* Posts by jelabarre59

2005 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2013

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

jelabarre59

Re: Entirely legal

Then they should print that in big bold lettering on the first page of their warranty:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Using other than our brand of [whatever] voids this warranty.

I'd be in favor of it being printed on the top of the "EnergyGuide" label. Just to be sure the potential buyer gets a chance to see it before purchase.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

jelabarre59

Re: Never understood this

Everything is a poison in the wrong context. Relative risk is the important issue.

https://www.dhmo.org

jelabarre59

Re: Never understood this

Anyone know who's been tasked with hanging one of those signs on the sun?

At one time I would have suggested Jerry Brown, but he's of no significance now. These days I'd probably start with Joe Biden (except he'd probably forget what he was doing half-way there).

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

jelabarre59

Programmers that require hardware to bail them out of performance problems could do the industry a massive favour and move to another profession.

Yes, but they'll just move into management.

Don't panic: An asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is flying past Earth this weekend but we're just fine

jelabarre59

Re: Units of measurement

Well, as a Yank I kind of understand the size comparison (having been to NYC on more occasions than I would have liked), but shouldn't it be rated in Albert Hall's or something? (and wasn't it already determined how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?)

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

jelabarre59

Re: Press the button Max ...

More like this Ren & Stimpy clip...

https://vimeo.com/126720159

jelabarre59

Re: More of a Who Me? except he got away with it

And of course, a whole generation brought up to think about "price" rather than "value" feeding the supply side of that.

I tend to look at price, because I figure the expensive stuff is just as crap as the cheap stuff. If it's at all possible to judge build quality, *then* I look at that first.

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

jelabarre59

Re: Amazon is a shady bookstore

And when you pop over to the Korean or Japanese book sections to see what's new, you find yourself drowning in softcore porn rags.

Hey, I at least buy my hentai doujin from INDEPENDENT vendors...

Google+ replacement ‘Currents’ to end beta and debut in G Suite on July 6th

jelabarre59

Re: Oh, you can opt out. Trust me.

All it means is they'll be migrating my non-existent data from a service I never used over to a different service I'll likely never use either. Don't think it will be hampering my work.

jelabarre59

Re: Another artificial need

But Slack doesn't let me log locally (so I can search back texts *without* having to use Slack's CRAP interface). But hey, it's the latest thing all the kids are raving about, even if it is fecking useless.

Repair store faces hefty legal bill after losing David and Goliath fight with Apple over replacement iPhone screens

jelabarre59

Apple lying??? Who'd have thunk it?

jelabarre59

Re: You kill our right to repair, we'll stop buying your over priced tat.

Could toss together some amateur production (live action or animated, either works) and post it on Youtube, LBRY, Vimeo, etc (the other sites besides YT because you KNOW crApple will manage to get YT to pull it). Heck, do a Japanese version and post it on NicoNico.

Sure, won't get as much visibility, unless you can find a way to play the "Streisand Effect" when Apple demands it get pulled.

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

jelabarre59

Re: Driven to Linux by M$...and Linux turns out to be wonderful!!

An additional tip there as well:

When you're making that local account, Setup insists upon asking for "security" questions (I had been picking random ones and providing a single colorful answer). Then I found if you*didn't* provide a password, it wouldn't ask. You can then add a password later on, after the install is finished, and before you re-attach to the network.

jelabarre59

Re: Vendor support is one thing...

Content providers like Amazon, Google Play, Apple, AAA game developers and publishers, and subscription based cloud services from Microsoft (looking at you MS Office), and the MPAA need to realize that they are missing legitimate profits (not just income) from the Linux Desktop.

Yes, would like to be able to buy from the iTunes store on my Linux system (or even Android, but I see that as even less likely). Heck, let me buy from a web-browser. Streaming music isn't any use to me (I don't have nor want to use mobile data for listening in the car), and most of the anisong/J-metal/Touhou doujin/Vocaloid music I'd want just isn't available in the US otherwise.

(and as long as Amazon insists on their 1-Click scam as a requirement to buy digital media, I'm not buying from there).

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

jelabarre59

Expansive? Expensive?

on its third attempt to migrate to the expansive internet protocol

did they mean to say "expansive" or "expensive"?

