Posts by bombastic bob

Can we talk about Kevin McCarthy promising revenge if Big Tech aids probe into January insurrection?

Re: Lawmakers or lawbreakers?

U.S. Congress subpoena power is still "due process" and of course if there is overreach (like violating the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution) then a federal judge can intervene for any objections to discovery that is deemed a violation or simply "too broad". So it's still "due process" and not tyranny so long as you have the ability to object and the congressional investigation is overseen by the courts.

It becomes tyranny when due process no longer exists.

(IANAL so my legal advice/opinion is worth what you paid for it)

Yet, I think there is STILL value to leaving your phone off (with no battery) at times...

The questions that no one has asked those leaders are "who are they protecting?" and "why are they fighting this?"

I would like to see SIMILAR QUESTIONS asked about what happened in Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, and other places from organizations like B.L.M. and ANTIFA. And I think the death toll from all of THAT was a *LOT* higher.

The laws were broken, and justice MUST be applied EQUALLY to ALL.

(and what happened on January 6 was a clear violation of the law, too)

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

Re: Yes, but...

I bet they forgot "Semprini" too

Re: Who did knew that

Actually, "they" should know better than to anger programmers, many of whom are white-hat hackers, with a few grey hats as well. Github was (more or less) originally a place where people were FREE to put open source projects. Commercial-use support came afterwards, and I use it so it's a good thing.

HOWEVER, "angering the customer base" is a BAD thing. If I am right, and the people who originally *MADE* Github so popular are "Freedom Loving" hacker-types that *CRINGE* at even the *IDEA* of nanny-bots built into the service (and getting in the way of their FREEDOM), I think the results will be predictable.

Re: Any interest, though

agreed

Re: Too few words

I'm waiting for words like "if" and "for" to be included in their list

Re: Passive aggressive is okay, right? ... right? ... right?

from the article: The software also won't make suggestions if the user's code contains any of the stored slurs.

So that could be a back-door way of implementing an OFF switch, right? I'm assuming that would be in a context of a "you must use this" directive from a clueless boss.

I don't like "features" of this nature anyway. I type fast and don't need something correcting me while I type, nor GENERATING BAD CODE *FOR* me. I haven't used Copilot yet and so it may not be as IRRITATING as other "autocomplete" or so-called "intelligent" features of an IDE. Still, from the descriptions (and apparent history of generating INSECURE code according to the article) it's probably NOT something I'd use without coercion.

I'll just have to make sure to include a harmless (yet 'banned' word) in the header comments of each file. heh.

/* The liberal use of code comments by maintainers is encouraged */

Re: Usage

your example is CLEARLY a reason why "profanity nanny" global "one size fits all" filters need to have LOCAL SETTINGS MANAGEMENT (including an "off" switch).

And maybe certain programmers should REALLY just become more tolerant and/or get a sense of humor. There are CERTAINLY more important things in the world of software development than ROBOT WORD POLICE. One of them was pointed out in the article, something about Copilot generating INSECURE CODE...

Confessions of a ransomware negotiator: Well, somebody's got to talk to the criminals holding data hostage

Re: Shah and his team get very little intelligence from the police

actually I would hope that during the negotiations they are GIVING a LOT of intelligence TO the police

(I would be MORE interested in NAILING THE PERPS than getting my data back, as anything truly important is being regularly backed up)

In space, no one can hear cyber security professionals scream

back in the early days of teh intarwebs only a relative handful of people, the vast majority of whom were NOT potential miscreants, could access other computers on teh intarwebs. So the *pressing* need for security was a *bit* less than it is now. (A *bit* being more like the comparison between dust and boulders, knowing that you really do not want dust to accumulate either).

Currently, only a relative handful of people have access to satellites via radio. Obvious comparison follows.

Re: "If it asks whether you want to play a game, may I recommend you select 'no'"

and don't forget to water the flowers

AWS Tokyo outage takes down banks, share traders, and telcos

the internet was designed to have a routing failover built in.

Why not "the cloud" ?

Electricity and phones and water in 1st world countries are expected to have 100% reliability. Why NOT "the cloud" ? I believe it CAN be done, and SHOULD.

(see my earlier post, below)

private cloud failover?

Here's a business opportunity for AWS: sell/rent end-users an inexpensive "private cloud failover system" in the form of a private cloud server that is capable of automatically handling the load (albeit slower) while the rest of the network is titsup...

