Posts by bombastic bob

It's official. You can get FUCT, US Supremes tell scandalized bureaucrats in rude trademark spat

Re: Who will buy this clothing?

havingt a T shirt that says 'FUCT' on it would get enough laughs, so sure (I might buy it). If it's not too expensive...

oh, and well done to the Supreme Court "getting it right". More of same, please.

The Windows Terminal turns up in the Microsoft Store

Re: The Store - really?

"Much better than letting users try and install apps from websites... Or spending the time doing it for them"

you have *GOT* to be *KIDDING*...

thumbs down for the bad attempt at humor, or maybe you weren't joking...

[I cannot believe that SOME people actually THINK THIS WAY, or perhaps it's actually *FEEL* because no LOGIC could EVAR justify this kind of patronizing arrogance... so it MUST be emotions or evil motives or something worse]

Re: The Store - really?

The reason they're using "The Store" is to LOCK! EVERYONE! IN! to the following:

a) Win-10-nic *ONLY*

b) UWP

c) "Microshaft Logon" (with it's tracking and HORRIBLE EULA privacy violations built-in)

and of course, "The Store" in general, which _HAS_ been a pretty DISMAL FAILURE as I understand it...

[so one or two 'sorta ok things' make "The Store" a worth-while place to look for schtuff? yeah, right...]

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: Never trust software of which you cannot see the source

"Never trust software"

even when you can read the source. [for the truly paranoid]

From the article;

"this website uses cookies, please click ACCEPT"

one of my favorite FF plugins is "cookie white list with buttons" which lets you whitelist certain cookies as being persistent (or mark them 'session only') and [best of all] optionally store the rest of the cookies IN MEMORY ONLY so you can dump them ALL whenever you want to, especially when closing the browser.

[I'm considering my own webkit browser, and this feature SHOULD be a built-in]

Shameless Facebook treats its poor human moderators like absolute dirt. But y'know what it does treat right? Robots

meatbags don't get no respect (from FB)

what it says in the title

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Just as smart as their nuclear reactors

I call B.S. on this, having worked in the nuclear industry...

"a Chernoble's worth of radiation" - no. just no.

fake news, FUD, and hysteria, all rolled into one. No.

strobe light

just sayin'

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

shhh... don't give them ideas.

Re: Black Choppers overhead.

maybe they're afraid someone will use curl as a back-end for a simple web browser... yeah it could be done.

Re: Black Choppers overhead.

ack on the ad tracker. or more like:

"Implementing libcurl using Cronet would allow developers to take advantage of the utility of the Chrome Network Stack" WHICH WOULD THEN TRACK EVERYTHING YOU WERE DOING OUTSIDE OF THE BROWSER'S CONTEXT

OK I added that last part, but still...

should I include AD INJECTION too? well, hard to do if it's just 'surfing' indirectly from an application running on Android, maybe FILTERING THE ADS OUT and presenting the CONTENT WITHOUT THE ADS...

Why are fervid Googlers making ad-blocker-breaking changes to Chrome? Because they created a monster – and are fighting to secure it

Re: Ok, so it's useful and dangerous at the same time

"Wouldn't this solve the problem?"

kinda like noscript, but managing script blocking on a per-site basis when too many ABusers of the web (known as "developers") *FEEL* as if it's ok for a web page to LOAD CANNED 'CONTENT' AND MASSIVE SCRIPTS FROM EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE just to "view content" on that ONE site, such that it's hard to find the right magic to block them when 'temporarily allow' must be hit SEVERAL TIMES to get it to work [because each script brings THAT MUCH MORE CRAP in with it, requiring EVEN MORE 'allows', yotta yotta yotta].

it's why I've resorted to using a sanitized browser environment for those "special" sites [meant pejoratively] that for some reason I must use, such as ordering electronic parts for business reasons, or looking at someone's cat video link pasted into an IRC channel so I can flame them for posting stupid crap that required ENABLING JAVASCRIPT to view...

