Posts by Chris Gray 1

Sounds bad

What is an "Activity View"? I'm thinking its not something I want. I've never used multiple workspaces, so hopefully all that stuff for them will just vanish 100% from the screen.

I've been an Ubuntu user for many years. I spend much of my day sitting here, programming, testing, debugging. My screen is a 1920 x 1080 monitor rotated to portrait mode. I have two permanent xterm windows - one on the left where I run stuff, do email with Alpine, etc. The one on the right runs mouseless Gnu Emacs. There I do my editing, compiling, etc. That leaves a bit of space on the right where I have Mate's panel. It has icons for a few status indicators, common program launchers (e.g. Firefox), and my active programs.

I have an incredibly poor memory, so don't even try to remember key combos or mouse waves. I have no interest in the system scanning my stuff, so turn off the thing that nightly scans drives and builds an index. I start programs from menus or commands, not from some goofy "search" thing.

Tried KUbuntu for a while a few years back. Hated the "Peanut" thing I couldn't get rid of - never even understood what it was for. Couldn't understand their complicated settings filters, etc. Settled on Ubuntu Mate - comes with customizable menus which remind me what the weird names of needed-but-not-commonly-used programs are. So, will there be something usable for me, or am I doomed to continual frustration and annoyance?

Totally American

For testing purposes, I've used the same set of names for a *long* time, and am unlikely to change:

Fred Flintstone

Wilma Flintstone

Pebbles Flintstone

Dino

Barney Rubble

Betty Rubble

Bam-Bam Rubble

Often without the family names.

Supported

I just went and supported this. I don't buy many Lego sets anymore, but this one is a must.

I see comments here that range from "Lego will make more specialty pieces" to "It's not accurate enough" (paraphrased). Well, given that the pair built an actual version, clearly it can be done with the current range of Lego pieces.

I would guess that to do this properly, Lego would have to produce the balls for the planets and the sun with painted-on detailing. You can't do that with decals. If they have to do that anyway, they *might* introduce a new ball size, but that would involve creating a new mold, and they likely wouldn't do that unless other upcoming sets could make use of similar pieces.

I wonder what the gear count is - looks pretty high, from the video.

Names Matter!

Hey, my copy of "Gamera vs Barugon" spells it with a "U", not an "A". Damn military can't get anything right!

100 minues, copyright 1965, "the second entry in the Dajei Studios' monster series"

I suppose its possible that whoever designed the disk cover is the one who got it worng.

....

Oooooh. Checking Wikipedia ... Baragon "Not to be confused with Barragon or Gamera vs. Barugon." Sigh.

Bandwidth!

I don't own any Apple devices (surprisingly, I'm OK with the walled garden, but can't afford them and since I run Linux, which has poor support for getting images out...), and it now looks like I never will.

My current cell-phone is an 8-year old Samsung S4, and my data plan is tiny by most standards. Any attempt by Google to do this sort of thing will result in me going back to a "feature phone", for purely financial reasons.

Optional

Hmm. My Dell 2000 from 2013 seems to be too old to be vulnerable. F2 brings up something quite different from what the info on the Dell site says. Oh well, due to paranoia, I never have networking on while it is booting. At least, the cable isn't plugged in, and I very rarely use it with Wifi (it's a foot from the router), so that's turned off at the Ubuntu Mate level. It still has Windows 8.1 on it, which I haven't deliberately booted for a couple of years, and which I never let onto the internet. Paranoid? Me? Dang Windows rewrites the boot order stuff on every boot, whereas Linux only does it on an install, so I have to be quick with the F-key that changes boot order...

Geeks too!

Well, the home might not contain a lot of stuff that is of normal value to burglars, but instead contain a bunch of geek gadgets. A friend of mine likes this type of thing (can't remember if he actually bought electronic locks or not), and has bought lots of tools and gizmos. I don't think his place has much in the way of normal expensive stuff like fancy stereos, jewelry, keys to fancy cars, etc. Actually I don't think it has *ANY* of that sort of thing....

And yes, I do realize he is in a small minority of buyers for this sort of thing.

Poor Code!

Note the "if <condition> = true". Sigh.

Good on 'em

I for one will continue to support Mozilla and Firefox in this.

The web, as Google sees it, is intended to be unsafe (from the user's point of view) and to provide Google with the maximum access to user information and the user's hardware. That's how they make most of their money, after all.

description, please

I know El Reg had at least one article about openRAN before, but this is an entire article about it that provides no definition of what it is. Not even what the acronymic name is short for.

It took me a couple minutes on Wikipedia to learn that "RAN" is Radio Access Network.

And then:

OpenRAN — enabling open ecosystem of GPP-based RAN solutions, chaired by Andrew Dunkin (Vodafone) and Adnan Boustany (Intel).

GPP: well, 3GPP is 3rd Generation Partnership Program - relating to LTE.......

IDE's

What they should now spend a bunch of effort on is putting their detection technology into as many IDE's as possible. That way, the possible problems are reported to developers, who can then implement a *proper* fix. Heck, I expect you can put it into compilers. Add it to "javac", "gcc", "lcc", etc. as a warning.

