* Posts by Dan 55

15338 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

China launches yet another crackdown on social media

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Social media is a curse on humanity

I can watch a livestreamed shooting to back that statement up, there should be another one along in a minute.

Check out Codon: A Python compiler if you have a need for C/C++ speed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Downloaded Codon from Github.....and then......

Seems like you really need to be careful of the results, because the expression evaluator isn't really like Python's.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I still seem to get along with Perl. I'm not sure about what that says about how I think.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not the first time

IMHO, he should just let twitter be the domain of the crazies until after the 2024 election. After that, god help us all

I thought that was what he was doing, wasn't it?

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Doing a Musk

Surprisingly, two racists agree with a racist.

US officials probe Tesla's incredible detaching steering wheel

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The USA is well known for (poor) build quality.

No, they build stuff according to spec, which may be different to good stuff.

AmigaOS 3.2.2 released for those feeling nostalgic

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: PiStorm is blasphemy

Vampire is expensive unobtainum and as just as alien technology as the PiStorm is, from an early-90s point of view.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Biases

Is that because you've exhausted the possibilities of Lander and Pacmania and are at a loose end?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Amiga is alive and kicking

3.2 doesn't have the tick on the boot screen, this ruins the nostalgia. Hasn't someone hacked together a 3.2 ROM image with the tick back on it yet?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Emulation Possible?

There's Amiga Forever which is above board but the chances of Hyperion ROMs being bundled with that are non-existent.

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

This breaking news just in

Emerald mine heir Elon Musk is still a twat.

Microsoft makes Outlook Mac native email app a freebie

Dan 55 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Does it slurp my data?

You are correct, if you set it up to work with a non-MS IMAP server then everything is synced to MS' own servers.

No need for that unless they're slurping.

Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?

Dan 55 Silver badge

I think it would be a saner design (even for MS) if apps wrote logs and then a telemetry process uploaded them, rather than each app uploading its own log.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Ok... I have to ask

AOSP comes with a calculator app so you wouldn't need to write an app either.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Ok... I have to ask

Windows calculator actually does phone home. I think it's just a data fetish at this point.

Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Anti-woke chatbot?

All those tweets he sends at 4am in a desperate attempt to raise engagement are tiring him out and Microsoft wouldn't let him buy Tay.

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Technology strategy

About food imports, if the UK were still party to single market agreements it could do something about substandard food. As it is, the whole of the EU knows that the substandard stuff can be dumped on the UK which now has no in-market controls or legal remedies and has chosen to waive import controls to avoid slowing down the supply chain even more. Before this food would probably have been destroyed.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Don't go grasping nettles

The car industry got screwed up by non-tarrif barriers due to the B word, which everyone is trying to pretend hasn't happened. Any new fabs will face much the same problem.

Also, no money will be forthcoming unless directorships for chums are available.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: DCMS?

Hurrah, just the CV you need for sciencey stuff.

As she's just moved to the DSIT from the DCMS, she's brought the chip strategy with her in her briefcase/pocket/on the back of a postage stamp, so that bodes well.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Now there's a challenge

The Tories successfully manage to get away with repeatedly claiming the previous accumulated clusterfucks have nothing to do with them after every change in leadership. It was wearing a bit thin but then luckily for them Truss came along.

Now we're building computers from lab-grown brain cells

Dan 55 Silver badge

Brain and brain, what is brain?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

brain in a box

Suddenly had a flashback to Tales Of The Unexpected - 'William and Mary'. I wasn't traumatised by this at all, oh no.

Intruder alert: WH Smith hit by another cyber attack

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: As someone married to an Ex-WH Smith Employee

If they were using Tasword 2, Vu-File, and Vu-Calc the data would be more secure.

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

Dan 55 Silver badge

If you have a custom UI then you could remove the new shortcuts to GlaDOS, sorry, Bing Chat. Obviously the only reasonable thing to do is break everyone's custom UIs.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So how does that work then ?

Are you sure there's an account recovery mechanism on Signal? If you mean setting a PIN so other people can't register using your phone number, they don't store your phone number to do that.

You could, if you wanted, register Signal using another phone number.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So how does that work then ?

Signal don't actually have anyone's phone number, just a hash of it. The change would have to be made in the client.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You know ...

So making left wing policies for different reasons make them right wing? Okay.

Different parties with different places on the political spectrum can have have the same policy for different reasons, yes.

Regarding the medical cannabis, thousands of people are now using it as it is possible to get a private prescription

That is right, and using the law to carve out a new market just for the private sector is definitely not a classic left-wing policy.

The linked FT "study" is simply bollocks, as they are just parroting the WEF narrative

... and yeah, I can tell this is going to be a productive thread. I'll get off here if you don't mind.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You know ...

The small business thing is easy to understand. The Tories' biggest donors are now from the financial sector, they want tax cuts and fewer regulations and that's what they get. The welfare state is sacrificed, small business is taxed to make up the difference. That is not left-wing.

The things you list that you claim communists are over the moon about are also things that authoritarians are over the moon about.

In practice it is impossible to get an NHS prescription for cannabis. It seems to have been a law made for just for two children who needed it in 2018 to get the public off the government's back, since then the NHS won't fund or prescribe it.

Finally same-sex marriage was passed into law relatively late compared to neighbouring countries and opposite-sex couples couldn't even enter into a civil partnership until 2019. It took a long time for the UK to allow something as common sense as civil partnerships and marriage for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Nothing particularly left-wing about that.

