Posts by bombastic bob

Re: UMAMI

need to send up tempura batter, a zero-G fryer, and cocktail sauce to go with it (-ika)

Re: "hats solve the problem presented by AR glasses"

I had considered a motorcycle helmet with built-in gadgetry

(but I'd just build it for me)

prior art: space helmets

Re: It is not just open source

Python tries to solve the "3rd party component" problem with pip and virtual python environments.

It does not always work, however... (my experience dealing with DJango a few years ago proves this)

[I had to mirror a broken DJango system onto multiple Linux platforms in order to fix it, and "bleeding edge" version of some things just outright failed on some systems, but worked on others. Go fig.]

Yeah, the education topic is pretty *HOT* right now, especially in one part of the state of Virginia. I'll avoid going beyond 'a mention' in this forum so as not to derail the thread.

Some of what you say may be true, but it would seem to me that companies will just build products to make money and as such they will go with a market that has a future in order to have growth potential, enough to keep them from going bankrupt along the way. The "Find a Need and Meet It" mentality drives most of the successful companies. There are still enough smart people to make the engineering happen, and even poorly educated employees can be trained by the companies themselves, if needed.

Bezos' company just needs their engine to outperform the Russian one, that's all. "Resolve the Contradictions" and they'll get there. They probably just don't have the decades' worth of experience to get it done quicker. But they will. Eventually.

Re: How wide?

not just width but unspecified parameters too?

Like "%.*g" repeated a bunch of times...

Re: Street signs

I think Canada still paints their cop cars yellow, like U.S. cabs.

And the crosswalks they show are usually the striped kind like on that one Beatles album cover [those weren't painted like that in the USA until very recently, and not consistently either]

Re: I wish I could find the cartoon on the origins of containers

couldn't you do the same thing by imaging the dev's computer into a VM?

Re: Tempting

(re: commentard's name 'Admiral Grace Hopper')

I actually saw (the original) Grace Hopper when she was a Captain, at the Orlando RTC [she was in charge of the recruit training base as they trained the women there and it made sense]. Didn't say hello but may have saluted her (can't recall exactly).

Thinking of commentards, El Reg _could_ review some of the better ones and see if any of those tend towards meeting their selection criteria. No doubt there are zillions of examples. Or maybe they did already and none were deemed 'worthy' enough for a job offer in an e-mail

Re: LSW

IRL this really happened:

* kid has guinea pig as pet

* kid sees something in pet store that says 'cat' on it, wants a 'guinea pig' one, gets bratty about it

* I suggest taking the 'cat' one and crossing the word 'cat' out with a marker and writing 'guinea pig'

* kid stops being bratty, doesn't bring it up again

(everything I ever wanted to learn, I learned by watching 'Monty Python's Flying Circus')

Re: Eh?

"My own ISP, est. 1982[0], has been asked by a couple of state and local agencies (and a couple of Universities) to block specific things over the years. I told 'em to fuck off each time."

(needs no further comment)

It reminds me of too many science fiction dystopias and they never turn out well

and one particular Dr. Who episode... (the yellow smiley button on your back isn't smiling, oops)

and when the building and everything in it (that isn't you) is a networked bunch of nanobots, they always know whether or not you are smiling...

No wonder developers have no passion for the Windows platform anymore.

I thought that '.Not' followed by C# (C-pound) and then "UWP" (and its predecessors) and all of the moving target "new shiny" things (that totally lost long term support) is wot dun that...

at least, for me.

(I just wanted to stick with C++, MFC, Win32, and the DevStudio 98 environment where things were becoming easy and familiar and I could pound out applications and libraries in no time at all...)

Re: Reminds me...

some cost accountant needs to factor in the COST OF INCOMPETENT MICRO-MANAGEMENT ON OVERALL PERFORMANCE when upper management tries to determine what speed settings to use on the equipment.

That vs the cost of an industrial "accident" that prevents such micromanagement from being implemented... [boss, the window is over here - check out the view!]

