Posts by WolfFan 1468 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2014
I found it to be an overpriced iPad pretending to be a convertible laptop. I couldn’t stand the keyboard. The fact that it ran Win 10 was good in some ways, terrible in others; notably, it had problems connecting to certain secure networks. As I needed it specifically to carry around and connect to various networks, this was a major problem. The fact that it cost more than an iPad but gave more trouble was the final straw. Fortunately it wasn’t actually mine, it was a work machine, and I traded it in for a Lenovo laptop. The Lenovo is also Win 10, but doesn’t have the connectivity issues. And has a much better keyboard. And a bigger display.
I am quite unlikely to try a Surface again. The company is dumping the Surface units, replacing them with Lenovos and iPad Pros.
I have gradually removed everything Oracle from all machines under my control. Java, Virtual Box, the lot.
I have received a little note from Oracle. I replied to the effect that as I no longer had any Oracle products on any machines, no, I wasn’t interested in anything to do with licensing. In particular I wasn’t interested in paying even one penny. And, yes, they could come and have a look to verify that I wasn’t using any Oracle products… at their expense. Any problems, any disruptions, anything at all, would be billed to them. I had Legal send the note, on actual paper, using the law firm’s letterhead. And signed by a senior partner. There is, after all, a reason why we have them on retainer.
I have not heard back. Perhaps I will.
Come, now… the holiday homes exist and can be used, it’s just that no one wants to go there. The carriers can get aircraft…. A little later. Okay, much later. BoJo’s lawyers were kept out of mischief. And the ferry company can get ships. Now, will MS Office ever be worth even one penny?
This should work well… or maybe not. I remember when Eudora implemented ‘peppers’ to show how hot your email was. Certain people (who, me? Surely not) went out of their way to get the max three peppers as often as possible. And, having used Eudora since 1993 I stopped using it. They wasted effort on peppers and ads instead of support for IMAP. I went to mail clients which supported IMAP. I was not alone.
It has been 40 years since I graduated, but I had quite a lot of work which was NOT exercises in retaining and regurgitating information. Among other things, I built a computer using breadboard and wirewrap tools. Everything went in by hand, and the instructions were deliberately vague... and misleading. And then I had to program the thing. In TI 9900 machine code, using the console. By the end of the semester, I had it talking to a keyboard and a monitor and had a primitive version of Trek (done in assembly) running. (I leaned on things a little so that the Klingons were tougher than on versions elsewhere.) I was working on a version where users could play as Klingon or Romulan ships, complete with cloaking devices, the better to thump arrogant Feddies. Aiming torpedoes was still a pain, though. If I had had the time I would have addressed that.
Ah, well, not even Bill Cosby at his most popular could sell TI 99 computers, so I never tried to see if it could be salable... or even if Paramount wouldn't have a fit if they ever found out about it.
Then there was Electromechanical Devices, involving surplus US Army Signal Corps transformers. Certain others didn't pay enough attention and discovered what a spark gap was, complete with vaporized copper leads. Despite the TA having told everyone the first day about the time someone caused an electrical fire. (I did well enough in that class that I got to be the TA my last year at uni. I much preferred it to my previous on-campus job, in the main dining hall. Even if some students were actively suicidal.)
Lots more.
Now, the Arts and Parties classes which I had to take in addition to actual engineering and science classes, _they_ were exercises in retaining and regurgitating data. And writing papers. Lots of papers. Most engineers could do most Arts classes without significant problems, but Arts students would have major problems with technical subjects. Which is one reason why I ended up with a BSEE and a BAHIST, in five years.
One wonders how they deal with substantial numbers of people from the Indian subcontinent. Just about all male Sikhs have ‘Singh’ in their names somewhere, usually at the end. About all female Sikhs have ‘Kaur’. A truly incredible number of assorted Hindis, Rajputs, and more are named ‘Patel’. (Patel means Farmer. There are a lot of farmers in rural India) Then there are the non-Sikh Singhs. (Singh means Lion. All male Sikhs, plus lots of Rajputs, are lions…) (Yes, Singapore means Lion City) And every Pathan is a ‘Khan’. All of them. (Or so I’m told, anyway) My high school (in Jamaica…) had three Singhs, one not Sikh, three Patels, and two Khans. (No Kaurs, it was an all-boy school. Yay British Empire!). I gotta wonder at how schools in, say, the Punjab, keep track.
