* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12132 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Codenamed Fugu?

Yes, though of course that script exaggerates. By most reports (see e.g. Poundstone's The Ultimate), it's not very tasty. People just eat it to show off.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So, Google is pulling a Microsoft ?

Personally, I never used any Chrome Apps, because I had no interest in seeing what the fuss was about. (Actually, I never noticed any fuss, even among developers.)

And I wouldn't have touched NaCl with a 10-foot pole.

WebAssembly is somewhat better, or at least less bad. The formal model it's based on eliminates a number of fundamental error sources. For example, it has no low-level branching, just loop op-codes, so it's impossible to create a verifiable WebAssembly program that branches to an invalid address (e.g. into the middle of an instruction). And it doesn't have threading, which is a big plus. This is a good paper.

That said, I don't foresee any reason why I'd ever want to enable WebAssembly in the browsers on my personal machines, and I'll only do it on my work machines if it's required for my job. And even then I'll do it in a segregated browser instance.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So, Google is pulling a Microsoft ?

I don't think Google generally kill off projects because they're unsuccessful; I think it's because they reach the point of diminishing returns in harvesting user data.

The mysterious giant blobs of gas around our galaxy's black hole are actually massive merger stars being shredded

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: And I quote...

Since there's no absolute frame of reference, and information cannot be transmitted faster than C, for most purposes it makes just as much sense to talk about it in the present tense.

AppSheet. Gesundheit! Oh, we see – it's Google pulling no-code development into a cloudy embrace

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: This is an application!

IBM Data Explorer/6000, which began life as IBM Scientific Visualization System, is another example, from circa 1991. It provided a dataflow programming system for data visualization where the user added processing modules to a directed graph. Users could also write their own modules (in the language of their choice), but drag & drop was the main paradigm.

It's an approach that works well in specific domains. I'm much happier seeing scientific visualization done that way than in Excel, for example.

But, yes, for general business application development, this approach is often oversold, and the market seems to already be well-served. Tableau seems to be reasonably successful, for example.

UC Berkeley told to cough up $5m in compensation to comp-sci, engineering students recruited to teach classes

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Just another example?

The almighty buck has for a long time dominated decision-making

So what's your solution? Running a university is expensive. US universities rely heavily on non-tenured faculty (fixed-term and part-time) and high-tuition students (foreign and legacy) because they have to pay the bills and state support has plummeted over the past couple of decades. Students who aren't wealthy rely on loans they already can't afford, so they oppose tuition increases.

Nobody really wants to learn - they only want the diploma; nobody really teaches - they just cram folks for exams; exams are increasingly multiple choice, which just tests parrot memory, not understanding.

Sigh. It's easy to lob generalizations. I've been an academic (including a number of stints teaching) and many of my friends and family members are in academia, and I'm calling bullshit on this. Most of the professors and instructors I've known take teaching very seriously indeed, and a majority of the students - undergraduate and graduate - are sincere about learning, for the most part.

Multiple-choice exams may be common in some areas, particularly for recitation classes; it's not feasible to grade several hundred essays in a couple of days. But I can only remember seeing a couple of them while studying for my three degrees (or the fourth that I never finished).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: ... another thing about Cal and CS...

He later dropped out, and had a significantly larger impact on computing that I ever did... so much for the value of a degree

So much for the value of an anecdote, anyway.

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Accountability

The purpose of the USAF is to support Boeing shareholders

It's symbiotic - there's money and power on both sides. That was Eisenhower's point about the military-industrial complex.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "This is what happens when you scrimp on software dev, testing and docs"

I don't know about that. I've known other CEOs who left in a cloud of disgrace and found a new sinecure pretty damn quickly. The old-boys network protects its own, and the public's memory of company officers tends to be very short.

At the very least he'll likely have some cushy board positions.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Flying

Agreed. And on some airlines those "entertainment" systems now bombard you with advertisements before and after the main part of the flight, and can't be switched off during those periods. In fact, the last time I flew, the controls on my unit were broken and the damned thing showed ads the whole time. I had to jam a piece of paper behind the bezel.

