Posts by jake

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Eh?

"The problem is your team forcing us to use the OS the way you want us to use it although it makes it 1,000,000 times harder to use it your way, than what would be convenient for us."

What about the above opinion is entitled, demanding or insulting? Sounds to me like somebody knows a better way to do something, and yet is being forced into doing it in a way that drastically slows down the entire process. If anything, the party being addressed comes across as authoritative to the point of saying "our way or the highway", which doesn't exactly work in a meritocracy like the FOSS world.

From here, it would seem that the Authors of the paper are backing the actual toxic element.

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

Utter bunkum.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed suspension bridge, not a chain bridge.

Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not

You still haven't defined "assault weaponry".

And neither has anybody else who is calling for the ban, nor has any law-maker who has actually written bans. All we see is hand-waving and waffling.

Free clue: the term "assault rifle" does not actually have a defined meaning. The so-called "assault rifles" that people are whining about are mostly poor quality rifles gussied up with flash hiders, larger clips, perforated barrel covers, skeleton and folding stocks, optic and light rails, and other bits of glitter that do absolutely nothing for the actual business of pushing lead down a tube. These purely visual bits are about as useful to the utility of the tool as racing stripes are on your average teenager's first car. So why are the politicians trying to ban them? Simply because they look scary and appear quite menacing in a photo lineup on the evening news. Quite frankly, most of my hunting rifles are far more lethal (in the right hands) than any of the so-called "assault rifles" on the banned list.

For example, take a look at the lovely Ruger 10.22. It's a wonderful little carbine in .22 Long Rifle. An excellent choice for a first rifle for the kid on your xmas list. Small, lightish, accurate, durable (mine was a gift from an Uncle in 1967, and still looks/works like new) ... an all around great tool to learn the basics with. Including safety, maintenance, cleaning, etc. What's not to like?

However, should you want to spend some money, you can easily buy the parts to make it look like an "assault rifle". Like this. Way scary, aren't they? WE MUST BAN THEM!!! ... despite the fact that they are the same exact carbine under the superficial crap bolted on top. THIS is the kind of bullshit that the anti-gun set are screaming at the GreatUnwashed who don't know any better. Brainwashing is ugly, but it works.

"Any modern pistol is semi-automatic."

Untrue. There are many modern[0] single shot pistols in both break and bolt action, some multi-shot in break action, and of course all the single-action revolvers.

[0] Modern in metallurgy, mechanical design, and esthetic.

The cops here in Northern California, where we have gun buy-backs quite regularly, say that they do absolutely nothing to curb violence because criminals can always get a gun if they want one, and pay no attention to the law (kinda by definition ... they are criminals. DUH!) All the buy-backs do is make for feel-good media clips, along with politicians saying "look, we are doing something!". The psychos are still at large, though.

"Have I been mis-lead by Hollywood?"

What kind of dumb-ass question is THAT?

Virtually everything you have seen on TV about America is either made-up to sell a script, or an anomaly that is so far out of place and abnormal that it makes the news as far away as your jurisdiction.

Remember, horrendous acts by psychopaths aren't "normal". That's precisely why they are "news". You never actually hear about what normal people are doing, day to day. Which is pretty much exactly the same thing as every other human on the planet does day-to-day.

For example, I'm about to go pick some veggies for our evening meal. Tomatoes, chilis, squash, salad stuff, some onions .... whatever looks tasty at the moment.

SHOCK! HORROR! Yanks eat food! Details at 11!!!!!11!!one!!!111!!!!!!eleven1!!!!

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Re: Theocracy

"I suspect God had a very good idea of how babes were made, also I suspect God had a very good idea of men's behaviour and correctly framed the problem as primarily being men being irresponsible with their seed."

So in your mind, instead of educating Man, God decided to lie about something so very simple and basic.

You worship a known liar. Nice.

_{Is it any wonder that xtian shamen refer to their congregations as "flocks"?}

Re: Theocracy

So you are either saying the Bible was written by clueless Men, or that God didn't have a clue how babies were made. That'll get you some downvotes from the lunatic fringe ... Have a beer in compensation.

Re: One day at a time

Virginia Colony was BRITISH, not American.

After declaring Independence, it was renamed The Commonwealth of Virginia ... and Governor Thomas Jefferson moved the Capitol to Richmond, for defensive reasons.

Re: Democracy

"The republicans are not getting their way due to democracy, they are getting their way because of expressly antidemocratic means"

I would go as far as to say it's through unAmerican means.

Re: Theocracy

"A clear majority still believe in god."

Even if you change that to "a god"[0], I'm not 100% convinced it is true. I know several people who go through the song an dance of attending services, but have made it clear (outside their place of worship) that they don't believe in that claptrap at all. They just attend to keep a family member (or members) happy.

