Any language that can be Broken jUst by switcHing fonT is not fit for purpose.
Posts by david 12
2380 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
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Are you a Nim-by? C-ish language, gentler than Go, friendlier than Rust, reaches version 1.0
Pizza prankster's prisoner plea plot perturbs police, Norks invading and Uber woes
Better Bluetooth in Windows 10 and more local Azure toys via Docker containers
That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away
Transparently faulty.
I've actually got a transparent mouse: You can see what's inside, which is fun, and you can see the little interrupter wheels go round, which is fun, and I'm a bit of a technophile and it seemed like a fun idea, so I bought one.
Used it once. Never used it again, for the reason mentioned in the article :)
Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up
What Charge?
Around here, there is nothing they could be charged with that has any reasonable chance of success. They weren't stealing anything. "Breaking and entering" is only "for the purposes of committing an offence". "Unlawfully on premises" has a defence of "honest and reasonable mistake of belief". Different locations have different rules, but unless it was a defence establishment or a bathroom I'm not seeing anything.
It's already being played out In public: I don't think it will go to court, and I don't think anything new will come out in court. Possible penalties include getting the men fired, and the company going out of business.
How long is a lifetime? If you’re Comcast, it’s until a rival quits a city: ISP 'broke' price promise
HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some
Re: Not good
They don't, of course, have 'a script' that collects all that. For your printer, depending on how expensive the printer is, it's just going to be firmware, or manufacture date, page count and ink details. Your HP PC will report other values, and various installed software will have other 'scripts'.
Congratulations! You finally have the 10Mbps you're legally entitled to. Too bad that's obsolete
I'm on 10Mbs at work. Me and the rest of the company. And yes, we use that for bookkeeping, banking, research, documentation, mail, and government websites. It's going to be obsolete sometime in the next couple of months, because our providers are forcing us out of 10Mbs services. But unless downloading and playing high-bandwidth games becomes a human right, I don't predict a human-rights problem in the next couple of years.
Deloitte man kept quiet at Autonomy's internal audit committees, says scrutiny chairman
Re: Nuts on basic principles
>That is a ratio of 13.8 times revenue.<
Which is why we've been discussing what the numbers mean in terms of growth. If the company is growing exponentially, then it's 14*turnover this year, 7*turnover next year, 1* turnover the third year, 30% of turnover in the 4th year ---- and then you're in gravy.
For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020
Re: But but
It was c purity they were trying to maintain, as also shown by the <> != change, and the insistence at the time that the c library was the only possible way to do math (thankfully abandoned soon after, but following years of amazing blindness)
The people who maintained python-written-in-c were really c programmers at heart, and at the time of the fork between 2.x and 3.0, their idea of what a language should look like was still defined by c.
Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month
MAMR Mia! Western Digital's 18TB and 20TB microwave-energy hard drives out soon
Re: I bought a drive on the weekend
Although I used 10, 20 and 40MB HDs, I never put my own money into a hard drive until they were cheaper than 1.44 MB floppies. When floppy storage was $1/MB, I couldn't justify the personal expense of a $10/MB hard drive (I was poor). Floppies haven't fallen in cost very much: I can still get them for around $1 each. And a 20TB drive is just 20 million floppy disks........
Whistleblowing saboteur costs us $167m bellows Tesla’s accountant
750 per hour
In 1999 I was sitting across the desk from a manager as he explained, on the phone, to someone from one of the big three accounting firms that he was prepared to pay 750 per hour for good advice, but didn't like to pay 750 per hour for advice that turned out to be incorrect.
It doesn't seem like the price of bad advice has gone up at all in the last 30 years.
Microsoft's cloudy Windows Virtual Desktop: It fills a gap, but there are plenty of annoyances
Re: Is this where X-Server steps in (for Linux) ?
I have been using Remote Desktop on my home machines (not even proper 'server' versions of Windows) for years, and it delivers me a remote virtual desktop (that allows multimedia*) without any palaver.
Can't help but feel that someone is trolling here.
*multimedia in the ordinary sense of the word. I take the point that video streaming wasn't directly supported by Windows RDC, but my use of other platforms for video streaming from my home computers was exactly in proportion to my need to do so.