When Truss had her mayfly-like premiership an FT study found this:

Study names Tories as ‘most right-wing government’ in the world

Since then the Tories have inched back, but only because they realised they were boiling the frog a little too quickly.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You know ...

Please highlight a left-wing policy from the Tories, if you would.

The only reason some people call it left wing is their Overton window has sadly become unhinged and they're now under the impression that Atilla the Hun was a centrist dad.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So how does that work then ?

How would this even work if you're at the Scottish border? One step north to apply Scottish law, two steps south to apply English law?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I suppose we should be thankful for an actual UK story, but...

Someone burglarized El Reg's dictionary.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So how does that work then ?

Not even that, if it's on an England-and-Wales based device.

I'm sure the Home Office have got it all thought out, there must be an IP subnet reserved just for E&W or something.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Tell me you're middle-class without telling me etc etc

If you think that's bad wait till you see what Plan 2025 is - it's a bet to see how many credulous people fall for made-up conspiracy theory bullshit on social media. We seem to have arrived at the peak two years early.

Pop open a cask: Homebrew version 4.0.0 is here

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Probably the only version of UNIX™ without the UNIX

Okay, if the concept which proved useful for both MacOS and Linux users is not no-root installations after all, you'd still need to set up a /home/linuxbrew directory on Linux which in most distributions would require a password to create the new linuxbrew user. It's not e.g. ~/.linuxbrew which would not require a password.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Probably the only version of UNIX™ without the UNIX

Homebrew was originally built for macOS, but the concept proved useful for Linux users, too. Either you may not have root access to the machine – or even if you do, that may only let you install ancient versions which aren't much help, but you can't readily update.

Installing Homebrew outside of /usr/local is not officially supported and Apple removed permissions to access /usr/local for non-root users years ago. Then a few years later they removed root. In short, on a Mac, no user installation for you - you need the admin password at least once.

Tesla hits the brakes on rollout of Full Self-Driving code to new users

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Drive-by downvoter was here...

... or yet another example of Autopilot going wrong?

ChatGPT, write a report about database glitches that crashed you today

Dan 55 Silver badge
Go

Keep at it Zuck

If you sink half your profits into VR and the other half into ML, one can hope bankruptcy won't be too far away.

Germany to court Indian IT talent – starting with easier visa application processes

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: so what happened ?

Except for Mark Twain.

Infosys founder slams working from home, side hustles, as slowing India's growth

Dan 55 Silver badge

Is he all there?

"You may have a little bit of comfort in saying that I'll work three days a week, you may get a little bit more money by moonlighting."

He seems to think turning up to the office three days a week means working three days a week, WFH means not working, and the time employees spend WFH for his company is actually time they spend freelancing for other companies. He seems a bit confused.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cease and desist

This behaviour 20 years ago wouldn't have been tolerated, MS and Google need to up the ante and start playing properly dirty instead of all this tipsy-toeing around. Each one putting "our results are better and return this" on each other's search pages and stuff. Make each others platform's unusable. Not so their behaviour gets to them taken to court, rather to make people see what's more-or-less already happening now and get them to look for alternatives.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Never really gave it a thought.

installing Chrome as the very first thing I do after installing Windows

This is where Microsoft are going wrong, they should put up a banner asking you to install Firefox.

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.

There is also the Wartime Broadcasting Service. In the true spirit of pointless secrecy so beloved of the UK, whether it actually works or not is a secret.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.

After the cold war those were left to local authorities to either maintain or decommission, most eventually chose to decommission.

Do you rely on Microsoft Bing Search APIs? Price hike incoming

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Makes cents

They could have just stuck with Tay, it would have been cheaper.

Microsoft did Nazi that coming: Teen girl chatbot turns into Hitler-loving sex troll in hours

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cat ... bag ...

If you've got one foot in each country, e.g. income from the UK, living in another country then yes, you need two tax returns. If someone has no taxable income in the UK and is living and working in the other country, there's no need to complete UK tax returns.

It is obvious if you're working in another country you declare residency, pay tax and social security to that country, and use that country's social security system and health service.

What freedom of movement does is give you the right to be a resident, compete on an equal footing for work (no need for companies to sponsor you or prove that nobody else can do the job) and be treated like any other citizen of that country when it comes to the welfare state or healthcare. You may have to do a bit of paperwork to achieve that, but it's not any more onerous than a citizen of that country would have to do either.

And now after Brexit that is not true any more. The loss of FoM amongst many other things makes Brexit the greatest swindle perpetrated by a country's government against its own citizens in recent history.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: my biggest single issue is to get the Tories out by any means necessary

If the Tory party were either of those two things then they wouldn't be the continuation Austerity party, they would be come to an agreement over Northern Ireland without having a collective nervous breakdown, and the Home Office wouldn't be run by someone slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cat ... bag ...

The minimum yearly income to retire in France as of last year was €19,237. The full UK state pension for 2022-2023 is £185.15 a week.

You've already got your foot in the door should you want to retire in France thanks to the Withdrawal Agreement, well done you, but I'll leave you to work out the rest of the maths to see if new British retirees can or can't retire in France post-Brexit (i.e. as a plain third third country national).

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

Dan 55 Silver badge

The new French number that Ugo got after transferring his number using WhatsApp was previously owned by an Italian speaker judging by the profile and the groups he got added to.

Really WhatsApp should reset the profile and remove the number from any existing groups when transferring an account to a new number which was in use but hasn't been used for some time, not blame the teleco.