Posts by Pirate Dave 1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
I used to be a heavy user of their SMS query service, since I am a Luddite and refuse to get a smart-phone. It was great for finding things when visiting a new city, but it got canned due to "lack of interest". I guess I was their last user...
Can't count on anything at Google sticking around. At some point, they'll bin everything for some new latest-and-greatest whatsit. Follow the money.
I can't count the number of times I've been called into a classroom by a panicked faculty member because "The projector won't come on". Go in, hit power button on projector or remote control and, voila, projector lights up. "Oh, I'm supposed to turn it on?"
Poor PhD's. Sometimes they just need a little extra help.
"These are drive caddies that will sustain years of service, something that may mean little to some, but to folks like us who have done our time as rack monkeys it certainly is appreciated."
Eh, I'd think if you're swapping the drives often enough for caddy wear-out to be an issue, then maybe you should have bought better drives to start with? If I have to swap a drive more than twice in a 5 year period, then something is wrong.
I admit, the 2.5" spinning rust SAS drives HP has been shipping the past 2-3 years have had a very high failure rate, IMHO. Far more than the 3.5" U-320 drives I got from IBM 10 years ago (which are mostly all still running as of today). But even so, I don't think any of the HPs have failed twice. Yet.
So I admit, I'm no cryptographer. That's way too much math for me and it puts me to sleep. But I'm confused by this new homomorphic thing. If you can "massage" the encrypted data until you see manipulable patterns in it, doesn't that mean your encryption isn't really that good? I mean, I thought the whole point of encryption, the gold standard, was that without the keys the data was basically jumbled streams of worthless numbers. Only with the keys can you do anything worthwhile with the data.
Sorry to sound dense, but this doesn't make sense.
"As the use of technology by human beings grows..."
There's the problem. Right....there. Perhaps we should henceforth ban human beings from using technology and just teach panda bears how to run everything. I mean, who could ever get angry at a cute, fuzzy panda bear? They seem peaceful enough, just let them take care of it all while we spend our lives growing bamboo. Human beings, especially ones in positions of power over other human beings, are stupid, power-hungry, selfish critters. But mostly just stupid.
I, for one, welcome our adorable ailuropoda overlords.
I mean, the gubmint already maintains the roads and the bridges and the dams, why not the consumer Internet backbones as well?
And back in the old days, when TVA and the rest were bringing electricity to rural America, it's not like they could tell their far-flung customers "Well, the refined city folk in Lexington get 120 volts at 60 Hz, but you country folks way down here in Jellico, you're only going to get 50 volts at 25 Hz. Make do with what you get..." Imagine how life today would be different if the electric companies had gotten to play by the same lax rules that the whiny, crybaby telco's and cable operators have been playing by for the past 20 years. Wah! Cry me a handful...
I remember the first time I rode through that area on I-65 back in 2010. Hadn't been through there in about 4 years and I don't think there were windmills in 2006. The massive size and scope of that windmill farm is mind-boggling. Two-hundred-foot tall windmills as far as the eye can see. It's quite surreal.
"the foundation has been able to create a burgeoning class of paid foundation employees, whose salaries swallow most of its estimated $55m annual expenses.
So all those popups on Wikipedia the last few months saying "if everybody gave just $3 this fundraiser would be over in an hour" were for paying salaries? Wow, that puts a whole different spin on things. I thought it was used for things like servers, bandwidth, and trips to tropical islands.
Really? So this is the path Nadella is taking/pushing M$ down? This is starting to sound like those drive-by installs for Norton/McAfee AV out on the Internet, or the annoying Java updater that seems to re-enable itself any time you fart. I could forgive their initial push to trick the sheeple into installing Windows 10, but this mutation of the GWX process shows a deviant mind at work. This isn't something BillG or even MonkeyBoy would do, as it involves giving away their crown jewels. And that's what is so very worrying about the whole process. Why are they pushing this so hard? What is their end game? If they start handing out Chum Bucket helmets, I'm really going to start worrying.
So, I wonder what they're going to do with all those horribly outdated and crappy nodes in Yellowstone once Cheyenne gets fully up and running? I mean, Xeons from 2012 are pretty much worthless for anything useful, except maybe as boat anchors. So, as a good American, I'll offer some space in my server room to store some of those old racks full or useless junk for a few years. It's my patriotic duty.
and from the sister-site article about the new system:
"The climate code is over 1.5 million lines of code and there are over 100,000 IF-THEN statements, and those kinds of things don’t do as well in GPU-type architectures."