Git the news here! Code quality doesn't count for much when it comes to pull requests
5 years ago now, my supplier pulled back from using gcc, switched to a private in-house fork. The stated reason was difficulty getting upstream changes accepted. (The issues were critical for them, but not critical for gcc) The process effectively involved getting your changes accepted by a sponsor, then having the sponsor submit the pull request. With something like a 12 month timeline even if you could get a "high-reputation" person interested.
Doesn't look like much has changed.
Yes, TfL asked people to write down their Oyster passwords – but don't worry, they didn't inhale
Re: I've got a little list
"TfL's introduction of the whole zonal / smartcard consistent fares system (along with Hong Kong) is a structure now being copied across the world"
Including Melb.Aus, where it was used to protect the jobs of tram conductors and station staff, replacing a whole-of-city travelcard that threatened to, and was intended to, make them all redundant.
The zonal fares system copied from London also shifted the power from the sub-urban private bus operators, who were collecting the cash for the whole-of-city fares, to the transport unions of the government-operated urban hub.
I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™
Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card
Re: Signing = worthless
The signature on the back of the card is your vow that you will be bound by the terms and conditions, and responsible for the debts you incur. The signature on a bill is your acknowledgement that you owe the money on the bill. Comparison of the signature for "security" was never more than an afterthought and never had any value.
Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech
Bomb-hoaxing DoSer who targeted police in revenge was caught after Twitter taunts
Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts
Re: Nah
"Standard QWERTY" keyboards didn't have control keys.
I take your point that the IBM PC keyboard was designed to match CPM keyboards, rather than IBM green-screen keyboards (which had the function keys across the top, where IBM returned them with the later keyboard layouts)
Our Kaypro keyboards had the control key to the left of the A key. This made the WordStar (on CPM) shortcut keys natural to type. When the keyboard changed to the PS2 keyboard layout, the WordStar shortcut keys were no longer nearly as natural. And when the keyboard got dedicated arrow keys, using the numeric keys on the right no longer required disabling the arrow keys.
Re: Nah
The WordStar shortcut keys were designed for the IBM PC keyboard, the one with the function keys on the left, and the control key immediately to the left of the A key.
On that keyboard the control key is very easy to find, and the X key falls naturally under index or middle finger while you are using the control key. The movement commands E,S,D,X were a direction diamond before keyboards got dedicated arrow keys, and the fast left/right movement keys were naturally A and F.
The direction diamond wasn't just used by WordStar -- it was in most software that required direction control from the keyboard. WordStar added the ^K prefix. That was easy and natural for touch typists, but wasn't used in games.
On the correct keyboard, the WordStar shortcut keys were incredibly natural and effective. Sadly, since they were designed to match the keyboard layout, when the keyboard layout changed they became unnatural and, to a certain extent ineffective.
But the shortcuts that didn't depend so much on the position of the left hand ~ ^KB ^KK, ^KV ~ still remained in use long after they had disappeared from the documentation -- the WordStar shortcut commands were silently supported by typing environments like MS Visual Studio for years afterwards.
Chap uncovers privilege escalation vuln in Steam only to be told by Valve that bug 'not applicable'
Disabled by default: Microsoft ups the ante in its war against VBScript on Internet Explorer
Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening as loo shatters, embedding porcelain shards in wall
One of my older friends, with his pal, put half a stick of gelignite (lashed to broomstick) down a deep drop toilet. "We saw the owner come out of the house and head towards the dunny. Oh no we thought, he's going to be killed. We're going to jail for the rest of our lives. Then the gelignite went off. A /gout of blue flame/ erupted into the sky, demolishing the outhouse. Followed by a rain of shit..."
Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene
It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's two-dozen government surveillance balloons over America
Particularly over cities?
Rubbish. This will be contentious particularly because it gives oversight of rural areas.
Cities are already heavily monitored, and the people who live there know they are being watched by cameras and other people at all time. Out in the country, they aren't used to having people watch them all the time, and they won't like it.
Dear hackers: If you try to pwn a website for phishing, make sure it's not the personal domain of a senior Akamai security researcher
Google shores up G Suite against hapless users in the enterprise: App whitelist, physical security keys, and more
Re: Improved security . .
Back in the day, when we signed up to G Suite, it only meant we had to login to use it. It didn't mean we had to tie our authentication to our global ID, the same global ID used by location services and the same global ID associated with our web browsing.