And then there’s the Kims in Korea, about a quarter of the population. At one point the president of South Korea was a Kim, and absolutely no relation to the criminal gang running North Korea. Something like 60% of China uses variations on six family names…
The fine institution of higher education that I sometimes do adjunct instruction at uses first initial last name in the email… with numbers to differentiate between individuals who have common names. I know for certain that there have been at least 129 J Garcias because I one had a student whose email was jgarcia128@schoolname.edu. (It’s Deepest South Florida. Lots of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and a lot more….) You really don’t want to know how many jsmiths and jbrowns there are. And every third Kelly, Ryan, or other Irish name has FX for the first two names. Those who are Catholic will know why. No, just putting in middle names or initials won’t help. Hell, some of the Mexicans are FXs, too. A legacy of the Battalion de San Patricio, no doubt.
Seriously, anyone who uses a name as the primary key in a database deserves what he gets.
Is a lot smaller than SAP, but apparently we are far more secure.
1. All servers, NASes, etc., are inside locked racks. Yes, the racks aren’t anything special, and the locks are pretty flimsy, but it would be obvious if someone liberated a drive.
2. All racks are in locked rooms, using card and touchpad access. And with security cameras inside the rooms and outside, pointing at the doors. Only authorized people are allowed inside. And the cameras would spot some taking a drive.
3. Entrance, and exit, to the building are via security doors in a mantrap system, with lots of cameras.
4. The sysadmins would probably notice missing drives, not least when reviewing the backup logs.
5. The Morgue where we play with dead equipment is right next to the server rooms. And is locked and the door has security cameras.
6. Anyone who pulls any equipment from the server rooms has to sign for it. And sign it back in when done. We definitely do not allow drives to leave the building. Unless they are headed to Iron Mountain for storage or destruction.
7. As getting into the Morgue or the server rooms requires the key card, which is your ID card, you can't even access anything without it being clear whodunit.
8. Backup tapes are stored in fire-resistant cabinets in the Morgue until the guys from Iron Mountain show up to take them to secure storage. The cabinets are, of course, locked. (Yes, we still use tape. It works.)
There is no reason for a drive to be anywhere except the Morgue or a server room, or in transit between them. (Except for brand new drives arriving from outside, of course.) Any drive going out of service is reformatted seven times, if it still works, and destroyed by physically drilling holes through it. Really good recovery people might get some data from the drive, but it won't be easy. Destroyed drives are sent to Iron Mountain and run through their shredder. Now not even a really good recovery service is going to find much.
So how, exactly, did a major corporation manage to let drives get out into the wild, and not once but multiple times?
I used backup software which had a remove feature. I could, and did, have it look for specific files and types of files in specific folders and nuke them. Certain people insisted on playing Doom, Wolfenstein, and Marathon on my network, and _not telling me_. Say bye, boyz…
Now, those who were polite and at least asked first, they got their very own partition which was not visible to the backup app. As long as they didn’t abuse the system, I had no problem.
Parking lots of iTunes files on my servers would have been abusing the system. Those files would have lasted one day. Just one. Any complaints would have been met by my showing the abuser a copy of the system usage protocol, which they had allegedly read and signed.
My mother has been going to the same optometrist for nearly 30 years. All billing and payment is handled by an ancient DOS application running on an XP machine. He still has two spare machines sitting in a back room; periodically, someone (guess who) gets to take them out and test them to be sure that they still work. The system does not connect to the Internet. The system does not even know what a credit card is. (Seriously. You pay by check or cash or, in our case, by keeping the computer alive. And none of that pay by phone nonsense, either.)
The DOS app, and the XP machine, will be retired when the optometrist is. Dinosaurs live forever, so that ain’t happening soon.
I shall be investing in a few copies of the items in the article, so that I can revive a dead XP box if necessary. The optometrist has all the install disks (actual 5.25” floppies, backed up to 3.5”, and then, by me, to CD) and license keys and what not, in the back room next to the spares. You would not believe what a complete set of WinXP and Office 2003 floppies looks like. I didn’t even know that you could get Office 2003 on floppy… (Yes, the floppy drives, one each 5.25” and 3.5”, still work. The hard drive is a massive 100 MB, 3600 RPM Western Digital thing which I think is still running only due to magic pixie dust.)
Velveeta is not cheese. It is something called ‘cheese food’. Hint: both words have nothing to do with the abomination that is Velveeta. Velveeta is the real reason why a certain Orange-u-tan is the color he is, and even he has sufficient sense to only apply it externally, and to never, ever, ingest the stuff. Velveeta is evil. Velveeta should be banned by the Geneva Convention. Even Pony Boy Putin won’t use Velveeta offensively; he will threaten to have the troops eat some if they won’t attack.
I would expect to get a picture. And some video.
