Posts by Munchausen's proxy

"So... we should have rats driving our cars?"

Have you ever taken a taxi in the U.S.?

Re: "the system has a more modern and 'flatter' look"

"Modern KDE can indeed be far too resource-heavy, but at least you can configure it to be light."

Can you easily get rid of crap like akonadi being a prerequisite of every thing I'd like to install but don't want a goddamn desktop indexer for?

I used to like KDE a lot. Used to.

Re: Denials

"So far AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and TMobile have denied being the "major telecommunications company" in question. Who does that leave, Centurylink?"

Comcast. But it couldn't be them -- if it were they would have charged the customers for it.

Re: Because there has to be more to being loaded.

> "coke, meth, heroin"

> When you're that loaded you need to get loaded more?

" There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.” -- Hunter S. Thompson

Re: i've been waiting for this since the first experimental Dimm loaded scsi SSDs

"persistant ram is going to need a whole new programming model to be used effectively I feel."

Or a whole old one -- multics used that model. Almost 50 years ago.

Re: timestamp is a date format

"Maybe The Register can come up with its own special timestamp ? Milliseconds since el'Reg started ?"

VMS (and OpenVMS) uses tenths of microseconds starting November 17, 1858.

"So basically... Stick all your configuration in source control and you can check out old versions when you screw it up?"

It's actually more than that. The point (I think) is that you can automate that process almost completely, so you can commit a change, press a button, and the change works its way through your machine farm, paying attention to which machine does exactly what thing, and therefore needs exactly which change, and so on.

Of course, if you can automate it, you can give the button to someone who doesn't understand the inner workings, doesn't have a good model of those machines and their relationships, and is all too willing to push the button because, hey i'ts automated - the button knows all that stuff.

What can go wrong?

As I understand it, there's a reason U.S. Navy submarines have so many people on board. They think it's better to have humans who know stuff in the loop than to have a fully automated system with catastrophic failure modes.

Re: PC 2.0

"IIRC the VAX architecture had instructions for BCD arithmetic."

The VAX had instructions for EVERYTHING. Including a single machine instruction for solving polynomials.

Re: A Wide Spectrum of opinions

"Hopefully the shareholders will be able to salvage something out of this mess."

Well, I don't know about the shareholders, but the 'backers' are all receiving a good lesson, for those who can understand it.

Re: Isn't it time for LART to get updated?

"Any suggestions for a modern Agile, IAAS enabled version of it?"

Thought leader.

"f laptop makers were really serious about security, then hard swtiches for the camera and mic, just for starters."

Yes, it's not the camera that worries me nearly as much as the microphone. I'd really like a laptop without one, or failing that the confidence to open it up and cut the correct leads.

Re: Republicans voted against financing municipal broadband

And just wait until they start raising the chocolate ration.

Re: Art World

"He's cross because he didn't get credit for producing all that piss. The artist just took it."

That's the crux of the matter, I think. You've nailed it.

Re: A true paradigm shift!

Dataless. That's the future young man! If only all our apps don't need any data, then there would be no need for any sysadmin, or security.

Software-Defined Data. I see it coming.

No, wait. Hyperconverged Software-Defined Data.

Data-driven hyperconverged software-defined data.

Yes, I think that's it. Is it Friday yet?

Re: 2 questions

"2. What services will suffer as a consequence of the loss of net neutrality? If a more lucrative end of the Internet will cost more, will the ISP throttle the bandwidth so that the connections become slower? That is, if you want faster Internet connections, you have to pay for it?"

In principle, ANY internet endpoint without the money to pay for its own distribution is at risk.

In principle, in fact, some non-favored-by-ISP endpoints are at risk of having no distribution at any price.

That means ANY internet forum run by amateurs for amateurs to discuss their interests.

ANY website collecting, for instance, freely available software or documentation.

ANY local organization who want a web presence for their members.

ANY mailing list whose traffic an ISP doesn't like for some reason.

Making the argument into Comcast vs Google is beggaring the question by assuming the internet is NOTHING BUT a top-down commercial entertainment distribution system.

With net neutrality, amateurs have a presence. Without net neutrality, it's money all the way down.

Re: Techie dummy?

"As a trade we learned molbio."

Fundamental rule of molecular biology - If some is good, more is better.

Leading to the definition of a molecular biologist:

A biochemist who uses enzymes in stoichiometric amounts.

Re: Anyone seen the The Wire?

