* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

WWW = Woeful, er, winternet wendering? CERN browser rebuilt after 30 years barely recognizes modern web

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interestingly,

I see no shiny, just different windows with different documents being rendered inside them and dialog boxes. Seems pretty standard X Window-like stuff to me. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interestingly,

I don't think the Next's GUI was that far way from TWM and Motif on UNIX, and other hardware of the time (Amiga, ST, Classic Mac) ended up with web browsers of one description or another by the mid 90s, which I guess is understandable as that's when home access took off.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The only external content is Google Analytics for simple stats.

Don't let your site become a tentacle on the Google octopus...

List of web analytics software

Dan 55 Silver badge

No https for you

It doesn't take long to run into a brick wall. Not even the GDPR version of USA Today works. NPR does though as does the BBC.

Oddly enough, with ye olde formatting, the BBC site shows how we're being treated as simpletons with sentence-length paragraphs.

Turn on, tune in, drop out: Apple's whizz-bang T2 security chips hit a bum note for Mac audio

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Who Actually Wants the T2?

To answer your question, Apple, because:

1) Can't use 3rd Party SSD replacements,

2) Certain components can't be repaired without the blessing of Apple,

3) Alternative Operating Systems have somewhere between no ability to see the internal SSD and intermittent support

Expect more and more things to be pulled into the T2 chip in future models, so it becomes less and less repairable.

Guess who's working on a health data-slurping digital tool? Bzzt! Nope, it's the UK Department for Work and Pensions

Dan 55 Silver badge

Hostile environment turned up a little more for everyone

"It's getting a bit warm in here" says the frog to nobody in particular.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: proof of concept to expose NHS data to the department's systems

It's the DWP, that can be very easily arranged.

Here come the riled MPs (it's private, huh), Facebook's a digital 'gangster' ('disingen-u-ous'). Zuckerberg he is a failure (on sharing data)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Regulate the algorithms?

You don't need to regulate the algorithms, just the output.

If it recommends flat earth videos or Alex Jones, drop that output, tell the machine learning algorithm it's been naughty so it'll recommend it less in the future, and go back to get another recommendation.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

Now, will the government act...

... or will it be buried, like it seems anything to do with the Leave campaign and foreign funding has.

Want to create fake web profile pics? This creepy AI tool makes them on demand. Plus predictive policing, and more

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Re: I love that site - for privacy reasons!

One-time profile photos that don't show up in a reverse image search such as Tineye or Google Images... They must be getting a lot of hits from St. Petersburg right now.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

Couple the nVidia profile pic generator with OpenAI...

... and you have an all purpose commentard generator for Facebook, Twitter, and below the line on newspaper sites. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, according to the Commons report into Facebook out today, it already did.

Dratted hipster UX designers stole my corporate app

Dan 55 Silver badge
Angel

That's what I do. Doesn't everyone?

Dan 55 Silver badge

That link is the link equivalent of a modern UI suffering from all the typical problems we're on about here.

1. It's not actually a link, it needs to be copied and pasted.

2. You don't know what it is beforehand so you don't know if it's relevant or not.

3. Time could kill the link shorter (Google will be killing goo.gl).

4. Link shortners can take you to malware.

Here you go:

Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Do what Microsoft used to do...

No:

Windows 95 Usability Testing (1993)

There was a lot of thought put into it, unlike Windows 8, 8.1, and especially 10 where they fling any old shit at the wall to see what sticks.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's not just designers

How will the intermediaries justify their salary if developers sit down and talk to users and produce something they actually want?

It has to be "intuitive" but slow as that means no training and any slow work is the user's fault.

No fax given: Blighty's health service bods told to ban snail mail, too

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 2FA

You don't get a call and a robot voice speaking the message to you when you answer?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 2FA

Now you have to implement, maintain, pay for and secure two communications channels, and keep them both operative in order to do anything.

So the same as SMS then. Only SMS is more easily got round (a bit of social engineering with the operator's call centre droid or someone on the inside and you've got a duplicate SIM).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 2FA

SMS doesn't need a smartphone, they'll work with dumbphones. You can send them to landlines too.

TOTP would be better though. By which I don't mean the BBC programme.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: On the subject of ancient history

That was because Sinclair reused the ZX80 RAM pack mould instead of Rick's ZX81 RAM pack design.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Yay landfill!

For older devices, however, a firmware patch is going to be necessary to handle the week epoch rollover, and GPS.gov recommends anyone who is unsure about their readiness for the turnover, particularly enterprises, consult the manufacturer to make sure they have the proper updates and protections in place.

What do you think Garmin and TomTom are going to do, put out updates or sell the most they've sold in years?

Roses are red, we've received about fifty. Google's next trick? Pixels for the thrifty

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Can I correct the subheading?

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Have this cheap mobile

So we can stalk you

Take your pick: Linux on Windows 10 hardware, or Windows 10 on Linux hardware

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

"full-blown Windows 10 desktop"

Is it curable?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Neither, please

Oh, Linux on an ARM laptop would be nice. It's the old Asus EEE laptop come full circle, useful for sysadmins, developers, and as a kid's computer. And you can have more colours than bright green.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Has anyone seen the film "Minority Report"?

The UK does not and has never had free speech rights until the Human Rights Act 1998 came along (which incorporates Article 10 of the ECHR into British law).

Government ministers have said on numerous occasions that they want to rescind the HRA and replace it with something else.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: https://www.conservatives.com/

That really should come under "economic terrorism" which is an actual thing in British law, because she can revoke A50 at any time but chooses not to.

