Posts by Herby

This is vaguely familiar

Wasn't "Linux" trademarked in the USA by some goon, and then an army of nice lawyers (a rarity, I know) came in and got it awarded to Linus (where it is now).

Deja Vu all over again.

Remember the marketing saying:

The first markdown is the cheapest and easiest!

Microsoft should take note. Of course, with all those dancing and keyboard clicking people that appear in the adverts what is it really good for? Promoting dancing lessons?

Boeing needs to sponsor more of this

QUICKLY!

Then again the problems with the 787's batteries might be some silly RoHS regulations that promote Tin (Sn) over Lead (Pb) for solder.

Just a display for me!

The added feature of obtaining some programming thru a coaxial cable is kinda a bonus.

Features? They all belong in the "program providing box", which may or may not be an integral part of the unit.

It is kinda like automobiles having zillions of different seat configurations. A wonderful idea, but not really helpful.

It was the best of time, it was the worst of times.....

It is now.

I suppose that Dell could be one of the lovelorn, but I don't know exactly what it is doing other than playing with itself.

Maybe if he signs an order to...

Not have Microsoft Windows in government offices. Now that WOULD be an improvement in "security".

Is this what Americans really want?

Google controlling the wire? I think not. It is already bad with Verizon's FiOS and AT&T's U-Verse and Comcast's XFinity. Not too many alternatives, as most don't overlap. Trade it for Google doing the job. Not today!

Now that Comcast has gone in and taken control of the content (it now wants to have all of a national broadcast network), things will get a bit sticky.

Maybe the problem is...

That web servers actually KNOW what browser is out there. If they all rendered pages "correctly" there wouldn't be a need to know. Unfortunately, there are differences, and web servers have adapted. Had there been a reasonable "standard" which everyone followed and a test suite that the standards published, we wouldn't have problems like this.

So, here we are with a multitude of rendering engines that all have their own quirks, and us gullible users accept what browser vendors put out.

I'll believe that things improve when that ugly browser gets rid of the abomination called "ActiveX" which is the source of security holes that trucks drive through.

I'm not holding my breath!

Replacement...

Theater of the absurd replacing theater of the absurd. I'm surprised that anyone noticed the change on the television.

But someone had to watch it (and record it) for the newspaper to pick it up, so somebody IS watching (all two of them?).

Just wait for...

Earth capture. Then you can take your time. It also could impact the moon and we could fetch its booth from there.

Just a thought.

Then there is the local soda machine...

Which just a few hours ago dispensed not one, but TWO nice 20 oz plastic bottles when I asked for only one. Having finished the first, my bladder has performed its function and awaits draining.

No cigarettes or 8 kids for me, but geeze, 9 liters, a day! Give me a break, any liquid in that amount on a daily basis would finish one off!

What happened to the ice age?

It seemed to go away, and we are none the worse for wear. Warming has been happening for quite a while, and will likely continue changing the climate for the foreseeable future. Get used to it. Us humans haven't been able to alter the weather and will most likely never be able to to any significant degree.

Of course when Al Gore turns off HIS electric switch, I might listen, but I'm not holding my breath!

Ancient??

Latin ancient?? Not really! The pope's recent declaration of his stepping down was released in Latin, which is the official language of the Holy See.

Now can they do that with Cobol?

The answer to this:

UFEI = Antitrust.

The sooner a government accepts this, the better off we all will be.

Now to reverse engineer the signing keys (maybe a screen saver application?).

Be careful for what you ask for, you might get it!

Just a note about BYOD stuff. Here in the USA we just had a court case that indicated that workers who did company work "on the own time" were entitled to compensation and (possibly) overtime. If one does BYOD, then there is the opposite effect of having workers actually do work on it "away form the workplace". So, it runs both ways. Would you allow "work" stuff to run on your home network (tracking, etc.) and would you actually trust it to keep ALL of your personal stuff private.

So, it may be doubly costly to have workers BYOD. Then again, some places (like where I am) allow "work from home". Joy Joy Happy Happy.

What? No Picture?

Of the beloved napkin?

Please add it (I'm sure it is somewhere out there!).

