* Posts by PRR

790 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Mar 2021

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US news org still struggling to print papers a week after 'cybersecurity event'

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FAIL

Friendly fire??

"February 3, the day the attack took hold." The specialized CMS used by the Post-Star and some other Lee Enterprises shops had a buffing and re-branding that day: "On February 3, TownNews will begin our next chapter as BLOX Digital when we officially launch our new brand."

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

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Unhappy

> a good chunk of the campus would go dark for a few hours. Next day the papers would print a report about Rocky Raccoon

Monkey, raccoon, possum..... they are all of a size. My school had one building lose power. (They tole me the PCs were out; they didn't mention the lights were out too...) And it stank! Cooked corpse. Some odd legacy had left a pad-mount transformer behind the parking lot where the possums play. Probably 7KV. More a roast than an explosion.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

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WTF?

Fifty-four forty or fight?

> Rather peculiar IMHO....

It is quite logical, step by step. Tom Edison had no good insulation, but found fewer dead workers around 100V machines, more around higher voltages. So lets use 100V! Works great for small loads in a small lab. Run a furlong to a real load, voltage sags. Well, crank the near end to 105V, 110V, whatever. Works good, now sell more customers. Saggy again. Start to run more wires. Wait! If you run just one more wire (3 instead of 2) across two generators in series, the sag/cost ratio is quite good. Not far short of 3-phase which sure was beyond the state of the art at that time. Oddly, 3 wire split works really well on AC also, gives 110V for lamps (domestic size 230V lamps were a later German invention) and also 230V for cooking and heating loads.

Yes I have two classes of outlets and several sub-types (15A, 20A, 30A, 50A) but they do not interfit and only geeks like me have to know how to change a plug today.

> .....but then what now isn't south of the 49th parallel?

Canada Code is exactly the same as US code except a couple details they do better. It's still all split-phase 15A/20A black and white and bare.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

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Re: Each store was supplied a box of 10 DATs

> have never seen a DAT player.

I used to go through DATs like candy. I recorded audio on them, watching the mini-reels turn, hundreds of hours of live musical performances. We actually rarely played them, cuz the only machines were in the studio. When we first moved to DAT, good old cassette was the handy-if-hissy medium. We stopped buying DAT tapes when CD-R got more convenient, cheap, and (like cassettes) playable in the car on the way home. I understand most DAT drives aged poorly, but I was easing/being-eased out the door by that time.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

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Headmaster

My mother sez: A fairly large saucepan. Cold tap water. High fire (or best you can do with electric). When it wants to boil-over, turn the fire off and put the lid on. Let set until cool enuff to handle.

Mother is right.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

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WTF?

> "Sorry, but my printer is not a file!"

Hmmm. He can't be at the front of the room if he is that stupid, or that aphasic. So WTF is he on about??

Mesopotamian merchants made marks on clay tablets and FILED them on shelves. Has he really confused the stylus for the data?

When I "send text to the printer to file it", I expect to get marks on paper or other artifact suitable for FILING storage, retrieval.

When my wine business gets huge, and I have many stylus-scribes working under me, I'll probably assign accounts or divisions to them by name. Akaru, Bob, Con:, LPT (1,2,3) so I know who to promote or fire.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

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Re: Why change?

> for a home user today how insecure is Win7?

Works for me. Windows 7 Home Premium I have ZeroPatch installed and it did stuff recently.

The only "malware" I see in this house is the Win10 and Win11 machines and their near-insistance on non-local accounts and constant spying. So far I think the stolen data is too much for MS/anybody to absorb, it just goes into Bing to try to fool me it knows something.

Microsoft admits January's Windows Update broke USB Digital to Audio Convertor

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Facepalm

> Don't use an audio DAC in the connection process.

Unclear here. ALL "audio" beyond BIOS boops goes through some form of DAC. On $399 PCs the DAC is a sliver on the system chip; on a $3,999 audiophile workstation it may be a hand-honed boutique chip on an add-on (or it may be a $2 chip in a $999 case).

Is the problem USB? (Shocked!) Mobo bus connect? PCI? Bluetooth?

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

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Re: Another chance

> one of the only Windows tools I still miss... Paint Shop Pro was, but it grew into a monster

PSP 7.x was peak PSP. Then it was sold-off and screwed-up and I removed that "upgrade" ASAP.

