Posts by Triboolean

Big Blue

Fred Saberhagen created the Berserkers, AI spaceships and robots that outlived their creators and rampaged through the galaxy.

I recall a few authors created derivative works as well.

Awesome fun stories.

Do you get a better grade of key if you stroke or rub the banana instead of just touching it?

I took a very quick look at rust docs. Saw this line:

let x = 5;

Whenever I see "let", I think ANSI Minimal BASIC from 1980.

Am I wrong to make this association?

Still waiting for no work

With every decade comes the promise that we will no longer have to work, real soon now.

With every decade that dream is further and further away. The cost of living increases faster than wages. We work as many hours as in the 1960s. The so-called middle class is shrinking in many countries. It now seems to require two incomes to maintain a decent life. Some people even invite the kids to live back home to add their income to the pile to meet ever increasing costs and rising taxes.

Its not going well, this quest for robots to do it all while we sit back to a life of leisure. All those promised robots, promised by every decade's futurists, are no more here than the promised flying cars of the 1950s, 60s, 70s,...

Education may not help, only drive down incomes as there becomes 2, 3, ... 10 people available to spin up your servers (which is more automated than ever). Or pretty much any other job. Change is certain, but its certainly not looking like the endless glowing promises of the starry eyed futurists,

For many, the life of leisure will be sitting curbside, with a hat open to a few coins.

Beer icon - while beer is still affordable.

One thing directories do for humans is make it possible to partition by project, subproject, or other mapping so that you can have same name (such as settings.py, tracking.xls, project.mpp, readme) files without any worries about name collisions.

How long until you see names like toasters/designs/2015/jan/bread.file ?

Object storage is going to work well in some situations, not so great in others.

Cant resist:

420: Server is stoned

Weather data?

If they hacked a supercomputer, wouldn't the first step be to install bitcoin mining software and call it something like cloud_predict.so and grab its output data?

Pain, then gain

From some book I read:

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going. To someplace else."

Industries rise and fall. If you want to sit around whining, go ahead.

The industry I was in collapsed (tech, but not cloud related). Now I do another kind of tech. Life happens, and the living roll with the punches. Now looking at the cloud for career number 3 in a series.

Copypasta

Cannot install handy open source tool because not whitelisted.

Process of getting something whitelisted is borderline impossible in many orgs.

Goes to github (if not blocked by net nanny).

View source.

Copy - paste many source files.

Compile and run.

Mwaahahaha, increase productivity 14%.

Blame the victim

"Have backups" Yes, always a good idea.

But this crap of blaming the victim as if thievery was the norm and just trying to go about your business is a target on your back when the bad guys come calling? Gimme a break.

<rage level="nuclear">A proper solution is to track down the human garbage that does this and take them out.</rage>. Err, A proper solution is to track them down, give them a fair trial, and then hang them.

Conway's game of life, planetary scale.

Bad guys run exploits against antivirus programs.

Sun to rise tomorrow. Dogs sometimes bark. Bees seen visiting flowers.

News at 11.

Plain plain text

Base64 is plain text.

Here ya go GovCo. Plain text of the encrypted files...

Do not fine them for it

Though they may spin it as good as any good scammer would, its fraud to say 'unlimited' then choke you off.

The best way to get them to comply with the law is not to fine the company since that does not really hurt the decision makers. Esp. CxOs who if shoved out the door would get big exit payouts anyway.

The best way is a few months of jail time for board members and/or CxOs. No luxury cells either.

Perfectly reasonable

It makes sense to not say they are slurping all info including credit card info and passwords.

Especially so. Because sooner or later someone will notice that human beings work for these agencies in every capacity. They are not any more or less ethical as a group than any other, being human. This means some, at some time, some of them are going to take that info and use it for profit (like buy stuff on your cc or loot your bank account, or sell that info).

When any agency says your info is safe and secure and accessible only for security investigations, they are lying to you and to themselves. Wherever the two-leggers are involved, stuff eventually goes wrong. So best not to admit what info they take as there is a risk, I would say a large risk, of it heading out past the firewall one way or another. And making them look bad.

By saying nothing - plausible deniability.

Ad blockers, who cares

I only use a host file (winhosts).

Never did like the idea of yet another add blocking plugin soaking up my cpu cycles and bandwidth (and probably phoning home to do some tracking of its own). Free ad blocker = you are the product.

Host file = one install protects all four browsers on my machine in one shot.

Sending those ads on a trip to 0.0.0.0 for years.

The Catboard Factor

How I type depends on where the cat happens to be lounging on my desk, and if one of the keyboards is leaning of a stack of papers to avoid her. Often while she claws at me to try get my attention. Click click oww backspace click click