* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Good news: Japanese boffins 3D print what looks like marbled Wagyu beef. Bad news: It's tiny and inedible

Dan 55 Silver badge

Now concentrate this time Dougal

This 3D-printed Wagyu beef is small, but those out there are far away...

Microsoft does and doesn't want you to know it won't stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

MS is irresponsible

If it works on older hardware it should install on older hardware without jumping through hoops. Perfectly good hardware is going to end up in landfill because Windows Update is going to badger people about Windows 10 reaching EOL but is not going to offer Windows 11 as an update.

Obviously the US and UK won't give two hoots about this, maybe the EU will.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Good vintage, decant carefully and enjoy

They put a load of paste in to compensate for the fact that Apple's EFI is programmed to start up fans about four seconds before total meltdown, as if they believe the noise of fans in a laptop might somehow break the illusion of perfection. Also as Apple laptops are have practically nowhere to vent heat, the fans are pretty useless anyway.

Thermal management is instead done by CPU throttling which is terrible for performance.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: ifixit

After following a couple of iFixit's guides I've come to the conclusion you're supposed to video everything you did and play it back backwards to see how to put it back together again, and you'll also hear a message from Satan Himself.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why would they need to even put it to a vote, every platform has its own thoroughly-researched UI style guidelines book that leaves no room for doubt, right? Just like it did 20-30 years ago.

P.S. Those who entertain the thought of not labelling the colour buttons should be forced to fix Windows 11 bugs for the next two years.

UK promises big data law shake-up... while also keeping the EU happy, of course. What could go wrong?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Piss

About the same age as in IT.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: An interesting set of countries

She's obviously not ineffective enough:

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport also announced on Thursday that John Edwards, New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, would succeed Elizabeth Denham as head of the Information Commissioner’s Office. It added that the role would probably be expanded “to encourage the responsible use of data to achieve economic and social goals”.

FT

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Piss

They literally have no ideas, only dogma about reducing red tape which turns out to be yet another trade barrier with every other country in the same continent and will be ignored by every business which wants to trade with countries in the single market.

Dan 55 Silver badge

When he says "remove cookie banners" he means "remove data protection rights and free up NHS patient data". Easy slip to make, understandably.

And then the adequacy decision will be reversed, yet more businesses that have hosting in the UK will move it to the EU, and the bleating will start.

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Hackathon

Seems odd because isn't the taxpayer paying OS to do this kind of thing already... or are they paid to just sit on the data and publish maps?

No place like GNOME: 41 in beta, features frozen for forthcoming release

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Gnome 3 is shit

It seems mobile/tablet GUI designers responsible for that amazing idea never had to read anything more than a couple of swipes depth because they never thought that knowing where you were in the text was useful.

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Border Bureaucracy?

The "EU drivers paid per km" thing is an urban legend:

FACT CHECK: Are Eastern European truck drivers paid per km driven?

Dan 55 Silver badge

According to point 7, in 20 reasons why there is shortage of drivers in the UK, it's a real exchange and it must be done if you're a resident for five years in the UK or by your 45th birthday. Until then, when you're driving on your EU licence, there's no way you can prove your points to employers even though it's in the DVLA's records.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The EU is also facing an urgent driver shortage because our previously significant contribution is no longer available.

Ah, but then again, 50,000-odd* drivers from EU who came to the UK now don't, they stick within the Single Market on other routes. That itself has gone some way to alleviating the driver shortage within the EU.

* To pick one of the numbers I've seen thrown about.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Alternative paywall-jumping link

EU drivers delivering to the UK have vastly reduced cabotage rights on the return trip to make it worthwhile, so they don't come.

No EU driver will come to live and work in the UK either because pay is low, they have to navigate the Home Office visa nonsense, and they have to exchange their driver's licence for a UK one which means it's not valid for work in the EU. Why do that when EU countries are solving the low-pay problem already?

