Posts by bombastic bob

NASA budget shock: Climate studies? GTFO. We're making the Moon great again, says Trump

Re: Not what they say, what they do

"Like most Republican leaders Trump is utterly convinced of the dangers of climate change"

No, you're wrong in your assumptions about Trump, and only a handful of Republo-Crats have actually swallowed the koolaid on man-made-<whiny-voice>ClimateChange</whiny-voice>

Trump said he had an "open mind". I know that global-warming-fascist types assume that means "swallows their propaganda and asks for another" but his governance obviously says the opposite. Top 10 results in an online search confirm this.

And why do you assume that "fusion experiments in space" mean shipping ITER there? I think your vision on what is possible may be a bit too narrow. In space, you can cross multiple proton beams without containment, as one possible research example. The biggest problem with fusion (in my opinion) is the containment. The second is the confinement. Eliminating containment problems gives you more options for researching how to do the confinement better, and a LOT of things have probably NOT been tried, and don't require "what you said" to be launched into orbit.

Anyway, that's just ONE thing that space helps with.

I'm also looking forward to a 2001-like space station, with multiple gravity levels for various purposes.

But yeah you have to think out of the box for some of this stuff. being stuck in the mindset of what everyone else is doing at the moment doesn't give you a whole lot of freedom for how to do things.

Re: We don't need no education

well, just to explain things better: too many federal gummint things are replicated and/or disorganized. Also, there's a general move to eliminate the Department of Education entirely, leaving education up to the states and local gummints, which is how things used to be. With education spending being the HIGHEST IN THE WORLD, and per-dollar performance some of the LOWEST, I'd say that gummint inefficiency has simply inflated the bureaucracy, and inflated the overall cost, while SIMULTANEOUSLY making things WORSE.

Although I'd like to see more science and technology in education, a "top down from the fed" approach isn't working. THAT is why it's being dropped [and not to make kids 'do without' because they won't].

The ISS, although very useful for a lot of things, isn't really "state of the art". It's tested a number of very good ideas, one of which is the inflatable module.

OK - now we get to look and see what Boeing, SpaceX, and others are considering to replace the ISS. We just got a new 'heavy lift' rocket from SpaceX [still more work to do no doubt but a great start], and NASA will be shifting their fix to a LUNAR SPACE STATION, which is a hell of a lot more interesting.

As for climate change - it's not "climate change" that's the hoax (climate changes ALL of the time, like ice ages and warming periods), it's the idea that HUMANS are causing it via CO2 "pollution", which is not only bat-guano LUDICROUS, it's CLUELESS with respect to chemistry, physics, other areas of science, common sense, and the well-known observations of solar cycles and normal climate behavior.

Not even bothering with the [obvious] point of its IR absorption spectrum, CO2 is such a small amount of the atmosphere (0.04%) , it could be as high as 2% without a (significant) negative impacting on animal life, and an increase in its concentration stimulates plant and algae growth in order to increase its depletion rate (so it's at an equilibrium). Maybe we just do NOT need "rocket science" devoting itself to chasing the tail of climate change politics.

/me points out that in a space station, CO2 levels will probably exceed 1% all of the time, because you need enough concentration for the scrubbers to work efficiently. You just need to keep it in the low 1% range or everybody will get headaches and become really grumpy... (my submarine experience tells me that).

And while they're looking into a Lunar Orbit station, maybe they can work on solving the ENERGY REQUIREMENTS for a Lunar station, maybe refueling rockets for the return trip to earth with Lunar-minded materials, and so on. Wouldn't that be worthwhile? And consider fusion reactor research in space, where they can afford to take bigger risks... and have a natural vacuum to assist them.

Developing Fusion power would eliminate the need for all of this CO2 nonsense, anyway, so it SHOULD be the focus, but it's not, because, politics. Good riddance to THAT at NASA for the next few years, at any rate.

Still not on Windows 10? Fine, sighs Microsoft, here are its antivirus tools for Windows 7, 8.1

Re: Supported until January of 2020.

and after Windows 8.1 is no longer supported, what then? [see earlier post regarding FUD/rumor]

Re: Letter To Redmond...

