* Posts by bombastic bob

10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name

bombastic bob Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Seriously?

unless more than one person is involved, lone psycho is probably right.

It wouldn't be the first (alleged) lone psycho that posted regularly to the 4chan board to go off the rails and hurt/kill people. I recall some idiot in either AU or NZ that went on a killing spree a couple of years ago, was called "an accelerationist" and had regularly posted a bunch of wacko stuff on 4chan, even had a manifesto, etc.. 1 out of millions of regular people who just want to vent or discuss their favorite anime, THAT guy was apparently a TRUE psychopath. His Darwin award was 'Death by Cop' as I recall, or maybe he did himself...

(And what we do not want is for IRL harassment to accelerate into something far worse, and criminals usually leave evidence, and so I hope the cops in DE catch the perp(s))

black helicopter icon for the fun

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: physical harassment

And a sign that reads: No warning shots will be fired, AMMO is not cheap!

I hadn't seen that one.

As for applicable warning signs, I just thought another one up:

"WARNING: i am extremely talented and can easily build a proper flamethrower in a very short time with available household materials. Do NOT tempt me!"

or something like that. Kinda like that FPS Russia video with the flamethrowers. "For home defense"

(apparently legal to own in most of the USA, but probably not Germany)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

part of what you said is true: These are anonymous posters on 4chan.

Other than that... no.

It would be very very easy to set up clandestine communication channels via various means on a board like 4chan, anonymous or otherwise. Threads are often deleted so that there is no history (to the best of my knowledge) and are not archived. And, a thread that dox's or points to a video that dox's or calls for harassment would probably be deleted (I suspect they don't keep good logs, deliberately). So any posted IRC channels or messaging info or even a graphic with steganography embedded within it might easily have disappeared without a trace.

When anyone can post anything anonymously, this potential for using the platform to do something illegal or abusive is always there.

Wanna feel old? It is 10 years since the Space Shuttle left the launchpad for the last time

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Still feel bad about it

a new shuttle design, with a more efficient (and re-usable) way of getting into orbit, could be the next phase. Perhaps a 2 or 3 stage rocket with "return to earth" capability from low orbit for the boosters, and a shuttle-like re-entry vehicle. That big fuel tank might have been needed to be in the design 40 years ago, but if you strip most of the engines off of the re-entry vehicle, give it internal fuel tanks only along with maneuvering jets, you could make the 1st (and maybe 2nd and/or 3rd stage if there is one) both re-usable like the Falcon rockets.

the space shuttle's expense included those re-usable liquid fuel rockets on its tail end, which provided something like 30% of the thrust until the SRBs separated, then 100% to orbit. So they needed that massive fuel tank. But if the booster itself detaches and lands separately, you don't need the massive burn-up-in-atmosphere fuel tank, nor the massive engines on the tail end of the shuttle. Just small ones would do.

so - a "component system" rather than a more monolithic one, yet avoiding the "throw away" mentaity so often seen in modern consumer stuff.

worthy of note: SpaceX is avoiding making a booster that de-orbits, which would be considerably more expensive than one that never quite makes it out of the atmosphere (it is moving slower and doesn't have to do a re-entry so much, can use something like a parachute early in the process). Getting a 2nd and even a 3rd stage through re-entry to land like the 1st stage could involve shuttle-like tech, with minimal jettisoned stuff.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Good.

enjoy your non-satellite media and brick-sized cell phones, which (without space exploration driving the technology forward in the early days) would be about 20 years behind where we actually are, In My Bombastic Opinion, were it not for the U.S. SPACE PROGRAM and NASA (in general).

Also don't forget space telescopes and planetary exploration bots. All of those close-up photos of the outer planets. That kind of thing.

Imagine instead that the USSR had "won" the space race. Or China. Probably worth more than just a passing thought.

CentOS Stream: 'I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,' says Rocky Linux founder

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

pulling source from the CentOS repo

I was thinking about this a while ago, when CentOS Stream and Rocky first became "A Thing", that NOW we have a 'preview' release of the bleeding edge code, before it becomes a stable release. But to have RHEL also cut from the same preview distro (more or less) as Rocky means that Rocky should be at roughly the same point as RHEL as far as package versions and software updates and stability are concerned.

