Posts by bombastic bob

Iran intelligence backdoored US bank, airport, software outfit networks

Re: Iran is no pushover

I fart in your general direction over THAT remark.

So far 90% of their missiles, 85% of their drones, and 30 of their ships have been destroyed. Let's see who outlasts whom...

Re: "The backdoor was signed with a certificate..."

then what's the point in forcing open source devs to identify themselves and sign their software?

SIR, *YOU* are making WAY TOO MUCH SENSE!

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

Re: Another war for oil

Iran does not need another Shah. They need some kind of republic, whether a pure one or a constitutional monarchy or some hybrid. The Shah's son would be viewed as an opportunistic usurper of power if he did not immediately abdicate leadership once elections are held, and thereby turn over power completely. If he did this he MIGHT unite them. Otherwise letting him try to lead might make things WORSE, MORE divided than if he stayed out of it.

Re: Another war for oil

Middle East wars are as old as Egypt, maybe older. The earliest Bible history reference would probably be around 1500 BC (Exodus being 1440-1400 BC), even earlier if you count Sodom and Gomorrah and other Abrahamic wars (around 2000BC as reported by Grok). Not sure if the Sumerians have anything earlier. Grok reports the lowest layers in Jericho when they first built major fortifications at around 2000BC. Earlier fortifications date to around 8000 BC. Grok reports skeletal evidence of projectile injuries dating to around 11,000–12,000 BC.

Re: Another war for oil

Americans don't seem to have a plan for what to do when their missiles have all been fired.

I expect this is NOT true. Please do not interpret Trump's obvious evasion of "announcing/revealing our plans" as "not having one". Trump probably has a plan every time he takes a crap. And he NEVER tells anyone what the plan is unless they need to know. My Bombastic Opinion, anyway.

If you want to know how Trump thinks, read Sun Tzu's "Art of War".

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

The UK has been a US proxy since the 1940s

as a left-pondian I have to COMPLETELY disagree with that, and acknowledge that it's insulting to the UK.

The problem is UK''s current PM (In My Bombastic Opinion), NOT the citizens nor the nation itself. But as Iran busily attacks everyone else in the world as if the world is against them, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and nobody is on their side. Even China is staying out of this one. I really think UK's PM Starmer will come on board soon. We'll be ok.

Funny thing the Iranian ships (now all turned into scrap metal and sent to Davy Jones' locker) incorporated a LOT of CCP China tech. So in other words, like Ukraine against Russia, it's a test of US and NATO tech against CCP China's tech, and they're not doing so well.

That torpedo shot out in the Indian Ocean was priceless! Especially because I spent nearly 4 years on an attack sub, and I was more than familiar with capabilities of Mk-48 torpedoes (existed since the 1970's), and they now have the designation 'ADCAP' for advanced capabilities... meaning the 1980's torpedoes did well, but THESE are even BETTER!

Icon 'cause that's really what is at stake and we WILL make sure Iran NEVER has one!

Starmer will soon get on board, and I think it will be obvious why: We do NOT want a repeat of Gulf War II. We're gonna destroy all of their war tech, preventing them from threatening ANYONE for ANY reason, and pave the way for Iranian people to make their OWN revolution happen. The "nation building" crap that kept us in Afghanistan for 20 years is UNACCEPTABLE! Iranians will have to build their OWN nation after we completely destroy the regime and the army that OPPRESSES them.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Re: create a "flippy disk,"

C-64 disks were also possible to be made into "flippies" - one of the first things I tried out after getting a drive.. Wire cutters created an effective (but mangled-looking) notch.

I ended up with 2 drives and tested out the ability of the early ones (with an internal power supply) to overheat [later versions used with the C128 had external power supplies]. At one point I had to place a 110V computer fan on top of it with several enlarged notches in the drive's case to keep it working. Ah, those were the days! I think those external floppy drives were around the same price as a new computer, each.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: OVH

aren't they using SPF records? Don't they have a dedicated mail server to send mail?

Outlook SHOULD allow anything through with a valid SPF (or other sender verification)

Windows 11 tops market share as 10 faces extended farewell

Re: Windows 11 tops market

Windows 11 has leaptbeen kicked ahead of Windows 10 in market share

Fixed it for ya.

I would not call killing off the now 2nd place platform so that the 2nd place one can move into 1st place as "leapt". Funny thing it's not really dead yet, either.

