Posts by osxtra

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Travel Days

We moved from Chicago to Los Angeles right before I turned eight years old. Dad and I drove. (well, he drove, I was in the back seat). Mom, being six months pregnant with soon-to-be sister, flew out.

It was. a great trip. Mid July, sleeping under the stars, listening to Walter Cronkite every time we had reception.

See, we left 18 July and got to L.A. on 21. Apollo 11 left 16 July and got to their destination on 20.

So, in my little pea-brained kid's head, I thought it took three days to drive to Los Angeles, and four days to drive to the moon.

VAG

The big problem these days with gauging the accuracy of any US Government project's cost estimate is that one must factor in how much its CEO is going to demand in vig for the deal to actually happen.

Think of the extra amount not as a Value Added Tax, but more of a Viciously Applied Grift.

Aurora immutable KDE Plasma workstation: Big, slow, and confusing

All Twisted Up

After investigating Aurora, famed Linux researcher David Bowman was said to report: "My God, it's full of knobs!"

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

Way 'mo problems

Tin-foil hat firmly in place, one has to wonder if a certain Mustelidae could be responsible for the intrusion.

After all, his competitor's auto-taxi service is miles ahead. Be a real shame if they had to halt production.

Zorin OS 18 beta makes Linux look like anything but Linux

Not Yet Ready

Was percolating on migrating an office of around three dozen WinDoze boxes to some flavor of *nix.

They're already half-way there, using FF/TB/LO for most of the daily activities.

Tried MX, Zorin, Ubuntu, straight Debian, others.

The big stumbling block is a couple of the managers are used to dialing in via TightVNC.

Don't want RDP. Need screen sharing like they're used to.

It's all single user, no hopping around from account to account. Staff sits down and gets to work.

Haven't found a single simple app that can be installed in *nix which will reliably share the GUI at system boot.

Trying to craft a systemctl service to use KRFB just crashes. Auto-login is required to get it to run at the user level. Ugh.

Did get it working with X at one point, but it had to run this loop so the remote screen was hugely long and kept resetting itself. Awful.

No, don't want RustDesk, NoMachine, or any of their ilk. Want to give the managers their little icons they can click on to be dialed into the machine as needed, move the mouse around if they have to, paste the clipboard back 'n forth. And it has to work before login, in case the the remote host gets rebooted.

As smart as *nix is, as polished as desktop is looking these days, at least in this regard it's alas still not ready for prime time.

Smart-blooded super soldiers: Coming soon from DARPA

All Green On The Inside

So the good folk at DARPA have finally read Scalzi's excellent Old Man's War.

The idea does actually have merit, but for now think I'd prefer to remain stock sapiens.

Though, were it able to be turned off, his concept of the BrainPal is rather interesting.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

I Never Meta Code I Didn't Like

"There is also the open question of what happens when AI models are trained on the output from AI models."

Does no one remember how quickly Michael Keaton's characters in Multiplicity went sideways?

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Method 3A

If method 1 doesn't work, and you're helping someone set up a Win 11 box they've purchased from somewhere so you can't use Method 2, there's a fairly simple way to get that local account on the machine.

Hopefully you own a domain with a * entry in your aliases file pointing to some real address. This allows you to give any email address you want at that domain to M$ and keep its grubby hands off of your real address.

Once WinDoze is up and running, logged in to M$ with the throwaway address, open a DAS prompt as administrator and run:

net user mylocalaccountusername myreallysafepassword /add

net localgroup administrators mylocalaccountusername /add

Substitute your own choices for mylocalaccountusername and myreallysafepassword.

Reboot and log in as mylocalaccountusername

If you don't recall the name of the M$ account, open a DAS prompt as administrator and run 'net user' to see what it was. Let's say it was mystupidonlinemicrosoftaccount.

Then run:

net user mystupidonlinemicrosoftaccount /delete

Reboot again and M$ is out of your hair, at least until the next time CoPilot maddeningly adds itself back to your taskbar.

Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling

Opportunity

I now eagerly await the arrival of a new online service: Flockusign.

Funding for program to stop next Stuxnet from hitting US expired Sunday

Info-Grab

To keep it from getting lost, perhaps some young pup will write a patch to forward all that CyberSentry data over to TikTok.

Yeah, that sounds safe...

Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth

Latency

(Popup Balloon) Your message has posted!

It should be delivered in under 600 hours.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

One Ringy Dingy

Sounds like M$ is on track to repeat its glorious takeover of the cell phone market...

AFRINIC election annulled after ICANN writes angry letter to African regional internet registry

So, if China grabbing these IP's. was against policy, when do they come back to Africa? Seems a no-brainer. You steal something, it gets confiscated by the authorities and returned to the owner. Court cases yes, but lawsuits should not be necessary where actual crime is involved

Too bad for the folks in China illegally using the IP's. Perhaps they could get reimbursed via the judge that orders the IP's back?