grump grump grump javascript grump grump - I can go on all day on this

and what's WORSE, is that, for a contract, I had to UN-JAVASCRIPT a couple of important pages because "web developer" (who should be shown the window by the BOFH) *FELT* (again with the FEEL 4-letter F word) that client-side scripting was needed, except it took over a second to total up a bunch of numbers and display the results, even noticeably flashing the occasional 'NAN' in the total (much to the irritation of boss and supervisor), even after FIRST rendering the entire page with zero values, making the system look SLOW and CLUNKY and UNPROFESSIONAL. My re-factor (now that 'web developer' is out of the way) used PHP to do all of that server-side, by embedding things like <?php print $var; ?> where he had '0' stuck in there (and then dynamically changed that by assigning DHTML with JQUERY of all things) and amazingly, it is so blisteringly fast [compared to that javascript abortion on the client] that you don't notice ANY delay at all, on an embedded device even. [and I had written all of the back-end, mostly in C, and hand-held him with super-simple php 'glue' pages to cough up the data values in his desired format, go fig, while he took 4 times longer than he should have to create the things, though we all admit they have a nice overall 'pretty' appearance...]

Anyway, javascript is *SO* overrated. Its inventor needs a session with me, a cluebat, and a cat-5-o-nine-tails. Or the BOFH, accompanied by "It's over here, by the window..."

Re: The title is no longer required.

"If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple."

"So says someone who has no idea to what extent Google extracts information."

or no concept as to what effect a MONOPOLY has on the free market. In short, "go elsewhere" is no longer an option, and the existence of the monopoly PREVENTS competition from providing alternatives.

If it were gasoline, he'd be screaming a lot louder. "Don't use it" he says? Or maybe buy something OTHER than gasoline or diesel fuel or whatever your car runs on? Good luck doing THAT... Or what about FOOD? If it were FOOD and we were told "if you don't like it don't eat it"... yeah right.

And now we come to 'Teh Intarwebs' which pretty much everyone needs to be on these days, for many reasons from employment to paying taxes. NOT being on the internet is like NOT having a telephone.

"Go elsewhere" and "don't use it" just don't apply.

Re: The title is no longer required.

firefox with noscript on all of the time works for blocking nearly all of the ad/tracker crap. And in those rare cases where I _MUST_ do something "scripty" I do the following (on a FreeBSD or Linux machine).

1. make sure I've run Xorg with the -listen_tcp option [or some equivalent thereof]. This is sort of required for me, because I like to do embedded dev across a network, and not even try to use a tiny screen like for an RPi as a development platform...

2. xhost +localhost (naturally) - this lets you connect from localhost.

3. from a terminal on the desktop, 'su - otheruser' where 'otheruser' is as guest level as you can make it

4. in the shell as 'otheruser' export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

5. then 'firefox http://whatever/ &' as 'otheruser'

7. make sure the browser DESTROYS ALL HISTORY ON EXIT, from cookies to cache, and especially passwords

this has no obvious performance (or other) issues when playing videos, or doing anything ELSE the browser needs to do, in order to properly display any content, access any web service, etc.

Yeah, FreeBSD and Linux (with Xorg, *NOT* Wayland) are AWESOME in being able to share the desktop like this and run in the context of a user that doesn't have any cached info on what you've been doing...

Re: Simply my ass

"What is your "simple" method going to do when they use IP addresses instead of hostnames to reference the ads?"

a not-so-simple method involving:

* RDNS and regex filters

* content scanning (somewhat smart-filter type scanning, "looks like an ad" or "has tracking in it")

* blacklists (including nation boundaries for entire IP address ranges)

but yeah, simple methods only work until the bad guys decide they'll stop using simple methods, and then the spy-vs-spy cold war begins

Re: Or, simply...

"Ever heard of Google Analytics?"

yeah they're permanently banned in my NoScript config

Re: Or, simply...

"move ad-blocking outside the browser to the DNS level."

year ago, before I had a NAT setup, I had written an HTTP proxy server. It included some simple DNS filtering, such as anything with "ads.x.x" got immediately re-directed to localhost

It makes me want to write my own browser, with a regex DNS pre-processor to bypass DNS entirely (for everything that is caught by the blacklist or "not on the white list", whichever). And if I wanted to be really slick, I'd RDNS every direct IP address request, too, and filter THOSE with the regex as well...

but anyway - none of this is all that hard to do, assuming that the web browsers and their plugin APIs have NOT been deliberately designed and/or obfuscated to PREVENT it...

