* Posts by Pirate Dave

1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Only as good as the AI?

Maybe El Reg had an AI write its article on AI's writing articles...

$69b Activision deal totally helps gamers and saves them money, says Microsoft

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: That's a load of dosh, that is

Replace all occurrences of "games" with "operating system", then re-read it and you'll understand why this wouldn't work. ;)

Back to work, Linux admins: You may have a CVSS 10 kernel bug to address

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: This does not belong in the Kernel

So, eh, what is your take on ksmbd in general, a year later? Is there any integration now between it and Samba, as the article mentioned?

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

This sucks. I'm not out of popcorn yet, and Twitter is no where near the smoldering corpse phase.

Where's the carnage? The multiple failures on Wall Street as all the dominoes fall? The bailout by the US Government? I paid good money to watch this failure and hate to be shortchanged by Musk bailing out now. The captain must go down with his ship, but the ship's got to earnestly start sinking first. So far it's only been hurt feelings, drama, and waffling on accounts being banned/unbanned/banned/unbanned. That's just a normal day on the Internet. Where's the video of $44,000,000,000 irretrievably going up in smoke?

Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

First time

'This is by no means the first time Microsoft has had to address an issue caused by a Patch Tuesday update"

Well, to be fair, it IS the first time THIS WEEK that Microsoft has had to address such an issue. Although the week is still young, so may not be the LAST time this week, either. Have a little faith...

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

In the early 90's, as a young CompSci student, I had a copy of TurboPascal 6, and that's what we used in most of my 100 and 200 CompSci classes. I got pretty good at it. Then, in Junior year, I took a class that centered around Modula-2. It was OK, but I remember there were some syntax differences from Pascal/TP. Minor little things, IIRC. Minor but important . Most of the rest of my classes were in C or C++ or even ADA (bleh...). So I didn't do much TP for a couple of years. When I finally found a problem that was screaming for Turbo Pascal, I realized that Modula2 had corrupted my previously pristine knowledge of Pascal to the point that the F9 key caused horrible messages to appear on-screen. I never really did recover from that, and wound up doing VB6 for the next several years in self-induced penance (plus VB6 jobs were a dime a dozen by the late 90's, whereas Pascal/Modula2 jobs were practically non-existent around here).

Email hijackers scam food out of businesses, not just money

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

TLC got hit

I'd have thought their network/security guys would have done a better job. AFAIK, they don't want no scrubs for that job.

On the 12th day of the Rackspace email disaster, it did not give to me …

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Right.

I fell for this in ~2009 and again in 2013. First time was to move student email out to Live@EDU. Free, basically unlimited, all hosted by MS, and I got back several hundred Gigs of space on our Groupwise POA box. Just had to learn a little Powershell, and off we go. Second time in 2013 was to move Faculty and Staff to Office365. Groupwise was falling out of favor internally due to the lack of easy integration with third-party apps, not to mention Novell's dissolution, and O365 was free, unlimited, and meant I never had to learn the struggles of an on-prem Exchange Admin. Yeah baby, let's go.

I don't consider it a bad move overall, especially since MS removed Single Instance Storage in Exchange 2010, which, as a 12-year Groupwise admin that seemed like the dumbest idea ever unless the intention is to push everyone off-prem (which I guess was the entire idea). Exchange Online has proven to be usable , we just have to hope MS is better prepared to deal with a massive issue like this than Rackspace apparently was. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath...

Rivian abandons electric van partnership with Mercedes-Benz

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I'm roughly midway between Atlanta and Chattanooga and the last 2 years here have been really bad. Must be from the stimulus money? I don't know, but in some spots they're building warehouses and distribution centers as fast as they can get the concrete in the ground and the steel unloaded from the flatbeds. One after another after another. Sure doesn't look like a "recession" is looming here - somebody somewhere is making major bank on all of this. The usual justification used by the local Pols is "Jobs, jobs, job$" but, hell, this is the beating heart of the carpet industry, we weren't at a loss for jobs before. Not in the least. Greasy palms, I guess,

Pirate Dave Silver badge

As a Georgian, I can't say I'm shedding any tears that Rivian is having troubles building a plant in Georgia. It seems the State government wants to whore us out for anybody that has a bag full of cash by offering them an even bigger bag of tax-breaks. This is one area where I part company with the general Republican mindset - I am not pro-Big Business, especially not after the 25 years that Big Business has been raping the countryside around here.

