* Posts by anonymous boring coward

3232 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2015

US President Joe Biden reminds the White House he is serious about repairability

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: Do The Right Thing

At least he isn’t a mean, nasty scumbag. That’s a plus.

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

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"With many customers still unable to meet Microsoft's infamous hardware requirements for Windows 11"

Yeah. About that. These requirements makes no sense.

You might want to consider the cost of not upgrading legacy tech, UK's Department for Work and Pensions told

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That's too obvious.

Why plan and do things right, when you can just wing it?

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UK in a nutshell.

EC president promises European Chips Act to quadruple homegrown production by 2030

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Makes sense. It's not as if China is above state intervention. It's a matter of preparing fertile ground.

And EU has the clout.

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

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Tinkering with task manager in order to get a more coherent GUI?

There are tonnes of incoherent stuff in Windows 10, and that's the most urgent they can come up with?

I wonder if Windows 11 will be a "Vista"?

Austrian watchdog rules German company's use of Google Analytics breached GDPR by sending data to US

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Re: Give it a couple of weeks..

How's that going to work then? There's plenty of insight into EU governance, compared to UK.

James Webb Telescope will be infatuated with Europa and Enceladus

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“The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to launch in 2018”

Actual launch date: Dec 25, 2021

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

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I’ll never buy an overpriced Sonus product. They just copied Slim Devices anyway.

How Google failed to prove prior art, is incredible!

US Army journal's top paper from 2021 says Taiwan should destroy TSMC if China invades

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Re: Almost A Perfect Plan...

Yes. And neutral Switzerland stashed quite a lot of stolen gold for the Nazis. Russia was in a pact with Hitler, until Hitler foolishly attacked. And neutral USA profited from selling weaponry to UK, until USA was attacked. And then kept on profiting. And UK fought hard to keep its empire. Not at all for profits.

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I believe it was Dimitri that was quite proud?

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

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Re: Just one more thing

"It was later revealed that Sony had violated the CD audio format standard "

I assume that this was when they deliberately introduced errors on the CD that old CD players managed to handle, but which could throw off the CDROM drives of that era? Thus preventing error free rips.

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You have to be really effing daft to implement something like Autorun. And even dafter to admit to having done it.

The Omicron dilemma: Google goes first on delaying office work

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Re: Safely reopen?

"Except having the infection seems to provide longer lasting immunity (apparently something the AZ vaccine is better at)."

Would you rather risk death, or Long Covid, than get a jab every 6 months or so? It's only a theory anyway, and the actual medical advice is to get the vaccine even if you have had Covid.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: Safely reopen?

"Because the media (main stream and social) keep banging on about how we should be scared and people keep believing them rather than turning their brains back on."

I'll tell you what really scares me. It's the 60+ semi-senile gammon type that can't be bothered with putting on a mask, but must creep up on you like he wanted a snog, only to talk to you. Can't take a hint. Totally self centred, and convinced he's brilliant in every way, and knows better than any expert how things work.

Many of you posting here, it seems.

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The "muscle memory" is the virtual cap doffing and forelock tugging. What a nightmare if social hierarchy breaks down!

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The managerial types, who are brilliant at wasting peoples' time with endless business speech, are worried about their looming irrelevance. They push to get people back so they can waste some more of their time and feel important. Avoiding spreading the virus is not that important to them.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: Safely reopen?

"This is the problem faced by countries who locked down excessively and thought they had done well. Only to find they are reliant on vaccine to build up immunity but instead of the single variation to protect from there are now many mutations."

Well, now there ARE vaccines. There weren't any before. So I'd venture to say they did the right thing. Their death figures show this. And they have enjoyed considerable freedom from restrictions at times when we were in lockdown. They just handled it by killing flareups off quickly, instead of dragging their feet like we do here in UK.

Indecisiveness due to piss-poor education of our politicians is to blame. Latin spouting morons can't grasp science -they always inject large proportions of magical, wishful thinking into everything.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: QALY

What a load of absolute bollocks!

Children and adolescents bringing the virus home to kill their parents or grand parents won't thank you for your advice. Actually, most young people have no problem at all with the safeguards in place. It's old, lazy entitled and narcissistic farts that have problems following simple rules.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: Safely reopen?

How are those blinkers working for your, then? Very well, it seems?

Try reading up on how hospitals are delaying millions of procedures due to being overwhelmed by UNVACCINATED morons with Covid.

You can't go back to normal, when normal means people dying in droves outside hospital care.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

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Re: We know it has no future

" Its cost of mining is usually cheap due to its use of stranded or waste power, eg off peak, hydro, and in El Salvador almost free due to geothermal power."

Nice to still live in a 1950s carefree bubble. But reality is knocking on the door. Global warming will affect El Salvador just like everywhere else.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

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So when will the dystopian future be here, where someone else owns your operating system, and decides to run hour long updates on "your" computer whenever it likes to (preferably just as you try to reboot it to fix an issue before you urgently must use the computer, or when you try to turn it off before going to bed), while the OS bundled software snoops on your purchases and store checkouts, making unwanted offers to you?

Oh, it's here already, you say?

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Who said it's surprise?

It can still be annoying, however.

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: The first is such a nice word.

