Posts by crayon

Mine was a Sony Vaio, with 64MB RAM and 6GB HDD. KDE3 ran like a champ on it. Back then successive versions of KDE3.x ran better and faster, sadly it's not the case anymore with KDE4 and KDE5.

Their terrible investments were badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic ...

Re: Am I being over cynical?

Hidden the scale? At the beginning of January China had announced to the world that some new kind of virus was doing the rounds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html

"Mr. Azar was at his home in suburban Washington, on Friday, Jan. 3, when Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C.’s director, called to tell him China had potentially discovered a new coronavirus. Mr. Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive who helped manage the response to earlier SARS and anthrax outbreaks, told his chief of staff to make sure that the National Security Council was aware.

This is a very big deal, Mr. Azar told him."

On 10 Jan China had made public the genetic sequences of the virus which meant that test kits could be made.

By the end of January China had initiated a unprecedented lockdown on huge areas of the country. Western pundits at the time denounced the lockdown as draconian and an infringement on human rights and added (for good measure) that something like that cannot happen in the "free" West.

The West spent the whole of February deriding China's response to the virus and questioning China's casualty figures implying that they were too low. They were not observing and learning from the measures that China and its neighbours (HK, Macau,Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan) were taking - namely screening at borders, quarantining, contact tracing, wearing masks, social distancing.

In March the virus reached Europe and the US they were both caught with their pants down and when the scale of the pandemic hit home the politicians sought to find someone to blame.

NB In Nov 2019, a US military intelligence report stated that there was a potential pandemic developing in Wuhan. A report that was handed to Trump and he admitted to having not read it.

Re: Testing! testing!

"and a great many have summer houses they can escape to."

Are they like here where the locals want to drive away the people who want to sit out the lockdown in their summer/2nd homes?

Re: And that you might find your SMSs filtered because of course they will be.

And why would they do that?

If you use a non-mainland China issued SIM inside mainland China you will not be subject to any restrictions, ie you can access sites that are normally blocked. Eg if you buy a SIM card in HK, even if they're issued by China Telecom/Mobile/Unicom, you can use it in mainland China without restrictions or filtering.

Programs on *nix used to store their (user) config files and data in a central and fairly predictable place ie in a single "hidden" directory/file in the users home directory. Nowadays they are split over $HOME/.config

$HOME/.cache

$HOME/.local

and maybe something in $HOME/ for good measure.

Re: "That will probably be in 1.1"

Version numbers in many open source projects are increased very conservatively, as can be seen from this article itself in that it took 16 years for a v1.0 release.

Re: Terms limits and volunteer work.

That will probably just encourage them to make even more of their time in office to enrich themselves.

Re: Naysayers-Again!

"as well as withholding a chemical they have a license to manufacture, probably given to them by a U.S. manufacturer, from the world."

Is there a problem with that? Given that they had to ensure enough supplies were available for domestic use? Now that the pandemic in China is somewhat under control, they are sending medical staff and supplies to various hard-hit places around the world - and then they're accused (by certain Western critics) of "facemask diplomacy".

Re: The Last Nokias

My N900 ended in my front trousers pocket with some keys and when I sat down the screen got damaged releasing the liquid in the LCD. One of my favourite devices of yesteryear the Sharp Zaurus was still working when I spun it up about a year ago. My Psion S5 and Ericsson MC128 both stopped working years ago.

Re: Look at the super markets.

"Incidentally, have you seen the news reports saying that people are trying to spread disinformation about Covid19 to spread panic?"

Sounds more like a report to spread disinformation about Russian disinformation.

"It adds that Russian state media network RT Spanish is the 12th most popular source across Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and Reddit when it comes to the coronavirus."

Does it says who are the the top 5? My guess is that the top 3 or 5 sources accounts for the vast majority of the requests for coronavirus information, the rest of the sources are insignificant.

Re: For those who don't know GERMany that well

"The BND is just a GERMan speaking CIA outlet."

They were blasted recently (last couple of years?) for releasing a report to the US before releasing it to the German govt.

Re: Deskjet - sold for $1,000, and not subsidised.

Either you had a very crappy machine or I had a very good one. For a good period of time I used the DJ500 to print onto pre-printed "forms" where any registration errors of more than 0.5 - 1.0mm would render the output pretty much useless, after printing hundreds of these only a few turned out to be useless.

My current printer is a Brother MFC-L2740DW, which has auto duplex, which usually has a registration error of about 1mm and sometimes up to 2mm. The ADF of the scanner part is even worse - the paper is sitting straight in the feed, the guides are tucked in tight against the paper but once it gets into the machine it's often skewed by 5-10°. The single sheet feed slot is also a bit crap. I mainly use that to print onto cheques (saves me the hassle of writing them out by hand), when the mechanism manages to feed it in straight they come out perfect. Unfortunately more often than not they go in slightly skewed making the output wonky, not good but so far the bank accepts them.

Re: the gang

The CIA does, so I guess the FBI is the same:

https://newspunch.com/cia-director-lied-cheated-stole-mike-pompeo/

Re: "increasingly violent Chinese security forces"

It's deplorable that the level of violence (from all sides) have reached the level that they have. However it had taken more than 2 months of protests and gradual escalation of violence on all sides before the police rolled out the water cannons. Compare that with the recent G7 protests in France where water cannons and tear gas were used from the get go.

