Posts by Cheshire Cat 241 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
Maybe can keep a running replica of the Centos streams repo, and snapshot it every time RHEL goes up a point release? Then run your centos update form the snapshot repo, and you effectively get the RHEL point.
Will kill things like EPEL though, and there will be dependency chaos.
At my first intern job, around 1990, I had to use fortran for the first time. Having nothing better to do, I decided to port a boulderdash-clone game from C into it. The lack of recursion was a big problem, since the whole system depended on it, but I worked around it by having a separate function that managed its own stack, and called a function which returned a list of new items to put onto the stack. It did change the order in which things were resolved though, which in the end broke some of the puzzles in the game screens.
> While we're about it; do we have to do something about "Abort" too?
I had to deal with that sort of misapplied nonsense 20y ago, someone thought the message "process aborted" was insensitive as they apparently couldn't tell the difference between a computer systems process and a foetus. "process terminated" was also out. I can't remember what they finally settled on, but it was something like "process did not run at users request" or similar.
Maybe the plaque should say "These items were stolen back in '84 by persons unknown. They then spent the next 35 years with this woman who was so obsessed with Turing she changed her name to his. But we cant prove who stole them. Bit of a coincidence though dont you think?"
So users should be made to write "Cloud replication is not a backup" 100 times before you are allowed to use it.
It's not a backup unless you have at least 2 copies, and they are offline. And, ideally, tested.
Just having a synch tool from your device-of-choice to The Cloud (tm) is not a backup, as any phule kno. It's handy for remote access, and sometimes for 'whoops' moments, but its NOT a BACKUP.
For comparison, my photos are kept on the local disk, in one cloud sync (with delete disabled), 2 offline monthly USB disk backups, and a set of annual printed albums (for the annual favourites). And I'm far from being a professional photographer. I am constantly amazed by people (both home users and businesses) who put critical data that they would be heartbroken to lose in a single vulnerable place with no backups... my Work data are backed up in even more revisions and replicas.
"Yeah, we don't let any old Tom Dick and Harry create their own teams either - because if it's open slather, you get a whole bunch of crappy little teams people use for 2 days, then abandon. Then we need to spend significant time/expense tracking the owners down and ask them if they still want their crappy data."
Yes, THIS. Teams is designed to allow every Tom, Dick and Harriet to create a new group and the potential chaos for the admins is a nightmare. Not to mention that since you cannot add people to a team using a group, you end up with dozens of things to update when on/offboarding employees.
While I wouldn't use zoom for anything highly confidential at government level, I think it's fine for other things, provided you configure it correctly (waiting room, password, etc). I am using it for our Scout group meetings with much success.
Teams cannot do the tiled multi-person view of up to 25 users like Zoom can; the teams client for Linux and phones is cut-down and a resource hog; and Teams doesnt support anonymous attendees. Zoom is just much, much easier to get someone into a meeting if they're not already part of your company. Also, administration of Teams is a nightmare - tracking down uploaded files, new groups proliferating uncontrolled, and inability to use existing groups to define membership.
Whether or not the OSS contract is illegal probably depends on the wording. Saying "we won't do business with you in the future if you do X" is very different from "Accepting the contract means you promise to never do X"
Perens clearly thinks they said the latter. However the judgement is solely on the belief that he has every right to state his opinion, and OSS were trying to shut him up. Too often it seems that US companies use legal threats to prevent people discussing or stating opinions.
Actually, funeral strippers are a Taiwanese custom, not (mainland) China. They also have funeral processions containing flatbed trucks with pole-dancers on them, and "Professional Mourners" who can spend hours "crying" into a PA system about how sad they are that Uncle Wu has kicked the bucket, so that you don't have to.
When I was in Taiwan, one of the neighbours had one of these funerals. In the afternoon, there were puppet shows for the kids. After 9pm, the kids were sent home and the strippers came on. I wanted to go and experience the authentic local customs but the wife wouldn't let me ;)
"There's a deeper question here about why after so many arrests these alleged perps were still at large and unreformed."
The US penal system is not designed to reform, it is a business intended to make money. When they come out, they are even less able to get employment, and have larger debts, so go straight back to crime - and become more raw material for the prison business.
I think the important distinction is between being "qualified" (which many places do require for professions such as hairdressers, chefs, and so on) and being "licensed" (which in most places is reserved for professions such as doctors, teachers, drivers, etc)
Requiring licensing for such a broad title as "engineer" is likely a holdover from some overzealous lawmaker in the US back when an "engineer" worked with heavy machinery and steam.
> Ah - that was my first motorbike. Yamaha XJ600N in black.
You too? Was a great bike, I even brought it out to New Zealand with me when I emigrated 17 years back. Loved riding that bike and was planning to tour the South Island on it some time with SWMBO.
Then 8 years ago, an unlicensed driver decided to drive over the top of it while I was riding it...
Wife won't let me ride a bike any more.
Just last week, a whole town in New Zealand was cut off form the Internet due to a contractor with a JCB accidentally cutting the one fibre out of the place.