"Dev work is difficult enough without having the OS operate like a moving Target!"

exactly. when a project cycle is YEARS long, you can't jump on "new, shiny" you have to code for what's available NOW.

related, rumors suggest the possible abandonment of the 'Windows API' (formerly known as Win32 API), thereby forcing devs to use UWP and code for Win-10-nic only. They're probably just FUD, but I dunno, Micro-shaft has done similarly bold [read: boneheaded] moves...

Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

how about convert your existing Win10 into a VM [for those things that may require it in the future] and THEN UPgrade to 7?

a CLUE has been GOT!

You know, I just see this as a positive sign. It makes me smile! Well, just a little...

It's official: .corp, .home, .mail will never be top-level domains on the 'net

Re: I use .internal

'.internal' sounds like a winner - I'd like to see that listed in an RFC alongside a few others.

There are dedicated fake domains for OTHER things, why not a SPECIFIC one for private LAN use? Yeah, THAT is the point!

/me wonders if all of the ".profanity" and/or scatalogical TLDs could become 'private LAN' naming candidates

"It's not difficult - don't try to use domain names you don't own"

And pay the "internet domain TLD tax" while we're at it. for every private LAN in the world.

NO!

there NEEDS to be "something we can use" for non-public naming. THAT is the point!

as an alternative to '.local'

prior to the related RFC6762 publishing, ".local" was being recommended (by Microsoft, among others) to be used for 'local LAN DNS' kinds of things. I've been using it for ~2 decades. [and I don't care much about mDNS].

Post RFC6762 it's officially reserved for mDNS. Wheee.

NOW we have others, in particular '.home' '.corp' and '.mail'.

Will there be an RFC or similar document to CODIFY and STANDARDIZE these so that we don't get a "whoops, SURPRISE!" later on???

UK ICO, USCourts.gov... Thousands of websites hijacked by hidden crypto-mining code after popular plugin pwned

"I think the point is you shouldn't need JavaScript in a web browser in the first place."

I really wish I could do this 100% of the time. But then, if the customer needs 'google maps' embedded on the page, for whatever reason, you can just have a *teensy* bit of script to support it.

So I guess I'd re-state that: "You shouldn't need any more than a tiny bit of JavaScript, if any at all, in a web browser in the first place"

Re: Don't load third-party scripts

" those who actually write websites"

or worse, those tasked with fixing someone else's crap-web-code that uses a bizarre dependency tree of embedded script...

Sometimes the simplest solution is to include the script elements yourself, within the page where it's used, via copy/pasta, and then use 'STYLE' assignments in the HTML tags where appropriate. But, then again, I _HAND_ _CODE_ all of my HTML, and *despise* those dependency trees... and it was SO amazing to see that my changes were correctly reflected on the phones and slabs (when I did it _MY_ way) where they'd cached the included script files unnecessarily and there was no obvious way to flush the cache and get them to re-load... stupid browsers not re-loading the included script. The PC browsers re-loaded it, why can't the Android devices?

yeah - script dependencies NOT working consistently.

Re: Don't load third-party scripts

6. Come, look at this marvelous view from the ginormous 3rd floor office window...

Re: Don't load third-party scripts

"3. Avoid scripts entirely."

you need to sell this better.

"Just about every non-trivial website on the planet loads in resources provided by other companies and organizations"

"Another good demonstration of why ad blockers and script blockers are essential."

And a reason to apply a CLUEBAT to those web site authors that propagate this nonsense, who seem to have NO clue at all...

Are you an open-sorcerer or free software warrior? Let us do battle

what open-source became after the ideologues showed up

deserves its own topic, I think.

Agreed on BSD license, and MIT license. Both were conceived on college campi (pseudo-plural of campususes, and crymanthesums, and put 'em in a vase - gumby florist)

Icon, because, BSD

Re: GPL is not freedom at all.

@AC "whoever believes open source is the future, is just turning the clock back"

you almost had my upvote until I read that line...

FSF is a good idea, but carries too much baggage.

The point of the article is that OSI grew out of FSF's "restrictive" view on how to make software open. 'The Suits' made it more compatible with business. Hence, it has money and marketing behind it. And, it's all good.

I've mentioned this before - I like to 'dual license' anything I consider to be a worth-while project. That way if you want a BSD-like license, you can do that. Or if you need GPL for some reason, you can do that. Or, in some cases, to make customers happy [when I copy/pasta code from an open source project I wrote into a customer project to save time] I add a 3rd option of "use without a license by author's permission". Everybody wins.