PSP 7.04 runs near-flawless on Win7, 10, 11. It always seems to "burp" the first few starts and then Windows(?) gets the hang of it. PSP can be had from OldVersion.com : http://www.oldversion.com/search?query=PSP --- http://www.oldversion.com/windows/paint-shop-pro/ go down to "Paint Shop Pro 7.04" ---- last bugfix

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

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And the Apple

> remember the DEC Rainbow?

I don't see the Apple][ mentioned. For most of us that was THE introduction to slot-cards. Because they got to be common before the IBM 5150, and because the lid just popped off, no screws (heavy Velcro(tm). I know IBM did not copy the Apple slot connector, but next best thing to it. https://apple-history.com/images/models/aII_open.jpg

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> putting together their first ever PC from components ....disk controllers, I/O, and even the display circuitry all came on separate plug-in cards.

Even before that. I know the 5150 PC team sat apart from the Mainframe gang, but IBM was *always* aware of service costs, repair and upgrade. Plug it! The 5-slot PC had several video, parallel and serial card choices, with some really significant price steps so you didn't just get all options. The 8-slot XT had more disk and later video choices. And yes many of us hacked PCs into XTs and XTs into pseudo ATs.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

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> I read everything the local library could offer. This included stuff like the Jennings schoolboy series, Biggles of course and Bunter. Didn't understand half of the latter - what, they don't go home at the end of the day? -

These stories are unknown in the US. I'm enjoying discovering boys-books 60 years after my boyhood. The original (there are no others!) Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews are coming out of copyright. (Beware Harriet's revisionist versions of the 60s.) I read most of the Yankee Flyer books but Biggles surpassed them all. Canadian Copyright is more liberal and https://www.fadedpage.com/ has been eagerly posting works now public domain in Canada. (I'm close to the border, does that count?) Jennings is not hard to find.

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Happy

Re: "Sometimes it is easier not to ask..."

> "Sometimes it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission," I'll remember that,...

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

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Re: So... which VPN are you going with?

>which VPN are you going with? Hide My Ass? (I just _love_ the name...) or Nord? Or Cloudflare? Or a different one? There are so many to choose from.

Smarter smut sites have a pre-site with tantalizingly cut-off videos and a sales pitch for Full Access. These will now include links for "recommended" VPN services in your area, known to connect to their services (and kick-back clerk). (Ideally on the same payment for convenience, but they may need to maintain Plausible Deniability.)

FBI wipes Chinese PlugX malware from thousands of Windows PCs in America

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Windows

> had the FBI had fucked up their scripts and disabled the targetted PCs and/or damaged/deleted data on them.

They were Windows PCs, weren't they? How would we know how that data got dropped or that PC got disabled?

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

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> I seem to recall that you could turn off Javascript in settings.

Actually called Edit, Preferences. It is still there in my copy, which I use daily, and hasn't been turned-on in nearly a decade.

Also this copy of Reader will rotate for free. One of the many reasons I refuse to update/downgrade and hoard an Old Copy to deploy on new machines.

https://i.postimg.cc/ZWj4WX0Y/AReader-XI.gif

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

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WTF?

Re: You fool! You think your puny brackets can defeat *me* ...?

> I broke it down to separate, consecutive expressions and my little function is now fifty plus lines of horror, but *working* horror.

I had (still have) a hobbyist language/compiler for DOS, which could not swallow two operators in one line. Brackets no help. FORTRAN spoiled us all.

In fairness, FORTRAN expression processing was brilliant for its time, and the other language was freeware then $5 shareware (and then the developer released all his tools near-free and vanished).

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

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Thumb Up

> Australia ....Peregrine Falcon,... also worried by Crows and Ospreys

On your antipodes: Maine USA has Peregrines, Crows, and Ospreys. Our Peregrines nest far up Precipice Cliff-- we know because the Park closes Precipice Trail mid-summer so the chicks don't learn any naughty language from human hikers.

Our Ospreys like to sit on a POWER pole in the marsh, and built a HUGE nest of damp sticks (but is bigger in Australia). It burned, boo-hoo. To their self-credit, the Power Company moved the line, put up a taller pole adjacent, and built a platform. We drive past all the time. And a web-cam, mostly boring until you see a chick swallow a fish bigger than the chick. Little gluttons.

Crows own all the rest of the land and shore. My dad used to sit on the porch with a rifle, but my mom thought it was bad for my tender ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yYcy45JI2o (UK urban Peregrines)

https://www.earthcam.com/usa/maine/lamoine/?cam=lamoine_osprey (Ospreys on burnt pole)

https://www.earthcam.com/usa/maine/barharbor/osprey/?cam=osprey_barharbor (New, Ospreys at School)

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

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Re: "administrative roles that automation can easily replace"

> Hallucinating is the daft Silicon Valley term. Us users of AI prefer the term 'bullshitting'.