(It could also handle low bandwidth loads and include synchronization when normal services are restored)

Just a thought, anyway. No more ALL eggs in ONE basket. The web publisher/whatever would basically rent or buy the server (maybe co-located on a different part of the internet, or physically local to the customer), and use regular AWS things to manage it (along with everything else). It would be for uber-high-reliability services, like banks, hospitals, governments, military, etc.. And it would handle a portion of the normal load. It would also have to specifically be set up to work when completely disconnected from the rest of the cloud services, and reliably sync up when services are restored.

Something to think about.

(assuming they do not already do this)

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: I did the same by accident...

"dd" stands for "WAIT... take a breath, re-read what you just typed, and pray to whatever dieties you believe in before pressing the 'enter' key"

Re: I did the same by accident...

sixty hours without sleep taught me to be more careful.

and to always have a backup!

Re: Swiss cheese

banking regulators might decide to levy FINES that exceed that comparatively insignificant cost of $10k

Re: Court documents indicate that the credit union had "some" of the data backed up

recovery costs ARE high when it takes expensive consultants to do it. They're probably running file un-delete cleanup utilities and doing it all by hand.

But what you and I probably would have had at the very LEAST is a simple 'xcopy' of the shared drive (as it was last night at midnight) on the IT manager's personal computer, since its only a few gigabytes and any decent IT manager can offload some of the porn to make room for it...

Re: Court documents indicate that the credit union had "some" of the data backed up

Secondly, pay for a proper backup / DR strategy

Or something simple, like DOS-style batch files and zips of the entire share drive with the YYYYMMDD date in the file name. Probably less than 10Gb for the ZIP. A 2TB USB drive plugged into the IT guy's computer, backing up every day at 8PM with a scheduled process, and when the drive gets full, get a new drive. 10GB a day could run for 200 days before filling. Or maybe you just clean out old files once a month or something...

(just turn off the monitor at night and leave the CPU running to do the scheduled stuff)

But yeah you need an IT manager that knows what he's doing.

But the company bears a greater burden of blame for making it possible in the first place

The main point of the article, no doubt.

They apparently had a directory labeled 'DO NOT DELETE' containing ransomware-related things. At least THAT one should've been mirrored in several places, including a USB drive, on a regular basis. Why? RANSOMWARE of course!!!

icon, because, facepalm

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Carlsbad CA is a high rent zone where a lot of businesses might want to locate for "image" reasons. It's a little bit like being located in Palo Alto. Not saying "snooty" or anything because it's not THAT bad, but still I think there's at least a _little_ bit of that.

Anyway, having a L_[aw]_Y_E_R office there that (allegedly) TRADEMARKS THE GREEK ALPHABET doesn't surprise me at all...

Icon, because, FACEPALM

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: Storage

I consider CRIMINALS to be "pests"

Re: section 58

and if the criminals see that your house has a firearm in it they have basically 2 scenarios:

* you won't be home if they want to actually steal your firearm

* you WILL be home and will use your firearm(s) on THE CRIMINAL (I would)

It might be interesting to view crime stats later to see if criminals avoid the "firearm house" in favor of the one nearby with all of the lights off and an expensive entertainment system inside...

This drag sail could prevent spacecraft from turning into long-term orbiting junk. We spoke to its inventors ahead of launch

It could also be that the 15kg includes the hardware necessary to store it and deploy it.

Re: Fifteen kilograms?!?

I would expect that comparing 15kg to the amount of fuel needed to de-orbit in the same time frame might make it the most viable alternative to a de-orbit burn.

In Microsoft's world, cloud email still often requires on-premises Exchange. Why?

Re: Can CNCF please shepherd through an open source AD equivalent?

I think it would depend on your needs. AD (from my viewpoint) has a lot of tentacles...

Those of us in the real world ... know that email is not simple.

I could certainly replicate MOST of what I've done on an RPi but i don't think I'd want to. My setup uses FreeBSD and is based on a config I originally set up back in the mid-2000's, has DNS, IMAP, shared host mail forwarded in and received by sendmail, etc. etc.. Not 'simple' (but not so impossible either). ZFS replication is nice, as well as cron for daily backups. A bit much for an RPi. Still is kinda nice having daily cron job results and Fail2Ban output sent to a specific IMAP folder so I can look at it if I want.