Warning: in some situations, loop will never exit.

Not a chance

Ok, that makes it not a chance that I will use Chrome anywhere - desktop or mobile. Especially mobile. The data limit on my mobile plan is very small (300 MB) - I don't want *any* video playing, ever, unless I'm on WiFi. And, I don't have WiFi on unless I'm safely at home and can connect to my home router.

I make an exception for El Reg's blocky bouncing vulture - that's been cached for ages.

in the news

Combining recent articles....

I wanna know what happens if you drop Tsar Bomba in the middle of a big hurricane. We demand proper research!

Would love It

I have one of the original Kindle "Keyboards". Its one of the ones where Amazon provided old low-bandwidth internet access for free. (That might still be active - haven't tried for a while - I just use WiFi to get books.) The device still works as well now as it did when it was new - I've seen no fragility, all the buttons still work fine, battery charge lasts weeks, etc. I use it mostly indoors, but it was fine in direct tropic sun.

I would love a good colour E-Ink device - it would make the book cover images much nicer! Many of the newer E-Ink devices include one or more LED lights that you can turn on to illuminate the screen, so you can read in darkness.

96???

Why do all the numbers up top end in 96? Seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

To my eye, they flip back and forth between that and "%". Seems a poor font choice.

Careful

Well, that's what you get when you do sudden manoevering turns with the main body. Take it easy, or you'll break something, and then *they* will catch up quicker.

tethers?

How long are those ElectroDynamic Tethers? Does the presence of those make it significantly *more* likely that collisions will occur?

Ipify.org via curl

Ah, that's the root cause. I run my toy domain over a dynamic IP address from my provider. There are scripts that determine my actual IP address by querying "ipify.org" using Linux program "curl" (fetches from a single URL). That broke because of a certifcate problem. The logged error told me how to disable the security in "curl", but since my IP address is pretty stable, I chose to sit and wait for a bit. After a couple of days I semi-automatically got an updated certificate bundle from Ubuntu and lo, the problem fixed itself.

Even though I run a couple of services here, I am constitutionally unable to be a proper sysadmin, so its mostly a lot of fingers crossed that nothing breaks! Why am I unable? Poor memory - sysadmin requires a good memory of obscure commands, and of how all sorts of stuff actually works. And yes, I do have a router acting as a firewall, thanks.

It's cheap and easy!

I was fed tea (mostly milk of course) as a young 'un, and have stuck with it. I find coffee too bitter, though I imagine I could get used to it. Tea gives me the caffeine boost that I'm now used to. All you need is a kettle (which will last for years) and a teapot (which will last for decades). Far simpler than some coffee rigs. And, I believe it is a lot cheaper than coffee.

The one downside for me is stained teeth (not nearly as bad as smokers, and I imagine coffee does it too). And perhaps a few more bathroom breaks...

Exercise?

Hmm. Guidance I've seen indicates that one should continue to get exercise, and going out for walks is a good thing, and to be allowed (just like going for groceries). By common sense you don't hug and kiss any friends you happen to meet. Sounds like the rules in Hong Kong are definitely different, if you are not allowed out of your space for any reason. What happens if you are an antisocial computer geek, and don't have anyone to go get groceries for you? If your income is gone (or you were relying on retirement funds which are now worth a whole lot less than they were), you may not be able to afford to pay to have all of your food delivered to your door.

With great power...

(By chance, just watched Into the Spiderverse last night...)

The "Unix model" includes lots of very powerful tools, such as being able to use a shell from within programs. In cases like this, the tool is *too* powerful. Using a full programmable shell for process invocations not much more complex than using vfork()/exec() is overkill, and dangerous, as others have mentioned.

It shouldn't be hard to write a *much* simpler mini-shell, which is intended for such situations. It would take time to wean programmers off of using "bash", etc. but if you give it a few "modes" for the kinds of shell-like things it will do, it shouldn't be hard to handle most cases, and would be far safer. Yes, its slightly more total code to be maintained, but worth it.

Also want more security info

Amused to see a LISP-like syntax for the WebAssembly "source". Well, it is pretty much the simplest form of "source" anyone has come up with. Better than a Forth-like syntax!

I see it supports pointer creation, casting and dereferencing. The created X86 code includes no checking of values. I want to know much much much more about what is going on. Otherwise this is the equivalent of letting J Random Hacker run any C code he wants on my machine without me having any choice. Sure, I do that with the OS and all the other native stuff that's part of the distribution I run, but that isn't coming from a random web page, which, if I don't block JavaScript, can force run stuff in my browser. BBAADD!!

{AOL}

(Me too!)

Wade, add a decent camera (13+ Megapixels) on the back, and I'll take one - you hit my list almost dead on. (Currently on Galaxy S4, still going strong on 3rd battery.)

{AOL}

(Me too! :-) )

I'm on Firefox with NoScript here, similar to many. Since I'm not web-dependent it works fine for me.

Over the holidays I was using my sister's Windows 10 computer with Chrome, and it was shocking. Since she doesn't have users set up, I was seeing ads targeted at her, and they made sense in that context. But sheesh!!!