Bullshit has real value: to plants, to dung-beetles, and dried as fuel (Lisu, تپی , Кизяк, Ghunte, Gomaya, Muttal, Кизяк, etc). Cow Poop At HAAS

Do not tarnish bullshit's image with useless hallucinations.

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

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Re: Xterm is VT102 …(1)

> For my sysadmin purposes, I’ve found a VT52 emulation sufficient

ADM-3(A) for me, please!

(I had several. One was an honest no-A model (not a favorite).)

Luscious styling, clear font, satisfactory keyboard. High-hours CRTs did get a bit blurry and burned. Perfect fit behind the seat of a 1967 Mustang.

I do not understand 'terminals' dominated by a rainbow. Amber is the all-purpose text color.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

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Re: Hmmmmm

> proposed a law to set the value of Pi at 3.

That's not what the law said (as your citation clearly explains).

There WAS another pi law for the specific case of farmers selling timber to railroads and telegraph systems. Professional wood-traders have tools to measure round trunks. Calipers, tapes with pi built in. But a farmer in 1870 may barely have a tape-measure (or chain). Or a pencil. The company rounds-down and cheats him. But who votes? Hard to believe today, but farmers were once heavy in politics. The law simplified the round-math by saying the diameter WAS a third (/3.0) of the circumference (for commercial transactions where one party was not expert). Of course the company just adjusted their offer-price by 4.4% or more. But the farmers felt good at pulling a fast one on the slickers.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

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Re: UFO

> I notice that Alienware is not mentioned in the Great Rebranding.

Third paragraph, dude!

"This approach will apply to all future Dell ..... – other than the Alienware brand used for gaming hardware."

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Devil

So my housemate is among the last dudes to get an Inspiron, the Inspiron 16 Plus, Halloween 2024.

Not the VERY last, but in this house an Inspiron has been living here more often than not.

Nvidia shrinks Grace-Blackwell Superchip to power $3K mini PC

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Pirate

> it won't come cheap, with systems starting at $3,000.

I remember when a _good_ office PC cost that much. Back when $3k was real money.

Hell, a 1967 Ford Mustang cost $3k (base 2bbl V-8, slush-shift, premium tires-- Mom's car). Any "computer" of that day was up and up and up. Even a DEC: In 1965, DEC introduced the PDP-8, with 4 kWords memory, listed for only $18,000.

Get off my lawn!

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

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> the video just happened to go to like whatever YouTube selects to be the next video

I realize this works just like TV channel 6 in 1966-- one show after another, no real choice.

I'm sad to hear that 59 years of progress has only made it worse. If I don't hop on the PAUSE button fast I will get something stupid, or offensive, and hardly related to what I was watching. The amount of misogyny on Youtube is revolting. But copyright infringement is more important, of course.

Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery

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Re: 10 years !!!

> Imagine using a .....1995 NiCad-powered 800x600 resolution 486sx portable in 2005 !

I'm running a 2009 netbook in this year of 2025, 16 years. Got a whopping 2GIGs of DRAM, and WinXP doesn't use a quarter of that. Junod's WinSolit from 1992 (made for Win3.x) runs slick as snake snot.

No fan! The 2005 predecessor died last year of a bad fan and unfriendly repair aspects. So the fanless Atom CPU and no rotating storage seem promising.

Workday on lessons learned from Iowa and Maine project woes

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Alert

Re: Correction regarding Maine

> Maine still doesn't have a modern payroll system for it's 12,000 employees.

It was not that long ago that the state of New Jersey was buying odd-lot punch cards to keep its payroll going. They have always made payday but a lot of routine Purchasing.. well when I was hired NJ made a point of paying early for best price, and by the time I left my vendors were wining about payments in arrears.

There was a New Plan but the point of entry system (via MSIE) was obviously tying-up all resources meaning the backend may still have been a 1963 Burroughs. Unless Chuck re-emulated an older machine on a 1980 H-P mini.

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

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Re: At the sound of the chime, truncheon says bedtime

> XP had something similar, but I think it was 2024 that was the cut off. It's finally broken a friend's DOS based practice management system...

I don't doubt his story in the least. But FWIW my virtual XP Pro SP2 runs in a VM today without apparent glitch. At least as far as a Win3.0-era Solitaire game and the Set Time From Network button.

https://i.postimg.cc/MGMZSmXz/XP-Pro-in-2025.gif

We’re paying for what we don’t get: East D.C. neighbors frustrated with Amazon’s Prime delivery exclusions

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Megaphone

Order within three hours!!!

