Re: Good
pure-bred mongrel, and proud of it!
Posts by Sanguma
533 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2017
Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired
Remember so-not-a-pirate Kim Dotcom? New Zealand’s highest court has just said the USA can extradite him for copyright naughtiness
Thursday 5th November 2020 06:54 GMT
General warrants do not a case make
It still gets me that the NZ Police could act on a general warrant. And that general warrant not be disallowed on the perfectly sane procedural ground that a general warrant means nothing - if everything tastes like chicken, what does chicken taste like?
Not to forget, the dangerously open-ended "nature" of US copyright law - I'm still waiting to find out what new works dear old dead Walt Disney might've written which Disney Corp(se) has locked away in their vaults because it wouldn't do to publish stuff a dead film-maker might've written while dead ... discrimination against dead authors is still discrimination, after all, and if the purpose of copyright legislation is to encourage creatives to create, and the posthumous extensions to copygith are likewise to encourage creatives to continue creating, then publishers ought to, by law, be held accountable for all the dead creatives' creativity that they are suppressing and repressing ...
Boeing puts Loyal Wingman robot fighter jet through its paces... on the ground
Saturday 24th October 2020 01:32 GMT
Re: On fully automated planes
Rock-filled clouds, anyone? The F-111 (Aadvark) had a reputation of flying fast and low - very fast and very low. Interesting to see how this one pans out in those circumstances - the Aussies'd be interested if it can do what the F-111 could do. Otherwise, I doubt they'd be interested - unless of course the Yanks made buying it a condition of interaction with their armed forces. (I mean, they bought the F-18, didn't they? Under the assumption that they'd do some of the building - which never happened.)
RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music
Saturday 24th October 2020 01:14 GMT
Streisand Effect
Just a question - how do the RIAA think people will react, once this tool has been brought into prominence by their actions? (I'm sure the source code is out there, and will now be copied more than ever, by people who can't read a line of it, but who will want to pass it around to stick it to The Man. Doofuses/doofi.)
Where have all the noses gone, long time passing?
Where have all the noses gone, long time ago?
Where have all the noses gone?
RIAA and MPAA have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Nothing like a graceless dork pulling rank where there is none, to get up the noses of customers. Do you think the Numpty Breeders Association will finally show the RIAA CxOs when they finally do their (much awaited, many times delayed) Numpty Breeders Show?
Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined
Tuesday 20th October 2020 05:51 GMT
foot in mouth
meet Mr Bullet ...
“The eighth wonder of the world,” the hyperbolic reality TV star promised while claiming the deal was a reflection of him keeping his word to bring manufacturing back to America and make the country great again.
Sticking your foot in your mouth while brandishing a loaded gun then shooting yourself in the foot ... may appeal to some people, in particular those who can contort themselves and their friends as much as the Federal Secretary of Silly Tweets frequently does ... in the eighties I read about a trick some US military suppliers had, for ensuring their hands were stuck deeply into the taxpayer's pocket for the foreseeable future - overpromise and underdeliver, so the poor taxpayer gets "bought into" the project. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Mark Zuckerberg, 36, decides that having people on his website deny the deaths of six million Jews is a bad thing
Wednesday 14th October 2020 07:54 GMT
Re: And that would be bad how?
After an accident about 12 years ago, the local Accident Compensation outfit sent a guy around to do my cleaning for me. We got on okay, then suddenly one day he comes out with stuff about how the Jews hadn't helped the Germans during the Depression, etc, so maybe ... and I said, that's fine for the bankers, but it shouldn't apply to the shoemakers, and he was gobsmacked. The idea that there could be Jews poorer than him, or just as hard-working, just hadn't occurred to him. He didn't say much after that, and he left soon after.
The problem I've found is that a lot of these characters just are not aware of the other person at all. Let alone that they are people just the same as them.
I'm wondering, though - the Jewish Voice for Peace, a US outfit trying to bring an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, has been complaining bitterly about Palestinian voices being systematically throttled by Facebook. I'll believe he's had a change of heart and that other people actually matter to Zuckerberg when he starts changing that.
Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'
Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets
What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases
Tuesday 6th October 2020 09:54 GMT
Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'
It's when people use them for *storing* data that the rot sets in.
Fair curls my toes. You lose the advantage of ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) that comes standard with most reputable RDBMs and instead get a pile of arithmetic operators you can't use with alphabetic characters.
The irony is that even Microsoft put something in Excel to communicate with RDBMs, or at least with Access, and that's better than nothing. But nobody's thought of using it.
Tuesday 6th October 2020 09:47 GMT
Re: Use Excel or use Oracle?
Even better - dust off the GPLed release of IngresII and write a workable front end for it. Make it look like a spreadsheet but include a parser to turn a set of common elements into relations/tables and be fastidious about that so that they get the idea and don't misspell everything to D1D0 ...
Russia and China's 'digital authoritarianism' means we need to better arm our cyber troops, warns top UK general
Saturday 3rd October 2020 02:52 GMT
Re: Myself, I blame
I actually took the base data from the collapse of the Soviet Union; the finer points about the obsolete nature of the current crop of capital weaponry came from looking at HMS Dreadnought (1906) versus the cheaper torpedo boats, destroyers, and submarines ... something goes obsolete when you can replace it with something cheaper, something the SDI doofuses(?)/doofi(?) failed to recognize.
I think the collapse of the Soviet Union was more widely studied than previously expected, and this is part of that fallout - the West defeated the Soviet Union as much on the written page as on any battlefield ... or have you never read Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, etc?
Friday 2nd October 2020 09:58 GMT
Myself, I blame
the Grand Panjandrum with the round button at the top. And the Garyulies, and Joblillies and the rest of the crew. If it wasn't for the gunpowder running out of their boots, they'd've blown the whole world up by now - together with the Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, of course.
Speaking facetiously, it illustrates a point, that nuclear weapons have been made obsolete - by AT&T, BSD, et allii ... it's a lot cheaper to bring a country down by sowing discord and distrust of its institutions and doubt about its currency and future and blackmailing its head honchos and top doofuses(?)/doofi(?) than it is to go the whole enchilada with capital weapon systems - they're just a backup now, for when your enemy refuses to lie down and take it quietly.
Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it
Friday 2nd October 2020 03:42 GMT
Re: Not the same thing
Flu and the common cold apparently mutate very quickly. Which would explain why there has been no success in developing a "one size fits all" vaccine for them. This novel coronavirus is apparently a slow mutator, so there's more chance it'll be more controllable by a vaccine - but who knows - it might turn out to mutate quite quickly once it's settled into the population.
Microsoft claims to love open source – this alleged leak of Windows XP code is probably not what it had in mind, tho
Saturday 26th September 2020 04:39 GMT
Should be interesting
The prior NT 4-Win2k leak was only partial as far as the Win2k/NT5.0 source tree went. It might make an interesting MSc thesis to track some of that source tree from NT 4.x to NT 5.1.sp1.
And perhaps Microsoft should minimise the potential damage by issuing a statement like the one AT&T's successors eventually released on the Unix Research 8, 9, and 10 source trees:
Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. (“ALU-USA”), on behalf of itself and Nokia Bell Laboratories agrees, to the extent of its ability to do so, that it will not assert its copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial copying, distribution, performance, display or creation of derivative works of Research Unix®1 Editions 8, 9, and 10.
etc, thus freeing it for security research and general hobbyist experimentation.
Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology
Wednesday 23rd September 2020 08:48 GMT
Re: The point?
It's an update of the update of "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" - which as we know, was at one point, "No-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft", and has been for the past few years "No-one ever got fired for buying Google" ...
Think of all the dog trials you've ever watched, and you'll gain an understanding of corporate behaviour. (Better of course if you've actually helped round up sheep yourself - I once helped round up some lambs to get docked.)
Wednesday 23rd September 2020 08:37 GMT
Re: How close a Clone is Edge?
