Posts by Grunchy 1102 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
“Perhaps your motherboard manufacturers included a TPM header on the board, in which case you can buy the TPM modules. Should you really want Windows 11...”
Hey did you guys hear there’s a nearly complete ISA bus in that TPM header? Some guys have been busy hackin’ away and managed to get old Sound Blaster audio cards working on a modern PC! Some think it might even be possible to get a floppy drive controller card working, too!
Well I switched over to Ubuntu but I still run “classic” windows 7 and 10 by installing the ghost spectre versions in Virt-Manager. They run with full video acceleration because my motherboard has a second full length PCI-e slot for a dedicated Video card, which is passed through to the virtual machine.
It’s a legacy setup but the nice part is that I can easily take snapshots, make full system backups, clone the system as many times I feel like. I isolate the VMs from the internet so they can’t be hacked or meddled with by Microsoft. Zero need for any anti-virus. I keep all working data in a special folder on the Linux host as a Samba share. I run legacy programs on Microsoft so it’s ok if nothing ever gets “updated” (meddled with). Those programs already work good enough.
It actually harkens back to “good old” days before Agile forced people to run shitty buggy defeatured beta copies and endure years of constant updates while trying to get something done. I have zero intention of buying anything from Microsoft Apple Google Sony ever again. If Microsoft buys Ubuntu, I’ll switch to another Debian implementation I reckon.
It’s an iPhone 12 and locked down pretty hard. Ostensibly it’s an email appliance, but really it’s a surveillance device (must be, because they terminated my contract but left me the surveillance device). My working theory: they think I might be dumb enough to carry it around and possibly bring it to a competitor’s facility? It’s still 100% activated. Maybe they are surveilling my kitchen cabinet. Mystery!
I lusted after the SX64 but it wouldn’t have fit my circumstance. I was working as a nighttime clerk at a self-serve gas station, which had a staff TV (and infrequent customers). I’d wait until after the Taxi re-run then I’d hookup my bread bin c64, 1541, and modem (just enough room for this stuff), and surf BBSs. Or play Dr. Creep, or Bungeling Bay, or Karateka, or Raid Over Moscow, or dozens of others…
The last 8-bit I owned was a C128 I miserably regretted: I couldn’t afford the 80-col monitor which meant I never left C64 mode. Plus the oversize case, the unused Z80, stuck at 1 MHz, the inferior 8581 audio, even the keypad wasn’t recognized in C64 mode!
My friends all moved to DOS and Amiga, all frightfully expensive, while I knuckled under to Engineering in University. Graduated May 1995, rode my Honda down to Key West Florida for holiday, then back home where I got what I always wanted: combination Sony CD player and PlayStation 1 game console for cheap! That tiny little box resoundingly kicked the ASS of every single thing that came before it.
(The very best DOOM version, ever — on PlayStation 1.)
Forget Apple too, for that matter.
I switched to Ubuntu a couple years ago and it was much easier than I expected. I might fire up Windows once a month now (maybe). There is a bit of a hiccough running Windows inside virt-manager with a dedicated GPU for full video acceleration, but once you sort it out it works just fine!
https://github.com/Andrew-Willms/GPU-Passthrough-On-Ubuntu-22.04.2-for-Beginners
For Windows I personally choose the “ghost spectre” defeatured versions (Win 7 and beyond).
For activation with Microsoft, it’s all taken care of, courtesy of massgrave.dev.
https://youtu.be/rDH0f59klWc
“4,242 x 1,977”
Yeah, because some people call “,” a decimal point whereas most everyone else recognizes “,” to be a space between digit triplets.
In my mind this is a straightforward input that a computer ought to handle. But since string parsing and interpretation are so particular there is hardly any language written that could interpret this request, most notably ForTran itself, which is guaranteed to barf if it doesn’t get * instead of x, and all “,” omitted.