> you can download your Amazon data here

"Usually, this should not take more than a month."

HOW in this day and age can ANY customer's account need a month to pull data?

> This is plain and simple deceptive practise .... All this other stuff about race seems largely tacked on...

I think you are right.

In the (lily-white) woods on the north-east coast of Maine USA, hundreds of miles above Boston but just off US Route 1:

> "It may say if I order within three hours I'll get it the next day; as soon as I order it they claim I'll get it two days later,"

Every dang time. Amazon begs and tricks me to pay for Prime but seems incapable of moving goods quickly.

It's not about who delivers it: I have had 12-hour delivery from UPS (this may have been a mistake). FedEx's contracted trucks are fast and reliable here.

Amazon can stall my orders in the warehouse for a week. Rarely will it move next-day, even when I foolishly pay for speed.

> Amazon ..... maintaining ..... that the issue pertains to driver safety. ....crime rates in the east end....

Crime here is low and usually domestic squabble or $5 break-ins. Assault on delivery drivers is nearly unknown.

My lover has been saying "Walmart". She's right, at least for some things. Small plumbing 2 day free, Lenovo Flaptop next-day free. Walmart's listings manage to be worse than Amazon, and I hate their supply-side policies, but Wally is seriously fighting Amazon on delivery to my woods.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

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> it could've been a thousand dead

Not a thousand, but Teterboro Airport NJ USA is tightly bounded by highways. I remember when it was literally open field; those days are gone. "February 2, 2005,.. Bombardier CL-600...hurtled off a runway at Teterboro Airport, skidded across US 46 and slammed into a warehouse during the morning rush, ..... Later that year, Congress ....directed the FAA to install 1,000 feet (300 m) arrestor beds at all U.S. airports." I think they even did the arrestor at the tiny municipal airport near my house; the Koreans instead built a hill to protect some infrastructure?

Former NSA cyberspy's not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights

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Alert

Re: A senior person ...

A senior person in the NSA: "I don't want to be on the roof in bad weather and wind."

> neighbours who leave their decorations up all year round. It is bloody annoying .

Every year we get a little more senior. More trouble with ladders, cold, ice, foot-tangles. A decade ago I was leaving the upstairs lights up all year, the price had got so low I didn't care if they blew off (one is trying). Last year we left the downstairs string up. I have been taking down the little bit over the entryway, but even that's getting painful.

Parker Solar Probe set for blisteringly hot date with the Sun on Christmas Eve

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Re: Cycles

> I still want one of the JPL Mars team watches that measures in Martian days.

When I was a boy, we was told that a standard Earth clock (or watch) could probably be tweaked to Martian days, the difference is so small.

And popular-price mechanical timepieces were that imprecise those days. Usually the balance spring was plenty long, a dingus like a guitarist's capo shortened the working length to speed for Earth. Let it all the way out and it may be near Mars rate. Or hack: solder-blobs will slow the wheel. Pendulum clocks, cut/splice the pendulum longer and whack a slot in the bottom of the case to clear.

Accutron (tuning fork) and then Quartz gave us timepieces that could not be mis-regulated, or not much.

Get a fine old Bulova and a smart watch-tech, Mars-rate should be easy.

Image:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/tWQAAOSwfZBnI4Qy/s-l1600.webp

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

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> ...the poor Boeing test pilots ...planned week-long mission into ...nine months.....

Considering some other recent Boeing flights, nine months alive in a can beats some alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/Boeing%27s%20737%20MAX%208%20Disasters_0.pdf

Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up

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OMG IT WILL FIT ON A CD!!

(* adelie-live-xfce-x86_64-1.0-beta6-20241214.iso 640MB)

Yes, I remember bringing in 2 packs of new 1.2M floppies because you didn't always get twenty perfect diskettes in two boxes. And I remember my first time a linux ISO failed because it had grown past CD size and now DVD size; that was some years back (Puppy was scraping the limit for a while).

AHHH-- it "must" have network for install, so it can fetch stuff not in the "CD" ISO. It comes up with LYNX! Reasonable. And NetSurf, cute, functional. In VirtualBox, screen defaulted to 1280 by 800, reasonable; no 1200px dialogs in 640px display.

