* Posts by captain veg

2624 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

captain veg Silver badge

I hadn't realised just how little these chancers have actually achieved so far

SpaceX is supposed to be a success. And yet 'in early February, Musk said he was "highly confident" Starship would reach orbit last year'.

You mean they haven't even done that yet?

Wow.

"The Karman line, commonly accepted to be the spot where Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins, is around 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above sea level."

So not even close.

'Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and COO, said in 2019 that the company "definitely" wanted to land Starship on the Moon "before 2022,"'

Successful orbit: about 42 thousand kilometres.

Distance to the moon: about 400 thousand kilometres.

SpaceX so far: "a little over six miles".

-A.

Microsoft is changing how it handles device diagnostic data to keep EU sweet

captain veg Silver badge

good grief

"Microsoft is continuing to change how diagnostic data from Windows devices is processed and controlled to keep its place in the European market amid stringent privacy and security regulations."

Call me weird, but I would like Microsoft to use diagnostic data only for diagnosing problems.

They can't know that such problems exist without me telling them, so this would be, of necessity, strictly by my permission.

"IT administrators enrolling devices in the Windows diagnostic data processor configuration option had been able to use a range of policies for each system, such as allowing for a commercial data pipeline and for desktop analytics processing."

I really don't know what those things might be, nor why IT administrators would want to enroll devices to them. Are they getting backhanders?

"As part of a larger effort announced in May 2021 to enable European entities to process and store their data in Europe, the software giant is ending the use of policies to configure the processor option and instead is offering a configuration for an entire organization based on Azure Active Directory to set Microsoft's role in processing data."

How about just turning the whole thing off by default? If the justification is that it make Windows better then clearly it has failed.

-A.

Microsoft boffins contemplate equipping Excel with AI

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't it be nice

> (looking at you, 'find')

I'd quite like that 'find' actually finds occurrences of the text you asked it to look for, without you having to know the special incantation that reveals this wisdom.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Aaaaaaarrrrgghhh!!!!eleven

So, as well as being riddled with copy/paste/careless-edit errors, spreadsheets will benefit from "the computer did it all by itself, so it must be right" upfucks.

Great.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't it be nice

40Kb is dangerously close to an entire 64Kb segment.

What's your point?

-A.

Have we learned anything from SolarWinds supply chain attacks?

captain veg Silver badge

Re: where to start?

Do you think that they reviewed the code before incorporating it?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: where to start?

I seem not to expressed myself clearly.

So far as I know, Microsoft wrote all the code for Windows itself. I'm talking about projects which pull in code from the public domain.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

where to start?

"a miscreant can inject malicious code into a piece of software before the compromised software is sent out to customers and compromises those systems"

Er, how?

> attackers have targeted code repositories like GitHub and PyPI

Ah, that's how.

Don't use them, folks, unless you're prepared to audit the code yourself.

> and companies like CI/CD platform provider CircleCI,

Never heard of it, but the name reeks of fad-du-jour.

> What the CircleCI incident illustrates is that organizations have to not only be concerned about malware being injected into a compiled object or deliverable, but also of the tooling used to build them,

No. It illustrates the stupidity of making your enterprise reliant on third-party code that you haven't yourself validated.

That's all.

-A.

Semiconductor world in for a rough ride as chip bubble bursts at the high end

captain veg Silver badge

Sounds like a good time to buy DRAM, except that...

My rigs are already maxed out.

I don't know why 32GB (or even 16GB) seems to be a common limit on mainstream motherboards from the last few years, but there you go. Can a BIOS update fix that?

I was recently checking out the options for replacing my current laptop. Not many candidates boast a higher limit. A surprising (to me) number have soldered-in RAM chips. I want to be able to specify 32GB right now, and to be able to at least quadruple that as needs must,

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Boom and Bust Cycles

I was told at a technical college in, about 1978, not to bother with computer science because it was just a fad.

-A.

Qualcomm feels the squeeze because you don't want a new smartphone right now

captain veg Silver badge

headline

"you don't want a new smartphone right now"

Actually, I do. I just don't want any of the models currently on offer through the usual channels.

I hate my current device with a vengeance. Unfortunately it is a very ordinary Android handset, albeit running LineageOS, so any likely replacement will be more of the same, just newer.

I've tried to like Apple kit, but it just doesn't work for me. I know that an iPhone is just a tiny computer. Apple knows it too. For some reason they go out of their way to hide this fact. I don't want that. I want my tiny handheld computer to behave like a computer, just one which fits in a pocket and is handily connected to the cellular network. I want to be able to install my choice of software by any means that I find convenient. I want to find the tools common to normal computers built in; things like the ability to connect to server shares, FTP, SSH, a usable email client. I wan't to see the real filesystem. Most of all, I want a physical keyboard.

