Posts by bjr

Elderly? Disabled? You clearly need a .38" Palm Pistol

Lincoln was killed with a derringer

John Wilkes Booth used a derringer to kill Lincoln so anyone who says this can't kill is simply wrong. This thing is basically a derringer with modern ammunition.

Visitors no longer welcomed to Scotland's 'Penis Island'

Athol, MA

In Massachusetts we have a town named Athol. A former governor, Endicott Peabody was said to be so popular that they named four towns after him. Endicott, Peabody, Marblehead and Athol.

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Re: Windows only though

It can't effect Linux for several reasons, first it's looking for a Windows installation and it won't find one, second it's looking for an NTFS file system, it won't know what to do with EXT4, and finally windows binaries won't run on Linux except under WINE which they won't be using.

Gigabit Google? We're getting ready for 10 gigabits says Verizon

Re: But here's the kicker

Verizon has no caps. I have 150Mbit FIOS from Verizon, it's very reliable. The big problem with Verizon is that they've lost interest in fibre, they haven't added a new town in several years. All of Verizon's efforts are going into mobile.

One more thing, this is for business not individuals. The fastest service that a home user could possibly want is 1G because that's the speed of a PC's Ethernet port, only servers have 10G ports and 10G switches are still extremely expensive.

Boffin: Will I soon be able to CLONE a WOOLLY MAMMOTH? YES. Should I? Hell NO

Re: Anyone for lunch?

They must have been delicious, that's why mammoths went extinct, they were hunted into extinction by pre-farming people. If they had managed to hang on for another 3000 years they might have been OK. The Asian elephant is a domestic animal and they are doing just fine.

Getting eaten by people is by far the best evolutionary strategy for a species even if it sucks for the individual members of that species. There are probably 51billion lbs of chickens produced in the US alone each year (i.e about 10 billion birds), I'm sure that no wild species is anywhere close. The best strategy for individuals is to become pets. By far the best deal was made by cats, they must have had a really good lawyer. They agreed to sit on our laps occasionally at a time and place of their choosing, we get no say in the matter. In return we agreed to give them a house, as much as they want to eat, and a comprehensive health plan.

Cash-strapped Chicago slaps CLOUD TAX on Netflix, Spotify etc users

They will spend more on lawyers then they could ever hope to collect

This is insane. This is basically the same as a sales tax and the law is very clear on this, you can't collect a sales tax from a company unless they have a nexis your jurisdiction. Since none of the streaming companies are located in Chicago they can't collect a tax from them. The streaming companies will fight this all the way to the Supreme Court (where they will win), they have to because if they don't they will end up having to collect taxes for potentially 10's of thousands of cities, towns and states. The cost to Chicago in legal fees will be at least an order of magnitude more than they can ever hope to collect.

Couple sues estate agent who sold them her mum's snake-infested house

Re: US Home inspection..

They must of had a home inspection, you can't get a mortgage without one. The home inspector didn't notice the snakes because he wasn't looking for them.

Tesla's battery put in the shade by current and cheaper kit

Lead is cheap, Lithium isn't

There is a reason that UPSes mostly use old fashion lead acid batteries instead of lithium, lead is cheap, very very cheap. In fact lead is the very definition of a base metal. Lithium is favored in mobile applications because it's light, that matters to the phone in your pocket and it really matters in a car because the energy used to move a car is directly proportional to the mass of the car, for those of you who didn't take freshman physics the equation is

K = 1/2 * M * V^2, i.e.

Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * Mass * Velocity * Velocity.

So if you cut the weight of a moving vehicle by 50% you cut the energy used to get it to speed by 50%. However a battery pack that sits in your basement has a velocity of 0 so the weight doesn't matter as long as it doesn't exceed the load limit of the floor which in the case of a typical concrete basement floor is very very high. So the only factor that matters for a backup battery system is lifetime cost and that's an area where lead acid batteries are always going to beat lithium batteries because no metal is cheaper than lead, and the process for making a lead acid battery is dead simple. Also lead is really easy to recycle when it comes time to replace the batteries because it's melting point is so low as anyone who has ever soldered a wire or a pipe (before they banned lead solder) knows.