American coders are most likely to use AI

Shakespeare

Monkey, meet typewriter.

Seriously, anyone who thinks they're a coder because they figured out how to scribble into a prompt is, by definition, not a coder.

It takes a good head for language, and time to develop the critical logical skills necessary to become a competent programmer.

Saying "ChatGPT, what logic do I need for ..." is NOT the way to go about it.

Sneaky Serpentine#Cloud slithers through Cloudflare tunnels to inject orgs with Python-based malware

Rule #1

"Once the victim clicks on the malicious link"

The very first thing I say to any new client concerned about web safety: "DON'T CLICK ON IT".

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Ugh

Have been faithful to FF since version 1, switching from Netscape.

IE was never my friend, same for it's "modern" offspring Edge.

Chrome (and its variants) will never be my friend.

DDG is not yet ready for prime time (not sure of its progeny, but hell, you can't even see its version via CLI, or start in safe mode, or persist a chosen downloads path, or ... many other things a browser *should* be able to do. Guess I could poke around its Github repo and try to "mend" it, but if it wants to be a "big boy", I shouldn't have to.)

At least Mozilla's other main app - Thunderbird - still works.

I'd been pitching a little $ to them every month, a thanks for keeping the lights on. But about a year ago I moved that small amount over to double that to my other regular offering : The Document Foundation.

Thanks to CloudFu$!, can't even use FF anymore on many sites. And so far as those folks go, one can forget scripting. Have a legitimate need to automate report downloads from your CRM? Too bad; if you're automating - at all - you're apparently evil and need to be blocked. What a childish view of the 'tubes.

At least SeleniumBase seems to be able to break through their idiotic inter-moat, but ... yeah, Chrome again.

Ugh. Might just have to go back to Lynx, and give up on all that GUI stuff.

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

Royal Offering

I wonder how many Nigerian Princes will apply...

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Clickety-Clack

'k, a couple of things with that article, but to be up-front about it, I may come across as biased, having typed in the Dvorak layout for over 35 years.

So long as Qwerty (sic) "works well once learned", sure. Shovels work well, too. But a backhoe is a helluva lot less stress on your body.

Yes, Mr. Sholes invented the typewriter, and in 1878 his contraption would jam if you tried to go faster than three or four words a minute.

So he munged his layout, and thus "qwerty" was born.

The ubiquitous "they" say the average typist fingers move around sixteen miles a day. With dvorak, it's one.

Percentage of words one can type on the home row with Querty? 32. Dvorak? 70.

Never took typing in school, so after a stint in the military as a mainframe operator, just another hunt'n'pecker, knowing I was going to be in the 'puter field the rest of my life and also wanting my hands to be able to still play guitar for many decades, I lit upon that alternate layout.

Haven't looked back.

So far as that M model, never used it, but still have my Northgate OmniKey Ultra (a fair mechanical with dip switches for adjusting the layout, and an optional set of caps could get to match for letters that changed row), and the DAS Keyboard from around 25 years ago, a big klunky black thing with no stencils on the keys.

(I did once visit a friend with a Selectric II and wanted to type something one day. Having gone straight from longhand to the cursor, it took nearly two pages to remember to press <RETURN> after every line. And that stupid ding as you got close to the end. Annoying! Give me word-wrap any old day.)

I had always preferred mechanicals, but after getting an MBP in '09 got the fingers to adjust and really don't mind. It took longer to train the thumb to do command instead of control than to get used to the feel.

These days it's a hand-built OpenCore desktop running Sonoma, and a Matias backlit USB model, closest I could come to the feel of the Fruity laptop.

On a different note, no, I'll bet somewhere in the world there is at least one person with a home alter and gilded icons. And a manifesto lovingly crafted in assembler. ;)

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Color Me Happy

Have fond feelings for that app, but honestly, if you're going to get all GUI about it (i.e., not shelled in and using a proper editor such as VIM), VS Code is quite sufficient these days.

Thank ghu they made it black and yellow instead of that (IIRC) hideous old blue and off-white look.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Shiny Stuff

Wonder how one would calculate their *actual* footprint?

For example:

The daily driver was built from parts first purchased in '18, these days running Sonoma via OpenCore. Did have to spring for a used Titan Black a few years ago as the old XP couldn't keep up; Fruity Co. had dropped its architecture. The old GPU went into a TrueNas box built around that same time.

"Tiny mobile" - a Galaxy S20 Ultra - is a hand-me-down from when my 19 got run over by a car and the GF upgraded hers to a 21 to get the better camera. (She still uses that one, too).