I shall probably end up with something obscure running UBPorts and have to explain to corporate IT that no, my personal choice of smartphone can't run the authenticator app that's available "on all platforms".

Ho hum.

-A.

Linux Mint 21.2 includes a bit of feature creep from the GNOME world

captain veg Silver badge

screaming over every version of Windows after 7?

I started using Windows in anger at 3.1.

It was OK. Not brilliant, but it got stuff done. What was insufferable was the GPF, an error in a single application program, or system component, which stiffed the entire computer.

Windows 95 was slightly better, but certainly not immune. It brought some UI changes which were mostly just changes, and in some cases improvements.

Windows NT4 did away with GPFs taking down the whole system, and had the Windows 95 shell. Quite good. Needed a lot of RAM, for the time. Didn't know anything about USB.

Windows 2000 knew about USB. Which is useful.

Windows XP started *much* quicker. It had a stupid new Fischer-Price UI, but you could turn it off. Really good, by the standard of these things.

Windows Vista is utterly unknown. No one used it, it was that bad.

Windows 7 was better than Vista. Damned by faint praise. The last version of Windows with a sane user interface, which counts for something.

Windows 8 was... the less said the better.

Windows 8.1 was a little bit less bad.

Window 10 was just terrible. There is no good reason for running it other than the fact that Windows 7 is out of support.

Windows 11 is even more terrible. There is no good reason for running it other than the fact that Windows 7 is out of support, and Windows 10 will soon be.

-A.

Microsoft swears it's not coming for your data with scan for old Office versions

captain veg Silver badge

Microsoft is delivering the update to users who have opted to receive updates for its products

> Microsoft is delivering the update to users who have opted to receive updates for its products

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. HA HA HA HA HA HA Ha.

Hahahahahahahahhaha!!!!!!

HA!

Ha!

Ha ha ha, aha ha ha.

Where do I opt out?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: I don't care that it only runs once - it should not run at all without my permission

I'm not keen on Microsoft not asking nicely before updating files that it supplied itself in the first place.

Trawling my entire filesystem for, what, we don't really know, is taking the piss.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

more stable

Well yes, Windows for Warehouses contained code from the beta builds of what would emerge as Windows 95. The 32-bit disk access was so buggy that Microsoft recommended turning it off.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

open sourced

As an additional bonus we could then compile it ourselves and not have to trust the frankly terrifying assurance that it has been virus-scanned. I'd be much better disposed to run it then.

Hold on, that's mad.

-A.

As Apple sales slide, Tim Cook says fanbois will tolerate higher iPhone prices

captain veg Silver badge

I've never owned an iThing, but once upon a time an American intern in our French offices proudly took delivery of a new iPhone. Being Californian he was very pleased with the fact that the packaging declared "Designed in California". I couldn't help but point out that the designer was a Brit.

Well, at least that Brit lives in California.

Manufacturing tech devices in China at whatever is their prevailing rate, I don't know what, but I doubt that it's more than a few dollars per unit, and flogging them to Californians for thousands of dollars is, um, good business.

I wonder if it's sustainable. Were Apple to suddenly announce that henceforward its products would be assembled in California, I can't help but imagine that this would enhance the brand image. It might impact the profitability by literally some percentage points, but leave it obscenely profitable.

-A.

Google opens arms to VMware in the cloud and Microsoft 365 on ChromeOS

captain veg Silver badge

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

> Syncthing?

That could be it, thanks!

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

> Nextcloud

Looks a bit over the top for my purposes, and the server software doesn't appear to be in the Mint repositories.

Feel free to tell my I'm wrong.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

there is still no official OneDrive client for the open source OS.

Thank Bob for that.

I'm still looking for a home-hosted "drive"-alike to replace my FTP server. Must run on Linux and be available in the usual repositories.

Any takers?

-A.

Meta, which pays for web scraping, sues to stop web scraping

captain veg Silver badge

If you don't want it scraped, don't serve it from your web site.

You would think these people ought to know *something* about HTTP.

-A.

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

captain veg Silver badge

Nice to see they've got their priorities sorted.

Shame they're not the same as mine.

-A.

GPT-4 could pop up in Bing, as Google races to build chatbot search products

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Sorry AC

So you can. Thanks.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Fools errand

> People don't need their search results dressed up as a fake conversation

I would say that they also don't need their search results expressed as plausible but wrong opinion rather than objective fact.