Simple solution...

Put a '$' in front of it. When the guy says something like "I can't accept a payment like that", then you will know if he is REAL stupid.

So, quitting was the best solution for everyone. Let's hope he doesn't sue the company for some reason. Given that lawyers exist, I won't hold my breath.

Real programmers...

Don't drink tea, they drink COFFEE. Nice strong COFFEE. None of this milk or cream stuff.

That's why god invented COFFEE cups.

General rule: COFFEE in code out.

Simple task: Find some tea in Seattle. Good luck with that! Of course one reason we here in the USA drink COFFEE is that a few years ago we dumped all the tea into Boston Harbor.

Just make sure that the COFFEE isn't computer animated, I'm told it is "dreadful".

Access to the "home lab"

Look, this is easy. There are lots of dynamic DNS providers, and just about every firewall-nat-router box has provisions to do the update automatically. Once that is done, your nice "home" machines are accessible from the world (+dog), and you go from there. Of course, they have a variant of *nix, and opening up an SSH connection is quite easy. Once you are "inside" access to the other machines and other stuff (connected printers) si quite easy. In one instance I was able to do remote printing so my wife could pick up the information I had on my desk at work.

All of this goes without saying: What IT guy DOESN'T have a home system (and connectivity) that he uses "after hours" to do something work related.

Simple problem, simple answer...

It is only a matter of money. Just spend more!

That's what we do here in the good ol' USA. Best government inflation will buy!

Big question for everyone...

Is 64 bits of address enough?

You only get a range of 64 exabytes (64 x 10^18, more or less).

You never know? IPv6 allows for 128 bits of addresses 4 x 10^40, so maybe not?

Of course there is the guy who wanted to be paid by grains on a chess board, one grain then two, then doubling for every succeeding one. Problem was there weren't enough grains in the world to satisfy him, and (as the story goes) he lost his head. Never mind.

Could be problamatical...

In the USA at least. Just published rules regarding things like copyright and the (dreaded) DCMA say that the simple act of "jailbreaking" a cell phone so you can use it on another carrier is an offense. Not good! What will the penalty be for breaking Mr. DotCom's crypto. Who knows?

Me? I really don't want to find out.

Then again, he may be hiding some child porn and that could get you into trouble as well!

As the saying goes...

Easy come, easy go. Or: If you make public promises, you better keep them!

Speedy fix!

It seems that the Linux community is pretty quick to respond to problems. At times I wish other vendors were as good, but it will take a while.

What do they churn out?

From the looks of it, all we will ever see are some script kiddies.

An engineering background (putting things in practical use) should be part of something.

Oh, well.....

Maybe we can get Samsung to get the point

Actually it may be quite easy. Just walk into a friendly computer store and ask to see the products. With a nice flashy USB key in hand (attempt) to boot from it. When the device bricks up, mention it to the management "That's funny, I can't get this to work, do you have another?".

Repeat as often as necessary.

When you run through a chunk of inventory (at the store), and they no longer have items to display/sell, they will complain to Samsung and a solution WILL happen.

Being able to "brick" a computer this easily is a major failure mode. I guess it would be similar to putting the wrong brand of gasoline (petrol) in a vehicle, and causing the car to never start again at the gas station. Bad, very bad!

They ARE interesting animals!

My cat (custody from my ex-) was a wonderful "lap-cat" for almost 18 years. Yes, he did his share of dispatching both birds and mice (just a few), but overall a nice animal.

As for cats in general, one theory is that the great plague ravaged Europe because cats were "unwelcome". They previously did a job of cleaning up vermin, and had a partial immunity to the Plague. Maybe that is their great purpose.

I do understand that cats have domesticated us humans quite well when we keep them as pets.

Dell??

Dull!!

So we want to reduce "hot air"

I feel that some urban areas have more population density than others. Given that one of the HIGHEST population density is in our nations capitol (Washington DC), maybe thinning it out a bit might help the cause. Given that politicians DO blow a bunch of hot air, this is doubly important to thin out the people.

Simple removal of half might be a nice start.

Then again it is wishful thinking (*SIGH*).

