* Posts by jelabarre59

2005 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2013

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

jelabarre59

why even NYC?

I don't even understand why Amazon would have wanted to move into NYC anyway. Only companies that have no other choice keep their HQ in NYC. It's such a stinking morass of crap I would have thought, if they could have picked anyplace, NYC would be the last place they'd want to go.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

jelabarre59

but wait

Hey, *I'm* ripping vinyl to digital audio. But that's not because I'm some hipster converting my audiophile disks. It's because I accumulated a lot of records through the 80's and 90's and am too cheapass to repurchase them as CD or digital downloads (presuming they'd even be available in digital format anyway).

Pandas so useless they just look at delicious kid who fell into enclosure

jelabarre59

Re: The monsters are gone now, come down!

Ancient people and their possible taste for panda meat no longer being an issue, it now appears that pandas might be able to co-exist with us, given their mellow dispositions (as demonstrated by this incident). Many animals that we neither compete with nor consume can adapt to human presence if they become acclimated to us.

Let them work as phone support techs for a while. That will cure their mellow dispositions.

Oh Snapd! Gimme-root-now security bug lets miscreants sock it to your Ubuntu boxes

jelabarre59

Re: Snaps from L. Poettering ?

It sounds like his install of Mint must be pretty out of date seeing as the snap tries to pull in so much.

With all that extra cruft, might as well have been running VLC inside a container.

Snap seems to encompass all the BAD bits of container with none of the good bits.

jelabarre59

Re: This talk, on youtube, is worth a watch.

Seen it. SystemD propaganda with the same old message: you don't like it because it's new.

We need a lot of the things SystemD provides. We don't need them executed poorly.

Yeah, well "Star Trek Discovery" is a new Star Trek series, doesn't mean that one is well implemented either.

Q. What's a good thing to put outside a building of spies? A: A banner saying 'here we are!'

jelabarre59

Re: closely guarded state secrets

You are so wrong. When a relative worked at GCHQ he was not even supposed to tell his family where he was working and his cover address was in Stevenage.

A friend had been stationed at Camp David (during the Reagan years) and was required to list his posting as Washington DC. Only difference was if an officer or judge *directly* asked if he was at Camp David he would then acknowledge it.

Bit perhaps the Huawei centre is pulling a double-bluff. Obviously, if the place is clearly marked as a security centre, it obviously wouldn't really be located there. But since everyone will assume it's a feint to cover up it's actual location, it's safe to put it there.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

jelabarre59

Re: TomTom

TomTom has idiots working for their route algorithm. Both of ours used to insist on entering Manhattan when going past it.

Hate to disappoint you, but Garmin does the same thing.

jelabarre59

Finally realized that the GPS can be wrong, especially in the rural Tennessee/Virginia border area

It used to be the practice of map companies to intentionally introduce errors in their maps, in order to catch anyone re-using the maps and reselling them as their own. I wonder if the sources for GPSes and Google Maps has the same intentional errors?

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

jelabarre59

Re: Doctor Who

With the way the series is going, I'd rather be watching *THIS* version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt3qZYUPi2Y

jelabarre59

Nothing's as good as Dangermouse though. And that teaches a proper accent too.

Only the original ones, though. Those recent revival ones are crap.

jelabarre59

Re: Doctor Who

Only problem I have with the current Doctor is that even though critics love it, the ratings are higher than they have been in years...

Only the "critics" ratings are higher. Viewer ratings have gone down the jolly crapper.

...and the stories are "fresher"...

If by 'fresher' you mean bland and tasteless, then yes. I was really disappointed, I figured having a female doctor would be an exciting opportunity, new outlook, etc. Instead we got a shedload of scrunchy-faced 'meh'.

No fax given: Blighty's health service bods told to ban snail mail, too

jelabarre59

Re: 2FA

SMS doesn't need a smartphone, they'll work with dumbphones. You can send them to landlines too.