I've always brought my own entertainment when I fly, using a cunning portable device called a "book".

As far as I'm concerned, there's been one significant improvement in air-travel comfort in my lifetime: banning smoking.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Flying

would it not be sensible to reduce the amount of times we fly in airplanes, at least a bit?

That seems highly subjective. Some people can justify flying relatively frequently, for jobs they find rewarding or family visits or what have you.

Personally, I am happy to be flying much less frequently these days, even though it means I do several long-distance (18-24 hours of driving each way) car trips every year. And yes, those car trips are significantly more dangerous than flying - though in the best case I'd still have significant driving even if I did fly, and unless I spent several hundred dollars more for each trip to fly in and out of tiny regional airports, it would be hundreds of miles of driving, as there are no hub airports near my origin or destination, and public transportation in the US remains laughably inadequate.

If I never fly again, I wouldn't miss it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Flying

flimsy flying tubes of aluminium

Agree about passengers being squeezed in, but I can't think of a practical design for passenger aircraft that's not a "flimsy flying tube of aluminum".1 Should we go back to wood? Anything other than thin-walled aluminum is going to be significantly less fuel-efficient, unless it's made out of prohibitively expensive materials.

Structural integrity of airliners has sometimes been a cause of fatalities, but usually (AFAIR) due to incorrect maintenance, as with Japan Airlines 123.

1The "aluminum" spelling was Davy's official nomination and etymologically justified; IUPAC now accepts both spellings. See Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales, or the Wikipedia article on the element, which actually has a decent discussion of the matter.

IBM, Microsoft, a medley of others sing support for Google against Oracle in Supremes' Java API copyright case

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: An API is not a triviality

The opinion of the Solicitor General is no stronger than any other informed opinion. Plenty of people think an API is trivial, as far as copyright is concerned. And the Solicitor General has some incentive to side with CAFC regardless of legal subtleties.

Also, the SG's opinion is not necessarily the opinion of the DoJ as a whole. It's officially the position of the Federal government for cases before SCOTUS and amicus briefs filed by the DoJ; but the SG is not the only lawyer in the DoJ, or even in charge of the department.

And the appeal to Microsoft's actions is irrelevant, even if your summary of the case and assumption of their motives are correct. They might simply have decided it was more cost-effective to pay Sun.

Welcome to the 2020s: Booby-trapped Office files, NSA tipping off Windows cert-spoofing bugs, RDP flaws...

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Confusing.

Yes. This is sometimes known as an "exploit pool collision". There's a good (long) report from RAND from a couple of years ago on 0-days which discusses government 0-day hoarding at length, including disclosure strategies.

The value of an unpublished 0-day drops as more hoarders discover it (or learn about it through leaks, purchase it on the exploit market, etc). Eventually there's more value in getting it fixed.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "...almost-universally panned Windows Vista"

I never had a problem with Vista, personally. But then I was running high-spec development machines, and the first thing I do with a new Windows installation is tweak the hell out of it (Security Policy, Group Policy, UI settings, etc), so I was never bothered by the default settings. I like UAC in maximally-secure mode (prompt for credentials on the secure desktop), for the same reasons that I like sudo on my Linux and UNIX dev machines.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: You want that again?

"nagware" long pre-dates the Win10 fiasco. It might even pre-date Windows.

Yes to the former; I'm dubious about the latter. The earliest use of it I could find in that sense was in an 1991 Computerworld article, which found it necessary to slap scare quotes around it and provide a source and definition. So it looks like "nagware" wasn't in widespread use before the '90s.

On the other hand, "shareware" was used in the '80s, and it's not a great leap from "shareware" to "nagware". So it probably enjoyed some use in enthusiast cant for at least the later years of that decade.