Re: Facebook will sue

they _are_ the wall.

and their users are just bricks in that wall. Unimportant, identical, mook-like bricks with no individuality and complete obedience. Just sitting there being monitized and holding up the big FB wall...

(I wonder if Zuck realizes the irony of that particular song in an ad related to one of his companies...)

I agree on the national security part. Not the rest.

(there are many costs in manufacturing, and from my viewpoint, a LOT of these are government-caused, like regulations and taxes, which is why REDUCING those becomes "the incentive")

Re: Sideloading

smartphone users are idiots who need protecting from themselves

I wouldn't go THAT far. Even the average LUser can be educated.

All you need to do is make the default security as tight as possible, and allow people to turn things off if they don't want them. This MUST include both side-loading AND installing without code-signing, for TRUE freedom for the user.

This way open source and independent developers can more easily distribute their stuff (without paying the 'Apple Tax' or hiding your needle within their ginormous HAY STACK).

But if the end-user doesn't want that, he can just leave all of the security options ON. So simple.

(and if a system reset can wipe everything and restore the phone/slab to factory state from a ROM, so much the better, for dealing with viruses and malware, in case they show up more frequently)

Yeah, PERSONAL CHOICE. Who knew?

Re: Photos all the way down

I would expect that generating the deepfake in a very high resolution, and then using a standard method of shrinking it down to something with less resolution (cubic interpolation, let's say), or using JPEG vs PNG even, might be just enough to fool the deep-fake spotter-bots.

I like use 'gimp' and a hand-done "fuzzy" technique around the borders of, let's say, a face, surrounded by transparency, that melds right into another photo when proper re-sizing and perspective is done (no pr0n though, just funny things).

in 'Little Nicky' (Adam Sandler) Nicky's brother pasted his face over Al Pacino in a clip from 'Scarface', and did it poorly. But often times it's funnier if poorly done, which is then obvious to everyone (including algorithms I hope).

Re: There Are Three Things

this reminds me of a Dr. Who episode - in space, O2 is expensive, after all! (in that episode the suits literally took over)

Along with a zillion other things I'm not an expert on, I have kicked around a design concept for a one-size-fits-all space suit, mostly for emergencies. In short, a vinyl bubble [made of thick material similar to a waterbed] with an integral helmet and radio, pockets for important things like an O2 bottle with a regulator on it, a couple of hose connections (for the O2 bottle etc.), and a bunch of oversized SHOE STRINGS that you'd use to obtain a proper fit.

For working it may not be tough enough, but if you put something _like_ this on, then put some stronger clothing over it (like pants and a jacket, only SPACE pants+jacket) and gloves, it might be pretty effective, fit ANYONE, be relatively easy to put on, and maybe even cheap enough to be DISPOSABLE.

And you could put these in boxes at various places inside the people compartment, for emergency use, in case of sudden decompression.

(you'd have to strap on the extra A/C when working outside but that could be more like a backpack thrown on after everything else, connect up hoses, etc.)

yeah - I think in terms of doing it "on the cheap" yet being extremely effective and reliable. But it would look like you were wearing a balloon tied with shoelaces.

Re: ISS' swansong?

Is there any reason that what you propose could NOT simply extend the existing ISS? One "connection module" at a docking port and you end up with "the old station" attached to the new, a kind of "city planning" if you think about it.

Re: Why assign copyright?

I would guess that this is a part of it (i.e. prevent someone withdrawing their submission and expecting that to be honored). But I think the "work for hire" concept would be more practical.

* as a contributor, you are "working for" the project

* As 'work for hire', the project has ownership

* They can, and should in my opinion, allow you to also distribute things on your own terms that are derived from your work [but I don't think this is part of it] to avoid YOU being sued later if you copy/pasta your own code into some other project

* They are free to license it consistently with the rest of the project (as owners)

In short, you gave them the contribution, so it's theirs now. Plus, if you GPL it, a derived work can always be made from the source (so no withdrawing it later).