[my work-related windows box is still running 7, and the other el cheapo one with 11 is for taxes and stuff I had no choice but to have 11 for]

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Grok replaces Anthropic

that's actually pretty funny. well played

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

the problem with "empathy" is that it is all too often TOXIC, and uses other people's money.

It is better to have none at all than to enable a CRIMINAL.

Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Re: Doubt it

I'd stick with GTK3 - you can STILL theme it properly. Adwaita and its mandated derivatives STINKS on ICE

An afterthought

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

I replaced Vista on a laptop quite some time ago with Devuan Linux when the system had slowed to a crawl so much and was so virus prone it just had to go.

The user (a relative who was not all that computer savvy) learned it in around 30 minutes, happily went back to the usual browsing, e-mail, watching videos, etc.. She still uses that laptop to this day. Recently updated it with Devuan 'D' something 'cause of the recent (irritating cert-related) need to update Firefox.

Re: Anyone remember ...

devices in the 90s were more responsive.

They were. They were written in C++ mostly. And the OS was devoid of TIFKAM BLOAT.

I blame GARBAGE COLLECTION ALGORITHMS and JAVASCRIPT.

Re: Stranger things have happened

The Porcine Squadron

Re: Recycle / re-use?

I debated Rufus for getting it into a VM, decided it was smarter to CANCEL MSDN or whatever they call it now (saving $800/yr), wait until I HAD to get 11, THEN bought the cheapest low end piece of CCP junk I could find [which turned out to be a rather nice 8GB Dell mini-PC with 11 Pro for around $130, plus the HDMI to VGA I needed to use it[.

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Idly wondering if MS will suddenly realise W11 WILL run on those ‘legacy’ PCs after all.

Windows Vista all over again. Computers were released with XP on them in a short-lived reboot because of it.

Seriously enough, I just want Mozilla and Google Chromium and WebKit-based browsers to OPTIMIZE THEIR BOAT-ANCHOR INEFFICIENT BROWSER ENGINES, clean up that RIDICULOUS MEMORY CREEPAGE (especially YOU, Mozilla) *CAUSED* by GARBAGE COLLECTION with LAZY CODING [and a fried egg on top and SPAM], and stop adding "Features" UNTIL YOU FINISH FIXING WHAT IS THERE!!!

Otherwise, I will CONTINUE to BERATE YOU while HOLDING DOWN the SHIFT KEY! [and FART in your general direction]

After which we won't NEED 64GB of RAM just to read the El Reg Web site!!!

Re: Recycle / re-use?

recently needed to replace hardware anf get an 11 box to do taxes. All 3 are Amazon reconditioned units. One is an HP, two are Dells. all 3 have 8GB, the one for win 11 as an SSD system disk. Only problem is HP box does not like to boot drives over 4TB so I left an "ultimate boot CD" in the drive.

All were significantly under $200 each. One is my FreeBSD 15 server+gateway+dns+web+mail+storage+firewall+NAT multi-homed on a /29. One is a Linux development box. One [the smallest] has no CD but boots ok from USB [windows 11]. I'm happy with all 3 doing what I need, at least through 2030. All 3 for a total less than ~$500

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

Re: I'm reading a disaster

FreeBSD standardized on llvm years ago, but you can load gcc versions from ports - several ports ONLY build if you use the correct gcc version, sadly.

Not sure about the others, though. I like llvm better now that I've used it side by side with gcc.

Re: Still waiting...

Some might argue that even if it's a pro-Nazi group, their code is not their politics.

I find the "opposite" [read: woke] policies of other groups to be equally disturbing. It does not stop me from using the software.

Re: BSD

SystemD and Wayland are the death of Linux...

Sadly, their [unfortunately] growing fan club would disagree.

hmmm... that was worth a re-look

out of curiosity I followed the link in the article. well, there are scientific points that could have been made about "the virus" back in 2021, assuming it was the correct kind of venue [a question was raised concerning virtual meeting attendance and someone brought up the vaccine question]. And apparently Weigelt posted something that Alex Jones would have raised an eyebrow over, which greatly angered Linus resulting in one of his somewhat infamous one-way correspondences. I too would have disagreed with Linus on the need for a vaccine [I caught the virus early on before anyone had heard of it from a co-worker who'd come back from China with a bad flu-like bug right around Christmas 2019] but not for the same reason. In any case 2021 was a bad year for bad policies which I think hindsight gives us a lot more insight on.

So if THAT is the only sort of thing people are getting bent out of shape over, then this whole thing is entirely too silly and Graham Chapman needs to virtually tell us all so that we can move along to the next sketch.