The government raised the number of hours worked per week for UK drivers giving them a de facto pay cut, unless the driver were to change over to another company with a signing on bonus. But it's not all about the money, perhaps drivers would like more of a work-life balance or to not kill someone due to falling asleep at the wheel.

As it takes time to train people and as being a HGV driver isn't particularly enjoyable, this isn't going to get fixed in the short term.

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

Dan 55 Silver badge

A500 Mini

Does it include the brick-sized modulator hanging off the back of the computer for the full experience?

Having trouble getting your mitts on that Raspberry Pi? You aren't alone

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The Spectrum Next is also having the same problems

Is it too late to add Blockchain and NFTs to the proposal?

Dan 55 Silver badge

The Spectrum Next is also having the same problems

And it looks like the best solution they've found is to manufacture it in the east where the parts are instead of ordering the parts, waiting for a year for them to arrive, and assembling in the UK.

Source.

Asahi Linux progress: Apple Silicon OS works – though it's 'rough around the edges' and has no GUI acceleration

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I can't see the point in it

I wouldn't make any plans which depend on running Linux on an M1 Mac as Apple can just push an update which makes life more difficult than it is now or even impossible. If they wanted you to run Linux then things would be easier than they are now. Why not just support an ARM computer manufacturer who wants you as a customer?

Dan 55 Silver badge

"unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs."

They already did, the bootloader will only boot partitions which look like MacOS installations.

In order for an OS to be bootable on Apple Silicon machines, it has to “look” like a real macOS installation. This means it has to be an APFS container with multiple volumes within it, containing specific directory structures and files. Until now, the simplest way of doing this was to actually install macOS a second time in a separate partition, and then replace its kernel with m1n1. This is, needless to say, a major pain in the ass, as the installation process is fairly slow. It also wastes around 70GB of disk space, which is how much you need for an upgradable macOS install. It also makes it difficult to install a specific macOS version, which is going to become a problem once we start requiring the usage of specific firmware bundles. This clearly won’t cut it for anything beyond early development.

Source.

Apple didn't engage with the infosec world on CSAM scanning – so get used to a slow drip feed of revelations

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not the problem

It's not just photos, it also checks Siri and web searches and could probably be expanded to include other file types.

And what's to stop Apple running different country-by-country on-device checks depending on how they're leant on?

As the blog in the first post argues, it's probably why they're doing this in the first place, because they have a CSAM problem and were told by the US government to sort it out. Well, now they have a tool which can be turned into a Swiss Army knife should any country require it.

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Not even PHP or JavaScript

VBA must be a complete mess internally if a boolean function returns some unknown third value but only if it's not compared against a boolean, its class has got a user-defined empty destructor, and it's run using the 64-bit interpreter.

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Social Media

Breaking human brains since 2004.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sumption is wrong

It never applied in Scotland and right up until today Scots law is different from English law, so they might as well be quoting the US constitution for all the good it'll do them.

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

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how does it affect you as a user?

It won't until blows up then it will.

A Whopper of a bork for seekers of pre-flight nosh

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not a sad face

But a furrowed brow...

Good to see they put the effort in to make the new BSOD work with singage screens which can be orientated in different ways.

Please do not touch the exhibits – or this tabletop Windows Boot Manager

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

At least it wasn't "bootmgr is missing"

Yet another overly-complicated Windows way of doing something essentially simple which is prone to failure.

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things

And all of that for IE3 which at that stage it was pretty much a port of Spyglass Mosaic with a different theme. If you're going to screw up your private life over something, it might as well be a new non-polluting energy source which saves humanity, not porting a bloody browser.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I thought then pretty much everyone downloaded Netscape with FTP and was ether a student or evaluating it... for rather more than 90 days.

Microsoft fiddles with Fluent while the long dark Nightmare of the Print Spooler continues for Windows

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Moral of the story…

Guys like Lennart Poettering who try to standardise things get shat on instead of rightfully receiving the praise they deserve for significantly improving the base system.

