Posts by FrankAlphaXII

Rights issues probably. Unlike the other US Federal military and paramilitary organizations NASA's images aren't in the public domain for most uses, and they're very particular about employees being used in commercial material.

From their media usage guidelines:

NASA Content Used for Commercial Purposes

For more information on using NASA content for commercial purposes, please read NASA Advertising Guidelines. Any questions regarding use of NASA content, or any NASA image or emblem should be directed to Bert Ulrich of the Multimedia Division of NASA's Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Commercials and promotional content cannot be filmed on NASA property

If I'm not mistaken, Dr. Porco is currently an employee on the Solar System exploration committee so unless they go find her CalTech faculty official photo, which may also be copyright, its not something they can use.

Re: Or Brooks, "It's good to be the king."

I don't think anyone's suggesting anything non-consentual, at least I didn't read anything non-consentual into his behavior. At the same time abandoning your child while he's ill to go have a threesome in SF with some side-chick(s) is a pretty trashy thing to do though, no matter how you measure it.

Re: Have to ask...

Very true. Old timers around here would probably agree that he's almost as predictable as Eadon was in that regard. Bob's more entertaining though, I rarely agree with him but every now and then he's got some diamonds of wisdom mixed in with the turds.

Re: Accenture was not tied to Enron

"The market will decide whether the company lives or dies. And that's fair enough"

Wow. You must actually believe that. How cute.

Or, more hopefully anyway, is that a code for "vacuous corporate raiding investors who don't know what they're doing aside from screwing over the employees and long term investors, and have no business having anything to do with how a corporation behaves dictate whether a company lives or dies"?

Re: Hmm.

The way I read it was that it not only required root, it required physical access on top of it, and that's a step above even root.

Re: The first rule of backups

I always thought the first rule of backups was that if you don't validate your backups, you don't actually have one.

Re: Mumsnet penetrated

I know they had an issue with Heartbleed, but I'm not sure anyone actually exploited it. To be fair, its a forum for middle age (mostly) women to whine about everything wrong with society and those damned kids, its not quite a financial institution or communications provider.

Re: Seen this plot before

Gotta keep an eye on your girdlesprings and the side-warbling that they cause when installed too close to the gargleblaster.

Re: The FBI paid him back in return for his services

It tends to suffice, this is the kind of guy that the Marshals don't move to a place like San Diego, Phoenix, Vegas, Los Angeles or Albuquerque on an S visa. He's a sysadmin that ran part of the communications infrastructure of a multinational criminal organization, it won't be too hard to find him a job.

Unless he does something on the more stupid end of the spectrum, like stay in touch with sketchy family members who are in the cartel or prone to being violently or non-violently influenced by them, he'll likely be fine somewhere like Cour d'Alene or Springfield, MA working for one of the Native American development corporations like on one of their non-classified government contracts so the USMS can keep tabs on him easier.

That they do, even if you blow away the four(!) "recovery" partitions.

I bought a Lenovo once, right around when they did this Superfish bullshit. It was the first and the last time. This thing had four extra partitions, only one of which had recovery data on it. Its not like the other three had something like a UEFI hardware diagnostic program (like what HP's been doing on their Probooks and Elitebooks for a while now) either. There was something on them, it was big enough to have a full headless OS and then some on all three extra partitions.

Being the not exactly paranoid, but not exactly clueless, person that I am, I started digging around and asking what the deal was. Funny thing is that I've yet to get a straight answer about what it was from the manufacturer. Lenovo have told me several different stories about them and none of them make sense. Fortunately the HDD failed after about a year and its been a paperweight ever since. I never trusted that machine because of any of that and I won't ever buy another from them.

Dell may have awful support and abysmal components, and HP are fucking expensive (if you want decent warranty support anyway) with only marginally better components, but neither one of them fling malware at you if you format the hard drives because the installer stubs are hard coded into their firmware.

>>You have to wonder are they a tech company any more?

No, they're an acquisitions company (see: Red Hat) that dabbles in Mainframes and buzzword laden marketing, as well as their semi-lucrative business of selling parts of itself to Lenovo.

Re: 'Unimpressed by Oracle'

I think that Oracle just has more money than sense, which isn't an uncommon condition around tech companies.

Plus they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to management and stewardship of most, if not all, of their non-proprietary projects. It certainly seems like everything they touch that wasn't invented by them they lead to ruin, or they make things so difficult for developers and users to deal with that it winds up killing whatever project or product. At least with FOSS, you can usually fork it.

About the only exceptions I can think of are Java and ZFS, and even that's complicated.

Re: It's an Apple move

It was because of the way that the forces were color coded at the Louisiana Maneuvers just before the US entered the second world war.

Traditionally, the British Army and the Armies of its dominions and colonies (especially India) was colored red or pink, and it still is if you look at their flag. Blue (or sometimes Black) were always the enemy. The Prussians/Imperial Germans and Russians wore blue, as did the French. The British Army always made plans to deal with any of them hence the OPFOR color was blue. Matched the uniforms.

General Douglas MacArthur, control freak that he was, convinced General Marshall, Admirals Stark and King, and even FDR that it was some British or in some versions Nazi, Japanese or general communist bullshit (or to remind Stalin who was top dog in yet other versions of the story) and that he demanded the US War Department start color coding our forces blue on our maps with the enemy being red. OPFOR became red, and is still red to this day (I was in an OPFOR unit, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, as my first permanent party assignment. We're always red on the BLUFOR maps and such at NTC) which was convenient in the Cold War given the Soviet propensity to use the color red.

Green are neutrals which we consider friendly but don't have any kind of operational control over. We tend to use it nowadays for Islamic governments and movements that we usually have a strategic alignment with (since they tend to use green in their symbols) like the Iraqi Army and the ANA/ANP, with the Jihadis and Iranian SOF being colored black or red depending on who they are and who's doing the coding. I've also seen purple being used for them, usually for stuff like the Mahdi Army and Iranian militias in Iraq/Syria or Hekmatyar's people in Afghanistan because while we've had to kill them in the past and they're still not really "friendly" and you probably don't want to lead a patrol through their territory, they're not usually trying to shoot at us or bomb us....for the moment anyway.

Might be a REALLYgood time to fork CentOS before IBM pulls an OpenSolaris on it. Same thing with Fedora.

Kind of sad really, when I used Linux CentOS and Fedora were my go-to distros.

Re: "Iron Mike Pence"

Maybe in Pence's own mind, if he can string a coherent sentence together that someone didn't write for him and I have my doubts about that.

Re: ADD Another FYI

Yep, and Alliance Data's Epsilon owns Abacus, the ad database that nobody knows about which Doubleclick also owned.

I'd honestly be more worried about Alliance Data Systems than Google. Google gets scrutinized. Alliance really does not and they have so much data on everyone that it would make your head spin, and a huge majority (basically everything that isn't in their credit card business) of it isn't secured all that well

Re: A significant article

Supercomputers aren't usually profitable, nor are they really supposed to be. They're machines built to show off potential capabilities than anything a normal customer is going to use for something in production, except when that customer is like TLA/TLA, a research university, or one of the National Labs.

Also, keep in mind that HPE is the least profitable in terms of earnings per share of the Hewlett-Packard spawn (HP Inc, HPE, and DXC). It was like 8 cents in July. HPI was at like 50 cents and DXC was around two bucks.

None of this really matters though, if SNL wants to try this then they're going to try it. Sandia really doesn't care about the IT market's fluctuations and what the beancounters say. They care about advancing the state of the art no matter what it costs. They're an incredibly cool place to work because of things like this, if of course you can put the whole weapons of mass destruction thing aside.