Posts by Pirate Dave

Re: It's difficult to take ATMs seriously on security...

"All you get is an IOU."

When you get down to it, isn't most paper money basically just an IOU anyway? There's no real intrinsic value to the scrap of paper other than the amount printed on it.

Re: Fickle Microsoft

I still remember back in the early 90's when I tried to transition from TurboPascal 6 under DOS to, eh, whatever Borland's C compiler was for Windows. I could do cool stuff with TP with no problem, but I remember looking at a small sample Windows program and it was like 18 lines of code just to get an empty window on the screen. Bleh. So I stuck with DOS for a few more years. In '94 I found a copy of VB 3 for sale for $15 in the back on Computer Monthly, so ordered it (and a $5 copy of Windows 3.0), and decided I was GOING to learn it. And I did. It's served me well over the intervening 23 years. I never did take a liking to the low-level Windows API. Fast, sure, but ugly as hell to code.

Re: Newsted hasn't been in Metallica in almost 15 years...

If you haven't bought the albums since Master, don't bother. Just run your Master cassette at like 2/3's normal speed, and you'll be pretty much hearing all the albums since then. Although Justice did have some good songs on it ("One", in particular, I still consider to be the apex of all metal).

Re: ITEOTWAWKI

Yeah, years...

If you wanna feel REALLY old, go read some of the ones from before 2005 and think "OMG? It's been 10+ years but I still remember this story line..."

Somewhere, way back in the early days, I remember the story where Simon was at some sort of training, and said something that I printed out and stuck to my wall:

"But root IS my account!"

Re: Must have been made by...

"Any buzzwords I missed?"

You didn't mention their back-end reliance on DevOps to keep things going. But that omission is entirely understandable.

Re: Dear Apple.

"There's enough Apple Corp "fans" ( I use word in it's strictest sense! ) out there that will happily die for the company."

You mean things that just go 'round and 'round in a circle all day and don't do anything more useful than move a little air?

Re: Gravity well problem

"maybe a nice place to 'work out' - Just 'Sayan'"

Just don't tell the wife you're taking the kid, too. She'll get pissed.

"If it is shown that cell phones do not pose a threat to the plane, there is no further need for the ban."

Agreed. IMHO - If the FCC doesn't have an actual technical reason for the ban having to do with radio emissions or radio interference, then they should drop their ban and let the FAA be the deciding agency.

"He's getting soft in his middle age,"

Well, he did fall for that consultant gal a few years ago. Emotionally and literally, if memory serves... The goalposts tend to move as you get older - sometimes things that were fun in your 30's seem like more trouble than they are worth in your 40's.

"Except it's the SAME UI Chrome used to steal most of Mozilla's users. "

Don't know if I agree with the extend of "most". Mozilla has been snubbing users for several years now, so I don't doubt many previous FF users switched out of anger at the direction Moz was going more than because of Chrome's UI. But among new users, with little investment in which browser they use, yeah, Chrome's UI might have lured them. Or the fact that it's the same browser they used on their phone/tablet, so let's use it on the PC too.

I've been a FF user since Phoenix, which if memory serves, was begun as a grassroots, anti-bloat Mozilla hack to give users what they wanted faster than the old Mozilla team could. Those days are long over. Mozilla might as well be a federal bureaucracy nowadays - they love telling us what is good for us.

Re: Intelligent(?!) Design

"Our knees are a significant point of failure... ...No kind and loving God would have ever put them into production."

And don't forget the prostate. A kind and loving God would have put that on the outside and made it easily replaceable. (said as I'm staring down the barrel of turning 50 and having to start worrying about such things).

Re: And force everyone to use those auto insurance monitoring devices too.

"one of the crap parts of getting older is remembering when conservatives actually stood for small government."

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers those days. Days when there was a delineation between Liberals and Conservatives, but things weren't so polarized. Your opponent could be "wrong", but that didn't mean he was necessarily "bad". As it is now, it's like two oppositely charged plates in an enormous capacitor just waiting for the electrolyte to break down.

(oh, and if this bill passes and a future employer wants my DNA for health insurance purposes, fine, they just have to get on their knees and suck it out...)

Nope.

Re: Schrödinger's coin?

"Head and tails both at the same time."

Careful, this is a family-friendly site...we'll have none of that AtM stuff here...

Re: Sympathy? Not a lot here

Same here. While it's fine to use FOSS on "invisible" stuff like DNS/DHCP servers, firewalls, web-servers, etc, it wouldn't fly for a device that sits on the President's desk. Plus, well, locally there weren't many outfits who could help with an FOSS rollout or the afterwards-support, since, eh, there's not as much money in it. Sure, we could have locked our phone guy in a closet with Asterisk and some hardware for 3 months and not let him out until he mastered it, and then did our roll-out, but the CIO didn't much like that plan. Strangling our own neck when something breaks that we built doesn't really help the situation. So we went with Avaya since the local VAR had been installing and maintaining their stuff (except their switches) for years and their main Phone guru is like Rainman-level genius with Telco stuff. Sadly it seems all of the Rainman-level switch geniuses (except McNamara) work at Avaya - all 12 of them.

SETI@home was a bit of an obsession for me 17 or so years ago. I had ~30 old motherboards at home in the crawlspace under the kitchen running it - each mobo hanging from a floor joist by a screw through the standoff hole, along with it's attendant hard drive and power supply held on by strands of Cat5 wire. Everything from 25 MHz 486DX's to 600 MHz P3's. All running the Linux client under RedHat 6.2 (the ORIGINAL 6.2, not the renumbered Fedora stuff). Those were the days. The wife finally got fed up with the power bills and told me to take it all down. :(

Re: CYGWIN

I admit, my memories on this are fuzzy after 7 years, so you may be right about requirements for AD. I do remember that permissions were a big factor in getting NFS to run, so perhaps I have confused "permissions" with a requirement for AD. However, I do remember thinking at the time that it seemed byzantine and horribly complicated the way Microsoft needed things setup, compared to how it "just worked" on Linux with a minumum of fuss. I never could find a simple way to just mount a NFS share without jumping through what seemed to be an inordinate amount of hoops.

(oh, and the downvote was not from me.)