* Posts by bombastic bob

10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

If at first you don't succeed, you may be trying to install that Slow Ring Windows 10 build

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Does anyone bother with Windows anymore ?

"No suppliers have dared suggest they'll force an application that uses Win10 only."

Hear THAT Intuit? Please continue to support windows 7 (k-thx).

Good news to me. I'll effectively 'sandbox' my 7 machine and VMs until doomsday, to avoid Win-10-nic.

YouTube's pedo problem is so bad, it just switched off comments on millions of vids of small kids to stem the tide of vileness

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: what is the solution?

if you go swimming in a sewer, expect to get sick from the diseases found there. And don't complain about the smell, either. You KNEW ahead of time it would stink. It's a SEWER.

I guess the solution is to convince people to stop swimming in sewers... not try and make them SAFER sewers. Or pleasant smelling sewers.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Is this real, or just the latest panic?

“Playing heavy metal records backwards summons the devil”,

PROMISE???

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: One of the YouTube channels I watched got its comments deleted in this manner

A 'blunt instrument' - probably automated moderating, which is likely to be abused (for political purposes) and end up more like this:

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/02/27/facebook-insider-leaks-docs/

I really don't want Google + Youtube + Alphabet going down that same path as Fa[e]cebook with shadow-banning (etc.), or even 'punishment' or 'retaliation', whether or not they've actually done so already.

but, since WHEN did Google/Alphabet/Youtube EVER care about 'false hits' on such things...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Has anyone else noticed that these reccomendation algos are basically cancer?

and these algorithms are being 'gamed' apparently. this is not a surprise. inevitable is more like it.

it's like a new form of steganography... to game the algorithms into revealing the information you wanted to be revealed, but only to those who know the 'code'.

I don't know whether to high-5 these people, or throw rocks at them... because it _IS_ a very clever hack!

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Apparently someone has unmet needs

send them to 4chan for a day...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Went on vacation...

it's probably cheaper to give everyone a "blue can" for recyclables [and ask nicely that they be rinsed, etc.] then hire a few people to separate them at the trash collection facility, recycling stuff and getting money back for it... (that's what San Diego does, and it's my understanding that there's a net profit from plastic+glass bottles, paper+cardboard, and aluminum, or at least a great reduction in cost)

so yeah toss those 'have a deposit' bottles into the blue-can, avoid the inconvenience of taking them to someplace to get the cash back for them, and let the city keep it. they should be happy about that, right, and NOT try to tax sodas out of existence...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: What's wrong with these people?

back in the late 70's I worked out a math equation for a "thigh gap" and then occasionally caused it to print on a Tectronix vector graphics terminal with an attached thermal printer...

it involved a 3rd order equation of the absolute value of 'x', as I recall where the coefficient on x^3 was negative (so it disappeared off the bottom of the screen, like legs...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Power unchecked

_I_ don't want to be ruled by the California legislature, either, but I live here...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Power unchecked

ahem... had the rules been different (popular vs electoral college), the campaign stops and overall strategy would have also been different. Trump would still have won but would have spent more time in high population areas.

Trump efficiently went for the electoral votes. The popular vote didn't matter. So regardless of whether anyone likes it, those are the rules of the game, and you play it by those rules if you want to win.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: Tom Lehrer says it best

I guess the piano-playing professor (apparently the chem prof I had at a university in the SF Bay area knew him personally, before he went on the night club circuit) must have invented 'Rule 34'. It just lacked the more familiar intarweb name, that's all.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

careful of the ice, you might have a Freudian slip

/me wonders what kind of snow-shadow pattern you'd get from a Plymouth Prowler

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

The neighbor doth protest too much, methinks...

And isnt it just like an SJW to see offense where none is even remotely intended? And, THEN, force everyone to comply with the demands according to 'snowflake' sensitivities?

Yeah, the 'snowflake' and 'snow pattern' coincidental comparison did not go unnoticed, either.

icon, because I'm not sure whether to facepalm or just snark

Don't mean to alarm you, but Boeing has built an unmanned fighter jet called 'Loyal Wingman'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

oh come on, wouldn/'t be cool as hell to be the pilot of 3 aircraft at the same time???

