* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

US schools sue Meta, Google and friends over 'youth mental health crisis'

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Multiple responsables

And so the usual WEF, gender, environment, and climate conspiracies are channeled together, dressed up with a veneer of concern for the children, and barfed onto the Internet. Well done you.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: parents are stopped from taking responsibility by the social media network

No, it's a problem with social media networks, that's why I said "social media networks". Where did you get "internet service providers" from?

You may even be aware that a social media account can be accessed from many devices and the account's settings and associated parental controls (or lack of them) have little to do with the device its accessed from.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Multiple responsables

And yes there is also responsibility by the user or their parents.

Until recently no social media network had built-in parental controls. Now some claim they have parental controls but that usually means a pointless parent guide explaining what the settings page does. In other words parents are stopped from taking responsibility by the social media network while their children get hooked on the dopamine hits.

Dan 55 Silver badge

At a guess that's something to do with the social media addling half the students' brains or the chance of getting shot being pretty high, and no politician doing a thing about it for years because they like the money from lobbying and are scared of the Freeze Peach and Freedumb mobs. If schools didn't have those things to contend with then they could be a lot less dreadful.

Rust projects open to denial of service thanks to Hyper mistakes

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Incorrect

Where practice means only using structures < 4K in size and hoping the OS and MMU will catch everything for your supposedly memory safe language?

Seriously?

Not sure what even to say to that.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: NULL Pointers On Unix and Windows, Sappeur

Page sizes on x86, x64, MIPS, and ARM are 4K, not 64K. You appear to be arguing that there aren't many structures > 64K so it doesn't matter as it'll segfault anyway, there are many more structures > 4K.

Really not a good advert for your supposedly memory safe language.

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Incorrect

This is not guaranteed to fail and C/C++ leaves the behaviour up to the platform.

*NULL will SIGSEGV on OSes which don't assign a physical address to virtual memory location 0, but NULL->weight, i.e. *(0 + offsetof(P, weight)), could point to a virtual memory location which is mapped to a physical address and if it does the assignment would work.

Then there are old and embedded platforms which do no virtual to physical memory mapping. If you dereference NULL, you dereference address 0, no problem.

Surely someone who wrote a supposedly memory safe language on top of C++ should know this?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: So Rust is not memory safe then

It doesn't matter if Rust unwinds the stack or not before exiting when it panics, the OS recovers the process' memory when it exits anyway.

Palantir's Covid-era UK health contract extended without competition

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: WEF

Yeah... I was rather hoping for a real answer e.g. comparing what they say with what they've done.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: WEF

From Wikipedia:

WEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; building in a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way, utilising environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and "harness[ing] the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution."

Why is this so terrible?

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Dan 55 Silver badge

That's what they're still saying in the 23rd century.

Can't park your starship anywhere these days.

Samsung expects profit dive as demand for memory and devices continues to slow

Dan 55 Silver badge

Yeah, but then you're dealing with bugs and customer service even worse than Samsung's.

If you want a fairly untouched Android then try a Sony Xperia or Nokia.

Microsoft said to be thinking of sinking $10m into self-driving truck startup

Dan 55 Silver badge

But will these trucks be able to pull "near infinite mass" like Tesla's?

Tesla’s Claim That Cybertruck Can Pull “Near Infinite Mass” Is Hilarious Bullshit

... like most things Musk's companies claim I think.

Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: USB-C charging is compulsory

If Apple does move to a black monolith without any ports, it's because they think there's more money in it for them, not because of how good or bad USB-C or Lightning are or are perceived to be.

Meanwhile, in the real world, what exactly is wrong with USB-C that means it's good enough for laptops and tablets but not good enough for phones? USB-C is better in every way that counts - USB-C's better for charging than Lightning and is faster at data transfer than Lightning.

How does this artificial divide benefit the people who have bought an iPhone? No idea. I'd need to be some Apple fanboy to understand why.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Roll up, roll up, join the Qi2 standard, now with MagSafe incorporated!

But don't use MagSafe or Apple will sue you.

Up to 18,000 Amazon workers in firing line as it chops cost

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Alexa Schmalexa

That's all you use it for, what does it use you for?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

"finding a way to do more for customers at a lower cost"

This means "We, a corporation still making billions a year, are going to dump other people's workload on the remaining employees. Suck it up or you'll be in the next round of layoffs for complaining or just working your contracted hours".

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Shirley?

Machine learned from data obtained when Tesla drivers' manually park.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Shirley?

Also Tesla seem particularly terrified of someone suing them if a car bumps into them while it's automatically parking at 3mph and refuses to park if anyone is nearby, so it would be unable to park in any high street you'd find in any European town.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Shirley?

That's because YouTube spams "brand-friendly content" with ads, and the creator probably doesn't even know.

NewPipe on mobile or uBlock origin plugin on desktop.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, and Full Self-Driving

Tesla should have been slapped down at the first outlandish lie, not allowed to carry on regardless with two more.