We should change the state motto to: "Come, cut down our trees, dig up our fields, and build your ugly-assed factories and warehouses. We love the abuse."

NixOS 22.11 'Raccoon': Like a proof of concept you can do things with

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

"You just have to learn to let go of the idea of things being in particular known paths: they won't be. They will be in some very long folder directly under /nix/store/ and you need to let the OS manage that for you."

Sounds like the kind of thing that would make Poettering starch his shorts. But then, it also sounds like another facet of the whole "dumb-down" computers push as we race towards being more like Microsoft Windows. Let the OS handle stuff = let the Admin be a little stupider. I guess the whole world is headed in that direction as far as IT is concerned. Or maybe this is the old "pets vs cattle" argument given new life in the very fundaments of the OS itself.

Yes, I am old and set in my ways.

Washington DC drags Amazon to court for 'yoinking' driver tips

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Customer trust

In practice, they don't give a flying fuck about "customer trust" either. The ONLY two things they give a fuck about are

1. Taking money from buyers.

2. Making sure buyers' saved credit card details are up to date.

Everything else can fuck right off.

Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Oink!

Ya know, maybe it would have been better if the Anti-Trust lawsuit 20 years ago HAD broken Microsoft into separate independent divisions like we'd all hoped. Obviously this big, fat, trundling pig of a software provider is no longer able to pull itself out of it's wallowing hole and release reliable code. It just lays there, surrounded by the stench of its own hubris, while the rest of the world tries to walk around it without getting their shoes covered in shit.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

A a conservative Republican myself, I fervently hope the leadership of the Republican party and the RNC takes a really long, hard, critical stare at how Trump's poor behavior has cost us elections that we should have easily won. He will most likely scuttle any remote chances we have of retaking the White House in 2024, whether that's because he ends up being the Republican candidate, or because he pulls a Ross Perot and drains votes away by going independent. He needs to follow Hillary into the Hole of Irrelevance and just STFU, but I don't think he's capable of that. So it's going to come down to the Republican leadership actually "leading" for a bit, and putting him in his place. Strategically and numerically he can't win the election, so if they give in and cater to him, well, then we're looking for a decent candidate after Biden's second term.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

If Twitter fails

can we all go back to MySpace? I miss pages with crappy tiled background graphics and 75 DNS lookups from 75 different domains for each page refresh. Ah, the good old days.

But more seriously, have any moderate to large players started positioning themselves as replacements for Twitter? Seems like this would be the ideal time. I've head a fair bit about Mastodon, but I thought that was more a framework, like Drupal or Wordpress, than an actual social gathering place.

US Air Force reveals B-21 Raider stealth bomber that'll fly the unfriendly skies

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"Why do you think it cost $750,000,000?"

Yeah, you're probably right. Will probably be $1,000,000,000+ by the time the 10th one rolls off the line...

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"Northrop Grumman describes the B-21 as "a digital bomber" and says the defense firm uses "agile software development...""

So by the early 2030's, we can expect the stories of B-21 crashes due to "software glitches" to start appearing . I mean, if there's ever been something that deserves slow, methodical, traditional software development, a $750,000,000 airplane carrying nuclear warheads would sure seem to be it.

Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams went down in APAC because Microsoft broke itself

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Wasn't there a major fiber cut in Egypt a few days ago? I wonder if Microsoft's infrastructure is responding poorly to that...

Microsoft 365 faces more GDPR headwinds as Germany bans it in schools

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I was thinking more along the lines of - if you're the 800-pound gorilla in the "industry", you pretty much get to set the "standard". And if you set the standard low enough to walk over flat-footed, well, it's still the "highest industry standard".

