* Posts by big_D

6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009

Firefox 115 browser breathes life into old operating systems

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The problem is, the old OSes often use depricated APIs that are no longer supported in newer operating systems, newer OSes have, generally, improved security, which means things need to be done differently etc. or new browser features require features only found in newer versions of the OS.

It also means extra testing and extra code to maintain to keep it working on older operating systems. What works on one release might crash another, so extra time is required for an ever diminishing market. At some point it just becomes uneconomical to continue. Even (especially) open source projects have limited resources.

Dropping those older OSes means a slimmer product, because you can get rid of a lot of kludges and workarounds, drop code using old APIs that are depricated or don't exist on more modern versions of the host OS etc.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

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Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Being English, I'd write 1st November...

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Re: Paris...

The Marriott was about 50M from the clients offices.

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Re: Paris...

It didn’t interest them, 40 consultants for 18 months, but they could charge 4 times or normal rate for peak periods, because they were 100M from the convention centre.

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Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Why forever English on people who can’t speak or read English?

Most of my colleagues over the last decade have had rudimentary school English, certainly not fluent and definitely not good enough for technical things, like server administration.

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Re: Keyboards...

I wrote some software for international reporting at one company. I tried to be kind to the users and tested it with different languages and when it was asking for input of data for the months, it showed the lolcalised month names (Janaury, February, March or Januar, Februar, März, janvier, février, mars etc.). Worked perfectly...

Only the customer was using Windows 95 International English version...

I had 1 bug report with the system in 2 years... For many users, the month names were: January, January, January, January, January, January, January, January, January, January, January and January... The International version of Windows couldn't handle localisation! So I ended up reverting to using hard coded, English month names.

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Re: Faux AZERTY

I use a QWERTZ keyboard, but regularly switch to UK layout for writing documentation or code ( { [ ] } are all on AltGR + key combinations). If you can touch type, you can switch back and forth without thinking after a couple of days using the new layout. What really annoys my colleagues is I use a Natural ergonomic keyboard! :-D

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Re: Paris...

Had to stay in a hotel in Paris mid-summer. No AC and no opening windows, it was around 40°C in the room, it was in an industrial suburb and was essentially a converted warehouse!

In the morning, I ran a cold batch, then laid my clothing out in a line to the door, with my briefcase by the door... I then took the bath and cooled off a bit, then quickly dried myself and dressed as I headed to the door, then quickly down to the street, before I was sweating heavily again! :-(

Such a glamorous life!

Another time, working in Frankfurt am Main, we were staying in either the Maritime or the Marriott, which were right next to our customer's offices. Then the Buchmesse (book show) turned up and all hotels were suddenly 3x as expensive and the Marriott threw us out, because we were on a reduced corporate rate. Mad panic to find us other rooms. I ended up near the Bahnhof (central station), which is a well known drug and red light district. The USP for the hotel I was supposed to be staying in was "a free porn channel"! The carpets were sticky, the matress and duvet were at least clean & relatively new, but the remote for the TV had "black" keys, which were sticky... I turned the light on in the middle of the night, to see something scurry under the bathroom door! I jumped out of bed and opened the door and turned on the light, in time to see cockroaches scrambling for cover. I grabbed my bags and spent the rest of the night sleeping on the floor next to my desk in the customer's offices!

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Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

UK is small to big, ISO is big to small, US is middle, small, big... :-S

ISO makes most sense for sorting purposes, when used in file names etc.

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Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Actually searching in the local language often provides better results - there is less garbage out there in non-English languages.

As a Brit working in Germany, I actually go to a lot of authoratative German language resources ahead of the big English speaking platforms, because the information is often better and more concise and I don't have to wade through tonnes of clic-bait that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

My PC is in German and the servers are in German - I do switch to US English, when I have to write documentation for our US satellite office, but the rest of the time it is in German. Same with my home computer, it is set to German with a German keyboard.

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Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

We don't have any chaos, but we do use national keyboards in each region - for example, our US subsidiary are allowed to use US keyboards. We don't want to impact their productivity by making them use keyboard layouts they aren't comfortable with.

As long as you don't use regional special characters in passwords, it isn't a problem.

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

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In Germany, Apple lost a case about OS X not being usable on non-Apple products.

The problem is, in Germany, the only T&Cs that are valid are those the user is aware of at the point of sale. As the T&Cs, including the one about using it exclusively on Apple branded products, were inside the shrink-wrapped packaging and therefore the purchaser could not be held to the terms and conditions they could only find out about, once they had paid for the package and removed the shrink-wrap.

I believe Apple tried to argue, that the T&Cs were also on their website, but the court said that, as the website wasn't displayed to the customer at the point of sale, that was irrelevant.

Obviously, OS X/macOS and most other software is delivered electronically these days.

