Posts by bombastic bob

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Re: "objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence"

It's about time that Ronald Reagan's legacy on this point dies a final death.

WHAT the hell is THAT supposed to mean? Do not forget, Ronald Reagan WAS a Union guy! (He was the president of the Screen Actor's Guild to be precise)

As far as I am concerned, if Amazon's warehouse employment conditions are SO bad that a union needs to be formed to rectify that problem, then THEY totally screwed the pooch on managing their warehouses.

Ideally you make the conditions equivalent to a union shop so that people do not bother with unions. It becomes a better place to work, enough that people do not want it to change, and you get happier employees that ideally work harder. A labor union, however, will take money from employers and employees as a kind of "middle man" so ultimately they cost more.

But if an employer wants to use the union for H.R. and training, they can make unions and management a winning combination. That depends both on the union and on the management to make that work (as it does in many places, though, so it CAN work well).

But I suspect that this new union will be more like Teamsters or one of the other "not so nice" power-grab politically motivated unions.

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

Re: Data center cooling

depending on how hot the water is, you can use it to generate chilled water using an absorption chiller.

Re: Water companies in England

maybe when the solids have been removed from the sewage, you can burn them to make electricity?

Recycling to the max!

(some decades ago i knew people who worked at an experimental power plant, one I actually visited, that ran on cow manure. Yeah, no sh... OK bad PUNishment but still...)

Boston Dynamics' latest robot is a warehouse workhorse

Re: Love the bullshit

Well, past performance would suggest that warehouse employees would stlll be there but they would be managing and repairing the bots. Just like accountants who would otherwise add up numbers all day become analysts and/or programmers.

So, if the robots take over the menial jobs, there will still be other jobs for humans to do. As companies are more efficient, they can hire people to be EVEN MORE efficient. The work gets more interesting, requires more creativity and intelligence, and so on. At least, that';s how past performance has been in industries where people are "replaced" by computers and/or robots. The people (generally) end up getting better and/or better paying jobs doing those things that still need doing (but cannot be done by a 'clank'). And don't forget jobs 'making more robots'.

Re: Love the bullshit

When computers replaced rooms full of low level accountants slaving away 8 hours a day with adding machines at banks (with job titles like 'calculator') I'm sure there was a bit of an adjustment period... since they were all "replaced" with a "robot".

Now, does anybody want to go back to that?

Same thing with warehousing. I think people need to be more creative and fit better into jobs where they CAN be. (And those jobs tend to pay more)

UK spy boss warns China hopes Russia will help it take over tech standards

Re: potential to fragment the internet and allow more central control

There's a reason why AOL disappeared

And yet, there's Fa[e]ceB[an,ook], Tw[a,i]tter, Google[-ism], Insta-[Sh,gr]am, and the rest of 'em, all trying to control their fifedoms on 'teh intarwebs'.

So I wish this were true, the reason why AOL disappeared being the need to control too much and losing to freedom. But I fear it is NOT. More likely, they just could not compete with the overall intarwebs as compared to their own offerings, at the price they charged for the services they offered. Similarly, CompuServe.

And the ones trying to be gatekeeper are still jockeying for position and the CCP wants in, too.

Re: shooting down their own aircraft

yes, "friendly fire" incidents are a constant risk on the battlefield. But currently there aren't many Ukrainian pilots flying MIGs, if any at all (have they received the MIGs from Poland? last I heard they have not, for reasons that anger me).

Anyway, if there are no MIGs being piloted by Ukrainians, the Russian soldiers should know better, but apparently they do not (at least as indicated by news reports, FWIW).

Couple that with low morale and apparently improper/inadequate training of a mostly conscripted fighting force [that may only be motivated by threats and intimidation] and you get the kinds of things we appear to be seeing.

Re: The World's Weakest Metal: Chinesium

From the article: "China's choice of standards bodies is widely interpreted as forum shopping, to find a receptive audience for a proposal that would not be accepted by current gatekeepers."

And the idea of Russia being their new customers (NOTE: Russia has about 1/10 of China's population, 146 million vs 1.42 billion) is NOT going to make a whole lot of difference in the number of people deploying their new 'standard'. So the world would end up with "an internet": and "a seperate Chinanet". Big whoop. China has their own internal market for things anyway. It's where all of the stuff made with (alleged) patent and copyright violations (allegedly) get sold.