I am surprised though that the DoD didn't become involved in the specification early on, so that their issues (security & such) could have been addressed while the spec was in development. Seems precisely the sort of thing they would have wanted a say in.

With all the difficulty of implementation so many companies have dealt in, and the seeming resistance in various areas, maybe we *do* need to go back and re-evaluate the spec, and write a new one. Not expecting such an idea to be easy or quick, but it at least needs to be considered, even if the idea gets rejected later, it could spur on some creative thinking. Or how readily could an extension to the spec be designed for the security-minded, something that looks to the outside to be regular IPv6, but enough additional routing information for the routers at the edge of their networks to know what the traffic really is (and no, I'm not talking about setting the "evil" bit).

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

jelabarre59

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

And one quickly learned to sequence by tens or hundreds in order to allow for inserting patches.

I recall the BASIC system on our PDP-11/20 in high school had a "resequence" application, which would run through your program and re-number the lines by 10, and adjust any line number calls.

If we're so damn smart, why don't we have $12 keyboards with the touch and feel of IBM Selectric typewriters?

Properly done, it would cost more than $12 to build. You'd need a rumble motor to get the throbbing of the Selectric's motor, a sound card to simulate the sound of the type-ball with every keypress (and probably a slight vibration for the action as well). And custom round keycaps need to be molded. (do modern mechanical KB switches have enough travel in them?)

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

jelabarre59

Indeed, all of Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba's many, many competitors as hard disk manufacturers must be rejoicing.

That's the sad situation we're in, isn't it?

VirtuaVerse: Cyberpunk point-and-click throwback with ace chiptune soundtrack put out by... a metal record label?

jelabarre59

MBR

Ah yes, I love MASTER BOOT RECORD's music (yet another of those genres with an odd classification: "synthwave metal"). Grented, my favourite release of theirs is INTERNET PROTOCOL[1], but this one should be good too.

The artwork in the game looks like what you'd see in a lot of vaporwave music videos.

[1] with track titles like this:

FTP

IRC

TELNET

GOPHER

HTTP

POP3

SMTP

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

jelabarre59

Re: average office

Perhaps "picoHilaries", with one "Hilary" being the density of your average Hilary Clinton supporter.

jelabarre59

Re: I can lend you a tape measure if you like.

Volume measured in Cubic Cubits?

jelabarre59

Re: ...but does it really "matter" given the state of Humanity?

Depends on whether you're speaking of Mean, Median or Mode averages.

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

jelabarre59

Feel free to correct me where I am wrong ;

Beings born with XXY, XXY or XYY are recognized scientifically as being male.

Of course, now I can't find the original article through Google. But here's a couple articles that refer to XXY females.

http://www.reproductivemedicine.com/toc/auto_abstract.php?id=21954

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1483688/

strange enough that I was originally researching this in order to create a made-up condition based on it for a fanfiction story I was working on. I had thought the condition was Non-Klinefelter XXY, but Google is proving useless on that. As I recall, it referred to cases where female XXY patients had even successfully carried a pregnancy to term.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

jelabarre59

How about...

, and plugin support for AudioUnits on macOS, VST on Windows and Linux, and LV2 on all platforms.

VST? Actually I'd be impressed if it supported VSQ files.

Motorola sticks a suit on Moto G Stylus mobe, pushes it towards European corporate types

jelabarre59

input device

Styluses aren't a great general input device –

Styluses *are* a good input device if you have large hands, and mashing your big fingers on a small screen (and yes, even a "phablet" screen is small, when you have large hands) is far less productive than a stylus.

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough

jelabarre59

Maybe at the moment, but you do realise that the aim of those companies is to get rid of the "or" by not licensing their content to their competitors?

So I don't get Disney's crap content. No loss.

jelabarre59

Re: Taxes and fees

Did you know that the stations that you can free with an antenna charge a fee to put their free channel on your cable?