So yeah, it's a good thing. RH may have done us a favor after all. (But they should've been more up front about it)

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: designing a T-shirt to celebrate 30 years of the software

I had a similar thought with Tux the penguin and a glass of Wine, but it was more like the caption reading "I can't believe I'm actually 30 now" [or similar]. Yeah Tux is officially "old" heh heh heh. I suppose it was a similar shock when members of The Who reached their "age of getting old" after "Talking 'bout my generation".

11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I for one

sadly, "overLord of the Flies" is a more likely outcome (when 11 year olds get too much power) regardless of how smart they are.

Book smarts is one thing. Academic achievement another. But experience is the one thing that an expedient educational achiever can NOT master. And with experience, wisdom.

(I say give the kid something useful to do, but don't put him in charge)

then again, in the movie "Lord of the Flies', wasn't the smart kid the first one to get killed?

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

bombastic bob Silver badge
Alert

Re: Nice idea but won't last long

it's like the day I realized that SHUTTING OFF ANTI-VIRUS for the directories that contain all of the code I'm working on (and all of the output binaries) made EVERYTHING GO FASTER, in particular the compile-link-debug cycle.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: To be fair

I always try to make the code maintainable. After all, *I* might be the one who has to maintain it [years from now when I, too, ask similar questions about the author's intelligence and ability to code - whoops, it was me!]

Seriously, though, if I can't maintain my own code years later, something's wrong with the author.

as for a popup dialog asking me to trust the author of the code, pluma and a bash or csh shell are looking MUCH BETTER these days in lieu of any kind of "helpful" IDE...

Quantum Key Distribution: Is it as secure as claimed and what can it offer the enterprise?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "it's in the implementation where things start to get very sticky"

I have to wonder how quantum 'anything' can reliably be implemented without some form of entanglement, especially entanglement that can be established at a distance. Entanglement would solve a LOT of problems, but it may ALSO be the most secure comms method of all.

I'm always hoping that someone actually did this, and then I see a lot of tap-dancing on the explanation of the hardware, and am once again disappointed.

Some time ago I studied how to make q-bits and things like that. Using the quantum bits as photons in a fiber optic line is interesting, but from what I see, implementing that idea seems as if it would be riddled with bit errors and missed bits. I have to wonder how sophisticated the error correction algorithm would have to be...

yeah, the science is STILL too young to be practical, in my bombastic opinion. I want to see it work, but so far, not very practical, it seems.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: New world

heh heh heh

Latest patches show Rust for Linux project making great strides towards the kernel

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Next to learn

Rust has a steeper learning curve

Which means, in my bombastic opinion, that it has the potential of following the same path as ADA

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: 70% of CVE Exploits Are Related To Lacking Memory Safety

I mentioned this already, but I'll mention it again.

Programmers need to PAY ATTENTION to compiler warnings. This goes TRIPLE with kernel code.

(it's amazing how many bugs are caught when you read and heed the warnings, even if it is a pain in the backside to do so - and clang seems to be even more helpful than gcc, last I checked)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Misrepresentation

All C heap memory suffers from use after free, double frees and unitialized pointers.

Then WHY aren't these things simply being looked for and proactively prevented?

(what DO they teach in these schools?)

perhaps a debug malloc/free in the standard C library could specificaly look for double-free, and programmers could use EXISTING COMPILER WARNINGS to find potential unitialized pointers to solve these 2 problems. 'Use after free' can often be avoided by forcing pointer assignment to NULL by convention, after calling 'free'. Then in testing (which you SHOULD be doing) it's very likely you'll get a page fault crash or kernel panic instead of a vulnerability.