Business owners were on TV complaining that they couldn't get access to their bookings data or accounts (which were in the cloud), couldn't accept EFTPOS and couldn't run their businesses without their clouded functionality. Schools couldn't run without Google Docs, GMail and website.
I was yelling at the TV like a grumpy old man (so SWMBO tells me) about the idiocy of (a) making your business unable to operate without the Internet link, and (b) having no plan for disaster recovery. I mean, if you have to keep your calendar online, then at least have a printout of the day's bookings!
I would like to think that the people affected would now reconsider their dependence on the Internet, but I bet they won't.
AI should never be able to *permanently* delete accounts. However, when you number your accounts in the hundreds of thousands or millions, you have to have some automatic disabling. Then the rare false positive can be manually corrected.
Of course, if you have a lot of false positives, you have a different issue and should tune your algorithm better before you give it teeth
According to the (Taiwanese) wife, the joke currently going around in Taiwan is this:
After he announced that his candidacy was on the orders of Matzu, all the different Matzus from the many temples around the country got together and had a meeting.
"OK, who was it that gave him this stupid idea?" they all asked.
"Not me!" "Not me!" they all responded loudly together, pounding the table angrily...
And this is what caused the recent earthquake in Taiwan.
Show me someone older than 30 who hasn't done some questionable things in their youth that they would rather not have done. Harry's list of faux pas seems tame compared to some less public people I know.
The only difference is that Harry is young enough that these things were more easily recorded and spread to the Internet; and royal enough that tabloids and gossip mags are interested in doing so.
He's entitle to his opinion, and we're entitled to listen or ignore as we choose. Personally, I'd say that anything fun can get addictive if you've not much self-control, and I wouldn't let my kids play it without the teamspeak disabled, or at least restricted to known friends only.
Well, if people want to watch/read it, then why not...
I think Ms Rowling (officially the richest woman in the UK?) actually gives much of her excess money away to worthy charities. Certainly a greater fraction than the majority of people in the 1% do, so good luck to her.
A few years ago, I was travelling to the US. The security goons demanded I start up my laptop, log in -- and then they took it away for 20 min without a word. I assume they were cloning the hard drive. Then they brought it back without a word, and sent me on to the frisking and shoe-xraying. Not a word of explanation, not a word of thanks.
Were I bringing in anything dodgy, I'd have encrypted it and hidden it on a website somewhere for late download; so the whole things was intrusive and pointless.
Of course, I am an Evil Foreigner (albeit white and non-beardy) so presumably I'm fair game.
Those of us outside the UK are wondering why UK people complain about paying only $145/year for access to the whole of the BBC. I would gladly pay so little for such a huge number of advertising-free decent programs.
Try living in Au/NZ for a bit with only Sky at 50 quid/month that is 40% advertising by time.
Of course, the iCar can only be fuelled by a special, proprietary fuel nozzle (adaptor hoses available for US$139 each).
You can also only use Apple Maps to navigate, and require an Apple Driving license ... and any time they want, they can cause your car to lock you out and drive itself back to the Apple office.
Well, from reading the email exchanges made public and so on, it looks like everyone involved is coming off as a dick.
Koçulu seems to be less than professional and not particularly polite in his responses. The Kik people seem to have opened by threats of legal action if they didnt get what they wanted. When they offered compensation, Koçulu asked for $30K, and there was no negotiation on either side.
It would have been easier for Kik to have opened with "we'd like to take over the name, because trademark, and offer $10k in compensation". Even paying the asked $30k would have been so much easier and amicable all round. And, Koçulu should have responded a bit more professionally to the initial contacts, and not throw his toys out of the pram so soon - though I doubt anyone could have predicted how much would break from his removing the code.
String wires over the courtyard at a distance of about 3m apart.
Tie to the wires a large number of 1m long plastic strips that will blow in the wind.
Then, any drone coming past will tangle its rotors in the strips and get hung up.
Of course, if the drone then drops its package, this might be an issue, though you should have the wires at least 5m up in the air so anything dropped is likely to break.
"Don't all garage door openers use rolling codes now?"
Some do, some don't. I know ours does, because I can't use a cheap record-and-replay replacement key but need to buy a special one and program the system to accept it (rather than the other way around). However cheaper ones (such as the ones used to secure stargates) do use fixed codes.
In the current climate of there never being enough competent tech workers, surely any company that uses any criteria other than technical competence when selecting a new employee will eventually darwinate itself out of existence. I know my employer is desperate to find competent IT people, regardless of any other criteria.
There are fewer women working in IT because there are fewer studying IT at uni and fewer playing with IT at high school. If you want more in tech roles, concentrate on getting more into the market. This is the same reason for there being fewer men in teaching or nursing - less of them study for the profession at uni. If you want to balance these out, remove the social disincentives of these career choices at high school and college; quotas at hiring time will not help as the candidates are simply not there.
DMARC is massively broken, because it mandates an SPF test on the From header, even if a Sender header is present. What it should do is to test the Sender if present, else the From, but it doesn't.
Most mailing lists work completely RFC-compliant by adding a Sender header (known as the 'secretary scenario'). However, to get past DMARC tests, they have to violate the RFC and rewrite the From header instead, concealing the originator of the mail.
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