"Bush bombed the US-installed dictator Saddam back into the stone age because he was selling oil in dollars and made out like a bandit (WMD was but a -bad- excuse)."

And Obama took out Gaddafi because he had dared to setup a pan-African currency backed by gold and was planning to sell Libyan oil in that currency instead of USD.

"The problem: the Chinese can affect that trade pretty much from about mid 2020 onwards. They expand this ability quietly as always, but I suspect the smart people will spot this and silently bail on the dollar too which eventually lead to major problems"

The smart ones already know this. Incremental steps have been taken over the past few years by China and Russia and their various trading partners to reduce the usage of the USD and eventual replacement of it by their national currencies. For years both countries have been building up their gold reserves and shedding their holdings of USD bonds. Both have also setup inter-bank transfer systems which bypass the US controlled SWIFT since SWIFT has become a political tool of economic terrorism.

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

With the exception of Windows I don't think any other OS (worth mentioning) mandates the use of the file extension to indicate file type. AmigaOS/Workbench also had no need for file extensions decades ago.

It's not just speed. Another reason is if the distro maker has moderate infrastructure then it might be better to use bt to ease the strain on that infrastructure.

Re: Here's the funny part... actually it's not so funny at all ...

"I wonder if non-democratic states will respect that intent, or start making highly efficient missile control systems quickly and cheaply."

Being able to build an efficient anti-missile system will help those countries to avoid being destroyed by Freedom Bombs from "democratic" states.

In case you are under some kind of delusion, "democratic" states or entities in "democratic" states have no obligations to and can just as easily not respect the "intent to democratize processor development".

"We routinely work to address customer concerns by clarifying our policies and data protection practices, and we look forward to working with the Hessian Commissioner to better understand their concerns."

MS are still at the "looking forward to working with" stage and haven't reached the actual "working with" stage.

Re: "...their head stuck in their slab..."

The majority of the time I spend on my phone is in reading books. So I guess that makes me doubly self-absorbed and moronic :(

Re: Botnets, spies, and spammers

"From the article: The company [Huawei] is owned by the Chinese government"

Bobbie, did you even read the article before launching your bombast? The article is about China Mobile. I don't know why you think iphone dollars have something to do with this article. The company assembling iphones for Apple is Foxconn - which is Taiwanese owned.

"Because of 'slave labor' [essentially], working for government owned businesses [essentially]"

So [essentially], are you saying that working for government owned businesses is slave labour? Or does that only apply to Chinese government owned businesses? And [essentially] why do you think that?

Re: We are considered pretty trustworthy globally ...

"which is standard operating procedure when it's unclear who should be entitled to them"

You're right that it's SOP against countries that are too weak to fight back. It's the new face of piracy, except that it has been practiced for decades. It's also perfectly clear who should be entitled to them - but a bunch of rogue countries decided otherwise and anointed a practically nobody as the "next president" of Venezuela.

"Since Maduro is not recognised by the UK (and other EU governments)"

At least you got it right by using "and other EU governments" and not "and the EU". Italy was the only major EU country with the balls to stand up against this blatant aggression against another country and prevented the EU from making a joint statement.

Note what happened when the Italian deputy PM met with some representatives from the Yellow Vests - France called it "an unacceptable provocation" and recalled their ambassador to Italy for "consultations".

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/06/italys-deputy-pm-luigi-di-maio-meets-senior-gilets-jaunes-figure

But somehow it's perfectly fine for a bunch of Western countries to dictate to Venezuela who their president should be and to urge their people and their military to overthrow the incumbent government. And then they have the cheek to call this "returning Venezuela to democracy".

For the record, Venezuela has one of the most transparent election process in the world (yes, really - do some research). Stakeholders are present at all stages of an election to monitor and verify. All voting machines give out receipts and maintain a hardcopy paper trail (which are tallied and checked against the electronic results) - unlike some countries where although machines are required to keep hardcopies they "mysteriously" end up with no paper loaded on voting day.

"When Venezuela gets its government sorted out, then that government will have access to the money again."

There is no sorting out needed, the sole legitimate government is the one recognised by the vast majority of countries and the UNGA.

Hopefully the decision by Russia and China to send have their militaries pay a visit to Venezuela will be enough to signal to the would-be regime-changers that military options are not on the table.

Re: "Although given the NBT was DAT and Minidiscs"

Sony didn't learn and continued their mistakes in promoting their "whatever is was called" equivalent of CF and SD memory cards.

Re: For the cost of an Oracle license

... Or they could use the money saved to pay some taxes. It's been reported that Alibaba paid some $7.7 Billion in taxes last year:

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/alibaba-paid-51-6-billion-yuan-in-tax-last-year/

I wonder how much Amazon paid.

Re: "Misinformation coming from Russia"

Craig Murray, bless him. Now that he no longer draws a government paycheck is free to speak his mind. He writes more sense than the whole of the British so called "news" media put together.

Re: We're doomed.

"Who do the usual chant of 'death to America, death to Israel', demonstrating that geography perhaps isn't their strong point."

I'm not going to pass judgement on their grasp of geography, but unlike you, they do know their geopolitics. Like the fact that until relatively recently the US were refueling the Saudi jets that are used to bomb mainly non-military targets.

Re: Real point here

What values of "free" are you talking about considering that Huawei provides funding to run HCSEC?