Besides, the problem with communism and totalitarianism is that, with the exception of an elite group of favored individuals, innovation is effectively DISCOURAGED. 'Evolutionary' development would quickly stagnate, the overall quality would be poor, and nobody would DARE point out problems for fear of losing one's job or (worse) getting "disappeared" merely for 'rocking the boat'. Bad social credit if you do not refer to the inventor as the smartest person on the planet, and your bosses as both kind *AND* wise as well as fair and just.

And, after some recent news about Universities in the USA being 'soft targes' for stealing innovation, you have to wonder how much of China's tech proposal originated inside the USA or EU or UK or anywhere ELSE for that matter, and was simply stolen/co-opted/etc. by the CCP for their own purposes...

Re: The war in Ukraine is a devastating blow to the image of a mighty Russia

They are looking a lot more like Saddam Hussein's "Republican Guard", which prior to January of 1991, was highly respected and even feared.

But Russia still has nukes, and Pootie just might be insane enough to USE them. Dammit.

[it also does not help that the Biden "administration" is still doing things to irritate and antagonize Pootie rather than doing what would REALLY be effective, i.e. project STRENGTH and drop the restrictions on USA domestic oil production, especially in Alaska, and let the world buy OUR oil and natural gas at prices below that being sold by Russia (yes people are still buying Russia's oil and gas), so that Pootie will REALLY get an economic hurt put on him, instead of :"what they are actually doing right now"]

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

Re: Software with western components

Not sure how this will work for them.

They could try forking ReactOS...

(when Pootie is finally deposed or ??? maybe they could re-submit as actual contributions to the project!)

Japanese startup makes baby carrier-style sling for 'Love Robots'

I thought my brain would explode...

when i saw "love robots" and "baby carrier-style sling" in the same sentence...

(fortunately I read the article)

Next versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu head into beta

Re: any version of Gnome is painful

FBSD supported the final version gnome 2 for several YEARS in its ports collection, until Mate.

In many ways it was EVEN BETTER since it became VERY stable, built properly, and had no major issues that were un-patched. I liked it.

Re: Here we go again

he was wearing the wrong hat (see icon)

Re: Here we go again

Well, there's THIS "distinguish" between Wayland and X11

From the article: (re: desktop extensions for VirtualBox) but it still didn't work using Wayland.

Also the BIG thing that does NOT work with Wayland: export DISPLAY=MyWorkstation:0.0

(it would be IM!POSSIBLE! for me to get work done with Wayland because Wayland will not support this)

Rocky is an interesting alternative to Fedora. I'll have to check it out when it tracks the next RHEL, now behind Fedora (and CentOS). When I tried it last time it worked out of the box but did not have a lot of choice for GUI etc. The one thing I had to hack up was a result of them picking an arbitrary RFC1918 address for their internal firewalling. It happened to be in use by me, an IP block for the LAN that I decided on ~20 years ago so it would not affect routing when VPN'ing into a customer's network.

Anyway, Rocky works ok when I last tested it. But I forget what file I had to edit to make it work. I could just do a "grep -r /etc" for the IP address string, though, and it would be quickly found.

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

linux iTunes equivalents

does THIS help?

Re: Subscription charging coming to you soon

it's hard and a bit tedious, but you can resist the strong-arm techniques applied to you when installing Win-10-nic, and ONLY have a local account. As for "Win II", I have no clue. (Waiting for an update to VirtualBox that emulates the TPM crap)

Re: No matter

I (somewhat) recently built 2 machines from parts ordered online and purchased locally. They both "came with" FreeBSD 12. Both are AMD Ryzen systems. The 2nd one actually uses an older Ryzen (3 I think) and the 1st one a Ryzen 5 (6 core). So they're pretty "modern" depending on how you interpret the word...

and they have NEVER booted windows (in a VM sure but never the main OS)

Re: Wait for v2

Windows 11 is stable thanks to it's Windows 10 core (etc.)

you're supposed to put the lipstick on the end that goes "oink"...

Re: Gaslighting

Gaslighting: shining a "fake light" on something in order to make it seem like something else, as if your own past experiences are no longer valid. It differs from distraction (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain) in that you're being told or shown things that try to make you "question reality", such as the reality of burning buildings in the background when the news reporter says it is a "peaceful protest" - the reporter is 'gaslighting'. Or, saying that a feature is "not an advertisement" when it most clearly *IS* one., would also be gaslighting. Your own eyes and ears tell you the truth, but "the gaslighter" is trying to convince you otherwise, by making you question your own concept of reality.