Sure, and just how do you **RETRIEVE** those SMS messages sent to your landline, especially as I have yet to see a SMS-enabled house phone.

Took me ages to get it through Crapcast's thick skull that SMS on my house phone was useless, and I wanted my landline set to *reject* SMS.

It's 2019, and a PNG file can pwn your Android smartphone or tablet: Patch me if you can

jelabarre59

breaking

So can we use this exploit ourselves to jailbreak otherwise nailed-shut devices? Like maybe to install a bootloader so you can install a current and supported version of LineageOS on it?

jelabarre59

Re: Errrrr.

Lots. This is one reason why I will not install banking apps on my mobile.

Same here. No store apps either. Mine is a phone, address book, and notepad (and Frozen Bubble for those times I'm stuck waiting someplace). And some music to play through VLC (screen is too small to use for video, or reading). Consdering my 5yr old Moto Droid is still on 4.4, probably a wise idea.

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

jelabarre59

Obligatory silly suggestion

For all that money they'd be dumping into extended MSWin7 support, they could instead send it to the ReactOS and Wine projects, and get the added benefit of not being chained to the Microsoft upgrade-treadmill.

Of course, these are the same sorts of enterprises who should have dome that when MSWin XP was nearing it's expiration date, and they were all too cowardly to do it then as well. So presuming they'll continue to open their wallets and bend over for the next round of "installations".

Google: All your leaked passwords are belong to us – here's a Chrome extension to find them

jelabarre59

Re: Which password manager to plump for?

I've finally decided to give in - but which password manager is the choice of the Regerati?

The password manager plugin for JPilot?

LibreOffice patches malicious code-execution bug, Apache OpenOffice – wait for it, wait for it – doesn't

jelabarre59

correction

The Register tried to reach two OpenOffice contributors to find out what's going on. We've not heard back.

There, FTFY.

jelabarre59

Re: Of course

"The ultimate logic of this whole situation is for OpenOffice to be merged with LibreOffice which is the most efficient thing to do under the circumstances."

Why? What would be the benefit of that?

I've tended to look at OpenOffice as the semi-official "reference implementation" for the OpenDocument specification. Not necessarily meant to be actually used in real-world application, but just to define an example of how the specification could be used.

jelabarre59

Re: Tried Libre about 3 weeks ago....

One word: Outlook. The rest of the Office suite is and always was easily replaced, but I don't know of any other email clients that offer anything approaching Outlook's feature set.

I don't know, would have preferred if Microsoft had gome with Mozilla's engine rather than Chromium/blink when they gave up on Edge. They could have used the same codebase (Thunderbird) to replace Outlook (really would only need to fine-tune the Exchange extension)

jelabarre59

Re: Tried Libre about 3 weeks ago....

You don't want Google Docs. It's fucking awful.

I don't know, it's adequate for my fanfiction (and some original fiction as well). I just make sure to run Odeke's "drive" utility regularly to keep local ODT/PDF backups of all my documents.

Windows Defender update: So secure, it wouldn't let Secure-Boot Windows PCs, er, boot

jelabarre59

Not a bug

A MSWindows update that prevents MSWindows from booting? That sounds more like a feature than a bug to me.

"I keep letting Microsoft's 'Malicious Software Removal Tool' install, but next time I reboot. MSWindows is still there..."

Using WhatsApp for your business comms? It's either that or reinstall Lotus Notes

jelabarre59

Ah, Lotus Notes. The cut-and-thrust of corporate managed databases, employee forums and sending email without having to use the command line. Most memorable of all was the way it sang out "der-der-der DER-der!" from each PC's internal speaker for every arriving email all over the open-plan office of 150 staff, and absolutely nobody knew how to shut the fucker up.

I did at one time track down where Blotes kept it's notification audio files, and had suitably replaced it with a Monty Python & The Holy Grail WAV of "message for you sir!" Was especially helpful in a lab with multiple people running Notes (I would know which was mine). Later on Lotus seems to have switched Notes to using some obscure and otherwise unused codec for their WAV files, since you could no longer make it work with any other files.

