* Posts by Version 1.0

5376 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Cost

Cheers Sir Sinclair, I have always appreciated and admired your work. Sinclair was always working at making the computers affordable - sure there were issues sometime but I learned a lot by figuring out how to get them working again. Fixing them and using them helped me find tons of jobs later in my life.

If he had "missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs" then maybe he would have been a billionaire and vast numbers of kids would never have learned as much. Instead of being computing engineers these days we might all just be truck drivers.

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: It will be interesting...

You rarely see these problems with laptops that have a clit mouse in the center of the keyboard because making sure it doesn't happen is part of the design. I suspect Apple designed the laptop and checked that it functioned well ... but never spent a month or two shutting the device and carrying it around.

Facebook building 'on-demand executable file format' that self-inflates using homebrew compression

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: I still remember this well from the C64

When I started writing programs I was working in about 48kb of memory, the BIOS and CP/M using the rest of it and virtually everyone in that world wrote programs that worked well, even if they had to use half a floppy disk to store the data - I was writing in assembler with a Z80 and using an 8048 when I built hardware devices.

There are quite a few factors that have resulted in massive program size increases - for example think about adding 1+1+1+1+1 in a 64-bit environment where the default calculations are always floating point.

ExpressVPN bought for $1bn by Brit biz with an intriguing history in adware

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: ExpressVPN is generally known for being one of the best VPN providers

The ExpressVPN devices are very reliable.

Tech widens the educational divide. And I should know – I'm a teacher in a pandemic

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Education leads to Learning

As a kid in school I used Home Learning Packs - distance learning meant that I had to ride the bus to the town library to get four or five Home Learning Packs every week 60 years ago. Computers and technology are very useful for researching things which can lead to "education" but do not guarantee education. Reading books is a major factor because it takes a lot of effort and checks to get a book written, published, and proposed as part of the terms' lesson plans - so reading a book is far more educational then reading a post on the Internet at some social media site.

Getting the students to think is far more important - reading makes you think, tapping a keyboard pushes everyone in a different direction.

Sort-of Epic win as judge kills Apple ban on apps linking to outside payment systems

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Epic Greed

Hosting the app in the store means that it has been evaluated to be clean of malware, phishing, and other issues that cost and risk users - certainly the fees charged are making Apple money, but they are also paying for the safety testing too.

Could the result of this change mean that free apps will disappear at some point?

Music festivals are back in the UK. So is the background bork

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Happy

I was sitting stoned, halfway back from the stage, at a festival one evening in 1970 at Bath and we never saw any Bork issues at all in those days. But I can still remember the entire performance - icon!!!!!!

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Facepalm

I agree, I suspect that she was being manipulated by the investors who only cared about their income, not the functionality. The concept initially "looked" good to them and caused considerable bloating of their wallets so when it appeared to be faulty they kept pushing her because they were very happy with their profits from her totally dumb mistakes.

I accept that my opinion could be totally wrong but it's going to take a lot of effort and investigations to actually know what happened ... right now it's all just opinions. It's easy to look back and call actions stupid, like selling all your bitcoin when it peaked at $2,000.

Boffins unveil SSD-Insider++, promise ransomware detection and recovery right in your storage

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Linux

An excellent collection of comments

They illustrate a range of approaches to "solving" the ransomware problems and extend ransomware too. I think this describes is a good precaution, it's not a solution but it could be very helpful. The solution is more likely to build a new operating system that prevents the entire malware attack methods - but I can't see that happening because it would have to limit many of today's commercial data theft "features".

Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Teaching collaboration

I wonder if I would think that the world would be a better and safer place if university students were taught how to create malware?

This could result in more malware but would probably result in an environment that was much safer because every graduate would know what is actually happening in the Internet these days.

GitHub merges 'useless garbage' says Linus Torvalds as new NTFS support added to Linux kernel 5.15

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Facepalm

The word "git" has always been defined as "mildly derogatory, meaning a foolish or contemptible person" - that was seen as a joke originally when Git first appeared. A foolish or contemptible person is not an idiot and can be very good at some things (like writing software) even if you don't like them ... so the naming was a warning, not a joke - and it has turned out to be simply a fact of life.

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Usage

So "liberals" is bad but "ballsier" is OK now? I guess we'll have to start using "anagrams" unless they ban them too.