As a cord-cutter, I find it most irritating that "Cable" channels available as streaming content as well insist upon proof that you are a cable/fios subscriber before you can view them. Now these aren't premium channels, these are channels that SHOW COMMERCIALS as part of their feed. If you watch it on streaming, you will still get commercials. So they're already getting paid for their content, and your viewing of their channel only increases a billable viewership. But apparently that's not enough for them. So I just say "screw you" and watch something else, I have way more content to watch elsewhere that I'd never have time to watch all of it anyway.

jelabarre59

Re: Taxes and fees

Yup, I cancelled my Mediacom cable when the "broadcast basic" here went from $13.91 to $25.00 all at once. They even tacked on the "sports surcharge" when the package I was on included ZERO sports channels!!! "Broadcast Basic" is literally just the channels you can get over the air if you have good TV reception... my area gets poor reception

The thing I find funny about Mediacom is that their headquarters is nowhere near anyplace the provide service for (I had interviewed there once). I wonder if that's intentional?

'I wrote Task Manager': Ex-Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer spills the beans

jelabarre59

Re: Space Cadet pinball

LGR {Lazy Game Reviews} has a video about the game it was adapted from, "Full Tilt! Pinball" (Cinematronics/Maxis). Apparently the full Maxis version could even handle higher resolutions.

jelabarre59

Re: Pinball Wizard

Sadly, years later, I no longer can get those high double digit mega-scores.

I'd have trouble with it simply because of my computer layout. I used to play Space Cadet Pinball on my Pentium 133mHz Micron laptop, and by holding the laptop just right you could use your thumbs on the "flippers" quite easily. And if you got the ball just right into the "hyperspace portal" it would repeatedly bounce right back in multiple times, racking up high scores quickly.

jelabarre59

MSWin usually gets my ONE-fingered salute...

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

jelabarre59

Is it just me that feels that the wheel is being reinvented, yet again?

Alright, Mr. Wiseguy, if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be

jelabarre59

The day ReactOS is up to Win7 level is the day we can stick a fork in MS.

Unfortunately, unless a lot of devs and backers step up and add the much needed support, that day is easily another 10 years off (likely more). At which point it would probably be a "retro gaming" platform.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to be able to use ReactOS for a few different uses right now (games or applications that can't be forced to work under Wine as an example), yet every time I try a new build it wails to perform as needed. The EOL of XP, Vista and now Win7 should have been the incentive for some serious corporate backing, but that's never going to be forthcoming.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

jelabarre59

Re: simple shit so much easier with cmd

YEARS ago I wrote a command line interpreter for windows 3.x that extended COMMAND.COM commands with a bunch of power-shell-like things

What, you wrote 4DOS?

(I still have my license for it somewhere...)

Nope, still can't find them. Skullcandy slips Tile's gadget-tracking hardware into individual earbuds

jelabarre59

Tracking

I have a novel tracking device for my earbuds; it's a thin wire running from each but, which join some distance along to a single wire, leading to a 3.5mm handle. And when they're in use my phone/tablet/computer has a handy 3.5mm holder to place the earbuds handle into.

Although I prefer those new-fangled kind, the ones that fit outside and cover the ears rather than fit inside.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

jelabarre59

why Arm?

Not migrated to an ARM processor? Why not just move to a Power9 system?

Coronavirus masks are thwarting facial recognition systems. So, of course, people are building training sets from your lockdown-wear selfies

jelabarre59

Re: I find your lack of face disturbing ...

Actually, the local Hannafords has masks for their staff all sporting the Hannaford logo.

TCL 10L: Remember the white goods flinger that had a licence to make BlackBerrys? It made a new own-name phone

jelabarre59

TLC?

I thought TLC was the cable channel once known as "The Learning Channel" (and these days would be better defined as "The LYING Channel").

Forget BYOD, this is BYOVM: Ransomware tries to evade antivirus by hiding in a virtual machine on infected systems

jelabarre59

Disappointing?

Like Inception, but expensive and disappointing. So... just like Inception

You should have watched "Paprika" (2006) instead. Satoshi Kon might be more your style.

jelabarre59

I'm definitely not convinced that smuggling stuff using a carnival float is the optimal method. Somebody might notice it, and wonder what is is doing there, at this time of year.

But you're forgetting the "Stealing Wheelbarrows" story (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wheel-of-fortune/)

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

jelabarre59

Re: And this is why I don't do cloud based access.

It's already available, with the rest of the junk stolen from the unaware. You can usually access it for yourself at IP address 127.0.0.1 ...

