Posts by This is my handle

US convicts ex-Philips engineer for exposing X-ray secrets to competitor

It seems they saw right thru this X-Ray Engineer's defense!

I'll grab my coat on the way out...

Welsh Doxbin admin jailed for egging on swatters from behind a screen

No, please don't extradite him to the US! We'd only elect him POTUS.

GitHub nukes 70+ Microsoft repos, breaks CI/CD pipelines, following suspected worm infections

Re: Ugh

As a young man (still living with Mom & Dad in fact) I came home after my 2nd shift job. Mom had left some spaghetti on the stove. My cousin was visiting, with an appetite, and had been told I got first crack at the leftovers. I didn't know this, but scooped the entirety of what the family hadn't eaten on to my plate after heating it up. "That looks good!", my cousin said. "But doesn't spaghetti remind you of bleached worms!?" He got the leftovers, I made a snack of fruit & yoghurt or something. Decades later, as an inveterate composter, I look rather fondly upon vermiculture: which does, not coincidentally share a Latin root with vermicelli, LOL.

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

I wonder if they considered the possibility ....

.... that folks with dementia simply forget to drink their coffee?

Oracle unveils Project Detroit for faster Java interop with JavaScript and Python

'not entirely sure what problems this solves

I was using this about 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) and of course there has long been a JPython or Jython or what have you. Very flaky, but do we have any indication this will be less so?

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

My problem with that age check...

.... is I inevitably end up timing "ifconfig -a" into the CMD app on my Windows box; then "ipconfig /a" on Linux.

Memory: the 2nd thing to go...

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

More a commuter story than at-the-office but ...

My commuter train had just past the last "downtown" station where it was really picking up speed. It was a Friday, I think, and after rush hour, so express trains were done for the day and this one was going to stop anytime it saw a station. By this point though, it was headed south to University of Chicago at about 100 kph. A lady walked into the car, who was obviously under the influence of ... something. She looked around and for some reason was particularly focused on the upper level. I was on one side trying to mind my own business, and a couple of guys were sitting across from me. "Is this train going to Chicago?" she asked, speech slurred. "No, not this one. *That* car is going to Chicago," said one of the guys on the E. side of the train, pointing to the car she had just exited. "Oh, OK. Thanks." It was funny but I was worried about her safety. Before I could flag down a conductor the train made an unscheduled stop and I saw one walking her off the train and giving her instructions on how to get the Northbound back to Chicago.

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Au contraire...

... Having for worked for "Proprietary Trading Firms" in the past, ... there are actually are financial companies that don't have clients. Fun fact!

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

To this day I don't know why he apologized for the painting!

The boss in question has moved on, so I may never know. He is Israeli, so I thought there might be some hyper-zionist backstory or something but no, as you say: just a painting about man's hubris based on Abrahamic mythology. I couldn't figure it out either.

Samsung acquires Xealth to merge hospital records with data from wearables

Not sure if it's related but they just deleted my data today, or claimed to

I got an email saying my cloud data was deleted. That's it. No reason, no specificity around what the data might have been.

I thought it might be a phishing attack but there was no call to action, and the email header seemed legit.

Funny thing is other than a couple of Android phones I used years ago, I don't own a Samsung device that

would conceivably collect data and ship it to the internet, AFAIK.

I wonder if this was somehow in preparation for the acquisition.

Odd.