Well, it seems that plenty of people do, in fact*, want plausible but wrong, but the species as a whole is doomed if that's what we get by default.

-A.

*With respect to Majikthise and Vroomfondel

captain veg Silver badge

Sorry AC

I clicked the downvote button in error. Have two virtual upvotes.

-A.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Sorry but where is the problem?

I would have thought this should be easy to solve.

If you're making money out of free software then it's your responsibility to check the code and certify that to the best of your knowledge it is fit for the use to which you are putting it.

Otherwise, as you were.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: When the EEC was born

And yet pattern parts exist. And always did all through the period the the UK was in the EU.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

Thank you for making my point for me.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

Sorry that my "fuck" offended your sensibility.

You called me a liar.

You continue to call me a liar.

Is this what passes for debate around here? Beneath contempt.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

I'm perfectly capable of answering, thanks. Unlike you, apparently, I have a working life to attend to.

I have not the slightest idea what your latest post is supposed to prove.

Kindly fuck off and stop wasting my time.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

This is sophistry.

Do you deny that Liz Truss was sacked by the parliamentary Conservative party?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

You can define anyone who works in an office as a "bureaucrat", if you like, but the commissioners are political appointees, selected by the sovereign and democratic governments of the member states.

Those member states could easily choose to put their commissioners to election if they so wished. They don't, because they don't want there to be an alternative pole of governance with similar or greater democratic legitimacy to their own governments. The EU has to go along with this because it is a treaty-based club of its members, and not a superstate.

You can believe what you like about what I know about my MEPs. Frankly I don't give a shit.

The point about what you choose to characterise as "private members bills" is that the UK legislature is a much more of a "rubber stamp" than the EU Parliament.

In the UK the government is *NOT* in the slightest way directly elected. The members of Parliament are directly elected; the Prime Minister and all of the cabinet and all of the rest of the payroll vote are appointed by whichever party happened to get the largest number of seats, even if without a majority of the popular vote.

Not a single UK citizen voted for Liz Truss to be PM. Or Sunak.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

I think the questions in your final paragraph are somewhat moot since the UK is no longer a member. I can answer them, but then I'm still resident in an EU country. Let me pose a contra-question: can you name a single piece of legislation passed by the UK Parliament which was initiated by an ordinary member rather than the government? They are vanishingly rare.

As for not mattering, well, that's a view.

The Parliament scrutinises legislation and has formal powers to amend or reject it. It is not the function of the Parliament to initiate legislation. This is called separation of powers, and is widely regarded as A Good Thing. Informally, however, MEPs are free to suggest legislation to commissioners, and this happens quite often.

The Parliament can also sack the entire Commission. This is not merely theoretical; it has happened.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: rubber stamp

Not this one again.

The EU parliament amends legislation far more often than the House of Commons. It is extremely rare for HMG not to get its way due to the hopeless intermingling of executive and legislative functions in the Commons and the power this gives to the party whips.

As for corruption, pot, meet kettle.

Of course, if the European Parliament really were just a rubber stamp then the opportunities for corruption would be minimal. No one hands over a brown envelope stuffed with cash to a rubber stamper.

-A.

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

captain veg Silver badge

translation

I work for an American-headquartered international company.

Whenever meetings involve people whose first language differs, they are held in English.

Often the hardest people to understand in these meetings, for the non-native speakers, are Americans and Brits.

Will this AI gubbins translate from, say, Herne Hill patois, to international English? Or from manglement-bollox to plain speaking?

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

sounds ghastly

With any luck they won't bother bringing this "functionality" to the Linux version.

-A.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing

A few years ago I persuaded my retired father to get off the Microsoft treadmill and gifted him a NUC with Mint Cinammon, and a Window VM in VirtualBox should he need that.

He doesn't.

Having got him off Windows on the desktop, I presented an M1 MacBook to replace the Windows-driven HP laptop that he occasionally used.

Absolutely no take up at all. The HP's battery is pretty much knackered, and still the old fella prefers it to the Apple portable, to the extent that he never uses the latter.

I really don't know what to conclude from this.

-A.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

captain veg Silver badge

This is not the only technology being considered for delivering a wireless service to...

"remote or hard-to-reach areas"

It's the UK we're talking about here. Certain fringe-right politicians insist that the islands are somehow already full. How hard, then, can it be to run some fibre out to all of them?

"SPL's antenna uses phased array tech featuring 500 individually steerable beams, and is able to provide data speeds of up to 150Mbps"

150Mbs. So already ten years out of date.

