Posts by Tom 13

Re: because they cost money

Nope, that EXACTLY why I have an EOL programs on my home system. It would be another $80 (every three years) just to fix something that OUGHT to be a utility in the OS. My monthly budget is down to my last $30.

Re: I remember having to give a presentation once

That's all on you, not on Windows. It was your job to make sure the machine was ready before you did the presentation. Yes, that includes making sure everything was up to date.

Re: Puzzled

Well one of the things that sometimes remains on my unpatched list for a while is LibreOffice. Secunia can't download and install the update so it waits until I have an hour or so to sit with the box and patch it (If I patch one thing the WHOLE damn thing is getting done including new scans until only EOL stuff is on the list). I'm not overly worried about it because even though I like the software, I know it doesn't have wide adoption. And I don't use browsers all that much. Truth be told, it's mostly a quick check of my gmail so it's a very low risk site from the malware perspective.

I know I've seen other things that applied to as well, but I can't recall what they were now.

I also sometimes see "update pending" messages for things that should have been patched. So I manually patch them instead.

@Bob Dole (tm)

I like Windows Update, or at least did when it was still publishing at least some details about what it was updating.

This x1000!

I'm not so sure about expanding it to other apps though. Because it's a service provided you take on risk for enabling the update and don't control the software. You could setup some sort of QA program, but then you wind up hiring staff who need to know a bit about the programs. At which point even if you can setup the Chinese air walls to comply with FTC regs, you still have the problem of vendors not trusting MS with any details of their software because of past behavior. Part of the reason it works for the driver market is those QA programs are already in place and the maker of the driver isn't selling the driver, he's selling the hardware the driver enables. He doesn't much care if MS knows his algorithms, only that his hardware competitors don't. Well at least as long as MS stays out of the hardware business.

Re: Similarly for Apple Quicktime. Nobody uses it, nobody cares,

Not quite. If you run iTunes (just about the only thing Apple really makes for Windows) you need Quicktime.

The updater is easy enough to leave in place and turned on, but it has a problem. Since Apple is accustomed to their drones living inside their walled garden, they just update the list of things your updater installs without asking. So if you only want iTunes and Quicktime to support it you still get iCloud and whatever else happens to catch their fancy that week. And when one of them breaks during an update you have to manually uninstall the whole fricking Apple stack to fix it.

I run Secunia's PSI. It's a decent tool. Configured correctly it will keep your system in the 97%+ current status excluding EOL software (yeah I have some, DVD burner software because I don't actually do it that often and I'm not paying for a new copy every 3 years). It does sometimes find issues that require manual intervention. I recall one dll problem related to one of MS's C+ modules that kept showing up on the scan as needing an MS update, but my when checking with MS update no update would appear. I had to dig down into the directory with the file and delete it.

Re: flight pattern clearly showed it was flying through

That's easily dismissed. Even if

- yuv got your best shoot'n iron in an easy release rack on the back of yur pick-up

- it's loaded with the appropriate shot for drone hunt'n

- yur outside at the time of the flight

it still takes more time to get it, cock it, aim it, and pull the trigger than the drone would need to fly through your airspace in a straight line.

QED.

@GrumpyKiwi

US rules are different. If you aren't cleared you can't look at it. Not even under supervision. That's assuming of course it is some sort of secret clearance as opposed to the "clearance" of we ran him through the usual police databases and nothing turned up so he's ok to work here and Bob's Farcebook search didn't turn up anything either clearance. Given how they treat telecoms at my agency where I got the second type of clearance, I expect they really did need the first. And yeah, those cost a contracting premium.

Oh, and depending on your situation, that clearance might or might not transfer to a another project even if it is the exact same type of work.

Re: Why are "we" still using "flash"

So what development tools in a Windows environment do you recommend instead?

I'm not a web developer and don't pretend to be one. But as the front line I've recently been asked that question. Unfortunately all the rest of the web developers in our organization are on the Adobe wagon so Flash gets used extensively and that's the way they are likely to go even though it's a new project.

sidenote: as far as I'm concerned Adobe's new licensing, downloading, and installing regime for their paid programs is even more shite than their Flash end user software.

Re: Managers

It's a tad more complicated than that. Companies run solely by engineers tend not to be around because they lose too much money. Companies run solely by bean counters tend to become zombie corps because they don't understand the project but know how to keep shifting the money around. To have a truly successful company you need one where the two groups are in balance. Sometimes, but very, very rarely, this balance is found in a single individual. At it's inception HP seems to have been blessed with two. But when they left the corporation didn't know how to find that balance.

Re: You make it sound like dystopia is a new thing.

Zoooooom!

Right over the top of your head.

THE WHOLE POINT OF ORIGINAL TREK WAS IT WAS UTOPIAN, NOT DYSTOPIAN.

I hope it is less dystopian than the current trend

Nope, that was what the reboot was all about: bringing on even more teen angst than a a sparkly vampire tv show. I might, maybe, possibly have been able to torture myself into accepting their time is linear except when we need it to be timey-whimey for dramatic purposes plot point except for that issue.

Re: None are reboots

The Star Trek movie was filmed as, and sold as a REBOOT. Period.

An abysmal failure in my estimation as it pretty much destroyed everything Roddenberry put into it that made it Trek, but none the less a reboot.

