Posts by bombastic bob

Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

the spoonful of sugar only works when the "medicine" is going down your throat...

Re: Oh shush!

When I see the 'Super Cali' headlines I

a) try to get the song cadence to work

b) laugh somewhat pathetically because I have to *live* here in Cali-Fornicate-You

c) occasionally happy if they actually get something right (like in this particular case)

So yeah a big thumbs up to El Reg for the entertaining titles

Welcome. You're now in a timeline in which US presidential hopeful Beto was a member of a legendary hacker crew

no I'll stay because of my "fan club". you're welcome.

strangely a good number of posts seem to involve me. I guess O'Rourke is a pretty boring topic.

Re: Nice

I routinely reject "life advice"

Re: I'd be wary of letting this sort of stuff influence your decision

It influenced my decision - from NO to HELL NO.

Re: This is awesome

I never really thought of 'Cult of the Dead Cow' with any kind of favorable opinion. Nor their members. It seems to have spawned some of what you see in the 'War Games' movie from the 80's though, or the 'Hackers' movie from the 90's. The truth is far less glamorous...

Don't forget, O'Rourke seems to have acknowledged how he STOLE PHONE TIME to access BBSs via long distance calls, as reported in the Reuters article linked from this one.

"Like thousands of others, though, he said he pilfered long-distance service 'so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill.'"

I guess _some_ of what cDc did might be considered "cool" - BackOrifice, the Tor version of the Firefox browser, stuff to scan for steganography, etc. - but O'Rourke's involvement was probably more "social" than actual learning/coding. Yeah, I'm challenging the validity of his "skillz".

And the idea that most hackers are really libertarians, and not socialists, leaves me to wonder why he plays this "both sides of the fence" game, unless he's trying to SOCIAL ENGINEER EVERYBODY into voting for him...

And, THAT would make him DISINGENUOUS, DISHONEST. Well, POLITICIAN at least.

Sorry, Linux. We know you want to be popular, but cyber-crooks are all about Microsoft for now

Re: Really?

Bill Gates _LOVES_ BASIC !

(that's why it was there in the first place. Now, legacy, I'd guess)

Re: Oi! Keep quiet

some Linux flavors are already WAY too permissive with 'sudoers' and one Mac exploit used an Apple API of some sorts that is (in many ways) very similar to a permissive config of sudo...

keep THAT up and there will be exploits for it

Microsoft buffs up its open-source halo to fine sheen with PostgreSQL GUI in Azure Data Studio

It used to be called MS Access

when using MS Access with an ODBC database back in the 90's, for example, you had GUI schema tools available...

(I have yet to really see anything in the open source world that does what MS Access did in its day)

But I'm not going to go out and get MS Office just to have Access again. And Access in Office '97 broke when I installed a patch for MS Word. Totally screwed up. I use Libre and/or Open Office now, and haven't seen a good MS Access equivalent there.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

yeah it's good for regular serial port too, on windows.

For Linux etc. I typically use 'cu' or my own program [which is open source and can be searched for if you're interested, also works in windows last I checked]. But for windows there used to be a decent terminal program built in [hyperterminal] but it stopped being included either in XP or Vista. And, of course, there was no ssh support as I recall.

I can't recall what Cygwin has for a terminal program. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I generally don't do serial port things from windows anyway.

(using serial comms programatically in windows is unnecessarily painful, and I've been doing it since Win '98 and NT 4, starting with this one customer project that used TAPI to dial into remote devices and download data from them, etc.)

Re: "but the availability of the source code means that anyone can."

With open source, it's also easier to:

a) apply your own patches

b) apply patches someone else published to get a fix in right away

c) get the patched version compiled and installed in your system before a package has been made available

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

Ack. He was spoiled by a GUI front-end, I see. "the ones I was used to". Yeah I think I had to spend at least a minute learning the ssh command line when I first used it, too.

Hint: "man ssh" (this works on OSX as I recall - I don't have a Mac handy to verify it with). I use this (literally) ALL of the time (a remote shell to a VM running Linux, to test stuff - left logged in on one of my desktops on a FreeBSD machine). That and scp also, making backups etc.. And sftp works really well with my web site. Who needs "authoring tools", am I right?

One thing I _LOVE_ about Mac OSX is that its userland was forked from FreeBSD 5 and so I can just jump in there and do stuff and it WORKS.

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

this is a pathetic reason to "up" (read: down) grade to Win-10-nic or windows server 2019.

