Posts by bombastic bob 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
the problem with printers is a lack of SERIOUS CUPS SUPPORT by some vendors.
this was a thing back in the windows 3.x and '9x days, too... lack of drivers. lack of non-buggy drivers, at any rate. I choose printers that support CUPS and make it easy to update with their PPD files. Vendors should remain aware of this.
I only have a pre-paid "dumb phone" for when I need a cell phone. 99.9% of the time it is OFF> I never give out the number.
On the land line I record a message, first sounding like I picked up the phone, then thanking friends/family for calling, leave a message, etc. followed by a lecture for everyone else. ~30 seconds. I don't get a LOT of calls but if I'm there everyone who knows me knows I can hear if they say 'pick up the phone' and I don't have the ringer on, so ONLY the answering machine speaker lets me know I have a call.
Been that way for a couple o' years now. At first I only turned off the ringer because of political robo calls. then teh spammers got to the several per day level, and I just left it that way after one election cycle.
After all, I'm not a slave to a phone. The ringer is NOT an emergency. I have e-mail. It works better. The phone is nice for REAL emergencies, but I'm really considering not even HAVING one...
[the only problem is NOT having "a number" to use for things that seem to REQUIRE one... so I continue to pay money to AT&T every month for a pair of landline phones that I generally can't use - yeah a FAX line too]
Seriously if we're talking "old school" then we should just collectively hire hit men to go find the robo-callers and leave a horse-head in their beds [or similar], and accelerate the response if they don't get the hint...
and, collectively, it would cost a LOT less I bet!!!
[organized crime has no national borders, which addresses the 'overseas' problem right there]
/me mentions something about the dark web... OK FBI it's a *JOKE*. now quit getting FISA warrants and tapping my lines already!
Chrome never "caught on". Everything ELSE simply started becoming INDISTINGUISHABLE from the chromium CRAPPINESS and so people settle for what they already have installed on their 'droid phones... hence it's "popular" because no true alternative exists. Google publishes their "standards" which differ from the IBM ones of the 90's [the ones that made Windows actually popular because people went out and BOUGHT IT to add to existing computers, not simply accept because it "came with the machine"], because the new SMUG kids on the block [aka millenials] have to do it THEIR way. And FORCE everyone ELSE to COMPLY with it. Because, they're superior. And it's THEIR turn.
I'm reminded that I need to write my own web browser, by porting webkit to use MY toolkit [once I finish it] and ENFORCING the non-2D-FLATTY 'classic menus and tabs' look on EVERY operating system [including Win-10-nic]. no more hamburger menus, etc. Something like MIdori, except it won't swallow the fornicating 2D FLATTY HAMBURGER MENU coolaid.
at least with Libre Office I can work with Micro-Shaft format documents _AND_ do so on Linux or FreeBSD without having to be online. And it's not all 2D FLATSO, has *NO* ribbon or other irritating UI elements, and I've *NEVER* heard of a MACRO VIRUS that affects Libre Office (so you can open up documents that random people that you don't know might send you with pretty good security and reliability).
"Their cloud is the mainframe of old"
yeah I saw that one coming during the dot-bomb days of the early noughties.
We'd just gotten to the point where computing power was distributed among all of those PCs on everyone's desktop. THEN, "the powers that be", to control and monetize things back in their own favor, "decided" to change everyone back to the old way of doing things, by going light-client-heavy-server instead of heavy-client-light-server. Except they'd use JAVASCRIPT to force all of those "light client" applications into becoming HEAVY CLIENT applications, which is why every web browser nowadays is a FORNICATING PIG when it comes to CPU and memory and other resources...
that way our ">10 times faster than they were in 1999" computers on our desktops run like CRAP with all of that "required" BLOATWARE, plus the latency of "cloud", and the reliability of a single basket filled with all of our thinly shelled eggs.
irony acknowledged. heh.
So, the *FIRST* major change to github is a bot that FAILS to "get it right" with respect to spam filtering, punishing the honest/innocent via brain-damaged AI algorithms, while GROSSLY MISSING the 'bulk' of the problem at the exact same time.
Sounds like hotmail or anything ELSE that MS "took over". I'll still use it, I suppose. yay.