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: I wonder if Windows itself is GDPR compliant

All that snooping on typing, where does it go?

Over seas, in the breeze, why, didn't you know?

Redmond reads what was writ, and as quick as a flash,

Out the other side tumbles a box full of cash.

'Til the Law takes a look at their working machine,

And decrees, with a frown, it's to children too mean.

All that snooping on typing will not be allowed,

Kick the state and the schools from the Microsoft cloud.

Or something like that...

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Doesn't matter to me as long as the paychecks clear the bank.

Sure. They rent me for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And here's a hint - if you've got a job, they're doing the same thing to you.

I was self-employed for a few years, but didn't like the inconsistency of the income (nor the constant paperwork). I much prefer a steady paycheck. So hey, they give me money, I show up and do what they want done. That's pretty much what we all do, innit? Except maybe the consultants, who get paid to show up and tell them what they need to have done. But that's a whole other topic.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Meh

As long as they keep signing the paychecks, sure. Might even be a welcome break - swirlies are much easier than tracking down network loops, dealing with MFA issues, or installing cameras. Hell, if they want, I'll go out in the plant and spend 8 hours a day on the production line instead of herding the network. Doesn't matter to me as long as the paychecks clear the bank.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Meh

Don't care really. If the guy signing the paychecks says we're working from the office again, well, guess we're working from the office again. My opinion on it has naught to do with anything, so what's the big deal?

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Hydrogen...blah blah blah...batteries...blah blah blah...renewable...blah blah...carbon neutral...blah blah blah...1.21 Jiggawatts...blah blah.

Whatever. When do I get my flying car? Flying cars were PROMISED, hydrogen-fuelled or battery-powered jetliners are just nice-to-haves. Can we set some priorities and focus, people? And maybe work on making the Dick Tracy watches not suck so much?

Windows Server domain controllers may stop, restart after recent updates

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Yeah. IMHO, that would be the Win2012 years. I don't recall ever having any trouble with patches for 2012 (but then, I never ran Exchange on-prem). It's like they finally figured it out, after slogging us through 2000, 2003 and 2008 for all those years.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Pfffft.

Hey, it looks like your DC are broken and users are crying to the Helldesk? How about you put that all behind you and play a rousing game of Minesweeper in Teams!

OTOH, could we run SAMBA under Microsoft's new Linux services store app? Maybe that would be more stable than the stuff Microsoft touches, because that's twice this month they've borked their own fucking server software with an "update". Christ on the Cross, is their development process really that broken internally?

AWS joins the water positive gang, claims it will be there by 2030

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Perspective.

"587 million litres sounds like a lot. But is it?"

Nope. From the article - "This is tiny compared with total water consumption (1.218 trillion liters per day)" . With "tiny" there being a reference to "datacenter water use" of 1.7 billion liters per day. So in an entire year they'll "recharge" about 8-hours worth of the water used ONLY by datacenters.

This is worse that greenwashing by several orders of magnitude. It's more like impressionist greenwashing...you can't really see what's there, so you have to imagine it, and then read the placard at the bottom of the frame to see if you were right or not.

If they REALLY wanted to help, maybe they could use their billions of American pesos and build some de-sal plants or some such. I'm a dumb Southerner, so you'd know better than me what they could do to help out over there on the dry west coast. (Although Atlanta is getting thirsty, too - my Dad told me a couple of weeks ago that the state (or maybe TVA) is planning to build a new dam here in NW GA and flood a valley where I used to go swimming as a kid. The plan is to pipe that reservoir water 70 miles down to Metro Atlanta. God only knows how much that will wind up costing us taxpayers who DON'T live in that hive of people)

Still using a discontinued Boa web server? Microsoft warns of supply chain attacks

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Their Whois lookup shows the domain was renewed at Network Solutions in 2019 for 5 years. A reverse lookup for their www IP shows it's hosted at Linode. Does Linode offer "free" hosting? The cheapest plan I see is $5/month. Or maybe they got a "free" plan back in the mists of time and are still using it.