As for the ability to handle large volumes of e-mail, that would depend on my internet connection, Cyrus IMAPD, the shared host that forwards mail to my LAN server, and sendmail. (My internet connection is probably the weakest link)

in any case, I can't claim to be any kind of network guru unless I can manage to set all that up...

Re: Confused.com

I don't use Exchange at all but I do engineering work (mostly remote) for a company that apparently uses the cloudy version. Recently they were having trouble receiving e-mail from me for some reason. I never did find out exactly why except that for about a week, the outlook servers wouldn't respond to regular SMTP protocol. Now that it's working again, I was wondering if someone had turned OFF the machine running Exchange (assuming there had been one) and maybe THAT caused the e-mail to stop working. It didn't help that their MX settings appeared to be wrong (2 backup SMTP servers that do not recognize any of their company e-mail addresses when I checked them). So for a little over a week, I'd send them mail, it would go to a backup server, and then bounce back. Frustrating.

Their IT stuff is handled by a contractor that's apparently more of a B.S. artist than an IT pro. He doesn't seem to know basic networking very well (but apparently knows the right buttons to push to set up a new user's e-mail account). Unfortunately I'm not in Simon the BOFH's position and can't simply invite him to take a look out of the 3rd floor window...

In any case the company's e-mail is "working" now. Nobody ever told me why it wasn't. It might not be my department but I hate to see things like that happen, especially when I have a "clever" setup on my own LAN (been running since mid 2000's) that involves sendmail and an IMAP server and forwarding that I set up through one of those inexpensive "rent a shared Linux server" services.

And I wonder just how much of that was caused by Exchange...

Children of China, your state-sanctioned hour of gaming begins … now!

Oh, NOZE, _ONE_ _PERSON_ _DIED_ fear fear panic panic panic... NOW let's use that to justify our HEAVY HANDED RESTRICTIONS on EVERYONE ELSE'S BEHAVIOR *just* *in* *case* ...

REAL LIFE _IS_ RISK. The odds of dying in a traffic accident or having a tree fall on you or getting struck by lightning is NOT keeping people from driving or going outside... at least for NOW. In the current acceleration towards dystopian heavy-handed BIG BROTHER control of EVERY aspect of EVERYONE's lives, you have to remember that RISK *IS* *LIFE*. Otherwise we're just LAB RATS.

(icon, because, FACEPALM)

A free country should not implement bans on activities

PERIOD (with the exception of REAL crimes like theft, rape, murder, etc.)

this acceleration towards DYSTOPIAN CONTROL by BIG BROTHER is sickening...

Re: Freedom vs public health

what we do NOT need is a HEAVY HANDED TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT becoming "parents".

To have a truly FREE society, you have to ALLOW people to make choices AND accept the responsibilities of those choices, without HEAVY HANDED GOVERNMENT INTEFERENCE, even if you DISagree with those choices.

What China is doing is DYSTOPIAN and you can NOT justify it without IGNORING the overreach and the constant pressure of "big brother" looking over your shoulder at EVERY! ASPECT! OF! YOUR! LIFE!!

and, since when is PROGRAMMING a GAME? (article referenced Go, Chess, and PROGRAMMING as acceptable-to-the-CCP "games")

After quietly switching to slower NAND in an NVMe SSD, Western Digital promises to be a bit louder next time

Re: Revenue is ego, it doesn't mean anything

These actions are by design.

AND they got caught, AND people are watching, now. More watching is probably needed.

Re: Revenue is ego, it doesn't mean anything

Their gross margin is 26% though, which is huge!

you probably haven't done a LOT of financial analysis and reporting for the top-level executive suits, have you?

When it comes to cost accounting and analysis, there are those factors (generally called called "burden") that are basically fudge factors applied to adjust estimated costs for specific product lines in order to determine what it REALLY costs as best as possible without getting down to the nit in every analysis.

"Gross Margin" generally takes some (but not all) of this into account. As a general rule, the gross margin for a product line is used to determine "which products are profitable" so they know what to can, what to cost reduce, and what to promote like hell. That sort of thing. But it's "gross margin" and STILL does not factor in ALL of the costs. (Obviously that comes later with the 'bottom line').

Not unexpectedly the costs of sales, marketing, "ivory tower", taxes, loan interest, dividends, and other such things take a HUGE bite. That's where all the margin disappears to, as a general rule.

So 26% gross margin in a financial report might simply be fudged up or down to look better than it is, or may depend heavily on how they do their overall cost accounting at the end.

