* Posts by david 12

2344 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Alien UFOs

Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?

The connection is there in the lede:

the government is concealing important knowledge from lawmakers and the public.

Recent revelations like the Snowden affair confirm what Americans think is standard government practice, but the UFO conspiracy theories date from the time when, after accidental sightings, men in black would routinely meet aircraft passengers and tell them not to report seeing new/secret/research aircraft that had flown past.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

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waiting days to get it back.

... someday my prints will come ...

(Snow White. 1937)

OctoX is a radical Rust implementation of a very old OS for RISC-V

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Re: C will never be replaced.

“I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.” (1982)

It's still called c, but it doesn't look like K&R c, and the compilers have large adopted the design decisions of Wirth Pascal.

The litter included the bones of c. What continues is partly compatible, and has the original name.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: You are not expected to understand this.

Implementing an entire library in a single .h file seems to be getting popular.

Because there are religious objections to doing it the other way, (including a .c file as an include file), and the use of .inc is not only evil, it's strange as well.

Millions of people's data stolen because web devs forget to check access perms

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Re: Some companies just offer other people's data without even asking

Classic fraud scenario. Payments can't be verified by the customer, nor by the auditors. And for that reason, the company doesn't want to fix the problem.

I'm not saying the British Gas was run by crooks (was it?), but I'd certainly expect to see losses reported somewhere down the line.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Don't get me started on # and £

I haven't been to the USA for decades, but when I was a kid, # was used on supermarket tags to indicate pound weight. 3# for 3$

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

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Oddly enough, the Windows system calls I learned in the early 90's still work find on my Win10 machine.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

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Toys

Our product has a 40 year expected life at 90C. I don't expect us to replace the boards with low-temperature boards. But my house if full of small crap with small battery-operated single-or-double sided circuit boards, that fail anyway after a couple of years, or when dropped or stood on, or are simply discarded.

In a country like Germany, where there has to be a disposal process for Wireless Headphones, this absolutely makes sense.

By the way, there isn't anything technically new about this product: paper phenolic boards predate glass-phenolic, and there have always been water-soluble phenolics.

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

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Re: Beware apologist Commentards

In some countries you can install a toilet with a small sink on top of the toilet cistern. You flush, and wash, and as you wash you refill the cistern. It's actually quite convenient for tiny houses and apartments where you want to put the toilet in it's own small room off of a hallway for whatever reason. It certainly would have been convenient in our small house, where you have to cross the hallway to the shower room to get to the sink.

But we couldn't have that, because in our suburb, the toilet is (must be) supplied from untreated runoff in a separate system.

Swings and round-abouts.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

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Re: Parsing the data

SIMD, Single Instruction Multiple Data, is encryption / decryption.

I have no idea how the vector registers work, or how the exploit works, but if I was looking for data that was being encrypted / decrypted, or signature generation or checking, the vector registers would be the first place I looked.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

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I remember back in 2003 ...I seem to remember there was one we used because it was faster than the official one

Oracle won the copyright case in court, and MS withdrew both the Java product and Windows 2K (because Win2K had the MS Java product embedded).

The competition did have the salutary effect of causing Oracle to put more effort into Java development to keep up, and Oracle Java also became a lot faster.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

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Re: Why? Really, why?

That "real OS" line was the one used by the IBM dev-ops to describe unix -- the cut down toy operating system without virtualization, segmentation, isolation, or proper multi-user security.

You can still tell that the description burned.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Chromium 86 based browser for XP

I miss the days of an OS that fully booted in about 30 seconds.

Ahh, a youngster....

The reason Windows has an opening chime (the Windows Start sound) is because it was inherited from the old DOS machines the developers were used to. Adding a start-up sound to the end of your DOS startup enabled you to walk away and get a cup of coffee while your machine started, coming back when the start sound played.

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

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Potentially greener?

This potentially makes Microsofts's choice of generators a more sustainable option than Amazon's, as the generators can be converted to run on a 50/50 mix of hydrogen and natural gas or upgraded to run entirely on green hydrogen.

In both cases I'll believe it when I see it: there is presently no bulk source of Green Hydrogen

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

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And then it was all open-sourced

There were large numbers placed on the value of the material he "stole" from the phone companies. The large numbers were largely imaginary. But it was somewhere between sad and funny that all API documentation, operation manuals, and source code was eventually released free, when AT&T realized that the secrecy had no commercial value.

MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ individuals

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...And that's just the ones we know about

Which is surely un underestimate, because not all nations and exchanges have public disclosure rules like the USA. I'm looking at my bank in particular. They've never disclosed the nature of their 'similar' breach.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

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Coat

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

service renaming disease

Enteritis

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

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"Unknown" operating system

"Unknown" operating system is 3.2% in North America --- and 9% in China. Yes, it may all be 'security conscious linux users" -- or it may be that less common browsers aren't reporting the OS information that Statcounter relies on.

Unidentified object on Australian beach may be part of Indian rocket launcher

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"It warned the local population against handling or moving the object."

O FFS. Another self-aggrandizing 'warning' from self-important nobs.