Then again, circa 1991 an outfit named NAG was publishing software (e.g. a Fortran compiler) under the NAGWare brand, which they might have been reluctant to do if that word were recognized as a term of opprobrium.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Upgrade from Windows 7

It's hard to do online banking or emails with a device disconnected from the Internet

Sure, these days. We used to do it all the time.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Upgrade from Windows 7

any of them that use crypto32.dll

If you're referring to CVE-2020-0601, that's crypt32.dll (no "o"), and it only applies to Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019. At least as far as all the published information goes, it's not relevant to Win7 or earlier.

Also, it only applies to ECC signatures. While ECDSA certificates are becoming more common, RSA is still widely used. So while this is an important vulnerability, it's not universal.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Hypocritical

it turned out that SCO really dodnt have standing to litigate over alleged SCO violations as they didnt have full copyright licensed to them by Novell

The question was actually whether Novell had sold the UNIX copyrights to Caldera, later renamed SCO Group.

In 2007, the court issued a summary judgement saying Novell retained the copyrights. In 2010, the appeals court reversed, stating that "Agreement 2" between Novell and Caldera did not clearly reserve the copyrights to Novell. Later that year, a jury ruled Novell did in fact retain the copyrights.

Subsequently The Attachmate Group bought Novell. They sold a bunch of Novell IP to a holding company controlled by Microsoft, but retained the UNIX copyrights.

Then in 2016 Micro Focus bought Attachmate (well, it was one of those complicated reverse-trust merger whatchacallit things, but to a first approximation...). Currently, according to the latest information I can find, the copyrights are still assigned to Novell, as a division of Micro Focus. Woo!

Of course the UNIX trademark was long ago transferred to The Open Group.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Hypocritical

Posting about Fred's expunged criminal record or that Karen was a prostitute 30 years ago being two obvious examples upheld in UK and USA courts

Citation for a US action, please.

Here's a source - and an actual lawyer, at that - who explicitly disagrees with you. "The truth is an absolute defense against a defamation action." He's writing about US law.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Hypocritical

This is the Register. Everyone remembers Final SCO, and many people remember Real SCO as well.

Pomp and ceremony: When the US Secretary of State meets Oracle overlord Larry

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Debatable

Congratulations! You've mastered tu quoque. Now try an actual substantive argument.

It's your walkie-talkie Teams mate, over. 'You don't have to say Over, over'. Copy that. Stop making the static noise, over and out

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So what's the difference ...

Exactly. Teams will record all of this, run speech-to-text (as it does for e.g. conference calls over Teams), and index all of it. Then if you're trying to, say, ask a question in a Teams channel, it will prompt you with rubbish dragged up out of random voice messages.

I can guarantee this is something which will never go on any device I own. And if it ends up on any of my company-owned equipment, I suspect it will routinely fail to work.

Whirlybird-driving infosec boss fined after ranty Blackpool Airport air traffic control antics

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: We've all been there.

Hire a pilot? Peasant. We keep several on permanent staff.

Privacy activists beg Google to ban un-removable bloatware from Android

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "most commonly found on cheap handsets"

Problem then is the banking apps stop working and they are so useful

Really? I've never used one, and I've never missed it. What do banking apps do for you?

CES la vie: Shrunken Ultrabooks, muted mobiles and Segway's adult prams at world's biggest consumer tech show

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Give me a chunkier laptop

Oh good, two machines to customize instead of one. Laptop essentially unusable unless I sync it with the desktop before leaving. No thanks.

And since I have two offices, ~1300 miles apart, I'd either have to keep moving that desktop system or have three work machines.

ICANN finally reveals who’s behind purchase of .org: It’s ███████ and ██████ – you don't need to know any more

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Directors

This falls under state law, not federal. In Delaware, corporations do not have to list officers, and don't even have to list directors until their annual report, which means you get a year to do your dirty work and then close up shop or appoint puppet directors.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: @ Warm Braw

Or over Macho Grande.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: We have the technology

except for those of us who like to arrive warm and dry at their destination most of the time

Whenever I've commuted by bicycle, "warm" was not a problem. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd have done it more if my workplaces offered showers.

(Of course, having grown up in New England, I think being warm and dry just makes you soft. Misery builds character, damn it.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Flying taxis = wrong solution to right problem

I don't care to travel by elk again, but tell me more about this can-transit system.