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

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IT Angle

the surviving car brand

> ....the surviving car brand ..... was a Peugeot

The film was (will be) wrong. The last 'car' standing will be JEEP. Jeep survived the collapses of Willys Overland, Ford(partial), Kaiser, Rambler/Nash/Packard/AMC, Renault (the year they ate AMC, put up new signs, and choked), Chrysler, DaimlerChrysler, Chrysler LLC, Chrysler Group LLC, Fiat Group, Fiat Chrysler, Stellantis, and....? Historically Jeep has gone out of business (and revived) more often than my urologists. Winking at overlaps, that's still about 7 different companies who grasped at the Jeep market. Ne'rmind that today's Jeep can't chew through a paper bag, cuz it's at the dealer waiting for FIAT parts. JEEP has ferocious fanboiz who will buy Jeeps even if they never run.

Phishers cast wide net with spoofed Google Calendar invites

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Facepalm

Hover over links

> Hover over links and then type the URL into Google rather than just clicking on it.

Yeah, right. Google calendar links are of the form "https://calendar.gooogle.com/ calender/u/0/r/editevent /NzdpZDJsdH V1MGNpczU1 c1bHJyZW %lkQGW1 lazU4azdm c2YgcGF0"(*) Yes, 98 mostly random characters. I can't even type "teh" correctly, HTH am I gonna type that gibberish link?? (And I use a keyboard; forget typing with thumbs.) Do Google people even taste their own dog-food?

AND what Mike007 said.

(*) Lightly corrupted for my privacy; also old.

Scumbag gets 30 years in the clink for running CSAM dark-web chatrooms, abusing kids

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Re: Hope the Other Inmates Take Good Care of Him

> take good care of him.

I am finally reminded of the phrase, play, and film "Short Eyes". Prison slang for a child molester. The play took six Tony Awards, the New York Critics Circle Award and an Obie Award for the "best play of the year". I tech-consulted for a university theater production. Not a cheery story.

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Childcatcher

Lot of this today

I thought you had heard today's news from Maine. No, this is a different case.

Maine youth theater founder faces 30 more years in prison after discovery of hidden child sex abuse files

by Christopher Burns -- December 11 -12, 2024

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/12/11/midcoast/midcoast-police-courts/topsham-maine-henry-eichman-child-sexual-exploitation-guilty-plea-hidden-laptops/

The founder of a Maine youth theater and former Catholic school teacher faces another 30 years behind bars for sexually abusing children. .....employee discovered two laptops and several hard drives hidden under a kayak ....discovered files depicting the sexual abuse of children,.... The worker recognized Eichman, a former employee of the company,..... .....more than 500 images and videos of child sexual abuse, including videos .... sexually abusing four children .... Eichman was already serving a 10-year sentence for sexually abusing children. ....over a number of years during sleepovers at his Topsham home and ....Youth Theater, which Eichman founded.... He also inappropriately touched children over several years at St. John’s Catholic School.... ....sentenced Eichman to 10 years in prison for each felony,....With these new charges, Eichman faces up to 30 years in prison, a fine up to $250,000 and five years of supervised release.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

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Linux

How often do you boot unix boxen that start-up time is onerous?

Parallel paths are usually bad ideas.

CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT is all you really need.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

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Re: Pedant

> it works for longer keywords too - so more key presses saved. And most decent shells on .....Unixen.... much the same thing

I have a file 'Magic-3-Go-Hydrophlic-Intermittent-Catheter-instructions-for-use.pdf'. The directory it is in, "ma{TAB}" would bring it to the shell command line in 3 pokes. Instead of 68 careful typos. Saves 65 presses PLUS shiftkeystrokes, and that's about my limit these days. (Yes, even with a wrong-case 'm' on front, and even in Win7 cmd instead of a proper Borne/Korn shell, tho Win7 might not insist on proper case.)

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

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Maine USA was a pioneer of recycling in the 1970s. Also the Bottle Bill got the soda/beer containers out of our ditches.

But it has all collapsed post COVID (and was teetering before that). We are now all trash together, and investigations show the dumps are just unable to effectively sort our mountains of rubbish.

I don't think AI is the whole answer. I know "90% uptime" won't do.

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

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Obviously this is just a PoC for publicity.

Some very obvious optimizations:

Nail/strap the printer to the head so it moves with the wiggly patient. (Spastics may have special need for such study.) Also shortens the range needed.

I don't see these "wires" and it seems to me they could be routed by hand: a 9-contact plug with 9 free ends shoved into the black glops.

For that matter: what is the 3D printer doing that I can't do with a paint-pot and brush? We can project Xmas stars onto a house, why not a head? A little tracking of earlobes and pupils, it has to be as accurate as those huge blobs.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

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Re: "text editor", you'll find three

> As to Kommander, the klue clue is in the name. There are users who simply want a clone of the original (was it Norton?) Commander.