You got a smart speaker but you're worried about privacy. First off, why'd you buy one? Secondly, check out Project Alias

jelabarre59

Re: Why not just

If only they had a button on the top to turn off the microphones....

I was thinking that wiring in a "push-to-talk" switch in the microphone would be less involved. Of course, the microphone is likely so ingrained into the circuitry that you probably can't add a switch into the circuit.

Yeah, going with the 'don't have one in my home' methodology. The alternative would be to use one of those raspberryPi projects to do a build-your-own Alexa/Siri/Google client box you can mod yourself.

Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain

jelabarre59

Premium

And here's a reason I'm not buying Apple products. They gouge you on premium prices, then turn around a year later and say "screw you". If I'm going to get screwed over by a company for substandard products that die before their time, with only a "screw you" in response, I'd much prefer to pay 1/10th of the price Apple is charging for the dubious privilege. Sorry, but I can get the middle-finger for significantly less than what Apple is charging for it.

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

jelabarre59

Re: I've been avoiding...

You should read WD's tech paper on it, it's really an eye opener as to how they view their customers.

As suckers to pawn off crap products on?

jelabarre59

WD

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago

Unless you're buying Western Digital drives. Then all bets are off.

Used to be if you had a WD drive it would take two to six months for it to fail. Bought one a couple months ago, it was already dead fresh out of the box.

As netizens, devs scream bloody murder over Chrome ad-block block, Googlers insist: It's not set in stone (yet)

jelabarre59

Re: Fine, I have a solution for you

Simpler solution.

Chrome, uninstall.

Exactly. Although it probably won't affect me much. I'll just continue to use Waterfox as I always have been. And for entertainment I'll continue sending nastygrams to websites that fail to work under Firefox/Waterfox.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

jelabarre59

Re: No, you don't wish you'd have bought it.

...I particularly relished the idea of putting multiple modern motherboards and drives in the AS/400 case - the size of a half-height filing cabinet - and figuring out uses for its front-panel switches and LED display.

Was planning on doing the same sort of thing myself, except it was a Wang OIS-50 (one of the main boards was dead, and I didn't have a terminal anyway). Then I decided it would probably be too much work or even impossible to mod the case. Later on I saw all the wild and outrageous case mods and installs into anything you could hollow out a mini-ATX sized hole out of, and I realized it would have been dead simple to make an ATX board fit.

Of course, the Mac G5 case, which would *seem* to be an easy mod, is a nightmare in the making (from the videos I've seen on it).

jelabarre59

Re: No, you don't wish you'd have bought it.

If you HAD bought it a quarter century ago, you would have had to move it however many times, only for it to wind up, un-used, un-loved and non-functional in your basement, attic, shed or garage, smelling vaguely of rodent droppings.

I've managed to sell off almost all of my vintage computers, figured I was never going to actually DO anything with them other than stuff them in storage (at one time I had my Model 1 set up on a side table, not like I ever had company coming by to impress them with it). Just have a couple TI 99/4A machines left with some accessories; had someone interested recently but they never followed up (so I need to).

The Lisa was one of those "i'd like to have one someday" machines, along with the Data General DG1, and an IBM PS/2 P70. Had the latter two eventually, in non-working states, and eventually got rid of them.

Now what to do with the (still working) 32-bit PC laptops I have, since I've never been into vintage PC gaming (trying to set up one as a ReactOS test platform, if the ROS folks were even interested in regular validations on physical hardware).

Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020

jelabarre59

Re: Clickbait

But hey, lets classify people who actually like the way Windows phone does things (me included) as just "tens"...

I am by no means a Microsoft enthusiast/supporter/whatever. But it seems that even WITH the control MS to exert over their operating systems, you *still* had more flexibility and personal control with WInPhone than you'll even gave with the nailed-shut Apple and Android ecosystems. And I'm an Android user at that (suitably pissed off at the ever-increasing lock-down in Android).