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Kids these days...

Yes, but the Walkman was a rubbish phone.

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Riddle me this:

The ways of the downvoters are mysterious. (I admit I found the "sea" analogy unconvincing - what would be making the sea larger, and why would it cause the boats to move further apart? - but that's hardly downvote-worthy.)

There are enough pseudoscience kooks among the regular Reg readership that you may just have been downvoted for failing to mention some alternate cosmological fantasy they cherish.

As internet pioneers fight to preserve .org’s non-profit status, those in charge are hiding behind dollar signs

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Does ICANN actually DO anything?

Serve as a cautionary example?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I'm still suspicious that this might be the end game for DoH. If you were Google and Cloudflare, wouldn't you be thinking that DNS looked like fertile territory for colonization?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Founding beliefs. They're going to use it for a store-and-forward ASCII-porn system.

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Yes, very interesting ...

Weak anthropic principle: Observing that there is something requires a priori something to observe it. Thus in any world where we can observe whether there is something, there must be something.

Of course there is nothing, too. I have a jar of it right here on my desk. Damn, I just spilled iaskjdff8^*&NO CARRIER

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Moving slowly from a state of irrelevance to a state of expectant interest

the term "Supremacy"

Is a term of art in this field, so your objections should be addressed to those who coined and popularized it, not to the Google researchers.

a calcification [sic] specifically rigged for the target platform

It's not "rigged". It's a problem that had been proposed, by other researchers, years ago, for testing QCs with uncorrected qubits.

does nothing that can't be done on another platform

Quantum computational supremacy has nothing to do with problems that can't be solved in principle by a conventional machine (the principle in question being the Extended Church-Turing thesis). It has to do with problems that are infeasible to solve on conventional systems. And the biggest problem Google threw at Sycamore (the depth-20 one) is right at the edge of what Summit can handle (at the moment - with some algorithmic improvements they might be able to squeeze a slightly larger one on there).

doesn't do anything useful

There's at least one known application. Read Aaronson's blog.

The minimum we should accept for a claim of limited Quantum Supremacy would be the blah blah I know more than actual researchers in this field

Yes, you're very smart. Everyone working in QC should immediately bow before the wisdom of Anonymous Coward and change their definitions.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

It is also the kind of problem quantum computers are supposed to be good at.

"It" - that is, problems in BQP - are one class of problem general quantum computers would be good at, for some value of "good".1

In the case of the Google paper we're talking about here, the specific problem they're using the Sycamore chip to solve is random-quantum-circuit, which isn't one of those. It's one of the "we have reason to believe this output stream looks right" sort of problems.

Another QC application that doesn't have poly-time confirmation of the results is quantum-physics simulation. Some of those experiments can probably be cleverly confirmed, but at a certain point we're likely to move from "yes, the QC gave the right result for this very small simulation that we can also do on a conventional computer, so let's assume it will get this bigger simulation right too".

Or, similarly, we might use QC to model some protein interactions, then test those empirically, and if they look good decide we can trust the QC on others.

1The specific problem would have to be large enough to take longer on a conventional system than it takes to do the setup and post-processing on the QC; but not so large that it exceeds the QC's capacity. And it would have to be valuable enough to justify using the QC, both in terms of absolute value and relative to other problem instances. And while solving it on the QC might be faster than on a conventional system, or feasible on the former but not the latter, it wouldn't necessarily be especially "fast" in human terms.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

53 qubits, actually - see the paper (or its abstract, which you can read for free on the Nature site). So 253, and not 256, which obviously would require 8 times as much conventional computing power.

The problem they're computing (random-QC) has a solution which can be tested probabilistically in polynomial time. It's probabilistic because the output of the QC is a series of bit strings which should fit a particular distribution, and the shape of that distribution can be approximated on a sufficiently powerful conventional system. Then it's just a matter of collecting a lot of samples from the Sycamore output and seeing if they converge on the right distribution.