"IF-THEN" statements? The climate code was written in VB6? Yeah, I can't imagine VB translates well to GPU architectures.
"But what serious militia could act without air defence and artillery support these days?"
Yep. As much of a gun-nut as I am, I realize there's a big white elephant in the whole 2nd Amendment argument regarding "protecting ourselfs from the Government". They've got tanks, bombers, drones, artillery, etc.etc. All we civilians are allowed to have are pea-shooters compared to that. True, a .50-cal BMG will put a big hole in a piece of armor plate, but a 105mm Howitzer will put a crater where the armor plate was sitting. So any "armed uprising" we could muster would likely not last long before it had to devolve into guerrilla warfare.
"they can't own a nuclear missile for instance."
No, we can't. And if you even so much as ASK to own a nuclear missile, they look at you like you're totally bat-shit crazy. It's not like I'd ever USE it, I just want to have one parked in the back yard for the "coolness" factor. I mean, unless the neighbor's dog shits in my yard one more fucking time, then I might think about pushing the big red button. Well, no, not really, I imagine it would make a hell of a mess. (the nuke, not the dog-shit).
Perhaps the trick is in the wording. If you say "I want to own a nuclear bomb", then folks think you're nuts, and possibly dangerous. But if you say "I want to own a physics package", well, fine, that's just a bunch of nerd-stuff, innit? No harm there.
Ah well. Back to my regular firearms, I guess.
"I liked Pascal as a language, it seemed elegant compared to Basic and Assembly. A very good stepping stone to C."
I liked it as a better alternative to Basic and Assembly that let us escape having to learn C. ;) And at one point in the late 80's, early 90's, Borland was selling an "educational" edition of TP 6 for like $50. I think I bought my copy at Walmart, of all places.
"Then all you pesky Objectified Orientated kids came along and ruined programming for everybody."
Amen.
Liam, dude, chill-pill - I think you need one.
So you write an article for El Reg, and your article mentioning Oberon attracts a fairly lively debate among a bunch of old Pascal hackers and detractors, where otherwise, you'd probably have gotten just a few page views. And then you launch into us like we're a bunch of unruly school kids making too much noise during lunch. Dude, did we spoil your party or something? What's with the condescending tone? We're just the normal El Reg commentards talking about something we're passionate about. Chill out.
If you'd rather, we'll skip your stories from here on out and wait for Verity Stob's next story so we have somewhere to talk about the old programming days and not ruffle any feathers. Hell, at least nobody asked if there was a COBOL compiler that ran under the Oberon OS.
"Python provides higher level data structures (lists, dictionaries, tuples) to solve _application_ problems rather than getting stuck in computer problems."
Don't be too harsh - some of us got into computers because we liked the COMPUTER problems, and suffered the APPLICATION problems because they paid the bills...
I did read-up a bit on Oberon this afternoon. So, maybe it's not as Pascal-y as I thought. I remember taking a Modula-2 class in college in the mid-90's and how badly that screwed up my (previously pristine) knowledge of Pascal ( well, TP6 to be precise. Standard Pascal is, as you implied, pretty useless for anything useful). Things looked alot a like, but there were subtle differences. Oberon looks like an even more weirdly redone Pascal. Not that I'm criticizing Dr Wirth, not at all. Oberon seems to be a cool programming language. Just that it may look like a duck, and sometimes quack like a duck, but it's really a swan with a bad chest cold.
OTOH - FreePascal is really smoking these days. I've been playing with it on the Mac recently (just got an old Macbook last month), and it actually works. Can't say I'm fond of Lazarus though - it seems horribly slow on my 2009-era MB (and was a bitch to install). But Nano and the command line compiler have kept me entertained for the past few weeks. And to be honest, the Mac itself has turned into a source of amazement to me, coming from the Linux and DOS/Windows world like I do. Stuff just works, not a lot of putzing around required. I'll get flamed for saying this, but OS X is how desktop Linux should look and work...
Same here. A computer that's Pascal through-and-through would be awesome, but not for $140, and not using connectors from the 1990's...although maybe the PS/2 and VGA connectors are easier to wire up (on the board itself) than newer USB and HDMI/displayport/etc connectors
I wonder how much tinkering it would take to get Oberon to boot on the Pi Zero...