Another widgit from Microsoft

YAWN

It is interesting to study this now.

My brother (he has an MBA) went ga-ga over Lotus 123. He was doing predictions for a business, and they would get bigger and bigger. For a while, he would be a customer for more and more memory for is lowly IBM PC.

I really don't know how big he made it, but you needed to add in lots of cards to get memory up to a decent level. I believe he started with an XT, but he may have started with an original PC with floppies, as that is all that was produced.

I suspect that even to this day, he likes 1-2-3 for spreadsheets, but probably uses Excel "because it is there".

Yes, memories of the early 80's!

What isn't mentioned...

Well, the gun stuff is a bit outrageous, and commenting further just re-hashes previous comments. My big question is what was the intruder on?

It must be the water in Florida or something, as they get all sorts of screwballs there. Sad to say that locally here in sunny California, isn't far behind in is ration of screwballs either. Funny how it seems that quite a few of them are in out state Capitol, Sacramento, doing "political" things.

Yes it must be the water!

Helium leakage...

Yes, there is a problem with helium, it leaks through lots of things (its molecule being quite small). Everyone knows this, and putting helium inside a drive can be a bit problematical. That being said, there IS a solution, replenish the gas that leaks out. Pretty simple if you ask me. There are lots of things that have alpha decay (which is essentially helium nuclei in disguise) and just pop a little bit of a nice isotope in a corner of the drive. Alpha particles don't need much shielding and many have long half-lives so there shouldn't be any problem.

Or as the saying goes: "How hard can it be?"

Seems to be a case of:

You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.

Maybe there should be...

...permanent luggage tags. You buy one to attach to your bag, and it is scanned at the airport and inserted into the database. It is latched onto your name and address, so if it gets "lost", the bag could find you.

In this case the cost of the tag happens ONCE for the user (per bag), and you don't have "throw-aways" that the costs add up on.

An interesting idea, you heard it here first. No, I haven't patented it yet.

Given the incidence of SSH probes

This is a real problem. Just about every day I get one or two ip addresses that attempt to use SSH to invade my site. Thankfully I have setup SSH to only allow a few accounts to "enter", but they still fill up my log files.

The scanners seem to think that if there is an SSH server out there, it must be hiding something. Of course, if there is a telnet server, they seem to ignore it. Go figure!

The "science" of climate change....

"Nothing to see here, please move along"

Should apply to all of this silly debate!

We're

ALL doomed. Life is a terminal disease!

SSH scans?

From my recent experience, there are people who do SSH scans looking for open SSH ports and throwing LOTS of account names up to see if anything sticks. I have a home network with a "public" SSH port and it gets scanned all the time (about 1/day). Yes, they fail (but fill up my logs) but they are out there.

Be afraid, be very afraid!

So...

I want to tax this "internet" thing. Where is its headquarters? How come I can't see it? Is it like a telephone or some such. They pay based on time connected, so why not the internet, and take a fraction of that?

Yeah, that's the ticket. Make people pay for connection time and tax that. Just like a telephone!

Logical?

French moaning: "Why does my internet cost do much"

Now if the stock will hurry up...

...and get back to $700/share we would ALL be nice and cozy. Still its hovering around $500 (+-) isn't bad for year over year price.

Yes, my wife DID buy an Iphone 4S about a year ago, and likes it very much! Me? I sometimes want to be away from all things connected at times, and just want a "phone" (nothing fancy). But that's just me.

So, go buy them Jesus Phones and fondleslabs!

So, this is the cause....

...of global climate change.

Yeah, that's the ticket, supernova causes climate change. See it in 1500 years.

I'll pass!

War??

Google vs. Microsoft seems similar to the eastern front in WW2. For us in the "west", it was one part that we really didn't want either to win, although one of the protagonists WAS fighting a common enemy, so we backed them.

I'll leave it to the reader to assign characters to the struggle, which implies who to support.

I also do not mention the leaders, as that would come close to invoking Godwin's Law, which I really don't want to do.

Now the next step:

Get rid of the silly TSA. After all it is only security theater. Expensive security theater at that!