(Gates’ BASIC always pissed me off too: every INPUT command always receives a text string from the operator, and if you pass some arbitrary text sequence through VAL() it will reliably interpret it to be 0. This is the dubious sequence, “INPUT A$:A=VAL(A$).” Whereas if you foolishly tried “INPUT A”, as a number directly, and the operator were to type in the same arbitrary text, stupid Gates’ BASIC will crash with “INPUT ERROR”!! This same baloney behaviour persists in almost every language to this day, and to make any of them work you have to do the same chicanery as Gates’ BASIC, or some other “error trap” scheme, which proves nothing ever improved much even after all these years!)
Maybe you meant, “Power Shell?”
(I actually don’t care what they’re doing to the Windows, I run “legacy” versions anyway. Once you run Virt-Manager, all other operating systems become just more programs you can run within Linux. Kind of like redefining all Imperial measurement systems in terms of S.I. — in one fell swoop the whole world is metric, whether they knew it or not!)
I was cruising through some Ukraine coverage on the YouTube when all of the sudden was an “announcement” of the new 2025 Chevelle being rolled out by GM, so naturally I clicked and it was nothing but a rendered 3D model and some very generic-sounding voice over, so then I did a search, and now here’s a dozen-plus similar videos, and I’m like “What the hell? Which one is it?” and I’m looking over all these video thumbnails, and then I see one of them has an overhead banner saying “CHBBEL,” and I’m like, ohhhh now I get it. It’s a goddam friggin A.I. prank or something.
So then I watched how some guy filled up his engine with 5L of cooking oil because he forgot to pickup a jug of 5W-30 at the Walmart.
https://youtu.be/8p62TQ1WXSA
Some people like Notepad++, I respect that. For me Notepad is “good enough.”
I also like NoteTab, an alternative not many people heard of.
MS Office is a big old sack of nails, useful for smacking across someone’s face (more likely, other people smacking it across MY face!)
If I need something a little more sophisticated than Notepad I’ll probably fire up MathCad.
I (occasionally) run Windows in a real sandbox: within a qcow2 environment inside Virt-Manager running in Linux.
I gave it exclusive control of a second video card, too, so it has full hardware video acceleration.
The best part about using a real sandbox is that I can spin up duplicates in seconds and try out stuff on Windows, and if it goes wrong, can revert to snapshots or delete the copies. I’ve got all the options, all the control, and Microsoft has been completely neutered.
As a matter of fact I have zero intention of trying the new Mac OS or Windows ever again.
As far as I am concerned… they are irrelevant.
I didn’t know what’s it do, it’s a premium update scheme for upper crustys (or so I thought), and then all of the sudden it’s free for personal use. But only for up to 5 computers, and only for LTS=long term support versions. Plus, you have to give em an email address, which has to work, and they make you identify all the fire hydrants out of a photo lineup.
Now I am Pro! And the very first thing it did was crash and send two complete system reports to Ubuntu Pro HQ presumably for chuckles!
Space exploration, for living creatures, is a futile exercise.
Yeah it's because "space" is completely barren and hostile environment where nothing that didn't evolutionarily adapt can survive!
There are some interesting experiments, like "suppose I sent a seed out into space and it floated around in space for awhile and then was gravitationally attracted to another planet and landed on that planet and then found some soil or something and then germinated or whatever, could that even happen?" yes, an interesting fantasy.
Or, "what if a bunch of really tough and hardy bacteria were blasted into space and floated through the galaxy and then landed on some other rocky watery planet that wasn't a gas giant or a star or a black hole or comet, could they colonize and become an extra-terrestrial algae bloom on the side of a rock?"
Or, "what if some rich a-holes in flying gas tank land empty on a barren dusty rock without water air gravity food sunlight magnetosphere and they got blasted by a coronal mass ejection, how miserably do they die?" Galileo called this "thought experimentation," because it's cheaper and less lethal than going to find out first-hand.
ALL the pollution comes from the Earth, and it all stays on the Earth. It's the consequence of manufacturing "purified" objects, the source material comes from the Earth, becomes "purified" into a finished good, and then all the non-desirable constituents get isolated and then somehow have to be put somewhere. "Where" do you put a substance that came from the Earth, I guess you could put it back where you got it from? Only now instead of a trace contaminant, your toxic waste has become highly concentrated...