Had to buy a MS Win10 box a few weeks ago. Installed Firefox for reasons too obvious ... but it had an older version of Edge, which duly installed the newer version of Edge, which then arrogated to itself the task of opening my PDFs.
Mostly harmless, except for the boganosity of not even asking me ...
Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs
Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons
Wednesday 16th September 2020 08:02 GMT 
There SNAFU like an AFU - again
Two sides at least to every argument/discussion.
Worth noting that the Western democracies aren't exactly guiltless. Surveillance has been growing year by year, and the excuses - when the governments are found out - have been growing weaker and weaker.
The PRC's taking dossiers. The Russians have been putting up fake info on the social web for at least four years, most probably longer. The PRC and Russia have not always got along so nicely. Anyone see any risk to the PRC in this? let alone to Cambridge Analytica fanbois worldwide? Poisoning wells has long been a tactic in wars.
It's not a storm in a teacup. it's a very real threat to anyone using social media. But it's also a huge risk to the collators of this data - there's a possibility that somewhere someone along the way will have poisoned it - or after having collated it, someone might crack into it and poison it.
FWVVLIW - there SNAFU like an AFU ...
In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows
Wednesday 2nd September 2020 09:39 GMT
There SNAFU like an AFU
Kinda like their other lines of development ... I was prowling around Microsoft.com today on my Win8.1 box, looking for info on writing MS Windows device drivers. I'd installed Visual Studio Community 2017 last year, and was planning on doing something with it. But to write a Windows device driver, i'd need to install the WDK, and there's only two major versions of the WDK available, one for MS Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2019 installed, the other for MS Windows 8.x with Visual Studio 2013 installed.
Happy happy joy joy!
(I suppose I should add that this sudden love of writing MS Windows device drivers was brought on by my new MS Win 10 box happily informing me that I had a device which Microsoft would no longer support. So, I know which end of a compiler does which, I know something of how to fam something unpleasant down an MSWindows box's throat, I figured I'll write a device driver for that device ... happy happy joy joy! Their doc section hadn't been upgraded to Visual Studio 2019 ...)
China trolls Trump with tech export rules changes that could imperil TikTok sale
Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles
Thursday 27th August 2020 02:37 GMT
Re: Doric columns
Well, that illustrates a sound-change I've long suspected. Some English dialects make a phonemic difference between "w" and "wh", which is "w" with a puff of air. I have long suspected "wh" would change into "f" given other sound and stress changes - it appears to have done so in Te Reo Maori in relation to other Polynesian languages, so Maori has "whare" pronounced with the "wh" pronounced "f", while Hawaiian has "hale" and Samoan has "fale".
"Fat hae ye been haiverin at, min ?"
Chinese State media uses new release of local Linux to troll Trump
Saturday 22nd August 2020 23:41 GMT
Re: The OS also supports x86 CPUs flowing from the AMD’s joint venture in China ...
4.2BSD arrived some time during the eighties. 4.3BSD arrived during the late eighties and 4.4BSD arrived around the time of the AT&T vs BSD Inc lawsuit - the earliest CDROMs of 4.4BSD were 4.4BSD Lite, with some of the files removed because of their indeterminate status - they were the ones AT&T was suing about.
The *BSD Unix lineages first appeared on the x86 architecture during Bill Jolitz's porting of 4.3BSD to the 386: DDJ published a series of articles by Bill Jolitz on the porting process, procedure, whatnot. I'm unsure which came first - the FreeBSD project, or the NetBSD project, but both were spun off from the 386BSD project when Bill Jolitz wasn't able to incorporate a series of patches for 386BSD quickly enough. OpenBSD came along much later.
So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills
We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data
Saturday 22nd August 2020 01:15 GMT
low-wing civilian monoplane
There was one such an aircraft I knew of, one of the small civilian monoplanes German aircraft manufacturers made in the 1920s or 30s, a two-seater with a small engine, big wings - very light, not particularly fast, but with good range ... the Klemm Swallow. It was featured in the Air New Guinea in-flight publication, which I've also forgotten the name of, as one of the aircraft I think the Lutheran mission used during that period, or it may have been the Catholics ...