/me takes off accountant hat and tosses it back into the corner - stupid stinky hat

Japan's bullet trains replace smoking rooms with Zooming rooms

Re: its trains should not be Zoom-free zones that inconvenience business travellers

we need a portable "cone of silence"

(see 'Get Smart' TV show from the 60's, which was co-written by Mel Brooks, if you haven't heard of that before. "Sorry about that, Chief")

Re: Lagging

a decade or so ago I was using a commute train in southern CA to avoid traffic (went up to 75MPH in spots, but mostly under 40). Unfortunately the trip time kept increasing (due to inconvenient bus re-scheduling at the destination, mostly) so I stopped doing it. But while i was using the train many of us train riders wanted wifi. A laptop made it possible to do work, but I usually just played music and had an "alarm" go off 5 minutes before my stop in case I nodded off...

Trains being used as off-site work zones could mean shorter actual work days, recovering time while commuting, but at the expensive of inconvenience and bad scheduling practices. Unfortunately the trade-off got SO bad I withstood the traffic that I HATE to save over an HOUR each way...

(bus arrives too early, leaves too late, inconvenient "everyone on one or two for-the-train buses" and their convenient-for-the-politicians schedules, buses slowed down in traffic and hence picks up earlier and earlier, drop you off later and later, and they leave you at the station longer and longer, etc. etc. - not a good thing after initially being pretty cool)

'Unicorn' startup CEO faked sales figures, deals to trick investors, prosecutors claim

I will never understand UNSCRUPULOUS businesspeople.

I think I fixed that for you. Most business people are honest, and are the kind of people who hire you and pay you well if you do a good job, charge fair prices and service customers well, and report expenses and earnings honestly to investors.

Re: Robinhood?

without a suite number in the address it looks the same.

But a NORMAL company address WOULD include the suite number.

I used google maps to zoom in on it. It is a simple two story office building that looks a bit like a house, as far as I can tell, a kind of "semi-posh looking" rich neighborhood "homey" kind of building in my opinion. And it's not that big. You need 'street view' to see what I mean.

Google maps flagged 'Robinhood Financial' on the map. I do not think it is a mailbox place, but actual office space. Maybe it comes with a limited office staff (phones, mail) and internet service? That would make having an office space and a physical address convenient, especially for an intarweb company.

Interesting observation though. It's worth following up.

What's the top programming language? It's not JavaScript but Python, says IEEE survey

Re: What about people just using the language, and not talking about it?

I also haven't found a decent Python editor yet.

I use Pluma. It has syntax highlighting/coloring, auto-indent capability (somewhat simple but easy to get used to), and the ability to indent a hightighted block of text using tab/back-tab.

(gedit can do this too but its interface IRRITATES me)

Re: By that measure, YAML wins hands-down

Python's in the repo so it gets counted anyway.

Python DOES make VERY good "glue".

I also like using Python for sample code for processes that are better described with a sample program rather than trying to do it in prose with diagrams...

Re: Probably right

try and do whatever they need to do with the tool they know best.

and when all you know how to use is a hammer...

Yeah Python is "fit for purpose" for a lot of things, like a hammer. Just not EVERYthing.

Re: Probably right

Python seems to be the new duct tape of the world.

good analogy.

Python seems as if it is often used (or insisted upon) where it is really NOT fit for purpose but can be shoehorned in with extra time and tenacity.

Reminds me of how a DJango server that I took over was doing many things in Python that it should not have. I re-write the worst offenders in C, then passed files and piped stdio to/from them (called them as external utlities) and sped up the process at LEAST ten fold, so that uploads from smart phones took WAY less than a minute to crunch the data (instead of over 3 minutes - imagine waiting 3 minutes to upload files because of Python data inefficiency - YUCK!)

that is just ONE example. ALSO not a fan of all of those external dependiencies. If you must have pip and a special environment to run your Python program, you're doing it wrong...

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Re: Hmmm

I'm rather more concerned that they are able to brick them remotely

For me this justifies two things:

* do not connect TVs to the internet (use a box of your own choosing with HDMI or component output)

* do not purchase TVs from companies that CAN actually do this

Last thing _I_ want is for my legit purchased hardware to "accidentally" be BRICKED like this. So you companies who TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS LIKE POTENTIAL THIEVES, TAKE NOTICE.

At least ONE potential customer WILL NOT BUY YOUR SCHTUFF UNTIL YOU STOP IT!!!

