Posts by Pirate Dave 1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008
Yeah, somewhere down in the murkiest depths of the Azure App-Only Authentication setup docs is the incantation that opens the gates of Hell. I'm pretty sure I saw it there. Or perhaps it was one of the cross-links to the .NET authentication docs. All nasty, nasty stuff that made it hard to breathe afterwards.
I will confess that I left FF when they removed the ability to clear the downloaded files list (and ONLY the downloaded files list, not the entire history) when the browser is closed. I even requested/complained that they put it back (as did numerous other users), but we were pooh-poohed by the devs and given a bunch of excuses of why the functionality couldn't/wouldn't be added back in. I mean, really, it's not like it would have taken a ton of work - there was still a button somewhere that would clear out just the download list, so it should have been easy-peasy to call the button's click event during shutdown. But, no, that was asking too much. 700 settings in About:Config, and one more would have broken the camel's back? Plus, the condescending attitude of the devs was just uncalled for, IMHO. Palemoon was still in early days then, but was good enough for what I needed.
I guess at some point, most popular FOSS projects get the shititude with their users. Must be something about human nature.
"There are now just two menu buttons, the hamburger menu top right, and a right-click menu; the three-dots menu in the address bar has gone."
Just what Firefox needed - LESS user controls. That's one of the reasons I've stuck with Palemoon on Windows - it has classic menus, just like billg intended.
Perhaps Firefox should put out their own branded cell phone. That certainly cemented Safari and Chrome to the upper reaches of the popularity list.
I think there were 4 or 5 different admin notifications that popped up in Outlook today where MS was advising that various services were having issues. Obviously they're rolling out something semi-major on the backend and it broke things.
As a long-time sufferer of the frequently unstable crap-fest that Microsoft calls "Microsoft365/Office365", I just wish they'd come out with a Long Term Support branch that we could opt our tenant into where they won't fuck with things for like 2-4 years. No feature upgrades, no "improvements", no GUI redesign, no major changes, just bug and security fixes for a few years, and software and servers that do what they're supposed to every day. Imagine that - a consistent, reliable, STABLE version of O365 that will work and look the same for 2 or 3 years. That would almost make it bearable. But this constant fucking around, mostly just so they can continuously sing about how they're coming out with new awesomeness, is the pits. Makes me long for the days of running Groupwise 6.5. Ah well, only 13 years to retirement...then fuck'em.
"it's unlikely that the commercial entity will vanish overnight "
I don't know about that. We have several pieces of "commercial" software that do various small things in our workflow. Well, commercial in the sense that at various times in the past, the company paid some small dev companies or individuals to write the code. It's definitely not open source. Some of those companies/programmers are still around and available, some are out of the business now. But the code still does what it needs to do, and we're still shipping product, so nobody wants to look the gift horse in the mouth. Yeah, it ain't "right" but it works, and in manufacturing "working" seems to be job #1.
I'd hit that. Yeah, I said it.
I don't know why VB gets such wide hate. It was never meant for system development or for stuff like manipulating pixels in a video stream or fiddling with hardware. It was meant to be a way around having to learn the vagaries of programming Windows in C++. I looked at Windows programming in like 1991 and decided I'd rather keep working in a yarn mill than go that direction. I got a copy of VB 3 in '94 (after 4 or 5 years of DOS programming in Pascal and Assembly), and thought it was pretty neat. Beat the hell out of learning all of the Win16 stuff, IMHO. Drag and drop, then add the needed code.
I know there was a lot of shitty code put out by non-programmers (ie - managers) who could suddenly make something that looked important, but had no discipline in how they did things. But that wasn't the fault of VB.
Oh, and it had an IDE that loaded in, eh, half a second, even on a 4-Meg machine, didn't require a Java runtime, and had actual, non-web-linked context-sensitive help when you highlighted and pressed F1. Shit, that was awesome stuff in the mid 90's.
Those cheap lathes are more headache than they're worth. Got to a local Harbor Fright and turn the knobs on the 7x12 lathe they usually have on display, Gritty, jerky, bleh.
Best advice is watch Craig's List or Facebook Marketplace for an old American benchtop lathe - Southbend, Hardinge, Atlas, Sears, even Montgomery Ward. At certain times of the year, those will popup on CL for under $1000. Read-up on the various old lathes at places like lathes.co.uk, Practical Machinist, etc, so you'll have an idea of what you're looking for. I was super-picky and took a couple of years to find one I wanted, but I finally got a sweet SouthBend Heavy 10 for $900.
Well put, Jake. I like that line of reasoning that the rest of us shouldn't be punished for the possibility of a tiny fraction doing something stupid. That's not something I see a lot of in the online groups, usually it just winds up being "Shall not be infringed!". But reason and logic, that makes a lot of difference.