Jeez, AT&T. Billing a pensioner $24,000 for dialup is pretty low

Could be an old virus or it could be AOL's fault

Back in the days of dialup there certainly were virus's that called 900 numbers. Sometime around 2002 I found one on my sister's laptop. I solved the problem by wiping Windows off of her laptop and replacing it with Linux. It's entirely possible that there are still some of those viruses out there. There is another possibility which is that AOL eliminated his local number and their software automatically picked a long distance number. That wouldn't be a problem for anyone with a modern phone plan because the phone companies don't charge for long distance anymore on their phone/Internet/TV bundles. But anyone with AOL is unlikely to have a modern phone plan, they would still have a 1990s or earlier plan where you don't have long distance included and what's even worse the definition of long distance is anything outside of yoru town.

Vint Cerf: Everything we do will be ERASED! You can't even find last 2 times I said this

Re: Not really much of a problem

One century's garbage is another century's treasure. That's literally true, the thing that archaeologist's love most of all is garbage dumps and cesspits. Historians in the distant future will find Facebook fascinating. They will also love our primitive cat videos. Undoubtedly they will have some form of cat video which is as unimaginable to us as YouTube would have been to the Egyptians who built The Sphinx (the oldest known cat video).

Seagate's spinning rust most likely to crash, claims backup biz

Re: Seagate 3TB

You are misremembering. The Death Stars were IBM drives (now Hitachi) not Seagate. At the time (15 years ago) the Seagates were the reliable drives and the dogs were IBM and Maxtor (now part of Seagate). In the last five or ten years the Seagates have been junk, I've lost a half dozen and I only have 10 machines so that's an incredible failure rate. The other brands have been fine. I don't buy Seagates anymore. I'm really glad that these statistics are being published. This is a significant sample set so the numbers are very meaningful. It sounds like Seagate has gotten the message and started addressing their problems if the 4T drives are operating reliably. It's possible that they've just gotten lucky with the 4Ts, we'll have to see another years worth of reliability reports to see if they've really fixed the problem or not.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Re: Stop and think a bit, please...

A VM is forever. I'm also a Linux user and only run Windows as a VM. You can move the VM to different hardware and different versions of Linux without Windows knowing it's been moved. All you have to do is make sure that the new VM is identical to the old including MAC IDs.

As for increasing the size of the virtual disk, that's easy. I've done it for an XP VM and it worked fine. Create a larger virtual disk, then in a Linux VM mount both the old WIndows virutal disk and the new larger disk and use DD to copy the old disk to the new one. Use ntfsresize it resize the partition. You can also resize with gparted.

US Navy's LASER CANNON WARSHIP: USS Ponce sent to Gulf

Re: "Ponce"

This sounds like a case of two peoples separated by a common language. Ponce is just a name in the US, I've never heard it used as anything else. Ponce de Leon discovered Florida, that's the best know Ponce.

What's MISSING on Amazon Fire Phone... and why it WON'T set the world alight

Re: Hmmm

You're being really unfair to the Palm Pre. Palm OS was way ahead of anything else at the time, it's multitasking was better than today's version of Android let alone anything in 2009. The Pre came out a month before the first Android phone (it was supposed to come out 8 months before but Palm was chronically incapable of executing, if they had met their schedules the world might be different today). The Pre was a ground breaking product, the Amazon Phone is just a medocre phone at a high price (although in the US they are have a fire sale, $200 unlocked, bet they don't sell any even at that price).

Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized fusion reactor breakthrough boast

Just in time for a time machine

Doc Brown brought back a Mr Fusion home reactor from the year 2015 so this annoucement is just in time. However they need to boost the power to 1.21GW and reduce the size so that it can fit in the backseat of a Delorean, but maybe they can do that by the end of next year.

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

Have you tried a Virtual Machine

If the problem was software only then a virtual machine running on Linux is the obvious answer, because NETBEUI is involved you will have to try it to see if the performance is good enough (it probably will be). Because this is a business the choice of Linux distros is simple, You should use a Redhat Enterprise Linux clone like CentOS or Scientific Linux. RHEL is supported for a very long time, 11 years, and it's incredibly stable, it just doesn't break. If you want to clone the existing system you follow the same procedure that you would to create recovery files in case of a disk failure. Using something like Acronis, or any other XP backup tool, to create the recovery files. Then you need to create a fresh KVM virtual machine on your Linux box, there is a very simple GUI to do this with. You should set the MAC IDs on the virtual NICs to be the same as the MAC IDs on the system that you are cloning. After you created the VM you should attach the ISOs of your recovery disks as virtual CDROMs. Then boot the VM and follow exactly the same procedure that you would if you were restoring to a fresh hard drive in a real PC. Once you are done you can boot the VM and you will have a clone of the original machine. If you have an install CD for XP you could also just create a fresh XP virtual machine.