I can see that coming - 2 and 3 plane squads, single pilot with high tech helmet and practically plugged into his own aircraft...

the reason you'd want the pilot to control all 3 in coordinated attacks is that the latency of short range radio signals and less likelihood of takeover or jamming (when at close range) gives you a tactical advantage. And you could attack with the bot planes while staying back a bit, too, maybe less likely for the people-plane to get shot down.

Let's try it in video games, first, to see how well it works.

Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Instant Ink?

I don't print things often enough to justify a subscription for supplies. Once or twice a year I spend less than $40 on another HP branded ink cartridge. And I can get them at Target which is about a mile away (or Walmart, if I happen to go there). But the printer is starting to show its age, envelopes are getting stuck and not printing properly (misaligned), the color cartridge is rarely used and I have to take it out and clean it with alcohol all of the time [because it gets clogged up], and so forth. It's always been kinda 'marginal', an all-in-one scanner/fax/copier type. Worked ok at first, then started being finicky within a year after I bought it.

HP should consider looking at their QUALITY first, if they're concerned about lower sales trends.

Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today's computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Huh?

affects hosters - yes a shared host cloud server would be most vulnerable. the problem in this case is that multiple customers share the same CPU. And so that meets one condition, that the code runs on the same CPU. It may even be the same core of a multi-core system that's being shared by a particular VM. And so on.

As I recall, one of the biggest problems with Spectre is the theoretical ability to pass through the host/VM boundary.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Too many cores

not just heat, but the laws of physics, distance being one of them. The physical distance of the wiring between one part of the CPU and another part, or between the CPU+socket and the associated bus [like memory], limits how fast it can possibly go. At ~3Ghz, that distance is (for all practical purposes) less than 1 inch. Keep in mind you need time to send a signal out and get something back, so you double the distance, then factor in settling and response logic times and whatnot and there ya go. If you're lucky you might get away with a longer distance. But the wavelength of a 3Ghz signal is about 10cm. At that distance, an entire clock cycle will have passed before a signal gets from the start to the end of the wire. So the best practical signal length is about 1/4 of that, accounting for logic time on each end, plus some settling time for a pulsed signal. That applies to anything running at 3Ghz. And higher frequencies, of course, are even SHORTER.

The current solution: have a wider bus, more cores, and more levels of cache. Make the cores able to predict branches and hyper-thread and super-scale and do other things to limit "logic time". Otherwise, Mr. Physics makes things impossible.

Heat also being a factor if you reduce distance too much to allow for higher speeds, since with less silicon to transfer this heat to a heat sink of any kind, you could end up with 'hotter localized hot spots' which create entropy and allow "other bad things" to happen, eventually damaging the CPU and rendering it useless... yeah Mr. Physics again.

Then if you reduce voltage even more, you run into the limits of silicon-based [or germanium, or anything else for that matter] materials to act like logic gates, and switching logic levels become less tolerant and settling times may be longer and currents might have to be THAT much higher [rendering the drop in voltage less effective on overall power consumption].

And "idle cores" are more likely the fault of programmers not writing multi-core algorithms, Windows background processes notwithstanding [they're "scampering" instead of "running", i.e. unproductive motion, as far as I'm concerned, so I'd rather have idle cpu cores instead of "doing that"].

Tech industry titans suddenly love internet privacy rules. Wanna know why? We'll tell you

bombastic bob Silver badge
Go

laws of this nature need to be enacted by U.S. Congress

That's what the U.S. Congress is for, interstate commerce and international stuff. Not state legislatures, not government bureaucrats.

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Canonical example of failed demo:

I'm pretty sure I was in the audience for that one. San Diego 1997 PDC?

plug & play, multimedia, web, ActiveX, Windows '98, and NT 4.0 - except for ActiveX, all good

bombastic bob Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Big demo. Should we test?

A demo is an integral part of the development process. A functionality "proof of concept" demo should be a part of the initial planning phase of any 'waterfall' project, even if it's just dummied up for the dog and pony show.

not sure what the article meant by referring to 'that' as a 'a classic waterfall affair', when there's apparently NOTHING to demo progress along the way, for 12 months even!

In just about every project I've worked on, especially my own, there's a demo that must be done early on as a "proof of concept", and some occasional functionality tests to make sure integration is working properly. And in one specific case, a team of 3 (minus me) went off to do something that was initially called 'agile' but was later deemed to be 'cluster-@#$%', and spent a YEAR on something I'd dummied up and demo'd in about 3 weeks... [and my version was used in several subsequent potential customer demos to show what the company was working on].

