Posts by Luiz Abdala

If reloads were charged in Battlefield...

...players would be engaging in bayonet charges.

Only snipers would be left using bullets for one month, tops, until they run out.

Wait a minute...

What happened to that Linux distro/skin that looked like a Windows XP, for all intents and purposes?

Can you do that (already)?

Airspace quilt.

Is the EU airspace still that hodgepodge of a dozen or more restricted zones that you must avoid on a single flight, or did they streamline things a little bit?

Not saying both being related to be the cause, this time...

You know, if you have a extremely complex flight plan just because NATO, Russia, etc, you could prevent an automation meltdown in the first place if they were greatly simplified, perhaps?

A sturdier machine...

...would have shredded the cloth, like some printers I heard were capable of chewing through a tie, and the neck attached with it, with aplomb. Clip-on ties were invented for a reason.

Perhaps the cleaning rag was more up to spec than the printer.

Nuclear option

I wholeheartedly support BIG PWR nuclear power plants, producing 1000+ MW each. Except these guys don't like to slowdown or speedup and love working at 100% all the time, just changing fuel rods every 18 months. Sell the rest of the energy to the grid or make hydrogen.

Don´t forget the Lawrence Livermore research to break down the HLW (high level waste) into something less risky for the environment, and that research should be included in the package.

This hydrogen part needs a lot of research however.

Task failed successfully.

So if humans fail the task 50% of the time, you should present 2 or more tests, expect humans to fail, and bots to complete all of them successfully.

After 10 tests, there is only 1 in 1024 chance of humans doing all of them correctly, while bots will get them every time.

See icon.

TEMPEST

This has been the subject of TEMPEST for over 20 years.

Straight from that wiki: "TEMPEST is a U.S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations".

Yeah, a leaky VGA cable or the sound of a keyboard, all the same. Altough reading the electromagnetic emanations of a VGA signal is a much more esoteric way of snooping around, IMHO.

Keyboard icon for reasons.

Diamond chips, with golden coolers. New shiny, indeed.

Oh boy, the RGB crowd is gonna go nuts with this. Bling-bling through and through.

Imagine that, 30-billion-transistor-9000-carat-chips, with gold-plated coolers, the Kim Kardashian of PCs is gonna be born within 10 years!

"Oh I spent 30000 quid on this new shiny Intel 20th generation diamond Core i11!"

In Brazil, of all places, I got 100 mpbs up and down already.

To top that, my plan is outdated, no longer sold, all the ISPs sell only 300 mpbs minimum, and with no "cable" TV attached on the plan, just raw broadband, for cheaper than what I am currently paying.

I plan to change soon and ditch the TV plan that only shows low quality programs, that I don't watch anyway, any longer. All the good stuff have their streaming equivalent straight from the web, so the "cable" is no longer justified.

And I just bought a FireTV from Amazon that hosts an impressive amount of streaming channels, that even takes voice commands from Alexa, which is neat.

By the way, I am paying the equivalent of 64 USD / month here in the... remote South America. The next plan is going for 21 USD. (64 still feels like I am being ripped off.)

How come the US of A is so far behind ? This is beyond my understanding.

Crosstalk? Not anymore.

I had an acquaitance that complained his POTS had a crosstalk with another line, and he was being charged through the roof for calls he didn't make. He called the phone sparkies, which found nothing.

That process was repeated for a month.

He then got hold of a coil - the kind used to ignite spark plugs -capable of 5 or 6 digit (volts or amps, whatever, this is irrelevant). As soon as he heard the line being used, he turned it on, immediately frying his line, the junction box down the street, and the line of the perp that was stealing his phone, just outside the box, on a carefully dug hole on the sidewalk by a tree root.

He then called the phone company for "Line not functioning" and everything was magically solved.

No GUI?

I used KDE once, 20 years ago, trying dual boot in a Pentium II machine, breathe some life back into it. Maybe a Gnome Ubuntu boot disk in recent epoch to unbork some system when Windows hit the fan (not that often lately, it turns out).

But I never used Slackware... maybe if I had came fresh out of DOS in those days, I would have tried another OS without a GUI.

Lightning always finds a way... of least resistance.

At least the guy that made the server rooms didn't weld the wrist straps ground to the lightning rod's ground... like someone I know...

The friend of mine that noticed this averted a Benjamin Franklin experience en masse, and got in charge of the grounding of the building for his troubles.

Quantum computing is...