There are vast numbers of mouth-breathing Fox viewers out there; this does not alter the fact that if a ‘phenomenon’ landed on the White House lawn, the entire world who are not mouth-breathing Fox viewers would know about very quickly.
And it does not alter the fact that an interstellar capable craft would be naked eye visible in orbit. Even mouth-breathing Fox viewers could see it.
Video and stills can be examined for fakes; that’s how certain ‘phenomena’ were confirmed to be fake. And there would be physical evidence; the exhaust of the motor would leave traces. Unless it’s a reactionless drive, which causes more problems with physics than FTL, but hey, maybe they can build one. Proving it will be interesting.
I’m fairly sure that I would get _something_. People used to get alleged pix and video of ‘phenomena’ in the past. Very few people would have been carrying still cameras, even fewer would have had video cameras. Now almost everyone has a camera. There should be vast numbers of stills and video. There isn’t.
So… none of these people were carrying their cell phones, or the ‘phenomenon’ got out of sight before the phone could be deployed, eh?
I find it fascinating that, in an era where just about everyone has an excellent camera, capable of taking high resolution video as well as still images, so few pix/videos of ‘phenomena’ has been taken, and so many of said pix/videos appear to be fake.
This is over and above the simple question: Why The Fuck Are These Whatever They Are Coming Here?, and the related question: How The Fuck Are They Getting Here?
Hint: they ain’t coming from anywhere else in the Solar System. Venus is too hot, has an atmosphere totally incompatible with carbon-based life (sulphuric acid. High temps. High pressure.) to the extent that anything that could live there would die if it came here. Mercury has, effectively, no atmosphere, and is even hotter. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, and any life there is really good at hiding out. The gas giants are very cold, totally incompatible with oxygen-breathing life and have high gravity and lots of radiation. The asteroids are right out. This means that any visitors have to come from some other star system. Problem: Faster Than Light appears to be impossible. And if, by some miracle, it can be done, would require lots of power. This would mean Very Large Ships. Slower Than Light would take years to decades to centuries, and require Even Bigger Ships. In either case such ships would be naked eye visible at low orbit. Possibly naked eye visible as far out as the Moon, depending. A STL ship using a reaction drive (a rocket or similar) would be naked eye visible anywhere inside the orbit of Mars!
So… anyone saying that we have had visitors needs to explain how said visitors weren’t detected on their way in by legions of amateurs with telescopes and even binoculars, much less by professionals with bigger telescopes and radar! And why the visitors bother, and why even one such visitor hasn’t just parked above a major city and got on the radio to announce that the planet is under new management. Just point the main motor down and light it for a few seconds, those outside the city will get the point, those inside the city will be too dead to argue. Or drop a rock or two. Rocks are cheap and plentiful, gravity is free, a nice rock will make a mess when it lands. An alien ship in orbit would _own_ the planet. Period.
Nah. Show me some data. Until then, it’s considerably easier to assume that anyone seeing ‘phenomena’ is mistaken or faking.
They had no hope if they didn’t get a quick victory. By 1864 even Jeff Davis knew it. He wasn’t getting the major European powers to come in on the Confederacy’s side; France was bogged down in Mexico (remember always, Cinco De Mayo isn’t Mexican Independence Day, it’s the day that they hammered the hell out of a French army) and while the upper classes in Britain leaned towards the Confederacy, the lower classes hated slavery with a sufficient passion that multiple textile mill workers refused to work with ‘slave cotton’, even if it meant that they themselves lost their jobs. Politically it was impossible for Britain to side with the Confederacy. And even if France could extract itself from Mexico, France declined to support the Confederacy by itself. Britain provided lots of help to the Confederacy, including arms and even ships, in some cases bending the law to so provide. CSS Alabama was built in Britain, then armed elsewhere, and ran wild, taking and sinking Federal civilian shipping until caught off France by USS Kearsarge. Bob Lee went north twice, lost at Antietam, lost at Gettysburg, lacked the strength to try again. Jeff Davis pinned his hopes on holding on, causing enough casualties, to affect the election of 1864 and have Lincoln lose, as it was clear to him, and Lee, that the Confederacy could not win on the battlefield. But then Farragut damned the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, and Sheridan left the Shenandoah so devastated that, and I quote, “A crow flying over would have to carry its own provisions” and Sherman made Georgia howl. McClellan, the Dem candidate, had built his whole campaign around getting peace and ending this unwinable war; with Federal victories everywhere, with alleged Rebel victories over Grant ending with Marse Bob retreating and Grant pursuing, suddenly the war doesn’t look unwinable. Lincoln won… and Grant kept on the pressure. And Marse Bob really wished he had some of the boys he threw away in Pennsylvania and Maryland .