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

Re: Why Johnny Can't Code

Thanks for the article. I was unfamiliar with the article or it's author so thanks for both. I read it and I think the author is on the verge of suffering an overdose of nostalgia. I remember BASIC. I had to write some in Uni and even got paid to write some on the side: Can't say I ever liked it. C (which is what I ended up re-writing my got-paid-for-this BASIC code in a year later when I couldn't make any sense of it) provides at least as low-level view into "how the machine thinks" as C-64 BASIC, without having to use BASIC as the "shell" to interface with your O/S (something it's even worse for than application programming IMHO). The author himself admits that are many variants of BASIC he could download then, (and even now) if he really thought BASIC was the cat's meow, but that they were all too high-level. Really? He admits that his son was learning C++ but doesn't really say why that didn't accomplish the same purpose. Finally, he mentions some of the languages designed specifically to teach kids to code (I think he used Logo as an example but there was also Turtle Graphics and I think Scratch was already a thing...) but that they were too high level for his purposes: that point I concede. I totally agree with the underlying premise: someone who thinks the way to sort data is to use COBOL's "SORT" verb, or SQL's "ORDER BY" is missing a lot, but I have to admit that it's been a pretty long time since I had to write my own sort routines from scratch (it was in Perl as I recall -- that's how long ago!), but don't his specific examples don't resonate with me (personally) at all.

Re: The AI coding fallacy

Aye there's the rub. "Natural Language" is quite vague, and coding is annoyingly specific? I've not yet done much with CoPilot, etc. yet but I imagine you'd get all sorts of "What do you mean by 'it'?" kinds of errors, no?

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

Anecdotally at least, it seems not to work.

Amusing, but as my 5 year old grand-niece responded when I suggested that the card game I was playing with her great-grandmother was only for people who could follow instructions responded: "Not helpful." I've been threatening (or at least insulting) Gemini since it first replaced "OK Google" or whatever the old thing was on my Android devices, to no avail. It's gotten so bad I've gone back to Siri.

As Oracle's AWS deal completes Big 3 triumvirate, questions remain over licensing

So, they're throwing in the towel on OCI?

Not the API, the Cloud Offering?

Salesforce now owns Own Company after $1.9B bargain hunt

Re: Anyone use salesforce?

It's one of those, "If you think this is bad, you should try the competition!" kinds of things. I admire their vision of CRM in the cloud; they were sort of the pioneers AFAIK, but it's been rough going. Once helped a friend move the customer base for his small firm from Act! to SalesForce. Within a year or so he paid me to move it back. Then there was the Lightning UI upgrade fiasco. Still: take a look at their competition and you'll get a new appreciation of SF.

IRS has loads of legacy IT, still has no firm plans to replace it

While working on an "Associate's Degree" (2 year post High-School program unique to the US AFAIK) in Information Systems (then called "Data Processing" -- this was the early 80's) at an independent computer store (remember those?) one of my co-workers, George was a district manager of Information Systems as the local (Baltimore, MD) district of the IRS. He was moonlighting at this minimum wage job to learn more about these new-fangled things called micro-computers. Rather than spend his Saturdays & evenings out in the burbs he offered me a job. I was reticent to work for the federal government, having heard all the horror stories, but this guy impressed me. He said I could work with the COBOL / mainframe stuff I had learned at school, or with the Unix super-micros he had brought in. Naturally I chose the latter. It was the opposite of everything I'd feared, ... George was forward looking, a servant leader, and had found ways to get stuff done despite the bureaucracy. When I decided (for personal reasons) to move to the West Coast he got me a transfer to the LA district. It was the epitome of all the horror stories you've heard about government work. Maybe it was just the much larger city / district, or the difference between East Coast work ethic and West Coast laid-back.... I still wasn't in the dreaded mainframe division but it sure felt like it. I guess the moral of the story is YMMV. I am sure George has long-since retired or was managed out as an over-achiever (gosh I hope not), but I wouldn't be surprised if they still have those mainframes running COBOL.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Re: Bad journalism

Well, you're half right: It rhymes with cut. It alliterates with slot.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: Whatever became of WordPerfect and WordStar

I forgot about MultiMate! I ran it on my Eagle MS-DOS luggable. Lovely machine, for the time. Apple-level styling, but with a usable keyboard (no mouse; they had barely been invented yet) and a color screen as I recall. I have to admit that I abandoned it for WordPerfect after a bit, due to the latter's WYSIWYG accuracy: What you typed, what you saw, what got printed all pretty much matched, which seemed a miracle at the time.

