Posts by jake

Re: The point is ...

If you are a cog, you have no say in what the machine does. You have two options: Suck it up and accept it like the rest of the sheeple ... or you can move on to greener pastures (starting with attempting to change the culture where you are now, if you like).

Your mythical Captain Peachfuzz (usually the Nephew of The Founder, or the like) can be treated as the speed-bump that he is. Rule one: Get it in writing, with a wet signature.

I'm a man, not a number. Yourself?

In this context, to all intents and purposes, the meaning is clearly the human at the controls.

Yes, there are many non-human "users" in the world of *nix ... but mostly we call them daemons, precisely to make this distinction.

One word: Sorting.

Re: All to be superseded

Lauded? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

Everybody's playing, at some level, for various values of playing.

Re: All to be superseded

Nah. EMACS is both functional and a learning tool. The systemd-cancer, not so much.

Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

So you're an advocate of stupiding the world down to the lowest common denominator?

When I was younger I thought I could change the world. Now that I've been teaching on and off for about 45 years, I've come to the realization that probably nine out of ten humans are ineducable beyond "eat here, sleep there, bathe occasionally & don't poop in the living room".

I can live with that. Just don't ask me to join them in their mire in the name of you separating them from their money. That's between you and them, kindly keep me out of it.

_{... and it irritates the pig.}

"With traditional Linux distribution tools and approaches if you want to downgrade your version of Libreoffice or get compatibility with a different version of Blender3d the only way to end up with a supported configuration is to re-install your operating system."

Horseshit. Total, utter and complete horseshit.

Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

Nah. I admin my own computers. The only person who can take me down is me[0]. And if I do, so be it ... at least I'll have learned something. Having proper backups and automatic fallover hardware redundancy in key systems helps with piece of mind.

[0] To be perfectly honest, the Wife has access to the safety deposit box with the BigBookO'Passwords[tm], just in case I step in front of a bus. She's *nix literate (finally!) and knows how to access everything, but she's never seen reason to use root, even on her own computers (Slackware and BSD), so she doesn't.

Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

"But everybody plays the fool sometimes."

Yes. It's part of the learning curve. Learning can be painful sometimes, it's part of what makes us human.

The point is ...

... it is up to me to decide if I have the ability or not, not the likes of Apple or Canonical. Indeed, some would say that that is the entire point of FOSS.

It all started going downhill when people changed /u back to /usr ... Us lazy bastards at Berkeley had changed AT&T's /usr to /u in the name of brevity, but apparently it made things hard to understand for newbies.

/u (or /usr) always had non-home directories & other stuff in it ... Source code, documentation, the man pages, user installed binaries available to everybody, and other useful tat like vi, EMACS, UUCP and the BSD games pack.

It was both useful and logical to split it into /usr and /user when the system grew large enough, and had many users. Then some bright spark decided that /usr and /user was too complicated due to their similarity, and thus /user became /home ... except in the appleverse, where they "simplified" it to /Users (Caps in a system directory name? WTF‽‽‽).

Re: Their New Motto is

Not cuntish. Delusional.

Re: Politics, not Good

You're talking about the so-called "first thanksgiving" of the Puritans in 1621, right? It might surprise you to learn that those folks had absolutely nothing to do with the Founding of America.

It cracks me up every time you Brits claim the US was founded by the Puritans. In reality, the Puritans were a fairly unimportant sub-culture by 1776. If you look at facts, not a single one of our Founding Fathers was a Puritan. In fact, many of them spoke out against organized religion partially because of the Puritans ... If anything, the American Revolution happened in part to rid ourselves of such bullshit (sadly, we're not done yet).

On the other hand, and apropos of ElReg's science oriented crowd, seven of the ten initial core group that became The Royal Society were Puritans. The Puritans never ran the United States, but they DID run England for many years. The effects are still visible.

Not a lot of lawyers call themselves Barristers in California. Basically, any lawyer who has passed the state bar and has been admitted to practice may prosecute or defend in California. We use the term Attorney for both prosecution and defense.

Like the above terminology, don't assume "the Law" (whatever that means!) is the same here as it is in your jurisdiction. It frequently isn't, and assuming otherwise just makes you look silly.

Re: Their New Motto is

For some reason certain people seem to think that adding asterisks somehow mutes the badness of the word(s) that they self censor, despite the fact that their actual meaning is blatantly obvious to anyone with native intelligence greater than that of a flatworm. It's almost as if they think that the words themselves are somehow more meaningful than the intent behind the words.

People are weird.

Re: Not the orbital kitty video delivery system

CRS-3 ... Wasn't that Cisco's 2nd generation Carrier Routing System?

You're right, they sure delivered a lot of kitty videos ...

Re: Bah!