I do remember doing the math a few years ago (after the Vegas shooting, I think), and the scary black AR/AK guns had, according to the Mass Shootings page at Google, been involved in around 200 deaths since Columbine (which, IMHO, was the beginning of the mass shootings). 200 is not an insignificant number, and I'm not trivializing it, but out of a population of 270+ million, with an estimated 20+ million AR/AKs in circulation, well, that number of deaths doesn't seem to justify the need for the heavy-handed bans that are being put forth. I've got 4 kids that are driving age, and I'm far, far more worried that they'll be killed by a Mustang driver (not banned) going 90 MPH (not banned) who had half a bottle of Jack Daniels (also not banned), than by an AR.
I could be in favor of "Red Flag" laws IFF they are extremely tightly written and have strong provisions regarding false accusations and the restoration of rights and properties if the accused (if they can be called such) are found to not be a danger. It's a very sharp razor's edge to walk, though. Too weak and they'll be all but useless, too strong and it leads to governmental abuse. I certainly don't trust the current lot of politicians to get the balnace right, on either side of the aisle.
I don't know, I've never had an accuracy issue with my AKs. They aren't match rifles by any means, but even my first one (an N-PAP assembled by the monkeys at Century) was surprisingly accurate and repeatable right out of the box (and I did get lucky in that the front sight isn't canted). Maybe the American barrels they put on them nowadays are more accurate than the older imported barrels that were quenched in Communist tears.
I love the AK. The first time I field-stripped it, I realized Father Kalashnikov had done a genius thing - the complexity of the gun is in the machining, not in the parts themselves. The gun itself is a simple weapon made up of simple parts. I remember thinking "this is really just an advanced rock-throwing device". Compare that to an AR with it's flimsy gas tubes and star chambers and a BCG that just looks like it wants to fail. I mean, I love the AR too, and carried one for a while, but the AK is just beauty in a more primitive form.
"According to the posted document, law enforcement officers between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2020, have recovered 23,906 privately-made firearms at potential crime scenes, including 325 homicides or attempted homicides,"
Those numbers sound fishy. I've built my share of AKs from parts kits, and assembled a fair few ARs using complete lowers, and I have to say, I don't think most mass-murders would go to the trouble of building a "ghost gun". from an 80% kit or a flat. Why would they go to ALL THAT TROUBLE, and the possibility of screwing it up massively, when (pre-Covid) a completed lower from Anderson or Palmetto State Armory could be had for under $50 that's in-spec (mostly) and vastly more reliable than whatever crap they'd turn out with their drill press and a couple of jigs? And the Glock 80% kits are an even stupider idea, because not only do they have to cut and drill the frame accurately (and again, risk failure), but then they get to spend almost the full retail price of an entire new Glock to buy the trigger and slide kit to make it into a pistol. That's immensely stupid given how many stolen firearms are floating around in the underground for not a lot of money.
I do realize that, for whatever reason, "ghost guns" are in the cross-hairs right now, so the Administration (and their lapdogs in the media) are going to be pushing statistics that justify their goals. But this stat about "privately-made firearms" just seems like bunk, unless the FBI/ATF considers scratching one's name into the side of the gun to be a criteria for "privately-made".
Amen to that! We've already got enough bullshit gun laws here (922r compliance immediately springs to mind), we don't need more. A few LESS laws would be a welcome change, actually.
And why are "we" only worried about controlling guns, instead of worrying about WHY these shooters thought it was OK to go kill a bunch of people for no good reason? That's just treating the symptoms, not the disease.
I can only speak for myself, but in all the years I used CentOS, I didn't do so because it was "Enterprise", I did so because I cut my teeth on the old (pre-Enterprise) RedHat, so all the file locations were where I expected them to be. As well, CentOS was well-represented in most of the how-to's found across the 'Net. But I was a small-time admin with at most 10 servers or VMs running CentOS, so I had little need to learn all the "Enterprise" stuff that made RH so...Enterprise-worthy.
How the mighty have fallen and been cast down. The school that gave us Gopher has now been banned from the Linux Kernel. And banned for a Bad Idea so stupid and bone-headed it's as if the whole scheme was dreamt up by a drunken freshman at his first Frat party.
I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that I never thought I'd see this day.
I'll probably get hated-on, but I gotta ask. Why? Other than developers who want to test cross-platform capability, who is this aimed at? The paper-MSCE crowd who keep hearing how wonderful Linux is, but can't figure out how to install standalone ESXi on an old box and spin up a CentOS 7 or Ubuntu VM ? The "admins" who stack black-box services together like Legos while reading the how-to recipe on StackExchange?
I know I'm old-skool thinking with this, but trusting Microsoft in anything Linux-related just seems like a Bad Idea. Sure, they've apparently hired some upper-management droids who claim to have the Linux religion, but in the end, GPL is the polar opposite of Microsoft's strategy, and can't really be good for their (or our) long-term plans.