"Medium mobile" - a Galaxy Tab S2 - is from '16 or so, running Lineage. Not used as much these days, but still works.

The old "big mobile" - a seemingly un-killable '09 MBP - was replaced in '22 by a Framework. Have adjusted to the slightly smaller screen. I still crank up the MBP because newer editions of the Fruity OS won't play U-Boot. Mindless fun!

The main car is a '15 Prius, long paid off, around 150K in mileage, just getting broken in.

The backup car is an '01 Tacoma, manual everything, barely any computer. I can actually work on it!

Home tech - A/C, fridge, stove, dishwasher, water heater, etc. - all from the last remodel, around '16. Nice Washer/Dryer set bought used around '22. No wifi connectivity to any of it. Call me old fashioned, but the fridge should neither talk to me, nor the 'tubes.

There is *some* new stuff. The iFixit soldering station purchased last year is awesome. Just had to get a new battery brick (it drives the reading light when at the bar) as the old one died and while ascending to portable charger heaven tried to start a fire in my glove box. Had to replace the box; the brick melted a hole the size of your hand in the bottom of it. Icky plastic smell in the car for a couple of weeks. Got a replacement at the pull-a-part for $20. Replaced the '15 Bravia as a b'day present for the GF. It had developed an unsightly vertical green line, and compared to the new one was really dark. Who noticed? Me, I'll stick with books, but she likes to stare at the thing. It was last year's model when we bought it in mid-'24, interest-free but already paid off (mainly as the scum at Syncrony Bank decided they weren't getting enough vig and announced a new fee for me to get print statements. No thank you. I mean, green is good, but don't try changing terms after the purchase and say that I *have* to do something or you're going to charge me more. You make enough money, and this crap about "terms subject to change" when purchasing something is simply not legal. Why have terms at all if one side can arbitrarily update them without the other's consent? Contract law doesn't work that way, and without an actual human on the other side at the time of agreement there's no way to remove that "subject" clause, as one could at least attempt to do if an actual, mutually agreed-upon contract were being drawn up). A little bigger than the old 70" Sony, it seems to have shed a few pounds, too. Think Samsung is mad I won't let it connect to the internet, but they'll get over it.

The newest piece of tech will be a Prusa Core 1 kit; if the shipping date would ever stop skipping into the future, I might actually get to play with it.

One change has been breaking up with Scamazon. Initially for political reasons, but the wallet seems to like it, too. It's amazing how one doesn't actually *need* same minute delivery of something they're apt to return anyway, and how peaceful the street is without their ubiquitous trucks constantly swinging by. Plus, it's like playing a little detective game figuring out how to buy other "needed" items without going through Bozos. I sure do miss local stores.

(Speaking of ubiquitous, Waymo is in town. Seems you can't get down the street without tripping over a few of those creepy driver-less electric taxi things. Wonder how long they'll last before getting replaced? One of the main depots, with 20+ cars constantly charging, is directly across the street from a big office building featuring a Tesla sign. It's got to gall them, having to watch all those Jags coming in and out. The Mustiladie really missed the boat not getting his vehicles to be the default driver-less car; but, with their track record I wouldn't want to be in one even if it was human operated.)

There are two things you never see on Star Trek: Bathrooms; and trash. Guess those transporter/replicator gadgets are good for something.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

I'd Like A Venti Fail, Please

Wait, StarClucks tried to go with less human baristas?

What are all those Philosophy, History, and Liberal Arts majors going to do while waiting to secure tenure?

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

ABM

MicroSloth - Always Be Misstepping.

Charging four times as much to run your own software on a competitor's hardware does sound a little steep. Maybe a nice 10% markup would be enough? It's not like they don't already have an abundance of money. Where are those WWII profiteering laws when we need them?

Still, this isn't about M$ overcharging. It's about Gezos and Bezos trying to get (and keep) more customers. Seems they have some resources; figure it out, folks!

Bits is bits, and data is data. The customer doesn't need to know how the interface works under the hood, so long as they can operate it. How many of us can build our own cars, vs how many of us know how to drive?

Where G and B could really shine is to do a little work themselves, figure a way to have the M$ customer get their same reports running on Ubuntu or whatever - even ugly-fying the output to make it *look* like something Redmond would do - and then offer that API to customers at a fairly discounted rate to get them in through barn door, and stay there, content if not happy.

For extra credit, they could make it look like CoPilot was helping.

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

LO L

Cue LibreOffice...

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Some things never change

So, they've put a fancy screen on a VT-100. Cloud = Client/Server.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

In The Future

2052: Grampa, what's an 'Inspector General'?