The real force behind the Federal victory was the Navy. It was the blockade which blocked supplies. It was the amphibious assaults on various ports which sealed the blockade. When CSS Virginia attempted to break the blockade on 8 March 1862, and sank multiple Federal wooden steam frigates, but had to go home to reammunition and to fix the ram, damaged when sinking one Federal, it looked as though the blockade would be broken… but in events that storytellers could not have scripted, because no-one would have believed it, that night USS Monitor arrived from New York. And on the morning of 9 March, Monitor managed to not lose. The American republic was, for the second time in the same water, saved by a force which did not just lay down. (The first being Admiral Compte de Grasse, fending off the Royal Navy and dooming Cornwallis) For four hours, 49 men in a little ship with just two guns, held off Virginia. At the end of the battle, Virginia had 97 dents but no penetrations in her armor, but Monitor had lost one gun and had her captain blinded by shell fragments. But it was Virginia who retreated, never to fight again. And that was the last time that the Confederacy had a chance to raise the blockade. When the news of Monitor’s stand reached Britain, one major national daily newspaper opined that “Yesterday the Royal Navy had 146 ships of the first class. Today we have two, for only two are fit to stand in battle against the American ironclads “ And now you know an additional reason why Britain declined to side with the Rebs.
It was the blockade which caused the rampant inflation that destroyed the Confederate economy. It was the domination of the sea which allowed the Federal forces to roam at will. Bob Lee could do nothing about it. Every man killed after Monitor drove Virginia away died unnecessarily. The only way for Bob Lee to force a victory would have been to assault the Federal fortifications around Washington… and he lacked the manpower to do that, thanks to his losses at Antietam and Gettysburg. And he knew it. By the end, Jeff Davis was trying to get black slaves into uniform to thicken the Confederate lines, such was the desperation and lack of manpower. For some reason the slaves were reluctant to fight for slavery. Gee. I wonder why.
So I got roped into teaching American History 1, Settlement to Civil War, at the college, again. I’m in Florida. Florida was, and is, rabidly rebellious. There’s a reason why Governor DeSatan was elected.
So the Heap Big Paper is on the American Civil War. I spent a lot of time on the ACW. I ensure that it is clear that the Confederacy was doomed from the start; if they failed to knock the Federals out in a year to 18 months, they would lose. No ifs about it. Earlier on I had spoken about Winfield Scott, the man who won the Mexican war even though Mexico had more and better trained and equipped troops than the US. (They did. They also had Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Santa Anna thought that he was the Napoleon of the West. He was the McClellan of Mexico.) Winfield Scott created the plan dubbed ‘the Anaconda’ by his detractors at the start of the ACW. The name was adopted by those who made it work, the way that the Big Bang was first called that by the exceedingly atheist Fred Hoyle, to attack the Catholic priest who thought it up, and was then, to Hoyle’s dismay, adopted by its proponents. The Anaconda was simple: strangle the south. Cut off trade. Cut off supplies. Starve them out. The beauty of it was that the Army need merely not lose, and provide garrisons for seized seaports and such. The Navy would do the heavy lifting. The Army would have to seize enough of the major rivers, such as the Mississippi, to deny their use to the south, but did not have to, for example, take the southern capital. Just surround them and squeeze.
Marse Bob _did_ have to take the Federal capital if he wanted to win; thus his expeditions to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and disaster. If he just sat and waited, he would lose, and he knew it. The great land battles in the East were Marse Bob trying to kill the Anaconda before it killed him. As long as the Federal forces held together, the Anaconda would strangle the south. When Grant took Vicksburg and the next day Longstreet failed to hammer Meade, it was game over. In Lincoln’s words, “the Father of the Waters again flows unvexed to the sea”; the entire length of the Mississippi, plus the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Missouri, were in Federal hands. The Confederacy was split into two. And Lee had to retreat from Gettysburg, having lost far too many men for no gain. Marse Bob would never go north again, he couldn’t. Grant would come south to chase him. And the US Navy blockaded Confederate ports, and mounted assaults on them, and cut the south off from the world… except through Mexico. Except that Mexico had been invaded by France and their was a major war going on. And the Mexicans remembered who it was who had wanted all of Mexico, plus Central America down to Costa Rica, for slave plantations. The Anaconda strangled the South. Farragut took Mobile Bay; Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant vowed to fight on this line if it took all summer; Wilson rode from the Mississippi to the Atlantic; Sheridan burned down the Shenandoah. Marse Bob could do nothing.