But, if the service provider changes the T&Cs, the customer/user has to agree to the changes, before they can be enforced, but they can't be enforced, and you can't stop the user using the service, if they don't agree to the changes, or you have to provide them with an immediate right to cancel the contract, without prejudice. This caught out WhatsApp and Facebook a few times, with new changes coming in, but large swathes of users refusing to accept the changes. In the end, they put in a deadline of accept or leave, if you didn't accept by the specified date, your account would be locked.

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Re: Size matters

It's not the size that matters, it's what you put in it (your T&Cs) that matters.

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Re: Great spoof

This was my first introduction to Black Mirror... I found it plodding, predictable and a rehashing of arguments I've been spouting at friends and family for nearly 2 decades - and at my previous job, I was tasked with actually reading such contracts on behalf of the company and its CEO and pointing out any such discrepancies, before they signed on the dotted line (or clicked the Accept button).

That said, I held out because of Salma.

Attorney sues Microsoft for $1.75M, claiming his email has been useless since May

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Re: We have asked the company for comment. ®

Or Google, or pretty much any big tech.

We got DoSed by a Google server at a previous employer. Called Google, hours of recorded messages saying to refer to the relevant part of their website - I could find no pages dealing with a poorly configured Google server pumping 1gbps of data down our 10mbps link. (ISP confirmed that the Google IP address was pumping 1gbps to our address at their border)

I tried emailing them, I just got automated replies saying, "we get so many emails, they are simply deleted and no human looks at them." There account on Twitter didn't respond either.

In the end, had to go to our ISP and get them to put a border-block on the Google IP address. We managed to switch to a secondary line within a couple of weeks. About 4 months later, just before the contract with the old ISP ended and they capped the line, I checked the connection, Google was still stuffing more data down the link than it could handle.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

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Re: Clean keyboards

Oh, I reserved that for his laser printer. That had a nice clean stripe down the middle of it!

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Re: Clean keyboards

I was staying at his place once, while in the process of moving. His office was orange.

He went away for the weekend. My girlfriend and I cleaned up the place. Breff on the orange door, started off pink at the top, as it dripped down the door, it turned yellow, then orange, then black...

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Re: Multiple things lead to the conclusion

I worked in a business center that was a converted slaughter house... They only partially managed to get rid of the smell, in some offices, the sealing on the floor must have cracked underneath the linoleum and the smell wafted into the offices...

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Re: Clean keyboards

If they aren't plugged in at the time, and are given time to dry, they are pretty resilient. It is the drying time that is critical (as is not using abrasive or corrosive detergents).

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Re: Clean keyboards

Doing support over TeamViewer is much nicer these days, than having to visit a user's PC, where the keycaps are so black that you can't read the letters underneath, and sticky as well...

One positive from Corona, at least we always have a bottle of hand disinfectant, for when we do actually have to make a personal visit...

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Re: Clean keyboards

A friend loved his Siemens keyboard from the late 80s. He treasured it for years, but he was a chain smoker... So it went into the dishwasher every 6 months for a clean. He had to finally replace it in the early 2000s.

Google has blocked in its in-car software rivals, claims German watchdog

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Re: Potentially?

I bought an Android TV, for the picture quality, mainly. I used the Android functionality for about 6 months, after that, it never got another security update, that was around 2018.

The TV is still going strong, although it hasn't seen a network in over 5 years, it just acts as a display for a FireTV, which has been replaced by an Apple TV, as the FireTV ran out of support (and space, there wasn't enough space for Amazon Prime to run without putting up out of space errors). I'll be looking for a dumb TV next time around, or at least, the "smart" features won't be part of the buying decision.

A TV is something I expect to last for at least a decade, but the "smart" part of the equation is out dated in a couple of years and unsecure probably before that, if Sony and their Android efforts are anything to go by.

Replacing a 20-150€ every 5 years is cheaper than replacing the whole TV every couple of years, because the manufacturer got bored & couldn't be bothered rolling out security updates...

Apple squashes kernel bug used by TriangleDB spyware

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Re: populateWithFieldsMacOSOnly

That was all programming 101, when I learnt programming, back in the 80s.

Only on primitive BASIC versions, which only supported single letter variables was that not the case.

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

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Coat

If it was in a data center, I'm surprised it wasn't part of a RAID array and totally unintelligable... :-S

On the other hand SAP HANA SaaS backups sorted, if you lose data, just look for it on eBay.

Where's my money?! Now USA Today publisher sues Google over online advertising

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Re: Not sure about this one

Yes, this is where you want both sides to lose.

That said, we are talking about writers trying to make a living here, as well. Gannet itself doesn't really get my sympathy.

But I've heard from some tech website owners and they are saying that the ad revenues cover the server and bandwidth costs of the free users, but it is the subscribers that are paying them a living wage - they can afford to keep writing tech articles, but they will never get rich doing it.