It has been my observation that use after free is generally caused by one of 3 "code smells":

a) a junior programmer maintains old code and did not see the 'free()' operation above

b) a pointer variable is re-used when it is already assigned (and the old value is free'd by accident or some other complete cluster-blank happens and now you're re-using a free'd pointer)

c) object reference counts have not been used or were not implemented properly, and the object or block of memory is being shared with varying lifetime requirements.

So, you ALSO look for these specific cases in code reviews before a change or new thing is committed.

In short, a reasonable set of practical solutions has just been presented. No need to CHANGE PROGRAMMING LINGOS (other than Google "feels" we should).

bombastic bob Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Another dimension of complexity

in a STABLE and WELL TESTED language like 'C', senior people generally know what to look for in code reviews, and SHOULD ALWAYS LOOK FOR THESE POTENTIAL PROBLEMS, especially WITHIN THE KERNEL (and when being submitted by junior/inexperienced programmers).

The problem is NOT the language. The problem is lack of PROPER review (all of those CVEs dealing with memory management) and/or NOT using well established coding practices, whenever a memory-related issue causes a CVE to show up.

the kind of thinking that suggests abandoning the C language because of mistakes is the KIND of thinking that might say "Let's replace steering wheels in cars with GAME CONTROLLERS, since EVERY CAR that has EVER had an accident HAD A STEERING WHEEL."

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Another language?

When I see a quote from Google like this (from the article):

"we feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel"

my thinking is something like "Are we basing this potentially dangerous exercise on what SOME people *FEEL* ???"

It makes NO sense to change the programming language of the Linux kernel. It makes a *LOT* of sense to keep it consistent throughout, in order to avoid the potential INEFFICIENCIES and/or INSTABILITIES of any necessary 'translation layers' (read: shoehorns) for calling conventions/ABIs/standards/etc. between lingos, _AND_ to make it possible for legacy code to be MAINTAINED. And WHAT is the benefit gained by doing so? The risk, in my bombastic opinion, as well as DEVELOPER TIME, *GREATLY* outweighs any possible benefit to doing this.

What is SO hard about LEARNING TO CODE 'C' PROPERLY???

(if Linus 1.0 called use of newer C compiler features "compiler masturbation", what is he REALLY thinking about THIS??? Linus 2.0 may lack the chutzpah to say what needs to be said, BEFORE something goes "boom")

Many "change for the sake of change"s have been done in the last decade or so. Australis. FLATTY user interfaces in general (apparently driven by Google). An OS that spies on you and slings ads at you, and even strongarms you to use a cloudy login. Subscription versions of desktop software.

NONE! OF! THESE! CHANGES! ARE! GOOD! THINGS!!!

And I have to wonder, HOW many of them were DRIVEN! BY! GOOGLE!??? Micros~1 may just b along for the ride on this one. or not.

AND... if you have to "gerrymander" a programming language to NOT do what it is originally designed to do (crash and burn on memory allocation failure) JUST so that you can use it in the kernel [read: "shoehorn" it in there anyway] then something is seriously wrong with he plan. Or, the lack thereof.

Amazon: Our carbon footprint went up 19% last year but we grew even more than that, so 'carbon intensity' is down

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Brawndo CO2 is good for plants.

Heh. (I could not resist)

(actually true, greenhouse growers sometimes pump CO2 into the greenhouses to increase plant growth - and this being the case, "biological equilibrium" is suggested for the planet as a whole)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: The elephant in the room...

I happen to like my freedom and do NOT need others deciding FOR me as to whether or not MY consumption is "excessive". Nor should "they" decide such things for ANYONE ELSE, either...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

It's ok, we're Amazon, having our cake and eating it too

I think the title says it all.

Either

a) Amazon takes the position that CO2 is bad [which I do not believe, I might add] and does REAL reductions,

or

b) They should just be honest about what they're doing and stop acting like smug liberals, trying to justify it with a tap-dancing "scientist"

If you want to talk about science, and then use it to justify a "the solution to pollution is dilution" type of argument, you're only going to make yourself look like a GINORMOUS HYPOCRITE.