Hydroxyl-Terminated Poly Butadiene (HTPB) solid propellant is dangerous because it is so reactive that is disappears when in contact with anything other than it's fuel tank -- which is so safe and stable that it can contain even HTPB.

After spending time in the ocean, the space junk is less dangerous than the average shopping trolley or old tire.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

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8, 9 or 11 point ?

Just dropped in to point out that 'point' is not a fixed size. Different type foundries -- and hence different publishers -- use different absolute sizes (mm) for a 'point'. For example MS and Apple.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

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Re: I need my Trash

limit on trash being implemented at an OS level.

Policy _is_ implemented at the OS level.

There's also disc quotas, which are implemented "at the file system level", which given the lack of third-party file systems, is pretty much the same as "at OS level".

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

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Cooling needs to run in winter "because it's not evaporative"

Evaporative coolers are favored because they .... only need to be run during the hottest months of the year. [...] alternative cooling methods ... will need to run year round.

WTF?

I can imagine designing a data centre that needs to be cooled year-around. I have trouble imagining that the cooling load in winter is because it's "not evaporative".

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Data Center Straining Wastewater Plant?

Why not filter out those more concentrated minerals on site

They agreed to do that, to get their planning permit, but didn't actually get around to doing so.

Eventually the waste-water people wanted to connect more houses (because real-estate development is an even more powerful lobby group), and, under pressure from the land developers, made threats and loud complaints. So their next data centre won't get away with that.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

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It's not just enjoyment. Those marketeers who've got any sense at all recognize that, in spite of protests, their consumers -- developers, sys admins, supply officers, middle management -- choose and are willing to pay for "change" and "improvement" and "engagement" and even "needless complexity".

People get real pleasure out of change and aesthetic complexity. As they do out of stability and simplicity.

It's the balance of life as well as the life of commerce.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

david 12 Silver badge

Re: 6 weeks

I did an implementation in AUS. Yes, the biggest part of the implementation cost was handling the two categories of transaction. Only two, but that meant there had to be a database field to assign the categories, and calculation at the line-item level, and calculation and display branches, and display fields to indicate GST status for each line item. And I had it easy: the mainframe implementation ran more than a month late, and major suppliers stopped supply of millions of dollars of product while they waited for payment of outstanding invoices held up in the GST implementation.

Which all could have been avoided by simply boosting the pension rates and tax cut-off rates as compensation, but the party in power had invested so much moral capital in opposing GST, painting it as an evil right-wing plot, that when they came to implement it anyway, they had to agree with every 'injustice' claim as a special case.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: 6 weeks

If it's not in ROM, it's not "hard" coded.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

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overland -- 1.2 Mach

I get that this is a research project, not a new airplane, but even so -- that looks like NYC to LA, not NYC to London.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

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Lamborghini's last apostrophe already spoken for?

Which is why they've replaced "Who has" with "Whose"

Google uses India to test ‘deliver to the house near the post office’ feature

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Re: SeeGull – a database of offensive stereotypes

Left-wing Americans, (or at least my friends), have a thing about stereotypes. (Maybe Republicans have the same problem, but none of my friends are Republicans.)

They just regard all stereotypes as offensive, along the lines of "informal or idiomatic words used to identify groups of people", which they regard as positively evil.

I don't know why this is so, but it is related to their enormous sensitivity to "race", which, oddly enough, leads them to be "non racist" by viewing every subject through the prism of "race".

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

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Github copies

I put code on StackOverflow. It's been copied twice: it's now on GitHub in two versions, without attribution.

The copies are actually better than my source code: they've been cleaned up and commented. On the other hand, it was actually original: nobody else had done it before, or even thought about how to do it before.

The lack of attribution burns a little bit.

Cops told: Er, no, you need a wiretap order if you want real-time Facebook snooping

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Surprise

In a surprise finding, courts have held that courts must be consulted and must be in the loop.

Very human. Lawyers, plumbers, electricians, nurses, teachers, accountants, farmers and truck drivers hold similar views about their importance to humanity.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

david 12 Silver badge

Re: grammar pedanty

Possessive it's is another legitimate punctuation with a history just as long as all other English spellings.

One of the reasons it's still a common variant is that, unlike actual apostrophe miss-use, it doesn't actually cause confusion in normal use.

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

david 12 Silver badge

Lock him up!

Because he intends to work in the music industry, and the incentive for fraud remains the same as the incentive for everybody else in the music industry.

In fact, lock up everybody in the music industry who isn't rich, because the incentive for fraud is strong.

In fact, lock up everybody who isn't rich, because they might commit crimes in the future.

Or, alternatively, lock up prosecutors who write crap like that.

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

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Re: I'm a bit torn

The Federal system abolished Parole in 1987. (Parole is the system by which you serve part of your sentence in Goal, and part 'on parole').

Part of this is just a renaming exercise. Holmes still gets 'supervised release' (parole) after the end of her prison residency. But it wasn't entirely Orwellian: average length of residency has approximately doubled.

This had had no effect on reducing crime, but has significantly increased costs, increased employment, and lead to massive contracts with the three major private contractors who own and operate 12 Federal prisons.