The only other option is to increase the number of ad impressions per page, that the reader can't actually read the content, because you get an ad every couple of lines.

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Re: Feel the sympathy melt away

The problem is, they didn't outsource the advertising voluntarily, it was outsourced away from them. Advetisers went to the platforms, because it was quicker & easier than negotiatig with millions of websites individually, so they had to use the exchanges or not use advertising at all.

But the levels of income have dropped off dramatically. I know of several sites and networks I regularly visit/listen to that are suffering. The revenue per ad had fallen off a cliff and either they have to up the ad to content ratio to the level where you can't see/enjoy the content, or they have to find altenative sources of income - I subscribe to several sites I visit regularly, for example.

One stated last week, that the ads pay for the servers and bandwidth of the free users, but that's it. His salary comes out of the subscriptions, but subscribers get an ad-free experience, so part of the subscribtion also covers their bandwidth costs... They make enough to live on, but they'll never be rich.

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I've blocked over 200 "advertisers" on Twitter since the weekend, because they are pushing tat I have no interest in (NFTs, environmentally unfriendly chemicals, wind farms, women's clothing, investment in solar farms in the desert etc.).

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

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Looking at my family and friends, their phones usually get replaced between 6 and 10 years, depending on whether they got a new phone or a hand-me-down.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

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Re: Memtest

I got through after about a 5 minute wait, the support was quick and competent - maybe being a professional IT worker and telling them what I had already tested helped. They sent out replacement memory without question and when that didn't work, quickly agreed to send out an engineer...

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Memtest

I bought a Gateway 2000 P90 PC just before Windows 95 came out. It was one of the first machines to come with EDO RAM.

Having spent years testing and benchmarking kit at work, the first thing I did was run the diagnostics software included in the package with the PC. Memory errors all over the place.

I contacted Gateway, they had no ideas, sent out another set of RAM. That came up with the same error as well. So I put both sets of RAM inside and used it (a MASSIVE 32MB!) until the technician arrived with a new motherboard. The PC seemed to work fine in Windows, just the diagnostic software kept saying the memory was faulty.

The technician looked at it, swapped the mainboard and the memory, again. Diagnostics ran, same errors...

Then I had a brainwave. I asked how old the diagnostic software was, and whether it knew how to test EDO RAM. Long pause on the phone as the technician relayed this question.

No. The diagnostic software didn't know what EDO RAM was and, because it was responding differently (but correctly) to normal RAM, the diagnostic software thought there was an error.

An expensive learning lesson for Gateway, but not for me, luckily.

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Our test data...

I worked at a company that was looking to install a new project management software.

One of the tenders came for a product called Project Manager Workbench. Not a bad solution, at the time...

The tender team sent each of the companies a specific set of documents, including a complex test project that was to be used for the demonstration - if it couldn't cope with one of the standard (seemingly complex) projects, there wasn't much point in looking at the product. A couple of the companies gave up and withdrew. The rest came and presented...

The PMW team rocked up and started to demo their product, using their standard test project, not ours. After 5 minutes, the project manager stopped the demo and asked where our test project was, "oh, we didn't do that, we always use our test project"... End of demo and a quick exit from the site of the PMW team.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

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Re: Well...

The later Spectrums had the same membrane underneath, but plastic keys above, not really a "real" keyboard, but a darned sight better than the old ones.

I had a Kayde external keyboard on my ZX81, ribbon cable fed into the case. Much better than the built-in touch sensitve keyboard.

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Re: Well...

Not me, I had a Kayde external keyboard for my ZX81.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

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Re: Tennessee

What is with trans speakers at the event? (I know a few of the people who would be attending, who would fall into that category) Would they be arrested, because their talk in front of the audience could be considered a drag show?

How safe will they be on the streets going to the conference venue and back to their hotels?

What about attendees who have had an abortion? Will they be safe, if somebody doxes them, while they are attending the conference?

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Re: Mixed Feelings

Holding a conference, where many of the attendees aren't going to be safe is a bad idea...

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Re: Women in Jobs?

America, land of the free*

* richt, white, heterosexual males

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

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Coat

It sounds like the "small town hack" did at least some due dilligence and actually asked the plaintiff, before publishing and asked for the complete text.

That said, using a tool that is known to not speak the truth is probably a bad idea, if you are trying to be a journalist, but I suppose they have to talk to politicians at some point during their career...

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

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Re: Lucky you.

It is not just old computers.

I have a bunch of Raspis doing various tasks, 2GB RAM, plus a Raspi 400 with 4GB RAM. Those are newish computers (all under 4 years old).

At work, our standard PC is a Core i3 with 4GB RAM. Most laptops have 8GB, but a majority of the desktops are still on 4GB.

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Re: Lucky you.

I have a lot of Raspberry Pis running Linux, most have 2GB RAM and a slow ARM processor...

