Posts by MacroRodent

Re: Dog Food

My first reaction went like who is this Alpo and what has he done now? "Alpo" is a male first name in Finland. Having "I" and "l" look identical in common fonts is indeed idiotic.

Re: salted duplicate check

No, that is NOT correct. In fact, storing your salt in the database alongside the passwords would be bad practice. You store it elsewhere and just query the database for the salted hash, not do it all on / within the database. All the database needs is the hash, not the salt.

In any case, you need to store each user's salt value in plaintext so that you can use it when the user logs in. From this point of view, it is irrelevant if it is the same database, or a separate one for the salts. So all the salt values are available if you want to check if the user's candidate password is already in use by someone else.

Re: Remember OS/2 Warp

* The OS/2 environment only catered for 2Gb address space in virtual memory. Win32s made a completely pointless memory access outside that which caused a crash on OS/2 but was OK on Windows 3.x.

Interesting! I remember this problem of Win32s not working on OS/2 (which I used at home at the time), but though it was just related to the hocuspocus Win32s had to do to make 32 bit applications run under the 16-bit Windows 3.x, which itself was layered on real-mode MS-DOS. But having Win32s do something just to be incompatible does sound like typical Microsoft tactics.

Re: remotes

To be fair Libre/Open Office isn't as good as MS Office, I've been trying for years to reconcile the issue but it doesn't come out in the wash.

I beg to differ. It is nothing but a matter of what you have grow used to. I have mostly been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice for years, and now trying to MS Office for some project is driving me nuts. LibreOffice just fits my way of working better, and gives more support for producing a consistently formatted document. Maybe there are some places where MS Office wins, but I don't know of any other than being more compatible with the MS Office file formats. This advantage would disappear if more people used OpenOffice, LibreOffice or other tools that properly process OpenDocument formats.

Maybe some day...

Re: Hmm.

Got HERE maps and navigation free with a Lumia, but it is good enough I might pay for it in the future. I expect the car makers have a good motivation to keep HERE maps up to data, I like these new owners much more than I would have liked Uber or some Chinese outfit.

Re: I guess they picked the wrong guy to test the spam algorithm on.

Uh? systemd != kernel

Re: Very interesting story,

Considering that state of the art of that era was vacuum tubes, which intensely disliked high G acceleration

You are thinking of the variety used in living room equipment, with thin glass and delicate insides. Ruggedized equipment used much more sturdily built ones. I have a very small tube from a WW2 German military radio (probably) somewhere among my assorted junk. It does not even have a socket, just wires coming through the thick glass and says "Wehrmacht" on the label.

Re: @Champ (was: 160 chars)

Universality, as in supported by every phone and carrier (after the early years) compensates for the shortcomings of sms. There still is no convincing replacement. For example, to send WhatsApp I must know the recipient used it as well, but he might prefer some other system. Sms avoids this problem by being part of the standard. That is how telecommunications was done in Makkonen's day. Slower-moving, sure, but interoperable. Seems quaint in the internet age...

IntimateDNS

I use OpenDNS at home (to filter pr0n from the kid - at least until he wises up and learns about DNS and how to change the name server setting :-), and have enabled the statistics. It is eye-opening how much one can deduce about browsing habits from even rough statistics about the DNS lookups (and also the staggering amount of tracking and advertisement lookups). Something that could be pure gold for advertisers, and also various spooks or other shady characters. I'm keeping an eye on whether OpenDNS keeps its integrity. Any alternatives if it goes sour?

Re: stack based

Sure! Zap, ping etc. made the Oric easier to get started with, as I remember in C64 you needed peeks and pokes for sound effects. Sadly my Oric 1 (64k) does not boot any more, I suspect the EPROM has lost its contents.

Re: Does this also ...

The font handling in Linux kernel is trivial, just fixed-width bitmap fonts. Should be easy to check.

DOSBox

Another alternative is DOSBox (www.dosbox.com). Runs on Windows and Linux (and various other systems as well). This is a software-only emulator, but so is dosemu as well, if you run it on a 64-bit Linux system (the reason is the VM8086 feature that dosemu uses to run MS-DOS code at native speed on 32-bit Linux does not run in the 64-bit mode).

DOSBox is a bit easier to get started with because it includes its own built-in MS-DOS clone (unfortunately it is a bit behind the times, for example it does not support the long file name extension).

Re: minor quibbles

>All so Red Hat can steal other's work and cash in.

That is quite uncalled-for. Whatever one thinks of Red Hat products, it still is one of the largest sponsors of open source software developers.

Re: It does seem as if its a bit of a hole

Given that the probe woke up because its getting warmer and is on a ball of ice and dust, it's hardly surprising that its position has shifted slightly as the environment around it warms up.

I wonder if there is any serious risk of some kind of geyser becoming active under Philae, and literally blowing it back to space? I don't suppose it has been attached in any way to the comet now. I believe the original plan involved screws that drill into the comet, but they did not work.

Re: “The commercial use of...

There is also some tower in Paris that keeps appearing in many photos taken there. Will they all be confiscated now?

Re: No of course not

If we have to assume NSA can force any vendor to do things like that, then there is no solution. Even if the firmware were burned into real ROM, and unmodifiable by anyone, we would have to worry about NSA forcing manufacturers to pre-install their malware. That way lies madness...

Re: Baby monitors?!

If you are within 30 meters of your baby, then don't you have a pair perfectly functional baby monitors attached to either side of your head?

They are not enough.The point is getting to attend to the baby when he wakes up but before he starts crying at full blast.

hard drives?

What about hard drives? I think they still have a hole with a filter for equalizing air pressure inside the shell, and will certainly not work if full of oil. Of course not an issue if all your storage is solid state.