A little more gentle digging and it looks like boa.org may be hosted on a Debian box, under Apache (not Boa, as I was hoping...)

So I guess somebody's still keeping the lights on, at least.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

It does make you wonder that with this being OSS, why hasn't RealTek or one of the other SoC/embedded players forked this off and done some maintenance? Or maybe they have, but never released their changes, since the project is obviously dead and unmaintained.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Not even SSL...

" Otherwise, nginx can be slimmed down quite a bit (~2MB + deps install size for the nginx-light debian package, which has some room to be slimmed down)."

Just at a guess: (from boa.org's page)

" Supposedly, an older version of Boa, v0.92q, runs in 32K address space on m68k, like used in uCLinux."

I'm not an embedded guy, but I would imagine that to those that are, there's quite a lot of difference between a webserver that can possibly run in ~32K vs one that needs ~2M+.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Good luck getting the advertisers back now

" ...he paid so much for a business and within days was stating how it was so close to bankruptcy."

I've wondered how displeased the lenders are, now that they see their very large piles of loan money so close to the raging fire. I'd have to think some of them have at least considered fitting Musk for a new pair of cement shoes. Folks have suffered worse for losing less...

Pirate Dave Silver badge

So

If Twitter actually were so offensive to so many of such delicate sensibilities, and was preaching a sermon that they so vehemently opposed, common sense would seem to indicate that they would stop visiting and participating in the site. Eventually Twitter would go the route of Myspace, and those crowds of delicate flowers would find some new site at which to grow in the sunshine. So this problem, whatever it is, should be self-solving by the next equinox.

And if it hasn't sorted itself out by then, well, perhaps it wasn't really as much of a problem as believed? Perhaps the remaining citizens of the Twitterverse actually enjoy the abuse? Why else would they voluntarily keep using its services?

I don't know, I gave up on all "social" media a couple of years ago when I realized the views of their ownership and apparently the bulk of their users was completely orthogonal to my own views.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: And to think that 30 years ago...

Are you a complete moron, or just a recent recipient of a lobotomy?

Proudly Signed,

Pirate Dave

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Pirate Dave Silver badge

The problem

My problem is that these services send the data out to whatever web-Giant it is that processes the voice signals. That's why I never use them. Now, were these things STRICTLY local-only, like the old Dragon Naturally Speaking, or the computer on NCC-1701 Enterprise, and didn't send data out to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, I'd likely use them, whether for shopping or because I'm too lazy to get up and walk 10 feet to flip a light switch. But that is unlikely to happen as there isn't much profit (ie- ad revenue) in such a local-only system. So as long as they're web-based and feeding who knows what data to their masters, I will never knowingly use them and will do all I can to disable them in any devices I buy (ie - FireStick remote).

Microsoft's attempts to harden Kerberos authentication broke it on Windows Servers

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Trust and Microsoft can't even be honestly put on the same Venn diagram.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

No idea if there's any relation, but hasn't MS very recently started forcefully disabling basic authentication all of their online services? It wouldn't be surprising at all if MS found out - after the fact - that internal components of their systems were still reliant on basic auth in some way and were getting borked.

Or I could just be spouting nonsense...

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Hmm

I guess this also gives Microsoft further slots to charge for "extra" capabilities in Windows that makes better use of Intel's "extra" hardware. As if Microsoft's SKUs and terms weren't already confusticating enough.

Seems rather stupid, really. Or rather, it smells/stinks strongly of IBM.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Let it slide

"360 days is a nice round number of days per year -- it divides evenly into thirds, quarters, tenths, and more"

Great, so we'd have to go through yet ANOTHER rebranding of Microsoft's online services? No thanks. Besides which, they'd be no closer to a goal of 360 continuous days of uptime per year than they are to 365 days, so it's a wash either way.