Re: Why move to Windows 11 ?

with the exception of ME, I pretty much liked windows 3.x (and NT) through XP. After that, not so much...

The only post XP version that is any decent is 7. The rast *ALL* *STINK* (starting with server 2k3)

Re: Why move to Windows 11 ?

The hardware that does not support Linux or FreeBSD does not get purchased by me. And for an employer or client to purchase it, when I am the one that needs it for doing work, same thing.

So if it is ONLY supported by 11, chances are it would have to be heavily discounted before any normal person would actually want it...

With 90% COVID-19 vax rate, Intel to step up return-to-office

Re: It's about conversation

Telephones work, last I tried. Pretty useful, tnose things. Had a conference call for a court hearing recently. Being that it was 3000 miles away, and I had to participate, having that capability was extremely convenient.

Yes, businesses thrive on communication. But it does not have to be in person. And it does not have to be on a computer, either. That old-style land line comes in handy! (of course you could get a message on IRC or slack saying "hey we wanna do a conference call at 1PM today" and there ya have it.)

So yeah, communication still possible, as it always was, by phone.

Re: Heads in the sand

news flash: the shutdowns, the lockdowns, the masks, the distancing, and event he vaccines have not stopped THE VIRUS. It's a VIRUS. It's what they do. In fact I would argue that "all of that" has SLOWED the normal immune reactions creating herd immunity. and possibly even CREATED NEW VARIANTS outside of the normal natural progression of such things (which would have greatly suppressed those variants), ALL because of gummints and media driving fear and panic and do not doubt me, follow the money, SOMEONE is profiting off of "all that" in some way.

So if you're gonna DOOM and GLOOM over it, you get a big THUMBS DOWN from ME. Enjoy your masking and distancing. *I* refuse to participate.

What this article seems to be about is the one thing that has come out of this COMPLETE AND UTTER BOVINE SEWAGE, and that would be the VERY welcome trend of "Work from Home", and the likeliness that it's here to stay.

Re: Delusional thinking

interactions have suffered and businesses are feeling the pain

Interactions "suffered" ? And I have not seen business 'feel any pain' EXCEPT for that created by gummints trying to "solve this" (all of which resulted in quite a BIT of pain, for EVERYONE, because THAT is what gummints DO, cause PAIN, usually in our backsides and/or our wallets).

The biggest pain has been the completely unnecessary disruption of the supply chain. And I think we can blame China (and those companies unwise enough to have placed all eggs in THAT basket) for most of it. But as for working from home? It has most likely been an overall BENEFIT.

And as I mentioned before, a hybrid work environment, where you do work from home AND show up in an office whenever it makes sense to do so, is probably the best solution ever.

Re: WFH is here to stay

I think you'll find that being in the office and the rate of getting sick from being around others at work is not going to be a whole lot different than in the past, and for those who live their lives in fear over it, they'll only be doing themselves a disfavor. It's time: Time to get back to the REAL normal, except with more time working from home whenever possible because we CAN. And, employers have been taught (by now) that it IS possible (and probably better in the long run).

Re: WFH is here to stay

their idea of management was being able to see the back of your head.

heh. yeah we've all seen THAT kind of 'management' before.

(or you could just install a slow scan low resolution webcam behind your desk, and just 'loop it' with recorded video when you're drinking adult beverages or viewing online content)

Re: WFH is here to stay

They idea of the 'hybrid' work environment might simply be 9one that works well for me, where you do most of the REAL work in your home office, but show up when there's meetings or office equipment or things to bring back/forth during hours where high traffic is not a problem. So you basically go in when it makes sense (and usually it won't, heh), and/or for only part of the day, and work from home the rest of the time. WIn-win.

With the exception of on-site-only kinds of positions where "being there" is a requirement (we can all think of THOSE kinds of things, from hospitals to warehouses to retail) a hybrid work environment might be the best thing ever.

Russian devs plan alternative Android app store after Google Play bans paid apps

Re: The proletariat

your use of the communist manifesto term 'proletariat' is disturbing...

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

Re: I pay for Turbo Tax

agreed, with the K1 forms and other stuff associated with having income come through a corporation, it's usually the cheaper option just to use their software and pay the e-file fees. An accountant costs more and you're essentially buying the amount of time you would be spending,. and costs of mailing stuff the old way.

(it's how they stayed in business by providing such a service at low cost)

Re: So true

Maybe what we REALLY need to blame is an OVERLY COMPLEX TAX SYSTEM.