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: First remove the engine...

This the life one...

Baby Manual (3rd edition)

Conception to two years. All models covered.

Dan 55 Silver badge

RIP Haynes

Although your manuals could have been a bit less terse than "assembly is the reverse of disassembly".

iFixit's instructions also follow their lead as well with "to reassemble your device, follow these instructions in reverse order".

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Peppa Pig, for those fortunate enough to have avoided the cartoon, is an ageless talking pig-child who lives in a world populated by talking mammals. The squeaking of the creature and associated theme tune is usually enough to kick off an involuntary twitch in a parent’s eyelid while also assuring a few minutes of peace as offspring are transfixed.

It's like a David Attenborough documentary compared to competing cartoons.

I also identify with Daddy Pig and agree with your analysis. <twitch>

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Disk in continuous use.

Where might one discuss this topic further?

Ask Woody

This month they've highlighted a bug with SMB/NTLM.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Disk in continuous use.

It's a brave person which installs patches less than 24 hours after MS releases them...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Is it Acrobat or PDF itself?

The chances are pretty slim. The client is probably better coded than that mess on Windows (unless it's Adobe's client of course), if the PDF file contains an x86-only payload it won't work on ARM, and it has to deal with Android's sandbox.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It's 2019...

... and Microsoft's server daemons still don't spawn a low-rights process to parse untrusted input from the Internet.

RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun's bright SPARC

Dan 55 Silver badge

Low-level programming on the old 8-bit processors with their paucity of registers and addressing modes etc. always felt more like puzzle solving than most of what I've done since.

You should have tried the Z80, there are quite a few more than the 6502... I never thought the zero page was an adequate substitute.

Dan 55 Silver badge

This definitely needs porting to the +3 and Next.

Alternatively, try FUZIX for Z80 machines.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Halt and Catch Fire

Sorry, got to be pedantic, on the Z80 it's:

DI

HALT

Never got to learn Z8000 unfortunately, but it deserved to do far better than be steamrollered under the '86 (as did the 68000).

Ivan to be left alone: Russia preps to turn its internet into an intranet if West opens cyber-fire

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Airgapped

Or Ivan disconnects from the net, there's a huge cyber attack on a western country, Ivan connects, Putin appears on RT and says, "What's happened here? We weren't connected. lol".

Thanks for all those data-flow warnings, UK.gov. Now let's talk about your own Brexit prep. Yep, just as we thought

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: a second *binding* referendum and cancel the madness that is Brexit.

The EU is willing to offer Single Market + Customs Union to the UK without it being a member of the EU, so where's the lack of compromise on the EU side?

The reality is this would have been all done and dusted six months ago if Theresa May didn't change her backstop from a NI-wide thing into a UK-wide thing... and then vote against it anyway.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why would anyone be driving *any* lorries through them...

Trouble is come March 30th there's going to be a big obstruction in the way:-

The UK.

Ireland is working on that. New routes from Dublin and Rosslare around the UK, skipping a possible logistics nightmare.

And going the other way, it seems the UK is also the obstruction, denying ECMT permits to Northern Irish haulage operators so they won't be able to work in Ireland in a no deal scenario, and if you read the tweet there's a lovely UNIX epoch bug in the message shown to haulage operators, which bodes well for the magic unicorn customs system on the NI border that the UK is proposing if they can't even get a date right.

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Can I buy more than one Pi Zero?

The Zero is made in small batches.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Not Just a Store

10 PRINT "PLEASE WAIT WHILE DEMO OF WHATEVER OVERHYPED GAME IT IS THIS MONTH LOADS"

20 RANDOMIZE USR 1234 *

Or similar always got a queue of people in Smiths.

* Or whatever the address was to drop you into the tape save routine, which made it look like it was loading something.

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Updating to Windows 10

Yes.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Updating to Windows 10

Wasn't it true that a key for Win 7 retail gets converted into a key for Win 10 OEM (i.e. locked to the device) though?

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Blue jeans, sweatshirt with a logo on it, plimsolls, that kind of thing."

Nowt wrong with them, those are my best clothes.

Leaky child-tracking smartwatch maker hits back at bad PR

Dan 55 Silver badge

"a simple and cheap kids' watch"

Not that simple as it has GPS and ticks the box in the marketing brochure, simple enough for abysmal security. Why do purveyors of IoShit always choose that sweet spot I wonder?

OK, Google. Music in 2019 isn't what it was, but Play nice, will ya?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Out of curiosity ...

If you had an MP3 or AAC without DRM and set its release date to 2019 in the tags, I bet it wouldn't refuse to play it.

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Um, guys, only 1 month left

Yeah, ten years of central-government imposed austerity does that to a country.

But not as much as leaving the EU with a deal yet not even knowing if you'll be able to trade with 71 countries via EU trade agreements during the transition period (Twitter link to jump over FT paywall). We ain't seen nothing yet.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: As a yank

In these heady political times, you'd better edit your post and put a joke alert icon on it...

WeWork restructuring bites El Reg hacks where it hurts as afternoon brew delayed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You guys had mugs?

I'm another time traveller just arrived from 1978 and I can see that nothing has changed, at least as far as vox pops go.

What's a coffee machine by the way, is it that thing which makes a cup of Mellow Birds?

Accused hacker Lauri Love to sue National Crime Agency to retrieve confiscated computing kit

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Representing himself

It's incredibly rare to represent yourself.

But not as rare now as it was a few years ago...

How legal aid cuts filled family courts with bewildered litigants