Posts by Daniel B.

Re: Ah yes, Colbert. Another unfunny guy.

The humor seems to be lost on people that don't know (or refuse to believe) Kissinger was a war criminal. He's got a lot of blood on his hands.

Re: 2007 hardware obsolete?

2007? a 7 year old machine? So you'd expect a machine bought in 2000 to run the Vista in 2007 or a machine bought in 1993 to run Windows 2000 in 2000 or a machine bought in 1986 to run Windows 3.11 in 1993 or a…

Or a 1986 Mac Plus to run System 7.5.5 (released in September 1996). And that's even after Apple had transitioned the Macintosh platform from Motorola's 680x0 to PowerPC. Sorry, but Apple (used to) have a pretty good record supporting older hardware.

The point's moot on 2007 hardware anyway. The real reason for those Macs being unable to run ML and Mavericks is that 10.8 and newer are now 64-bit only. Apple jumped ship to Intel too early, they should've probably waited 'till the 64-bit processors came out. PPC was 64-bit already after all. They'd probably have all users on Mountain Lion as a minimum if they hadn't killed Rosetta on Lion and newer.

Re: This is funny

I have been using a Mac since the 1980's and have never had a virus, been hacked or lost data and I have never spent a single cent on anti-virus software.

Had you said "early 2000's" it would have been believable. I was a Mac user during the early Mac+ days, up until sometime around 1998. I came back to Mac sometime around 2012 as most of my work is now based on UNIX and Linux, thus no real need for Windows (and gah! Win8! yuk!). But there's no way you're going to hear me say Mac has never had a virus. Frickin' Symantec Antivirus was born on the Macintosh ecosystem. And yes, we did get hit by a couple of virii, in fact we got to lose a couple of HDDs thanks to them. MacOS Classic had quite a bunch of virii roaming about, it was OSX that started the virus-free claim.

I will agree that it is at least more secure than Windows, but most UNIX/POSIX based OS can claim that feat.

Re: Strong crypto is not a magic bullet

It usually depends on how secure do you want your stuff. People or organizations that are really, really security-oriented or need to have something hard to break should get an HSM (Hardware Security Module) and use that to encrypt everything. Why? Because an HSM is FIPS 140-2 certified, tamperproof, and will keep the crypto keys in such a way they can't be extracted out of said HSM.

Of course, even then if security isn't hardened around the servers that have direct HSM access you can still end up getting everything compromised (mostly if you don't enforce Level 3 compliance, anyone can use said HSM and thus decrypt stuff without getting asked for password/token validation). But well, it can be done.

Re: the old our nukes are bigger than your nukes argument

To be honest, the US already had accumulated a lot of bitterness during the Cold War, so much that a good chunk of their current problems are caused by their past evils.

- Iran? They CAUSED it, along with the UK, with Operation AJAX. So much that said operation is no longer considered a good thing as it basically triggered a series of events that caused the Islamic Revolution and turned Iran into the US-hating, religious-zealot-run country it is today.

- Most of Latin America suffered bloody tyrants and South America in particular had at one time a CIA backed dictatorship in most of its countries. Ever wonder how Chavez got to be President in Venezuela? That's why. Having a US hating prez is the new cool in most of South America.

- The Iraq WMD lie basically killed whatever goodwill was left in the remaining part of the world that didn't have a grudge against the US. Dubya's Administration foreign policy brought hatred to the US and the whole NSA/PRISM thing was just the finishing touch to all that.

It is indeed sad to see this happen, given that the US at one point was the shining beacon of freedom during the 19th Century. Today? Not so much.

Conspiracy theory alert!

Khazar!

Those are found in the same place where the Reptilian Thetans have their Space Hitler base, launched by the Iluminati and Raptor Jesus during the establishment of the New World Order. The Khazar are really inhabitants from Nibiru and are just waiting the deep space signal from Mothra to destroy OUR WORLD!!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!

COBOL

The problem with a lot of these things is that they run on System/390 (which we now know as z/OS) and use stuff that only those familiar with S390 know: CICS, TSO, ISPF, COBOL, RACF, OMVS … if you know what any of those things are, you're probably better qualified than most people in IT these days. Note that I said "you know what it means", not "know how to do stuff with that".

It also doesn't help that a lot of stuff from the mainframe's heyday was done in COBOL, which was all the rage back then in business realms up until Dijkstra rightfully slammed it and fell out of favor. (Sadly, nobody was able to do the same to Visual Basic.) Maybe the only thing worse than having to work with VB6 code or COBOL has to be MUMPS, and that language will also live for eons thanks to its usage in the US healthcare system.