(this is probably comment #43 - oh well, so much for having 42 of them. I ruined it.)
actually, the WORST thing you can do is install Windows on top of the Linux [thinking it would be 'better']
But I expect that without massive database accessing going on at the time of the plug-pulling (or equivalent) incident, the EXT4 file system did its job and no data was corrupted. maybe a transaction or two was lost, but that's the point. File/System integrity was preserved!
And that assumes it wasn't using ZFS, which should be even better at such things.
Got, Linux?
(in my opinion, and that of others) Mrs. Clinton is only good at scamming people and shredding evidence, beginning with the White Water and Rose Law Firm stuff... and the breaking of phones with hammers and "losing" 30,000 subpoenae'd e-mails that most likely demonstrate the connection between the Clinton Foundation and foreign governments getting favors by contributing to it (which is why she had that private e-mail server, to conduct that sort of 'business' outside of government record keeping laws). At least, that's the theory.
So her "foreign policy" would be the kind that enriches her and her family, not necessarily the kind that "Makes America Great Again". And that's the point.
"will the WTO survive Trump's wrath at all? "
Not at all. They'll soon decay into irrelevance. After all WHAT can they really DO about it? Nothing. They haven't stopped China's abuses. Their presence is like a bunch of sheep telling wolves to "don't, stop..." and so NOW that their ineffectiveness is obvious to the most casual observer, the rams and shepherds and sheep dogs are going to put a stop to it the old fashioned way.
Or something like that. WTO can just BLANK the FEEL off!
The feckless WTO _IS_ the problem. I'm sure that the USA will simply IGNORE them, tell them to go pee up a rope or perhaps a nice classic New York expression, like "Bite Me"...
You're forgetting the reason for the tariffs: China is VIOLATING OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. And they REFUSE to stop it. Cutting them out of the loop by raising the cost of having them IN the loop is one way to resolve this.
And the WTO was a _STUPID_ idea in the first place. And that's the point. The USA is a sovereign nation with a CONSTITUTION, and not some 3-member bureaucracy deciding policy. And that's the point.
"alcohol. How do microplastics get in there"
I'm guessing it's part of the brewing and filtration process for beer, and distillation process for distilled liquor. It makes perfect sense to use plastic, particularly nylon if there are moving parts, along with stainless steel, in any food, brewing, or distillation process.
But hey, I'd rather have plastic than GERMS, ya know?
"So what's the problem again?"
Ask Henny Penny. Her son, Chicken Little, thought the sky was falling when an acorn hit him on the head, and now she's running around (like a chicken with its head cut off, flopping and twitching and trying to run in a random uncontrolled manner) screaming how "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and a bunch of alarmist idiots are buying into it as if they have a PSYCHOLOGICAL NEED for "the doom and gloom".
Same story, different names, same plot line over and over and over [and the "solution" will be the same too, RESTRICT EVERYONE ELSE'S FREEDOM except for those who are 'more equal than others', using public tax money to pay for it all].
"I believe that we have to tackle the use of plastics"
Here comes the KNEE JERK REACTION. That all-too-infamous solution of CONTROLLING OTHER PEOPLE because *YOU* *FEEL*.
Control YOURSELF, *FIRST*. Leave *OTHER* people *OUT* of your *FEEL* schemes.
And now, I'll go back to doing things with plastic, again. LOTS of plastic. Like this plastic keyboard, plastic mouse, with plastic soda bottles for my soda, plastic water jugs for my water, R.O. water from machines out front of the grocery store (which no doubt contain LOTS of plastic parts including plastic hoses and ion exchange resin beads for that final step in the process), plastic cups and plates for non-breakable portability of food stuffs, plastic phones up to my face, plastic headphones for listening to music, a plastic pick for playing my guitar, plastic threads mixed with natural fibers in my clothing [so they don't easily disintegrate] and so on. Oh yeah, and a throwaway plastic bag to wrap bananas in so that they don't get contaminated from the meat, which is also wrapped in plastic so we don't have to get meat germs all over ourselves when taking it home from the grocery store. Salmonella and E Coli and all that, STOPPED by the use of PLASTIC! (or do you want to CUT DOWN TREES and wrap it in BUTCHER PAPER like was done until the 1960's ?)
You know it's JUST polymers, right? They're chemically INERT, and you KNEW that, right?