Re: What's in it for the user?

"why should the user care about the freedom to modify"

most users don't. however, a company that ties its success to others' efforts is going to want to be able to protect itself, should the author die or (worse) get sued out of existence. Open Source does a VERY good job in mitigating that kind of risk.

Re: blacklash against GPL viral clause

"More important for everyone concerned is, I think, the potential aspect of liability despite what all the licences say."

Exactly. Too many are more than willing to throw sueballs, in a "biting the hand" moment, because they are the same ones who would complain about a gift. "That gift horse has bad teeth, get me another".

I think we've all seen enough well-written license disclaimers to pretty much know how to word them for our own personally contributed stuff. If it weren't for those "sewers" (sue-ers) the world would be a much better place, perhaps with a bit more "please" and "thank you" thrown in.

Re: Sorry...

"For me, Free means it costs nothing."

As in free beer.

The problem I have with 'Free', as defined by the FSF, isn't "free" at all. If something is truly "free" as in freedom, you'll be able to do whatever you want with it. GPL licenses, in the name of 'freedom', put a whole lot of restrictions on what you can do with something. I wouldn't call that "free".

A proper "free as in freedom" license protects the author from getting sueballs thrown at him because his 'free' product didn't perform properly or allegedly broke something. Anything beyond that is too much.

I'll avoid making the left vs right comparison on the concept of 'freedom'. I supposed you could call FSF vs OSI as "left vs right" though. And the obligatory civil war begins!

Boffins upload worm's brain into a computer, teach it tricks

The worm is the spice - the spice is the worm!

I figured I'd have to give a Dune reference, before someone else beats me to it.

Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers

Re: my parents were in the film business

"The insulting anti-piracy messages on bought video disks"

The U.S. release of 'Excel Saga' had some fun with this. They integrated the anti-piracy warning with the evil organization 'Across' and its dictatorial leader, 'Ilpalazzo' with punishment involving being tarred and feathered, and something to do with a depraved walrus. Or something like that.

There's a reference to it here: http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Digital_Piracy_Is_Evil

Re: Oh my...

in the 80's I deliberately purchased vinyl, and then [when brand new] went straight to tape with it using high quality C90 cassettes, typically one album per side. Then play 'wherever' like in the car, or with a walkman.

Records hardly ever got damaged that way. I sometimes wish I still had some of my old vinyl. For various reasons, it went away... [I don't even have a working record player any more]

Re: CDs ... bloody expensive

"Record Executives: Killing Music, underpaying Artists."

Except for brief periods with artists like Muse, most "modern" music just plain sucks.

The music executives MARKET what they WANT you to hear until you tolerate listening to it, then OVERPLAY it until you "like" it. They've been doing this since 70's DISCO. Thankfully the 80's was a time when the 'one hit wonder' bands PROVED that real innovation still existed. Also were one-hit wonders in the 50's and 60's. But that kind of thing is VERY hard for "the suits" to wrap their claws around, as it's unpredictable.

Instead, they DRIVE "the trend" with their somewhat evil marketing strategy. it deliberately picks the winners and losers, more or less, and finances the losers on the backs of those who are unlucky enough to have a sucky contract. Well known artists and bands who were so exploited: The Beatles, Smashing Pumpkins, and Prince (who had to become 'The artist formerly known as Prince' for a while). There are many others.

I have no love at all for RIAA or any of the OTHER DMCA-wielding media-fascists. When I hear some of the CRAP that seems to get airplay, I have to wonder "how come you're not playing MY stuff, which I see as being a WHOLE lot better than much of _THAT_". OK I know the reason why these contracts go to others, much of which has more to do with the way Harvey Weinstein used to do business in Hollyweird than it does with REAL talent or good quality stuff: When THEY are "in control", THEY 'make or break you'. It's that simple. And so, to 'make it big', your forced to play THEIR game THEIR way, and it STINKS.

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

"C-- is already taken, it's what I call Microsoft's C#"

I've always called it "C-pound". It's what I want Micro-shaft to do with it. Like sand.

Java, on the other hand, has some uses (and no ".Not"). But it _still_ suffers from that bass-ackwards way of thinking that's "all too common" in the world of alleged "object-oriented" lingos...