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

The House of Paul and Bill

Picked up DAS in the mid-80's after flying mainframes for USAF. It seemed really cryptic, no good docs to speak of. Even Zork on the ARPAnet had better help. Was still using my Commodore at the time; it had better games.

Found a bug in a 9-track tape driver (controller was bigger than the SX-16 PC we had connected to it) around '90 or so while using their compiled BASIC "Professional Development System" on DAS 3.31, and actually got through on the phone to speak to a human in Redmond. The bug never got fixed, so while we'd sprung for the full 4 megs of memory, I could never take full advantage of it. (That much memory was 10% the capacity of a 1600Bpi tape, would have come in handy.) Even today, thinking about making incantations around QEMM and config.sys still gives me the shivers.

Got off of M$ as my daily driver in '09, switching to the Fruity OS. Still using that now but won't buy their hardware anymore until I can upgrade and work on it, so am hoping either Adobe finally ports to *nix, or I finally learn GIMP. Unless, of course the good people at Opencore get together with someone who's come up with a vanilla Arm hardware implementation.

Keep a WinDoze box handy for providing tech support. Have not let it see 11 under the general "even numbered version rule". DAS 3 & 5 were good. 4 sucked. Win 3 was OK, but super buggy. '95/'98 were good, but still more DAS than Doze. 2000 was OK, but nothing to write home about. ME needed to be taken out back and put out of its misery. Win 7 was finally NT for the consumer, fairly stable and as pretty as it could be for its time. 8 blew dead bears. Since 10 actually kinda works, am not holding much breath for the next one, might just have to start recommending clients move to React (maybe Fedora if they can handle it). Way too much bloat and ads, but that seems to be way of things these days.

The MBP still works, too, though for mobile I've moved to a FrameWork with Fedora. Server boxes are either Debian or Alma, since CentOS got retired. M$ Server licensing is insane, and their implementation of AD was taken from Novell anyway, just like their version of DAS was bought. I wonder what it is about the richest guys being the ones who know what to buy so they can re-sell it?

Even were I still on WinDoze, except for one thing, wouldn't use any of their stuff. Browser? FF. Email? TB. Spreadsheets? LO. DB? Maria. Web? Apache. Coding? Python. All open source. Don't get me started on CoPilot, it's about as much crap as their earlier take on cornering the mobile market, and we all saw how that turned out. Like all current versions of AI, it's a hula hoop, definitely not Ready For Prime Time, hopefully relegated to the trash bin sooner rather than later. (I remember M.U.L.E on the C64 giving a bonus sometimes that said "You've won $50 for your research into artificial dumbness". 40 years later, that's still my rough take on AI.)

I'd rather keep giving the Document Foundation a small token of my appreciation every month than have one of those infernable 365 subscriptions. At least with the former I can see the source code.

About the only good app they have these days is VS Code, though if Pulsar ever catches up on extensions I'll probably ditch it, too. (Yeah, Excel proper is awesome, but they wrote that for Jobs, and it's UI on 'Doze has been junk for years, ever since that stupid Ribbon thingy came out. Wish Bob would have buried it, along with Clippy, and himself). Code is also GUI, so for any remote work it's still Vim all the way.

I remember putting Doom on the office network, '94 or so. Thomas Conrad ARCnet cards, coax in a star topology (token-ring was a gift from the Devil, a blasphemy to be avoided at all costs), running at max a whopping 2.5M bits per second, dip switches to set the node ID, don't flip the wrong one or you may accidentally duplicate an address and everything stops dead.

There were five of us that used to play regularly when we could sneak in a little time. Until the boss asked why his files would never open whenever he heard grunting and chainsaws. Then it was after hours, and since we were off the clock, beverages. Who knows, maybe we invented the LAN party!

The shop got broken into one night. PC's and expensive HP Laserjet 4's stolen. The Novell server, sitting in a corner, a non-descript beige XT case next to all the pencils and other supplies, wasn't taken. Thankfully the thieves didn't realize that was the most powerful box in the building. I reminded the higher-ups we had no backup system in place, so if they had stolen that too... The next day I had a tape drive. And hid that set of tapes every morning in another part of the building, so at worst case we'd be one day behind, a vast improvement over the possibility of being *all* days behind and re-keying everything from paper.

The PC's got turned on and off every day, but the Novell 2.12 beast was like the proverbial Energizer Bunny. It ran 24/7, and was indestructible, never needing a re-boot. Got the snake up to over 1,000 days before upgrading it to 3.12. Before another K of days I'd moved on to a new shop.

The first time I heard the word "munged" was in the context of computers, from a guy that did contract work for the place with the tape drive. He wrote Clipper scripts, and was always munging data. Munge and massage. Munge and massage. Here's your invoice.