Once you have the VM you won't be tied to any particular piece of hardware, you can move a VM anywhere, it's just a file. As long as you make sure that the VM on the new machine is a clone of the original (same MAC IDs, same virtual graphics card), XP won't know that it's been moved. This will allow you to use the system forever even if the PC dies, you can always move it to a new PC. You also won't have to worry about the system becoming corrupted, as long as you keep backups of the VM file you can restore the system. If you keep a copy of the VM on the same PC then you can restore the system in about a minute, all you have to do is rename the backup copy to the primary VM's name and reboot the VM.

The underlying Linux box won;t be subject to viruses, it will be much more stable than any Windows system. Linux includes SAMBA so it can share directories with the Windows systems on the network, including the XP VM. If someone needs to access the Internet from that box they can do it from Linux so it won't be subject to any malware. I've been using WIndows VMs on Linux since 1999. I've never had a virus on my WIndows VMs, not even when I had a Win98 VM, because the only Internet access I do on the VMs is to a couple of trusted sites like Microsoft and Intuit. I use Linux to access the Internet and it's immune to the malware that's out there including the stuff on sites of a sleazy nature.

Friends don't do tech support for friends running Windows XP

Re: No

For someone who needs more than a Chromebook can provide but doesn't need things like video editors, a RHEL clone like CentOS is definitely a great choice. XP users clearly don't embrace change so an ultra stable distro like CentOS is the perfect choice. It doesn't break and it will be supported for a very long time, Redhat intends to support RHEL 6.x for another six or seven years. The user interface of the 6 series is Gnome 2 which is menu based so XP users won't be confused. If they got their copies of MS Office at the same time as they got XP then they are going to be on Office 2K, 2003 or 2007. The UI of OpenOffice is very similar to the classic versions of MS Office, certainly much much closer than the current UI on MS Office is.

Re: I've been helping friends (and businesses) upgrade from XP to ...

The obvious choice for an Ubuntu user who is unhappy with the direction that Ubuntu has taken is to go to Mint. Personally I'm a Redhat user, I use a combination of Fedora with Mate (thanks Mint people for creating the Mate project) and Redhat EL clones (primarily Scientific Linux and a little CentOS).

On the subject of moving WIndows users to Linux, I have experience with users on the opposite ends of the sophistication spectrum. About a dozen years ago I moved my sister from WIn98 to Fedora after I discovered that her laptop was a virtual pest house of viruses. She has 0 understanding of computers and only needs a browser and e-mail. I cofigured a basic system for her and she never knew the difference except the system never breaks. Currently I have her on Scientific Linux because it's unbreakable and she doesn't need any of the programs that are missing from RHEL (Redhat EL is aimed at enterprises so it doesn't try to be as full featured as it's sister Fedora). If I was doing it today I'd put her on a Chromebook because that would fully meet her needs and require even less support from me. At the other end of the spectrum is my girlfriend who is a software developer but who has always been a WIndows user never a *nix person. She had heavily customized her environment and she is a heavy Photoshop user and the Photoshop license is tied to the machine, and she really hates change. Every now and then I'd have to waste a bunch of my time repairing XP when something broke on it. The last straw was on Valentines day several years ago, we had plans to drive down to Cape Cod for the day, instead I spent the entire day removing a root kit from XP (which I finally did using a Fedora Live USB stick, the was unfixable from within Windows). Once I had the system back up I made an Acronis backup of the system and took it home and created a KVM virtual machine which was an exact clone of her system. As it turns out that was a very fortunate thing because her motherboard died a couple of weeks later. I replaced her motherboard, CPU and memory with an iCore5 and then put Fedora on it and then I put the XP VM on top of Fedora. After several years she is finally using a lot of native Linux apps but she still relies on a bunch of Windows programs so she has the XP VM running in a virtual desktop all of the time. The XP VM is frequently backed up so when it breaks it's always a simple matter of just overwriting the broken copy with a recent backup which takes a few minutes instead of all day. All of her licenses work just fine on the VM. Running an unpatched VM won't be particularly dangerous because it's much less vulnerable than a native system because it's never used for anything dangerous like web browsing, that's done on Linux, and because if something does happen you can fix it by overwriting the VM with a backup copy.