LSB is standardising the base system. Poettering is not improving the base system, he's reinventing the wheel, making things more difficult to configure by using proprietary binary formats (not what you want when a system is half-hosed), and introducing new bugs and exploits while doing it.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 21st century lamp columns ... incorporating sensors that can receive and transmit

In another story on the front page there's a story about toxicity in the Perl community.

I'm rather of the opinion that the human brain is unable to cope with social media instead of toxicity or stupidity in this community or that community, because it seems there's problems with practically any community you could name.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Why Bluetooth

Google argue that apps could scan nearby Bluetooth MAC addresses and work out your location so the app must have the location permission in is manifest and you must turn on location on the phone to show you agree to this hypothetical piece of nonsense happening... and also by the strangest of coincidences you also offer up your location to every other app on your phone which wants it and Google themselves.

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Chome's market share has come about because of Google's incessant marketing for more than a decade. Pushed on desktop with installers. Pushed on the search website. Pushed on YouTube by using Chrome's own standards that don't work with other non-Blink browsers. Pushed by sync. Default on Android which badgers you if you don't get a Google account. Default on school Chromebooks. And so on and so fourth. The miracle is Firefox's market share has held up so well.

Google staff who work from home might see pay cut under corporate policy – reports

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: WTF?!

From the quote you highlighted:

"With many businesses struggling it is unsurprising that they will be looking for ways to cut costs."

A huge rented office building which has to be maintained just so everyone can go there every morning and go back home every night must be known an investment, then.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Eh?

You could always get your first version of AmiTCP, MIAMI, or KA9Q by dialling up to a BBS.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Web is already 30

DoubleClick was launched in 1995 and it all went downhill from there.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

The problem is Windows 3.1 was (mostly) 16-bit and only 32-bit versions of Windows have the Windows-on-Windows layer to run 16-bit software. 64-bit Windows only has a WoW layer for 32-bit software and Windows 10 is now only sold/supplied/whatever it is as 64-bit only.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Would need a 32-bit Windows?

And Microsoft has knocked that on the head in the latest versions of W10.

Dutch education IT crisis averted as Google agrees to 'major privacy improvements'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Netherlands is in the EU?

But it's odd how a country with a population 17 million people can force Google to make improvements, but a country with a population of 66 million people somehow can't do a single thing to stop the privacy onslaught against the ChromeOS trojan horse.

Apple responds to critics of CSAM scan plan with FAQs, says it'd block governments subverting its system

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Who creates the hash?

Winnie the Pooh will have is own hash database that Apple will have to use.

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: ambition comes at a price on the desktop

I'm sure management weighed up the pros and cons and chose Teams for a very good reason.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Dan 55 Silver badge

"the user experience (UX) strategy for the project."

Snort.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Icarus

No, if you want to do it properly you need diamond satellites controlled from a penthouse suite in a Los Angeles hotel.

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Tried DeepL? The output is usually better than Google Translate's.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Wait, VB applications can act as web servers?

My mind is boggled.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Dan 55 Silver badge
Alert

Babylon Zoo

Never have so many singles (remember them?) been sold off the back of the first 30 seconds appearing in an advert.

Das tut mir leid! Germany's ruling party sorry for calling cops on researcher after she outed canvassing app flaws

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How did this happen?

In your head, in your head, they're still fighting...

Microsoft to require proof of vaccination from on-site staff, pushes back full reopening

Dan 55 Silver badge

Doesn't everyone pray to the bingo gods?

Unfortunately they're not listening to me.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Perhaps the official sky fairy apps will get an update with a QR code generator?

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Like a broken record, baby, round round

Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around

I'm spinning around, move out of my way

I know you're feeling me 'cause you like it like this

I'm breaking it down, I'm not the same

I know you're feeling me 'cause you like it like this

Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy

Dizzy!

I'm so dizzy, my head is spinning

Like a whirlpool, it never ends