Note also that they said "more than" 5km ... I, personally, will be passing the ISS more than 5km away several times per day. Or, if you prefer, "a minimum distance of 5.4km" ... so about as close as Paddington is to The City[0][? Ohhh ... scary!

Propaganda. Or, in the words of the prophet, "smells like bullshit to me".

[0] As the crow flies, of course.

All OSes suck.

Some are just well known for sucking more than others.

Re: There was a good Windows once........

That's a few years younger than I would pick.

Win2K was peak Microsoft.

Re: @Pascal Monett - "Feeling good while you’re looking good"

Intends to do? ITYM has done. The entire OS has been sliding downhill at an ever increasing velocity for about the last 20 years or so.

Re: Would you rather...

"have the UI designers put in charge of the kernel patching?"

Seeing as Redmond's Marketing department is clearly calling the shots for Engineering, I rather suspect this is the what is actually happening.

Thankfully, there are viable alternates to Windows.

Re: At Jake...

The non-286 machines I work on (and have spares for) run the slightly esoteric i386EX ... This is part of the reason I took an interest in the silly things in the first place :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386EX

Re: .MRE Lifespan

Tang.

::blargh::

Re: At Jake...

Nothing is impossible, given time, money & will ... but at what point do you wind up with a Ship of Theseus situation? (Arkwright's Brush, if you're of an age ... or Trigger's Broom if you're a youngster with no knowledge of the classics ... ).

Re: At Grace, re: temp solutions...

I still use Procomm (on DOS, rarely) and Minicom (on Linux, near daily) ... There are still many reasons to eschew the Internet at large for a simple modem-modem connection.

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

Certainly not! Even as a callow yoof, I knew that realistic fleshtones were infinitely irrational and somwhat chaotic in nature, and thus uncompressable if realism was intended in the final display. Instead, we compressed UUCP headers in usenet multi-part binaries. Saved entire kilobytes per picture in early testing. Shame it never caught on ...

_{Pardon me while I get back to restoring my original 1944 Quick Turbo-encabulator.}

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

The aforementioned contribution was in 1981. RFC-1122 was written in 1989.

Re: .MRE Lifespan

"I can still remember a very lubricated taste test in 1997 of MRE sachet food with best before date in 1968, manufactured date in 1963."

Must have been very lubricated indeed ... MREs didn't make their debut until 1980. Prior to that, the food was canned. Food packaged in 1963 would have been MCI ("Meal, Combat, Infantry, debut in 1958). The "Long Range Patrol" ration, available to the troops from 1968, was packetized, but was freeze-dried and required rehydration prior to sampling.

Most versions of Xenix weren't Y2K compliant.

Re: At Jake...

Difficult. It boots and runs from a single floppy, contains no HDD, and the display is a rather small LCD. Most early units are 286 based, with 640K RAM. Later models have a 386, 2 megs of RAM and an unused IDE controller and unused ISA expansion slot. They all have odd memory mapping because of the LCD display, a small built-in thermal printer, and proprietary hardware for the blood work itself. I have never tried to plug in a HDD or expansion card, no point.

Re: The secret to a long life

I keep my Vet's blood machine running. It's an original Idexx Vettest 8008, and is about 30 years old. It's up-to-date, though ... it runs a 22ish year old version of FreeDOS, because MS-DOS is no longer supported. None of the Vets or vet-techs who have run a blood panel on the thing know (or care) that it runs DOS, much less that it's built on a rather elderly PC. It's a single-purpose device, and air-gapped, so security isn't an issue.

I know of about forty of these things still in use here in the SF Bay Area, because I have worked on them. I suspect there are several hundred more. (I bought a bunch of used units 23ish years ago from Vets with Y2K worries ... I was speculating on the need for spares in the future. It was a good guess on my part. I have since augmented my stock by purchasing them whenever I run across 'em.)

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

I hear what you are saying, but the vast majority of people, even those who understand the conversation, would not consider the Dollar or Pound to be digital. Bitcoin, on the other hand, most definitely is in the minds of those very same people.

And it avoids overloading the word Crypto, while properly using the word Digital.

I'd mention Cryptozoology ... but there be dragons.

Re: who is Infosec?

jake$ whois infosec

No whois server is known for this kind of object.

jake$

Re: But it is crypto

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Schrödinger’s actual cat while he was at Oxford was named Milton ... The cat in the thought experiment had no name, as it was unimportant to the outcome.

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

How about calling it what it is?

Shirley a simple "Digital Currency" more than covers it?

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

That would be compression, not cryptography.

Related, yes, but not quite the same. Not even if you squint.

Re: Hacker vs Cracker, v2

Exactly.

On the bright side, such misuse makes for handy filters when trying to sort out who actually knows what they are talking about, and who is parroting things they've heard somewhere.

I'm with Bruce on this one.