Needless to say, True Sons of the South really don’t like hearing that Marse Bob killed a lot of people for nothing. They really don’t.
So I got a nice paper from a True Son of the South. A paper which I knew for certain he didn’t agree with. A paper containing a great many very familiar sequences, in several cases word-for-word familiar. I dug a old copy of my thesis out of my files, and lo! So much was identical. Including the references. It seems that m’man had been quite specific when setting the parameters for his LLM search, and there were only so many possible sources in the LLM training data. If he had been less specific, odds are that the LLM would not have created something so close to my own paper. M’man got a zero, and failed the class. He appealed. I gave a copy of his paper to the dean and then a copy of my paper. M’man got himself a road scholarship, as in hit the road, Jack, and don’t come back no more.
Go ahead, boyz’grrlz. Use that LLM. If I catch you, you will regret it.
It seems that being wide open for a decade blows right past T-Mob. Something that takes real talent.
I have devices on T-Mob, and a Toyota. Time to go change passwords. Again. And to think dark thoughts about what should be done to T-Mob and Toyota marketing and senior management. Something involving Komodo dragons would be a good start.
MSA has been asking me to enter a number to auth for months now. Every single time I log into certain services at certain sites I must dig out the phone and enter the auth number. Even if I have already logged into that site, but for a different service. Example: I do adjunct instruction for a local college. If I log into Canvas, the Learning Management System (don’t ask, you don’t want to know) I must use MSA. If I log into web-based email (OWA) I must use MSA. If I log into Workday, I must use MSA. Even if I am already logged into one or more of the services. It’s very annoying. Especially when Workday times out a few hours later, well before OWA or Canvas, and I have to log in again. Despite being already logged in. And despite having just spent hours in Workday. Urge to kill sets in.
That’s interesting. Most people hated Enrage with the fury of ten thousand suns. I spent actual real money on Eudora rather than use Enrage on my personal machines. Anyone still using Enrage must be on Office 2008 or earlier (2007 in Windows years). Not that Outlook in 2011 was any prize. Damn. I still have an eMac that will run Office 2008, but that’s about it. What hardware is m’man running?
Ahem. It’s possible that you have not seen “Full Metal Jacket”. And let me quote R. Lee Emery playing R. Lee Emery as a Drill Instructor: “This is my rifle, this is my gun, one is for fighting, one is for fun.” (At least 50% of Mr. Emery’s lines were ad-libbed; he was playing a Marine DI, a role he had played for decades for real. He was really good at being a DI.)
Unless you’re German. Hmm. Panzerkampfwagen. Panzerkampfwagenaberkanonne. A.k.a ‘Panzer’, or ‘tank’ to English speakers, and PAK, or anti-tank gun. A direct translation of panzerkampfwagen would be ‘Armored Battle Vehicle’. Note that ‘tank’ in this context is because the things were developed by the Royal Navy, under the cover name of ‘water carriers for Mesopotamia’,
Flak is similar: fliegeraberkanonne.
Germans apparently love to mash words together where others just get a new word. Unless they’re French, where they use half a dozen existing words. Because le Academie says so.
I literally have got Amber Alerts for Jacksonville and Orlando. I get Silver Alerts for Tampa. I’m in West Palm. There’s a problem if I get alerts for places hundreds of miles away. For those not in Florida, Jacksonville is about 280 miles away, and Tampa is 170 miles. It is extremely unlikely that the subject of one of those alerts will get near me. What it looks like is that the alert is blasted out to everyone in the state… which is exactly what happened in the current case. This problem needs to be addressed. There is no evidence of anyone even acknowledging that this is a problem. The current situation is just the latest example of massive incompetence.
I live in Deepest South Florida. I have two iPhones (one is the company phone, one is mine, and no, I do NOT put company stuff on my personal phone) and neither of them got the alert allegedly sent to everyone in Florida. Perhaps Governor DeSatan has heard of my opinion of him, and is taking action against me. Perhaps the Florida emergency management people are just… massively incompetent. Perhaps the local office declined to send the alert out, knowing that there are a lot of rednecks in the county with shotguns and short tempers who read don’t like being woke at any time, but particularly early on a workday morning. Perhaps some combination of the above.
There is also the possibility that I may have turned the damn alert nonsense off after one too many Amber Alerts about some child from Duvall County (that’s so far north that it might as well be Georgia) or Orange County (the land of the Mouse) involved in a custody dispute. The very strong possibility.
In any case, Ron DeSatan can bite me… or maybe not as the Mouse has kicked his teeth out. I never thought that I would say this, but go Mouse, go.
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