Oracle's desire to stranglehold Java was actually _CAUSED_ by Micro-shaft's attempt to embrace/extend/extinguish it, which THEN gave [illegitimate] birth to C-pound and then J-pound... (does anyone even USE J-pound? The Wikipedia article says it's no longer supported)

one online page suggests that C-pound was originally C++++ but was hard to type in, and so the 4 '+' became the '#' because it kinda looks like 4 plus signs...

Re: Lame name options IMHO

"I would have chose a coffee theme like cappuccino."

Call it 'Joe', and you can keep the 'J' in every potentially affected acronym.

Now I'm gonna go and get me a nice cuppa Joe...

No sh*t, Sherlock! Bloke suspected of swallowing drug stash keeps colon schtum for 22 DAYS

Re: The Assagne option

"Have they offered him Ferrero Rocher?"

Or perhaps disguise some of THESE as Ferrero Rocher

I once heard a rumor of someone getting hot chocolate made from that stuff, as a bad prank/retaliation. It's why you don't anger the people who prepare your food.

(grabbing coat)

You can resurrect any deleted GitHub account name. And this is why we have trust issues

Re: It's Not GitHub's fault

"The fault is dynamically loading code from random folks accounts on GitHub rather than from a proper repository and then hosting either in a CDN you control, or within the application itself"

people who do that probably [ab]use ginormous libraries that they don't understand, doing a zillion things they do not need, and polluting the dependencies with unnecessary download requirements, both on the client end AND on the server end. My $.10 anyway.

I prefer copy/pasta the relevant parts and then maintain it as part of my OWN repo. Proper acknowledgements and licensing as needed.

(why do I need to load BLOATWARE when all I want is what 'left-thingy' does...)

Re: 'a bare minimum would be forking'

"Something severely lacking in these Agile DevOps days, it would seem."

ya think?

Re: 'a bare minimum would be forking'

"Merging is difficuuuuuuult"

no, it's not. do a snapshot and merge to the master branch (on the original) with a pull request from time to time. Easy.

Or you can fork the repo, fix things on your end, and THEN do a pull request into the original repo [which I did a while back with the Arduino project, as an example]. It's the best way to contribute. It's all well documented on github.

Re: What am I missing here?

"If you use a third party module you download it, put it under your source code control, and be prepared to maintain it yourself."

Or, just fork it.

Former HP workers one small step closer to throwing one giant sueball at tech goliath

Re: Not just HP

"pulls the same stunt"

exactly - age discrimination, ESPECIALLY in a society whose average age is significantly increasing, is a *MAJOR* future problem.

The only reason I can think of that might motivate people into "getting rid of" older people is the desire to hire 'cheaper' starving grads with way less experience. But you get what you pay for when you do that.

Seriously, I plan on working until I'm dead. If being over 'nn' years old screws your employment opportunity, something's wrong. I would think that capability would outweigh any other factor, in a SANE world anyway, and knowing which button to press often saves MANY hours of experimenting to find a solution (particularly one that's typically obvious to an experienced, OLDSTER employee).

damn younguns, OFF MY LAWN!

US Senate mulls giving Huawei and ZTE the Kaspersky treatment

It's really "N.I.H."

"equipment not having the approved NSA backdoor"

NO, no, no. Gummint doesn't WANT any back doors! Not for THEIR stuff, anyway. [what the REST of us end up with, that's completely different].

What it _REALLY_ is: a 'Not Invented Here' thing. At least, for equipment used in secure systems.

That way U.S. laws can apply, and prevent manufacturers from sneaking in any kind of spying (or back doors) that create security problems. There could be the threat of jail time and/or YUGE fines for breaking security relied on by gummint systems "by design".

Re: &genie=1 (amongst others)

Netgear has its OWN problems, *ARROGANCE* being one of them. They used to claim that their multi-antenna single-radio 802.11g solution from ~2005 was 'MIMO'. [what a joke!]

/me points out that MIMO requires multiple radios and multipath (and the '802.11N' spec).

I wouldn't recommend any NETGEAR solution for gummints, either. Yeah, they'd probably go with Cisco...

Wish you could log into someone's Netgear box without a password? Summon a &genie=1

"with remote configuration access enabled"

THERE's your problem. That, and enabling UPNP. *SLAP* *SLAP* *SLAP* with a ginormous green onion... bad, no biscuit!