Whatever happened to compiling OpenSSH (etc.) and just installing it? And put all of the DLLs where other programs can access them?

Isn't there an open source version of OpenSSH available that compiles on windows?? OK there's a Cygwin version, yeah. I suspect that making that a MinGW version wouldn't be all that difficult...

So why not just do THAT if you need an open source OpenSSH ??? And it wouldn't have restrictions on it, like "only Win-10-nic" or "only server 2019" or "only if you have a Pro version" yotta yotta.

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

on windows I prefer to use Cygwin's ssh implementation.

on POSIX systems, I just use the built-in ssh.

Seriously, PuTTY could have wrapped the existing ssh program with a simple GUI and probably would have avoided most of these problems. If it were to ship with a portable version of ssh, and maybe a handful of patch files to put the magic into it more easily than dealing with Windows' pathetic handling of console applications and stdin/stdout/stderr re-direction, then a lot of these problems wouldn't be problems any more.

Just a thought - maybe PuTTY could get a re-write to do it this way... [then you just need to maintain the GUI and keep the back-end up to date with all of the relevant patches]

From MySpace to MyFreeDiskSpace: 12 years of music – 50m songs – blackholed amid mystery server move

Re: Likely sequence

"If your new servers don't have the right sort of drives to read the old media would you keep the media?"

Yes, along with the machines capable of reading it, until such time as all of that had been archived in an updated format.

Re: Likely sequence

I see a scenario of a Linux server with case sensitive file names being migrated to a Micro-shaft server, with case insensitive file names, some of which overlap the case sensitive ones, resulting in name collision chaos.

[saw that with a perforce repo once, $boss insisted on hosting it on a windows box, but it involved a source repo for building a Linux kernel for embedded devices, and some directories in the kernel source had file names that differed only by case... which meant that perforce couldn't save them in a unique way, causing all KINDS of interesting source tree problems - would have been ok if we'd hosted it on Linux in the FIRST place which is what WE wanted to do, but NO, $boss insisted on a WINDOWS server, "felt" it to be more reliable for who knows WHAT kind of reasoning or lack thereof...]

Anyway, some insight as to what _could_ have happened, maybe like this: 'and then the people doing the migration took some "Dammitol" and, washing them bitter pills down with as much coffee alcohol as they could find, simply announced "cannot be done" and they quietly moved on...'

Re: So....

MySpace today...

my old data seemed so far away,

How I wanted songs I used to play

oh how I long, for yesterday...

Where - did - my songs go?

I don't know, they wouldn't say...

Then - I - found out how

they had thrown them all away-ay-ay-ay

(etc.)

Re: MySpace

"If it was copies of Coldplay songs then I'm all for deleting that shit!"

And get rid of anything by Red Hot Chili Peppers, too, while you're at it. And 70's disco. And anything that [ab]uses autotune.

Re: I wonder

Jake's Corollary to Murphy's Law: If there is even a remote chance of the data being monetized, then yes. It's inevitable.

how's that?

Bombastic Bob's Corollary: "If it can be monetized, it will be."

Re: I wonder

if a typcal mp3 file is 6Mbytes in length [a bit large, but good for ballparking it] then 50 million would be 300 million megabytes, or about 300 terabytes. That's about $10k worth of hard disks, not including config'ing them as a RAID [which would be what, 4 times as many?]. So, not a lot, compared to annual revenue.

And with all of the other "old crap" that goes with those mp3s, probably 10 to 100 times as much stuff [photos, videos, etc.] in total. So you're talking maybe $100k to $1M.

Still "do-able" but bottom line is what it is. To your old schtuff that you stored on MySpace: Buh-BYE!

(yeah "the cloud" is HIGHLY overrated)

Wondering why 'Devin Nunes herp-face' was trending online? Here's the 411: House rep sues Twitter for all the rude stuff tweeted about him

Re: herp-face

No I think 'herp-face' was a slang term derived from commenters on some anarchistic message/image board. The 'know your meme' site describes 'herp derp' as "a rage comic face and an expression used to indicate that someone is unintelligent or making ignorant statements". Kinda like the 'troll icon' face, but dumber.

it's probably that.

Re: Dim the lights

I think federal jury duty pays like $50 per day too...

Re: Beware of unintended consequences

If Twitter bans our president, let's just create a USENET newsgroup for Trump and let people re-discover the anarchy. I'd even "write an app for that", make it free. Might be fun.

