting keeps old printers working – even on Windows
Thursday 10th November 2022 18:07 GMT 
Resource use?
So, eh, how much memory and disk space does this Frankenstein use? I mean, I could see using it on a network print server if a company has numerous still-functional printers with no drivers under Win10/11, but for individual desktops it seems a tad much IMVHO, other than as a novelty. The thought of having to troubleshoot this from 500 miles away to get the Father-in-Law's Brother HL720 going again is scary.
All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing
Tuesday 8th November 2022 22:09 GMT
Re: You don't hack the count..depends where you are..not a big city by the sound of it
"Now add to that the fact that in almost a dozen states one single big city swings the state for one party even though the rest of the state votes solidly the other way and that one single big city has been a single party machine city for several generations and you will start seeing a pattern."
That's happening here in Georgia. Atlanta's population has grown enough to nearly outweigh the rest of the state for state-wide races like President, Senate, or Governor. Add in Savannah (which votes similarly to Atlanta) and the Democrats are practically a shoe-in. Yet county and district voting is still largely Republican outside of those two metro areas.
Tuesday 8th November 2022 21:46 GMT
So he'd have to first get Congress to agree to it, or get 33 or 34 of the 50 States to hold a Constitutional Convention to propose it.
Then it would have to be ratified by 38 States.
That ain't happening in any of our lifetimes, much less Trump's. If he couldn't even get the Governor and Sec of State here in Georgia to fudge voting numbers for him in 2020, then there's scant chance he could ram an entire Amendment through. He doesn't have that much political savy or clout.
Tuesday 8th November 2022 19:53 GMT
I'll admit, I don't take issue with the first 90% of your post. But that last paragraph is pure paranoia.
Even if Trump wins in 2024, by January of 2029 he has to leave the White House and never return again as President/Comander in Chief. That is the law, and I don't think the small ragtag band of his most fervent supporters (who couldn't even successfully commandeer a soft target like the US Capitol for more than a couple of hours) will be able to change that.
Sorry, somebody is stoking the fires of fear in you guys and filling your head full of dystopian fiction.
Tuesday 8th November 2022 16:01 GMT
Yeah, it's hard to follow sometimes. I've found it's easier to be lazy and be a single-issue voter, and since I'm a gun-hoarding-fetishist, I let that become my single issue. Abortion, prayer in school, drug legalization, illegal immigrants, etc, etc., I don't get too worked up about. 2A issues, I do, and the economy, since that's how I fund my gun-fetish. The rest, I'm sort of "meh" about. I could get on board with a few of the more moderate Democrat ideas around "the environment", but they will never, ever fully support gun-rights like the Republicans claim to, and want to go the opposite way about it really, so that's out.
Catching a falling rocket with a helicopter more complex than it sounds, says Rocket Lab
Qualcomm vs Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale
Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams
Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process
How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling
Monday 24th October 2022 03:55 GMT
Re: What a lot of comments!
"It used to be so much more fun around here"
It is just my own opinion, but that period passed about the same time that Lester did, or shortly thereafter. Something subtle but fundamental changed, and, as a reader here since ~2000, I don't know that it's really been for the better. When was the last time we had a Lego re-enactment? or a Flame of the Week? Or a camera review? Was there no-one willing to step in as The Moderatrix II? And was Lester really the only one at El Reg with hairy enough gazongas to take on the US FAA and try to launch a rocket into space from a weather balloon? That's the zany, interesting, non-scripted, off-the-cuff kind of nerd stuff that used to make this place cool. Now, it seems like a lot of it (but not all) is either sponsored, or toned down to appeal to mid-management corporate types.
Like you said, more grown up, less irreverent, less biting the hand that feeds IT.
I guess in the end, it's all about the Benjamins, everything else is just a happy side-effect.
Ad astra tabernamque.
Tumblr says nudes are back on the menu – within reason
Friday 4th November 2022 11:38 GMT
Re: Do you know...
They'll also let you buy a truckload of fertilizer and fuel oil. Or a week's worth of crack/meth/whatever. Or send a sizeable campaign contribution to a Republican candidate. Heck, they'll even give you cash advances whereby you can hire an underage prostitute if that's your thing. Those naughty credit card companies are destroying our society.
As far as I'm aware, the only major bank that's still somewhat gun-friendly is Wells Fargo. The rest jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon years ago, and some, more actively than others, began making life more difficult for weapons dealers. It was just a few months ago that the industry added a new classification specifically for businesses that primarily sell firearms, and no longer classifies them as general "sporting goods" retailers.
Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs
Thursday 3rd November 2022 19:23 GMT
Maybe my memories are foggy, but isn't this similar to what MS tried with eMachines and MSN/MSNBC back in the mid-to-late 90's? ISTR there was a substantial cost reduction or rebate on the purchase of a shitty eMachine desktop if the buyer signed up for an MSN subscription. That didn't work out too well long term (or did it?) But the future is just the past in reverse, so let's try it again.
Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'
Thursday 27th October 2022 20:38 GMT
Re: Contact life span
I had similar happen on an IBM Thinkpad 15 years ago. Was a royal PITA, and never could get them back to "normal". Wound up putting the hard drive in another laptop and being much more careful when unplugging.
All I could figure was the tips of some of the contact "wires" got hung in the grooves of the RJ45 plug and as I pulled it out, they got bent.
Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process
Thursday 27th October 2022 20:20 GMT
Re: ::shrugs::
No, last time I touched Slackware was probably 2001-2002. Roughly the same time frame that I played with Gentoo for a bit. Maybe Caldera too, before the darkness came. I stuck with RedHat until CentOS came out, then hung with them until a couple of years ago (and was still running the aged 6.x line since it was sans systemd).
Thursday 27th October 2022 04:50 GMT
If this had been brought up by anyone besides Poettering, we could at least look at it and go "Meh, don't care". But as it's Poettering pushing it, how are we supposed to maintain a level of professionalism and not descend into various incantations involving the words "fuck" and "massive horse cock"?
Seriously, that dweeb's crap software has already had far too much impact on my professional career as a (former) Linux admin, so at this point, there's not much left to lose.
Fuck Poettering and every goddamned stupid fucking idea he has from here on out.
Sadly, I don't feel better having said that. Still miss initd and the like, and Linux admin under systemd is at least as bad as Windows Server, maybe worse since most of the old ways still work under Windows. But not Linux. Nope, the main distros all smoked from the same crack pipe and wound up with the same incurable cancer. What used to be a fun little OS to make run like blazes is now usually surrounded by a steaming pile of the most putrescent and nigh-on incomprehensible boot garbage imaginable. And now, NOW, Poettering is muttering into his hat about initrd, and we KNOW the distros will just bend over. Again. But it's even worse than before because now he's calling up the spectre of Microsoft's cold, dark fingers around the neck of the Linux kernel itself. That should never EVER be allowed to happen, and if the distros give in to his bullshit, then there really is nothing much left to Linux except a couple of old shells and a grumpy but subdued (neutered?) Fearless Leader Torvalds. Microsoft will have won, and most of our careers will have been in vain.
Fuck Poettering.
Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine
Thursday 27th October 2022 19:50 GMT
I've been using a tool called DesktopOK to keep my icons in place for a few years now. Windows 10 seems to love shoving them all on a single screen when waking up. As far as I know (or at least how I use it), DesktopOK only saves and restores when I tell it to and puts a little icon in the systray for quick access.
It seems like DesktopOK can also be used to tweak a bunch of desktop/aero settings as well - I think that's why I originally got it. I can't remember what that was though, probably some idiotic behavior in Win10. But the icon save/restore function is why I've kept it.
It's not a pretty program - the UI looks like it came straight out of the VB6 Programmer's Guide. But it works really well.
Purpleurchin cryptocurrency miners spotted scouring free GitHub, Heroku accounts
Microsoft will help trim your Azure bill to encourage loyalty
Wednesday 26th October 2022 11:24 GMT
We looked at Azure over the summer to run a single VM for RSA's SecurID. It was going to cost a couple hundred bucks per month, which seemed a tad high, so we went another route. It's not a bad ecosystem, considering it's a Microsoft product, and things did actually work. I still have a personal azure account with a single Rocky Linux VM running that costs about $7 per month, which isn't bad for a hosted web-server.
Rambus offers chip designers a drop-in PCIe 6.0 subsystem
Biden wants SpaceX to beam internet to Iran amid uprising
Gartner thinks enterprise IT will be immune to recession
Thursday 20th October 2022 11:49 GMT
"You know, once you're on that cloud bandwagon, you can't cut that spending,"
Duh. Isn't this exactly what we were warning the PHBs about 10-12 years ago - that "cloud" was just us growing a teat that the provider could permanently attach themselves to? Oh, and that we no longer have absolute control of our data.
President Biden still wants his cybersecurity labels on those smart devices
Thursday 20th October 2022 11:12 GMT
Yep. I have to think this "labelling" will be about as useful as the yellow energy-efficiency labels on appliances - good for about 3 seconds when you're in the store deciding which washing machine to buy, but completely useless after you purchase one. But it keeps several bureaucrats employed with important-sounding titles.