There is one fond memory of the little company Paul and Bill started, though, a quote from the latter that went something like "given the proper library, I can write rings around anyone with BASIC". I'll buy that. Libraries are great, shorthand for the mind. Condense a whole bunch of logic into something much easier to type, rinse and repeat.

I would imagine in another 50 years either M$ will be gone, or we'll all be in those Matrix coffins running Windows 67, as a giant click farm for the Great God Azure.

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

Make Install

Switched from 'doze in '09. The MBP is still running, though a little long in the tooth. The more used laptop is a Framework running Fedora.

Back then, it took about a month to train my thumbs to press CMD instead of CTRL.

For Desktop, it's OpenCore. Was Clover back in '18 or so when I got stopped using the MBP as my daily driver. Not sure what a 128GB memory system with 4TB nVME storage and 6TB GPU would cost in MacLand (not to mention the two 28" 4K screens), but don't want to find out. As soon as I can repair a fruity device and add my own storage and memory again, may consider purchasing one, but even though I could afford it, am not prepared to pay their eye-watering prices.

Was tempted to play with Homebrew, but have been compiling code since the 80's, and OSX is Unix based so fairly straight-forward. Bit of a pain the way they lock down the system drive these days but you can always mount it then bless a snapshot if you really need to, which mostly you don't if you just set prefix to /usr/local like any sane 'nix box.

Do not like what they did to /Applications, though, and haven't found a way around it. Don't want to see every single app in one screen. Adobe has a folder, so do the Audio apps, editors, Video, etc. Used to be able to move the native Apple apps to their own folder, alas no more. So, a bash script to just open a finder window straight to the desired folder, and I don't have to see that crap I never run anyway.

Like Mr. Proven, don't use any Mac apps. FF, TB, iTerm, VS Code, Python, LibreOffice are enough to get by. Except for Python, don't compile those, but do give a few bucks to the Document Foundation every month. Don't listen to music on the desktop, it's streaming (mostly either a Swiss classical station, or SOMA FM out of San Francisco, the latter of which also gets a few bucks a month). Tunes are on the phone, which has an ever-growing catalog of purchased discs loaded on to it. No Spotify.

My nVidia Titan XP had to get retired a few years ago; it's in the TrueNas box now. The Titan Black still serves ably, but I don't care for ATI/AMD and have had to tweak things a bit to make it work properly on Ventura. Imagine it's almost time for an OS upgrade again; that's not difficult, just tedious, easier to load onto a fresh disk and use migration assistant to bring all the data back.

I do like the Mac OS, but before too long will have to figure out what to do when Intel support finally goes away. Honestly, though, since I spend so much time either in the editor or the terminal, could probably live without it, just am used to it.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Halt! Who Goes There?

This is why from two phones ago I haven't allowed it to log into G during device setup, or any time afterward. It's APKPure and ADB all the way.

We both have Samsungs - my Galaxy '20 is her hand-me-down from when my '19 got run over by a car (different story), and she took the opportunity to upgrade to the better camera in the '22. (Sorry we're not such blatant consumers - NOT. My '09 MBP still runs, albeit a bit more slowly than the FrameWork). She's always complaining about "wanting Google", but I say just because you have an in-house IT person, if you really want it, learn to log in yourself, at the expense of losing your "support contract". ;)

She recently got prescribed a sleep study which used an app to upload the data.

D/L'd the app just fine onto her phone. Installation was a breeze. Started it up.

"Please log into Google to continue".

WT?

Reached out to the device manufacturer, explained the app installed and ran fine but would not actually function, and asked how to use it without logging into Google, which should in no way be required just to run the thing. The sensitive medical data the app would be gathering is simply none of G's business.

Did get a response, but it was boilerplate "If you're having trouble logging into the App or Play Store..."

I so love it when people don't know how to comprehend a simple sentence.

Uninstalled and had her tell the doctor the gadget was being returned, and that perhaps a traditional on-prem sleep study like had been done before would be more appropriate...

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

Up To Spec

You can tell this is a Government machine by the DB-25 port. I'll bet it's used to connect the Space Printer.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Bite Me

One of our offices is in a warehouse that previously housed a large photo lab, some 40,000 square feet of equipment.

Due to power requirements, the building has 3-phase input.

The main pole to the building was very near a tall tree, beloved by squirrels, which one summer took a liking to skittering up it, attempting to "eat" one of the phases.

We'd know they'd been at it again, because suddenly half the building's lights and computers worked, while the other half just flickered in a sickeningly fashion.

After the third time this occurred, the local power company finally put up a big "squirrel-be-gone" device way up on the pole to discourage future rodent visits.