... the ability to make a variable assume two values at the same time, which happens to help when you want to bruteforce password guessing, making it infinitely faster (in a rough definition).

But a quantum password that assumes two values at the same time should accept an attempt to guess it by inputting either one of the values, thus making it less secure.

(See icon.)

BOFH jargon bingo

Oh, the needle of the buzzword-o-meter on the wall just turned into a fan while reading this article. Good lord, I never heard anybody my age (late 70's early 80's) talking like that.

Don't mention Soundblaster.

I spent more time fine tuning dos boot sequences to free the 600 kilobytes of base memory to make those DOS games run properly, than actually playing them.

Then their original media got destroyed before I could setup a dosbox for them, eons later. Never bothered with them again, chasing a bootleg copy, whatever.

Now they are so cumbersome to play, they belong in the past, behind several layers of rosy, laser-etched colored glasses.

A drink to those memories.

EK Water Blocks

I bet the gaming community absorbed that knowledge from whoever worked with these guys. 20 years in the business means the information will inevitably get around.

Thanks to them my PC cpu never overheats with a simple off the shelf AIO watercooler.

And I'll drink to that.

CBRN* checks on the USB payload

Yeah, a vacuum-sealed container filled with boron sand lined with lead and kevlar and with an USB extension cord is a good idea.

Altough a usb stick can carry its own battery and detect the leads being connected to trigger a detonation, even without a USB 5v power, or detection current.

I would suggest some form of rail guide and a relay to push the drive into said USB extension cord port, then powering it up.

*Chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons

John Deere and Apple.

Finally that icon is relevant again, because both annoying companies intercepted when Louis Rossmann picked up the Right to Repair crowd about Apple (the fact that he repairs iphones despite Apple blocking him at every chance), and a handful (more than that) of disgruntled John Deere customers showed up on the same RTR meeting.

Just a reminder.

I was expecting he'd compiled his own OS.

Well, if the man created C, I was kinda hoping he'd have his own WIP pet project OS.

Don't forget the ID10T error!

Nobody mentioned the ID10T error, but I didn't reach the end of the comments yet, so there it is.

HP 48GX

I miss my HP 48GX with the game Columns played sideways, fully customizable universal Remote Control that used the IR transceiver, and an Italian version of Poker, plus a full blown text editor.

Taking a break from thermodynamics lessons and reading "Doppia Coppia": priceless.

All of it from 3x AAA batteries that lasted months, the best keyboard ever devised for a portable device, and a monochrome LCD.

My college didn't demand the Texas Instruments equivalent, it was agnostic, but people chose the HP48GX due familiarity from the brand and easy to find on the grey market.

No good deed goes unpunished...

...But you can charge through the nose for them.

DOS boot chip?

Is there a way to load an OS from a rom chip these days? Something you can only physically change?

If it gets corrupted by malware, just yank the chip out and replace with a clean one. Then, with all storage devices cutoff, flip a physical DIP switch on the motherboard to read-only and then tell it to wipe all storage boot sectors it finds or load cleaning tools.

Something that can't be tampered eletronically, and then flips the switch back to accept a clean modern OS install bypass, then it can be locked again to read-only for that single OS checksum signature.

I don't know, having a read-only onboard OS with a DIP switch seems like a good idea. You could even load a second BIOS with the solid read-only OS onboard.

I think some vintage machines had DOS onboard once upon a time, but if it worked like this somebody would have made it at this point.

Noise cancelling headphones

I thought for a second his RF tuner was screaming back the frequencies that were causing interference in the opposite wave, like a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

(phew, glad it isn't)

Because that would work fine with regulatory agencies... (no it wouldn't, and jamming is illegal outside a war and very specific siuations, I assume)

Please carry on.

BOFH tampering..

... you know, instead of going to a dealership, it locks the user inside and proceeds to move at high speeds on the wrong way of an Interstate... while disabling the forward collision sensors...

Nvidia...

If you have seen the latest Nvidia GPUs (and AMDs too, for that matter), they already need nuclear power to run, have an issue with melting cables, have coolers several times larger than the board themselves... and don't fit in any case.

People joke that the boards should have 110V sockets straight on them. And they have the room to fit TWO sockets, in any orientation.

Things have already gone stupid, at least since last year.

Reddit.

There is an entire subreddit dedicated to malicious compliance.

r/MaliciousCompliance needs a beer served cold in a pint to accompany the reading. And lots of hours to waste.