AWS teases mysterious mil-spec 'Snowblade' server

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Re: Marketing Jargon Detector Goes PING!

It depends, we had portable disaster recovery at one customer. If their systems went down, an HGV with a container and generator on the back turned up, with a complete datacenter inside, including Windows servers and VAX.

It was portable, because it could be taken to any customer location to be linked up and put to work.

Portable != for a single person to carry.

Huawei could be banned from 5G networks across the EU

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Re: Very well

They make back-bone networking kit, amongst other stuff.

Lots of security issues and around the 2018-2020 timeframe, it was almost a monthly game of spot the backdoor, with Cisco publish patch after patch to remove back doors from various kit.

Then we have HP, where the US TLAs allegedly intercepted a shipment of switches going to an ally and put their own backdoored firmware in them, then resealed the packaging.

Microsoft embraces Apple Mac loyalists – as long as they're using its software

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Re: a healthier mix of Windows and Apple Mac device

Not if you are a Mac user, Outlook for Mac lists support for Microsoft Exchange as "coming soon"...

Consumer Outlook.com? No problem. Yahoo! email? No problem. Gmail consumer? No problem. Microsoft Echange? Nope, not a chance.

Texas judge demands lawyers declare AI-generated docs

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With tools they've had since the 80s... AI does the same, just with added halucinations.

Arm acknowledges side-channel attack but denies Cortex-M is crocked

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The thing is, if you can gain enough control of the system to inject your own code, you don't really need to bother with the side-channel attack, because you already have control over the system...

A lot of these side-channel attacks are interesting, absolutely mind bendingly clever, but in order to use them, you already have to have pawned the system.

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

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Re: Interesting idea...

Yes, I've often thought about using a mini-PC instead of a laptop. I'm either in the office (44" screen) or in home-office (44" screen) and don't need a laptop as such, so a small, compact & lightweight device I can take with me would be useful. But the fan noise is the problem.

I was thinking of a "puck" PC back in the early to mid 2000s. It contained processing & storage and you connected it to a dock in the office, or slotted it into a mobile screen & keyboard on the move, to make it a laptop, maybe wirelessly to a small handheld screen to be a mobile phone, although the puck would need to be bigger to allow for a battery.

My previous desktop was a mid-sized tower & with AMD Ryzen 1700, nVidiai Geforce 1060ti graphics card and case fans, it was still fairly quiet - the major irritation was the internal hard drive spinning up every hour to perform a backup of the SSD. I now use a Mac mini, which is totally silent and have a MacBook Air as a backup laptop at work, my primary still being my ThinkPad and I'm becoming more and more intollerant of the fan noise of the ThinkPad, compared to the utter silence of the MacBook Air.

Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

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Did you miss the DSAG news over the last few days? Several articles coming out of DSAG regarding SAP's focing customers to the cloud and price rises. The German speakers' user group is not impressed...

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

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Re: Is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use?

If the trainers of the model haven't bought a copy of the Harry Potter series or paid for a license to use the material, for example, then they are breaking copyright by reading it into the model

I would argue it is fair use, if it is for research purposes for internal testing or a universtiy lab, but if it is being used in a commercial product, they should be paying for the licenses for the material they are absorbing, where appropriate - just because they found a hooky copy of a book somewhere on the Internet doesn't relieve them of the due dilligence of getting the licenses in place for that material.

It is very difficult to say where you draw the line and this needs to be legally defined, before these things go commercial... Oh, wait, they've done typical Big Tech and not bothered about the law, until the lawyers come knocking and they won't do anything about it until the cost of lawyers + fines exceeds the cost of doing it the right way. Surely any sane company should have gotten these questions answered, before they started slurping up stuff willy nilly and selling the results.

Apple, Google propose anti-stalking spec for Bluetooth tracker tags

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Poor option

The thing is, the Apple AirTags are already the worst possible option of all the tags out there, if you want to covertly follow someone. iPhones in the vicinity bleet about them and if you are worried, there is an Android app to monitor for tags in the area.

Other, older tags don't inform you that they are nearby, they are stealthy by design and I doubt that will change much with this initiative. The genuine lost item trackers will conform to the new standard and the real people tracking tags will continue to be silent.

The only benefit that the Apple AirTags brought was ease of use for stalkers with fewer than 2 brain cells to rub together.

Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads

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Bleeping Computer reported again, yesterday, that Google was pushing ads to download malware...

I don't use an adblocker at home, I just blacklist their DNS entries.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

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Also bring your own... Not here. No personal data on business PCs and no business data on private devices.

Most production systems are on their own network and can't see the Internet - PCs which monitor the PLCs and manufacturing equipment, for example. Can't really do that with a cloudy PC.

I previously worked for a company that designs plants (manufacturing facilities, not flora). Most of their customer contracts explicitly stated that all information would be stored behind the company firewall and explicitly forbade the data to be stored on the Internet.