Posts by Gene Cash 5768 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
However, Atlas was already end-of-lifed and production ended.
The CEO of ULA has tweeted that they have all the RD-180 engines they need for the remaining 25 or so missions in a US warehouse.
How long would it take the US to reverse engineer them?
The US already has the manufacturing info from Russia, as manufacturing the engines in the US was a requirement by Congress... who then failed to provide any of the promised funding for said manufacturing.
There are some unusual opportunities for drones, I guess. I ordered a bunch o' stuff, including 3 SD cards.
Amazon delivered the bunch o' stuff, but only one SD card.
They sent a truck to deliver: 1 SD card.
They sent another truck to deliver: 1 SD card.
I tweeted about it and some Amazon robot posted a link to a page about how I can help by recycling my boxes, which gave me an opportunity for snarky replies.
But that's bad 2FA. Or lazy at least.
In the same realm of bad "authentication" is the captcha shit, and recapcha and all it's relatives.
It insists that I must upgrade to the latest browser version. Which is 97.0.1... which is what I'm running.
Of course it boils down to the fact that it's not happy about the user agent and apparently that I'm using Linux. If I paste the UA from Windows, it's happy.
However, a lot of sites refuse to provide any communications if the captcha shit barfs up a lung. No phone number, no email address, nothing.
I've already cut ties with 5 vendors because of this.
There's a weird psychological thing going on with buying apps...
I find I don't hesitate to drop $20 on a meal, or $75 on a rain suit for the bike, or $10/mo for a patreon, but then I'll go "WHAAATTT! $11 for a weather radar app because it has TDWR? ELEVEN BUCKS?!? I'LL BE IN THE POOR HOUSE!"
It's so strange when I catch myself doing this, knowing how irrational it is.
I'll bet if you'd let those engineers keep it "in development" it would still be "Wait: it's not done yet. We have this long list of things we still have to figure out" today.
Robert Watson-Watt couldn't really fit radar on a WW-II fighter, so he justified his choice of a non-optimal frequency to make it small enough with "Give them the third-best to go on with; the second-best comes too late, and the best never comes"
Plus a big factor in California is the laws. There's no non-compete, so that let people leave Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild, then leave Fairchild to start Intel.
So every engineer that thinks he can do it better, starts his own company to do so, and boom - you have Silicon Valley.
I saw an ad on TV while I was at lunch. I thought it was really funny and wanted to look it up on YouTube to see the whole thing with sound.
I made a special effort to remember the company/subject/theme.
An hour later: No idea except "it was really funny"
I guess all those ad dollars pay off.
But the point is NO. I DO NOT want an IOT cloud serviced car or TV or clothes washer.
The problem is you *can't* buy one without. Try buying a TV that isn't "smart" in some way or another and wants an internet connection. Or buying a Ford/GM product without OnStar or whatever the fuck they call it.
So yes, it's inherently wrong.
https://sites.google.com/site/pcdosretro/multitaskingdos4
"Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0 was a little known and separate development of DOS..."
...
"Despite these limitations Microsoft wanted to make DOS 4.0 a retail product but IBM at the time was not interested in such a version of DOS, instead they formed a joint development agreement with Microsoft which resulted in the development of OS/2 1.0"
Huh. TIL.
Written in Unity, runs on Linux using Mono, and thus I can play it, and it was mature enough to do so in mid-2013. Heck, it was the incentive for me to migrate my Debian box from 32 to 64 bits.
Holy cow, have I been playing it for almost 10 years? The Register always makes me feel old, sad, and tired.
Also, red alert #4, it sounds like the first time he looked at the setup was when the maintenance window started.
So apparently he agreed to do something and set a maintenance window time without even eyeballing the situation.
There's lots of times when "it's a simple printer switchout" has turned into something like "the printer has been permanently installed in a custom built alcove" or the "printer is something from the '70s that uses neither USB, parallel, or other bus known to modern man, and has a custom interface board."
So there's been times I've have to NOPE the hell out, and agree to fix it on a "best effort" basis.