The 3 man team version was a re-write of what I'd done, with my version as a 'guide' of sorts, and the specs kept changing. They _NEVER_ implemented the functionality in the 3-man version until after one member was lost from the layoff cycle and I was brought in to help finish the thing. That project was always chasing the mayfly of "features" without FIRST getting the core to work.

In any case, what was described in the article is NOT a 'waterfall' process. A 'waterfall' process would focus on the big stuff up front as part of the overall design spec. And, a _PROPERLY_ done waterfall process would have a "dog and pony show ready" demo of the features as a proof of concept. I'd actually use that to test the system along the way, from time to time, swapping in 'real features' for dummy ones as needed to test things. [this differs from 'test driven development' in that I'd just make sure it all fits and works, rather than doing 'unit tests' all of the time and wasting effort re-testing trivial things over and over]

Typically my bosses/managers/customers would want to see this kind of demo from time to time to make sure I was getting work done. It makes them happy to see something, to see "progress", and they usually gave feedback which helps me to make them happy. Then you can tell them 'yes' 'no' 'it will be expensive' or 'it will take too long' and discuss stuff without having to move the target a whole hell of a lot.

Anyway, if the project went on for a year without any kind of dummied-up demo to at LEAST keep the client from asking too many questions, that's not 'waterfall'. that's more like 'poorly managed'. And from what I understand, 'FRagile' projects are well known for 'poorly managed' more often than not.

I would say that 'Agile' should look like 'waterfall' the way I described it, with only occasional 'scrum' meetings and more frequent one-on-one's with the project manager. But just like your average cluster-blank isn't Agile, it isn't waterfall, either.

Fancy a .dev domain? They were $12,500 a pop from Google. Now, $1,000. Soon, $17.50. And you may want one

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: If only....

already do-able. I set up a customer mirror site (for development) once, using site.customer.mydomain.tld [fill in the blanks] on my local LAN, since I have a domain pointing at its DNS. it worked really well for proof of concept stuff, and was easy to develop for. It even had an entry for google's API for various things that were already a part of the site [but of course I had to re-do them because it was a different URL, but no biggee, since it WAS a URL}.

So yeah you can do "sort of" subdomains on your own, from your own "domain.tld", as long as you have easy access to the name server.

the A records kinda look like normal ones...

(in the appropriate file)

domain.tld IN SOA (name server info)

...

thing A ip.add.re.ss

the.thing A ip.add.re.ss

do.the.thing A ip.add.re.ss

and so on. works for me.

yeah "call it Domain Name System (DNS)" <-- was that snark?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Smells like a protection racket

you forgot...

create shadow company to 'domain squat' deep pocket targets

yeah, NOBODY is gonna 'domain squat' any '.dev' names, right?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: .dev! .dev! .dev!

I remember seeing him do that. I think it was the PDC for Win '95, in Dec of 1993 [they rented Disneyland that time, and Penn & Teller did a show sponsored by Motorola for their PPC processors].

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: daffyd.gay

you'd have to use ".alphabet" for all of that, but I think Google's owning company will want that one...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: HTTPS?

ack on the "tollbooth" part - of COURSE the IANA and ICANN "recommend" using ONLY registered TLDs, even for your LAN's RFC1918 address space, and (apparently) no self-signed certs for HTTPS, either.

(next they'll somehow invalidate 'letsencrypt.org' if they get a chance, and follow the money on why)

*SCAM* and *TOLLBOOTH* indeed...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: so confusing

'.crap' - you hit on a good idea for "guaranteed will never be a TLD" TLDs.

Now which one should I pick... (run it in parallel with my LAN's DNS, which has used '.local' for nearly 2 decades on Micro-shaft's recommendation, at least until I decide to switch it over for realz)

basically, pick the one thing that political correctness will ALWAYS demand not be used. well, you'd think ".local" would be like that 20 years ago, right?

/me calls for an RFC that explicitly stats which TLDs will NEVER be used, and declare them usable by private address spaces.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: so confusing

there REALLY DOES need to be a designated TLD for LANs. '.local" used to be the one to use until it was taken over by mDNS [without a lot of warning, in fact]. ".localhost" is by definition a 127/8 domain.

