* Posts by cuthbertgraak

11 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2022

Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

cuthbertgraak
Pirate

Oh, Hell, NO

Took a look at the linked site, and found that their "installation" procedure consists of

curl https://zed<dot>dev/install.sh | sh

Since when has it been a good idea to fetch an unaudited script off the internet and execute directly?

Sorry, zed.dev, but that installation method just won't cut it; we've had enough backdoors, phishes, malware, spyware, and other bad products installed in exactly that manner. We don't need any more, even if you pinky-swear that your product is nothing like that.

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

cuthbertgraak

"Fiction"

When an LLM generates a reply that deviates from fact, I would say that the LLM has written "fiction". It might sound like "plausable fiction", but I would still classify it as "fiction".

Microsoft hits snooze again on security certificate renewal

cuthbertgraak

Pass the popcorn

I do admit that letsencrypt is a reasonable way to get your TLS keys signed by a reputable service.

However, I'm just waiting for the inevitable admission that letsencrypt has been compromised, and all those keys secured by it's services have been revoked.

Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery unit, designs bigger bird to deliver pasta, faster

cuthbertgraak

Re: ingredients for dinner - pasta, marinara sauce, parmesan cheese, canned olives and garlic.

There's an old IT saying (from the times that IT was called "DP") that goes "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a car full of data tapes". The same goes for deliveries.

At 5 lbs maximum delivery quantity and a range of 12 miles, per delivery, a single car and driver could easily replace a fleet of these drones, and satisfy your arguments just as easily.

I'll admit that Alphabet has great technology, and cool toys, but these delivery drones seem to be more of a "concept" than a "real product". Certainly, they are less economically sustainable than the delivery technology that they claim to replace.

NASA gasping for ideas to extract oxygen from Moon dirt

cuthbertgraak

Re: Still looking

As I understand it, "Biosphere 2" ran into difficulties because of an O2 loss that was attributed to the fact that the builders had built the foundations and "rocks" of the biosphere from concrete. The CO2 in the biosphere atmosphere reacted with the concrete to create calcium carbonate, thus sequestering both carbon and oxygen which would otherwise have been reprocessed by the biome into biomass and breathable air.

It's all right there in the Wikipedia article you quoted.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

cuthbertgraak

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

On Slackware, the GUI startup is runlevel 4, not runlevel 5.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

cuthbertgraak

Forgotten lore

On X, left click at the start of the passage to copy, followed by a SHIFT left click at the end of the passage to copy will highlight the passage, and copy to the PRIMARY SELECTION buffer.

Middle click to paste the contents of the PRIMARY SELECTION buffer into another window.

Water-hunting NASA cubesat won't reach Moon after total thruster fail

cuthbertgraak
Coat

Lunar Flashlight gone T.I.T.S.U.P.

Totally Inhibited Thrusters Seized Under Pressure

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

cuthbertgraak

Re: Agree, Agree ..... 1000 times agree !!!

Or, IMHO, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.")

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

cuthbertgraak
FAIL

Re: Broadway

"BROADWAY was originally the code name for an initiative from the X Consortium which was aimed at delivering Web capability to X." (https://web.archive.org/web/20050616080217/http://www.broadwayinfo.com/bwfaq.htm)

Implemented in X11 R6.3, "Broadway" introduced "Low bandwidth X" for slow serial line connections, and a way for web pages to access X11 client applications via a web browser plugin.

The "Broadway" X-over-http and and low-bandwidth-X features were disabled by default in X11 R7.1 and removed in X11 R7.2

Visiting a booby-trapped webpage could give attackers code execution privileges on HP network printers

cuthbertgraak

Re: Malware or just a link to the firmware update site?

"Spooler" is the term we use to refer to a utility that manages the "spool", and "spool" refers to the ancient (for computing) acronym S.P.O.O.L., meaning "Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On Line".

"Spool" is also a play on what a spooler does: it writes a stream of data that gets stored in a fifo buffer (like thread on a spool) to be read out later (unspooled) to a peripheral device. Originally, that "spool" was a physical spool of magnetic tape that one computer would write, and another computer would read and print