As has been hinted at but not explicitly mentioned (unless I missed it) ....

Wordstar served as a text editor as well as a word processor on CP/M. It was a far sight better word processor than the PerfectWriter that came with my 1st computer (Kaypro II running CP/M) unless (as one of my consulting clients was) you were publishing an academic book.

PW supported much larger documents (Virtual Memory was not a forte of CP/M and actual RAM maxed out at 64K) as well as endnotes / footnotes. Even indexing, as I recall. For most documents I'd write Wordstar was more than sufficient and quite snappy, thank you, once I upgraded to a Kaypro 10 with a hard drive, so the 5.25" diskette didn't spin constantly fetching something or other. Sure, WordPerfect was much more WYSIWYG and an all around a better word processor once MS/PC-DOS came around and we had 16 bits (well sort of; with 8-bit addressable RAM segments) and yes -- arguably better than Word is today, and certainly not any slower. It also had a mode which displayed the embedded formatting codes with the toggle of an F-key; something I still miss trying to figure out why Word wants to indent something, or won't let me do so, or whatever.

Yes, as a text editor it was no vi (which BTW I still use to this day when I don't need something language-aware like VS code or a Java IDE) but for CP/M it worked fine -- as long as you remembered to put it in plain text ("Document"?) mode [and yes, I too got irritated when I didn't...], but I don't think CP/M came with a full-screen editor so short of writing your own we used what we had.

When I did get to use vi BTW, finally getting to use "real computers" running Unix then later Linux, there was a more programmable alternative I was often encouraged to check out, in case I liked it better. I didn't. Anyway, it was a little thing called EMACS and funnily enough, the default key binding on the version I learnt was ... you guessed it: same as Wordstar. (Or maybe same as PW...; it's been awhile) ... Still I have always preferred vi. EMACS was open source though when very little else was so I've hacked on it a few times to allow users to edit text fields in a database, e.g. Ah, the good old days.

Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up

It's not full-screen, but it is large; the same size as the one that keeps popping up for MS Store whether you ask for it or not. This one can be made to away though, by disabling One Drive. As has been noted, it could come back next patch Tuesday though. Sigh.

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

Re: Important Safety Tip

I don't know where archive.today is located, but this seems inconsistent with the (slowly) growing number of legal jurisdictions that have "right to be forgotten" laws.

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Re: First encounter with SQL

We're about the same age I gather but I started in Unix super-micros & minis rather than the big iron, so I learned whatever the original query language was for Informix, (which like many other RDBMSs also a QBE interface like the one that shipped with Paradox, mentioned elsewhere) then Quel, and only then SQL. I didn't think SQL was particularly better or worse than the others but was awfully glad one of them developed into a standard, so I didn't have to learn a dozen other query languages with more or less equivalent capabilities.

I don't know that I had much formal training on SQL either but ironically, have taught it a number of times. Thanks for the memories...

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

This is why we can't have nice things. :-(

Microsoft dusts off ancient MS-DOS 4.0 code for release on GitHub

Re: I had a different experience of early dos and even 95 than most users.

I have fond memories of the Robert X. Cringely headline: "DOS 6, users 0".

Re: DOS

As I recall, SCCS filenames were not DOS friendly (back in the day: they did not conform to 8.3). RCS filenames weren't quite DOS conventional, but at least you could create them. Hello.c,v is an odd but legal filename in DOS and always has been, if I am not mistaken. s.Hello.c was not.

It's 2023 and Microsoft WordPad can be exploited to hijack vulnerable systems

Or the <Del> key.

Windows File Explorer gets nostalgic speed boost thanks to one weird bug

Re: File list - easy way to create?

Following.... I no longer have a WordPerfect that will install on Windows (since the 1st 64 bit version... 7?) but I use a CMD.EXE or bash redirect, depending on what I want. Obviously, "ls" and "find" give you more flexibility in formatting but often DIR will do the trick.

