Posts by jake 26710 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Could see it this evening just East of the Golden Gate Bridge ... The inversion layer was lifted over Angel Island, you could see a "bump" in the fog over the island when flying overhead. (The sea fog was only a couple hundred feet thick near sunset.)
To be fair, Jon was discussing misconfigured servers spewing unintentionally, not intentional sending of junk email.
The first actual "spam" that I'm aware of was sent on ARPANET, mid 1978. If you're interested, search for "Gary Thuerk". I didn't get my copy of the email, alas (my bozo filter worked!), or I would copy & paste it here. Gary got yelled at, none of the rest of us ever tried anything as daft.
I remember a student at Stanford sending every email account on campus a "wanna buy my bike?" email back when I was stanford!sail!vax!jake (address changed to protect the guilty; I'm archived at DejaGoo under the real one) ... Probably 1982 or thereabouts. He got yelled at, loudly, and had computer privileges revoked for the rest of the year.
After that? Probably the first real spam was on Usenet in late 1993 or early 1994. (Religious crap, and a bot kibozing on the word "Turkey"). Followed, of course, by the infamous "Green Card Lottery" spam.
For modern email? Soon after Usenet ... I'm guessing late 1994 or early 1995.
"Let's just hope that your smart thermostat is smart enough to accommodate some fairly hefty firmware updates. In the future, it may need them."
My greenhouse's "smart thermostat" has been running for over thirty years. It maintains the temperature to within 2 degrees either way quite nicely. I haven't needed to update any code for at least thirty of those years. Why not? Because it works as intended. It's a thermostat, and just does thermostat stuff. Nothing needs updating. Perhaps a point for the IoT folks to ponder ...
In 1972, ELIZA (as "The Doctor", at BBN (tenex?) ) and PARRY (at SAIL, on WAITS) had a conversation at the first ICCC ... Well, they had a conversation that was followed over the ARPANET during the ICCC. It was immortalized in RFC 439.
More leftovers from SAIL here. Not much has changed in 45 years ...
For the record, my job title at the time was Floating Senior Member of the Technical Staff. I wandered from department to department, putting out fires. In this case, I was straightening out broken corporate computing culture in wholly owned subsidiaries of a Fortune 50, reporting directly to The Board. Part of my remit was to shake up Sr. Management at the subsidiaries ... They were dragging their feet over adhering to the new (to them) corporate mandate. When you're an F-50, you don't want unauthorized equipment anywhere near your network, but cowboys (like most of the above commentards, apparently) always think they know better. A high-level firing or two usually makes 'em realize that THEY don't own the network, the corporation does.
I've used the same methodology ever since, when necessary. Seems to pay the bills quite nicely now that I've struck out on my own.
As for interpersonal relations within the company ... back before I decided to become a contractor, I was the guy who started Homebrew clubs in several companies, and I was one of the people who helped introduce Cricket to Silly Con Valley ... I'm a happy go-lucky guy, for the most part. Just don't fuck with the equipment that I have been charged with safekeeping. You'll lose.
And no, I'm not a "BOFH". Do any of you lot even know what an Operator is? An operator is the flunky who swaps out tapes during late night backup runs. An operator keeps the admins in coffee and the printers in paper and ink. An operator counts supplies in the stock room. Most operators are interns these days. If you're a machinist, an operator deburs and degreases parts. Operators are rarely given jobs more important than remembering "one lump or two". The whole concept of an operator having admin access to corporate equipment is laughable.
A sysadmin in a company that is large enough to have at least 2 shifts finds an open share on the network, can't figure out who owns the box, nor where it is located, and so IGNORES THE FSCKING THING for three weeks? Some sysadmin.
I'd have immediately brought the place to its knees[0] until the box was located. No potential security headaches on my networks, thank you very much.
[0] And have. Three times. All three were C-level idiots plugging unauthorized portables into the corporate network. All were fired on the spot. It helped that I contributed to the corporate network security bylaws. Now ask me what I think of BYOD ...
How about "no weight at all"?
Remember, this is "the out of control State", California :-)
We're not laughing with you, Amber. We're laughing at your appalling ignorance.
Ignorant about the tech world, but maybe not so stupid overall ... a vacation in The Golden State at the beginning of August, at Her Majesty's expense ... Whats the weather in Blighty looking like this coming week? In Silly Con Valley, it's projected to be hovering around 85F (30C), low humidity and no clouds for the week (early morning fog near the coast, our natural air conditioning).
They are limp and pallid because they caught a disease from their housing. It's called "rising damp". It has always been a hazard of living in the British Isles, but now that they have moved from the coal heat that their Victorian buildings were designed for, and over to that new-fangled 'lectrics[0] that only heat small zones, it has become an epidemic. The only way to cure it is to raze vast quantities of aged stone row-houses and build more modern structures. Unfortunately, they can't. Because History.
[0] Hint to Yank electricians: Don't look up "ring mains" or you'll have nightmares for weeks!
Wouldn't YOU be fucking pissed off if a so-called "professional" tried to pass off junk as working code, and expected you to put YOUR name on it? Frankly, given some of the egregious errors I've seen on the KML, and the lengths that the owners of those errors go to justify their junk, I'd say Linus shows extreme restraint!
Out of curiosity (and I know I'm going to regret asking), where and how in the seven shades of hell did you come up with "8 inches of copper"? Do you have any idea what one square foot of copper, eight inches thick, would weigh? That's just about 373 pounds, or near enough 170 kilos. Can you point me at anyone lifting this kind of mass out of Earth's gravity well just for shielding?
Colo(u)r me confused ... What's wrong with Yaniger? I knew an Issac Yaniger at Stanford, and I know a James Yaniger today. Seems to me that a Yaniger was (is?) one of the Spiderman artists ... I've never heard any negative connotations related to the name.
It's not mocking. It's immortalizing.
I said "from Redmond", not "through Redmond". It may be semantics, but the devil is in the details.
As for Minerva, she must be 42, or thereabouts. I could be wrong, It's been awhile ... So no, objectively I guess I'm not sure.
... is or has been manufactured in our local galaxy, and given that the portion other than hydrogen was pretty much all manufactured in stars, and is pretty evenly distributed amongst the hydrogen, I'd say that ALL of the matter in the Milky Way came from other galaxies. Lex parsimoniae[1] & all that.
[1] Occam's razor, for the illiterate amongst all y'all.
I last saw this system at the Stanford University Bookstore on University Avenue (@ High Street), Palo Alto in 1992. I never heard it called "Russian". Strangely, I was purchasing Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog" for a Polish friend in London[0] ... I warned him that it was a waste of time and money, because the Internet was self-documenting.
[0] Why? Because it took about five working days for me to purchase it & get it to him in London. If he had gone through normal channels, it would have taken 5 weeks or more. This was normal for newly published computer & networking books back in the day ... Most were easily available in Silly Con Valley, but the rest of the world? Not so much.
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