Posts by DarkwavePunk

Stratolaunch takes ready-to-fly hypersonic craft skyward, but still no launch

The Roc

The Roc is so batshit insane to see flying that I'm sure Burt Rutan has a smile on his face.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Microsoft "Active Desktop"

Argh! I worked for a small ISP back when that horrible web push content became all the rage. Given the Internet industry pricing for peering in Australia at the time the bills went wild for a bit. We pinned down the problem and stomped on it fairly quickly. Ashen-faced bean-counters was mildly amusing though.

Management of UK govt's £158b property estate held back by failed IT project

This is one of those things...

...that me and a bunch of mates could knock up in a boozy week-long bender on magic mushrooms (even ignoring the Pink Monkey Bird) for a few million quid.

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

If...

I can ssh into it and it's a good keyboard - "maybe"

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: System 7 - the horror, the horror.

I had high hopes for CDE as a platform back in the day. It may look "ugly" to some but it does the job. Hell, even OLVWM is functional...

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Re: Not really novel

Too true. I remember back in the early/mid-nineties a shark taking out pretty much the only direct (commercial) Internet cable to the US from Australia. Routing had to be done through SE Asia in a very convoluted manner. Watching BGP go batshit was mildly amusing at the ISP I worked for at the time.

Perl Steering Council lays out a backwards compatible future for Perl 7

Perl

Used Perl4 as an awk/sed substitute for silly nested/piped shell scripts. Worked okay and still looked horrible. Perl5 still fits that role as well. If version 7 doesn't break the horrible 1-line data munge crap - go for it. Stick with sed/awk/shell, if only to piss off the Ops team. </sysadmin>

Snowflake stock drops as some top customers cut usage

Well this will be fun...

I wonder what my higher-ups will think of this article when I send it to them. Or, should I just not? Sometimes ignorance, hiding under a blanket with a teddy bear and swigging neat vodka is the right option.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Even when the Web existed...

Back in the day when I first used the Internet at university I had the chance to use the early WWW. It was a rubbish experience (especially with the network connections in Australia then). I went back to Gopher, Archie, Veronica. When the web took off I still tended to use Lynx which is sadly no longer really possible for most sites these days. Glad to see there's various projects kicking back against bloat and prioritising information again - as it should be.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

Re: "standard pc?"

I have no idea what that <Ctrl>-<Left Cursor> etc thing means either. In most KSH derivatives beginning of line and end of line are <ctrl>-a or <ctrl>-e, or word at a time forward/backward <esc>-f or <esc-b>.

*edit (before I've even posted* - looks like the latter. Never knew. Then again I'm the type that uses <ctrl>-p instinctively instead of the up arrow.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Slimy Arse Sausages.

As I age it seems I spend more time answering questions than doing stuff in the IT sphere. I swear like a fucking trooper but not at people directly. Vent my anger over some fucking shitty wankstain system that some poor sod has to support not them. If something is an utter cockbadger pile of fartmunch swine shlongs I can say it and they can get a bit of confidence about their (muted) thoughts. Old and cocking foulmouthed rants can elevate the youth into a proper state of nihilistic ennui.

NASA taps commercial partners for near-Earth communications network

Kuiper

I find it amusing that Blue Origin hasn't even made it into orbit, the Ariane 6 isn't finished yet, and the BE-4 engine (Blue Origin again) isn't ready to go for the Vulcan Centaur. Maybe Kuiper will launch on rainbow farting unicorns.

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Re: "free speech"

I'd generally be careful there. "You're a right fucking knob and talking steaming piles of bollocks you utter pillock" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to many things. I understand where you're coming from. I'm not targeting you personally in this response. If only "Social Media" was as civilised as USENET was... (AFK Mind Bleach).

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Re: no VLANs ????

You'd be surprised. Early 2000s I had a short contract job at a financial institution that had 700+ NT4 desktops on a flat network alongside the servers. With stacked hubs no less. After pointing this out as a "bad idea" many times I was basically told "We know, shut up!". Not exactly sure what they wanted me to do and why I was hired.

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

"C - it always compiles." - I get your point although not entirely true. There is as always the question of "Should it do what you tell it to do, or what it thinks you want it to do?". I'm mostly in the former camp despite having trashed many many things in my life.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Gardening leave

Ah the Cambridge IT Mafia. Back in the day I swear nearly every IT company had at least a few people who had worked with each other at a previous company at some stage.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

I get your thinking and would normally just do the voodoo and leave. In this situation however it sound like a week of paid holiday for very little effort and free booze. Can't complain there.

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

Sodding bogshite.