I absolutely and vigorously hate travel. I do like being in new places, I just hate getting there. One reason I ride bikes is it makes "getting there" a bit more pleasurable.
Anyway, once I was sent to install a Linux server, back when such things weren't commonplace and I was one of the few with any such experience.
I insisted on extra time to sightsee, since I rarely traveled and I was damn well going to take advantage of it. I was willing to spend vacation time instead of company time.
They said "no", to which I shrugged and said "fine" and started to walk off, at which point they backed down. I got to spend 4 days in Colorado Springs wandering around. Not really something to write home about, but It Was Some Place Different.
To reference some recent articles, the Intel chip fab WAS HUGE. Blocks and blocks of driving past the same building. And my hotel overlooked the USAF Academy, and Cheyenne Mountain, which I'm sure folks will be familiar with.
Edit: ah, HD is not "high definition" but "hybrid digital". Since the readership outside of the US has no clue what this thing even is, please do explain those acronyms in a short sentence in the article, would be really nice.
Hell, I'm American and I had no clue that's what it was...
The mentions of sendmail reminded me, because the ORA book on Sendmail was a godsend to a young wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin.
I remember when a couple entire shelves in the bookstores (remember bookstores?) were entirely ORA publications.
Now they've disappeared into their own navel and I haven't seen an ORA book in ages. I see they stopped publishing in 2017 according to Wikipedia.
I remember my company getting Safari, and Safari telling me to piss off because I wasn't running IE on Windows, and so I couldn't do its DRM. So much for open systems.
"In 2011, Tim O'Reilly stepped down from his day-to-day duties as O'Reilly Media CEO to focus his energy and attention on the Gov 2.0 movement. Since then, the company has been run by Laura Baldwin. Baldwin comes from a finance and consulting background. "
There ya go. That's why they're dead.
I remember reading the Novell APIs and discovering that if you were a print server, you could ask for owner rights on a file, so that you could access and print that file.
Unfortunately, if that owner was SUPERVISOR (Novell's version of root) then you also got supervisor rights.
And you could be a print server simply by advertising as one! So if a supervisor tried to print, then you could ask for rights on the file, become supervisor, then say you couldn't print the file anyway, so it went back in the queue and was printed by the real print server, with no one the wiser.
I also discovered that when you advertised as something, you got put in the bindery (a sort of object registry) of all the fileservers on the network.
Hmmm. What if I advertise as type "user" then I should be put in as a user for all the servers!
Well, you do!! Plus since it's the fileserver putting the object in, and FILESERVER > SUPERVISOR, then the other supervisors see this new user, go "huh?", try to delete it, and CAN'T.
Result: A bunch of pissed off fellow supervisors whom you now owe beers!!
Hm. ISTR that it was on this august forum quite recently that someone asked why anyone would want something like Starlink.
I think this answers that quite nicely.
I don't care if I have to contract with Satan or Elon Musk (any they may be the same) as long as my internet doesn't quite so resemble a wet string.
"Press F3, press down arrow 4 times, press right arrow twice, press 3..."
I had a "how to install important software $x" presented to me in that format. It was a 16 page document. No screenshots. Nothing.
only just out of the stone age of GUI design
Then we have trash like GIMP, where you try to exit, and the only option is "discard changes"
I spent a while, and I can't think of ANY other program that doesn't offer to save when you exit with unsaved changes,
Even Windows 98 was better, and that's sad.
Ensure that patents and copyrights of discontinued documentation, parts, software, or tools get placed in the public domain.
So suddenly nothing will ever be discontinued, they just "don't make it any more right now."
offer specialized tools on reasonable terms
I already had this issue with one of my bikes. My particular model-year FJR-1300 has 4 bushings in the front forks instead of just 3, so you need a special tool to insert the 4th one. They wouldn't sell me one until I got the Better Business Bureau (usually toothless) involved. Suddenly they were able to get me one. And it's a simple goddamned tool that's just a multi-stepped cylinder about the size of a Coke can. 10 minutes on a lathe max.
should be left to the market
What? You don't let us buy it! What kind of "market" is that?
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