Re: Really?

*light bulb*

the more ya know!

(now I don't have to google the term)

"not to mention that the statements weren't made by Twitter..."

To be fair, the accusation I heard on TV was that there were Twitter accounts that weren't supposed to have existed that were involved in this. so either Twitter allowed them to exist [and then claimed they did not], or they were being used by people with inside knowledge [or hacking access], or Twitter was claiming to have banned them when no ban actually happened.

There is also the alleged preferential treatment, where TOU violations by conservatives would be ban-hammered without hesitation, but those by liberals would be allowed to continue indefinitely, in a kind of preferential or at least "unequal" treatment of what a 'Term of Usage' actually is.

[and so I think Nunes seeks to use discovery to clarify what is happening so that it becomes a matter of public record]

'downright slanderous' is hard to make a case for in the realm of political speech.

You could accuse a politician of the most unscrupulous and heinous activity [use imagination, maybe involving a depraved walrus and bad smelling bodily fluids, or an impossibly contorted pose], all without any proof, and it would be LEGAL because it's "political speech". Free speech rules involving politicians have very wide latitude.

[IANAL my understanding] as far as legal precedent is concerned, there are NO limits. NONE.

Re: Round 1?

again, it might actually be in their ToS that they CAN do the discriminatory thing, and that you have to AGREE with it in order to use their service...

However, one thing a lawsuit WOULD do is make them defend the practice, or tell blatant lies about it, that are later uncovered, forcing them to apologize etc..

Maybe that's all Nunes wants to do... put them ON RECORD [and use the lawsuit to get discovery materials, which are probably MORE valuable than winning the lawsuit]

I think avoiding Tw[i,a]tter and Fa[e]ceb[ook,itch] is the better plan. Git yer own web site, post what you want to USENET, and maybe comment on El Reg articles just for fun.

Re: But he actually has a case...

The biggest hurdle is whether or not free speech allows the abuse. If it does, particularly because he's a politician, then some kind of proof that deliberate preferential treatment based on company policy by Twitter (or any other "social media" platform) actually exists, or this thing will get thrown out.

Of course I want him to succeed, because I suspect this kind of 'preferential ban treatment' and underhanded 'shadow banning' is actually happening. The question is, what laws has it violated?

(I bet it's in their Terms of Service, someplace)

/me points out that USENET is still unmoderated, for the most part, and uncensored [unless your ISP blocks it for some reason...]

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Re: El Reg follows common sense!

I was thinking "tossed into an active volcano" but ok

Facebook and Twitter weren't the only places...

that video was being recycled on 4chan's /pol/ for hours along with a link to the (previously taken down) manifesto. Just because it wasn't on Facebook nor Twitter doesn't mean it's not "out there". And of course on 4chan's /pol/ there were actual echos of approval in multiple threads... (well it's anarchy and politically incorrect, so there).

might be worth pointing out, the (alleged) perpetrator was apparently a REGULAR contributor to political posts about Australia and New Zealand on that forum, described by some as an 'Accelerationist', whatever that means...

so, point is, forums that are NOT Facebook nor Twitter nor Youtube already exist. And the (alleged) perpetrator of the mosque shooting was a regular user of one of those forums. So there you go.

Microsoft unzips Zipline, lets world+dog have a go with cloudy storage compression tech

Re: I almost got excited!

it'd be more fun if they launched packages of sneakernet devices using potato guns...

"What they need to do is put forward a compression system for HTML/Javascript"

Interesting, but I'd prefer GETTING RID OF THE JAVASCRIPT instead. And I think the HTTP protocol already allows for compressed data transfer over 'teh intarwebs'...

/me points out that you can't turn a pig into something that's not a pig. Javascript in HTML is what it is. A pig. A really FAT pig that gains LOTS of weight over time, and eats bandwidth+CPU without ever getting full...

Re: Storage Spaces and ReFS

if it were me designing it, ZFS with de-duplication and lz4 compression... running on FreeBSD.

Re: Microsoft wants to parse texts and get patterns.

well if they had anti-replication in their file system, it would make more sense than indexing based on text contents. I'd venture to guess that the text indexing is for a basic search algorithm, and probably not one that goes across their entire file system.