I managed to get windows 10 to install on an ancient ExoPC demo unit I got from some Intel conference nearly a decade ago. It was meant to run Meego as the OS which dates it somewhat. Sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet taking off, and could probably be used as a very loud impromptu version of Air Hockey. It did fucking work though. Now my old-ish i7 laptop with 16G of RAM with a discrete graphics card can't even run Win 11. Not that I particularly want to anyway.

Apple's Mac Studio exposed: A spare storage slot and built-in RAM

Re: Bloody hell...

I'd completely forgotten about the whole SoC style of it with the shared memory etc. I stand corrected.

Bloody hell...

Given the price of the top end Studio Ultra I doubt we'll see "upgradable, and reasonably priced Mac Pro.". The Studio is weird. Being completely locked in (okay the SSD might be upgradable with a software tweak) to the configuration you bought seems stupid. Soldered RAM on a chassis that big is outright retarded. They get points for useful ports though I guess. It's a shame as I really like the Ultra CPU architecture on paper for thread heavy tasks. Oh well.

AMD unveils first CPU with 3D V-Cache tech, cheaper Ryzens

Apparently...

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D can't be overclocked at the moment I gather. Not that I care as it's not my thing. Don't know how much overclocking really boosts these days anyway. It's an interesting architecture and looking forward to see where it goes.

Congress earmarks cash for fusion energy development

Odd.

Given the benefits to humanity (if nuclear fusion actually fucking works as a viable energy source) I'm surprised at how little money is - in relative terms - assigned to it. Obviously it's not a problem you can just solve by spaffing cash at. It's nice to see so many different design concepts. I don't see that as a bad thing as nobody has got it right yet, but it does rather dilute the funding. Public/private is a good idea, although as with anything it can stray into the "pork" territory...

Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking

Re: Interesting

Having worked with very "digital marketing" heavy companies in the past, I've seen horrors no one should have to. Implemented so many atrocities that I'm practically implicit in crimes against the Internet. This kind of shit runs deep in the industry and mutates fast.

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

The joy...

Being in a pub and getting a panicked technical support call as their team had run out of ideas. Trying to visualise the screen they're on and the system involved from memory whilst slightly sloshed (I wasn't technically on call, honest). Too many times to count. As an aside - why do all these calls seem to start with "Sorry to bother you, but..."?

Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error

Ah "Abort"

The "kill -9" of the DOS world. Does that make "Retry" -HUP, and "Fail" -TERM, loosely speaking? Bugger knows what "Ignore" would be, but I don't like it. A fun and simpler time, sort of, with caveats...

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

I agree entirely. Business park outside of Amsterdam, business park somewhere in Copenhagen, where the fuck is Luxembourg?, that sort of thing. Rack up the bar tab and get them to invoice it as "dining", watch the "interesting" things on European TV, and hope you're still drunk for the journey home.

KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24: It's eccentric, just like many old-timers

I'm still not that sure

I kinda like some of the ideas. Feel like adding even more stuff to the "Exposé" style thing dilutes it actually. Having had to deal with OL(V)WM and CDE in the past and various other shitshows of so-called Desktop Environments they still fall flat. Obviously not the target audience for such things as FVWM would probably still be fine for my needs. Guess it comes down to choice which is nice. Remember - set your virtual desktops in a 3x3 grid, bind a function key and cursor keys to move between them, make sure the background is different on each VD. Or don't.

Hello Slackware, our old friend: Veteran Linux distribution releases version 15.0 at last

No Sendmail?!

You and your fancy modern Postfix! Back in my day we wrote sendmail.cf files by hand and sent email crafted in telnet sessions. If anyone complained we'd beat them around the head with the complete Sendmail reference manual. I can't even see a way to download Slackware via Kermit - what is wrong with the world?!

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Moar visibility

Yes, lots of terminals, each with different colour schemes so as to get a visual cue as to which system I'm on. I do still use GNU Screen a lot though (mainly because I can't be arsed learning tmux after all these years).

Taekwindow: Time to make your middle mouse button earn its keep

Re: 3 buttons?!

Mate, as a non native Windows user, that option is better than being stabbed in the face with a rusty fish fork. My many thanks.

Beer for you --->

3 buttons?!

Back before dinosaurs learnt to fly I was using Sun (maybe SGI) workstations with a 4 button mouse. Proper mouse - balls and all. I must admit getting used to 2 copy buffers in *nix style takes a while, but now I constantly bugger up cut'n'paste when I need to use Windows. Can't win.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

Re: Serial to VGA? All you need is an adapter!

Argh! I got hold of an old SGI Indy once. It had SCSI-2 but the only SCSI CD drive I could find in the IT pile of crap at work was a Centronics style with a converter. Installing IRIX from a 1x CD-ROM drive was rather painful.

EthereumMax, a Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather Jr sued over alleged 'pump and dump' cryptocurrency scam

I for one...