Re: Dumbing down

wait until the browsers are NO LONGER OPEN SOURCE, for a fork of what they're up to that reverts it back to the way it was (for the convenience of the end-users) is likely to trigger some kind of knee-jerk control-freak response on SOMEONE's watch...

it makes me want to write my own browser. something webkit based. Midori was ok until it became as 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE as Chrome and Firefucox...

'AI is not the cause, it’s an accelerant. The pace of change is challenging' Experts give Congress deepfakes straight dope

"I am of course speaking about the orange-haired CIC Speaker of the House of Representatives of the USA."

Fixed it for ya. I think Pelosi was drunk at the time... [that's her new excuse]

Re: Missing the point

"even before the 90s we learned at school how to find and trust primary sources before jumping to 'OMG THEY SAID THIS'."

Fixed it for ya. I think that pretty much explains it. 4-inchers (people who view everything through a 4-inch screen) under the age of 40 may be driving all of this... and the "lack of education" system set them up.

All their base are belong to fake news. They have been set up the bomb. etc.

/me has a nice faked-up photo that I did with Obama's face as 'Cats' and the 'All your base are belong to us' as a demotivational... [it was fun]. It wasn't purely my idea, but I ran with it and made it better.

plastic pollution in the oceans? ugh, I hate environmentalist wackos using these kinds of premises as "examples" because we can EASILY forget to QUESTION THE @#$%-DAMNED PREMISE IN THE FIRST PLACE!

oh, and thanks for the subtle 'fake news' embedded in there. Nice. Job.

this could easily become like YOU BEATING YOUR WIFE because that is JUST AS FAKE as you asserting the 'plastic pollution in the oceans' thing.... [yes it's a reference to that classic leading question of 'how long have you been beating your wife' to which there is NO possible answer that comes WITHOUT the un-due criticism].

Such tactics are transparent. Your 'tricks' are for CHILDREN. <-- that was a reference to a breakfast cereal commercial

Re: Fakes versus bias

"So we all take our news with a grain of salt, which is probably a good thing."

The BEST thing that can come out of a ship-load of convincing 'fake news' is that people actually DO this, start thinking instead of feeling/reacting, and recognize that there is way too much B.S. out there to leave your skeptic hat on the hat rack while viewing it.

Hell, let's just call B.S. and 'fake news' on EVERYTHING, and wait for the dust to settle.

Re: OpenAI?

"OpenAI is a deep, well thought out and prepared deception, provocation and diversion."

without actually researching whether or not I'm right [and I most likely am, instinctively] I would venture to guess that Open AI covers a broader spectrum of what A.I. _could_ be, sort of like what the STL libraries have tried to do with all of their implementations for various collections of things, in a GENERIC sense, which tends to be inefficient [but covers a wide spectrum of possibilities].

So yeah there's an example or two of "that" out there, which also suggests that using OpenAI [like using STL] is not necessarily a bad choice except (possibly) for certain exceptions.

And if I bothered to research this, which I probably won't, I'd probably just confirm what my instincts and experience are telling me.

Re: News and my patented blockchain AI technology

I'm too lazy to do a patent search, but if you were to give us the patent number we could all look at it ourselves to see what it's all about... and THEN snark all over it!

heh heh heh heh

/me recognizes a few patents out there for things like perpetual motion devices, microwave based star drive systems, and other crackpot ideas. If you want to shell out the $ and file the thing, you too can have one o' those!!!! might be fun at parties

my own name is on a provisional patent (among many other names, department boss, supervisor, a couple of other engineers) having to do with a wireless network reliability method for wifi streaming audio/video content, as I'm the guy that did the prototype for it. never went anyplace as a product though. the latter part is what REALLY matters.

Re: a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

what about all of those photos etc. of drunken Mrs. Clinton?

(One in particular made a funny demotivational)

Re: Expert

"Trump sure is trying to make it so."