I like what Reagan managed to get done around 1986 - the one page form. And if it were ME designing the system, I'd have it down to a 3x5 card. Flat rate, no deductions (except for individals in your households), and if you report business income on your personal tax filing there would be a separate (but simple) form for all of that. But then you would not need to have an army of IRS agents, nor a cottage industry of tax software and accounting firms...

(and politicians would lose MUCH of the control and power and influence that they wield)

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Re: How often do we get to hear "Sorry"......

"Sorry we got caught doing something egregious"

Happens often enough to wonder what they did NOT get caught doing...

Linux kernel patch from Google speeds up server shutdowns

Re: I've figured out even quicker shutdowns

at least he didn't plug the vacuum cleaner into the UPS...

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

Re: Wheels to Reinvent

Modern UIs feel like they've gone backwards in the last 20 years

(even though you did use the 'F' word, 'feel' - heh)

The problem (in their minds, as I see it) is that if users make CHOICES, it may not be the "right" choice (according to their 'feelz').

So "they" must TAKE CHOICE AWAY, "for our own good".

(I posted the 'One look to rule them all' parody earlier so I'll just make reference to it instead)

Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

instead of interfacing with the user, you give them an experience

Reminds me of a light bulb joke

Q: "How many people from Silicon Valley does it take to change a light bulb?"

A: "Three, One to change the bulb, and 2 to 'share in the experience'."

(even though in California, selling traditional light bulbs is now ILLEGAL. Go fig... maybe that helps to EXPLAIN THE INSANITY)

/me humming song by Jimmy Hendrix now... ":Have you been experienced?"

Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

MOZILLA FIREFOX I'm STILL lookin' at YOU!!!

here's how I eliminate their Adwaita takeover. You need to specify a theme, though, and my preference is TraditionalOk

From the command line:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme 'TraditionalOk'

From about:config

widget.content.gtk-theme.override = TraditionalOk

widget.non-native.theme.enabled = false

(that should fix it, YMMV on using a different theme name)

Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

And FFS stop changing things just for the sake of change. We learned that lesson a long time ago...

Once a project has been maintained long enough for original developers to retire (or move on to other projects), such that the inexperienced CHILDREN take over, because "It is OUR turn now", the end result is likely to be a series of UNWANTED and UNNECESSARY changes, which [for something like Gnome] has been nothing but DISAPPOINTMENT for a LOT of us.

2D FLATSO interfaces, in general, fall directly into this pattern. It is a BAD trend, and has been since Gnome 3 as far as i can tell (when it seems to have begun).

(I could easily use CSS to make buttons and stuff look 3D skeuomorphic, or at least have a nice shadow effect, if they INSIST that everything be like a web page based on CSS... but CSS requires a bloatware browser engine to render it. i rest my case on that one)

Re: Arrogance reminiscent of Microsoft (i.e. just suck it up).......that would be the GNOME folk!

A *BRILLIANT* collection of links. Thanks!

From the 2nd one (Linus): "I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3."

From the 3rd one: GTK 4 is a major new version of GTK that breaks both API and ABI compared to GTK 3.x (Yes - they REALLY! SAID! THAT!!!)

Re: I hate "modern" UIs.

From the article, regarding libadwaita: "The purpose of this is to help developers conform to the new GNOME Human Interface guidelines"

One look to rule them all

One look to find them

One look to bring them all

And in the FLATNESS, *BIND* *THEM*

Muahahahahaha!

(or that's how I imagine their arrogantly top-down 2D FLATSO UI design tyranny to have become this way)

GTK4 - you can take your Adwaita and SHOVE IT UP YOUR UI!!!

(NOBODY *COMPELS* ME - I *REBEL* INSTEAD!)

I'm sure Mate and Cinnamon will continue to get the REAL support, while these ARROGANT LOONS jump off the 2D FLATTY "modern" CLIFF. Enjoy your 'customer base' of fanatics. The rest of us that want to get REAL work done will install something ELSE.

(Worthy of mention, Devuan to eliminate systemd for Linux, and the BSDs as well)

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: extensions to VMS

DEC operating systems at that time were not the most secure. RSTS/E had a program called 'init' that would often be publically runnable and (necessarily) with the privilege bit set. As a college student I experimented with it and discovered that you could send it commands like "LOGIN KBxx" and it would log KBxx in with whatever account you specified, and NO password required. Ooops. Ginormous security crater built right in. (this program runs the RSTS/E startup sequence - another simh exercise and you'll see it in action - somewhere there is an RSTS/E image you can DL and run under simh, i found one)

A lot of RSTS/E was written in BASIC and compiled into a kind of P-code. But I am pretty sure the kernel was done in the MACRO assembly language.

