Posts by Gene Cash

Re: About California's initiative process

And apparently it worked:

California governor signs soda tax ban into law

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/29/california-governor-signs-soda-tax-ban-into-law.html

(however I do think a soda tax ban is a GOOD thing, no matter how it was obtained)

Re: Similar experience in the USA

> US petrol stations are the devil incarnate.

Have you run into the ones with the foreskins? These are things meant to stop the gas vapors from killing us all, but end up causing half the gas to go on the ground instead of in the vehicle.

They're especially evil if you have a motorcycle.

Google "vapor recovery nozzle" I think...

> 80 dollars

Sigh. My friend's new F-150 takes about $140 to fill up.

Re: Could be worse

I remember James May pronouncing it IPP-pod... I seriously wondered if that was actually the Brit pronunciation.

Re: A truly epic xkcd...

Hm. My Debian box seems ok. I have the python 2.7 & 3.6 packages, and easy_install, pip, distutils, etc all install where they're supposed to.

Re: ROFL

Shoot, before I switched my Linksys to LEDE, the "update firmware" button did nothing but give an error.

This weekend I updated from LEDE firmware to OpenWRT, since they kissed and made up. It took 5 minutes and even kept all my settings. I was impressed.

Re: Wasn't that around the same time that Linux was going to take over the desktop?

My first daily Linux driver was 0.99PL13 in end of '93. That was the first one I installed myself w/o any help.

My FVWM config has mutated to the point no one else can use my PC... not a bad thing!

Re: What a surprise

Sure, he might be a bit biased, but Google does suck. They suck slightly less than Apple, so I have an Android phone, but it's still not much of a choice.

Re: Great site

"Abdul! My kingdom for an SA-7!"

I get plenty of cheap, reliable electricity with my local nuclear power plant. Plus it lets me say my Zero is nuclear-powered!

Re: someone can tell me

> You'd need a team of auditors to screen applications for spyware

Not really... you can put it behind a router or firewall, and see what connections it makes. It's not infallible, but if the device starts blurting data all over the place, you can put it on the naughty step.

> Seems to me to be a perfect example of why software houses shouldn't do hardware.

I don't know... all of Microsoft's hardware seems to be top-notch stuff.

Hell, I'm using a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard on my Nexus 6P right now, and it's probably the best BT keyboard I've ever used.

> There was no encryption.... just creative ascii. The innocence of the internet had not yet bee corrupted.

HEH. On this side of the pond, in my particular part of the US in the '80s, the power company sent an 80-column punchcard with your bill... which you returned with the bill, and they used it to process your payment.

Since my mother was a developer^W software engineer^W^W programmer, she took it to work and punched a card with a negative amount in the proper place, thus getting us credited for a nice chunk o' change.

Sigh. My mother... the hacker.

Re: Hard as I try...

> what's the punishment for violating it

Torvalds will swear at you!

> 'whack my pee pee'

Don't piss him off *too* much...

> Anyone else have a wonderful sense of nostalgia

Nope... because a ton of shit didn't work.

I remember having to compute modelines to get X11 working for a particular monitor/graphics card combination, and if you got it wrong, you could damage your monitor.

And while I'm at it, I remember shitty fixed-sync monitors. And monochrome monitors. And burn-in. And focus/degaussing problems.

I remember the nightmare of getting RS-232 working between devices that weren't a computer and a modem, and playing "guess the pinout" and trying to figure just what parts of the "standard" each side supported.

I remember slow-as-shit networking. When it worked. I remember Winsock issues.

I remember if you wanted to play this cool game, you HAD to have THAT graphics card. And not just a particular brand, but a particular model.

I remember if you wanted something faster than 9600 baud, you had to buy the same brand of modem as the other end of the connection.

Fuck all that broken shit.

Re: "The US approach maximises consumer welfare"

> AT&T and TW are largely in different businesses, and any local monopoly (eg on network or telco assets) already exists and would be unchanged

No, they're not. For example, my "choice" in local ISPs is AT&T... or Time Warner (Spectrum)

Hm. I wonder how the merger will affect me?

Re: If cops had their way...

Sure there are... they just go by the name of "hoarded zero-days" instead of battering rams.

Re: Black and white or various shades of grey?

The shades of grey has always been the level of access to the computer in question.

In this case, she was a judge, so she did have access. She shouldn't have accessed that particular file according to various unspecified rules of conduct, but she had never been trained/told otherwise.

I think that considering her motives to ensure an unbiased trial, this was a just and fair verdict.

Granted, there are the tones of "we wouldn't have got off so easy" but that's a different subject.

Re: Duh!!!

> was support not key to that decision making process

Are you kidding "Which one's cheapest? ... ok, that one."

Re: Gimme speed

> the program differentiated the different calls elsewhere by their entry point addresses.

Wait, what? Why the hell would it do that?

Re: Mixed Feelings

I had to stop upgrading Firefox at v43, since v44 removed several features, such as fine-grained cookie control. (i.e. it asks set/block/session for each domain it hasn't seen before)

I switched to Pale Moon, until they too removed fine-grained cookie control.

So I just use FF v43 again, and it'll never be "upgraded" again.

Re: Surely the solution is simple

> If they cared about the scooters they would be picking up the abandon ones

Actually they do pay people go retrieve and charge them

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/charging-electric-scooters-is-a-cutthroat-business/560747/

Cloud?

Or another change in usage, where now it's all in the cloud and there's nothing to pirate?

Re: The book

It's an AMAZING book. I've read it twice. She's a hell of a writer and explainer, and she makes the driest of technical details interesting. She also does a good job of fitting all the bits together into the whole system and showing how it all interacts.

> a request to contact the registrant by forwarding on the request to make contact.

So then you're suggesting they use an Ouija board to contact the dead owner...?

Re: Shame there is still a spectre in the background

One of the benefits of streamlining a CPU like this is reducing the attack surface for things to pop up like Spectre.

Re: Precision

Actually, I was hoping for a banana in the picture for scale... or failing that, Dabbsy.

Re: FCC enforcement of radio spectrum usage

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

-- Robert E. McElwaine