Not to mention, there's not an army of dark forces out there trying to make your washing machine less energy efficient than what's on the yellow label. But the IoT colored light bulb from Google you bought two years ago could be pwned at any second, even though the label on it says it's safe and doesn't store any data (because Google makes sure ($$$) all of their devices get a label giving them the highest rating possible, regardless of whether they actually merit it or not). I mean, a washing machine motor and transmission will degrade along a known statistical curve. IoT security is all about compromise because of unknowns, so any "label" is pretty much out of sync by the time the ink dries.
YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs
Wednesday 19th October 2022 11:10 GMT
"CSMP studied the effects of YouTube recommendations by getting 1,063 adult Americans, recruited via Facebook ads."
I think I see the initial problem right there - "recruited via Facebook ads". So not only was the pool of participants limited to Facebook users, but it was further restricted to those users who were dim-witted enough to actually click on an ad in Facebook. Probably the same subset of the population that always has to open every single email they receive, and then open any and all attachments, and will freely give up their login creds to any scam website that even remotely looks like the Office365 login page.
Other problems with the study aside, the selection process itself seems suspect.
Artist formerly known as Kanye reveals Parler trick: Buying the far-right haven
Wednesday 19th October 2022 01:48 GMT
Re: Twitter censorship is terrible but ...
I think Amazon does the same with their "moderation" of user reviews, although their only known action is to perma-ban you from posting further reviews. Oh, and they also remove all of your previous reviews. And promptly ignore any and all inquiries as to what you did that triggered the perma-ban. You'll never, ever know what you did that broke their "law", even if every review you ever wrote was completely and totally milquetoast.
Great customer service, there. That's why I no longer have an Amazon account, Fuck'em.
Monday 17th October 2022 20:17 GMT
Re: ::yawns::
Well, look at the bright side. If/when he buys the site, we no longer have to see him in the news complaining that Twitter/Facebook/etc has kicked him off again.
It truly is getting weird over here on the Right. Used to be Bushes and Reaganites and the like, now it's all over the place.
Linus Torvalds to kernel devs: Grow up and stop pulling all-nighters just before deadline
Monday 17th October 2022 18:03 GMT
" that should have gone out the window after high school"
I'm surprised at how "Americanized" Torvalds has become to reference "high school". Although, I guess he has kids in school here, so it's part of the day-to-day vocabulary. Still, as a dumb Mercan myself, I found it an odd phrase for a Finn to use.
Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365
Friday 14th October 2022 11:29 GMT
Re: I generally don't mind it...
Amen. I just noticed this morning that MS has re-designed the GUI for editing mail flow rules, because "better"...
And really, what in Hell's name was wrong with the previous (classic) Exchange Admin panel? Oh, right, it had all the Exchange-related settings available from a single screen instead of strewn across 3 or 4 different admin areas. Yeah, we can't have efficiencies like that, gotta make the admins work for their money.
So many stupid ideas in the past 5 years. O365/M365 could be a somewhat decent product if MS would stop fucking with it constantly.
Confirmed: Asteroid shoved by Earth crash probe DART
California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles
Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold
Monday 10th October 2022 17:06 GMT
Ford
I remember Ford had a similar issue with their Escape SUVs back in the late 90's or early 2000's. The wrench-monkeys at the factory had put some steering wheel nuts on upside down, and when they torqued them to spec, some would crack and eventually break. Probably not a good thing to happen when going 70 MPH. I only remember this because I had been looking for a new vehicle at the time and considered the Escape until I heard about that recall. Decided maybe Quality wasn't really Job 1 at Ford anymore...
Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of
Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins
American software biz CEO arrested for allegedly storing election data in China
Thursday 6th October 2022 20:07 GMT
"Republican donor Frederic Eshelman, who sought to recover his $2.5 million donation to the group to investigate election fraud."
What brain-dead moron donates $2.5 million to a barely-created group that has no history, no clout, and no political pull? I mean, regardless of feelings about the election fraud itself, how does someone who's managed to accumulate enough money that they can donate $2.5 million of it not do better due diligence before writing the check? Was this guy part of the HP team that bought Autonomy? Bizarre.
Former Uber CSO convicted for covering up massive 2016 data theft
Thursday 6th October 2022 11:54 GMT
Missed opportunity
"A month later, after managing to identify one of them, an Uber representative met the man in Florida and had him sign a confidentiality agreement."
It's almost too bad they didn't buy the scumbag a pair of cement shoes and take him on an all-expenses-paid deep-sea fishing trip in Tampa Bay.. To show their gratitude, yeah. But no, this is what happens when the lawyers get involved - "confidentiality agreement". So the little piece of shit can continue his mischief against the rest of us. Thanks, Uber.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