Intel adopts Orwellian irony with call for fast Meltdown-Spectre action after slow patch delivery

Re: No replacement

"As most Core and Xeon processors are in sockets, it would be possible to do a one-for-one replacement"

last I checked, an older (replacement) 'Core Quad' costs more than Intel's faster/better "latest" quad-core CPU. Economy of scale and all of that.

swapping out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU together might actually cost less.

Re: so those of us..

"is this the punishment for owning old bit perfectly capable kit?"

Yes, the WinTel Cartel _WILL_ force compliance on "bleeding edge Intel CPUs" and Win-10-nic

icon, because, obvious (snark) conspiracy theory

Why is Bitcoin fscked? Here are three reasons: South Korea, India... and now China clamps down on cryptocurrencies

Re: In a heating dominated climate

makes Antarctica the best place to mine Bitcoin

Bitcoin is so thinly traded

ew. that makes it even WORSE.

Bzzzt! If you're in one of these four British cities, that was a drone

Drones are LOUD

A while ago I saw what appeared to be a 'google earth' drone taking photos of the neighborhood. It made one HELL of a noise doing it, like a swarm of angry giant wasps or something similar.

Flying a few hundred feet in the air, it was noisy enough that I went outside to see what the hell was making all of that noise, looked up, and saw it hovering in one spot for a bit, then move a couple o' hundred feet, then hover for a bit more, etc.. yes, when it was near my house, I gave it the finger. Hopefully showed up in the google earth photo, ha ha ha.

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

Re: Cupertino's highly secretive idiot-tax operations

actually, Mac userland is a LOT like FBSD (seeing as it was forked from 5.x). And there are 'mac ports' available, last I checked. A few times I've helped mac users with shell things because of that.

Re: Yeah

"Of all brands, FIAT ? ROFL ..."

could've been worse - like a Yugo... (THERE's an oxymoronic car name!)

Re: Leak?

or, to get the open source community involved in scrutinizing your stuff for vulnerabilities...

Re: Yet another example

"Windows and now iOS, Linux is next."

subtle. nice! beer for you!

"You probably also enjoy Mrs Browns Boys and piss yourself laughing at crazy frog videos"

Ring, ding-ding-ding, ding, ding,

Ring, ding-ding-ding, bim-bim-bim

...

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

Re: Could be a positive thing

"I'm assuming the Resume Assistant is going to genericize your resume to make it as machine-readable as possible."

Doubtful. It's most likely going to focus on the kinds of things you do NOT want highlighted in your resume like favoring education over actual experience, or work history over your demonstrable skill set. it's the kind of things that H.R. weenies focus on, which is NOT the kinds of things that IT managers focus on.

How "they" read resumes:

H.R. weenie - it has the right key words and tricky phrases in the right order where I don't have to search for them, with education prominently placed at the top of the list so we can filter on it

IT Manager - this guy knows how to code, understands what a network is, has xx years of experience doing things similar to what we want, and isn't just some new graduate that specialized in "academia" instead of "getting work done on time and under budget"

It's an ongoing problem to find a creative way of getting the hiring manager to look at your resume instead of the typical clueless H.R. weenie that thinks 'networking' is using people you know to get a job. Of course that last part helps, too, but isn't what the job requirements in IT meant...

And it's a fair bet that Microshaft's HR department isn't much better than any OTHER megacorp when it comes to filtering resumes for hiring managers...

Re: Let the Slurpware games begin...

I propose flooding their data collection efforts with boatloads of bullcrap. See if they can filter it. Sit back with some popcorn and a beer to watch the results if they can't...

What did we say about Tesla's self-driving tech? SpaceX Roadster skips Mars, steers to asteroids

has there ever been a coal-fired car? I am pretty sure that the Stanley Steamer was designed to run on kerosene. (a web page suggests it could burn kerosene, gasoline, or a mixture of the two).

queue 'Lost in Space' theme

or maybe the 'Major Tom Revisited' from the 80's

was that in the selection on the Tesla convertible's dashboard? (still playing the David Bowie 'Major Tom' probably, still appropriate)

Assange fails to make skipped bail arrest warrant vanish

Re: @ Ben ... A Flagrant Rotten Denial of Justice and a Blot in the UKGBNI Landscape

" the word is regardless not irregardless"

one of the many common grammar screwups, like using "alot" instead of "a lot", or "could care less" instead of "couldn't care less". Irregardless. heh.