Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck 880 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2024
Drumpf and company are too indiscriminate and tasteless to be gay. No self respecting gay individual would be caught dead with Musk or Drumpf's hair!
No, for that crowd, it's "any orifice, any where, any time", I'm afraid. They have neither shame nor standards
To have lived to see a century; how the world has changed since he was born! Rest in peace, Sir. Although there were likely grumblings and rumblings during your tenure as President, it was but a pale shadow compared to the bile and vitriol that get thrown about nowadays. You were lucky enough to serve before the internet...
I find any news of Microsquishy prat falls extremely amusing of late as I ditched the Windows data hoovering of client activity in favour of Ubuntu 24.04.1 plus CUDA support for the Nvidia hardware now that you can play games and install CUDA at the same time, the same as you always could with Windows.
Steam with Proton Experimental enabled runs 28 games and failed to run two or three. Most that "wouldn't run" just needed tweaks from the protondb site.
Gaming has been the sole reason I stayed on Windows for the past 10-15 years.
I'm finally free!
Furthermore, does anyone really know what back doors might be baked into pieces of proprietary hardware and software?
How much monitoring and inspection is really done for the source code to ensure it hasn't been compromised? For the hardware boot sequence hardware? For the encryption technology in use?
Personally I suspect that the capabilities of the largest of networked clustered systems are already capable of cracking encryption on behalf of our most technologically advanced nations. And the US is not alone on that list, as much as it galls them. Nor are human individuals above being tricked into clicking an abusive link, responding to a questionable post, or otherwise triggering the trap of some scammer, which may or may not involve a code injection on your system.
Many systems do little to prevent that. Most of us with moderate knowledge of technology trust anybody but RedHat to provide reasonable monitoring and access options for the source code that is used to build the systems; they, alas, have decided to do their best to obfuscate the changes that they make and make them as difficult to replicate and access as possible, completely missing the point and nature of the GPL licenses on which their products depend. IBM's coffers are dwindling; sooner or later someone with a bigger legal team and budget is going to take them on over the issue.
The days of the proprietary silo are dwindling. People expect and demand that the code be open for inspection so that it's security and quality can be monitored and enhanced. It's in the best interests of everyone who uses open source.
I think it's important to realize that US authorities have just as much access to the American public's information from the ISPs and big tech providers and sites as they do foreign accounts. ALL that information is up for grabs iff you follow the right legal procedures for the law enforcement branch in question.
The same applies here in Canada.
Anyone with cross border accounts is exposed to EVERY nation's authorities where the websites reside should they prove to be of concern.
What exactly is everyone so afraid of China having the same information access through channels that everyone else seems to have?
I opted to buy a wallet with RFID blocking plates (basically iron plates as far as I'm aware.) The only time it is within scanning distance of the terminal and out of my wallet is when I'm scanning it.
My worry is not the RFID; my worry are the skimmers that get attached to reader hardware that you stick a card into. Seems to be a prevalent scam throughout North America.
I'm Canadian. There emphatically are limits on free speech in a nation of rules and laws.
We are not allowed to protest inside or near certain government buildings, both federal and provincial, unless we have a permit to do so, and have notified the authorities in advance so they can prepare for our arrival and any potential issues that may arise.
We are not allowed to hold protests within the work boundaries of hospitals and schools, which extends far beyond the entrances and exits of the buildings to the boundary of the property and as far beyond as is necessary to ensure the safety of the staff.
Canadians are a people of rules, laws, queues, and order on par with the finest Britain has to offer!
How can you claim a "right" on the internet that doesn't exist in the real world?
Generative "AI" is a "bad fit" for just about any purpose that people are currently fantasizing about using it for. I'm going to be checking out "Perplexity" because they cite links as well as their summary, so it may prove much more useful than Google's current iterations of a "search" engine (it is anything but nowadays - a screen and a half of ads and bullshit on a search before I found even one relevant link to content recently.)
If you think the US has never used their InfoSec resources to attack another nation, you haven't been paying attention to the news. They admitted as much as attacking Iran's centrifuges that they were using to purify uranium under control of a SCADA system. Nor is that likely to be an isolated incident.
Even at the peak of my career and on the worst of project crunches, 70 hours a week was very much an exception, not the rule. Far more typical during those days was 50-60 hours a week, and that was only because I was a flat-hourly-rate consultant who got paid for every last minute of overtime I worked, not an employee who was expected to "make up for coffee breaks" before the company would pay out any overtime.
The differences between most major distributions are largely feature-complete with minor differences like whether file system journaling is enabled by default or not. With Ubuntu, apparently it's not. I'd call that a glaring omission in the modern age, but I do love the convenience of the distro, and the widespread support, which is at least as wide as RedHat's reach, just not for profit, much to the annoyance of IBM bean-counters. Same goes for those Fedora beta testers for RHEL.
Haven't they heard of the Rules of Acquisition?
I just love the fact that so many Americans love the Ferengi send-up of the stereotypical American CEO and Board! Welcome to the Ferengi States of America!
And those "certified platforms" are rarely "current generation" hardware. They want a wider market than the latest and greatest for their wares. With the prices on leading edge CPUs and affiliated devices (NVMe4 is rather obsolete now, dontcha know...) what they are, and the performance of the previous generation hardware for all practical purposes, following Windows over the cliff of insanity just to appease Uncle Sam's marketing divisions is obscene.
I can only imagine one use case where this is necessary - that of the VM world specifically. They want to standardize the hardware to a more modern flavour, but many VM projects are at least a full rev behind CPUs that have been on the market for over 5 years in most cases in their VM models, and that is entirely the VM producer's own fault, whether it be an open source project or a commercial venture's VM architecture and platforms.
However, that has given those VM models time to stabilize their support from the kernel and other environments. Forcing kernel work to require hardware no older than 5 years flies in the whole philosophy of re-using "obsolete" but perfectly serviceable hardware to distribute *nix distributions to the masses - it would put a distribution on par with *spits* Windows. *spits again*
By all means, make it a requirement for hosting VMs on your CPU if need be for the "leading edge" virtual hardware, but there have to be fallback installations and configurations available for older, more limited hardware as well so it can be saved from recycling (which never seems to actually happen except in the movies.) There is an entire after-market and offshore world that depends on that support from the distributions because there is no way they can ever dream of affording current generation hardware in their currencies.