There's been some quibbling about how sure you want to be, and Google are pushing the limit of what they themselves can check. I think I saw a comment somewhere about how it's not clear they've really satisfactorily checked the biggest problem (the depth-20 one) they threw at Sycamore.

Way back in 2018, though, they did this with a smaller circuit that they could simulate at length on a conventional machine, and there the output of their QC looked good. Also, for these latest results, they archived all the data (the whole set of outputs) so if it becomes feasible to check them exhaustively in the future, someone can do that.

If Google had, say, a 53-logical-qubit system, one that provided the equivalent of 53 error-corrected quibits, then it'd be dead easy to test, because you could use anything in BQP, such as Shor's and Grover's. You could, say, multiply a 26-bit prime and a 27-bit prime, then have the machine factor them. You could do that all day. But no one has anything like that sort of quantum-computing machinery yet.

(Someone will probably leap in with the speculation, if not outright claim, that the NSA or some other nation-state intelligence service has such a machine. Well, I can't prove they don't; but I think it unlikely.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Actually, all of the things I personally use a computer for, and all the things my customers do with my software, either aren't applicable to QC or wouldn't derive enough benefit from it to bother.

Most computer applications need QC the way most transportation applications need a Saturn V rocket. It's kind of a specialized use case.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Colour me interested...

And fucking up the view of the sky. (I haven't spotted them myself, but I've seen the photos taken by folks in Michigan.) Musk is a supervillain.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Conventional supercomputer?

Part of IBM's objection was that the problem solved was not one that has been studied enough to have figured out the fastest algorithm, so there may well be an algorithm that allows an existing conventional computer to beat Google's quantum computer.

It's difficult to prove an algorithm is "the fastest", and impossible, in general, to prove that an implementation is optimal (from AIT; see Chaitin or Kolmogorov).

But I'm with Scott Aaronson on this: It seems very unlikely that there's a sub-exponential classical algorithm for the random-QC problem. He proposed offhand (and probably wouldn't be held to this, but it's suggestive) that P=PSPACE is about as likely.

Objections that hold more water are that what Google have shown is either near quantum computational supremacy ("we can do that on a really big conventional machine"), or that it's "baby" QCS, since without error correction (which would require a whole lot more physical qubits) the hardware is only suitable for a small subset of problems, without a lot of practical applications.

Random-QC does have at least one application, though - Aaronson notes it can be used to implement his protocol for generating a stream of computationally-provably-random bits. And as I noted in another post, things like quantum physics simulations have requirements that may be more achievable than those of things like Shor's and Grover's algorithms.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So we're up to 56 now

56? Pretty sure 53.

Not that that's a significant objection to what Google have achieved, by the way. I've been something of a QC skeptic myself - not that I didn't believe in the published results, just that I've felt it was likely that 1) it would take a long time to achieve quantum computational supremacy, if 2) it was feasible at all. (Interested parties can hunt down some of my earlier posts for links to arguments from physicists and others supporting the latter position. I wasn't convinced, but I thought some of the arguments were at least plausible.)

And we still have a long way to go before we have a machine with enough "logical qubits" (that is, error-corrected qubits, which may well mean orders of magnitude more physical qubits) to compute arbitrary problems in BQP. The random-circuit problem Google demonstrated on Sycamore essentially returns a distribution, not an exact answer; you couldn't use a scaled-up-by-100 Sycamore to factor a 2048-bit RSA product, because it doesn't have the error correction (i.e. it has 53 physical qubits, but not 53 logical ones).

But, yeah, I have to say my predictions were wrong. It still looks like we have plenty of time to roll out post-quantum asymmetric crypto before anyone has a machine that can practically crack RSA or ECDHE, but we might have useful QC machines for things like simulating quantum processes in a few years. That's cool. (And it's nice that the Google approach is not particularly resource-intensive.)