It is kind of funny, innit? They pushed Windows to get folks away from the "complexities" of the DOS command line, and now they're pushing a new command line to get folks away from the "complexities" of Windows. Maybe next will be a GUI that runs under Powershell to get folks away from the complexities of Powershell. And eventually they'll have to come out with a new command line to manage that GUI too.
Circle of life (or money) and all that...
"features such as OneGet, now also called PackageManagement, which lets you install packages from cloud repositories,"
Considering how much of a pain in the ass MS made it to do simple Powershell things like remote script execution, or, hell, even running a script in your current directory, why would they open Powershell (and Windows) to this type of crap? Seems like a bad idea just waiting to get worse.
I thought the whole purpose for the PITA around remote scripting and having to type "./" all the fucking time was to improve security? And now they want to make things as simple as
One-Get -install http://virushaven.com/NewVirus.ps1
That, er, doesn't seem like a step forward. Might as well go back to emailing VBscript code around...
I've got around twenty HP 4000 switches that we put in between 2000-2004 and all are still going strong. The fans did tend to burn out after 3 or 4 years, and HP promptly replaced them - didn't even have to CALL tech support - apparently it was a Known Problem with hose fans, so they setup a "replacement fan request" webpage where I just had to give a shipping address and how many fans I needed and they shipped them to me, no cost. Yeah, we've had a few ports go out, but we get a lot of lightning here. I can't blame HP for that.
Can't say I'm as fond of the rebadged 3Com switches. The stupid captcha on the admin login page is a total PITA. Who thought THAT was a good idea???
We're running Avaya (nee Nortel) ERS gear now for our backbone. Pretty good stuff, although, well, you can tell it started life at Nortel...
I confess, I don't much care for any Dell gear in my server room or wiring closets. IMVHO, they engineer too far down to a price-point.
Cisco is way more $$ than my small college can afford, at least for wiring closets. However, our main BGP router is a Cisco box, and it's been rock-solid for 5 years.
"In RFC 7704, Clark and Crocker argue that ... “aggressive and even hostile discussion behaviour is quite common”. "
Man, I hope they never join the Linux Kernel mailing list...or read any newsgroups...or post on any tech-related web forums...or visit El Reg. Poor blighters, the real world is just sort of tough...
I'm not a security guru, just a network guy, but I thought the SSL cert folks were starting to push ECC as the "next big thing"? At least, I saw it mentioned in an ad on the Symantec site a few weeks ago when I was renewing an SSL cert, so assumed it must be something they were moving towards. And I seem to recall they wanted quite a bit more money for the ECC cert.
So is CryptoPeak's CEO named Darl McBribe? This level of stupidity can only be ascribed to a colossal moron of his monumental caliber.
Google doesn't return much info on the company itself - certainly not a link to CryptoPeak's site. (although I will confess I didn't look too deeply...)
I was leafing through a Rubiks Cube solution book at a bookstore a year or so ago and realized (or reaffirmed), in spite of my degree in "Computer Science", I'm not a mathematician. My brain is really, really not wired that way. I never did figure out the cube in the 1980's, and probably won't even if I live until the 2080's. Too boring to me. But building or optimizing a cube's guts so it turns faster? That would be way more interesting than solving the cube itself. To me, anyhows.
"a nice full screen popup interrupted me with "Updates are needed" and only a "Get Updates" button."
I've noticed that too on the one Win10 box I have here. So while it's not exactly required to install the update, they sure make it look like you don't have any option. It's horribly annoying.
Personally, I don't see much major difference from Win 8.x. Sure, there's something they call the Start Menu, but, meh, with no tree structure like classic Windows, it's as useless as the Win 8 Start Screen, just smaller. So overall, just a big "Meh"...
I can beat that: 386 SX 25MHz with 4MB RAM
4 megs? Weren't you lucky. I had a 386-25 SX with 1 meg, well 640K really, since a dude I knew said that should be enough for anybody. And that was a replacement for the old 4MHz ITT Xtra that I got second hand (MFM - FTW baby...).
When I got Windows 3.0 (a couple of years after 3.1 came out), I seem to remember adding another 2 megs at a cost of like $110. I think this was after one of the memory price crises' - can't remember if it was where Bush Sr smacked the Korean manufs for dumping, or if it was after a factory blowing up (or some such). I also ran the DOSSHELL (from DOS 4.0 or maybe 5.x, iirc) and honestly liked it better than Windows - was much faster.