Saying things like that is _USUALLY_ called "pandering to the perception" (at least by me) and is a PERFECT example of trolling for up/down votes, etc. [like was mentioned in the article, or at least that was my interpretation of the quote I made a few posts up]

I'd ask for proof of your B.S. assertion if it was not so obviously 'fake news'

Re: Expert

lessee - the solution to RAMPANT FREEDOM GOING UNCHECKED is... A DATABASE?

HA HA HA HA HA HA! (oh you were serious?)

Re: Blockchain technology and AI

you're forgetting about a couple of things...

a) freedom of speech

b) artistic expression

And, from the article:

"Users can be easily manipulated to like, comment, and share posts without thinking about the potential harm they can cause."

happens in HERE _ALL_ of the time!!!

"Potential harm" - to WHAT exactly? If I could produce a ship-load of videos that use extreme audio/video editing to make fun of lib-tard politicians and their *RIDICULOUS* ideas, and how they continue to TRY AND RESTRICT MY FREEDOM [while simultaneously INCREASING THEIR OWN POWER CONTROL AND WEALTH], I'm gonna DO it. Consider it a Guerrilla tactic for FIGHTING AGAINST THEM.

keep on snarkin' !!!!

The joy of six: Microsoft emits latest preview of .NET Core 3 with plenty of pipes, perfs, loads...

stop, you're making too much sense!

There's the right way (compile efficient code to native binary)

There's the wrong way (scripty scripty scripty)

And there's the MICRO-SHAFT WAY! ".Not".

Take a look at the 'hello world' example for a C-pound appliation, compare to simple hello world application in C. Even a windows version just calls an API function to create a dialog box. Yeah. How to OVER-complicate the otherwise simple.

(and if it's open source, native compiling for any platform should be relatively straightforward)

just thinking, maybe the point here is that MS tried to make "one windows to rule them all" and ended up NOT being on "devices" after all. And so you have x86 and ARM. So why do we need a P-code translation taht can be re-compiled into something more efficient in the FIRST place? JUST! MAKE! NATIVE! BINARIES! clang and gcc have LOTS of cross-compiler support. shouldn't be too hard using THOSE...

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

OS/2 failed for different reasons. microsoft wrote the presentation manager, and OS/2 1.2 (releasing about a year before Windows 3.0) set THE standard for GUI environments.

Microsoft has broken that of course since Windows "Ape" and Win-10-nic and UWP and 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE, but I digress...

The point is that OS/2 was actually SUPERIOR in every way, like a 16-bit NT in a lot of ways, a better API, and so on. But IBM marketed it for the PS/2 computer, no love for clones. THAT basically KILLED it, whereas Windows went for the clones AND the PS/2, and the rest became history.

Too bad MS isn't studying their past successes, though. THEN they would see that they're following IBM's ineffective tactics on this one.

Re: "Windows Subsystem for Linux"

"throwing out the Windows kernel and leaving the API."

Re: But why?

"future versions of Windows would be able to simply run Linux software out of the box."

It's more easily done the OTHER way: a Microsoft-blessed version of WINE, running on a Linux kernel, with a WINE-like subsystem that implements all of Win32 at the API level, making native X11 and Win32 calls.

The rest of their ".Not" crap could then make Win32 API calls through the layer... and I bet it would STILL be faster than it is in Win-10-nic!!!

That's just too obvious, though. Remember MS did this with Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x running on top of MS-DOS. So now it would be Win-11 running on Linux! heh heh heh

considerably snappier file performance inside Linux

from being IN WINDOWS? Snappier than WHAT, MS-DOS 1.0 on a FLOPPY?

EVERY test I've EVER run that compares Windows to Linux or FreeBSD has demonstrated that Linux and FreeBSD file system performance is a *LOT* better than windows, by at least 10%. I haven't run those tests in a while, but a lot of numbers that came out at around the release of Win-10-nic showed that 7 was a tad faster than 10, and significantly faster than 8, and about the same as XP [which is what I ran the tests on, using equivalent hardware].