It's still a programmable computer. There's no requirement to modify the code dynamically to be a computer. The program was stored on a tape, just like with later machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

Interestingly:

"In 1937, Claude Shannon introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse, however, did not know of Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently[10]: 149 for his first computer Z1, which he designed and built from 1935 to 1938."

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

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Re: Fake.

It seems that Occam's razor is broken then.

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

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"Humankind will never build anything greater than humans"

Skynet begs to differ.

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Error messages?

"Something happened" should be all anyone needs, surely?

And an infinitely spinning thing, or a "sadly" smiley.

Just read what lusers write about their Windows updates. Things like "I'm on day three now. Should I wait longer for the update to finish?"

I guess we deserved what we got.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: At Jake...

"Later models have a 386, 2 megs of RAM"

If it's not a 386SX, then it's a very cool system! I recall having a non-SX, and my friends being very impressed. I also had a massive 4MB of RAM (but was only able to use 3MB for some reason).

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It's probably running in an emulator now, and is mission critical for the entire NHS (?).

GPU makers increasingly disengage from crypto miners

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"In my opinion, miners are just playing games."

Like gamers?

Russia blows up old satellite, NASA boss 'outraged' as ISS crew shelters from debris

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Isn't Brexit Unicorn One due to launch soon?

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"Who would have thought we were seeing a documentary of the not to far future..."

I did. And the same goes for the state of Earth in that film.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

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And here's me thinking "does UK hold the rights?"

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

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The monster Emacs is tiny by today's standards. Can't fire up hardly anything in Windows that's smaller... But, yes, I remember using Jove instead. Nice editor.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

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Stunning ingenuity!

P.S: The article could benefit from some images.

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

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Victimless crime? Almost.

Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it

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Oculus was a nice company. Then Facebook bought it, spent loads to make it more sleek, and improve the hardware (to some degree) and sell units relatively cheaply. Then they forced you to link usage to a Facebook account. Then they started to abandon their hardware (even the current model has many unresolved bugs), because, unlike Oculus, they don't really have to care about their grassroots. The end game is to make everyone live with a stupid VR headset on them all day long. I only wanted it for gaming, like most sane people. But Zucker isn't sane.

Google swats away £3bn Safari Workaround ad-tracking cookie lawsuit in Supreme Court victory

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So the takeaway from this is that taking data unlawfully is OK, as long as the one you took it from can't explicitly, and on an individual basis, point to the damage this caused?

Good to know.

Glad EU isn't as cowardly and/or bought.

Samsung reveals buzzword-compliant DRAM ready for 5G, AI, edge, and metaverses

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I'd like to swap out my 16KB extension module from my Z80 personal computer. Is it compatible with that?

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

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"x86 windows"

Presumably this has nothing to do with Windows?

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

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"Maybe even buying a cheapo printer and flashing/replacing the motherboard?"

Yes. 3D printing is pretty open. People make their own from scratch, even.

We need something similar for printing. The big limiter is probably those delicate nozzle heads.

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I'm pretty sure HP also does this. Or at least did this. I had one of those. Went to the skip when the ink ran out.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

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ok, I'll have to check if I have TPM.

I can live with being stuck on Win 10, as long as the few games (simulators) work, and drivers work.

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My gaming PC is an 8 core AMD, pre Ryzen. I wonder if Win 11 will work.. Obviously it would have to be a free upgrade from 10, or it's not on.

EU readies 'antitrust charges' against Apple Pay for locking rivals out of iPhone NFC chip

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"But too many groups today are determined to rip that choice away from us by forcing Apple to open their system and make it a clone of Google's Android."

Being able to choose which banking app to use isn't exactly ripping away choice, is it?

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: Cost of business

"Who thinks the fine will be lower than the profit made off of the said chip?"

EU has been known to hand out some pretty massive fines (billions).

And they can repeat the fine if Apple doesn't comply.

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

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Cheap is good. But I couldn't afford the cheap-ish ZX80, ZX81 or Spectrum (a load of dosh actually, despite being "cheap"), as I had no income and my parents had no interest in it. Same situation for most of my peers. Luckily schools invested in computers, so we got to learn a bit on those. I think VIC20 and Commodore 64, and later the Amiga were the biggest in Sweden. The Spectrum was big too, of course, but it was more of a pure gaming computer (like a console today).

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"Sinclair's vision was to get a computer into every home in the country, a tall order in the early 1980s when computers were synonymous with room-sized beasts in academic institutions."

I'm sure Sir Clive was great, but this is nonsense. I played around with a TRS-80 back in 1980, borrowed from a family friend. Apparently launched in 1977.

Back in Sweden the ABC80 was very popular at the same time. It had a blazingly fast BASIC as it compiled all BASIC input, and decompiled it for listing and editing.

Our school had a room full of them, networked to a dual massive floppy station, in about 1979.

Everyone knew that the mainframe's time was soon up back in 1980.

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

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"Brexit triumph as crown stamp FINALLY returns to pint glasses after 15 years"

Lol! Yeah, it's a triumph... Dear God...

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"he will be fair and impartial in his dealings with tech companies despite once describing Facebook as "morally bankrupt pathological liars.""

So? Why "despite"? It's a fair assessment.