But now that we are locked into gmail and the G Suite, they're tightening the noose.
Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town
And SKIP in DC
And as I recall, SKIP had to suspend use of scooters in DC because of a battery fire.
My own city experimented with bicycles for a while, but the complaints of the car users (who thought that only cars should be left parked in the streets) and the destructive vandals (who thought only cars should be left undisturbed) combined to force their withdrawal.
Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again
Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'
Right. My unix scripts use a shebang to indicate the actual file type. The shell has to actually open the file and look inside it to see what the file type is. This is so clearly superior that I don't know why we don't do the same thing for houses and cars.
Mystery GPS glitch grounds flights, leaves passengers in the bar
Re: Time
Well, they're not fitted with an observation port because navigators aren't using celestial navigation any more. Airplanes (like the 747) /were/ fitted with observation ports when navigators were using celestial navigation.
But evidentially it was relatively complex: I was intrigued to see that Kee Bird (in 1947), was carrying both a navigator and an "astro navigator".
Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days
Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned
Re: where there is no fire there is no smoke
The "mechanical triggers" were in the late model flashcubes, branded "MagicCubes". They didn't require the camera to have a flash battery, and they didn't fail to work when the flash battery was flat. And they could be triggered by hand, by a 10yr old! (Although you probably had to steal them from your dad's supply).
But they weren't the original kind of flash cube.
Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Partner boss explains yanking of free licences
Small Business
Not to be repetative, but .... MS started moving out of the "small business" market more than 10 years ago. "Small Business" was never more than a niche that MS created between residential and enterprise, and MS is an Enterprise and Residential player now: they don't need small business.
Website
MS used to have a server licence that was specifically for web servers, where the clients didn't connect using Windows authentication. If they aren't still offering that licence, it would be because not many people use Windows Server as a web server. Frim memory, t was a cheap licences too
Microsoft middlemen rebel against removal of free software licences
Meet the Great Duke of... DLL: Microsoft shines light on Astaroth, a devilishly sneaky strain of fileless malware
Re: Fileless?
And the files are stored in your file system. Cem Ayin isn't trying to pretend that a DLL, or that a memory loaded file isn't a file: they are using the word "fileless" with a completely different technical meaning, specific to the area of internet malware. It's like "printer resolution" or "radio discrimination".
Re: Fileless?
Not even that. (Although that also). The magic word "fileless" has been expanded to mean more things:
Firstly, a non-malicious framework that is used to load some other malware. To the extent it's not malicious, it's difficult to detect.
Secondly, a framework that uses other programs. To the extent that it just uses other normal programs to do its dirty work, it's difficult to detect.
Astaroth isn't actually fileless by any stretch of the imagination. It just uses "fileless" techniques as part of it's infection process. For example, it starts with you downloading a link, not an executable. Links are harmless right? They aren't executables right? They are actual files, and the Astoroth download is a zipped file containing the link, which is a file, but we'll call it "fileless" because there wasn't an exe to scan. That's not where it ends: it uses other "fileless" techniques, and it downloads other files, and even saves files in the file system, and generally becomes less and less "fileless" the further you go, but a lot of virus protection is at the edge of the system, looking for specific executables or executables that do specific things, and we''ll call this "fileless" because virus scanners might miss it.
Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default
Mmm, instant Java: Visual Studio Code 1.36 brings tasty updates – unless you run 32-bit Linux
We are shocked to learn oppressive authoritarian surveillance state China injects spyware into foreigners' smartphones
Poetic justice: Mum funnels £100 into claw machine to win single Dumbo teddy for her kid
You should really get an Android or iPhone, says Microsoft: No more app updates for Windows Phone 8.x holdouts
In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang
DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web
Bloody vultures! Cheeky Spanish paraglider firm pinched El Reg's mascot
'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev
Re: cutting edge caching schemes
'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!'
Even in WinXP, the default was that external disks were not cached, as had been the case since the days of floppies.
When MS says "previous versions of Windows defaulted to Quick Removal", what they mean is "previous versions of Win10." Maybe even Win8.
Actually, the bigger point is that MS never admits to anything good about previous versions. You will always see statements like "Version 10 of Microsoft Windows includes support for a fully graphical 'windows, icons, menus, pointer' User Interface." That does not mean that Win8 lacked that feature. It's just something to be aware of when reading MS feature lists.