As for '.dev' as long as it works with 'letsencrypt.org' and self-signed certs, should be fine, right?

/me points out that back in the late 90's, Microsoft was RECOMMENDING that you use '.local' with windows domains... and my FreeBSD-based DNS has been using a '.local' domain for the LAN since I moved my server to a FreeBSD server, back in the early noughties...

/me still uses '.local' as I don't give a rip about mDNS and just disable it for certain linux distros so it won't cause me trouble

post-note - did a tiny bit of digging, found this 'unofficial' list that's not generally recognized...

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6762#appendix-G

OK, your boss allegedly called you a lazy n*****, promoted the person you trained ahead of you and paid you less, but you can't PROVE it's racism, Facebook says

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: RE: """prove""" that it is racism

Blazing Saddles - making fun of racism by characters being blatantly racist.

"That's Hedley!"

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: RE: """prove""" that it is racism

yeah, proving racism, or any OTHER kind of discrimination, is difficult. At best you can show "being treated unfairly" which is difficult to show as racism unless there are many others treated like that.

Maybe the bosses just didn't like THAT guy. Assuming he wasn't an irritating activist that went around with the proverbial chip on shoulder, and an attitude of "you're discriminating" at every opportunity (there ARE people like that, "quota hires" they're often jokingly referred to as), then it's unfortunate that reasonable doubt works against you.

On the other hand, I've been discriminated against also, for different reasons (and in one specific case, it was resolved when I went through proper channels). All it takes is "that one person" who wields power and does NOT like you. Or maybe it's just some jerk in the office that's easily irritated (by you) who CONSTANTLY complains to the boss, about YOU. And if that jerk happens to schmooze with the bosses all of the time... that's the kind of interoffice politics that makes me NOT want to work for large companies at any rate.

There are SO many ways to discriminate, some of them "soft". Age. Sex. Politics. Race. Lifestyle. Whatever. The good looking or even the ugly one. Someone who's perceived as fat, or skinny, or sweats too much, or eats too many onions. And there's the really smart guy who keeps saying 'no' all the time, instead of going with the flow and jumping when the boss says jump, and letting bad things happen with a shoulder shrug and "not my fault" attitude (the 'no' guy usually gets enemies, the 'shrug' guy keeps his job...). And so on.

Discrimination takes many forms, but if there's a racist/sexist/bigot/whatever in the building, there will be more than one observer, and not just at the work place. It'll be hard to prove, but still possible. Bigotry is kind of like a lifestyle. It'll show up in LOTS of places.

All I want to happen out of this is for the truth to be known.

You're on a Huawei to Hell, US Sec State Pompeo warns allies: Buy Beijing's boxes, no more intelligence for you

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: But why are they inspecting the source code?

NOTE: if it's GPL'd, you should have the source and the ability to flash your own binary built from it

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: If everything's encrypted, what's the problem?

even when you encrypt with SSL, if you can sniff the opening sequence (DH key exchange specifically) you can decrypt the traffic. It would still take a little bit of work, but you can see examples of this happening in Wireshark, when you view an https stream [for example].

So yeah, a router that can capture the entire stream could render encryption useless. The only way around this would be to have a secure tunnel using known certificates on both ends, along with some kind of randomly generated salt, and no decryptable key exchange up front [PGP actually does something like this already, as a good example]. But that would be subject to a form of crypto analysis where you study a large amount of traffic to crack the certs. So nothing is perfect if you don't rotate the keys every time, and so on.

that being said, a possibly 'more secure' PGP for long distance traffic would be a good way to ensure good encryption, across 'teh intarwebs' and various network backbones and so forth, but once it gets on the LAN at its destination, it's probably gonna get hoovered up if spyware [soft, firm, or hard] exists in the routers and PCs.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Protecting their own industry AND their involuntary intel sources

from article: "less than convinced there is a threat to national security"

from post: "As the NSA is known to be bugging US-bult servers and routers before delivery for years now"

I'm a bit skeptical of both claims, that either the USA or Huawei are adding spy-hardware [or firmware] to things being sold to governments. And I would guess that governments should consider an anti-"Not Invented Here" policy if they want REAL security.

So i totally get it if the US gummint wants ONLY U.S. gear and software/firmware from approved vendors in government information roles. That's just prudent.