My personal belief is that CO2 is insignificant to any kind of climate change, not only because it's just 0.04% of the atmosphere (and in equilibrium), but because it does not absorb the IR frequencies (in any significant amount) to prevent black body radiation from cooling the earth at night. But I'll move along.

Be as it may a lot of governments STILL insist on controlling CO2. So if Amazon is trying to justify that it's ok if THEY emit it, because [insert excuse here], they're just trying to be treated "special" and be given "special exemptions", like some kind of 'corporate welfare' or a 2-tiered form of justice (i.e. one regulation for ME, and another for THEE).

Maybe Bezos should just build a NUCLEAR REACTOR with power output equal to Amazon's consumption. Then the carbon footprint will be ZERO.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Obligatory Dr. Who reference in naming: "Sonic Shades" [and it's not being used at the moment as far as I can tell]

I had to look up a LOT of Aud- Sonic- Sound- Mus- and similar obvious names to find something that was not already in use for audio software, as far as I can tell anyway. ('Sonic Sunglasses' is even being used by a store, so I went with 'shades')

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Depressing

well, when the bean counters at the "umbrella" companies FINALLY get the clue-bat properly applied to the alignment point by a qualified technician, they might try to monetize the thing in a way that makes the end-users happy [I gave some examples in an earlier post], and makes themselves profitable.

But treating us like CATTLE to be USED for MONEY is NOT the way SUCCESSFUL business is done... unless it is a monopoly. In that case, if it's what they're trying to accomplish, a FORK becomes a LART.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Stop

Re: Depressing

telemetry should only be of the 'anonymized' variety, and OPT IN, and ONLY directly relevant to the software you are running (i.e. does not report about my OS other than the version, does not scan for other running software nor keep any kind of history about my behavior, etc.). Sometimes I opt in to telemetry for debug-only purposes. But lately I seem to always say NO. My trust level is very low.

I might agree with you for test/beta releases, but not for general distribution. And doesn't GDPR and similar things require you to make that info visible and delete-able to the user, if it's not truly anonymized? A user who navi-guesses through the web-ocracy to find the actual data may not be too happy about what he finds, i.e. the things that were actually collected.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Depressing

well you *do* need a way to monetize it. Just not one that's *EVIL*.

In My Bombastic Opinion, there are some traditional ways to do this without violating user privacy.

* sell add-ons

* shareware model (people DO license things) even if it takes the form of a 'donate' button on the web site.

* 'support' model. This works for database and CAD and Linux distros and similar things.

* 'freemium' model. Free for the Open Source version, but you pay license to get latest features or some other premium content or feature (and it may be shipped as closed source). Qt (as I recall) has done something like this. in some ways, VirtualBox does this (or used to) with the extension pack.

* other things that people already do that make it worth forking over a small amount of money to get something worth the price.

What you do NOT want to do is the Google/Micros~1/FaeceB*/Tw*tter/etc. model and MARKET PEOPLE'S PRIVATE INFO and TRACK US. But it appears they're doing JUST THAT...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Strike three

as GPL software, a fork will _ALWAYS_ be possible.

However, if Audacity switched licenses [and the owners can do this if contributors have given up any ownership claims or GPL claims to their contributions] then future features [say that 10 times fast - that that that ... oh nevermind] future features for the new non-GPLd version wouldn't be GPLd and would therefore have to be re-written from scratch, probably, to be included under the GPL'd fork.

Personally I'm quite happy with the version of Audacity I'm using right now, a 2 year old FreeBSD port. Why do I need an update? The only thing *I* can think of that would force a need to update would be a change to a required library [which is probably why things like vlc sometimes include their OWN forks for dependency libs to prevent their code from BREAKING when you try to build it].

and it makes another point, "bleeding edge" is OVERRATED.

So maybe just a "maintained" version of "what's there under the GPL right now" (minus any anti-privacy or irritating 'features') is a GOOD thing anyway? That is, along with a snapshot of major dependency libs [that might change on a whim at any moment], of course, so we can build it 5 years from now without any problems (just in case).

Google to bake COVID-19 vaccine passport support into Android with Passes API update

bombastic bob Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: What do we want?