[0] You don't seriously think everybody believes in the same god, do you?

Re: Democracy

Slight correction, basically the supreme court said that health care is a political matter, not a medical matter.

Re: US of a holes

Presumably different laws in that Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales.

Re: Hey Mr Taliban, tally me trimesters

"But at least the religious traditions of the puritan minority are still embraced 300years later."

Not here in the US they aren't. Unless you can point me at a large, very well hidden group of the CofE sect here in the US.

What's that? You didn't know the Puritans were hard-core CofE?

Isn't that wonderful special.

Re: Hey Mr Taliban, tally me trimesters

"And whose first act was to execute a women for being an evil Quaker?"

That would be the British folks known as the Puritans, right? It certainly wasn't the Americans, because there weren't any yet ... Mary Dyer was hanged over 100 years before America even existed. Not too many years after that, most of that particular sect had fucked off back to England.

It cracks me up every time you Brits claim the US was founded by the Puritans. In reality, on this side of the pond the Puritans were a very unimportant sub-culture by 1776. If you look at facts, not a single one of our Founding Fathers was a Puritan. In fact, many of them spoke out against organized religion partially because of the Puritans ... If anything, the American Revolution happened in part to rid ourselves of such bullshit (sadly, we're not done yet).

On the other hand, I think if you look into it you'll discover that the Puritans ran England for a lot of years. For example, did you know that seven of the ten initial core group that became The Royal Society were Puritans? The Puritans never ran the United States, but they DID run England for many years. The effects are still visible.

Re: Canada

Yeah. The very vocal minority needs to be called on the carpet. Things have gotten way out of hand. The Founding Fathers (who almost to a man were not exactly pro-religion, and for very good reasons) would be appalled at all this un-American activity.

What ever happened to separation of church and State, anyway?

Re: Theocracy

"Moving steadily down the road to establishing a Christian theocracy."

Not going to happen. The number of practicing xtians in the US has been dropping steadily since the 1950s. Only around 20% of Americans bother to attend weekly services for ANY religion, not just xtianity.

"There'll be modesty laws for woman within our lifetime"

There already are. Consider that in most places it's OK for men to wander around topless ...

This thread will probably get contentious.

Please do not feed the trolls.

Thank you.

Re: Yes, I am ashamed of my country

You are not alone.

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

"The only other "religion" I know of that requires fees is Scientology."

It's so common in religions that it has a name: tithe, a word that goes back to Old English (call it the late 1100s). It would seem that even shamans have to pay for a roof overhead and kibble for the dawgs.

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

Re: Error Types

"Nobody in England, or indeed Britain, uses them anymore."

Have a pint? Or does the bathroom scale say that you weigh too many stone in these sedentary Covid times? Perhaps you should be walking/jogging/running a few miles per day? Did the milkman deliver your pint this morning? How many cubic feet of gas do you use boiling your kettle per month? If you're on the electrics, how many kWh does it take to boil the kettle?

And etc. You Brits are funny when it comes to teh metrics :-)

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Re: Why does modern hardware not facilitate "safe" software?

Yes.

Have fun :-)

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

Exactly, Bob. We're perfect.

::ahem::

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?..ah the downvotes

"In the same way that the next Fad Diet that comes along cannot solve the problem that someone eats too much, gets too little exercise, and is generally an all round total slob."

Methinks you're going to get a bunch of downvotes from so-called "devs" who are total slobs linguistically, with no control over their diet[0], and a severe aversion to exercising common sense.

I've had to maintain code like that, too ... Beer. Not an answer, but it helps.

[0] In the "executive meeting" sense of the word.

"Real Soon Now."

Ah. So roughly half past the twelfth of Never, then.

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

" I've yet to see any perl with comments."

Judging by the rest of your post, that's probably no great loss.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

And yet, with all that background, after reading ElReg this last decade and a half(±), you have never noticed non-ASCII characters in the commentardery, and instantly figured out how it was done‽

Dancing rodents[0]. You have managed to well and truly flabber my gaster. Have a beer.

[0] Conga rats.

Re: you needed to be able to live off the interest of the interest

"If you go to a place where your lifestyle costs you $5000 per month"

You film it, put it on YouTube, and turn your small fortune into a large one by keeping the kiddies living vicariously through you furiously clicking away.

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

Remember back when sarcasm and snark were coin of the realm around here?

_{Apparently even biting the hand that feeds IT isn't hip anymore ...}

Re: Manager and Cashier

"Where are you going to get interest of 3.5%?"

Personally, I invested in land. Much, much higher than 3.5%

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

You must be very new to computers, Martin.