The jury is still out on the Bloomberg article, though. Why has there been SILENCE on that?

Unearthed emails could be smoking gun in epic GDPR battle: Google, adtech giants 'know they break Euro privacy law'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Solution is clear

"static non-obtrusive ads that didn't annoy people"

exactly!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

"people can put as much detail on there as they wish"

There are already marketing-related web sites that offer discounts for stuff if you participate according to their rules, and so it's not a new idea. A lot of people would complete marketing surveys and allow their purchases to be tracked in order to get the discounts. But it should ALWAYS be voluntary, above board, and in compliance with laws SUCH AS the GDPR.

And if they're being sneaky about it, they have something to hide.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Ads?

in THIS case, the applications had 'infected' code within them that downloaded ads without the end user's knowledge in order to (apparently) prop up ad revenue. So ad blockers would not stop it.

As for ads in general, just block script and 3rd party cookies, and let the non-scripty non-video non-audio ones just display as-is and you can just ignore them.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Death to advertisers!

yeah as fun as it is to point a finger and demand DEATH TO ADVERTISERS I think it's just the *EVIL* advertisers who deserve it... trackers in particular.

(simple non-moving no-audio ads without tracking, scripting, web bugs, or other nefarious practices, are just fine with me. the rest need to be KILLED to DEATH by BURNING with FIRE)

Welcome to the sunlit uplands of HTTP/2, where a naughty request can send Microsoft's IIS into a spin

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: It's a bug ...

I was looking to snark all over it, but after reading the article, it's like "meh".

Glad it's fixed, anyway.

It's not like that 'Code Red' thing was, from (nearly) a couple o' decades ago, at any rate. That thing went unpatched for YEARS by end-users and created a LOT of intarweb traffic...

Oracle: Major ad scam 'DrainerBot' is rinsing Android users of their battery life and data

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: No Duh!

yeah, the whole "ads in apps" thing _IS_ pretty nauseating...

The 'droid sandbox is imperfect, people allow permissions for things they don't need "that" for, and so on.

Recently a relative got a 'droid phone. I went over the settings and SPECIFICALLY disabled location data for this one art application. Why did an ART application need LOCATION DATA??? yeah. It works fine without it, but it nagged to re-enable it the first time it was loaded after changing the settings...

NASA boffins show Moon water supply could – er, this can't be right? – come from the Sun

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Finding more hydrogen

your calculations are correct. the only problem is getting the density of the incoming hydrogen to be high enough. I think they'd have much better luck if they a) used solar wind capture thingies to make hydrogen gas, and b) did the reaction with the oxygen in the rocks separately.

So you grind the silicon dioxide or other oxygen-bearing rock into powder, and with the right conditions, a proper catalyst, and maybe some electricity...

Otherwise simply exposing rock to solar wind won't have enough surface area to provide a decent reaction rate, AND you'd just lose all of the generated water vapor out into the vacuum of space.

Capturing hydrogen, however, might be possible with a large enough collector, electrostatic and electromagnetic containment, etc. and would be useful for a LOT of things besides 'making water'.

[Look mom, I made water on the moon!]

Go, go, Gadgets Boy! 'Influencer' testing 5G for Vodafone finds it to be slower than 4G

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

"If it wasn't tested on a 5G phone then what's the point?"

Dr. Heisenberg... Dr. Heisenberg... Calling Dr. Heisenberg...

(advice to the testers: next time you measure something, make sure it doesn't significantly alter the results)

Bored bloke takes control of British Army 'psyops' unit's Twitter

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: So...

or password = semprini

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Should change its name

86th brigade would've been funnier

(sorry about that, chief)

well if they find the guy and arrest him, at least he had some fun, as opposed to some poor schlub that reported a bug through proper channels and got nailed for hacking them...

Germany, US staffers to be hit hardest as SAP starts shedding 4,400 bodies

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

experienced employees can't really be forced to get a pay cut "just to stay", yet inexperienced 'fresh meat' can be exploited more easily than those who are experienced. Or at least, I hope that's NOT what's really happening...

[it wouldn't be the first time if a large company lays off its experienced staff, then hires all new people with less experience at significantly lower wages]

But yeah, if this is the case of "they have the WRONG experience for the new position" then I'd also question why they don't just do internal training and retain existing employees for "the new thing"...