Software piracy pushes companies to be more competitive, study claims

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Is this a five minute argument, or a full half hour?

It's worth reviewing the Windows development, initially we all bought a copy and then after a while bought an update or a new version (I still have piles of 3.5 inch floppy disks) ... but Microsoft was watching users stealing the registrations and now we can update to the latest version of Windows for free ...

"The big difference between software for money and software for free is that software for money usually costs a lot less. - Brendan Behan (updated).

Big data means big money for the UK government as £2bn tender mooted

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: A "pro-growth and trusted data regime"

We are all just Sheep and the government is Farmers working on making money from woolen jackets and mutton pies.

Autodesk was one of the 18,000 firms breached in SolarWinds attack, firm admits

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Only 18,000 firms attacked?

18,000 firms noticed they were attacked, we will never know how many didn't notice. Working on the Internet is like walked naked through a field of rapists looking at your phone while posting on social media without looking around - your gender is irrelevant.

"We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur." - Al Gore, a merry can VP

Power users of Microsoft OneDrive suffer massive inconvenience: Read-only files

Version 1.0 Silver badge

A new problem gets a new fix ... and so on.

This sort of issue generation is common everywhere - locally we just had Hurricane Ida take out everyone's AC power and the phone companies lost service but everyone was just left with their phones to communicate. Go anywhere for hurricane information locally and you are told to check the streaming service to the latest information while the phone companies are slowing down service everywhere - if you're lucky, a lot of times there was no service.

The modern world means all your data is accessed via the cloud ... locally only 140 mph clouds. Systems are all built to work, reliability is not a factor these days. While the phone service data rates dropped, my Android got a couple of hundred Mb of "updates" during the hurricane.

'Unicorn' startup CEO faked sales figures, deals to trick investors, prosecutors claim

Version 1.0 Silver badge

But most "Investors" ask about the amount of money you are making and refuse to talk to you if you are not making at least five million dollars a year. So if you are trying to get investments then you either need to be in a situation where you don't really need them or else you need to invent income...

Q: "Did you make $5M this year?"

A: "Yes we have $6M in the bank now" ...

Internal Accountant: "The bank called about your $8M line of credit" ...

Apple wants to scan iCloud to protect kids, can't even keep them safe in its own App Store – report

Version 1.0 Silver badge

What happened when Eve ate the Apple?

I remember being a child and I thought about it a lot when I raised my child in today's world. Child pornography is an adult problem, it's the terrible way that adults act and think. As a kid I was raised wearing the equivalent of a dress (I'm a guy now but I was just a kid back then). We all were just kids regardless of our genders and back then as a kid by the seaside you dropped your clothes on the sand and headed into the sea. Was that a crime? No it wasn't, we were just kids playing in the sand - the kids virtually never did anything bad to each other, it was only the adults that were pains.

Now Apple wants to make life hell for the kids - they are saying that child pornography is bad but adult pornography is fine when you are "old enough" - that illustrates the "adult" problem.

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

Version 1.0 Silver badge

A BASE jumping error

Brexit was Boris's BASE jumping - He "got it done" and jumped from the EU but forgot to be prepared by wearing a parachute.

Brexit has been done, complaining about it doesn't fix anything. BASE jumping is fun and makes you feel fantastic when you get it done and land without loosing consciousness or breaking an arm or leg - but a lot of the time it needs a hell of a lot of hard work to get it done - just jumping off the wireless mast, or cliff isn't easy a lot of times - and the pandemic just means the wind was blowing.

So nothing that's happening is odd at all.

Fake Apple rep amasses 620,000+ stolen iCloud pics, vids in hunt for images of nude women to trade

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Does he not know...

When I was a kid we all just read the National Geographic magazine. But I just checked all the comments here and confirmed that everyone writing a comment is naked under their clothes.

'Worst' AWS service ever? Cloud giant introduces Redis-compatible MemoryDB – to mixed response

Version 1.0 Silver badge

70 years ago ...

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." - John Von Neumann, circa 1949

Playdate handheld game system torn to pieces, crank and all

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Pint

Re: I honestly thought...

I think that it's always fun looking a these old devices and then trying to get them working again - the iFixit folks are excellent at figuring out how to repair both old and new devices (icon to you guys) and anytime I have to fix something then they are the first place I go to.