As usual, Aaronson has some good posts. He wrote this on the IBM rebuttal, and it mentions some other critiques and links to the "quantum supremacy FAQ" he wrote when the Google paper was leaked.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I'm looking forward to this

CP/M was actually written in PL/M

Up through version 3. CP/M 2 and 3 are also available in 8080 / Z80 assembler, which was disassembled from the binaries and then cleaned up and annotated with comments.

CP/M-68K, CP/M-8000, etc were written mostly in C, with some assembler. Source available at the same site. The code is an entertaining mix of K&R C and classic "I don't like C's syntax so I'm going to macro the hell out of it" C:

........If minus then BEGIN

............If plain then zappas();

............else BLOCK

................for (jp = 0; jp LT HMPPTS; jp++)

..................If pkawnt[jp] and plocus[jp] EQ nupt then begin

....................pkawnt[jp] = 0;

....................minus = 0;

..................end

................If minus then goto chide;

............UNBLOCK

........END

........otherwise BEGIN

and so on. (Dots to the left are to stop the Reg's sadly-lacking post formatter from killing leading spaces. Will 2020 be the year we get a properly-behaving PRE element?) I particularly like the mix of initial and block capitalization, the inexplicable distinction between BEGIN/END and BLOCK/UNBLOCK, the mix of "else" and "otherwise", and so forth.

Haven't found any buffer overflows yet, mostly because the code is fairly strict about truncating or discarding anything that's longer than it expects. (For example, _toasc in XMAIN.C, which formats filenames for command-line globbing, fixes the length of the filename; it doesn't assume the input is well-formed.) But there certainly could be some, and I haven't bothered to chase some code paths.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Linux isn't great for developing Windows software. I mean, it's fine for writing code, because vim. But testing and debugging Windows software under Linux isn't ideal.

I do a lot of Linux and UNIX development too, but the truth of the matter is that it's easier to use Linux/UNIX for remote development than it is to use Windows that way; and it's hard to get a Linux machine on the corporate VPN. And if I wanted to run my corporate developer Windows instance in a VM, I'd have to mess around with licensing and activation.

So it's easier for me to keep the IT-installed Windows as the host OS on my laptops, and run Linux in VMs when I want it local, or use remote instances in the machine lab when that's more convenient for whatever I'm doing. Years ago I used to carry multiple swappable laptop drives, one Linux and one Windows; but these days I don't even bother dual-booting. It's just too much of a hassle to replace the host OS and put together a Windows VM with everything that I need under Windows.

I'll probably switch my personal laptop over to Linux (OpenSUSE, maybe) one of these days, but that's not a priority, since I mostly use it for paying the bills and such. And even there I'd still need a Windows VM for the yearly TurboTax exercise.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I've tried this, too. Windows always eventually restores the tasks I've disabled or deleted from Task Scheduler, regardless of how I hack the ACLs. I don't know that I've tried restricting that path specifically, though; maybe I'll give that a go.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Group Polic

This often works, but 1) if it's portable you have to remember to set every network you connect to as metered; and 2) there's a Group Policy setting that overrides the "don't download updates over metered connections" setting, so if the machine is domain-connected your local BOFH can break this fix.

I've also found other software that silently refuses to do downloads over metered connections, including one package my IT department uses. So I have to periodically un-meter my network settings, when it's convenient to have the machine update and reboot.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Group Polic

As it's Group Policy, it's only officially supported in Pro and Enterprise, and it's a power user only setting

And if the machine is connected to a domain and you're not a domain admin, you're probably SOL, since your domain admins are likely to enforce automatic update installation.

I am broot: The Reg chats to French dev about Rust tool that aims to improve directory navigation

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Stopped reading at "command line tool" ...

For me, "perfect balance" is 100% CLI.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Stopped reading at "command line tool" ...

Personally, I never warmed to NC, or mc, or tree, or ISPF member listings, or OS/400's WRKF, or any of those other full-screen filesystem navigators. Or to their GUI equivalents. ls and find, on their own or as part of a pipeline, have always seemed more straightforward to me.

But to each their own, at least as far as incidental use goes. For system-administration tasks that need to be audited or repeatable, I think anything other than a script (in whatever language) is pretty daft.