As with Fukushima, just dump that radioactive coolant out at sea so it can disperse across the world's oceans where it might not even be detectable (after awhile).
... it's also difficult to find some place to even bury it since some substances are liable to poison the groundwater.
Hey this sounds like a complicated issue!
Guy argues that maybe C isn’t so obsolete compared to Rust.
https://dev.to/sucuturdean/is-modern-c-better-then-rust-3odf
Fundamentally I don’t care much about which programming language: every “command” in every language is just another program. I think Lisp really took this to the extreme, plus Logo I’m pretty sure.
Even machine language op-codes are essentially hard-coded routines in silicon circuitry, go grab a byte, shift bits left or right, etc. For example, there are “kext” modules you can add in to your Hackintosh implementation to substitute slower subroutines in place of missing processor extensions.
In summary: any program is nothing but a sequenced assemblage of other programs, from a “language” that comprises a particular selection of programs to choose from. DOS and Unix scripts are clearly this.
So, what difference between C and Rust? Apparently Rust is more abstracted, and C you have to explicitly destroy all the objects and variables, even integers, when the program terminates.
But anyway: handing some complex translation task over to A.I. seems like it’s definitely going to inject bugs. Sure you can test the code, but I can bet this creates new classes of bugs that defy testing.
(Had a gnarly one yesterday: apparently a bug crops up between the ATA and the modem due to UDP timeout, believe me I have barely any idea what this refers to, that PERSISTS after reboots/resets of both Modem and ATA, which isn’t even a SIP AGL collision, anyway upshot is you need to pick a new random SIP port number, say 30000-60000 and not 5060, to “break” the confusion. The symptom is nobody can get through by dialing your VOIP ATA, it never “rings” and every call goes straight to voicemail. Or rather, you might temporarily “solve” it by resetting, but shortly the confusion comes back and symptoms resume. You can’t say the programmers are stupid but you can say they don’t care about fixing the problem.)
Link: https://forum.fongo.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19934
I have plenty of Intel equipment, but I only buy cast-off server gear that is a) built to run forever and b) completely depreciated to scrap value. My needs are humble, but also happen to be completely fulfilled.
(Another factor: once I gave up Microsoft and Apple, and switched to Linux and open source, I found I had no need for latest & greatest computer hardware. My main server now is an old Datto NAS powered by Intel 4205u running Proxmox, serving several Nginx pages, a NFS server, monitoring and transcoding 4 security cameras, and a whole bunch of other stuff I forgot what it is, purchased scrap value $30 yet running 24/7 at about 35% utilization.)
Plenty of speculation about who leaked the docs, and whether it was intentional or whatever. Nobody cares! Nobody cares about what the documents even say, since Trump is a known liar and the entire Republican Party is gaslighting so hard everybody’s walking around stupefied by the fumes.
Notice that the actual content of whatever was stolen, if it was really stolen, is completely irrelevant. Whether the “spear fishing” yarn was true or not, whatever “documents” were leaked were all nothing but contrived bullshit either way. It’s the only thing everybody knows for sure with respect to this entire sordid affair..
One distinction of so-called “professional” engineers is the requirement to learn and to observe some basic ethics. Including some fundamentals like “telling the truth” and “protecting the public safety” such as life & limb, health, property, etc.
These concepts are detrimental to the efforts of the “upwardly mobile”: those seeking influence and working on their persuasion skills. Inevitably you sabotage your career if you find yourself shackled with ethical principles. You can’t propel your own self upwards without exerting an equal/opposite influence on your immediate environment (which you are leaving imminently with your freshly-gained momentum). The trick is to step hard on solid footing, if the structure is too rickety or rotten you’ll crash right through!
(Actual engineers get trapped by ethics into building solid and sturdy infrastructure, which then gets scavenged and looted by hackers who just want to grab & steal & don’t care much about some place they were gonna run away from anyway.)
Hint: Agile has absolutely nothing to say about protecting life & limb, health and welfare, or preserving or securing property. Agile is “hacker” crap, just slap something together quick and cheap, cash the cheque, and get off that rickety platform as fast as humanly possible!