Get a $25 gift card if you help the US check whether these facial logins really work

Reminds me of password strength checkers

I had written a password generator and wanted to run the output thru a script that would objectively check the results for strength. Maybe some python, node, whatever. (I figured inspecting the source would help me up my own game on the password generation side as well.) All I found were websites, which at no charge, would tell me if my passwords were strong enough. Lots of them. The ones I did a View Source on were pretty opaque. P.T. Barnum was an optimist, I'm afraid.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Meh

What's old is new again

We were looking at tools (no ML mentioned -- this was during the AI winter) to convert COBOL to Java back in the oughts. HP3000 & what would now be called a Z-class mainframe were the source systems, and clusters of blades running Linux as the target enviroment. A colleague and I even wrote some code to generate Swing User Interfaces from 3270 screen definitions as a POC. I wasn't there long enough to see it into production fruition but it was kind of fun.

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

Sour grapes, er uh rice

The FinTech firm with which I had been happily engaged for a good 7 years was acquired by a bigger fish whose name (and it's founder) rhymes which Gnarles Schnob. Small fish had data centers in Dallas, Texas (long before TX discovered winter these last couple of years) & Jersey City, NJ (don't ask). Big fish had most of it's eggs in a basket in Phoenix, AZ and also Dallas. I could never figure out the Phoenix decision for exactly the reasons mentioned here.

Of course, we also grow rice (which basically grows in puddles, or "paddies") in drought stricken California, such are the distortions of an economy which totally devalues and disregards the natural environment.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Spot on!

"OEM" :-)

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

I'd take it one step further: How many coders built their first webpages & services on apache *because* it has a cool name, that may or may not honor a great native people. It's certainly a sexier name than NGINX. Some will claim to ignore such shallow visceral impressions and rely strictly on features. Most of those folks would be in denial at best or lying at worst. Better a web server and a great supporting org that's grown to many other OSS projects than a helicopter warship, no? My $0.02. </rant>

The CES tat bazaar: Bike desks, AI-powered bird feeders, and the smelloverse

Re: Smellovision

I still have a scratch & sniff card autographed by Mr. Waters himself from the Baltimore premiere. 'pity it never took off.

Save the whales – with, uh, artificial intelligence?

Sold! At saving the whales...

.... but missing the other parts of the trifecta? How does this help with air pollution? Climate Change?

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

If I could get a display that did that....

... I'd get a few large ones and bring up beautiful and interesting images on them which would persist when I unplugged my laptop. This would replace wall-art. Yes, I know there's e-paper but until recently was not colorful or sufficiently hi-res.

Re: Have you tried switching it off and on again?

I seem to recall having this problem with OS/2. Windows at the time got a pretty clean slate when you restarted (or as often as not in those days it restarted itself) but OS/2 seemed to come back in the same story state it was in when you rebooted it -- replete with cached keystrokes & mouse clicks you feverishly created trying to get it to respond.

US Space Force deploys robot dogs at Cape Canaveral base

It's about time

I've been waiting for them to move "Snow Crash" to the non-fiction section of the library.

Midwest universities unite to support US chip industry revival

Great idea and long overdue...

... but as an Illinoisan all I can think to say is, "What are we, chopped liver?"

Software engineer jailed for 2 years after using RATs and crypters to steal underage victims' intimate pics

Reminded of the scene ...

... from "And Justice For All" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078718/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) where a character throws himself on the mercy of the court (which has repeatedly held him in contempt) for his profane outbursts. "But your honor -- I'm a diabetic." "I fail to see what that has to do with it!" "That's because you're a douchebag!" "CONTEMPT!", as the gavel is pounded.

PS: I'm quoting from memory, which may have introduced some inaccuracies since 1979.

You loved running JavaScript in your web browser. Now, get ready for Python scripting

Not to sound like a sore loser but ...