It's my personal opinion that an algorithm that simply scans the data live, off of the hard disk, with aggressive disk cacheing [like Linux and FreeBSD have], outperforms any background "index everything" algorithm and data set. As an example, if I want to find something on any file system, I typically use 'grep'. Even with Cygwin, it seems to be SO much more flexible (and results more relevant) than trying to use MS's ridiculous "search".

The kinds of things _I_ would search for on a windows system: "Which header file has THIS function in it" [and considering where Microsoft wants to place header files, it's painful and bad enough already trying to naviguess to that - so I typically make a symlink in a Cygwin environment so I can do it more sensibly with 'find' and 'grep'].

It's also my experience that with compressed hard drives, decompression actually IMPROVES throughput. SSD drives, maybe not so much, but DEFINITELY on a hard drive. It has been so since the 90's, when MS first integrated disk compression into the OS (and got sued by STAC for it).

anyway, I think it would be an overall 'win' for them (pun intended) to not bother so much with the indexing, and just focus on throughput and performance.

Re: compatibility

I've been using xz (LZMA) compression for my tarballs. It takes longer but makes the files smaller.

Why Microsoft would choose ZLib over other methods is unclear. Maybe popularity?

lz4 is supposed to be several times as fast at compression (and also decompression) when compared to 'deflate'. So if they want speed, lz4 would be a better choice, I think.

WD spins off 300+ jobs in the US

Making them TOO well?

I'd venture to guess that the reason for the decline in hard drive sales is NOT that they're less popular, but that they're being made TOO well.

That, and the reduction in sales of new PC computers, particularly those with spinny drives. [my usual comments as to why are currently being withheld, but people generally fix and upgrade the old boxen, until there is no longer a need to do so]

The price of hard drives right now is REALLY good. You can get a 2TB spinny drive for under $100, and a good quality one at that. And seriously, even if you work at it, filling up a 2TB drive takes a while. Most people (who don't have source repositories on them or a zillion torrent'd videos) might actually never fill it before it develops bad sectors and needs replacing.

But one other thing worthy of mention: Milpitas and San Jose are right next to one another on the map. Silly Valley and Orange County are both VERY expensive to live in. And of course, wages will be highest there (within the USA), with maybe 2 or 3 other places being worse, like San Francisco and New York City. So they might actually be MINIMIZING the number of people they let go by focusing on those locations...

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

Re: The magic phrase

that's actually relatively cheap for tech support - well, certain KINDS of tech support. Of course the tech isn't being paid that, but it's on the invoice.

Re: Went for a coffee - stayed two weeks

"I always take several photocopies of my passport and a few spare passport photographs with me so that I don't have to hand my passport to the shop to photocopy."

Good idea. Also would help if you need to deal with an actual stolen passport, I bet.

Re: Went for a coffee - stayed two weeks

"had an abend in my product"

'abend' - there's a term I haven't seen/heard in a long time. I had to remember what it meant...

ABnormal ENDing. Wasn't that an IBM mainframe thing? A quicky google search yields a few other unusual/obscure definitions for 'abend' but the most relevant seems to be this:

http://mainframe.debugpoint.com/2015/07/system-abend-codes-s0c1-to-s0c9/

IBM mainframe trap/fault codes, basically.

Re: What?

sometimes happens with relatives and friends (over the phone even), but nothing in the line of business. Do friends, neighbors, and relatives even count for this?

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

The only thing devs need (other than the guts to just do it) to port windows applications to Linux is a decent toolkit and environment to do it with. OK I've been working on that for years...

Seriously, though, if something implemented Win32 like Wine does, but as a static lib so you could ship it built into your application, then run it on any Linux system as a binary, a LOT of windows application vendors would be VERY very interested. And all it would take to shift the balance away from Win-10-nic would be a bunch of software vendors targeting Linux!

The alternative would be a version of Wine that is 100% compatible with Win32 in general. Nevermind all of that UWP crap, let Win-10-nic keep that. I'm talking about Win32 API and the things that utilize it, the vast majority of windows applications out there that still run in W7 or earlier.

(devices are less of a problem since the Linux kernel gets a lot of support for that, and most of the Linux drivers are chip-level or class drivers, so most things should 'just work' when you install, Broadcom notwithstanding, and they need to get their act together better, yeah)

Re: Anglophones....

or peng-gwin

Re: Use?

There's always FreeBSD...

Re: Does this mean it's finally...

If _I_ have anything to do with it, YES. And that's all I can comment at the moment...

Re: I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again ...