I didn't go there. Of course I have NC or MC or other klone handy, but I don't even like it for most tasks. I liked navigation on 1dir+, which was 3 years before NC (and those were long years). Another, not its prime function, was Vern Buerg's LIST. Peak Windows file Explorer was XP or hand-tweaked Win7.

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Linux

"text editor", you'll find three

> "...if you search the KDE Applications website for "text editor", you'll find three: Kate, KWrite, and Nota. If you search for "file manager", you'll find four; and "web browser", three. .....multiple start-menu tools, multiple app-switching panel-button bars, and so on."

On my decrepit Win7 machine I have at least four 'text editors' installed. MS-Notepad in there somewhere, UltraEdit always running, and a couple 'Note***' apps for special chores. At least as many more tried-and-deleted. (Not looking in Archives where I hide PC-Write, and the text-app from WordPerfect5.1, and a couple WordStars.) Taskbar has links to FireFox, Chrome, and WaterFox, and I have Lynx buried, and I may still have an MSIE lurking in a dark corner/coffin. I know I have installed/removed many file managers; nothing better than 1DIR+, but MS Explorer handles many tasks and is already linked, aside from many programs having their own file browse/manage tools. I -started- writing start-menus for DOS2.1 (in ASIC!), so am not inclined to revisit that wheel. And yes I did a TSR to hide a game-screen and put up a Lotus 1-2-3 screen.

But as you see I went out and hunted for many of my side-apps. I end up with multiples of a "same type" when there is a PROBLEM. App A does this but not that, App B does that but not this. In an ideal world, or under a benevolent dictator, A and B would hash their differences so one app does this AND that. MS kinda used to be that unifying force; I'd have to go to TuCows (or the cover of PCMag) to get anything non-MS.

> "search the KDE Applications website for 'text editor'"

Recall that in the day, SimTel, SunSite, TuCows might have dozens or hundreds of apps to do "same" jobs.

Distro curators should try to pick ONE tool for each job and default it. With a small side-trek "Maybe one of this small number of other apps would suit you better?" like Amazon does? ("Compare with similar items")

Fine print in Intel's CHIPS Act deal includes requirement to keep control of its foundries

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Boffin

Re: Tough

> Hell, without Intel the computing landscape we have today simply wouldn't exist.

Without Andy Grove the world would be quite different.

Andy fled Hungary, became a busboy, and studied surface-states which led to a book 'Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices (1967)' which made MOS phenomenon manageable. A book is just a book but Intel bet the barn and is a major reason I have an EKG on my wrist and a Web in my pocket. BJT and JFET devices were never going to get to where MOS devices got.

Yeah, that's almost 60 years ago, and nobody is left from those days, and I don't say we should cut today's Intel any slack for past glory.

Microsoft slaps Windows 11 update hold on hardware connected to eSCL devices

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I was called by a FAX last week. It was painfully fun to hear the old ScreeeecH (burble) ScreeeecH again. I let it time itself out because they had no business FAXing me and I have no obligation to save them time and tolls.

Looking back: last time I FAXed was a long-distance real estate deal in 2007. We took papers to the UPS store which did FAXes half-buck a page. I've had four many-function printers with FAX function and even have the phone line extended to that table but it hasn't been used in a decade+. A more recent land deal was all PDF and "secure digital signatures".

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

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> As younger people enter the workforce ....sending out notices, you start seeing degrading grammar and proper use of words. The maximum length of a thought for many teenagers is around 140 characters ....

I retired in-part because of one remarkably stupid email form-letter from the student-staffed Help Desk.

"For students requesting a shell when their trying to find their course"

Hey! In 17 years I never noted that the Subject line (longest line in the whole message) was eXactly 140 chars.

The word "their" (for "there" or "they are") was abused again several times.

This student "moved up" to a SalesForce role.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

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Re: Copied the CD to HDD

> coping i386 folder to the C: drive and then start the installer from there.

Also a great help for installing MS Office fer Windows, Word 6 "C:\InstallFiles\Office2003Install". 760MB, 223 files.

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> PCs that had no HDD and double FDD. He asked "why?"

So you could copy that floppy.

Or to run large software. I had the full 6-floppy MS QuickBASIC and a 2-floppy machine. I'd hold 2 or 3 flops in the hand like poker cards, and usually could anticipate when the main program would demand which flop for some subroutine.

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