Google: Linux kernel and its toolchains are underinvested by at least 100 engineers

Re: How is this different from Rust?

how about using CODING STYLE GUIDES that are comprehensive enough, ONLY allow trusted devs to push their changes without peer approval, and basic project management control over things that are important enough to warrant it.

that, and the occasional code review.

Seriously NOT that hard. Spend time on fixing bugs, hardening security, and *NOT* *IMPLEMENTING* "New Shiny" and MOST bugs and security problems will disappear quickly.

Yeah it's boring, and less interesting than implementing your "wish list", but the rest of us WILL appreciate the lack of moving targets and force-down-the-throat "features".

Faster. stronger, a bit better, and NOTHING ELSE CHANGES (except hardware support). Isn't that the BEST thing that could happen to the Linux kernel?

Re: Google Control

Just another Google whine to take over and control every aspect of the Internet.

When you read between (and behind) the lines, yes.

Re: Google will take control over Linux

Only if we LET them.

Only if their way of thinking takes over the project.

Only if Linus retires and hands over the torch to someone else who's on Google's payroll.

They are *WAY* *TOO* *QUICK* to blame the C programming language.

They are *WAY* *TOO* *EAGER* to change the management environment.

They OBVIOUSLY have an agenda here.

It is NOT going to be a GOOD thing, if they get their way.

'Nuff said, I think...

Re: Has anyone asked Linus what he thinks?

He is also reportedly enthusiastic with the recent moves to make Rust a via language for the kernel.

NOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Just works

I switched a female relative's computer from Windows Vista to Devuan Linux a couple of years ago. Not only did it fix the thing so it worked well again, it did nearly everything it had done before (but better) and did not need replacing with a "New, Shiny" Win-10-nic machine. She knew very little about anything computer-related except using mail, web browsers, managing music files on an iPod nano, playing videos, and playing games. Well, some of the games she played as a kid were no longer available (but I offered to set up the games in a VM if she needed it, so far no).

Her successful OS paradigm transition took less than a day. Mate desktop helped. Everything just worked. It was an older Sony Vaio laptop, and I set it all up on a new hard drive. No problems since.

I would say that, for her, Linux is kinda like using a Mac. Switching from PC to Mac is generally painless (except for the bank account). Switching from Windows to Devuan+Mate, also pretty painless (and the hard drive needed replacing anyway, so no harm to bank account).

More people need to understand this.

Re: Linux on the desktop

That is just more shit to learn

I'm sure there are many 'SMUG's (Small Minded Useless Gits) who would twist this into a "you REFUSE to learn":comment of some kind, and then go on praising the glories of Gnome 3/4 and (the cult of) SystemD. (or Win-10-nic for that matter)

(Even though the rest of us understand that Gnome 3/4 and SystemD are NOT Linux)

Re: Linux on the desktop

The software houses claim there is no demand, so they do not create a Linux version

True, and yet there are still many Linux applications that are commercial.

Ohe of my observations is the way runtme and package linkage are too connected to the distro. You mention Flatpak which would attempt to rectify this. My preference: static linking. Then make updates (to THAT version) free if there are any important fixes later.

Probably the biggest obstacle to cross-platform is the use of "Micros~1 Shiny' as a framework. Old MFC applications could be adapted (using something similar to wxWidgets which is very MFC-like) as long as they're not using the latest 'Shiny". The 'Shiny' always has a lock-in effect to ONLY supporting Windows. And nobody who is SANE would want to use ''.Not" to start a new project (or to support an OLD one for that matter). LOTS of attempts to port games, etc. but Micros~1 still provides their "Shiny" to keep as many devs SOLELY on THEIR platform as possible...

(Seriously this should make Java even MORE popular, I would think)

Re: @karlkarl - Linux is not an OS

What would be the reason of GNU/Linux being so popular ?

Probably marketing and hardware support. The BSDs really didn';t have RH and other commercial support/distributions. And so Linux grew in popularity because you could buy it at the local computer outlet, and it (mostly) supported YOUR hardware. That kind of thing.

Sometimes that's all it takes.

Re: Linux is not an OS

Oooohh, look, a NIT to pick! pick, pick, pick, ...

That's kinda how I read that. [most nits aren't worth picking]

As for the article, I didn't realize Linux was already 30! I guess I've been using it since it was 12...

and a "well done" for the use of [L]GPLv2.* (I think many of us would be unhappy if it ever went to 3.*)