Posts by jake

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

Testing code in situ before going live. Most of the live computers are at research facilities of one sort or another and are used to monitor/control/log other equipment. Old stuff to be sure, but it still does the job.

Why? Because I can, primarily.Restoring and running old computers is a form of meditation for me. But research, maintenance of old scientific systems (somebody's got to do it!) and a misguided sense of tradition are other reasons. It can also be quite lucrative.

Re: BOBSMEDS

"and the ability for a CRT to send you across the room"

There is a reason they call it a flyback transformer ...

Re: Your headline reminds me...

I was aghast on my first day of primary school in Blighty. One of my new classmates asked to borrow a rubber ... This Californian knew about prophylactics at the ripe old age of 9ish, but had never actually seen one, much less been in possession of one. Fortunately, the teacher had a few cross-pond clues and translated for me. I think she was more embarrassed than I was ...

Re: Your headline reminds me...

"Grow lights use a considerable amount of electricity."

Not necessarily. The ones I use in the nursery greenhouse use little more electricity than standard fluorescents.

"Be sure to have a good explanation for your electricity bill if you grow plants indoors."

One valid answer could be "I'm mining crypto currency". (Actually. in my case I have a couple of mainframes and a small cluster of vaxen running most of the time ... but they are making far more money than mining bitcoin ever could).

Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service to grow almost 1000 per cent in five years

Re: Please define "cloud" for me....

IOW, selling refrigerators to the Eskimo/Inuit.

Re: Please define "cloud" for me....

So basically, increasing the size and scope of potential attack vectors in pretty much every aspect of computing, and laughing in the face of basic security practices, then.

Doesn't sound like something I'd trust with my company's business.

After 15 years and $500m, the US Navy decides it doesn't need shipboard railguns after all

Re: It’s not 15 years @Cynic_999

The Honeywell AGT1500 happily slurps marine diesel.

I've seen gas turbines run on marine fuel oil (No. 6) and so-called "Navy Special" (No. 5). They will run on pretty much anything burnable that can be injected into them in a fine enough form. Even coaldust and sawdust, although bearing wear can be a bit of a problem.

Buyer of $28m Blue Origin space ticket has a scheduling conflict – so this teen will go instead

Re: only SOME of the 28 mill is going to charity?

Just days? There have been entire years for me ... Decades, in fact (the first two were particularly bad).

Re: Time to change the rules

As I said, Wally's an astronaut. Did the training, should have had the oportunity to go into space decades ago. The other three are just tourists ... not even that, really. What is the proper noun for a rider of amusement park rides?

The payload specialists & etc. who spend time in space are definitely astronauts, they've been through the training and spent enough time up there to do meaningful work. I would say the early test pilots in the astronaut programs are also included. But the three pure "look at me, I'm rich!" tourists? Not so much.

Who is angry? Just musing on the obvious need for the English Language to mutate a little bit once again.

Re: Time to change the rules

To be fair, Wally's an astronaut ... but on this trip, she's just a passenger on board what is in essence a Vomit Comet taken to it's illogical conclusion.

Perhaps we should change the "been into space" meaning from "poked nose above Kármán Line" to something more along the lines of "entered stable orbit requiring engine firing to return to Earth".

El Reg visits two shrines to computing history as the UK lifts coronavirus lockdown

That 'scope ...

... on top of the Elliot (last pic) is a bit of a jarring anachronism.

Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police

Re: rich landowners are still armed - not us plebs

Last time I was in England for several months, a good friend, upstanding British citizen, tax payer, PhD research chemist for a big international company, offered me the use of a 9mm Browning automatic for the duration of my stay. I declined ... and was vaguely uneasy staying at his house for that time, despite the fact that here in my office in the USA I have easy access to several dozen rifles, shotguns & handguns. The "climate" around guns is different in England; as a Yank you have to experience it to understand it fully. Mostly, it's fear of the unknown (as you can see from comments here on ElReg and other places).

But the fact is that the guns are there. Even where they are illegal. In fact, by making guns illegal you are making a new class of criminal ... people who own guns, but don't actually do anything illegal with them. Thus, non-outlaws become outlaws at the stroke of a lawmaker's pen. And you are STILL not addressing the REAL problem ... actual, as opposed to newly invented, criminals.

Microsoft solicits Clippy comeback – later reveals it had already decided to bring back the peppy paperclip

"not even any pornographic ones"

Unfortunately, you are incorrect ...

https://www.amazon.com/Conquered-Clippy-Erotic-Digital-Desires-ebook/dp/B00UJ01WBW

I doubt it.

"meaning Clippy is all-but-assured of returning to your desktop."

Your desktop, perhaps, but certainly not mine.

Life's too short to be intentionally dealing with Redmond's broken-by-designware.

Researchers warn of unpatched remote code execution flaws in Schneider Electric industrial gear

Re: air gap - Air Gap - AIR GAP

"because suppliers must access their equipments to get logs, to update or fix them."