If the wind was sufficiently strong, and the pilot throttled back the engine, he could fly backwards.
Ever since I read that, I've wanted one, just to piss off the Cessna pilots ...
They're 'clean': SoftBank gets thumbs-up from Uncle Sam for keeping Chinese gear off its Japanese 5G network
Microsoft adds 'Here's what we may have broken' screen to Windows 10 Insider PCs
Wednesday 19th August 2020 05:55 GMT
the operating system kind of did away with the separate MS-DOS on which its predecessors tottered
Andrew Schulman's Unauthorized Windows 95 is the authoritative source on information on the relationship of MS DOS 7 and MS Windows 95, and yes, the DOS intx-Win16/Win32 thunking every now and then crashed or froze the computer, just not nearly as often as with MS Windows 3.x. I muxh preferred IBM OS/2 and SLS and Slackware Linux - later moving to Mandrake since it had KDE and I was needed to help maintain a community cybercaf running the blessed MS Windows 9.x, and the similarity of the Win32 and KDE desktops' appearance meant less time thinking, "Now where does that go? Where do I find this or that?"
Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code
Where there's a .mil, there's Huawei: Pentagon allowed to keep using Chinese tech deemed too dangerous for everyone else – report
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Winking red supergiants sneezing hot gas 650 light years away
This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit
Made in China? Not for much longer, reckons Foxconn boss
Friday 14th August 2020 04:13 GMT 
Said it before, bears repeating: PRC was once a cheap option, now it's got a rising middle class and isn't so cheap (or so "biddable" now). Move the manufacturing to Vietnam, the Phillipines, Brazil, Kenya, Mozambique, Egypt, Afghanistan, whathaveyou, the same thing will occur. Rinse and repeat.
And the "workshop of the world", the one/s doing all the hard construction work, will eventually get to be amongst the Great Powers. It's the rule throughout all recorded history. Have you ever read the Old English and Old Norse tales about Wayland the smith?
Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both
Monday 10th August 2020 08:55 GMT
Data silos here, data silos there, security like a hole in the head, WGAF
Resident Rump the US Federal Secretary of Silly Tweets neither knows nor cares that which data silos the data ends up in, is by now largely immaterial. Various events prove that data silo security's about as strong as waterlogged toilet paper - it wouldn't surprise me if the NSA's data silos are about as well studied elsewhere as they are in the NSA's "Hallowed Halls" - ditto the rest of the US "Intelligence" community.
Oh, but how the mighty have fallen, in the midst of slack overselfindulgent bouts of self-pity!
Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol
Saturday 1st August 2020 15:48 GMT
Re: Imagination and wishful thinking
Nah, the Demolition Notice would be the poetry, and we'd all go mad trying to understand it and demolish Earth ourselves in the process. The Vogons have not got a lot of style, but they're eager pick-pokets, and will pick-pocket any idea that'll save them from doing any real work. Real work might stop them from shouting in peoples' ears, "Resistance is useless!!!"
Saturday 1st August 2020 15:46 GMT
Re: Relics of the Space Age
FWIW, I was working as a volunteer in a community-run cybercafe in Chch NZ before the earthquakes demolished it, and a young chap comes in to do a bit of web surfing. He went straight to the Mars pictures then being beamed back by Spirit and Opportunity, and was clearly blown away by seeing another planet in the Solar System.
There's still hope for the younger generation.
What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible
Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory
Saturday 25th July 2020 06:06 GMT
Re: Angels are real
How can one study a being that is allegedly superior to oneself? We study animals on the occasion we have the ability to immobilize them in one way or another, or we can get close enough while maintaining a necessary distance. We study natural phenomena either by constructing an environment where we can abstract unnecessary details (chemistry, physics, etc), or by using information we've already gained through those methods on situations where we just cannot get access - astronomy, geology, etc. But if an angel can simply come and go as it pleases, how is one to study that?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