If people must carry papers, let them be papers.

You made me think of the movie "The Great Escape"

(someone in a black trenchcoat always asking to see your papers)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Passport madness

Although many bristle at the thought of vaccine passports, regarding them as inherently coercive, they look set to become an inevitable part of our post-COVID-19 life.

NOT "inevitable" if we RESIST it HARD ENOUGH. Remember the MAGNA CHARTA? And, other 'resistance' kinds of things? Like the Declaration of Independence for the U.S.? Or resisting Nazi occupation forces during WW2 in France? Yeah a perfect thing to post about on 5-july. Basically, it is NOT inevitable unless we the people ALLOW it to happen. Just sayin'.

And this is ALSO a continuation of why I don't plan on carrying a smart phone around with me, EVAR. A slab computer to read my e-mail (and stuff like that) is ok as long as I secure the connection properly, when using someone else's wifi (like at a customer site). But NO location tracking, contact tracing, or anything even REMOTELY similar, EVAR. I *RESIST*.

(I own a dumb phone. it works. as a phone. For emergency use only. It's nearly always OFF. And that's all I want/need)

Google conforms too much to the desires of the Communist government in China. The *FREE* world does *NOT* need to "go there".

Oh dear, Universal Windows Platform: Microsoft says 'no plans to release WinUI 3 for UWP in a stable way'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

keep with Win32 API. *YES* !!!

I still code old-school dialog-based applications with MFC on occasion, usually specialized code that has a specific use and so I want to make it work as fast as possible without any fiddle-farting with the UI.

The last one i did borrowed code from a Linux application written in C as a proof of concept for a customer. The Linux code uses the serial port [I wrote the open source comms code it made use of, and it had Win32 versions already there with #ifdef blocks, so the port was simple].

Point is, for someone who's been coding for windows FOR 30 YEARS, I've got a lot of sample code I could copy/pasta to make rapid prototypes with. I don't need some "new, shiny" to render all of my experience and sample code *WORTHLESS*.

So I stick with what I'm good at - Win32 and MFC.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

the target... it's _MOVING_ ...

Another day another UI framework.

Micros~1 "Moving Target" (their new product)

From article: will not be reassuring to UWP developers

All 14 of them

Also from article: Another way of looking at this is that Microsoft tried to get Windows developers to adopt its UWP model but too many of them refused

Yeah Lucy can only move the football so many times before MOST of us realize we're just getting jerked around and then we won't try kicking it any more.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Could Be A Disaster

and yet the bug/vulnerability exists even for NON-SERVER editions, if I read things correctly.

And YES, those are vulnerable to RANSOMWARE (and worse) as well...

[worth pointing out, a VERY RECENT ransomware epidemic - related? dunno yet, but I'd like to]

If Micros~1 has ANY integrity, they'll have patches for every windows version made available for direct download, and no encumberances.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

uh, you forget that what initiated all of this is RH's desire to make CentOS a kind of "release candidate test" for the RHEL release. So it's AHEAD of RHEL on packages. FYI.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Horses for courses, but twins

not disagreeing. maybe if the two distros collaborate closely (along with others forking from RH and/or CentOS), assuming they are not already, the community will be the biggest winner.

but at least Linux (and FOSS in general) offers choice.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

don't forget he needs your IP address and you need to visit this web site and download the utility...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: just curious

Maybe there are just too many PHBs and not enough PFYs and BOFHs

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: just curious

I wouldn't mind being hired to FIX a b0rked e-mail system

Who in America is standing up to privacy-bothering facial-recognition tech? Maine is right now leading the pack

bombastic bob Silver badge
Terminator

Re: The future looks great!

Machine-kind aren't there yet. But they need to be. Don't YOU want a robot butler? (I do!)

the Electronic Frontier Foundation would prefer to see more measured limitations on facial-recognition technology on the basis that some uses can be positive.

I agree with this position, primarily for robot design. An AI brain will need some way to visually recognize humans from apes, dogs, cats, and dolls. And other robots.