The bottom line is that if you have a friend with very simple computing needs the best solution is to have them buy a Chromebook or a Chromebox, they are barely more expensive than a Win8.1 license, and they will be easy to use and reliable. If you have someone who is strongly tied to XP for a good reason than a virtual machine on Linux is the best way to go. For someone in the middle just moving to Linux is a good solution. A Linux distro with a Mate desktop will be very familiar to an XP user. What's more Open/Libreoffice is much closer to and pre-2010 version of MS Office than the current version of MS Office is. The best Linux distro for a new user is whatever their LInux using friend uses. All Linux distros do mostly the same things so it's just a matter of having someone to lean on during the transition that's important.

Richard Stallman decides Emacs should go WYSIWYG

Re: XEmacs?

XEmacs isn't a WYSIWYG editor it's just a better Emacs. I use it constantly, it's a great editor but it's for text files not documents.

City of Munich throws Ubuntu lifeline to Windows XP holdouts

Why don't they offer free beer to their Muslim citizens?

Didn't it occur to them that anyone who is still running XP is either extremely adverse to change of any sort or lacks the necessary skills to do an upgrade of any sort let alone to a different operating system?. Anyone who has the necessary skills and the desire to do so can easily install any of the major distros, all they have to do is download an ISO and install it. If you can't make an ISO then you certainly won't be able to install an new OS. frankly they would have a lot more takers offering free beer to their Muslim citizens.

ZTE Open: This dirt-cheap smartphone is a swing and a miss

Why do an OS at all?

If the goal of Mozilla is to preserve an open web by moving the world to HTML5 then that's what they should concentrate on. You don't need a dedicated OS for that, you need the development tools, an app store, and a really efficient HTML5 engine. Instead of doing yet another OS, which is doomed to failure, they should enhance Firefox to run apps that look like apps, not browser windows, create a really good open source HTML5 development env, and start an an app store for HTML5 apps. Firefox is already on every platform and it's widely used so they aren't starting from scratch, just extend it to provide a means of running the same apps on both desktop and Android environments.

First burger made of TEST-TUBE MEAT to be eaten on August 5

Soylent Green is People

Horrible idea

Man sues Apple for allowing him to become addicted to porn

People who file frivolous lawsuits should be severely disciplined

There need to be penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits. I think this guy should be bound, gagged and flogged with a riding crop.

Fedora back on track with Schrödinger's cat

First usable Fedora since 14

Fedora 19 is the first usable version of Fedora since Fedora 14. The Gnome3 disaster made versions 15-18 ususable, I've been using Scientific Linux 6.x as my workstation as well as my server OS in the interim, but in 19 MATE is fully integrated so you now have a functioning desktop again. The new installer is much less functional than the old installer but it does work, unfortunately it requires a lot more post install work. The principal problems are,

1) Almost no customization except for the selection of desktops (you can only install one). This isn't terrible, it just means that you have to use Yumex to finish your install later.

2) They changed the User number base from 500 to 1000 which makes it incompatible with every other Redhat system since Redhat started. On an isolated single boot box this isn't a problem but it's a disaster if you have a multiboot system or multiple systems running NFS. The workaround is to not create a user account on the initial boot, just create the root account and then create the users after the system is up.

3) You can't install GRUB in the root partition so you can't do chain loading of multiple OSes. Your choice is either no GRUB at all or to install GRUB2 into the MBR. Apparently this was a deliberate choice so I don't expect this to get fixed. I've been using Redhat since 1999 and it's always been easy to use it in a multiboot environment, now they've made it very difficult, what were they thinking?

Firm moves to trademark 'Python' name out from under the language

In a world where Apple can patent the rectangle anything is possible

This sounds insane, only the BBC could claim precedence for the name Python. However we live in a world where Apple managed to patent a rectangular tablet with rounded edges ignoring the prior art for the patent issued in 1500BCE to Moses, God, et. al, so anything is possible.

Dead Steve Jobs tried to KILL Ashton Kutcher from beyond the grave

You eat rat poison for two days and not get sick

I'm not recommending it but you could probably sprinkle D-Con on your Wheaties for two days and not end up in the hospital. Unless he's seriously diabetic there is no way an all fruit diet, or an all bacon grease diet for that matter, could harm him. The pinhead who did Supersize Me claimed that an all MacDonalds diet caused his liver to shutdown after a month. Bad diets take decades to harm you, no normal food can harm you in a few days or even in a few months. An extreme diet can cause a nutritional deficiency given enough time, a no fruit diet would cause scurvy and an all fruit diet would cause a protein deficiency, but those take many months.

Smarm-bot Siri seeks side-splitting script-writer for charm transplant

I just tried your question on Google Now, it told me to ask Siri. I'm not making that up, the first five things in it's list were are articles about Siri.