The biggest single problem with the windows file system SEEMS to be what I like to call "paranoid cacheing". Linux and FreeBSD will use ALL of the available RAM as a read/write cache if necessary, to limit the amount of actual I/O until it gets efficiently flushed to the disk, thus making the I/O faster overall. When you have to wait for a write to complete, it just slows EVERYTHING down.

And you see this a LOT with Windows. It's not hard to reproduce, not hard at all. I am not 100% sure that the problem _IS_ "paranoid cacheing" but everything I see tells me that Windows waits for physical write completes, and may even assume it CHANGED ON DISK and then would re-read it back again [instead of leaving it in a cache and relying on it NOT changing], whereas Linux and BSD do asynchronous write cache and generous read cacheing, 'lazily' flushing the cache to disk and journaling the file system to ensure file system integrity if the power goes out or something.

As a result, _I_ _CALL_ _B.S._ ON THAT CLAIM, Microsoft. Maybe WSL is "snappier" than CYGWIN, or Linux in a VM hosted on a windows box, but _NO_ _WAY_ is it "snappier" than LINUX ITSELF!!!

In fact, I think windows should run in a VM on Linux so it can get a FILE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE BOOST from the Ext file system. Similar with FreeBSD, hosting windows and NOT the other way around. UFS+J, ZFS file systems, WAY better than anything Micro-shaft can offer.

/me thought of YSL ties when I saw WSL. Dunno why.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Document formats

"Libre Office is compatible enough with MS Office."

As far as I can tell it is. I was handed a spreadsheet that needed to be modified, running _THE_ _ONLY_ Linux workstation at that site [I needed Linux to use remote X11 with embedded devices so I could edit code on them and do other things like 'meld' to manage source control and changes and whatnot - embedded device has a tiny screen, NO good for development, so it's a must-have and a reason NOT to use Windows _OR_ Wayland, but I digress..] and no problems reading it, modifying the hell out of it, and submitting the modified version. it was created on a Win-10-nic machine using a somewhat recent version of MS Office, since that's what everyone else seems to be using.

the only problem I've had is trying to print on a Lexmark "all in one" type color laser printer. Ate a box o' paper doing a test page. Maybe Lexmark has a driver for it but I haven't needed to print so I left it uninstalled after that. Kinda funny in a way...

I think the Altium bunch is near enough to me that maybe I can go over there some day with a ginormous penguin-shaped cluebat and get them to create a Linux version.

no looking back if they finally "get it", I bet. I think CAD started with X terminals, now didn't it?

Re: Its the updates

" you don't know how it feels to a new user."

Heh - a FEELER, huh? FEEL the 4 letter 'F' word. You should try THINKING instead.

Re: Its the updates

"The pre-requisites for this lib and that was nothing but a real pain."

Me-thinks you do NOT know of what you speak.

" I've never found Linux all that usable, and I'm about as technically minded as they come."

You need to install something OTHER than Ubuntu with Unity. And don't bother trying to find 'Internet Explorer' either. You'll probably need a few different software packages that are equivalents to and/or better than the windows version, things like Libre office, VLC Firefox and/or Chrome, and so on.

/me has been using FreeBSD GUI almost exclusively for EVERYTHING, since 2005-ish. Linux is a tad bit more friendly for windows users with some of the built-ins, auto-mounting USB drives when you plug them in, GUI bluetooth and wifi config, things like that. It's all there for you, last I looked, in every decent distro.

I suggest either the Mate desktop, or Cinnamon. That should get you something familiar enough, easier of a transition than 7 to 8 or 7 to 10 would be.

Re: Rock, hard place etc.

still in XP? That would be a GOOD thing!

XP works just fine for my 3D printer software, though I admit I had to massage it and talk nice to it while getting the drivers and stuff installed...

The computer doing teh 3D pinting came with XP. It's one o' those low-end Lenovo "book sized" deals with a 1.something Ghz atom processor. Again, works fine for 3D printing. And if I were to "up" grade it, maybe not so much...

nothing wrong wiht XP. Micro-shaft should've stuck with it.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Re: On the bright side

/me considers a wolf temporarily moving its prey closer to the radiation source because it's a bit "underdone" and properly cooked carrion goes well with a nice chianti...

