Posts by Herby

Simple fact: Don't do the crime...

...if you can't do the time

Pretty easy proposition if you ask me. Sure others could have done it and the security was most likely terrible, but people should learm. If you keep at it for long enough, you will be caught!

Loser pays...

Enough said.

Will it.....

Disrupt what my current vehicle does: Go over 350 miles on a single tank of gas (petrol). I can drive nonstop for over 5 hours (at speed!) in my big ugly SUV, going from the Pasadena, CA area to the San Francisco bay area (look on a map, ZIP code 91017 to 94040) with a single tank of fuel.

No current electric vehicle even comes close. So, don't bother to DISRUPT me as I don't really care. If you want to disrupt, feel free to build another lane each way on I-5 from Bakersfield to Stockton, and I might listen.

Yawn. More hype and hot air!

Fool.....Money...

Soon parted.

Of course this is obvious. Then I look at my wife's collection of hair brushes, which is around 7 or so. Many of these are used at the same time WITH a hair dryer (blasting away!). And I wonder why it takes so long for the female of the species to "get ready".

She is really good looking though, I have to admit.

So, he "invented" a moniker we all now use.

So, what!! It might have been called something else or maybe "email" by anyone. "Email" is just an abbreviation for "electronic mail" (as opposed to postal mail) that moves electronic messages around. Big deal!

As for user-to-user electronic mail, I used one on a Tymshare SDS-940 back in the 60's. It was no big deal then. We used ASR-33 teletypes. The messages were "short" (thankfully).

Lawyers...

Shakespeare was right. Especially in this case.

Next they will sue the auto maker that might have prevented the accident by limiting the speed (or something like that).

Who knows, I may even be picked for the jury (it is local to me).

Here is a dollar kid, don't bug me.

To err is human...

To really foul up things, you need a computer!!

Old saying that applies here. Then there is "testing, yeah, we heard of that (somewhere)".

This reminds me of the hours long wait for passport control at the Moscow airport. They had one guy (that took his time) for a plane load of us nice tourists (who want to spend good money). As the line got pretty small, (a dozen or so out of a plane load or two), they added more passport inspectors. Real understanding of queueing theory folks!!

Just remember...

Artificial Intelligence isn't

This becomes painfully obvious when my (wonderful!!) wife tries to get a request into Siri. She fills up the request with words of noise, and never gets the right answer.

Of course, there is the speech recognition software that wants to change the word "Poway" (a city in California) into two words "pow" and "way", then mangles the response when it can't find the city name.

The silly voice bots that are on the other end of the phone line are another thing. Look, we all know you have options, and yes a limited number of them, just tell us. No, I don't want to speak my credit card number when the public is listening.

And so it goes...

All this "smart TV" makes me wonder...

That I have made a very correct decision to keep the 5 CRT based 3:4 aspect ratio TV's in my house. Boy are they DUMB. About the only "smart" stuff they have is which channels they work on, and since my two SAT receivers have modulators to nice channels, we don't worry about much.

This has worked fine for me for quite a few years.

UGH, the "other TV" is a Visio huge one. It might even be "smart" (it does access my WiFi router). The problem is that in some respects it is quite DUMB as well. When it receives a letterbox picture "over the air" it should sense it and zoom up the active part of the picture to the whole wide screen (where I could see all the pixels of the 360x640 picture) and let it go at that. But nope, it postage stamps it in the center of the screen. When will the manufacturers actually listen and make things "simple".

Yes, I know it takes a LOT of work to make things "simple". Probably more than people are willing to do. (*SIGH*).

Gives new meaning to...

"Halt and Catch Fire".

(0x4E on a M6800).

This leaves open all sorts of pranks!

I'm sure there are lots of ideas that a typical BOFH could dream up on a moments notice.

This gives all sorts of pranks that one could invent with a Raspberry Pi with a small power supply/battery. If it were me, I make it a changing name so as to not have too much suspicion.

This gives a whole new meaning to in-flight entertainment.

lady of negotiable affections...

Well, everything is negotiable these days. For instance the dialog:

Q: How about for $1,000,000?

A: Of course.

Q: How about for $0.25?

A: What kind of lady do you thing I am?

We know what kind of lady you are, we are just negotiating the price!

Moral: The best things in life are "free".

Windows bug fix

Another oxymoron.

Enough said.

Censorship & The internet...

When censorship is discovered, the natural instinct is for the internet to route around it. In this case, I'm sure that after a few milliseconds of a hardware device instructions would be published for the work around, and as for software, all I can say is "good luck with that!".

Stupid is as stupid does...

IBM also has the right to NOT PAY THEM

If they don't want to work on the projects.

Pretty simple trade if you ask me. I'm sure there are people who WILL work on the projects necessary.

Sounds like a temper tantrum to me, and I thought these were the domain of 4-5 year olds. Get real!!

One of these days...