And even then, we won't even adopt metric measurements here in the US. Can you imagine us trying to learn new clock times as well? All the old folks would suffer mental breakdowns if the six o'clock evening news was moved to noon. And Jesus himself decreed that The Tonight Show starts at 11:30 PM, sharp.

No, no, NO. It's better to spend the billions to reprogram all the satellites, airplanes, mainframes, and nuclear reactor control systems to deal better with tiny corrections of time than to screw around with the starting time for Fox and Friends.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Solution....

Or a decently powerful BB gun.

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Textbooks...

My Statistics professor required us to buy his "textbook", which had been written by him and "published" by the local Kinko's Copies. Each book had a unique code on the inside front cover, and we were required to logon to the Prof's personal website and register that code to our name, or he would not give us a grade for the class. As well, there was an included CD (burned, not pressed) with numerous Excel spreadsheets on it that were required for the class, all were password encrypted, and it seems like the password was somehow tied to the book code. Ah, and he would not allow codes to be re-used, so there was no selling the book and disc on after finishing the class.

The whole thing was annoying as hell, and to this day, 25 years later, still gets me dander up just a bit. Oh, and he wanted around $150 for the bundle back in the late 1990's. My "end of course" survey was not at all flattering.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

So, our patches may still nuke AD on Windows 2016+, but fuck it, let's put games in Teams. Priorities, people! Our Teams teams need to scratch their itch to play old, low-tech games, we don't need to worry about QC on our patches. Nobody will notice if those patches are crap because they'll be too busy playing 3-D minesweeper during the Tuesday post-lunch meeting.

Good grief. This seems the most completely pointless and wasteful thing MS has thought up in quite a while. Why is Microsoft trying to make Teams LESS useful? It's not like it needed any help in that direction.

Microsoft warns Direct Access on Windows 10 and 11 could be anything but

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: FFS

Move fast, break (other people's) things...

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: FFS

Yeah, and worse that they obviously no longer give any more of a shit about their Server updates than they do the desktop updates. They used to at least try a little harder with the server updates, but I guess those days are gone. And if they actually did "try a little harder" on this server update, then it must have really been a mess to start with if this still managed to slip out.

Hey, GitHub, can you create an array compare function without breaking the GPL?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"It's hoped that coders will be able to say out loud things like general descriptions of functions, and have Microsoft-owned Copilot recommend the source to fulfill that request."

Part of me thinks any "coders" who use this should probably just buy pre-existing software, or figure out how to do it in Excel.

If we take the "programming" out of Programming, what's left? I mean, that sounds suspiciously like "Management", not coding.

Microsoft to spend $1 billion on datacenters in North Carolina

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Who knew

The North Carolina Good Ol' Boy network was still accepting applications? If memory serves, Hickory used to be a hub for textiles and furniture, perhaps still is.

I guess I should be glad they didn't come to Georgia. We've already got more than enough corporate vampires here (and enough people).

OpenPrinting keeps old printers working – even on Windows

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Resource use?

I bought one in the mid '90s and got decent service out of it. But it was an "upgrade" from a 24-pin Epson, so maybe my expectations were sort of low to begin with. I think the fuser finally died, and at the time, I didn't know enough about printers (or where to get component parts) to resurrect it. A friend gave me an HP 6L in ~2003 and I used that until about 5 years ago.

The part about my FiL using it was a joke. I'd have never, ever let him near it. He's far too impatient and doesn't mind buying a new cheap laser printer every 2-3 years.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: reputation?

Aye!

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: reputation?

AdTran also has (or had, last I checked in ~2014) excellent customer service, even on gear they long ago quit making and selling. I called them a few times to ask questions about telecom stuff that I'd inherited, and they always graciously (and intelligently) answered any questions I put to them, even on stuff they'd built back in the 90's.

Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: If Twitter dies..

It's gonna suck if we find out that for the past 10 years, all the news articles have actually been written by Twitter bots...

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: That dog won't hunt?

Or... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112196/

I had a bluetick as a kid. Dumb as a box or rocks and it never could figure out how to pick up a trail. Good watchdog though, and not at all gun shy.