Oh wow! Now I don't have to do backups anymore, all my stuff is saved on the cloud! I can clear up extra files too, since I can always re-download them from there...

Imperial College London signs £5m campus sponsorship, 5G deal with Chinese comms bogeyman Huawei

jelabarre59
Trollface

Bonus

And every server will come with a free packet of COVID-19

Project Reunion: Microsoft's attempt to tear down all those barriers it's built for Windows developers over the years

jelabarre59

Re: Again?

And anyway, if you're going to build a UI using an abstraction layer, why stop at Win32 and "modern"? Why not choose one that can also build on Mac and Linux?

Just as long as you wouldn't be forced to use the fugly-flat look for your Linux apps. I want my applications to blend in with everything else on my Cinnamon desktop, and use the system controls I've chosen.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

jelabarre59

Re: Re:

Wow, someone who even remembers that film? (a shame the great Patrick McGoohan had to act alongside Michael Ironside, who can drag nearly any production down)

Better late than never... Google Chrome to kill off 'tiny' number of mobile web ads that gobble battery, CPU power

jelabarre59

Does anyone else see "you're using adblock, please disable to continue" and then take great pleasure in saying "ah well, your loss" before closing the page?

Especially since I'm not actually running an ad-blocker, just a cookie-filter. Cookies local to the site? OK, I can accept that. Tracking cookies? Heck no.

I accept that people gotta pay the bills, and unless I want to have some really nasty and buggy micropayment system just to browse websites (because I don't see that being anywhere near as neat, efficient, or free of bugs and vulnerabilities as people wishfully think), then advertising is a way to sustain those sites. Reasonable advertising, maybe even clever ones if they aren't too lazy.Ads that don't interfere with your usage of a site, hog your resources, and follow you for weeks afterwards. But obviously it's the tracking that they want on those sites, and that doesn't settle well with me. There are products I had considered buying, then didn't because the ads for them followed me everywhere.

jelabarre59

Re: Devil in the detail...?

What if I interacted with it while trying to close it down/trying to find its cunningly-concealed close or mute button as it has hogged the entire window of my device? Counts as an interaction so "heavy" ad OK?

I've seen ones where merely *scrolling the page* is enough to trigger video playback. One particular vendor had a video where when it started playing on page scroll, and then you went to the ad to pause it, as soon as you scrolled the page again it started playing again. Oh yes, that vendor got my attention alright; I fired of a message to them telling them how obnoxious that was, and how it convinced me I didn't want their product.

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

jelabarre59

Re: 16 bit installers?

I still occasionally come across crappy old 32 bit business apps that have 16 bit installers that clients insist are vital to their business.

Although sometimes you can find an actual 32-bit installer in there. The 16-bit installer is sometimes (often?) an installer loader, meant to blast you with advertisements for their other products and services while the real installer does it's work in the background.

jelabarre59

Re: I honestly thought it never existed

Ha! Yes, I recently had to run some old DOS software (had to - well, really just for nostalgia), and needed to run up an XP VM for that purpose.

If you needed to run DOS software, why not run a DOS VM? FreeDOS can be had for, well, free. And unlike ReactOS, it's *already* usable for many DOS tasks.

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

jelabarre59

Re: Ah, that old chestnut.

So it is really just a question of which countries you want to allow to overtly monitor your data and which you want put in the covert group...

Maybe we need some Marx-ist country like Freedonia?

Now there's nothing stopping the PATRIOT Act allowing the FBI to slurp web-browsing histories without a warrant

jelabarre59

Re: Illegal.is relative.

Well, maybe the congresscritters voted against the amendment because they just wanted to repeal the "PATRIOT" Act altogether? Right folks? Please?

Don't you just love how our Federal and State governments like to use their "NewSpeak" names for laws that do the complete opposite of what the name says? You know, "PATRIOT Act", "SAFE Act", etc.

Microsoft's Family Safety app drills into kids' screen time, browsing habits to help 'facilitate a dialogue'

jelabarre59

Re: So...

Whatever you think of the companies involved or the concept, Microsoft has the broadest solution and the only one that goes outside of their walled garden.

"...All your walled garden are belong to us..."