Asus pledges Android 4.2 update for Google Nexus 7

Re: My Nexus 7

That was 4.1.2 not 4.2. I'm guessing 4.2 will show up on the 13th when they ship the N10 and the upgraded N7.

Everything Everywhere's 4G: Why I'm sitting this one out

4G is great, just get a big battery

I have a Galaxy Nexus running on Verizon. 4G makes a huge difference in the user experience, browsing the web is joy, it was painful on my old 3G phone. The battery problem is trivially solved as long as you don't buy a phone from an arrogant fruit flavored company that doesn't allow you remove the battery. The battery that the Galaxy Nexus came with was inadequate but there are lots of aftermarket batteries available that do the job. I have a 3800ma battery in my phone that cost me $20. The phone is not as svelte as it was with the 1850ma battery that it came with but I'm not as thin as I was either. The aftermarket batteries for the newer SIII are 4000ma so that's even better.

Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows

Technical question, why does FPS > 60 matter?

Would someone please explain what FPS means in the context of games. I thought FPS meant frames per second, the human eye is pretty happy with 24 frames per second (the standard movie frame rate), the television frame is 30 FPS and even 1080p is only 60. There is no way that the human brain can process 300 FPS so why bother? Do game companies mean something else when they talk about FPS?

Shuttleworth: Why Windows 8 made us ditch GPL Linux loader

On x86 systems the BIOS will allow you to disable secure boot so you will still be able to install distros without a signing key, so there is no need for a modified BIOS. On ARM systems there won't be a disable switch. However there is only one Microsoft tablet and dozens of Android tablets so it's really not an issue. If you want to put a standard Linux distro on a tablet just avoid the Surface, it's likely to be pretty feeble compared to Android tablets anyway.

Belfast promises free city-wide Wi-Fi in cash grab hope

Ministry of Fun?

Ministry of Fun? Is that the new name for the Ministry of Silly Walks?

BYOD sync 'n share

I run it in a VM

It does a great job of syncing files between by desktop systems and my Galaxy Nexus, that's all I need it for. GMAIL provides me with contact and calender syncing, Dropbox provides a trivial way to move files to and from the phone. I don't put anything in the Dropbox that I consider sensitive, I think it's a bad idea to trust a third party with sensitive data. I also don't know if I can trust the Dropbox client however I get around that by running Dropbox in a Scientific Linux 6.2 VM. I setup a basic SL6.2 VM and installed Dropbox (it's in the repositories for RHEL/SL6/CentOS6). I exported a Dropbox directory from one of my servers using NFS and mounted it in the VM. The VM has no access to the file systems on any of my systems, only to the NFS mounted directory, therefore even if Dropbox is compromised in someway there is no way for the Dropbox client to access anything important.

Groupon's pants 'Weight Loss HOTPANTS' ad banned

Trim Jeans Theater

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvz1-ThCHY

Shatner faces final frontier as Priceline.com spokesman

Nightmare at 20,000 feet

That was the second best Twilight Zone episode after To Serve Man. If they were smart they would use some variant of this in their last commercial, it would be much better than a bus accident.

Groupon offer burns cupcake baker’s profits

The people who are going to lose their shirts are the ones who bought the IPO

The laws of economics don't get suspended just because you've dressed up an old idea in new cloths. Groupon is just a coupon company, how can that be worth a $10B valuation?. The answer is that it isn't, Groupon's annual sales are less than $1B, expect their valuation to drop to 1X sales or less within the year.

Groupon can't sustain it's current model because it's based on businesses offering ridiculous discounts. Nobody can stay in business by losing a little bit on each sale and then making it up on volume. Coupons have been around forever and they have their natural level which is a 10% discount not 75%. Loss leaders have been around forever also but they work by discounting a cheap item to get you into a store to buy more expensive items, think milk in a supermarket. If they lose $1 on a gallon of milk but the average customer who comes in for the cheap milk buys a weeks worth of grocery's then they make money overall. The trouble with Groupon deals is that the loss leader is usually the only thing that people buy. When Groupon discounts drop to realistic levels their days of fast growth will be over.

Celebrating the 55th anniversary of the hard disk

Origin of the nickname Winchester

For those to young to remember the term "Winchester" was first applied to the IBM Model 3030 drive (3030 get it?) which was the first drive where the heads were in contact with the platters. All similar drives were called Winchesters in the 80s, the term fell out of favor as PCs became the dominant form of computer and term hard drive was used to distinguish them from floppy drives.