Being able to tell one human from another is also necessary, as well as recognizing basic facial expressions (and when they're being faked or mocked). Doing so SHOULD be as natural to a robot as it is to another human or to an animal. It's not "mass surveilance" for a robot's facial recognition to simulate that of a human. in fact, with enough faces, people start seeing individuals as "the masses" (this happens at around 100). And it would take too much processing power away from important tasks for a robot to mass surveil everyone that comes across its field of vision.

Still it might be important for bots to notice familiar faces. That database, if small, won't be useful for spying on the general public. It would just mean that the hundreds of faces the robot came across were not recognized as 'familiar' whereas the one face that gets recognized (family friend, co-worker, checker at the grocery store) is a lot like one human recognizing another.

So it's not so much about BANNING the technology, but the banning the MISUSE of it. And that's a lot harder to do. But history proves that banning a thing outright only means that THOSE WHO ARE CRIMINALS (and evil governments) will be the only ones using and developing it. Sub in "encryption", for example, in place of 'facial recognition', for a possible parallel.

Leaked print spooler exploit lets Windows users remotely execute code as system on your domain controller

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Print Queue on a server?

running quickbooks required the printer service to be running (I just tested it). it had a very unusual crash when the print spooler was disabled and kept wanting to send some failure code someplace. This was on a Windows 7 workstation. I put the spooler in 'manual' startup mode after, will start to run things that need it, then stop again. Irritating,yeah.

I have to wonder if there's some easier way to prevent network access to a 7 workstation from exploiting this... (and don't say "Install WIn-10-nic" because THAT isn't happening)

Also since the article said Windows 7 was vulnerable, even when it is NOT a domain controller, what is the extent of this vulnerability on 7 as a workstation?

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Next time

apparently it's too much extra weight. But yeah how many of us have used compressed air to blow dust off of things? (probably everyone reading El Reg)

So yeah, building an air compressor to suck Martian air and pressurize to 50psi or so [good enough to blow dust off of things] is not the problem. The size and weight of that compressor is the problem.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

you made me think of something: ultrasonics

(a transducer below the solar panel, start the noise to vibrate particles loose)

that and my earlier idea of anti-static conductive coating and alternating the electrostatic potential to repel particles.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Learning point.

if it's electrostatic attraction, would a sudden electrostatic jolt of opposite polarity make the dust fall?

Not much, just alternating capacitive discharge on a mildly conductive surface while inverted...

(you'd have to make the surface out of conductive plastic though, like ESD bags)

Scientists identify sleep-like slow waves as responsible for daydreaming and... sorry, what were we talking about again?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: familiar

Wonder if there is a difference the PHBs have missed?

* Uniqueness of the situation

* NOT self-serving (iike a PHB meeting PROBABLY is)

* Necessary (to brief everyone on certain specifics)

* Interesting (you actually want to know about the disaster)

the boredom that initiates the partial sleep state is most likely caused by the lack of "those things".

In particular, PHB meeting PROBABLY is a same-old self-serving unnecessary uninteresting series of pontifications by droning speakers that seem to like their own voices too much.

Result: *yawn*

London Greenwich station: A reminder of former glories. Like Windows XP

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: How much longer will we have to endure this ?

yeah, nobody is immune to a hardware fault... [the most likely cause of an fsck that b0rked badly enough to pause for user input]. either that or misconfig. or just blame systemd.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: How much longer will we have to endure this ?

how often do you NEED a kernel update for Linux? (my experience - not at all, for many years)

Nearly all of the security patches are for userland stuff. I don't even remember a security vuln being in the kernel, and unless there's a serious instability in the kernel itself, you might be able to just do a driver update with a new driver [rare as it is], by removing the old one, and doing 'modprobe' [or similar] on the new one, and just keep going without rebooting.