The flight attendant will be speaking to a pilot who knows better. I've got a couple of them in the family. Some actually fly commercial for airlines (sorry, not United).

Now now...

Let's get real. This country of mine (USA) also does influence peddling as well. Hell, we even attempt to influence elections (mostly with rhetoric, but ...). And does anyone investigate the good 'ol USA for such indiscretions? Nope.

Recent example: Israel election a few years back. Thankfully it didn't work.

More recent example: Brexit vote. I'll leave it to those residing in Blighty to determine which was the better result.

Just a note...

Remember...

MicroFocus makes Cobol. This wouldn't be too bad for all concerned, but then one needs to understand that MicroFocus Cobol (the compiler) is WRITTEN in MicroFocus Cobol itself.

This isn't eating your own dog food, it the dog eating its tail.

I'm sure there is a good reason for this, but COBOL??

Yes, I know, IBM Fortran 4/Level H was written in Fortran 4/Level H (opt 02 as I remember, it has been a while). It was the 60's, and if you remember the 60's you weren't there.

Enterprise...

"Some penetration testers have gone further satirically arguing that a vendor's state of software security is inverse to its use occurrences of the term 'enterprise'. "

Now this is something that seems to ring true in many cases. Usually because some higher up wanted to look "important" (see this weeks edition of On Call for a GREAT example).

Maybe they should...

Have the update display "return for refund" on the screen, and not do anything else. Might get the point across.

Surrounding the message with flames is of course optional.

Simple Solution...

Maybe rename the piece as "December 21 is coming" (northern hemisphere centric, for sure).

Yes, this is a bit silly.

Maybe Uber needs to have...

A cab setup like the one in taxicab confessions. That way we can all see what is going on in the back seat. Of course it would "educational" for all involved.

But...

I'm farsighted, and will probably have problems with focus at such a close range. Have these VR headset people even thought about that?

Yes, it does get a little bit blurry at close range unless there is a LOT of light to constrict my pupils increasing my focus range.

Sadly most of these things are used by youth that haven't been subjected to presbyopia which comes as you enter later decades in life (*SIGH*).

Me? I just go to Costco and pick up +2.75's in the three packs and scatter them all over the place (soon to be +3.25's I suspect).

Need...

POSITIVE...CASH...FLOW!!!

Unless you are doing something illegal (which DOES happen), if you can get this right, things have a habit of curing themselves.

So, don't go into debt to cover operating expenses, that is a bad idea!

Cores??

Maybe intel will make one of the cores in a multi-core ARM chip execute x86 code directly. That might be interesting. Different instruction sets for different cores. You have lots of space so why not??

You heard it here first, so when the patent trolls come knocking over a year later (it will probably take that long to have something patented, I hope), it won't be. I can only hope.

Now they need to get rid if that UFEI (or whatever it is called) "secure" (aka lockout) boot stuff.

Does the realism extend to...

The ship sinking? Do they get the life rafts out so that only a portion of the "passengers" will survive.

I has relatives that were enamored with the movie, to which I said "The ship sinks", they called "spoiler alert". I'll leave it at that...

A plus for the operation. Spam volume down??

Time will tell. I certainly hope so. My current count is over 300 messages per day, some that include "buddy" or other such words in their subject (usually with asterisks somewhere, most NSFW). Most I suspect want me to click on some nice link that has lots of javascript to do nasty stuff. Yuck!!

Off with their heads (I wish!!).

Vitamin B12

Is provided by animal products, and very necessary for human health.

Need to get it somewhere, so why not a fiver??

Now if they built cars this way...

Of course we would all be going around 5 MPH, and having daily runs of 20 feet or so.

JPL had a pretty good record when it comes to building things. They have a couple of boxes escaping the solar system. A bunch of vehicles on Mars, and other things. All in all if it lasts thru "infant mortality" (check your unit conversions), they are bound to last a while. The engineers there would make Howard Wolowitz be very proud.

Bugs and their effect...

Yes, bugs come in a variety of severities...

Yes, many bugs are not very tolerable, and result from unknown interactions between things, and with Linux growing in complexity the number of interactions grows as well (and that is just the kernel!). Sometimes bugs can be a bit esoteric and for the most part benign. An example I noted on an operating system from long ago (the 70;s) was that leap year was calculated when the date was manually entered on the console (at boot time). This would have bad effects if the date were entered in December of the year, and the machine ran continually for another two months (till February 28/9th). Since the leap year was for the year before, it might think that Feb 29, 2017 existed (no it doesn't, I know). Sure this was an esoteric bug, and AFAIK it was never fixed, because reboots happened more often than the two month interval necessary for the bug to appear.

This is why some software is released with "known bugs". They are ones that usually 1) Aren't commonly seen, or 2) Have work-arounds that are acceptable to the user base. They are usually documented as well.

Then again, I have no idea how Microsoft and Windows do their releases, or if they follow any of these "reasonable" practices about "known bugs". Such is life.