It's those "we have to tackle the use of XXX" people who are a PAIN IN MY ASS and need to be TACKLED INSTEAD...
just think - there are tiny particles of WHALE PISS in every bit of sea water you get into your mouth and nose while swimming in the ocean.
Also, think of all of the RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT from above ground atomic explosions in the 1950's, Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, SL/1, and Fukushima, and so far [never mind the fact that Mr. Sun is putting out enough rays to give the average person 100mrem per year and it's worse when you're at 30,000 feet in an airplane] it's all "below minimum detectable levels" because [after all] the SOLUTION to POLLUTION is DILUTION. Just ask someone whose task it is to dilute some kinds of toxic waste down to below the maximum allowed discharge concentration level before dumping it into the sewers. Yeah, it's "a thing". Or, at least it WAS a thing at one time.
Yeah, that "below minimum detectability" thing lets a LOT of "pollutants" circulate around, through everything. And yet, nobody's growing extra limbs or developing odd diseases because of it [or else it'd be front page news, because ALARMISTS _LOVE_ to have 'see I told you so' stories manipulating people into various behaviors and knee-jerk reactions, for the power and control and money it all brings].
Maybe it's why we only live 100 years instead of 1000... but how can you POSSIBLY know when things like bacteria and viruses are far more prevalent and a LOT more dangerous, and our immune systems have to constantly fight all that stuff off to prevent us from decaying to death.
Seriously, I call "Henny Penny" on this one. The sky is NOT falling, and I'll take that famous advice from the Hitch Hiker's Guide: "Don't Panic".
so the problem is that ti's not recognizing HTML5 capable browsers, then?
you might see if there's a custom user-agent thing you can use, modify in about:config (for FF, not sure if Chrome "lets you" that filthy little dictator of a web browser)
/me just reminded I need to finish my X11 toolkit, port webkit to use it, and write my OWN browser with built-in no script, memory-only cookies, customizable user agent, and NO 2D FLATTY or flash plugins!
not true - it's why coca cola glasses are shaped the way they are, by the way: the larger diameter part has a larger diameter so that ICE CUBES (not crushed ice) can be used.
This has 2 dramatic effects: The cold layer stays relatively cold and does not melt the ice as fast, AND the cold later causes the CO2 bubbles to stay in the soda.
I've got several of those glasses and I should probably show it on a youtube vid just to make a point. But if you drink a lot of soda like _I_ do, you'll see this happen. It becomes obvious, even intuitively so.
And there's also THIS: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/docs/documents/1148/solubility-co2-water.png
yeah, nothing like a few FACTS to spoil the emotion-based "feel" about man-made climate change B.S., actually swallowing THAT Koolaid in the face of OBVIOUS chemistry and physics and engineering and indisuputable SCIENCE.
but when you FEEL instead of THINK, you can MANIPULATE (and be manipulated into) all KINDS of outright STUPIDITY. And *THEN* guilt/insult OTHER people for NOT swallowing that same Koolaid.
how about "WHY THE FEEL ARE THEY EXPOSING THE LISTENING PORTS ON A PUBLIC IP ADDRESS" as the #1 thing NOT to do with an MS SQL server... yeah THAT detail was pretty blatant, wasn't it? At least I think it was blatantly obvious as the #1 problem here. The article said that the logins were brute-forced, after all [captain obvious says so, as it's in the topic]
/me also points out - it's pronounced 'Es Queue El' in case someone said the 'sequel' word.
If you MUST have other machines across 'teh intarwebs' access it, USE A SECURE TUNNEL to an RFC1918 IP address, through a NON-MICROSOFT FIREWALL that outright blocks everything else.
why not just write a simple C or C++ application to access the Win32 API and be done with it?
It's amazing how much 'coverage' you get with standard MFC classes, without the ".Not" crap even. [of course turning _OFF_ the '.Not' crap takes extra effort, but it's worth it to me to do so] [assuming you still can in versions of DevStudio after 2010, that is]
oh - and last I checked, printf, scanf and FILE operations still work on windows, albeit a little strangely sometimes when you don't open with the 'b' flag and end up with crlf translation by default.
you forget the WORST part: the ".Net" integration.
what MS did with ".Net" in teh early 2000's is why I hate it, why I hate C-pound, why I _refuse_ to allow my C++ programs to have bindings with ".Net", and so on.