Un-carrier? Definitely Unsecure: T-Mobile US admits 48m customers' details stolen after downplaying reports

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Joke

My data is safe

I use Google Fi which means a common connection via the T-Mobile network, I'm so happy that my data is safe ...

It's just been sold.

Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Joke

typo

Not Trust Facebook, I think it was supposed to say Strut Facebook ...

Facebook walks around "with a vain, pompous bearing, as with head erect and chest thrown out, as if expecting to impress observers. noun. the act of strutting. a strutting walk or gait."

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

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Joke

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

Are we going to hear that Microsoft will fix this issue when Office 128 is released, or will we have to wait for Office 256, or Office 512?

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Does "compatibility" mean having the same issues?

"LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility"

Fair enough, but has nobody ever used Microsoft Office and found incompatibility issues with their previous version of Microsoft Office. Does perfect compatibility just mean that it would have the same issues that Microsoft is working to fix?

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Joke

Oh dear, I need to update my passwords :-(

My password everywhere is the last ten digits of Pi so now I have to change them all.

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system after spate of crashes

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Also: why?

It would be interesting to see how many Tesla auto-pilot accidents happen when a code writer is doing the driving, we know that just because the code complied with no errors reported, it doesn't mean that the code will not crash.

Apple's iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: It's simpler than that

They all say We Value Your Privacy

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: A long way still to go

How do you think the Delta variant was created? Most likely a small mutation in some infected people that turned out to spread a little better. It's likely that someone,or some animal, surviving an SARS infection when they had a Flu infection created the original COVID-19 virus variant which then evolved over time to become very infectious.

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: A long way still to go

In the US and the UK vaccinations were aimed at getting voters support. Certainly vaccinating older people was a good start but forbidding vaccination for youngsters was just dumb - but they weren't going to vote so their vaccinations didn't matter. Vaccinating "age groups" was stupid, it would have been much more effective to vaccinate people who were likely to catch and spread the disease.

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Forgery

All the law enforcement efforts need to go against the people creating the fakes. If they find someone with a fake card then maybe we should just quarantine them for a month and give then both shots before they are released - that would discourage all anti-vaxers from buying fake cards.

Microsoft emits last preview of .NET 6 and C# 10, but is C# becoming as complex as C++?

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: "perhaps the most important new type system capability since Span<T>"

When people say that code is "complex" it just means that they don't fully understand the specific coding environment.

Taiwan president pokes the bear by saying the nation needs to lessen its supply chain dependency on China

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Too much of the world ...

When you look at all the issues that we've seen for years now, it seems sensible for all countries to support their own manufacturers and manufacturing - the issue with buying from other countries is that the local business CEO's are making money but the rest of the population is not.

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

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Windows

Windows problems were Windows Features!

When we were writing code for the early versions of Windows we would see lots of problems as Microsoft upgraded and changed the DLL's that everything relied upon ... so to fix that we needed to stop relying on the assumption that the DLL's we needed existed and worked the way we planned.

So I required that all DLL code was complied into the applications and now they still run fin on Windows 10 because the apps don't expect that a DLL will exist unchanged.

Chinese espionage group targets Israel while suggesting the source could be Iran

Version 1.0 Silver badge

This is normal

It's just a "feature" of the Internet in the modern world - don't think that the Chinese are the only ones doing this, all espionage groups treat this as standard practice - their espionage groups and ours too. Just because malware or spyware "appears" to be from somewhere don't mean that the country was the source.

Scientists reckon eliminating COVID-19 will be easier than polio, harder than smallpox – just buckle in for a wait

Version 1.0 Silver badge

So what about an HIV vaccine?

We're still waiting for an HIV vaccine ... basically creating an effective vaccine is not easy, we've been very lucky that the current COVID-19 vaccines have been created so quickly even if they are not 100% effective. But look at the history of Flu vaccines, they need to evolve every year and it looks like that's happening with COVID-19 too. Fingers crossed, hopefully a fully functional vaccine will get created to eradicate COVID-19 but we'll not know for certain soon.

US senators reach last-minute compromise on cryptocurrency regulations as infrastructure bill vote looms

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Bitcoin price rises

I wonder how many politicians brought a Bitcoin before they passed the compromise?

AI algorithms uncannily good at spotting your race from medical scans, boffins warn

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Angel

Who won the Olympic Human Race ?