There is still an 'out' available. "In Prison" can mean a Government Prison, or a Private Prison, or your own house. I don't think the last is likely in this case, but if something like COVID comes back, home detention may return too.

Cops' total pwnage of 'secure' EncroChat nets 6,500+ arrests, €740m in funds – so far

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Press release?

EncroChat went down in 2020. https://www.engadget.com/europe-uk-police-hacked-encrochat-encrypted-phones-144351998.html

Loss of EncroChat pushed criminals onto "Anom", the secure encrypted communication service developed by the FBI and deployed in Europe and Australia (so that the FBI didn't have to get warrants for surveillance of Americans). "Anom" went down in 2021.

Reports on obsolete systems from 2020 are only mildly interesting. Has anything more recent than "Anom" happened?

Dialup-era developer writes ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1

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""WinGPT connects to the OpenAI API server natively with TLS 1.3, "

"WinGPT connects to the OpenAI API server natively with TLS 1.3,

How does it do that? Is there a version of cygwin for Win3.11, or something similar?

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Next on the agenda: ClippyGPT, because why not?

Clippy was the most annoying avatar for a published API.

Both sides of the API were published: you could design your own avatar, and publish your own content. (That annoying wiggle was apparently quite eye-catching when paired with an attractive photo-realistic character.) ChatGPT does seem like a natural/native match.

It's actually an interesting question if an anthropomorphic UI would be more or less irritating when paired with deeper, more helpful content. Cortana is being retired: perhaps people really don't want their computers to be "helpful" at all: does anybody really like "helpful" people? Or do we all just find helpful people as annoying as Clippy?

I have an opinion: really top-level professional waiters and servants are noted for their invisibility. I think perhaps what we are waiting for is not ChatGPT, but ReticentGPT,

Microsoft Windows edges closer to SMB security signing fully required by default

david 12 Silver badge

Re: A drawback is that this signing can reduce the speed of SMB copy operations

A drawback experienced by every small business that moved to Win2003 server, where the signing requirement was the default for domain members connecting to the AD/file server.

I can think of other reasons why connecting to Azure might be slow -- I would expect that it is using an encrypted connection

david 12 Silver badge

Re: This will be exciting

Require? MS is talking about changing a default policy setting. If you don't like it, change it back.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: This will be exciting

SMB signing was a feature of SMB1.

There may well be printers out there that can't do SMB signing, but I'd of thought that any printer that *required* SMB would also *support* SMB. I mean, it's just a policy setting -- would you expect that there was never anybody before that set the domain policy to 'required'?

However, our old HP network printers used PCL over TCP/IP, not SMB, so I've not a lot of experience with SMB1 printers.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: SAMBA Performance

SMB Signing is not the same as Encryption. Signing worked with Pentium Pro servers.

SAP admits HANA Cloud makes for multicurrency messes

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local currency conventions...

Aus is a "third party" to FX rates, which are traditionally referenced to EITHER NYC or London, except USD and GBP, which are referenced to AUD. Unless you are an international company, in which case your FX reports to the parent company have to reference AUD to USD or GBP.

I have sympathy for the report programmers. There are always some reports where it is bloody difficult to decide not only what the base currency is, but how the value of the third currency should be reported, and if the conversion rates are North-Side-Up or South-Side-Up.

With dead-time dump, Microsoft revealed DDoS as cause of recent cloud outages

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AP and The Register co-operate with criminal enterprise

the group "appears to be focused on disruption and publicity."

In the 1970's, young men used to listen to weekend radio for reports of their Friday Night Ultra-Violence. Now, according to police reports, the kids are looking at social media for reports of their exploits. At it's worst, this is what drives mass shootings in the USA, which, because of reverence for the press, is unable to address the problem.

MS correctly did feed the problem until asked a direct question. If only Associated Press could be equally responsible.

Google searchers from years past can get paid for pilfered privacy

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Re: Location?

You should complete this Claim Form if you submitted a search query to Google and clicked on a search result within the United States during the Class Period

I don't know why the article didn't mention this.

UK telco watchdog Ofcom, Minnesota Dept of Ed named as latest MOVEit victims

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knew about the bug as far back as 2021.

In March, Latitude Financial (GEC spinoff) lost a whole bunch of similar stuff (historical data files) through a "security breach at a software provider" through an intermediate company . They've never released details. But for sure it looks like the kind of MoveIt breach through a Payroll company being reported here and elsewhere.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

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Grown like Topsy

Not entirely management-speak, but one I hear frequently from people who are "using a phrase they don't know the meaning of".

I understand that most of you are too young to have read "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Here's the reference:

"Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?" The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual. "Do you know who made you?" "Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me."

No grown large, or fast (Topsy is just a child). Grown without any source or creator. Just grow'd.

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Re: EOD - Military

Captains outrank Lieutenant. Lieutenant outranks Sergeant Sergeant outranks Private. EOD specialist running at full speed outranks everybody.

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Re: COP/EOD

COP means "coefficient of performance"

I'm in the energy sector now, (so I know what "Coefficient Of Performance" means), and I'm old enough to remember card decks.

EOD means "End Of Data".