Riding in Sidecar: How to get a Psion online in 2023

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Very interesting

Once you've got a serial port set up somehow... KA9Q had TCP/IP and started out on CP/M. It could probably be persuaded to FTP files from floppy disk to an FTP server on the LAN from what I vaguely remember. Looks like it can be downloaded from the links here.

Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Works with computers"

The only title that counts, everyone immediately knows what you do.

'Multiple security breaches' shut down trucker protest

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: LOL 'bringing the people together'

Isn't the World Unity Convoy a USAian thing, like the World Series Baseball? What has Canada done to deserve them?

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Are they still paying staff salaries ?

There are complaints from people who left saying that they weren't paid compensation.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Smoke and mirrors?

Ah, the 48K spectrum with 80K of RAM - the top 32K of RAM had 8 * 8K chips with the upper or lower half of the 8K chips failing, 8 half-broken 8K chips were cheaper for Sinclair to buy than 8 fully-working 4K chips.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Keep politics out of open source

This is not new, there are "not for military use" and "not for evil" licences and they've been around for quite a while. Whether they're effective at all is another discussion.

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth"

So the damage is contained to just that organisation and it will serve as a lesson to everyone inside the organisation that the beancounters were wrong.

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth"

No, if you need a miniature nuclear reactor to prop it up then it isn't sustainable.

Most of the stuff that huge MS, Google, or AWS datacentres do could have been done locally on each site, PC, or mobile where any outage affects relatively few people and not everyone. Only artificial centralisation brought about by the push to move to a subscription model has made datacentre outages such a hair-on-fire disaster when they happen because centralisation means everyone is affected.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Monetise Me If You Can!!!

If you wanted to choose an endpoint for a VPN, better to choose e.g. Germany or another country with strong privacy laws.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Gmail service is way more interesting for smartphone only users because the easy to use app. Telco email has to be used with a separate mail client and you have to setup arcane parameters for IMAP and POP3 and TLS.

That's very much by design. Thunderbird automatically figures it out based on the domain in the e-mail address.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Serves Google right

If you want parental controls on an Android or ChromeOS device, the Google account has to be an @gmail.com account.

And they also want the parent's credit card number because... reasons.

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

Dan 55 Silver badge

400m users

So we are looking at their entire active user list plus a bit more, because Twitter has 368m monthly active users.

Back to work, Linux admins: You may have a CVSS 10 kernel bug to address

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This does not belong in the Kernel

Tizen is an utter car crash, and this sounds like it's continuing in the fine tradition of software development at Samsung.

Tencent CEO Pony Ma reportedly bemoans internal corruption, inefficiency

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So, a Chinaman moaning about corruption in China

China's neighbour is currently showing them exactly how much of a basket case a country can get if corruption runs rampant. I guess they've decided this isn't a good thing.

TikTok confirms it tracked journalists' locations as part of leak investigation

Dan 55 Silver badge

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Well done

Did they also think employees and Forbes journalists would be meeting at the park duckpond to surreptitiously swap identical looking suitcases full of leaked information on paper like some 1970's spy thriller and they would catch them by slurping their location info?

My flabber is gasted.

Don’t expect a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023, says Raspboss Eben Upton

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Bye bye Pi

Isn't the Pi Pico W the closest thing to the ESP32? That has been available throughout the pandemic.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Dan 55 Silver badge

But as a £50 Christmas or birthday present for an already existing Spectrum then it might have been worth it to see if you liked messing round with MIDI before buying an ST.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

RAM Music Machine review and demo tune with cowbells. Possibly even more fun than a Currah Microspeech.

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Musk's answer

"No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor."

So that was nothing more than an ego massage. If we just ignore him maybe he'll go away.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Confused.com

You can try Nitter instead but it is threaded differently and you may have to use settings cog > Hide tweet replies.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Confused.com

Why brother to vote when he's a documented compulsive liar, starting from the earliest lie about his science degree.

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Opaque Types

Why is this a big feature? Even C can manage opaque types.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 2FU

When you post a link to an El Reg comment, do you consider the source is El Reg itself or the poster?

Need a video editor, FOSS fans? OpenShot and Kdenlive both refreshed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Menus

Commodore evaded legal action because you had to right-click on AmigaOS' menu bar.

You can also hold down the right button before you start moving the house pointer or while you're moving it, then find the menu title so the menu opens up, then find the menu option, then release the right mouse button.

So no need to start, stop, click to find the title then start, stop, and click to find the option.

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Twit's on fire, yo.

They appear to be prepared for that eventuality, they've had a Mastodon instance since April.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: How is reporducing publicly available information "doxxing"?

Musk has done more harm to his children by giving them stupid names and abandoning them at the drop of a hat than anyone has looking at @elonjet out of idle curisity.

He didn't even need to drag them into this in the first place. No wonder his eldest child wants nothing to do with him.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Twit's on fire, yo.

He is apparently banning journalists because they mentioned @elonjet in yet another late-night paranoid rant. He's also suspended @joinmastodon and links to Mastodon.

In a way he is defending free speech - every prickish decision he makes running Twitter is immediately public and everyone gets to see how he runs his other companies.

Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk.