* Posts by jake

26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata

jake Silver badge

Re: Obama

"So what have the Onion ever done to upset you?"

He was expecting a lee^Hak and got satire. That kind of thing tends to play merry hell with conservative expectations. Thank gawd/ess for a free press.

edit: strike doesn't work all that well with a lower case e ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Down voted really? Meh.... Here comes the new boss.

All: Because he's GUMBY, dammit!!!

jake Silver badge

Re: Cambridge Anal. plugged once and for all? Maybe not

Is it just me who keeps reading it as "Emmerdale"? It has all the earmarks of a soap opera that just refuses to die ...

jake Silver badge

Re: "it was ignored"

Jeebus, John. You're really starting to flail. Why do you insist on embarrassing yourself in this way?

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: The title is no longer required.

:-)

Beers all 'round.

No top-ups, please, I'm a millennial: Lightweight yoof shunning booze like never before

jake Silver badge

"So the moron ritual of people cheering on and praising other people who do idiot things with alcohol is dying out? I hope so."

College kids will be college kids ... Part of the learning process.

I've been making alcohol commercially for quite awhile, beer for 20 years, wine for about 10, and with any luck we'll start selling small-batch calvados/applejack in a couple years. Over all that time, I've noticed that the more booze I make, the less time I have to drink any of it ... and the same holds true for most of my friends in the industry. As a result, I have come up with an observation:

Neophytes spend lots of money outside the house to get bombed.

Amateurs spend much less money bringing alcohol home to get bombed.

Experts make their own alcohol and drink at home on the cheap.

Professionals make alcohol for use by neophytes and amateurs.

jake Silver badge

Re: IT angle?

The IT angle is bootnotes.

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

jake Silver badge

Re: Flat Earth

That word "think", I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

jake Silver badge

Re: "No man is so ignorant as one whose livelihood depends on his ignorance"

We're working on it, John. But give us a break, it's only been a couple hundred years. How's that monarchy thing coming along?

jake Silver badge

Re: Matter / Anti-matter

Speaking as a registered American Voter, I can state quite safely that Trump has very, very rarely told me anything that I wanted to hear.

Speaking as a pseudo-normal human being, I categorically deny Gates has ever told me what I wanted ... at least not in any meaningful way.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: "“not a good use of my time”"

"lies often coming out"

You, sir, just won the Golden Pint of Understatement. Dancing rodents.

jake Silver badge

Gates never said "640K should be enough"[0] ... But Steve Jobs once said "128K should be more than enough for home users" (at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting, when introducing the Mac for the first time, a few weeks before it was unveiled for the general public.)

[0] The supposed "640K limit" was an IBM hardware limit, not a MS software limit. And it wasn't really 640K, it was more like 704K, if you knew what you were doing. I find it absolutely amazing that this piece of incorrect trivia is still being parroted as fact after all these years ...

North will remain North for now, say geo-magnetic boffins

jake Silver badge

Re: Wow

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, all y'all can see similar raised beaches from Pigeon Point to Año Nuevo, and indeed all along the San Mateo and Santa Cruz county coast. Try driving Hwy 1 from Pacifica to Monterey. Take your .sig other, and spend a night on the road. Worth it once in a while. Works as a day-trip, too, but I like to stop and smell the elephant seals.

I suspect this is what you call an "inconvenient truth". Or is that TRVTH?

jake Silver badge

Re: Just a coincidence

Soviet-bloc? Might want to review your history.

For some reason, I'm Balkan at making a joke about 8-bit computing.

jake Silver badge

Re: So what happens if...

Oh, pu-lease, really? How about a little dose of reality, Ledswinger? This "Merkin" has lived in the British Isles for roughly a fifth of his life, and has observed that overall you lot aren't exactly knowledgeable on matters as far away as Hull.

jake Silver badge

Re: "...what has a 34,000 year [old] cycle."

You had me until you included "honestly". That's a once in a geon event.

jake Silver badge

Re: I am SO looking forward to ...

Who is joking? I'm beginning to think I should cast my morals aside and start making a buck off of ignorance and mass hysteria.

Next year, I'm planning on selling gluten free, dairy free, non-GMO, unfiltered, organically grown xmas trees with no tree nuts, ground nuts or BPAs. I did a little quiet test marketing this last Marketing Season (December), and the rubes lapped 'em up at 10x the markup of regular dead evergreens ...

jake Silver badge

Re: North will remain North for now

I think that's what Kim is hoping for; he's out of raw materials.

jake Silver badge

Re: So what happens if...

I think you'll find that the Yosemite volcano has moved about 40 miles East, to Long Valley (see also the Wiki article). The Long Valley caldera is probably the biggest threat to humanity that nobody has ever heard of, with a threat potential of "Very High". Yellowstone is about 650mi NE of Yosemite, and has a "normal" alert level.

jake Silver badge

I am SO looking forward to ...

... selling coats (AC units) to people who think that the temperature where they live will somehow be greatly affected by a magnetic field reversal. Especially the kind of people who think that somehow Blighty will suddenly have the same climate as Perth and vice versa.

jake Silver badge

I wonder what the odds makers have to say on the subject.

Might be worth dropping a C note or ten in the hopes of making the descendants a little wealthier than they would be otherwise ... Normally I shy away from the likes of Lost Wages (I'll start gambling when they start gambling), but this kind of "investment" amuses me for some reason.

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

jake Silver badge

Re: Symantec refugee speaks

"maybe 5% of us cycle"

But 100% of you drink water. Shirley you're not one of those poor schmucks who think that water only comes in hermetically sealed plastic bottles?

NetHack to drop support for floppy disks, Amiga, 16-bit DOS and OS/2

jake Silver badge

Re: Hmm... that's an odd choice

stevie's not dead, it's just resting. I still run across it occasionally in the wild.

jake Silver badge

TECO?

That anything like EMACS Lisp?

jake Silver badge

Re: Hmm... that's an odd choice

Vim was a clone of the vi clone stevie as ported to the Amiga.

vi -> stevie -> Amiga stevie -> Vim

jake Silver badge

Start the kids on Wumpus.

Show 'em how to modify it to suit themselves. The more kids playing and trying to kill off each other, the better. Most find it to be great fun, once they learn the basic(s). The C version (part of the BSD games package) is a decent tool to get kids involved in more complex coding.

After this indoctrination, they will probably discover NetHack all by themselves. My Daughter, and most of my nieces & nephews did.

jake Silver badge

Re: Lamentable but understandable.

Strangely enough, this weekend I used punch cards (testing my IBM 1401 restoration), replaced an MFM drive (on an old Coherent system that runs a greenhouse ... due to be modernized. Eventually.), fired up a Betamax (pulled a wedding video off a long-lost tape for a friend), and drove a buggy (buckboard, actually). A stone axe, though, there you've got me. As penance, I'll split some kindling with one when I fire up the bread oven on Tuesday.

‘I broke The Pentagon’s secure messaging system – and won an award for it!’

jake Silver badge

It probably already has.

We just haven't noticed yet.

jake Silver badge

Re: Welcome once a

So that's why the late '70s hip hop group "Clan Emcee Woo" couldn't get any press ... the letters were hidden!

Windows 10 April 2018 Update lands today... ish

jake Silver badge

"Peer-to-peer patch distribution over the LAN"

Absolutely nothing could go wrong there! Great idea, Redmond!

Productivity knocks: I've got 99 Slacks, but my work's not done

jake Silver badge

Re: The value is all in how you use it

I agree with the rest of yours, however I question this simile:

"Why is "simple" a benefit? Perhaps tools ought to provide useful features, rather than aiming to be "simple". A Ford Model T is a lot simpler than a modern car."

I see the simplicity of my Model A and Model B to be very beneficial. Consider that both will still be traveling over the road long after the last Tesla Model S is rotting in a junkyard somewhere. A large part of the reason for that is the simplicity of design makes for easy maintenance & repair.

And no, they don't break down constantly. Their maintenance schedule is the same as the rest of my fleet. The Wife & I drove them to The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan from Sonoma California, and back (~5,000 round trip) with no issues other than a tune-up and oil change in Dearborn, which Ford provided. (They look bone-stock, but I'll cop to modern metallurgy in the drivetrain, and the electrical system similarly has modern updates.)

Newsworthy Brit bank TSB is looking for a head of infrastructure

jake Silver badge

Re: If their application process is anything to go by ...

The point of Linkedin? Simples ... Any applicant who references them, in any way, is not hired. I've actually had paper resumes/c.v.s cross my desk that included the phrase "See my Linkedin profile" with link. This is a relatively new addition to my filters for special filing in the shredder.

Other filters include bad spelling and grammar, incorrect CAPS and punctuation, h4x0r 5p34K, .txt shorthand, use of colo(u)red ink, ransom-note fonts, including pictures, logos & monograms, .DOC files attached to email, poor layout, and pretty much anything else that distracts from the facts.

Free hint: If you value your resume/c.v., 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!

jake Silver badge

Why are they looking for an IT bod?

It's clearly their corporate culture that's b0rken ... Until that is fixed, no amount of technology, no matter how well applied, will make any difference.

And no, I don't want the job. They are only a bank, they don't have enough money to pay me to fix the clusterfuck.

Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive

jake Silver badge

Re: Big red

I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me".

A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although a couple weeks ago, a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly.

jake Silver badge

Re: "How difficult can it be?"

"Stripping things down is the easy bit. The trick is whether you can re-assemble them and have them work afterwards."

Does diagnosing and replacing a thermostat on a CAT D3400 in the hold of a Monterey Clipper with no light except that from the open hatch while drifting past the Farallons count? (Sorry, no storm coming in ... Summer off-shore breeze).

jake Silver badge

Re: Overpaid and underskilled..

Unicornpiss, might want to investigate the phenomena widely known as "the Peter principle".

jake Silver badge

Re: try working in schools

"it actually worked after I thoroughly rinsed it out and let it dry for a week or so"

I miss my old Nokia 5185 ... Over 15+ years, it was stepped on by horses, gnawed on by sheep and puppies, run over by tractors, "cured" in the smokehouse overnight, dropped into toilets (three times), into a pot of boiling soup (twice) and into a bucket of used motor oil (once). When $TELCO forced me to retire it, it was still on its original battery, and didn't seem to function much different than the day it was new. I had to replaced the outer case and the antenna several times.

jake Silver badge

Re: Way Back...

"If there was a regulation colour for these sockets, or even if someone had the foresight to _label_ them a lot of angst would be saved."

The switched plug(s) is/are supposed to be mounted upside down. Easy to see in a 3-prong (grounded) socket, but a trifle harder to notice in a 2-prong polarized socket.

jake Silver badge

Re: Way Back...

"about 25 years ago (radio-operated phone system long before the days of mobiles)"

My DynaTAC is a couple months shy of its 35th birthday.

(No, I didn't purchase it new. The company I worked for did. About 8 of us were presented with one, and a couple spare batteries/chargers, and told that we were to stay connected 24/7 ... at which point we all said "more money, please". With threats of quitting en masse. The company finally agreed, and we were compensated the princely sum of $1.75 for each hour of "out of the office" on-call hours. Doesn't sound like a lot today, but in 1985 $11K/yr wasn't chump-change. Especially for essentially doing nothing. I was allowed to keep the thing when the company "retired" them a couple of years later.)

jake Silver badge

Loopy.

Back in the day I worked on a lot of T-carrier stuff. I can't tell you how many times an owner/client ranted about a shiny new (fractional) T1 link being down, how the equipment was shit, the field guys were incompetent, and pretty much everybody involved with the installation should be taken out behind the barn & horsewhipped. Only to become red-faced when I casually reached out and toggled a loopback switch, thus fixing the link. Seems bosses in general can't resist flipping switches ... and can't read blinkenlights.

Can't log into your TSB account? Well, it's your own fault for trying

jake Silver badge

Re: You bastard!

The passing of a mere six years makes you feel old? You must be very young ...

Turn that bachelor pad into a touch pad: Now you can paint buttons, sensors on your walls

jake Silver badge

Re: Nickel is cancerous

Yeahbut ... This paint is a water based urethane, with embedded nickle flakes (not powder or dust). It's UV resistant (hardly important indoors!), and not prone to flake, chip or spall. The carrier is an oxygen barrier, so oxidation isn't a problem. Standard solvents (including water) don't affect it once it has cured (not dried!). So after application, what's the mechanism for getting enough into the lungs or onto the skin to do damage?

Agree with your colophon. In fact, I suspect that's the ONLY thing it'll be used for.

jake Silver badge

Re: "airborne electromagnetic noise"

That would be ætherborne, Shirley.

Happy having Amazon tiptoe into your house? Why not the car, then? In-trunk delivery – what could go wrong?

jake Silver badge

Easy enough.

Put a remotely operated relay between the OnStar radio and its power supply (plenty of room to hide the relay in the OnStar box ... and only 6 T10 screws to remove in most cases). When the time comes to make the theft, kill the radio. Enable it again later, if you see reason to do so. I'd bet a plugged nickle that the additional relay/receiver would never be noticed by folks processing the crime scene ... and even if they did, so what? It's not like relays and handmade radio receivers are traceable.

Good news: AI could solve the pension crisis – by triggering a nuclear apocalypse by 2040

jake Silver badge

Re: The article is missing the point

Kim's hardly an important part of the mix. Like a teenager, he shot his wad as soon as he was able. Now he's out of raw materials and incapable of getting it up anymore (unlike the teenager ...). This, and only this, is why the loon is talking about peace ... he has no toys left to make his blustering sound dangerous.

jake Silver badge

Re: The Elite and Super-Rich are busy planning for it:

Mini bottles of booze won' be worth squat. Anybody who wants alcohol will be making it for themselves, as humans always have, .gov taxation and laws not withstanding.

Frankly, I rather suspect that salt will be the major commodity. It's the one necessity of life that I can't easily produce here post apocalypse, and I'm less than a day's walk from San Francisco Bay! Ever try to move enough ocean water to keep yourself in salt, with just horses for transportation? Try to remember that in this scenario, salt is a preservative for meat ...

jake Silver badge

Re: I wish they would stop promising us nuclear armageddon.

Replenish? You don't practice FIFO? How old are your emergency batteries?

As a side note, dried beans take less space than tinned beans. They can also be used to produce more beans, in a worst-case scenario.

Microsoft Lean's in: Slimmed-down Windows 10 OS option spotted

jake Silver badge

Re: The funny thing is that...

I wouldn't use cat as an example of bloat. It's still a pretty minimalistic bit of code after all these years, and only contains logical improvements/additions to what it was in the mythical days before Research Unix. Modern cat compiles and runs just fine on every un*x variant that I am aware of, with minimal or no changes to the source.

For bloat, see instead modern takes on the init process.

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm sorry Dave I can't do that

The actual answer is "it never was".

DON'T PANIC! America's net neutrality won't be ending today after all

jake Silver badge

Re: And the other 14% didn't understand the question

Take your political preaching elsewhere, John. I'm not a good target for religious fanatics.

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