And AGAIN, it's not a subscription series. It's a series that will only be available on their CBS All Access service, which is sort of a mini-Netflix for CBS at about half the price of Netflix. They advertise 7500 shows and movies.

Re: Reboots vs Extended Continuity

Nope, Enterprise was a prequel.

Like all things Trek, they fucked up the timeline and ignored the problems. Leaving Trekies to cobble together some false rationale for their abject failures in continuity.

Don't get me wrong, I like original Trek, a fair bit of TNG (but not the first season), and DS9. Spock was my second hero after The Batman. But the writers and producers ignored both continuity and essential human traits with some regularity. Take any episode where they had access to untold knowledge and didn't make a copy: City on the Edge of Forever, For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, Spock's Brain. Frankly, City on the Edge of Forever is the WORST offender because it starts out with Spock doing exactly that, the episode revolves around it as the McGuffin, then ignores it after they return from their trip into the past.

Re: Also: Subscribing specifically to a series?

You've mucked that up rather badly even if you did get a fair bit of a helping hand from the author.

You don't subscribe to the series. You subscribe to the CBS service which they claim makes ALL of their content available to you. (Certainly true for anything currently on air and most of the stuff you'd find on the likes of Netflix et al that is true.) But the series will ONLY be available through the service.

Currently listing for $5.99/month in the US.

Re: decades since the US and UK have done any research

Yep. That damn Hanoi Jane and one of her movies again. I'm sure LP has a long justifiably ranting article somewhere in the archives about how inaccurate the science was in The China Syndrome but ever since then you can't build a new nuke anywhere in the Occidental world except France. Not even sure they still build them.

Re: are eminently contestable in principle,

Actually they aren't, particularly with the current sentiment about IP in the western court systems and the US system in particular. The US government granted MS an uncontestable monopoly position vis-a-vie copyright. Through various legal mechanisms this effectively extends to all Western worlds. You can't do a clean room implementation of Windows and sell your product.

Re: water pipes in a city say.

The more I see the problems with the government imposed water monopolies in the US, the more anxious I am to see a city government privatize it and sell it off to at least two competitors so we can finally put a wooden stake through the heart of this meme.

Re: Old mines didn't have this, thus that river problem.

Right on the old mines, wrong on the thus part.

"That river problem" was entirely the fault of the EPA. They promoted a stupid plan as safe. While the situation pre-breach wasn't ideal, it was far safer than their plan. In fact a retired geologist predicted the plan would fail in precisely the way it did and almost to the day that it happened. I'm not saying the EPA planned it that way, but I can easily forgive the tinfoil hat types who think it was.

Re: Did I miss something?

Despite much bellyaching, there is no such thing as a natural monopoly. If you look at the historical examples of monopolies they were all local to a government which artificially created it within its confines. Cartels are even more difficult to maintain. Since China is selling RE's on the world market, by definition it isn't within the confines of their country.

As for the end of the article, you seem to have missed the bit where the attempts to force relocation failed miserably too.

Is there a problem with China processing all the REs? Probably. But it's not economic. The issue as pointed out upstream is that China is notoriously lax on pollution controls. Now, if you're a western country worried about that sort of thing there's a relatively easy fix: pass a law that says the purchasing of such materials is either taxed at 1 to 5 times (depending on the cost of implementing appropriate pollution controls) or comes from a facility that your government has certified passes the pollution standards (possibly with one of your government's inspectors being onsite to make regular or surprise inspections).

Re: you should do a fresh, full backup of everything

And ensure the malware that got you in the first place is now part of your recovery process?

Yeah, I know you mean after you've cleaned up the system, but how can you be sure you did that successfully? Sure you can build all the new systems from scratch, but at some point you have to get he data from the infected system to the clean one.

Yes a merely competent sys admin should be able to recover you from a ransomware threat just by going to the backups. I'm just not convinced that even an excellent sysadmin can get you a clean system after a bad one has been compromised.

Re: Helium

Cost, pure: $5.2 per 100g

http://www.chemicool.com/elements/helium.html

No price listed for bulk helium. Hard to tell from the balloon canister ads.

Re: hydrogen is *Bad* in balloons (because "Zeppelin") but *good* in cars

Last I checked, they were pushing methane for the Green cars not hydrogen. Granted I wouldn't want to hit/be hit by a vehicle powered by either, but the differences are important.

Re: Helium balloons

You must be a riot at a kids birthday party.

Re: Twitter's ineptitude is users benefit

It doesn't.

BUT it does have to be driven by SOME revenue stream.

So far, advertising seems to be the primary driver of most web based sites and is certainly the only driver for free ones. (In the case of Google you usually happen to be the product not the paying consumer.)

Re: What Twitter is for

Yes except for one rather important detail....

At the end of the day, you have to make enough money to support your infrastructure and yourself. Twatter can't do that yet, have no plan for getting there, and seem to have no clue that they NEED to get there.

Re: Twitter’s management themselves don’t seem to realise why people like and use Twitter

Twitter is the Pet Rock of the current decade. If you got in on the ground floor you stand to make a bundle as long as you get out soon enough. Don't ask why you made a bundle, just take the money and run. Don't try to repeat it, you'll lose the money you had when you ran.

Re: You Don't Win Friends With Salad

These days in the US, eating salad is actually more dangerous than eating bacon. Our last couple of e. coli outbreaks came through salad contents not bacon.