Speaking of long-term plans, has anyone seen the Zune update that MS pushed out last week for Patch Tuesday? I got a text message about it on my Windows-Mobile phone, but Internet Explorer couldn't get to the download page at TechNet. Not sure what's going on here...
I keep a copy of the old Paint, Notepad, and Wordpad from Win2003 handy and put them on most of my new servers. It's just easier that way. The bummer is that MS puts one of them (Wordpad, maybe?) in a protected directory, so it's a small pain to replace it with the older version so that calling tit from the command line (or the Run box) brings up the old version instead of the new crap.
I use notepad++ for those times when I need to open files that will give notepad fits (Unix format files, or partly binary files), and sometimes use Paint.NET when I need to do layers (ie - generating floorplans for Ekahau wireless surveys). But 99% of the time, I'm using Paint, Notepad, and Irfanview for day-to-day stuff.
Yes, I am a simpleton.
I'm on PaleMoon because it still has actual menus. File. Edit. View. History, etc. The Way It Should Be. Is it better or worse than FF? I don't know, since I haven't used FF in 5 years, maybe longer. It works well enough for me, isn't from Google, and isn't directly from the arrogant meat-heads at Mozilla.
Doesn't the US semiconductor industry do this every 10-15 years? They run crying to Uncle Sam that they need assistance only the Federal Government can provide. Yeah, I think I've seen this movie before. ISTR RAM going from $30/Meg to like $120/Meg in the early 90's because somebody complained and suddenly we had to have big sanctions against the Korean memory manufacturers. Yeah, maybe they deserved it (they were actually dumping, iirc), but still, that only really hurt those of us building and upgrading computers, the Korean corps probably don't even show it as a blip in their balance books anymore, and obviously it didn't fix things for the American semiconductor industry.
Eh, do they ALL take pics of themselfs naked these days? I mean, these guys successfully broke into what, 10 accounts total? And that was enough to find substantial numbers of nekkid pics? Jeesh. And then there's the whole "why did they have those pics into their school account" question, although maybe that was from device backups?
It sure SEEMS like owning the Groupwise copyrights is the first step in a company's slide to obsolescence. Word Perfect. Novell. Attachmate. MicroFocus.
I jest, of course. Groupwise was an awesome email system, just, as usual, the World-at-Large chose a not-quite-as-good alternative from Microsoft.
"SCotUS will never allow the banning of guns."
They didn't have much problem allowing it in 1994, and I don't trust John Roberts if it comes down to the wire. And that's assuming the SCotUS would even decide to hear any cases about it. HB 127 is a horrible thing in whole and in part, and could set in motion a wide range of repercussions that will take us years to untangle and free ourselves from, not to mention the irreversible damage it will cause to the small-scale firearms industry.
Besides, if there's one thing the current panic has taught us - all they have to ban is primers (or the evil chemical substances therein), and the whole industry will collapse on itself within 2-3 years. It's only been a year so far, and look how bad things are - ammo selling 2 to 4 times normal price, guns selling at twice normal price, the parts supply is all but dried up except for the $$ boutique stuff, and reloading components are just a pleasant memory with no concrete promise of when they'll come back. And that's without any sort of actual "ban" to make things harder to get.
Your premise is incorrect. In many states, training is not needed to carry, only to carry concealed. If you want to walk around with a 6-shooter hanging low on your hip, that's perfectly fine in most states south of the Mason-Dixon. It's stupid to advertise like that, but that's why we have the Darwin Award.
As well, in some states, there is not even a training requirement to get a concealed-carry permit. You show up at the Probate court, fill out the form, have your picture and fingerprints taken, and, provided you don't have a criminal background, you'll get your shiny new Weapons Carry Permit in a month or two.
like Google is building up to when they say "Why sure, we'll take on this all-important, but monumental, task of making sure no FOSS libraries are updated without 'approval' of the 'community'. We love to do our part. Don't be evil. Wash behind your ears."
Or maybe I just don't trust Google anymore...
Or maybe I really just don't trust ANY techno companies anymore...
Old. Cynical. Yep.
"Is the readership of The Register aging that fast, or are people just losing interest?"
Things change, popularity wanes, interests trend elsewhere, and AMFM made a few posts that were comprehensible. All strong portents of doom.
I admit, I sort of lost interest after Lester passed, something just "changed" somehow in the following year or two. But maybe that was me more than El Reg.
I deleted it from my Galaxy S8 a couple of weeks ago, and AFAIK, it's gone. I got tired of FB's crap (and all the crap on FB), so deleted my FB account I've had for 13+ years, then deleted the app from my phone. And deleted any cookies on my laptop that even remotely looked like they'd come from Facebook. It's shameful how much time I was wasting each day on that crap site. Now I've got loads of free time again, and not a bunch of garbage infiltrating my peace. El Reg's comment section is now the closest I get to "social networking".
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