But back to the OS2 topic - the question in my little non-OS/2 mind is - OS/2 was a really well thought-out, designed, and implemented OS that came from the Big Brains at IBM. And I think that's a big part of its reliability. Not to poor-mouth Arca Noae (whoever they are), but do they really think they are up to the task of updating an entire OS like OS/2 by late next year, and having it be as reliable as the original software that came from IBM? I admit, when I RTFA, I was a bit skeptical. Seems like updating OS/2 to current hardware would be a big task even for IBM itself. Or is Arca Noae a group of the old OS/2 folks from IBM?
"Nor is it clear why a few busy Office 365 customers necessitate such severe changes to the free offering for users in general."
Obviously, Microsoft ran out of the needed fairy dust and unicorn farts to make their "all you can eat for free" storage model work. But it's understandable they were caught out by this, since they weren't around back in 2000 when the initial Internet bubble went "pop". Those were the bad old days when Internet sites started to realize they needed to make a profit at some point, and they were spending a pantload of money on high-end server hardware and connectivity. Nope, Microsoft didn't live through any of that, so there's no way they could have known it wouldn't work this time either...
Thanks for that. That's what I figured, but wasn't sure.
On a completely unrelated note, I was at an airshow earlier this month and got to see (and touch, but. err, shhh...) an F-18 up close. I was amused that on the front of the airplane, at the very tip of the nose, is a phillips-head screw. Just struck me as funny that this big, death-dealing figher jet that costs millions of dollars is lead around by a phillips-head. Not an allen/hex, or a Torx, or something that requires a $5000 custom-made bit to remove. It's just a regular #2 phillips that looks like it came from Home Depot.
"But your comment about Powershell not being more powerful than Bash is woefully misinformed. It is not only better designed and more self-consistent, but it has vastly more capabilities."
Really? Funny, after using Bash for 15 years and Powershell for 5 years, I still say Bash is better.
It's more consistent, more mature, and there is a much better chance of googling a "proper" and perhaps even an "elegant" way to perform a given task instead of the hackish nature that surrounds the Powershell documentation. It reminds me of classic VB in that respect - folks finding ways of making something work, but is it a good and proper way, or just a hack they stumbled upon that will disappear in the future?
Not to mention it has a better grasp (meaning not-iron-fisted) of variable scopes - for quick one-off admin tasks global variables are useful and are no problem in Bash, but it's a PITA to have to prefix every single occurrence with $global: in Powershell just because MS decreed that we must do that, and no escaping it.
Why does get-mailbox support the -filter switch, but get-msoluser doesn't? That doesn't seem terribly consistent and is a PITA at times when dealing with Office365 users.
Why is it such a bitch to escape all the switches to a call to "icacls /grant"? Why does it take 5-10 lines of "native" Powershell code to do the same thing as a single call to icacls? There's granularity, and then there's being a total pain in the ass (to the point where it's easier to put the icacls call in a BATCH FILE and call that from powershell).
And why, why, why can't csv-import have enough sense to skip blank lines in an input file?
So yes, on paper, Powershell should be the cat's meow. But down in the nuts-n-bolts, it just isn't. Like most MS products, it's a decent attempt, and nothing more. Bash is still better in my book.
"Think a toolset like BASH but far more powerful and secure with fully OO features, so no parsing text files any more and worrying about text formatting , etc, etc."
LOL. If you think Powershell is more powerfull than BASH, you need to have another think. Although I will concede that I am inferring BASH is on a mostly-proper *nix system like Linux or the BSDs with all the attendant utilities. I would imagine BASH on a Windows box would be about as useless as Powershell on a Linux box.
Don't get me wrong, Powershell is a great step-up from DOS batch files in most instances, but a BASH-killer it ain't. As to text-parsing, eh, last time I checked, import-csv still had annoyances with blank lines in the input file.
this explains why LOHAN hasn't gotten clearance yet - the two "toy" dudes at the FAA have been busy worrying about drone regulations, not ballockets.
Maybe future generations will finally see LOHAN blast off. Right about the time everyone gets their own private spaceship.
Bloody regulators...
So, eh, legitimate question here. I see these are on Ebay for $180 (for us USians), and judging by this review, they look like decent devices. So is it possible to buy one of these and never connect it to a phone network? Will the device have fits (or not work at all) if I don't provide it with a SIM card? $180 for a little pocket computer with no data bill sounds like a deal - something I could take around at work to check access point strength, telnet into switches/etc (no serial is a bummer, though). But would it actually work?
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