And now I'm considering what I could do to assist XLibre into having higher quality and reliability and support the kinds of things the Wayland zealots have been making a huge deal over.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even I know when it's time to change the subject and focus on work. heh.

another definition of insanity

A division in tech and OSS development over ridiculous nonsense like THAT? [who started THAT religious war, MICROSOFT???]

What's next, "Big Enders" and "Little Enders" ? I just want a high quality GUI for my non-windows open source OS !!!

Long-time FreeBSD user and occasional dev

I've been working with FreeBSD since 4.8 and have seen a LOT. The Linuxization of too many OSS applications, the VERY stable gnome 2 desktop [gnome 3 port lagged for YEARS and gnome 2 became UBER-usable because ONLY FIXES WERE MADE!], the addition of Mate when gnome 3 was actually ported, and the systemD hacks and workarounds that Linux distros like Devuan helped to FORCE.

If GhostBSD goes with XLibre there is absolutely NO reason it will not also be in ports for FreeBSD and you can be DAMN sure I'll be testing it when I can. [I helped the guy test GhostBSD early on until I ran out of spare time]

There is NO need to develop Mate any further. GTK past 3.x simply **SUCKS** and all of the past history shows that when the desktops are NO LONGER A MOVING TARGET they become both stable AND reliable.

Adwaita STINKS ON ICE and it will NO DOUBT be ARROGANTLY CRAMMED up our assesdown our throats when freedesktop "decides" their 2D flatty flatso FLATASS look is to be LIKED no matter WHAT, against Mate's TraditionalOK. Like Google's crap and windows II, the ARROGANT CHILDREN **LOVE** to **FORCE** us like commie dictators. I guess it makes them **FEEL** better...

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: this is crazy talk

Java has portability as its number one benefit, and if you look at performance of legacy systems the inefficiency of Java is NOTHING compared to the klunkiness of old big-iron hardware the native code runs on.

GROK analysis

Re: this is crazy talk

assembler modules that are called (who's gonna convert that and what do you convert it to)... operational workflows/interconnections to other systems etc.

un-portable code is the worst, yeah. Outside of simvh how can we fix this problem before the hardware ro run it on no longer exists?

/me points out that an RPi running simvh could VERY LIKELY outperform a typical mini or mainframe from the early 90's. But I'd rather have something with SQL and REST-like protocol than rely on cryptic and/or legacy protocols.

Re: COBOL is easy...

I did a quick search, found THIS - anyone try it?

I learned COBOL in the early 1990's on the fly because I suddenly needed to maintain a sales tax calculation system that was written in COBOL. Did not take long [and I discovered the previous programmer had LOST the most recent FORTRAN "glue" source and I ended up re-writing it - stupid regression bug] but there is a difference in maintaining COBOL and writing COBOL from scratch. I think I could have come up with a way to port it to another language like C (or Pascal or FORTRAN or even Clipper) at the time, maybe with simple text conversion. HP3000 systems used a Pascal-like lingo that I cannot remember the name of. And the accounting and manufacturing MRP software were both written in FORTRAN. So converting COBOL to FORTRAN would have been a reasonable task, if the hook were not there.

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

tree diagram vs waterfall

basically the same general concept for tree vs waterfall except the tree diagram breaks the waterfall up into functionality until you have a bunch of utilities that the main program calls. In the kernel you can fold that into a "single thing" that's more run-time efficient, but in more general object-thinking terms it's a nice way to get a top level design.

gozinta - do something - gozouta

then 'do something' gets its own tree. I thought it was pretty cool back in 1990. It helped me break up larger tasks into smaller ones.

Re: Agile and Jive Coding

How many Silly Valley Agile programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

Three. 1 to call an electrician, and the other two to "share in the experience"

[in the voice of Doctor #11] "I know."

Don't believe the hyperscalers! AI can't cure the climate crisis

still at it with the man-made climate change scam?

why don't you just give up on the whole climate change scam already? The only "solutions" have been to take freedom and prosperity away from the middle class while elitists run their private jets to Davos every year so they can hypocritically tell US how to live and force SOCIALISM+COMMUNISM up our arsesdown our throats.

man-made CO2 is PLANT FOOD and the earth will be greener if we burn more carbon, CO2's GH effect is SATURATED, atmospheric and ocean carbon levels are at equilibrium based on ocean surface temperature, PRESSURE plays the biggest role in atmospheric heat retention, and temperatures+climate will be more or less the same as the Greenland ice cores indicate the last 400,000 years have been like. Seriously. No need for PANIC, MANIPULATION, nor CONTROL. Live your lives. It's just fine, K? FREEDOM!