Re: Manager and Cashier

Unconventional means?

In what world is theft and trafficking in illegal stuff "unconventional"?

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

"There's no need, ever, for the term UVEPROM"

So little use, in fact, that in all the years I've been using them (early '70s), this is the first time I recall seeing that term.

"Kind of makes a person wonder what the hell they actually do."

Check the CCTV footage (Megage? Gigage?) and issue traffic citations would be my guess.

One wonders what will happen when ...

... major governments of the world discover that when BigHighTechGossipMonster deletes all that personal data that they have been illegally hoarding for the last couple decades, all that really gets deleted is the current working copies. The carefully curated off-site backups live on forever, in all their redundant glory, just as they were designed to do.

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

Now hang on ... Linkedin is useful for something!

I've been dropping resumes/c.v.s that mention Linkedin into the shredder for about a dozen years now. IMO, including such a link is nothing more than laziness on your part, and I don't hire lazy people.

Remember, your resume/c.v. is a paper representation of yourself. Treat it accordingly. Free hint: Have it proofread by several people who aren't brown nosers before you actually use it. I may be critical, but even I know that I can't proof my own work!

Re: Really?

Allsorts? His type is usually more interested in getting away with a couple handfuls of dolly mix.

_{Note to my fellow Yanks: don't bother trying to parse the above.}

Xi Jinping himself weighs in on how Big Tech should deploy FinTech

As the rest of the world ::yawns:: in his general direction.

"Oh, bother." said Pooh.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

Re: Common sense...

It's not like you're new here ... why the sudden angst?

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Re: repeat after me

"The Bruce Schneier book Applied Cryptography would be a great place to start learning about why "rolling your own" is probably not a very good idea."

FTFY

Re: Still better than others

Personally, I just hang a small BSD-based file server (only 4TB of RAID-5, YMMV) off my Great Aunt in Duluth's network connection[0]. Encryption of my choice. No fuss, no muss, and it always works when I want it to work, not when some provider with its head in the clouds wants it to work.

[0] Mirrored at a couple of other relative's homes.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: Internet vs Renitent

"The Internet was created to renitent (resist and survive)"

Oft repeated, but simply not true.The (D)ARPANET was just a research network designed to research networking. The "survives nukes" myth came about much later ... The cold, sad reality is that the only reason it was built to be resilient is because the available hardware was really, really flaky.

The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS. If you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't securable.

Re: So, sit and enjoy a beer.

"With a bit of imagination you could say this is a story about fermenting hops."

That'd take quite the imagination indeed ... not a lot of fermentables in hops.

Re: Which means a bad actor could TAKE DOWN THE FREAKING INTERNET

Well, yes.

To be perfectly honest, perhaps not "take down the entire Internet", but it would be fairly easy to balkanize it for awhile.

Some say this has already happened, especially to the WWW.

I was online and doing work in that timeframe. I didn't notice anything amiss.

I was not using that new-fangled WWW-thingy. Do with that what you will.

" ... Large cloud providers have to manage a vast degree of complexity and moving parts, significantly increasing the risk of an outage."

To say nothing of the vastly increased size and scope of potential attack vectors.

Clouds are snake-oil.

CISA and friends raise alarm on critical flaws in industrial equipment, infrastructure

Many decades ago, actually. Try connecting to the gear that monitors The Beam at SLAC, for example. Or the controls for the Stanford Dish. Or San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy water supply. Or rather, don't bother. You can't. Grad students wanted to hook 'em up to the 'net back in the late '70s or early '80s; the sane among us put the kibosh on their plans.

Commercial interests of today, however, are truly insane. We tugged on their capes, and were shrugged off. We tapped 'em on the shoulder & were elbowed away. We tugged on their shirts, and were thrust aside. Some even kissed their boots, and were trodden upon. Our message was always the same: "Please, PLEASE, **PLEASE!!** don't connect SCADA kit to publicly available networking systems!"

But did they listen? No. They did not. The idiots.

On the bright side, those of us with a clue are making a pretty penny in our retirement, cleaning up the resulting mess :-)

_{Yes, I know, I've posted this or similar before. It's still accurate.}

Re: Hmm

"They don't require air gapping, just no routing or NATting directly between the two networks. "

Out of curiosity, who are the networking rookies making these hair-brained decisions? I'd like to avoid them, if at all possible.

Re: Hmm

"A serial connection isn't technically a network connection..."

Excuse me? A serial connection is very definitely a network connection. So is everything than can be loosely grouped together under the mantle of "sneaker net".

HCL to end all support for old versions of Notes and Domino in 2024

What took 'em?

I ended all support for Lotus products in late '94. Haven't missed it a bit.