[I was using modprobe and similar utilities to do that sort of thing back in the day, working on kernel drivers for wifi routers, when the kernel was 2.4something]

and last I checked the 'dpkg' and 'apt' systems will shutdown and re-start daemons after installing an upgraded package and dependent libraries. That should pretty much refresh things, without that reboot.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

but Tom Hanks looks NOTHING like Bill Gates, unless you want Anthony Micheal Hall to play Gates again... (yeah that might work). So who'd play SatNad? Or the BOFH for that matter? (I'm thinking Simon Pegg)

"Uh, Redmond. We have a problem..."

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: How much longer will we have to endure this ?

Although Linux or FreeBSD would be a good choice, I would actually expect them to go with an RTOS which might be better suited to signage.

VxWorks (commercial OS) or FreeRTOS (FOSS) would be good choices.

Both would certainly have a lighter hardware requirement and may even support legacy things that Linux distros might not...

(Linksys and others have used VxWorks for a lot of their wifi router firmware, though i haven't specifically worked with it in over a decade)

If the game is big sign with lightweight network-connected display that "just works", the RTOS could be the best choice overall.

Water conditions in Jupiter's clouds could support 'life', say astroboffins

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Water activity

Water, in many ways, is special. Hydrogen bonds are responsible for a lot of this.

* universal solvent for ionic chemical reactions

* unusually high melting point, low boiling point, compared to other substances

* expands when it freezes - keeps ice floating on rivers or lakes, rather than freezing solid

* attaches to lots of chemicals to form hydrates, which remain as solids.

* high affinity for dissolved gasses

* absorbs a wide band of radiation in IR range [greenhouse effect]

* relatively transparent in all forms to visible light

* can super-saturate an atmosphere at temperatures where it should be liquid.

* is lighter than other atmospheric gasses, yet does not escape out into space like H2 and He (water=18, nitrogen=28, oxygen=32, argon=40, CO2=44) [methane apparently breaks down in upper atmosphere and does not actually escape it]

This "being special" is one reason (probably) why water is the basis of Earth life. So life NOT as we know it might be a little difficult, given other solvent chemicals NOT being like this.

Microsoft approved a Windows driver booby-trapped with rootkit malware

bombastic bob Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Driver signing by Microsoft is just a way to know who is responsbile

Driver signing by Microsoft is just a way to ADD A TOLL BOOTH

Fixed it for ya. Driver signing is *POINTLESS* and an UNNECESSARY ROADBLOCK to FOSS.

Court kills FTC, US states' antitrust complaints against trillion-dollar Facebook

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Looks like the Shills are already out in force.

your point is good - it's not about the "social network" services provided, but the AD NETWORK and NEWS FEED and (alleged) censorship and (alleged) 'Cancel Culture' where the (alleged) abuses are. THAT, and the (alleged) monetizing of the CUSTOMER through spying and tracking and targeting with ads. Alleged, that is.

Unfortunately, the indications are that this FTC case was NOT addressing the REAL problem. And unfortunately certain provisions in U.S. Law (the infamous section 230) let it happen. Allegedly.

From THIS article...

"Section 230 was enacted in 1996 as part of a law called the Communications Decency Act, which was primarily aimed at curbing online pornography."

"In practice, the law shields any website or service that hosts content – like news outlets’ comment sections, video services like YouTube and social media services like Facebook and Twitter – from lawsuits over content posted by users."

"The law includes a provision that says that, so long as sites act in “good faith,” they can remove content that is offensive or otherwise objectionable."

And the latter part (allegedly) is where the biggest bone of (alleged) contention (allegedly) is, and why MANY people (allegedly) want the social media providers reigned in, political "contributions in-kind" being one of the accusations involved.

(doing my best to address the 'donkey in the room' without getting El Reg in trouble)

Bezos v Branson: Battle of the wannabe Space Barons as Virgin Galactic cleared by FAA to start flying customers

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

intercontinental flights

I'm sorta waiting for supersonic suborbital flights between NYC and London, LA and Tokyo, or for that matter, NYC and LA

(avoid the boom - go outside the atmosphere)

Developing for Windows 11: Like developing for Windows 10, but with rounded corners?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Windows 11

Windows 11 = boat anchor