Re: Small point

I thought ignorance was bliss?

silly me...

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

Re: I've been caught ...... I must have Asperger's.

"Expect to be downvoted"

why?

was said to have cost TalkTalk £77m to clean up

I call B.S. on that £77 million - I bet the company inflated it for insurance and tax purposes

[doesn't mean the perps aren't guilty - throw the book at 'em]

Re: I've been caught ...... I must have Asperger's.

yeah about "ass-burgers" - it's one of those ENVIOUS nicnames for "genius personality" - like AD[H][D

better drug it out of existence, because CREATIVE and INNOVATIVE people aren't so easy to control...

Microsoft throws lifeline to .NET orphans in the brave new Core world

As long as I can *PREVENT* linkage to ".NOT" (or whatever they call it)

As long as my C and C++ projects do NOT have link up with ".NOT" or CORE or whatever they wanna call it, I'll just not care what new/shiny bandwagon MS excretes now and in the foreseeable future...

I still like the idea of being able to let people download a single EXE file, copy it to 'wherever', and just run the application as-is without installing a boatload of "other stuff" and polluting the registry, etc. and requiring elaborate install and/or uninstall processes.

dynamic linking and shared frameworks are SO highly overrated

But of course the US and China's trade war is making those godDRAM oversupply issues worse

Re: Forthcoming Event

All that needs to happen is for MICROSHAFT to introduce a new windows update that's a TOTAL RAM HOG, and the recommended FIX is a RAM UPGRADE.

It wouldn't be much different than normal Win-10-nic feature creep anyway... maybe put the bloat feature into ".Not Core" or similar. Yeah, THAT would fix it! [*not*]

That, and Firefox+Chrome browsers, "improving" their memory model or script speed but REQUIRING the extra RAM to make it work.

Then it'd be like what happened with Vista, and when '9x first came out and we needed to upgrade our 386SX computers [that ran 3.x just fine] to 486DX2's and Pentiums with >16M because less than that ran POORLY with '9x...

Zorin OS 15 nods at Ubuntu and welcomes Windows escapees

Re: (three finger pinch will, for example, show a list of running apps and workspaces)

triple bucky. just don't do the WRONG triple-bucky or your computer will reboot from the climax

Re: Back in time

did you try links or lynx? text-mode browsers. heh.

Re: The 39 Steps

Yeah, but the problem with trying drivers is sometimes, if the printer is in another room (or building), the wrong driver will dump a box of paper with 4 characters on each page, creating a billion print jobs that have to be individually canceled before you can shut it off... [I had that happen a few weeks ago with a Lexmark printer at a remote site - no more attempting to print from Linux until I have a working solution]

Ideally Lexmark will have a CUPS driver I can find with a simple google search... but if they don't, I'm stuck, since that's "the office printer" and every other computer (that's not an RPi to be used in an embedded system, which is temporarily on the network so I can use ssh as well as pluma via remote X11 desktop to do development work on it) is running *cough* Win-10-nic... so they don't have problems, because Lexmark HAS to sacrifice to the Micro-shaft god to stay in business...

Re: The 39 Steps

regarding asking for Linux help in an online forum, or IRL for that matter, and generally getting a helpful response to your problems...

"Even if that were true (which in my experience it isn't),"

it isn't? Of course, it depends on how you ask.

wrong way:

"This @#$%-ing Linux thing SUCKS. Rant rant rant gripe gripe gripe complain blah blah blah. If it can't [insert minor nitty problem] I'll tell EVERYONE I know how much LINUX SUX"

wrong way:

"I'm a n00b at Linux. How do I XXX? I expect you to walk me through the process while I argue with you and tell you how wrong you are"

wrong way:

"Someone told me to install Linux and I did, and now my computer doesn't work"

right way:

"I have a problem with XXX. I've tried YYY after taking the time to google and research the problem, but it didn't work. Am I doing something wrong?"

[if it is not clear, now, then you are beyond any help anyway]

Re: The 39 Steps

"asking for help fixing an issue tends to get a friendly response."

even on IRC. or USENET. surprise!