DOGE bites taxman

Re: The assignment....

I always under-deduct and just pay them what I owe. Works pretty well.

The REAL problem is a tax code filled with CRAP. A FLAT RATE tax would fix EVERYTHING. Amazingly if you let rich people invest and buy things, you get SOMETHING for the money, like commerce, companies that hire people, inventions, and so on. If you send it to gummint instead, you get people subsidized for being lazy, subsidized for buying things you'd never want, subsidized for god-knows-what, and a bunch of corrupt politicians BUYING VOTES with YOUR MONEY.

[but that just means the class envy-ers won't be able to PUNISH THE SUCCESSFUL. Oh well, too bad, moochers and looters be damned!]

Deutsche Bahn back on track after DDoS yanks the brakes

Brazilian DDoS'ing on Monday...?

I was getting DDoS'd from Brazil on monday... not the first time, so I only had to add 8 or 9 more /24's to my firewall. SYN flood. for some reason FBSD's natd was consuming 100% CPU and I couldn't resolve DNS on the LAN nor ping out.. This happened before, last year, and THOSE IPs are still listed in the firewall. So they apparently found a new ISP to victimize. Probably a cloud provider, my guess.

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

I imagine Austin Powers saying "Oh, BEHAVE" after that...

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: You'd like to think

FTDI was one example. The fakes still work with Linux and BSD, and Micros~1 (or maybe it was FTDI) got sued for having a driver that would actually damage the fake and make it unusable. FTDI makes USB to serial chips, and one of these was faked. Hardware makers could not tell the difference and the supply chains got a good scrubbing to eliminate the chips. The windows driver was updated to simply "not work" with the fakes.

That's probably the one you're thinking of. Yes, it happened.

Re: You'd like to think

From article: Israel is the only country to have negotiated a deal with Lockheed Martin, allowing it to run its own software on its F-35I fleet.

They probably just asked nicely and paid money for the source+documentation.

UK and EU aren't going to be on the USA's "enemy list" at any time in the foreseeable future, regardless of how little a sense of humor certain EU "leaders" and agitators the press (allegedly) **FEEL** (not think) about it.

In any case, it's probably a FEATURE (not a bug) to allow other-than-Lockheed software to be loaded under the right conditions.

River project swims against the Wayland tide with modular window management

That's the Phoenix proposal if I gleaned the info right - to re-write the existing tech to clean it up, in essence a from scratch re-factoring, and not a re-design.

I'd like to see THAT, a bit stronger and more effective than moving from XFree96 to Xorg was.

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

I often run multi-user on a single desktop. One EXCELLENT way to do this with Xorg is to simply use ssh to invoke the application as a different user with DISPLAY set to 'localhost:0.0' via 'env' (or whatever). I set up simple scripts I can use from a button in the mate panel. Example, running X/twitter in a sandbox with a "guest level" user - script is enabled in the browser. Browsing normally, I'm using NoScript. AND X/twitter does not get to plant cookies or view any of my browsing history outside of the sandbox. Similarly a user for Slack, a user for other things where the browser dumps all cookies and history on exit, and so forth. I have no idea if applications with different users can easily play together under WindowsWayland. I suspect it's got a lot of UAC-like behavior with the clipboard, or perhaps "WANTS" to...

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

I do that with RPi all of the time. Default Pi install (used to?) has Xorg with XFCE and so you could use an editor like pluma or merge utility like Meld across the network.

Xorg has the GL and direct rendering extensions, which often leverage GPU etc.. Example, NVidia has it's own GL renderer but most others use Mesa (as i recall).

X11 has been extended AND can be extended further. My point was that THIS would have been the correct direction for the project, NOT creating a brand new monolithic "umbrella system" to replace it.

The OLD unextended protocol limits you BUT with multi-core CPU's it hardly becomes an issue. [in fact a client/server model INHERENTLY leverages multi-core]

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

Xwayland is yet another layer/hack that I'd rather avoid, thanks. I've read about pixelation and other compatibility issues using it. NOT buying it.