Wacom says crooks probably swiped customer credit cards from its online checkout

It's Only Money

We did receive such an email on Jan 27, and yes, there were bogus charges being "investigated" by the bank belonging to the card used for a purchase on the Wacom site around the end of November.

The fraudulent purchases themselves were dodgy - exact dollar amounts rounded to the hundred - and it looks like at least in our case at least two groups were using the card info, as the first hit was toward the beginning of January with subsequent hits spaced some days apart, but in the middle of that there was a charge then a reversal the next day, as if someone else was testing, perhaps gearing up for more charges.

It makes me wonder just to what lengths the bank would go to catch these criminals. The items would have been shipped somewhere. Some may still be in transit. Perhaps the FredEx delivery driver coming to your door could be a police officer.

A bit more labor, but one thing that would stop this fraudulent activity in its tracks is a "one-time" card number issued by the bank, with a specific dollar amount on it (plus maybe a little more padding for extra shipping, etc.). You'd get into your credit card account, enter the purchase amount and site from which the product is being purchased, and be given a customized card number & one-time code to use at checkout.

Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

It's Elemental

Well, let's see. An almost dozen year old flash drive, sitting in a mound of decomposing who-knows-what, at almost certainly elevated temperature due to said decomposition.

Even if this guy found the drive, do you think it'd still be readable?

I'd say let him look. By hand. With a trowel. And a full release for anything that may happen to him while in there.

Being trash, of course (as he ostensibly threw the drive away), once the item is found he'd also need to pay a most likely quite hefty salvage fee to the landfill owners, before he even knows if the data on it is still recoverable.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Find That Wire

Wait, people are still using USB to talk to printers? What happened to that newfangled IP thingy?

Panasonic brings its founder back to life as an AI

Visiting With The Folks

Shades of Grayland II visiting the Memory Room in John Scalzi's The Last Emperox.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

Lackey's Last Day At Work

Lackey to Orange One: "Sir, we've been hacked again".

Orange One: "$#!!&KITALL, HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? THIS IS THE WORST!"

Lackey: "Well sir, it looks like a message came in with a suspicious link, and someone clicked on it."

Orange One: "WHO??? I'LL HAVE THEM TAKEN CARE OF. RIGHT AWAY!"

Lackey: "Uhm, well, sir, the account in question seems to be attached to your personal cell phone."

Orange One: "WHAT? NO, REALLY, WHO DID THIS? TELL ME OR YOU'RE FIRED!"

Lackey: "Guess I'll be cleaning out my desk now, sir."

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Giddy-Up

Small stock trading house in the latter 90's, an ISDN line, and the IT guy - who happened to be the brother of the owner - getting canned. for running a porno BBS on the side with their ridiculously "fat" internet pipe.

As they no longer had an IT guy, the shop I worked for at the time got called in to see why email stopped working.

Everything stalled at a certain message. Outlook Express would never finish downloading. We did not have direct access to the email server so couldn't delete the offending message, much less see it.

Office '97 had just come out and the shop had a copy for wrangling all those financial spreadsheets, so eventually we got the email credentials from the owner, configured Outlook, and sat back for a bit to wait for the trouble message to download.

Turned out the fired brother decided to fling a last finger at his sibling, and had sent an 18 meg or so video of a gal from Mexico with a horse.

Ugh.

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Did notice that 8.0b1 was actually called "Thunderbird Beta", and for 8.0.b2 it's back to "K9 Mail".

The beta is good. My old K9 v6.something started freezing; sometimes the messages would never appear. The account is near its 2G quota; every now and again I run a script on the server to delete old messages and free up space, 'cause, you know, I'm not Big G, and my VPS would charge a boatload if I had as much storage as the desktop, which is POP. For phone/tablet/laptop/whatever, it's IMAP.

I'd exported the old K9 profile when putting the beta on, and had to enter passwords again. For 8.0.b1 to 8.0.b2, it was able to grab them, importing straight from the 8.0.b1 app.

Personally I find the unified method to be less than useful - why even have multiple accounts if you're going to just see everything lumped together anyway - but as one can choose either unified, or a single account when viewing messages (inbox, sent, whatever), it's not an issue. Just make sure "Show Accounts" is selected in settings and you'll get the option for each account in the hamburger menu.

Who needs GitHub Copilot when you can roll your own AI code assistant at home

Leaning Toward Learning

Call me old fashioned, but it seems using AI to "help" write code, term papers, laws, etc. is misguided at best, and outright dangerous for humanity at worst.

There are plenty of good use cases for the technology - iterating through billions of permutations to help discern what *might* become a new blood pressure drug comes to mind - but it seems to be antithetical to straight-up learning.

True intelligence is partly knowing how to combine data, knowing not only what to include in solving whatever problem may be at hand, but also what to ignore.