Some banks have been migrating their code to better languages like Java, but some of these projects take years or decades, and even then they only get something like "now we got 40% COBOL code in our core systems". Most of them have simply made some kind of "core system" for the lower-level stuff, and simply develop middleware stuff on top of that. Because nobody wants to be the team that broke the bank's code!

Re: Bubble has burst ..... ?

Ah, the right-winger troll is back at it…

No my dear, while BTC has fallen from the $1000 mark, they're still doing $612-650 on other exchanges. MtGox seems to be no longer the one and only BTC exchange, and its woes are probably bigger since they started complying with FinCEN's rules (they're actually asking for ID and proof of residence these days). Even though I'm not a US Citizen, I still got bit when OKPAY stopped serving 'em. Had I bought BTC back then, I'd have profited a lot by now (BTC was at $55, the up/down swings would've landed me a truckload of BTCs and USDs by now).

I've probably erred too far on caution on these thingies. Of course I wouldn't send my life savings on BTC, but I would send a stash of my non-critical savings there as it seems it gets better returns than my current bank does (3% per year! meh….) While I am skeptic on BTC, I don't dismiss them as "tulip mania" or even "ponzi scheme" as most detractors do. The BTCs will still hold value even if the exchanges go poof as long as someone's willing to use them as currency or trade 'em for hard cash. The same applies to other currencies like USD, GBP, EUR and such, most of our modern currencies value isn't set but is actually given by us ("us" being the markets, reserves, GNP, whatever.) That's why it's called "fiat currency"… and BTC is also a fiat currency, even though the most fervent BTC followers insist in this not being the case.

Win95 levels of sophistication?

they've dragged the desktop GUI back to Win 95 levels of sophistication.

I'd say you went too far into yesterday's future. The Start Screen is basically a revival of the awful Program Manager UI. It's even been commented by TIFKAM detractors, and they're probably right on the spot. App-centric UI makes sense in mobile devices but it never made sense in PCs. The whole Win95 UI revamp copied System 7's (and earlier) approach where files were the main thing on UI navigation, and it was one of the most liked changes in Windows.

And now they backtracked on that.

As many others have mentioned already, the optional Launchpad app which did attempt something similar to what Metro does (stick a mobile UI on a PC OS) is probably the one app that is either unused or hated by most OSX users. Noticeable by the fact that most OSX users are probably iOS users as well, so it isn't that they don't like that UI at all, they like it as long as it keeps to their mobile devices. This is where MS failed: their TIFKAM interface was loved by WinPhone 7 users when they put that on their new revamped WinPho OS. Then they force-fed it to Windows 8 … which has now turned it from "nice mobile UI" to "that fugly thing on new PCs".

Re: Well I'm blessed

Heh. I did a project on both nuclear fission and fusion at High School (preparatoria in Spanish) back in 1997. Same thing here, I was fascinated on tokamaks and the NIF thingy, though I was also kind of let down when I saw that break-even was still pretty far down the road. Yet I'm seeing progress in this area, so we'll probably crack it sometime during my lifetime, and hopefully we will.

Re: Does this mean ... ?

Given that AOL was for a long time the only ISP in most of the US, it probably is an appropriate comparison. However I doubt it'll have the same ending; AOL's demise was because broadband ate away its market, Comcast and TWC are the broadband in those places. The only way the AOL story would repeat itself is if another broadband ISP were to roll out nationwide and have better service than Comcast/TWC.

Re: Careto is not Mask

Careto is not Mask. "Máscara" is Mask.

There's a fun game with Spanish: depending on the words used, you can actually know what country the writer/speaker is from. Given the use of Careto, it indeed sounds like Spain, unless we're being sidetracked and it's actually Portugal and/or Brazil (with "Careto" being actually Portuguese instead of Spanish).

Now, an easy way to find out if it's Spaniard is easy if computers are involved: every single Spanish speaking country that isn't Spain calls computers, computers. Spaniards call computers "sorting machines" (ordenadores). That single word narrows down Spain real quick!

The other country that is equally easy to lock into is Argentina; if they speak weird Spanish (as in, "weird to anyone not from Argentina" it probably is from that country. Example: "compártelo" in regular Spanish turns into "compartilo" in Argentinian, "tienes" into "tenés" , or "eres" into "sos".

If they call pineapples "bananas" without the B, it's at least South American. It's probably a fun game to wade through the zillion Spanish dialects, but at least you can narrow down quickly if it comes from certain countries.