And that is the real point.: The "Children of the Chrome" *FELT* they needed to re-invent everything to look like Chromium running on a phone, including a brand new monolithic windowing system more like Micros~1 Windows than anything POSIX. It's taken DECADES and it's really STILL not ready for prime time. Like systemd it breaks the UNIX paradigm by trying to do EVERYTHING, POORLY. Adding a hack/bandade for "backward compatibility" is VERY likely to end up NOT in the standard release as soon as the NEXT group of ARROGANT CCHILDREN *FEELS* that the REST of us MUST CHANGE.

Seriously, look at what happened to Gnome and why Mate and Cinnamon exist. Same idea. Look at Adwaita and what that does in later toolkits to KILL any OTHER style/theme. THAT is the clueless trend, by CHILDREN who lack the experience of the early days.

When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

Just stating the obvious, the ONE RIDICULOUSLY GARGANTUAN FLAW in Wayland's basic design that shall forever keep me from using it... missing the split between client and server that allows you to run the client on one piece of hardware, and the UI on another, over a regular network connection - VITAL for embedded development.

The (apparent) Phoenix approach of trimming down X11 to its best features in a serious rewrite could have been what Xorg and opendesktop focused on, NOT turning POSIX systems into a Monolithic "Micros~1" style windowing system... but of course I would have added backwards compatibility in a way that only loads compatibility code if/when necessary.

So INSTEAD they went the WRONG way and wrote Wayland from scratch with minimal REAL progress and minimal backwards compatibility over a period of DECADES, apparently favoring one hardware architecture over others (for a while), and now prepared to CRAM IT INTO OUR BODY ORIFICES "for our own good". Sounds too much like "System-Thing" and anything ELSE Poettering and Gnome devs [since 3.0] have had their grubby fingers in. [yes I run FreeBSD, Devuan, and either Mate or Cinnamon on Xorg, occasionally XFCE or similar, in ABSOLUTE REBELLION to the "it's our turn now" "Micros~1/Google"-indoctrinated children of the 90's who seem to be trying to run things]

So splitting up the monolithic "Umbrella system" is probably a step in the right direction but might have made MORE sense 20 years ago.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Re: Wondering

They probably moved on to new ventures where they could do "startup" kinds of things

Re: Don't underestimate Elon Musk

the mediocre-minded have always rejected true innovative science.

Gallileo is a perfect example

Re: He isn't completely wrong

e) evolution may require some kind of CATASTROPHE in which radical environmental or situational changes drive survival of the fittest, such that only the EVOLVED survive

[an "evolution by catastrophe" model, which seems to be a likely explanation for why we do not see "in-betweens" in the fossil record]

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

meanwhile, if you just need a simple 8G RAM 2-4 core box to run Linux...

small boxen that can run Linux well seem to be relatively cheap, like "reconditioned" machines pre-loaded with 8G or 16G and modest hard drive sizes. Some come with Win 11 pro if you just need an 11 machine to do your taxes [what I find myself having to deal with]

Fukushima's radioactive hybrid terror pig boom was driven by amorous mothers

Re: Nuclear Powered Bacon!

Do they microwave themselves?

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Re: In 2026? Five years late...

some nameless beancounter counting beans wot got rid of their QA staff. It was the same time they all *FELT* (not thinking at all) that using the customer base to do their QA was a "good idea", just like TIFKAM, 2D FLATTY FLATSO, the 8.0 "start menu" tiles, the ads, the strongarming, the mandatory updates, yotta yotta, CUSTOMERS BE DAMNED!@!!

Yeah how'd THAT work out, Micros~1???

[oh wait they have a NEAR MONOPOLY - I forgot, been using FBSD and Linux for too long]

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

everything eventually ends up in a landfill (or burns up in a de-orbit maneuver)

It's an ongoing issue with the things that humans make. I'm sure archaeologists will one day root through our trash and find a space shuttle or two.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Indicted

What about the negative impact of TIFKAM, Windows 'Ape' (8). Win-10-nic, the ads, the strongarming, the 2D FLATSO, yotta yotta - all Sinofsky's baby...

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: Tired

Libre Office does everything I want. You do not need Office ~360

Re: The real reasons?

I got lucky. I set up an 11 box around 2 weeks ago. It was not able to "phone home" properly during the "set up user" part so I went on grok and it told me to do the following:

Press "Shift+F10" to open a command window while it shows the gripe screen

start ms-cxh:localonly

this utility bypasses the striongarming of an MS login and lets you create a user WITHOUT one.

[I think my firewall may have been blocking Micros~1's spyware from connecting back to me or similar, and this proved itself to be an ideal fix]