If you bring your own device in and let the IT guys manage it, how about THAT? And if they don't like you doing that, DOLLARIZE it - "You save $$$ per month letting me do this". I think every one of us has some old dust-collecting box with "acceptable hardware for Linux" on it.

And once you've PROVED how productive you can be with THAT, you can sell the idea of getting a BETTER one...

Re: I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again ...

Cygwin 'old in the tooth'? You make that sound like it's a BAD thing... [just fix the bugs, NO need for feature creep]

Re: I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again ...

"Shirley running your distro of choice on bare iron is cheaper/easier/faster/cleaner with far, far fewer security and update problems?"

Not only are there no licensing headaches, the *kinds* of hardware that can run Linux in a manner that has acceptable performance ('droid development notwithstanding, THAT porcine environment eats RAM and hard drive space and bandwidth worse than ANYTHING Micro-shaft, but I digress...), those kinds of systems can have >10 year old technology and still give you decent performance for Linux.

At least, that's how _I_ see it. For lots of builds you'll want faster/more cores but for general usability, I think older machines running Linux *EASILY* outperform "modern" machines with "modern" windows. [my fastest windows machine is a 3Ghz dual core; my slowest Linux machine is a 1Ghz Toshiba laptop from 2003. So yeah]

At a used-to-company everybody had a windows machine. Then us devs also had 1 or 2 extra non-windows machines. In part this started because I brought my FreeBSD laptop in, and was able to use it for development work to do things that the windows computer couldn't do. At that time Frys had inexpensive Linspire boxen available for under $200, so the company purchased several of them, and us devs then put "whatever OS" on them, typically Fedora, Debian, or FreeBSD, as "build machines". This rendered the windows machine virtually unused except for e-mail, certain documents, and occasional tests.

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

"Microsoft Services For Unix, the predecessor for Cygwin"

Interix/SFU/SUA - I honestly tried to make that work, from XP until it was abandoned, and all 3 naming iterations. It had X11R4 libs as I recall, an ancient version of gcc, and LOTS of trouble just trying to compile a newer gcc for it. I finally gave up, even after having made a web page. 'tar' was actually 'pax' and hard to use, even for uncompressed tarballs. Although I was able to use it for a few things (read: mangle settings and jump through hoops) I decided, after an unnecessarily long period of time, that the limited grep command line options and tarball incompatibilities and inability to even compile basic utilities and libraries just made it IMPOSSIBLE to use. And, as I recall, there was NO ssh nor scp available. And the only editor was 'vi'. yeah.

And of course, I install Cygwin on any windows system I use.for anything more than "just one thing". Downside of Cygwin is it being less convenient than Interix/SFU/SUA for integrating POSIX commands with the windows shell, and running windows programs from within the POSIX shell.

As for win-10-nic and it's subsystem for Linux, I admittedly have NOT tried it. I might have to if I create something that is intended to build everywhere with autotools, just to test it. not looking forward to THAT - I have a Win-10-nic VM set up for testing, but I haven't booted it in MONTHS... and don't want it to download/boot for 2 days just to "update" either.

For 99% of things, Cygwin does it right (even if it fights with windows on things like permission flags). 'rsync' does my backups really well (accounting stuff most of the time). For those few things it's not so good at I can just hack it some other way.

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

The name 'Pengwin' make me facepalm

Calling Windows 'win' was bad enough, implications obvious. I think the marketeers need to stop naming things with terms that sound like someone's making fun of them.

Well, there's this one 'cat video' (sorta) by a guy from Australia that wanted to stop cats from pissing in his back yard. He tried building a "Cat-a-pult" (complete with stuffed animal to demonstrate the concept) but it was a failure, perfect for comedy. And now 'Pengwin' which sounds just like someone is making fun of it, except it's REAL.

'Naut trio successfully dock at ISS after Soyuz rocket goes all the way

all female EVA crew

Interesting in a way. Although I'm really not impressed by things like this (first "identity" to XXX) it does sort of point out that working in space doesn't require "Male upper body strength" and it might be an interesting test to see if women are naturally BETTER at it.

When you compare things like depth perception, upper body strength, fine motor control, and the tendency (or absence therof) to take risks, men and women have different enough characteristics already.

According to THIS men have generally better depth perception, women have generally better night vision. And so on. Several things cited there.

But I suspect that overall, women will perform equally to men in space. Good thing.

Anyway I look forward to the day when it's no big deal that a man, or a woman, or someone of a particular race or religion, does something.