I fear that overuse of this technology will result in humans losing sight of how to think, and that just can't be a good thing.

There's a difference between getting a refresher on the capital of Zimbabwe if it comes up in conversation, and remembering how to solve a differential equation.

Having it readily available to spit out whatever answer is being sought, the tool becomes nothing more than a crutch, and you never absorb knowledge yourself because you can always get the machine to regurgitate it for you.

Sure, if in a hurry I'll query StackOverflow - it's way more convenient than sloughing through many, many boring pages of documentation - but am not just a copy/paste sort of fellow, which is the vibe I get from all these "assistants". I want to know *why* the solution works, not just that it *does* work.

Plus, who knows if they're even correct? I've talked to many a folk that don't have a clue but are still willing to spout as if it's gospel. Do most people fact check the results they get? Survey seems to say "no".

Do we really want to put all of our faith in this still relatively infant technology?

Am sorely hoping that at least in its current state, AI is a modern Hula Hoop, down the road used by some enthusiasts, but not in the mainstream.

Otherwise, we might as well just stop trying to improve our own minds and rely sadly and solely on the tool, awaiting the day it goes away and we've completely lost the ability to think for ourselves.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Kurt Vonnegut Was Right

Seems we're easing our way into the society elicited in Harrison Bergeron.

While it's certainly not OK to denigrate folks based on body attribute 'x', it's equally not OK to denigrate them for their own personal beliefs, unless they try to force those beliefs on others.

(I may, say, believe anyone from Oregon should be shot on site. Sure, it's a stupid opinion, but unless I start trying to carry it out, it's just that: A stupid opinion. There are many such dumb thoughts out there in the world.)

Perhaps future US cabinets will include not only a Handicapper General, but a Speak Nicely General as well.

So far as conversation goes, if only folks would grow a pair; metaphorically speaking, of course.

You don't like certain words flung at you? If they're true as applied to you, then you have no cause for complaint. But, if they're not true, either ignore them as you prefer, or sue in Civil Court for libel or slander as needed.

(Also, while you're of course free to engage in dialog with the 'offending' party and try to come to accord, just because someone may have a right to speak, doesn't mean you have to listen.)

Actions or threats, however are different a different respons. If they're not against you, again you have no cause for complaint, though you're well within your right to inform the police of these activities, should they not already be aware.

But if they are true, (bodily or personal property threats, carried out or not) that's where the police, and then Criminal Court comes in.

I have never in my life denigrated anyone, called them an idiot 'just because', or said someone was stupid merely for what they said. One must have faith that in a conversation the other party is attempting to honestly communicate, not just spew without reason. I have certainly never contemplated bodify harm on anyone just because they differed in opinion from me.

Can exchanges become heated? Of course, if one is passionate with regards their subject.

I may become vociferous in trying to get to the bottom of an issue or point of contention, but like the old adage goes, hate the messege, not the messenger.

Hello? Are you talking on a Cisco SPA300 or SPA500 IP phone? Now's the time to junk 'em

Re: Phones still OK on an inside non-routable network?

That's a good point, but hopefully folks are only plugging printers into the PC port. Most of those phones offer a 10/100 bandwidth.

It was a great idea though, having the second port on those phones, as many businesses only have the one plug at each desk. In a finished building, the cost of adding a second or third wire could be difficult to swallow. Any time these days for new construction I always get the customer to run at least two per desk (PC for one, Phone the other, with printer tethered to phone as needed). Another alternative would be small managed switches if you needed more than that amount of connectivity at any one location.

Re: Phones still OK on an inside non-routable network?

So far as them becoming beachheads, couldn't one use firewall rules to prevent them from reaching anything but the VoIP provider? That would in theory protect workstations and whatnot on the LAN.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

One Ringy Dingy

When we set up our phone system, I really wanted to use 911, but obviously that was out.

We're four digits anyway, so x9999 it is...

Zuck dreams of personalized AI assistants for all – just like email

Been There, Done That

One of my favorite skiffy novels is John Varley's 1992 novel "Steel Beach", itself an homage to Robert Heinlein's great "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" from 1966.

Both deal with the idea of a non-human intellegence managing needed resources.

In Heinlein's case, the question was "what makes a person", with "Mike" running all the needed infrastructure on the moon, self-aware, but everyone treating him as "just a machine".

In Varley's case, he had the "Central Computer" - also on the moon, providing the same sort of infrastructure - personalizing its interface to every user.

Unfortunately, all that personalization - building a personality to speak to each differnt user - kinda made it go crazy.

It'll be awhile before we've built something as sophisticated as Data, or Mike. Current AI feels more like Central Computer.

Once this genie gets let out of the bottle, we'll be living with Lor for awhile before we grow up enough to build something better.