So yeah, that and IANAL and my understanding of these things is limited to my own experiences.

(I think most contributions take the form of patches to existing things, though I somewhat recently contributed a userland application to the FreeBSD project - it may still have my copyright but it is under a BSD license anyway. It had to meet their somewhat tough standards, too, or they would not accept it)

Re: Viasat

you'd think they could afford an actual SCIENTIST who would tell them that below 600km altitude orbits decay in relatively short time frame.

According to NASA "Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth within several years."

I'd say a collision at THAT altitude is much less dangerous "to the environment" than advertised...

Re: Wow

I put 'ransomware' in quotes (followed by a 'd') because it's a similar concept, to threaten something based on a data leak and to potentially want money to NOT release it [unautorized data encryption/decryption being another variant].

But it was released, nonetheless, and the details about whether money exchanged hands (or did not) wasn't in the article... and if "police are investigating" it implies something a bit worse than your average data theft intrusion.

I suppose I could have said "data-leaked" or "cyber-burglared" or similar and been more accurate

Re: Tumbleweed with Wayland

if Wayland weren't trying to re-invent things [for the lulz apparently] while SIMULTANEOUSLY becoming more Windows-like _AND_ removing the one capability that makes X11 superior to all [display and interact on remote desktop over network or even on the same machine with a different login context, simply by assigning the 'DISPLAY' environment variable] I might actually consider using it. But I don't.

So if Mint/Cinnamon devs want to FOCUS RESOURCES ON THINGS THAT MATTER, and NOT waste time re-re-doing things JUST for Wayland, I'm in agreement with them.

Re: Better not be claustrophobic

I have to wonder how it would compare to Mir and Skylab (size-wise at least)

Re: Proof, if it were needed,...

Open Source can't innovate, only duplicate.

Seriously? Gnome and KDE had multiple desktop support around 2005-ish, as I recall. 'vtwm' even had it, a short time later [if I remember correctly], and all of the 'box' managers after that. This same feature took 10 years to show up in Windows. That is *ONE* example where innovation (in this case, for usability and productivity) came to open source FIRST.

Countless other examples exist. Where did that (obviously inaccurate) concept even COME from?

(I do recall some kind of 'powertool' for XP that came AFTER the multi-desktop support in gnome and KDE and it _attempted_ to provide multi-desktop support in XP, but it was brittle and sloppy and generally unusable)

Re: Desktop is boring?

well if "NOT boring" means "constantly using intarweb bandwidth (and wall time) to 'move fast and break things' and automatically surprise you with unwanted changes and unnecessary bloatware" then I _DEFINITELY_ approve of 'boring'.

"bleeding edge" is SO overrated... [why do people do this to themselves?]

I prefer being able to get work done, and abruptly changing the rules and/or creating instability just slows me down. It's why I like Debian for a lot of things. But I admit, I use Devuan, which is mostly like that too, except no systemd.

as for lipstick on a pig - the oinky end would have been better

Let's hope Micros~1 gets a clue and AT THE VERY LEAST let's US choose 3D Skeuomorphic and a "Classic" Start Menu/Button over 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO [which they're apparently TRIPLING down on now] and a Mac-like look on the task bar...

Granted I can get that with certain desktop managers but I use Mate and want my WINDOWS SYSTEMS to be equally CONFIGURABLE BY ME. And 3D Skeuomorphic, not 2D FLATTY.

Not expecting much else. Too much disappointment and "not listening to customers" LAST time around. It is my strong belief that this practice isn't going to change no matter HOW hard the end users complain.

more people should watch the old Python series.

They might learn how to laugh

nice video - very "educational" - heh

Re: Where are they going to sleep?

I think they need to send a few more (inflatable?) "Hotel Modules" up there to accommodate the guests.

"Hey can I get some more towels? And another bathrobe? And will there be cappuccino at the continental breakfast? You can add a bit of liqueur to mine, please."

(Don't forget to tip the bellman)

or maybe it's more like camping out under the stars... "roughing it" for fun