Posts by petef

Postel's Law considered harmful

Postel's Law which whilst admirable in 1980 has since become discouraged for reasons of security.

TFTP on the public Internet. That's a thing?

"We have not yet detected any malware operating in this manner" - sounds like the bad guys are doing a good job then.

> Instead pilots will see through what NASA calls the "eXternal Vision System," a 4K monitor fed by a set of high-resolution video cameras.

The SPV (admittedly a land vehicle not available until 2068) used a video screen for the backward-facing driver.

Windows?

You would hope that a product called Windows would do a half decent job remembering where Joe user had positioned them. Windows 11 does a marginally better job than its predecessors but that is still rubbish. Worst is Teams which continues to select its own size and monitor regardless of where I last put it.

Reduced battery life

The lifespan of the car battery will be lessened by the extra charging cycles.

It is also a waste of energy compared with a Powerwall type solution. You can apportion some of the car battery's weight to V2G and it is not efficient to be lugging that around with you.

I'm no Microsoft apologist but in my recent firing up of Windows 10 (22H2) I notice that Settings has stopped bugging me that my browser settings are sub-optimal. I forget the exact wording but the essence used to be that M$ thought that I should be using Edge instead of the preference I had set for Opera.

I'm referring to the top panel of Settings whose three remaining buttons are OneDrive, Windows Update and Rewards.

The computer in question is dual boot and spends most of its time in openSUSE Tumbleweed / KDE Plasma which I find to be an altogether more pleasurable experience.

I recall the advent of spam on USENET in the 90s. Early on I found that my list of 40 odd domains sufficed to filter it out. Happy days.

I'm still a regular user, Gnus/emacs to Eternal September and gmane since you ask.

For me the worst aspect of the ZX81 membrane keyboard was that your fingers moved a bit leading to you pushing at dead space and then being eaten by Rex. We mitigated that somewhat by taping things over the keys but that only improved the action marginally. As others have mentioned programs could come to an abrupt end when the 16 KiB (count 'em!) RAM pack perched on the back was breathed on.

When I was recuperating in a hospital bed after surgery I was glad that I'd the forethought to buy a longer USB charging cable for my phone.

Even now my optical mouse occasionally does not move as I would like. Not wildly but just annoyingly. Inverting it for a second or so recalibrates it into compliance.

The GitHub blog instructions said that there might be one RSA line in .ssh/known_hosts to delete. I actually found half a dozen because the name github.com resolves to several IP addresses.

Apps make encrypted communication convenient. There many ways for the bad guys to encrypt and then send via other channels.

Same old

This software is similar to the older practice of time and motion monitors with their stopwatches and clipboards. Yes it does provide metrics but at what cost to employee motivation.

Removing all shortcuts and apps will leave your PC more secure, albeit at the expense of usefulness. It leaves the elephant in the room of the Windows OS.

Zoom Spots immediately led me to the shorter Zits.

It's a good thing then that I migrated my repos away from Bitbucket when they sunsetted Mercurial.

EOL

IMHO the biggest sin by CentOS was reneging of the end of life for CentOS 8, cutting short support by 8 years.