Using Power[S]Hell (for other than 'occasional things') is something I won't be doing any time soon, ESPECIALLY on a non-windows system. And I've looked at it, and even tried invoking 'special things' from it [on recommendation on various web 'how to make this happen' pages, particularly enabling unsigned drivers to load and things like that]. The documentation is VERY hard to find things in, as it's poorly organized, but I have that criticism for MSDN in general, latly. It used to be better when there was a local help application and you could ONLY load the relevant help files, and NOT every-freaking-thing-in-the-world so that you could SIGNIFICANTLY narrow down your searches by NOT having the entire universe...
so yeah this is part of some general criticism about MS these days, and Power[S]Hell is just a part of it.
(/me back to bash and occasional Perl, and if they won't do it, simple C language utilities to make up the difference)
I got some sarcasm:
a) part of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plans for Linux
b) but it is STILL ".Net"ty
c) it's for alleged programmers that don't know how to use bash and Perl
d) Have they never heard of 'Python' ?
e) I can do more with less in shell/Perl and either Cygwin or Linux
f) from the same kind of crowd that LOVES systemd...
should be enough for now.
icon, because, facepalm
then it becomes a matter of enforcement, which probably won't happen in the case of marijuana. If it goes to the Supreme Court, however, then the entire premise of making drugs illegal at the federal level (without a Constitutional ammendment) might be challenged. In the case of ISPs, it may be less clear as to what's happening because of federal regulatory agencies wanting to hold onto their power and not share.
personally I think this is an FTC issue and should apply across the board, to ALL business, with respect to collection of personal data, and disclosing that data to 3rd parties, whether it's anonymous or not. Privacy needs to be favored over monetizing the customer. And make it opt-in, not opt-out.
(then "they" can sell people on the idea of opting in, maybe with special discounts or something, like grocery store discount cards)
Maine tends towards conservative libertarianism, as I understand it, so I'd like to think that the rest of the country would get on board with that kind of thinking...
that is: fiscal responsibility, personal freedom, less government
It's the only way things SHOULD be. That, and a purely FLAT tax rate. Equality is a good thing. I'm not sure how Maine-iacs are on flat tax, though. I haven't heard about any surveys on that one, and I don't talk politics with 2 of my relatives who live there (both former Californians, no need to mention anything else).
federal vs local - it's an ongoing problem. Although the federal laws will very likely take precedence [since it's "interstate" and "international" commerce involved here] it's obviously the will of THE PEOPLE to have privacy protection.
So Con-Grab (particularly "the Washington D.C. establishment") need to GET A FEELING CLUE and STOP IT with stupid legislation that allows companies to violate citizens' privacy. Similar with the 'can spam' act and the way the 'do not call list' has been repeatedly fumbled...
I wouldn't blame Republicans or specific U.S presidents for this. The main problem is in the "Washington D.C. establishment" which includes the 'chamber of commerce' and a LOT of well funded special interest lobbying organizations. RINO Republicans, most of the Democrats, and most of the U.S. presidents have more or less been 'on board' with these people. You can tell who was NOT on board, by the criticism that's thrown at them. In other words, who's for "the new world order" and who isn't... THAT is the litmus test! And politicians being who they are, they must bow to their masters to get elected... except for some of them, who receive criticism from ALL angles for doing the right thing.
considering that I'm willing to pay an extra 10 cents per gallon (sometimes, at discount stations) to use a credit card in a gasoline pump, just so I won't have to go stand in line TWICE to get gasoline AND fill up the tank AND get change back, assuming I handed the guy enough $ before I started, forking over a refundable $10 to get some human to fix your problems right away would be a GOOD thing...
it's like the phone company fixing my wires - which they've had to do several times - if the problem is inside the house, they charge you $75 for the service call. Thing is, every time it's been on their end. SO I'm willing to risk the $75 just to get the tech out to check the wires, which he generally finds are broken some place in the 10+ wire miles between me and the home office. My connection is LITERALLY at the "end of the wire". The neighbor's house has the wire literally heading the other direction.