I saw on the news that Donald Plump tried to tell the judge to overturn his conviction, because Harris said that she’s the prosecutor and he’s the felon, and he doesn’t like that, he wants to be the prosecutor and Harris is the felon, and I think the judge didn’t agree with the proposal (for whatever reason, who knows).
We have the socialized medicine but that’s just the medical, not the emergency transport. If you call an ambulance that’s a $500 bill (but if you have extended health, like with an employment plan, I think it might be covered — maybe).
I forget what the fire truck cost, for a while the emergency alarm was getting false triggers & not only was it a nuisance to the whole facility (because everybody had to evacuate & then appear at muster to attend the roll call) but the cost was not insubstantial.
I heard that you could turn on any deactivated cell phone in Canada, with no sim whatsoever, and they are all able to connect to 911. It’s like some parents would relent to providing their kids a cellular “for emergency purposes,” and that’s how they did it. You couldn’t use the phone for NOTHING, except the emergency. And then, you can use public wi-fi and free VOIP (Fongo) and free SMS (TextNow), not to mention the likes of Blackberry Messaging and iPhone messaging: all of a sudden paid cellular isn’t particularly relevant anymore.
I still never even booted up the Z80 processor onboard, although I'm told that every power-on causes the Z80 to check something & then transfer control to the 8502. I been running it since 1985!
(I saw on youtube somebody logging their C128 into CP/M and even with a hardware-emulated disk, it's ponderously slow. Plus, what could you run on it? Furthermore, you know what, I never had the 80-col capable monitor anyway!)
Nobody can deny Kildall's triumphs, contributions, and unwarranted downfall.
Nevertheless today I am far more impressed by KolibriOS: really amazing stuff!
AI is older than the current hype phase, and has already earned billion$ for plenty of very wealthy companies.
For example, and let’s suppose you were to play any kind of race driving game. Most of those games, by-and-large, are played as single-player experiences, and yet are contests among other “participants” (who are actually computer-controlled rivals following some kind of pre-programmed algorithm).
Even though the strategies are rudimentary at best, yeah, the ghosts in pac-man are an early form of artificial intelligence— that paid off hugely for the inventors!
Video gaming is one example of extremely lucrative returns on artificial intelligence (it’s just that nobody calls it that, even though that’s exactly what it is).
Nothing like taking down some Spaceward Ho! algorithms, particularly because they are so diabolically savage, it’s like ohmigod stop wasting my settlements ya cold calculating bastard, here’s my invading fleet on your homeworld you scummy cylon slime-suckin griblets. Eat laser blast!
This is a “dead cat” bounce. The manager in charge, faced with simultaneous need for revenue and dwindling customers, decides the 50% remaining customers will have to pay 2x the cost to maintain the original cash flow. The dead cat only has enough momentum for one bounce.
(The vendor can also use pricing to push customers to one preferred product, eg. when DOS came out IBM sold that for $40 while charging $240 for CP/M. Why did they do that, well, must have been because they preferred vending DOS.)
Furthermore, nobody can hack my “Ghost Spectre” windows install.
Well, there’s two reasons.
1. I keep my Windows VM isolated away from the internet.
2. It’s kinda hard to hack my Windows VM if I barely ever log into it!
… because what’s the point of running windows anymore ?!
I bought some cheep old servers and scientific computation GPUs, I suppose I could send them an AI query off my 1st gen iPhone SE and have it deliver results fast enough.
This is speculative of course, first of all I’d require some need or interest compelling me to seek such technology.
(I don’t see any such personal need or interest developing… ever.)
I was curious about what Trump was rambling about right when the bullets started to fly. Well, because they easily could have been “last words.”
What was it about? The interesting thing is that nobody cared about whatever he was speaking of.
I have an inkling that everybody knows it’s all phoney baloney and therefore completely immaterial to every conceivable purpose. …which explains why nobody knows what he was talking about. Nor cares.
I’ve done 3 upgrades since 2017. #1 bought a 4TB NVME when they got real cheap, #2 I built a 5900X system for a relative and the X570 motherboard absolutely needed a 3800X to do the BIOS update, so I bought a used 3800X cheap, which I subbed back into my B350 system, and #3 DDR4 ram got so cheap I maxed out to 128GB. Supposedly it is easy to spin up a Monterey VM, and I even did it one time, but I really have zero use for a Mac.