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Engines of Creation

Yes, that release announcement was a bit over the top, not to mention retentively inaccurate.

If one believes in the Big Bang theory (the actual physics one, not the telly show), supernovas do not create "building blocks of creation".

They merely regurgitate them.

Since they've got this theme running though, wonder if Big Bang will see the light of day, after which they'll just just start all over again?

That could really mess up the versioning system.

Having been on TB since before 1.0, will wait for my current Supernova (v115.13.0) to be self-upgradable rather than manually installing Nebula.

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

Whack-A-File

So, without checking each and every magnet out there, how would they know the content of 'LibreOffice_24.2.5_MacOS_x86-64.dmg.torrent' from dubious-site-43.com isn't really that of 'Descpicable_Me_4.torrent' ?

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Fix What Ain't Broke

My last Fruity purchase was a '12 Mini. Before that it was an '09 15" MBP. Both, while long in the tooth, still work.

Noteable about these two pieces of hardware is that storage and memory were user-replaceable.

Would I buy from theme these days? Sorry, not spending $2K+ on a machine I can't work on.

My last "big" purchase was one of FrameWork's 13" Intel models. Cost around what the MBP had. Came with a screwdriver. It's my road machine, and a great tool.

The daily driver is an OpenCore mutt with Gigabyte/Intel/Corsair/Samsung/nVidia parts, 128G of memory, 2TB of main nVME storage.

That, combined with two 28" ASUS 4K screens, would cost an obscene amount of money if purchased through Apple. Assuming they even had such a configuration.

And as things stand now with them, newer kit would never be upgradable.

Am still on Ventura and know eventually I'll have to make a decision on getting away from the Fruity OS. (Them deciding to lock down my system files is just plain stupid, and almost enough reason to switch by itself. I shouldn't have to mount system dirs in my own user space, make changes, then bless a snapshot just to put the latest compiled version of bash in /bin. Sudo is there for a reason. Sure, they *say* it's for "user safety", but it's my machine, not theirs. What's the sense of becoming root if you don't have full control over the bits?)

The Framework runs Fedora. Have a WinDoze machine, too, mostly just to keep a hand in for supprorting folks that use that OS. (The Framework has a W10 VM, but I hardly ever run it). The home NAS is Debian now that TrueNAS has switched away from BSD. There's a dev machine with no X still on CentOS that really needs to be swapped out for Rocky or Alma. Voluminous Free Time awaits that chore.

Much though I don't like software subscriptions, Adobe's products have become even more amazing over the years. When they finally port to 'nix, my Mac days may be over. Out of nostalgia, the only thing I may come to miss is that old chestnut, AppleScript. I still use a bash script written years ago that tells it to talk to Adobe for some doc automation. Will need a new workflow.

Biden throws $1.7B at automakers to prepare fading factories for EV production

Good for the Goose

I disagree that "political maneuvering" was a focus of this deal.

U.S. has allowed foreign manufacture for far too long, and a correction is ongoing to bring things back to the country.

The current president's issues aside, this is still a good move.

That being said, we still have a lot of work to do on making EV more environmentally friendly, giving the vehicles a longer range, and reducing "fill-up" time.

Have been on Prius since '06. Not that I drive this way regularly, but it's nice to know if I needed to I could hop in the car and go quite a distance. The joke is I like to fill up every 500 miles, whether I need to or not. It could actually do that when it was new. These days (she's nine this year), it's around 400 before I feel like refueling. Have never put more than nine gallons in at one time.

Had occasion to drive nearly a thousand miles for a work trip around eight years ago. It was a fourteen hour deadhead run. Left town with a full tank. Stopped twice on the way to fill up. Was close to empty when I got there, but made it without needing that third stop for fuel. Maybe a half-hour was spent in re-fueling and "pit stops" along the way. The rest was many, many mile markers passing by.

Did need a bit of a rest to recuperate from so much sitting, though. ;)

When EV can approach that, I'll be ready to replace my paid-off-but-quite-servicable Toyota with a shiny new American model (so long as it's not Tesla; that guy's a tool).

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

Through Thick and Thin

I'd say Samsung crushed it.

iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal'

In A World...

"While users have grown used to buying laptops with a fixed amount of memory fitted at manufacture..."

Who are these "users"? Soldered components that have traditionally been user-replacable is the reason I won't purchase anything Fruity these days...

BASICally still alive: Classic language celebrates 60 years with new code and old quirks

Re: BASIC

I still use it for Libre Office scripting. That and many other versions have acquired object capability (remember VB6?)

Haven't had to use GOTO or GOSUB for some years now.

One day, though, I will finally convert all that krufty LO BASIC code to Python ... just in time for the Next Great Language to come out, of course...