I make all my financial decisions based off what an ex-boxer and a mutant alien with a huge arse says.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Telcos and Bodge.

One of my mentors at a Telco in Oz used to write CGI scripts in shell and C. I expanded on this to use sed and awk (mainly because I knew it, but also because Perl 4 was utter shite). It stuck with me as an ethos. I'm so sorry to every company I've worked for in the last 25 years. Sort of. Maybe. Lot's of love - The Eternal Bodge.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

I hate these things...

1) I never completely understand the question (I'm a moron). 2) Even if I do vaguely glean the problem I'll try and solve it with some mutant hybrid of bash/sed/awk/bc (I'm a moron). Once tried that Project Euler thing. Got a little way through it mostly because there's a Unix util called "primes". Attempted to use Python but that added more misery and woe. They all seem to descend into "Your late uncle's half brother's sister married a fridge stolen from your great aunt. How many magnets do you need?". Have I mentioned I'm a moron?

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

Re: "I prefer not to think about it too much."

Yeah, at some point you've just got to throw your hands in the the air and go "Sod it. Done as much as we can.". Still, must be nice for the boffins to have almost real time comms with the kit briefly. May Eris, Goddess of Chaos smile upon the journey.

Genetically modified E coli bacteria produce ink for 3D printing programmable objects

I don't know...

...if it's just because I'm recently out of surgery and on a lot of medication, but the title of the story alone gives me the utter FEAR. The rest of the article doesn't help much either. Maybe should just go back to the tried and tested dried frog pills. Nurse?!

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should: Install Linux on NTFS – on the same partition as Windows

Head hurts.

I use WSL2 with Kali rolling distro (yes, I'm a criminal or terrorist or something - better than using PowerShell) but this is utter voodoo to me. I sort of get the pros, but the cons sound like an utter clusterfuck.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Draft copies..

I was once tasked with creating a networking diagram that was required for some Financial Services regulation. My draft copy had a label for one of our connections as "PISSNet WANK Link" as a joke. My final of course had "PSINet WAN Link", can you guess which one I sent?...

New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space

Uh

Don't mess with halogens. Put some dioxygen difluoride into the mix to spice things up - that'll get you bang for your buck.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Simpler times.

I remember back in the mid 90s in Australia registering a .au domain was so quaint. You just emailed or faxed some dude at a university in Victoria (Monash?) with the relevant details. Job done. How things have changed...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an Electron rocket descending to the ocean?

Re: Helicopter catching

I'd guess that there are good helicopter pilots and dead ones with a small overlap on the Venn diagram. I heard a tale from someone who saw a pilot put a teabag in in a mug from a helicopter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Probably just bollocks, but a nice story.

Remember that the Electron is rather small, will have lost all its fuel and be descending via parachute. Still don't think I'd want to be on that particular ride when they actually try it.

Good to see.

I like Rocket Lab and it's always good to see other players in the game. Mr Beck seems pretty passionate in the few interviews I seen. Watched the last failed launch live and was sad. Still, we all learn eh?

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

I almost want to...

...go back to CDE/Motif these days. That was an utter shitshow, but at least it was a consistent shower of shite. Maybe even GEM. Don't know, don't care, just work, be cohesive, and leave me the fuck alone.

Xiaomi has developed a mini heat pipe so your smartphone doesn't get too hot to handle

Tesla valves

Tesla valves are so very clever. There are many good videos on YT about them. I'm not entirely in the market for a phone that needs it to stop my genitals from catching fire, but the history and technology is groovy.

Imagination mulls adding DirectX to its GPU roadmap amid customer interest

To think...

...it was only the early 90s and rendering a refractive ball with multiple light sources on a chequerboard in 320x200 resolution using an Atari ST could take a day or more of work in PovRay. To think that real-time raytracing (even with some cheats) is possible blows my (albeit tiny) mind.

Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released

Long live the king.

X11 might be a bit of a mess as a protocol but I have fond memories of being able to use a web browser that my feeble hardware couldn't possibly have run at the time. Run off the mighty SunOS server at my university and projected to my screen at home in glorious 14.4 modem speeds I was truly enlightened.

Okay, all 1000 websites there were at the time, but still.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Why...

...did I get a CAPTCHA trying to read the El Reg Forums? Like I know what a fucking bus looks like. I've lived in a cave for over 1.5 years now.

Pi Zero looks neat though.

Saturday start for NASA's Lucy probe on its 12-year quest to map Jupiter's Trojan asteroids

Re: Near Jupiter?

Erm, Jupiter has has a bit of mass of its own.... Inverse square law and all that clever-clogs gravity whatsits.

Fun factoid

As mentioned in the article the Lucy mission was named after the famous fossil, but that in turn was named after the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. One of the imaging devices on the probe has a beam-splitter made from a large man-made diamond. Cute.