Tuesday, June 29
Daily News Stuff 29 June 2021
Endless October Edition
Endless October Edition
Tech News
- October continues apace. Start the day with three hours of meetings, end the day with two hours of meetings, constant interruptions between.
On the one hand, customers are just throwing money at us. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a few minutes each day to eat and sleep and stuff like that.
- Will your PC run Windows 11? (ZDNet)
Nobody knows, including Microsoft.
- Did Microsoft get paid by Apple to fumble this announcement? (ZDNet)
Only thing that makes sense. I wouldn't even consider an Arm-based Mac until they support both Linux and BSD, but most people just want to run a handful of programs and not worry about things breaking.
Sure, Macs break all the time and Apple complete screws you on repairs, but people aren't aware of that so they don't worry about it.
- Microsoft successful migrated 90% of its users to a single version of their operating system. (ZDNet)
And then they completely fucked it up. Hundreds of millions of users just got orphaned.
Oh, and first-generation Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc CPUs (I have two of those) and 7th-generation Intel desktop and laptop parts (I have two of those as well) might be supported after all. (Bleping Computer)
Eventually.
Or they might not. Microsoft apparently didn't think about that question.
Retards.
- As for what Windows 11 delivers, it looks like Android, only crappy. (Tom's Hardware)
Seriously, no-one asked for this.
- DDR5 modules are available right now! (Tom's Hardware)
Just the thing for your brand new Windows 11 system, because you can't get CPUs or motherboards that work with DDR5 yet anyway.
Retail pricing is $311 vs. a recommended price of $400 for 32GB. Frequency is 4800MHz which is very high for DDR4 but the new baseline for DDR5.
Latency is 40 cycles, which is, frankly, crap. But the first DDR4 modules were similarly slow.
- The Fuck You pattern. (CEdwards)
This is a user interface designed purely to annoy anyone who tries to escape the box the want to trap you in. Generally this falls under "dark patterns", but this is a specific case of using everything in the dark pattern toolbox purely to shit on users who won't behave themselves.
Case in point: Instagram.
- Docker bites man. (NewsBlur)
The NewsBlur ransomware hack from the other day was a Docker config problem. The attacker was able to delete the container, but couldn't actually encrypt it or exfiltrate the data, so the ransomware note was a lie.
Fortunately they had followed Rule One of Backups: Actually try restoring from them.
Actually a good examination of what happened and how they fixed it.
- SafeDollar, a stablecoin on the Polygon network, wasn't. (Cryptoslate)
With a current valuation of $0 it proved to be neither safe nor stable.
- YouTube TV is adding a $20 monthly fee for 4K resolutions and offline viewing. (Tech Crunch)
I've been watching YouTube on my new tablet - the Lenovo Somethingpad 10 FHD Gen 2 I picked up cheap on a one day sale. The YouTube app works infinitely better than a browser for watching livestreams with busy chat rooms. I've seen Chrome balloon out to 11GB of RAM after a couple of hours.
On the other hand, even when configured to prefer better video quality, it routinely resets to 144p. There is no option to permanently fix the resolution to something sane, because fuck you that's why.
- A Polish Bitcoin billionaire has reportedly drowned in Costa Rica. (MarketWatch)
My first thought was, did they recover the body? Because they never did for the guy who reportedly died in rural India leaving the crypto exchange he ran to crash and burn because only he had the master passwords.
- Google has a replacement for AMP, their attempt to control news articles on the web. (The Register)
It's called Core Web Vitals and, like AMP, its entire purpose is to hand control of your web pages to Google in return for... In return for nothing at all.
Disclaimer: ENOWIFI.
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1
The "fuck you" pattern is really annoying. In the specific example, deleting the modal didn't work because Scumstagram added "overflow:hidden" to the body style. Removing that style lets you scroll as much as you want after that (I'm a little surprised they didn't add an additional block of some kind.)
Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 29 2021 11:45 PM (eqaFC)
2
You see, Rick C, that's why we need to have the rendered page securely signed, so you can't fuck with the contents prior to displaying it. And a law that makes it illegal to circumvent that. And another law to make it illegal to tell people how to circumvent it. And at least one more law making it illegal to disable javascript or to create any custom stylesheets. The Web was never meant to be freely accessible, editable text. Everything was supposed to be hidden and walled off from non-paying clients. If you disagree, feel free to write your own browser!
(many years ago, I used to run one of those ad-and-other-annoying-feature-stripping proxies at the router. As I recall, every couple of months I'd have to update the filters for some new, fun thing that the garbage-web authors had come up with. I suppose a pi-hole is probably nice too)
I also note that all the dreadful "craptcha" stuff has taken to disabling the audio bypass feature. It was pretty fun for a while to fill the text boxes with stuff like "abortions should be mandatory and retroactive for all leftists" or "cutting off your penis doesn't make you female".
(many years ago, I used to run one of those ad-and-other-annoying-feature-stripping proxies at the router. As I recall, every couple of months I'd have to update the filters for some new, fun thing that the garbage-web authors had come up with. I suppose a pi-hole is probably nice too)
I also note that all the dreadful "craptcha" stuff has taken to disabling the audio bypass feature. It was pretty fun for a while to fill the text boxes with stuff like "abortions should be mandatory and retroactive for all leftists" or "cutting off your penis doesn't make you female".
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 30 2021 12:39 AM (LADmw)
3
I dunno about 4k resolution, but youtube-dl lets you watch movies offline.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 30 2021 01:33 AM (LADmw)
4
Okay, so at 370MB for a 4min 4k video, I'm not going to be downloading those, but it looks like it can be done.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 30 2021 01:57 AM (LADmw)
5
7, XP, and 95 are still usable for narrow applications.
Windows 11 does not seem to disprove the hypothesis that approximately every other 'release', factional politics within Microsoft results in a garbage release.
Will be interesting to see what happens for my use cases.
Windows 11 does not seem to disprove the hypothesis that approximately every other 'release', factional politics within Microsoft results in a garbage release.
Will be interesting to see what happens for my use cases.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 30 2021 04:06 AM (6y7dz)
6
I mean, there's nothing that XP can run that can't be run by NT5 with a little registry tweaking. Virtually the same with NT4, excepting the cases where you might want USB drivers that work (which would work fine, save for the prudent foresight of a certain software development company).
I really try to avoid the 9x-stuff, as it's merely an attempt to run DOS applications (a la windows 3.x) while making sure your customers can't run those applications under a DOS version less than 7.0, despite there being no valid reason why that should be so. I mean, if you want to do the work and hex-edit the (dozens of) files like it's 1997 to alter the version numbers, you can see for yourself.
I really try to avoid the 9x-stuff, as it's merely an attempt to run DOS applications (a la windows 3.x) while making sure your customers can't run those applications under a DOS version less than 7.0, despite there being no valid reason why that should be so. I mean, if you want to do the work and hex-edit the (dozens of) files like it's 1997 to alter the version numbers, you can see for yourself.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 30 2021 12:45 PM (obo9H)
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