Re: RISC OS

As I recall, RT-11 (Dec PDP-11) is also written entirely in assembler. It's quasi-open-source in that you can compile in your own device drivers along with the standard ones. As a runtime OS it was designed to control equipment and so i understand that the 'Unibus' and 'Q Bus' architectures were designed with custom peripheral boards in mind. RT-11 had foreground and backround capability and with memory management hardware, could swap blocks of memory in and out of visibility. Anyway, experiment with simh if you are so inclined (I have). Built the kernel a couple of times from source even, making fixes here and there for various things. But some of the userland programs may have been written in FORTRAN or some other lingo. Still kinda fun to toy with. And then when you see PDP-11 op codes doing post-increment and pre-decrement you can easily see how that ended up in the C language.

1,000-plus AI-generated LinkedIn faces uncovered

back when I was in high school...

(somewhat of a joke alert as well)

Back when I was in High School some students made up a fake student to mess with the substitute teacher's head. They turned in homework, and did other things to make the student seem real. I had my picture taken as this student and it ended up in the yearbook. (another guy did something similar, when he saw me doing it, someone who had a real chance at a sports career in baseball, though i never actually saw his name on any team)

So, why not just create fake profiles for fun? (not like nobody ever did this with a fake name on some platform someplace...)

(Still leveraging them for profit is an odd twist, but not an unexpected one)

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Annnnd...you completely missed the point of the article

a very good distinction. This is correct, you cannot jump into the middle of a 'scope' or it will throw an error if you try to do or access anything that is "out of scope". It's also why I tend to avoid using goto except for error handling.

Re: Annnnd...you completely missed the point of the article

Parallelism, hardware threading, systolic arrays, NUMA, immutibility of records, transactional memory, mailboxes, caching, segmented memory architectures...

Ah, I haven't written that kind of stuff in quite a while, though my past experience in the 90's comes in handy working with microcontrollers.

I wrote a nice sort demo tool (first wth MFC, then later adapted to wxWidgets, but for all practical purposes C code with some C++ thingies in there for the GUI) that has a multi-threaded quick sort that uses a bit of what you mentioned. Multi-thread quick sort, DFT, and even a 'value of Pi' program, all somewhat trivial multi-threaded algorithms. Not hard, 'CreateThread' for Win32 or 'pthread_create' in POSIX and you can do it, too. And do not forget background IO processes, semaphores, queues, and all of the other stuff that goes with it.

All in 'C'. Not a problem.

(I even wrote a cooperative threading library for 16-bit windows, to help solve performance issues, and it worked VERY well - and I solved the segmented memory issue by use of USE32 code but of course by then 8086/88 and 80286 processors were no longer in use)

Beijing to build Communist training college in a metaverse

Virtual Reality Communism indoctrination theme park?

This gives "Social Credit Score" an entirely new meaning (and level of intrusive Big Brother-dom)

I imagine seeing Stepford smilers and dystopian imagery, everywhere.

Do not forget the subliminal brainwashing and use of music and flashy lights to condition "good comrade" behavior.

[this goes WAY beyond slapping lipstick on a boar, oinky end or not]

(the fine print in the VR thingy says: this session may be monitored for future reference)

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: I missed a lot of fun.

Regarding only n-characters of variable name uniqueness...

I think they fixed that in FORTRAN 77 but in earlier FORTRAN 66 that was probably true for most compilers. 77 added other more structured syntaxes, like if/else and so forth [if i remember correctly]. i haven't worked with FORTRAN since the 90's but even then you had cases of older 66 code being used alongside 77 code simply because earlier machines only had 66 compilers... (and so the original code had been "maintained" for long enough it still had 66 syntax in a lot of places)

[the code in question ran on VAX and HP3000 systems)

I forget if Pascal and early MS C compilers did the same thing, but with more than 5 or 6 characters...

I can't stop laughing after reading your post...

Kaspersky, China Telecom, China Mobile named 'threats to US national security'

Re: Dummies’R’Us ....... Sign Up Here, Please

Did YOU just compare Trump to Putin?

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

Re: Experience

We'll be in caves again in the next few hundred years if we allow them.....

Maybe, but they'd be Caves™ and "new, shiny!" ones, at that