Broadcast or Point to Point?

That is the question. Most video things are broadcast in nature (like over the air TV). When you go to point to point, lots of thing change. For one thing you need bandwidth, and someone needs to pay for it. Most of the time the monthly fees contribute to the build-out of the connections that support high bandwidth. Eventually the users pay for much of the capital cost of the bandwidth, then the operator can keep charging people even though the capital cost is now zero (it was paid for). This happened for long distance in the period leading up to the "divestiture" of 1984. Because bandwidth was so cheap, long distance subsidized local service which was more costly to maintain, and so it goes. Fast forward to cellular service, and a similar circumstance happens. You charge for minutes while you build out the physical plant and keep going. Eventually the cell towers get paid for and all that is left is the electricity bill (cheap by comparison). Then the bandwidth hogs take over and you then need to make more bandwidth between points, and charge for it. If the pipe to the service provider (netflix, amazon video, etc.) pays for some of this it makes the consumers happier since they don't have to (directly) pay for it. So, it is all about cost shifting and capital costs. Pick your poison. Yes, AT&T (a modem test command if you are interested) will make money, possibly obscene amounts of it. If you are interested, the symbol on the stock exchange is 'T', and invest there.

Life goes on. Movies will cost money, bandwidth will cost money, and we will all pay.

Experience...

My PFY days were back in the late 60's and early 70's. It got adventuresome at times. Eventually I got to be the proper BOFH when I got the boss fired (he purchased something that he wasn't supposed to).

Youth gives you all sorts of experience. The normal comment was a retort to "I only changed one card, and it doesn't work now". The response was always "Look at that card", with an implied "you idiot" at the end. Of course some of the people I was dealing with had computer skills of a potato, even though they were PhD's ("piled higher and deeper") or getting one. Things have gone through a metamorphosis in the years gone by.

All your base...

...belong to us.

Enough said.

When things get old...

You just want to wash your hands of it all. The problem is that if you work on code over time that has accreted parts here and there from increasing requirements, you just keep pounding away at adding little things here and there, and the ball of string just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Yes, it works, but very few people "understand" it, or what is going on.

I suspect that eventually you get shortcuts compiled in, and underground cheats (see VW). Those that actually need to RUN the software and understand its error messages and their context (to correct the environment as necessary) just need to muddle through.

It is a tough life but we all persevere somehow.

Don't even ask what software I am relating to, let's just say it is BIG and COMPLEX and EVOLVING, all at the same time.

Oh, at one time I drove a nice grey VW bug (it wasn't THAT dirty!).

Optional...

As I understand the process, it is quite optional. One can (follow instructions) revert back to a more "open" system.

I just don't know if this is how shops will do this function, but it is an alternate path. I suspect that the reason is to dry up malicious software so it can do little harm. At least the company is trying to make things "secure". I can't speak for the company up north.

Thankfully...

most of this will be "ancient history" come Wednesday morning. Then one of two things will happen:

1) It is buried forever in a really big coverup.

2) It sees the light of day and we will all know what is going on.

Time will tell.

On laundering money..

The only way to "launder" money is to pay taxes on it.

Quote from a TV series (Orphan Black in this case).

General Patton...

Speak to them in a language they will understand.

First liar doesn't get a chance... (cont'd)

My escapades in this area are a couple:

As for phones, I would get people calling up my number and changing the digits. Mine was 8488, and they wanted to dial 8848. I would happily accept their take out order, and say it was on the way (the other number was a take-out restaurant.

The other phone story is that I would get calls that were intended for a real-estate agent with the same name (they must have looked up in the book). I would happily accept the golf dates with tee times for the next Saturday. I might have also said I would take care of everything.

Email, I have my own domain name, and for some reason people want to use it for signing up for stuff like outlook, or facebook. A couple of times I did the "forgot password" and posted lots of poor things on the page, and sent out lots of nasty notes to friends that had already linked up. Probably didn't do much good, but it made me feel better. I get 10's of megabytes of mis-addressed email every day!

Then I realize I must be a real geek when I look at the digits given and without looking at a phone understand exactly what it spells.

So how does this work for a reasonable systems administrator??

Who is maintaining a bunch (100?) of W10 PCs?

Ideally he would like to have only one update path to a local store so he doesn't tie up bandwidth for all 100 downloads to "the latest". Keeping updates "internal" to an organization makes the proofing of said updates (do they work? do they break things?) easier to do and publish the results for internal use.

All of this "E.T. Phone Home" stuff looks nice for individuals, but when you need to scale it up, things can get a little bit clogged up.

Oh, well wait and see, and let the BOFHs of the world get a new boss along the way.

JPL/CalTech do incredible things!

Yes, they do the "rocket science" stuff we all talk about.

Good people there. Of course the fact that my brother-in-law works there might color my opinion.

Still, if you want successes, this is the place to go.