Dial-back modems work a treat for this. I've been using pre-CXR Anderson-Jacobson dial-back modems since 1983ish. I didn't connect my (admittedly meager) SCADA shit to the Internet back then for the same reason I refuse to connect the somewhat larger collection to the Internet today: Because the Internet is inherently not secure.

Re: Headline:

It's not hate. It's apathy beyond "Will we make this quarter's sales goal?".

Re: Backward compatibility

The task is to place them on a completely separate network, with limited access. In other words, implement real security instead of the commercial crap in common use.

Re: Blank document

Pick up any book on Internetworking 101 For Management[0] from the 1980s. In diagrams, "The Internet" is often represented by a cloud shape, with no explanation as to what it was, or how it worked. It was just a magic thing that you dumped bits into at one end, and they came out the other end, untouched and unscathed.

Management STILL thinks that's what the Internet is.

[0]Real titles available upon request. Send an SASE to SAIL, c/o Stanford Uni ... Oh, wait.

_{Gee, I wonder where they got today's "cloud" meme from ...}

Re: air gap - Air Gap - AIR GAP

1) Rephrase that to "no externally accessible network".

2) Not Linux. BSD.

More than 20 years ago ... 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 pulled 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 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.}

Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much

Re: Too much choice?

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

Re: Too much choice?

Actually, there is only one Linux. That would be the kernel.

When you take that kernel and add the packages that you, personally, need/want, you have a distro. Ideally, all of us should have our own individualized distro ... unless you actually know a person who uses a computer EXACTLY the same way that you do, of course.

So no, there is not "too much choice" out there ... if anything, there is not enough.

At this stage of the game, we should be moving away from marching in lock-step, all using the exact same set of tools, and instead customizing systems to suit each and every user. (For example, MeDearOldMum has no need for the kernel source and most dev tools, so I don't install that stuff for her ... the rest of her system is similarly customized).

Sadly, that would be hard ... and people like the easy way out. So they just use what is given to them, without bothering to think about it. And so many/most are stuck with the systemd-cancer, for example. Including most down-stream distributions, which makes it look like there are too many distros, even though there are really only a few.

Re: Too much choice?

Add Slackware's pkgtools to the mix.

Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Re: Lots of fun!

Eww!

That's not funny, that's sick.

Re: "to ink" is not a verb

I ink lead type fairly often.

Re: Big credit

More likely Mr/s Cook was thinking about supper.

Re: Big credit

"And a GUI spreadsheet works better than a plain text one."

For the vast majority of spreadsheets, I completely disagree. Most have absolutely no need for all the meaningless glitter and overhead of a GUI.

Re: Big credit

An aging Aunt & Uncle of mine found it faster and easier to use Netware, MS-DOS 3.3 with WordStar, dBase III+ and Lotus on an airgapped 25 year old network than it was to use the latest offerings from Redmond. I finally converted them over to a Slackware based solution about six years ago[0] ... Their final year of using the legacy system brought them a tick over 1.5 million in sales, in 2015 dollars. Not too bad for a small mom&pop family business!

[0] It was becoming quite spendy to get parts ...

Re: The other alternative history...

"The Internet" (whatever that is) doesn't give a rat's ass what the wire is. We were running TCP/IP over Token Ring very early on in development, long(ish) before Gary's non-meeting with IBM.

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

Re: About that "guided flow"....

Instead of partaking in alphagoo's world takover bid, why not place those photos on a cheap&cheerful thumb drive and store it in a pocket? For important photos, put a second copy in your safety deposit box, and mail a third set to your Great Aunt in Duluth for safekeeping, and (for the folks working on being very paranoid) a fourth set to your Sister in Burgundy and a fifth to your Brother in Australia.

Re: Google - great at search...

They are not bad at marketing to other marketards who have drunk the Kool-Aid.

FTFY

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

It's not free. It makes you (more) beholden to alphagoo.

Instead, get a cheap thumb drive. Only logical, innit.

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

Well, when you consider that you can purchase 64GB of USB 3.0 for under 8 (eight) bucks, keep it under control in your pocket, and never need a network to access it, then your 15G that is held gawd/ess knows where, that you don't own or control, and which requires network access ... well, it looks positively pitiful and somewhat laughable in comparison, doesn't it?

Re: Legacy tech baggage is now no longer an issue!

Rights? What rights?

Have you not read the fine print? You have no rights in the Cloud. It's not your computer. (Not even provisionally, kinda, if you squint like your Cupertino and Redmond powered boxes.)

Shit at search, too. (Was: Google - great at search...)

I did a google search on my real name about four months ago. Eight of the top twenty hits were companies offering to sell me to myself, all at the lowest prices possible. One bragged about being the only outfit selling GENUINE US MADE jakes![0] WOW! I must get me one!

The other dozen hits were offering re-packaged publically available info to anyone interested in tracking me down, for a price. Page three, four and five were more of the same, at which point I gave up.

Curiously, none of them were professionally published papers which I wrote or participated in over the years, all of which are available online. In fact, near as I can tell none of it could actually be traced to me at all ... and my real name isn't exactly common.

I just repeated the search of four months ago. Same results.

Google search is useless. Absofuckinglutely useless.

[0] Strangely, they didn't tell me how much extra it was costing me to have me manufactured in the US, then shipped to China, and then shipped back to me here in the US ...

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

Contrary to popular belief, the customer is not always right.

Firing customers who are a more of a pain in the ass than they are worth is one of the truly great joys of being self employed.

About three times per year, or thereabouts, I quite literally use the phrase "you're fired" to a client of mine, or of the wife[0]. Frankly, I quite enjoy it. The look on their face when they realize I am dead serious is priceless.

It can work in BigBidnez, too ... All you have to do is make a business case for it ... show that the customer is costing more than they are paying. The costs can include employee downtime due to frustration, time to get back into the swing of things after dealing with said customer, time OTHER customers are on hold while dealing with said customer, etc.

[0] She's a softy, so I draw this detail by default.

Hopefully noting the irony of purchasing a T mocking the Cloud concept from cloud-based AliExpress --- Instead, perhaps ask your local Tshirt printer to knock you out a couple dozen shirts and flog the excess inventory to your friends on fleabay.

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

Re: PATA / IDE are still supported

The Slackware 14.x series has no listed EOL as I type ... Slack-stable (14.2) uses the 4.4.x SLTS[0] kernel series, which will be maintained until 2026 and possibly until 2036. If I know the Slackware maintainers & other volunteers, it'll still be maintained at least that long.

Running it in several places. Makes older hardware sing. Recommended. (I also recommend Slack 15.x for more modern hardware, now in 15.0 Beta & running kernel 5.12.16 ... it might be in Beta, but it's more stable than many other distros that I've tried.)

[0] "Super Long Term Support", also known as the Civil Infrastructure Platform. Somehow, I seriously doubt that kernel support for IDE drives will be going away any time soon.

Re: PATA / IDE are still supported

With a laptop that old (this one is ~17 years old) you hardly need a modern kernel. Any of the LTS kernels will work quite nicely, and will possibly be quicker than a more modern, "bloated" kernel. Obviously, if you compile your own kernels the modern one might not be all that bloated ... but then the LTS version will be slimmer still.

The fanbois who insist on using the most modern and up to date kernel on older hardware boggle my mind. Save some CPU cycles and HDD space and use the LTS code, knuckleheads ... That's what it's maintained for!

_{If you compile your own kernel you already know all this, so why are you still reading?}

Biden order calls for net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition – and right to repair your own damn phone

Re: Companies should also be required to open bootloaders

Horseshit.

The bootloader has no bearing whatsoever on the banking code. Nor does the OS. If it DOES, the bank is doing something very, very wrong in their code. Same for any other example you can come up with.

Re: "if you buy a product, you own it"

A Tesla isn't a car. It's haberdashery, an affectation of the well-off.

Re: "if you buy a product, you own it"

No, in America we're allowed to choose our own oil. For warranty work that oil has to meet certain standards ... but virtually all motor oils sold here meet those standards, so that's no problem.

So when and where are you taking your Mom for her first race? Most drag strips will happily allow your mom to run her minivan down the track ... usually Wednesday evenings for this kind of thing. She'll also probably be made welcome if somebody has rented the track for a private test & tune day ... they'll welcome the distraction, and probably go out of their way to help her improve her times.

Be careful ... I've seen people (moms included!) become addicted to it after one time out. Even in a slow vehicle.

Street racing is NOT illegal across the US. Plenty of cities and/or counties hold street races fairly regularly.

I think you are talking about the dumb-shits who illegally race on non-closed roads with other traffic using them. Those asshole give the legal racing community a bad name.

All kinds of racing. There are amateur racing classes for almost all forms of motorsports, with venues located all across the United States.

Re: Must be seen to be doing something

We're not suing to get money from the government. Get that thought out of your pointy little head.

What we're suing for is to be allowed to fix/repair/augment equipment as suits ourselves, the purchaser of the equipment, not as suits the manufacturers of that equipment. And for the right to choose a third party to make that repair if we like. And for the right to become that third party. And for the right to be a third party supplier of replacement parts. Etc.

This is about empowering the intelligent consumer, not making money for a few lawyers.

Re: Must be seen to be doing something

What it does is give us liittle guys the ability to sue said agencies for over-stepping their bounds. And trust me, the sue-balls are coming if they don't back off. Lots of money involved (in aggregate), and we're pretty pissed off.

"the FTC will be asked to "issue rules against anticompetitive restrictions on using independent repair shops or doing DIY repairs of your own devices and equipment."

Will the Biden Bunch reign in the EPA illegally putting a stop to small businesses building, selling and installing aftermarket parts on automobiles? To say nothing of the very same EPA claiming that it is illegal to convert a vehicle built for street use into a race vehicle, thus destroying the livelihoods of untold numbers of small Mom&Pop race shops across the USA?

Massive 3D catzilla gets crowds purring in busy Shinjuku district of Tokyo

Re: The Japanese…

... verbing weird since time immemorial.

"The whereabouts of a similar-sized litter tray have yet to be disclosed."

No need to disclose it ... the cat will find the nearest appropriately sized karesansui all by itself. They always do.