Spain has a much lower population density, and yet standard fibre delivers 300Mbps or more.

In France I can have 1.2Gbps for a very reasonable monthly fee.

I'm currently in Andorra. Basic, universal broadband is 300Mbps. Everyone here is up a mountain. How remote or hard-to-reach do you want?

-A.

Microsoft upgrades Defender to lock down Linux gear for its own good

captain veg Silver badge

intruders

"Intruders won't be able to connect to the device or run operations like assuming unauthorized control of the system or stealing sensitive data, Microsoft claims."

Have they demonstrated that intruders could connect to Linux devices or run operations like that without the "benefit" of Defender? Or does this, in fact, leave Linux users in much the same position as before but with some Microsoft bloatware installed?

-A.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Unhash?

Bless.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Suspect Home Depot aren't the only one's...

I think that this deserves the response "fuck me".

To be clear, that is not an invitation to Facebook.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Annnnnnnd...

Gosh.

We're genuinely not worthy.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Annnnnnnd...

Generally if some fuckwit corporation insists on me giving them an email address, and if a moment's reflection reveals that there's no way they can validate it (e.g. airport WiFi where you have to provide an email address before you can access, but there is no way that they could email you an authorisation code because you don't yet have access to the WiFi) then I make up something in the domain <example.org>. It could be <example.com> or <example.net> with the same result. Don't quote me on this, but I believe that *.invalid works much the same.

I'm not sure where your 320 character limit came from. So far as I'm aware any combination of <user-name>@<domain>.<tld> is valid, and <user-name> can contain any otherwise reserved characters so long as it is quoted.

But sure, feed the fuckers really long garbage in the hope that it might break their suppositions about maximum length.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

just in case

I expect that you already know this, but just in case...

'Canada's Home Depot has stopped using Meta's "Offline Conversions" tool'

In advertising, especially the online variety, a "conversion" is an action -- any action -- which resulted from someone seeing an ad. It could be a click-through on the ad itself. With tracking cookies it is more likely to be that you visited the advertiser's site -- or one syndicated to it -- at some point after the ad was delivered.

The holy grail, of course, is conversion to an actual sale, but others are possible. A favourite of the advertising industry is "awareness". You saw an ad, and this affected your awareness of the advertised product.

Home Depot sharing your freely disclosed email address allows Facebook to score a conversion of the most valuable kind. They (Facebook) showed you an ad, and then you bought something from Home Depot. If you are Home Depot then you probably hope that this sequence involved a Facebook ad for Home Depot, but it doesn't have to be so. No one really cares about causality just so long as the correlation is plausible.

I work in the industry, and I say nuke them from a low orbit.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Nope

Bless.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Annnnnnnd...

At least now I know why Decathlon (in France, at least) tries to grab your email address rather than printing out a receipt at the tills.

It had puzzled me until now. If I don't want or need a receipt, which is possible, then I might appreciate the possibility of them not spraying tar and carbon on to dead tree. Though why, if that's an option, they continue to place hefty security staff next to the exit from the megashed is non-obvious. If I do want or need a receipt then I'd like a receipt. Not some trivially easily forged collection of bits sent to some random email address that I happen to chuck in their direction.

Naturally I have thusfar declined, just because of suspicion of things that I don't immediately understand. I need to recalibrate my naivety-cynicism balance again. I just don't have the imagination to compete with people who think up this kind of shit.

-A.

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

captain veg Silver badge

memories

Remember when people started embedding Java applets in web sites? Think about how *that* might have turned out.

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Musk: Tesla's doing great. I mean, have you seen my Twitter follower count?

captain veg Silver badge

Naming your cars S,E,X and Y is slightly amusing, but hardly evidence of a business genius.

Rounding up your totally unnecessary bid for Twitter to <something>4.20, because it's (apparently) some kind of stoner meme is just hubris.

Nemesis is here.

-A.

captain veg Silver badge

Kardashians

I know almost nothing about them other than they have big bums. That might not be true; I haven't met one.

-A.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

captain veg Silver badge

Re: Harmony by disharmony

These days I just pull over as far as I can to the nearside*. Unless you can actually see the blue flashing lights there's no point in trying to second-guess the best way of getting out of the way.

Sometimes the vehicle[s] behind will (try to) pass you. This is because their drivers are cunts and not worthy of your anger.

-A.

*I was going to add the caveat that on dual carriageways you might want to move to the offside if that's further from the centre. But on reflection I think that I was right the first time.