So yeah. Good idea. If I ever get involved in tech support, I'll consider that option. Refundable $10 fee for accelerating the problem to a human's investigation.
ideally these cloud providers might be creating the "lack of backup" problem by CLAIMING that you have 100% reliability "in the cloud" with backups and reliability and/or some other such thing... until their bureaucracy SCREWS YOU.
but yeah us old schoolers with 20:20 hindsight can easily say "you should have had a backup"
nice clarification - my skim-reading of the article missed that aspect [i.e. the 10 parallel jobs] and since THAT was all it was, D.O. should've NOT shot themselves in the foot like that. If they don't want people spawning parallel jobs, they should set some kind of limit on that kind of thing, total CPU percentage, total number of jobs/threads, yotta yotta.
(effecitvely) banning them entirely was a HUGE mistake.
well, at least it appears that it STILL HELPS to GO PUBLIC when normal channels fail to get the needed attention...
and that the ultimate problem is bureaucracy and bureaucratic attitudes.
but yeah, having a local backup can be your ONLY salvation. a little over a week ago, a different contractor was supposed to commit his changes to github so that I could integrate it. If it wasn't bad enough that this guy took 2 weeks to do 2-3 days' worth of stuff [my opinion, or how long would it take ME to have done it], and we'd been after him the entire time to at least commit SOMETHING to the repo, he managed [with some GUI tool on a Mac] to WIPE OUT all of my significant changes and additions over the last 2 days when he uploaded his stuff to github (in effect, syncing up his private repo with the one on github, literally). ONLY because I'd had the foresight to have done a 'git pull' on my home machine before leaving, and having the ability to ssh in and grab a tarball of what the repo was 2 hours earlier, was I able to quickly fix this. a simple 'revert' probably would've left things in a worse state than a) tarball a snapshot, b) re-do the 'git clone' c) untar everything I did, d) git commit+push, and THEN have the other guy (one at a time) check in the files he worked on. I think that my method was faster, at any rate.
So yeah it helps to have some LOCAL backups, on multiple machines, just for things *like* this.
Oh yeah that particular contractor was given the "thank you very much for your hard work and effort" letter. I won't go into the other drama that preceded it, involving slack and a literal 'commit war' over a 3 day weekend when way too many things needed to be ready on Tuesday AM for review, 99% of it my effort for "last minute, because, THAT guy" integration purposes.
(ok vent complete)
"less 1st-worlders using much too many resources and polluting the world."
*facepalm*
Without enough babies being born to create the next generation, nobody is going to PAY FOR your arthritis treatments. It'll become SO expensive to 'take care of' the aging population that any kind of 'austerity' for the 'old and retired' will get shoved under the bus. Run the numbers, you'll see. The only way that you'll get your arthritis treatments at age 80 is if you have private retirement, assuming it's not confiscated and/or taxed out of existence. That is, unless millenials "get busy" and start making babies...
(but millenials are too busy texting each other on their 4-inch screens)
If sex weren't so damned pleasurable, nobody would EVER have kids. Then humans would die off. But someone with the attitude as seen in the above quote might actually LIKE that outcome...
well I'd like to point out that the desire for robo-sexuality (in general) could be explained with the term '3DPD'.
You have to ask yourselves _WHY_ the '3DPD' term even exists. A great deal of it comes from radical feminism and the general attitude towards men, the "all men are toxic masculine" (by defining normal male behavior as 'toxic', not simply the rude ass-hattery that's a stereotype of normal male behavior).
So from THAT perspective, when an overwhelming number of 'available' females are of the "bitch princess from hell you owe me because you have a penis" variety, robots look PRETTY DAMN GOOD.
Ultimately you can blame Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland,Irina Dunn (the originator of "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle") and others who have gone beyond equal rights for women into the realm of outright man-hating and "misandrony".
So what do men do? ROBOTS! And porn. And hookers. And go to other (non-westernized) countries.
(for those women who really DO want men in their lives, and not a Big Member 3000, consider NOT listening to those over-the-top radical feminist HARPIES and behaving NORMALLY, like 100,000+ years of human evolution defining the traditional roles and behavior of men and women have people do, and men will not only respect you, but probably not do things that anger you either; otherwise you'll play 2nd fiddle to the Lucy Liu-bots that are only COPIES of you, except without all of the "toxic femininity")
sad-face icon because, let's face it, this is sad.
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