Visited the Grand Canyon since 2000? You'll have great photos – and maybe a teensy bit of unwanted radiation

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: when he wore

could've been worse, if it had involved chocolate flavored laxative made into a hot beverage...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

I was there about a decade ago. maybe got a millirem or two

You know the drill: SAP has asked Joe Public to name Munich arena so go forth and be very silly

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: I hate "naming rights"

a) Uber-thingy

b) SAPfest

c) Bitte-Munchin'

d) Johan Gambolputty [etc.] von Hautkopft of Ulm

e) Semprini

coat, please...

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Have you ever heard a story about something you did told second-hand?

Probably the best example...

When I was at U.S. Navy Nuclear Power School (Orlando, FL) back in the early 80's, there were a lot of officers (as well as us enlisted types) at the school, in 2 different buildings. Between the officer's and enlisted buildings, there was a large circular sidewalk. One day the entire officer class was walking on the circle, and they deliberately went "the other way" so they wouldn't have to salute anyone. Now the military REQUIRES enlisted people to salute officers, and the officers are supposed to salute back.

Well, I was walking 'that way' and needed to walk around the circle to get to where I was going. So I went along the same path as the entire officer class, and basically SALUTED THEM ALL, with a nice fat grin on my face. Yeah, it was kind of a joke.

A couple of years later one of the officers (being Engineering Officer of the Watch) was telling a story in the maneuvering area (where the engine room control panels are, including reactor control) and I was the reactor operator, and he was telling this story about how "some enlisted guy" [or similar] caused his entire class to have to free up their saluting arm and salute him.

"Hey that was me!"

In any case he didn't appreciate the joke, even a couple of years later. Nothing ever came of it, of course, since I didn't do anything "wrong" but it was typical of me to be "overly military" as a form of humor.

Related, whenever I spoke over the P.A. system (the shutdown reactor operator had supervisory authority over the engine room most of the time while in port) I always used a 'near gravel' voice, spoken close to the microphone, in a manner similar to Officer Jack Friday from Dragnet. One officer commented that it sounded "overly official". And of course, it did. But then again, who's gonna get you in trouble for being "too military" ??? [and it was always clear and easy to understand]

icon, because, devilish humor

Down productivity tools: Microsoft Teams takes a Monday tumble

bombastic bob Silver badge
FAIL

~The Cloud~

It's SO overrated!

How about let's get back to p2p communication and local applications and local storage? And maybe do a periodic zip or tarball and put THAT online someplace, for backup...

After outrage over Chrome ad-block block plan, Google backs away from crippling web advert, content filters

bombastic bob Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: "Do no Evil" or "Do no progression"?

usually, I prefer something that lacks "feature creep", i.e. the developers focus on PERFORMANCE instead of "new, new, shiny" and PISSING! ME! OFF! with features like Australis 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE everywhere...

"let's compile everything to machine language", if it provides PERFORMANCE, sounds good to me.

What I don't want: another thing WORSE than the BRIGHT BLUE ON BLINDINGLY BRIGHT WHITE 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE look that has been CRAMMED UP OUR ASSES for the last several years...

/me still uses an ESR version of firefox that pre-dates 57 with the "classic Firefox" plugins, on Linux and FreeBSD. And I don't surf the web from windows. So there ya go. no need for 'feature creep'.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Who are we kidded by?

Modifying the browser extension APIs in an underhanded way that seeks to underhandedly remove choice and freedom from the customer base will ONLY create a vacuum, into which a competing product can jump.

The bar is higher now, because of all of the "scripty" crap, and it's not just HTML any more, it's HTML5 and backward compatibility and DOM and plugins and who can imagine what else...

But I've been *VERY* irritated by the directions that browsers are heading into. I think that a 'webkit' kind of approach is the correct one, in which the front end (like Midori as one example) uses a standard engine (like webkit, for example) which is adapted for your GUI toolkit (like gtk or Qt, for example), to run on "your platform".

So I should be able to use "my front end" which is 3D skeuomorphic and has built-in 'NoScript' and URL black-listing capabilities, for example, as a WRAPPER around "the rest of those things", to provide a competing browser that has some straightforward ad-blocking capability. And the vast majority of the security-related problems would be in code I don't have to maintain.

yeah, just need $$$ so I can devote time to it...