IBM HR made me lie to US govt, says axed VP in age-discrim legal row: I was ordered to cover up layoffs of older workers

jelabarre59

Re: For all you young 'uns out there, this is the "old" IBM in all its glory..

Hey, at least they don't fire you for transitioning genders anymore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway), although you had probably better do it at a young age...

Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn

jelabarre59

lots of gaps in the fossil records (maybe haven't found them yet) and , and they lived for 63 million years, 100 million years ago so they could have developed stuff, and it hasn't lasted- look at our civilisation, only 5000-odd years old, and a lot of the older stuff has gone already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

jelabarre59

Fuckers got me last night. Big box, "Install now" or something. Clicked remind me later and then when I shutdown it updated.

But it didn't say *what* it would remind you about. "Reminding" had fuck-all to do with the update.

Microsoft sends a raft of Windows 10 patches out into the Windows Update ocean

jelabarre59

Re: Father, forgive me ...

... for I have written Visual Basic applications with MS Jet engine, some 20 years ago.

I wrote a project tracking tool in Lotus Approach. Perhaps not a sin, but certainly a punishment.

Two out of five Silicon Valley techies complain Trump's H-1B crackdown has hit 'em hard

jelabarre59

Re: H1-B abuse

So they try to game the job opening with idiotic requirements that no one in the world can meet to show they cannot find US talent.

That, and they send their inquiries to "prospects" on the opposite side of the country, or to people who are not qualified in the particular skills needed. By carefully approaching people they know won't apply, they can skew their numbers to make it look like there are no qualified candidates. There *ARE* qualified candidates, but *they* were only approached for jobs that *they* didn't have experience in. And around and around it goes.

Makes me wonder who the poor unfortunate MCSE in Los Angeles is that is getting all those job offers for Linux work in the Northeast US.

Steamer closets, flying cars, robot boxers, smart-mock-cock ban hypocrisy – yes, it's the worst of CES this year

jelabarre59

Re: Well, scale matters

You can make electricity "work like that" but it'd have to be a really tiny house. When my wife was wanting to lose weight but still watch TV all day, I fixed her up an exercise bike with a generator and used that to drive a small portable TV that would run on 12 volts. Vacuum tube type, minimal power for that sort, though, around a 6" screen.

When she found out how hard it was to pedal - and that the tiny battery I'd added would only keep the TV up for about 1 minute breaks...she lost her taste for western re-runs real quick. Total win...

I've thought of the same sort of thing, except it would be for your kids' gaming console (or their computer). So long as they can keep pedaling they can keep playing. Unfortunate that Fisher-Price's equivalent (Think & Learn Smart Cycle) only uses the pedals for interaction in the game, and not powering it.

OTOH, the US Army managed to make a hand-crank version (https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/military_hand_generator_gn_58_gn58.html)

Thought Macbooks were expensive? Dell UK unveils the 7 meeeellion pound laptop

jelabarre59

Yen

Maybe that's supposed to be Yen, not Pounds.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

jelabarre59

Re: Wisdom equals repitition

Works with dad jokes too. After I trot out a belter for the hundredth time my kids are in tears.

My brother and I assigned them numbers...

"#14: the 'lens-shaped' rock"

jelabarre59

Re: Vinyl

Its a tedious process if you do it all at once but if you rip an album every time you play it then you rapidly convert those recordings you're actually going to listen to (the others obviously don't matter).

That actually is what I'm doing with mine. Although I would prefer to have a CD-Audio recorder I could directly attach to a *GOOD* turntable (not those "Crosley" things the department stores sell) and I'd just dump each side to a raw uncompressed file, to be ripped from CD and split later. That's how I'm handling all my old VHS and 8MM tapes; dump to DVD-Video, then sort through them later (the blanks are cheap enough to use as an intermediate medium).

jelabarre59

Re: Alexa...