... now the "we actually *do* care about whitespace" crowd can finally answer seriously the question I've been asking for about a dozen years: What can Python do that Perl can't do better?

What's the top programming language? It's not JavaScript but Python, says IEEE survey

An ex-coworker once riffed on O'Reilly ...

.... and left a notebook on his desk. Using a dark "sharpie" he wrote on the cover: "Javascript: The Good Stuff". He left the rest of it blank.

LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

Honestly, other than more rows in an Excel spreadsheet, it would be really difficult for me to name an "improvement" to any of the Office Suite products since 1997. Not that I've been able to use them for a while (had to abandon those old 32-bit Windows apps after ... XP?) so maybe it's just nostalgia, but they pretty much lost me when they introduced "the ribbon" (2003?).

Bug at payments processor WorldPay swipes £2k+ per ride ticket from Brighton Pier revellers

I finally get ...

... why the Fab Four was always crowing about how she'd gotten a ticket to ride... apparently that's quite the status symbol on their side of the puddle!

Hungover Brits declare full English breakfast the solution to all their ills

Re: Full English Whinge

In fact, I was just looking for the link to a radio snippet about the hominid adaptation that allows us to metabolize (yes "Z" or "Zed" -- I'm a Yank) alcohol, allowing hunter gatherers to digest fruits & berries past their prime. Instead I found an equally interesting snippet that explains why many of my E. Asian friends get flushed when they try to keep up: https://www.livescience.com/61845-evolution-may-decrease-alcohol-tolerance.html.

Mullet over: Aussie boys' school tells kids 'business in the front, party in the back' hairstyle is 'not acceptable'

Strength in diversity

This story reminded me of the Harley-Hampton twins (Devonte & Deante), talented young high-school (American-) football players. Word on the street was that they were offered a scholarship to play for the local Catholic school rival to our public (state-run) school, where my kids went. They wanted Devonte to cut his dreads. The public school, OTOH, told the boys they'd take them, "as-is". Sold! Those boys took us to two state championships in their varsity years. They gave it their all. They left nothing on the field. I understand they went on to (so far) success in the NCAA (university level league). The Catholic school has since dropped to a lower division.

Amazon deploys AI cameras inside delivery vans, misspells 'surveillance' as 'safety' in reason why

Once the numbers are in...

... you'll find that in addition to an accentuated reliance on the likes of Amazon for goods you might normally just pop out to the local big box for, the CORONA virus has inexplicably ushered in a dramatic rise in the incidence of car-jacking, or "grand-burglary auto", the taking of a vehicle using the threat of those deadly weapons which are so ubiquitous in the US. I have to think that jacking an Amazon delivery would be a bonus for one of these thugs.

Salesforce to buy Slack for $28bn in cash, shares – and vows to make it the new face of Customer 360

worst piece of software except for all those others

Apologies to Winston Churchill. I used to hate Salesforce, till I tried some of the alternatives... With #slack, it's rather the opposite. After years of complaining about chat systems (for 90% of all use-cases I still prefer email to getting a real-time interrupt that says "Joe is typing...." .... still typing ... ....; plus, I long ago drank David Allen's Getting-Things-Done "the fewer inboxes the better" kool-aid) I have come to hate #slack much less than the others.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Younger style

Not that there's any age-ism in our field but ... a few years back I read a post (likely on LI, but I can't be sure; memory's the 2nd thing to go you know) about how to write a resume that doesn't divulge your age. Lose the double-spaces was number 1. Along with omitting a snail-mail address and of course the date of your University graduation.

Those of us who have been doing this for awhile will also leave off the side job we had in school overclocking Apple II's, and other ancient history. If done correctly they won't distinguish yours from someone whose career began when your reverse cron CV ends.

By the time you show up in that suit & tie you haven't worn since your niece's 2nd wedding they will hopefully be invested enough in your skills to look beyond your attire and the grey beard.