"Surely every perp knows about 'burner' phones..."

This isn't about perps. It's about YOU.

Re: 128TB ?

"1Tb is enough to do everything you want, home or work."

HA!

(I upvoted you anyway - I agree completely ----- for now.)

"Net Neutrality is about innovative content providers being allowed to continue piggybacking on the common carriers without pulling their own weight on the cost side of infrastructure and last mile delivery"

The problem is -- well, A problem is -- wait let me start again -- among our problems is the fact that cable TV companies in the U.S. for mostly historical reasons now, have very strong regulation-mandated monopolies throughout the communities they serve. And it is entirely disingenuous to conflate "common carriers" with cable TV providers. Net neutrality is all about making them behave like common carriers.

What I mean is, in many if not most local communities, it IS NOT POSSIBLE for a content provider to legally pull their own weight by providing their own infrastructure. Whichever TV provider owns the franchise has a monopoly on "cables to the houses", mandated by the local city council or state legislature. Any content provider who wants to "pull their own weight" could only do it by paying the

TV company whatever amount the TV company demands.

That, in a nutshell, is what the Net Neutrality argument is about -- Does Comcast decide what websites you can usefully connect to? The alternative is to repeal the thousands of local ordinances that currently give Comcast that power, or alternatively, mandate that Comcast transport bytes at a non-discriminatory price for all comers.

Do we want an internet and a TV viewing system, or just the TV?

Re: Cats at 40,000 volts

The general rule of thumb I learned long ago was "about 50,000 volts per inch of spark in dry air." I think there's an awful lot of slop in that number, though; it would probably be more accurate to just say "tens of thousands."

Beer icon, because I've personally seen a falling droplet spark generator run on beer.

Re: Why am I not surprised to see sudo there?

My sshd's NEVER listen on 22.

Re: Of course there's a right answer!

===

"Do you KNOW what happens when you press the TAB key on an IBM 029 card punch? Do You?? DO YOU?????????

NOTHING, if you're good! Card punches don't have TAB keys --- the 029 has an Error Reset key there, like the Good Lord Watson intended!"

===

Well, duh. You put your tabs on the drum card.

Re: Accuracy of the highest order

And IIRC, a megalightyear-barn is near enough to a cubic centimeter for back of the envelope.

Re: Whats the point to this story?

"Well, the issue really is that a Russian sponsored hacking team is digging into political opponents in other countries (including ours) and digging up scandals."

If they have the access necessary to dig up real scandals, they also have the access necessary to create false ones.

Re: All mixed up in the Doctor's timey-whimey time stream...

I'd rather see Faye Marsay. After all, that Christmas episode was entirely Shona's dream.

"Going forward, a regular dose of BOFH articles will prevent nasty workplace accidents or nasty data loss incidents to occur again in future."

Prevent some, suggest others. It's all good.

Re: Isn't it terrible

Shut up, Lennart.

Re: Question

"one must assume that any soon-to-be-ex-IBM employees effectively interviewing for their own jobs at NCR will probably get less generous terms offered to them"

I know nothing at all about the specifics of either IBM's or NCR's internal processes, but I'm jaded and old enough to have an opinion on this assumption.

Suppose, for instance, NCR has fewer management / middlemen in the product chain, pushing paper and "costs" around internally, and jacking up the price customers see? It seems to me entirely plausible that competent staff could get equivalent or higher compensation for switching companies, without creating a necessity for higher prices.

I'm cynical. I seriously doubt it's the compensation of the people actually doing the work that's to blame for IBM's losses of contracts.

Re: Does anyone know

Tom Almy and Blake McBride have you covered:

https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC

Not war?

*

Re: Some humour is found in all this.

"I was about to say that it would be hard to surpass Trump in that respect, but I then recalled I thought the same of Bush, Palin - OH MY GOD."

Just realize the ones at the national level represent the most mainstream. I think you probably don't ever want to look at some of our state and local lawmakers, unless you think living in Lovecraftian horror would be nice.

Re: And thus..

" If you say a log can be reliably kept with nothing but ASCII, explain how you can say a coin landed edge when all you have to work with is a single bit: 1 or 0?"

Uh, that's exactly -- I mean EXACTLY -- the point of ASCII logging; you are not limited to a circumscribed description:

Aug 22 22:30:12 localhost flipd: INFO: Coin landed on edge

I think it's you who will have a problem expressing an incommensurate event in a number system that doesn't include a representation of the event's state.