Society says human race is "relevant" but if you want to study how we became humans then read Jeremy DeSilva's book First Steps - we're all one race (icon) with just a few genetic "uncles and aunts" that give us slight differences - none of which appear to help our stupidity.

Winning an Olympic event is far more significant than your race, so AI is only artificial intelligence, it's not real at all ... thinking that race is important would be like saying that we need to add Writing Applications in Visual Basic to the Olympic events.

Microsoft wonders if disabling just-in-time compilation of JavaScript improves browser security

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I have an easier fix...

We hear the same viewpoint from the anti-vaxers - does "I never travel in an automobile" keep you safe when the roads are filled with cars and you walk to the shops (probably without wearing a mask)?

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Actually it's a cunning Apple marketing ploy ...

Maybe the marketing folks just think that this will stop the priests using Android phones, "You can trust me, because I use an iPhone"

Facebook takes bold stance on privacy – of its ads: Independent transparency research blocked

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Delete Facebook = happiness

You may have deleted "your data" from Facebook but you probably didn't delete "their data" about you.

Research finds cyber-snoops working for 'Chinese state interests' lurking in SE Asian telco networks since 2017

Version 1.0 Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: Sniff test failed

I wonder if it works like this - the hackers email tons of messages that, when opened, grant access to the system. Then they look in the system to obtain internal details;

PFY hacker: "Nothing political or secret in this system, it's just a corporation"

PHB hacker: "OK install the malware"

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

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Maybe the next move would be to create fake accounts and feed the app fakes. These days we're stealing peoples data, selling the data, and faking the data to make money from whoever wants to think that they are in control - politics is simply a financial world.

SolarWinds urges US judge to toss out crap infosec sueball: We got pwned by actual Russia, give us a break

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Given their client base, you'd have expected SolarWinds to be ultra paranoid

No way, everyone expects them to be profitable - it's not just SolarWInds, you see this everywhere, Security is something that people say they will deal with ... and occasionally they have a go at it but you have to keep the accountants and the sales execs happy if you want to keep your job.

If you're the PFY, telling the PHB that they need to spend a lot of money while working hard to try and stay safe, means you'll be looking for a new job in most environments.

China tightens distributor cap after local outfits hoard automotive silicon then charge silly prices

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Smugglers

Look at the effects of the western Wars on Drugs - they have raised prices, demand, and supply, with the "bonus" of jailing people that were not voting for the governments - we may see the same thing happen in China.

'Prophetic' Steve Jobs autograph telling kid to 'go change the world!' among Apple memorabilia at auction

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Childcatcher

That's just the 80's

Remember those days when people would just try and be nice to kids.

These days what happens? We steal their data and sell all their information via social media companies; back then nobody had privacy statements requirements, these days a kid would get a "free account, please get your parents to sign the privacy statement and enter their email, phone number, and location" and they would start getting adverts.

Credit-card-stealing, backdoored packages found in Python's PyPI library hub

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: But.. you have the sourcecode right ?

I think that a lot of people assume that open source is reliable because someone somewhere must have checked the code so they just move on and apply it because it's free without spending time verifying it themselves.

Reading all the comments here makes me think of updating an old Brendan Behan quote from the days before software; "The big difference between sex software for money and sex software for free is that sex software for money usually costs a lot less."

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Version 1.0 Silver badge

Re: Built to repair?

Yes, certainly that failure was a possibility (I didn't downvote you) although in those days capacitors were very reliable, because they were just physical devices - I think the metal oxide AC power rectifier was a possibility but I was just a kid learning how to fix things then.

I only got bit hard by a TV once, my dad told me to always have the TV unplugged from the wall to be safe so I figured out it was probably just the CRT acting like a well charged capacitor.

Version 1.0 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Built to repair?

I started repairing TV's when I was kid, six years old - it was easy and fun then - just turn the TV on for a few minutes, turn it off and put your hand in the back and touch all the valves. All you had to do was just swap out the cold ones and then, most of the time, everything started working again. If it didn't work then I told them I'd get rid of the broken TV but I kept all the warm valves to fix the next one.

I was so disappointed initially when transistors appeared because it made my work much harder - LOL, but then I started learning a lot more and reading the circuit diagrams so it was actually a bonus.