1. Enter friend's house.

2. "Alexa! Buy me a Rolex submariner!"

3. "Alexa! Confirm purchase!"

4. Exit ex-friend's house.

Obligatory XKCD

jelabarre59

Vinyl

Major reason I listen to a lot of music on "vinyl" is because I spent many years in the 80's and 90's (plus a handful from the late 70's) accumulating all of it, and I'm too tight-assed cheap to replace it with a newer format.

Mainframe brains-slurper sues IBM for 'age discrim', calls Ginny and biz 'morally bankrupt'

jelabarre59

Re: Sauce for the goose

I bet you could find dozens of smart, experienced top level executives in India, many of them with MBAs from the best American schools,...

If they're MBAs, that automatically precludes them from being "smart".

If you've been dying to run some math on a dinky toy quantum computer, IBM may have something for you

jelabarre59

Riiiiiiiiight....

...has just 20 qubits

"Riiiiiiiiiiiighj.... What's a Qbit?"

(oh, sorry, probably shouldn't be paraphrasing Bill Cosby now).

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

jelabarre59

Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

The fact that (sort of) netbooks have sort of returned is a good thing in a way, but, yes, they really should have a spec of 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage (possibly 128 GB) as a minimum.

As an alternative, provision them as "portable X-terminals", keep all your actual data and (possibly) applications on the machine in your office, and use it as a screen/keyboard/mouse you can carry around the house. Maybe eventually set it up to work outside the home. Almost like a Chromebook, but without all that troublesome Googleness.

It would have worked back when XDMCP was still available, until the Gnome/Wayland folks decided such usefulness should be verbotten.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

jelabarre59

Re: xfer

I therefore used to create a directory for the data brought forward from the old system until I can find the time to properly integrate it into the new system. So I have directory containing data from the old computer, which contains a directory containing data from the old old computer, containing a directory from...

So it's not just me...

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

jelabarre59

idiot flyers

I see one very severe flaw in the whole idea of "flying cars". Just look at the number of idiots and morons you'll encounter in your daily commute. Consider that you're only dealing with them in (effectively) *two* dimensions. Now consider the situation where those same morons can come from above as well. Consider the idiot who forgets to check if he has enough fuel for the trip (hey, ALL of us have done that at one point or another). Now consider those same folks running out of fuel *in the air*.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

jelabarre59

Re: There's disposable income then there's

Agreed, but I only buy them because they tend to hold their resale value well, especially when they cross international borders.

Seeing as I tend to keep 'major purchases' (this includes phones, cars, televisions, computers, and the like) until they're well and truly dead, 'resale value' means nothing to me. Not being locked into Apple's armoured and fortified (not just 'walled') garden means way more to me. If I'm going to have to deal with someone's walled garden (hello modern-day Android) then I'd prefer to spend as little on it as I can.

American bloke hauls US govt into court after border cops 'cuffed him, demanded he unlock his phone at airport'

jelabarre59

Re: MAGA

Many U.S. citizens didn't vote for that ass-clown. Don't paint us all with that broad brush.

I didn't vote for the ass-clowns *EITHER* of the "major parties" presented. I proudly voted for my johnson...

50 years ago: NASA blasts off the first humans to experience a lunar close encounter

jelabarre59
Facepalm

Apollo 1

Back in the early days of the Apollo programme, my father worked as a service rep for an aerospace company, which had made some of the gauges for the command module. One day dad comes back from a business trip, carrying some burned gauges that he needed to do some analysis on. Dumb, thickheaded kid I was, I was holding these, looking them over, and presumed they were from an airplane (which they also made instrumentation for) and never made the connection. Wasn't until years later my mother said she had 'requested' they be taken out of the house because they were creeping her out (which is when I learned what they were really from).

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

jelabarre59

Re: Harmony ?

Isn't that a chain of sex shops and a pornographic movie studio so Google tells me (cough) ?

No, she was a character in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel'.

Or maybe it was a sci-fi anime movie.