(I stick with my B350 motherboard because it still has a single PCI slot, which I think I populated with something but I literally have no recollection of what that was. None of the modern devices suit my needs because they all lack PCI. My “update” regimen is that I forget all the stuff I packed in there, so I pull off the cover to take stock, then I notice the dust accumulation, after which I pull all the cords & redo the heat sink compound, etc. I see zero reason to do any actual “upgrade,” not in the next decade or ever again.)
“Preparing to configure Windows. Do not turn off your computer”. Any solutions would be appreciated.
Sure, I have a solution! Reconfigure your PC as a Linux appliance and load in the virt-manager. Set up a new “Windows” VM but make sure to install “Ghost Spectre” instead. Turn off all updates, and also kill the network connection. Take a snapshot just in case you ever do get infected.
It’s lovely. Microsoft is banished from meddling with the system and you are free to run whatever legacy software that doesn’t have a Linux version. I’d banished the scourge of Microsoft updates for many years already, it’s great.
LOVED the SE/30 and NCSA Mosaic, and its cheerful “quack” sound effects.
… ever since then, no.
(I still utilize Win10 as a VM, from within Ubuntu, with a dedicated Vega56. I suppose I could set up a OS-X VM, but the hill of “don’t care” has proven a bit too steep. I still occasionally fire up Win for CAD and Office 2007 Professional. What for, OS-X? The only things I ever used it for were #1 Bolo, #2 Spaceward Ho, #3 Aldus Pagemaker, and #4 Mosaic.)
Teams - Slack - Discord - ICQ and countless others are clunky distractions, because they demand constant monitoring.
It’s far more effective to just talk to the person face-to-face, or call them if they’re not nearby, or send a text/photo if they’re not available, or send an email if they don’t have the cellular, or leave a note, or send a letter.
(I don’t approve of these gimmicky “fad apps,” they come and go, they’re unnecessarily complicated, they’re inherently insecure, and they are nothing but glorified Usenet / RSS aggregators.)
If you read anything and learn from it (or even better: make some kind of profit from it) then you should have all your "earnings" (stealings) taken away from you, by force.
There is no justification for anybody to "steal" knowledge from somebody else (who had published it "for entertainment purposes") and then derive some kind of ill-gotten income from that stolen insight, it's just common sense people!
“What really strikes me about Teslas is that they're cars designed and made by a technology company which refuses to copy solutions developed by established car companies…”
Did you know Tesla scalped most of the Lotus design team for the original roadster?
Teslas are practically off-brand Lotus, mechanically-speaking. Of ~2010 vintage. The control scheme is pure garbage. I am bothered by the “steer by wire” insanely stupid scheme, I might be wrong about this, but it seems to me the steering is literally disconnected from the front wheels, all so a little boy ceo can play video games on the dash panel of the Tesla.
(I am not sure about how factual that is, seems bizarre such a scheme would be allowed on the roads, but it is something I heard about somewhere.)
It seems slightly suspicious that they want a copy of everybody’s data.
Sure, the data, once it is copied over, is safely secured behind impervious encryption.
What if they figured out a way to make a “summary” of the data in the few microseconds between when the data is transmitted and when it is encrypted. Maybe the encryption algorithm takes one input stream and creates two outputs: one is the encrypted data, and the other is a “bias” data. The bias stream can’t be used to recreate the original copy, but it might carry the “gist” of it.
Then, you feed all these bias streams from all of Microsoft’s “valued” customers to one big whopper of an AI processor, which, inexplicably, can suddenly make surprisingly accurate predictions about such things as the stock markets, consumer trends, voter preferences, etc.
I have long suspected Google of doing something similar with its “gmail“ service. Everybody in the world gets free email, and Google gets an opportunity to monitor all of the communications between everybody. Perhaps not a perfect copy, perhaps a “bias” stream is enough to suddenly be able to make remarkably accurate predictions about the future.
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