Posts by Pirate Dave

Re: Bring back VB6 programming

I'm going to disagree. I think one of the good points of VB6 was that it was single-sourced but immensely extendable. If it gets opensourced, then there will wind up being several competing variants of it, all using different weirdo-libraries (probably open-sourced and highly version-dependent) to build themselves, and none of them 100% compatible with each other.

I just wish MS would give up on VB.NET and update VB6 a bit. Although, maybe that's a worse idea considering Microsoft's moves regarding the Office Ribbon, the Windows 8 interface, and Cortana. There surely are a lot of people at MS who have lost the plot...

Re: resilience

"still fine for running the mail server, just like the 486 box in the corner was..."

What do you mean, "was"...?

Re: I can see it now...

"But you CAN buy the optional iOpener"

Err, I've had my iOpener for 15 years now, didn't know I was waiting for an iBag to put it into. Not that I can do much with a 180 MHz Geode these days...

Re: Mono

Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

Re: Isn't it time...

I wouldn't rush to nationalize anything as important as network access. That seems a dark path to a dim future.

But it would be nice if Congress would weigh-in and maybe pass a Federal law to pre-empt the state laws that the Monopolies bought 20-30 years ago that forbid this sort of thing. I'm usually dead-set against the Feds dictating to the States, but in this case, the state laws are just a racket designed to keep the fat-cats fat, not to help their citizenry.

Re: Newton's Third Law of Motion

"The other issue is shooting somebody with a 22. The victim might get very angry, grab the wannabe assassin, and then tear them to shreds with their bare hands."

I saw a quote similar to that about the .25 recently, can't remember exactly where. Something along the lines of:

Never carry a .25 pistol. If you absolutely have to carry a .25, never load it because then you might shoot it, and if you shoot it you might hit someone by mistake, and if he finds out about it, he's likely to be very angry at you.

Re: "On Linux we’re just another shell"

" Whilst I've never gotten on with powershell it's got an awful lot of nice structured features that make the standard Unix shells looking like what they are - a 1970s solution in need of update."

It does, until you get neck deep into it and realize it's still full of sharp edges and half-baked ideas. While there are things that make it LOOK like a true programming language, you eventually realize that's just shiny-shiny, and it's really just an overly complicated shell, or worse, just a bunch of loosely bound together common commands with a bit of looping, branching, and variables thrown in. And, in truth, it is relatively restrictive. You can only do the things that Microsoft thinks you need to be able to do, and (mostly) in the ways Microsoft thinks you should do them. At first, you don't notice these walls so much, but get further into it, and they become much more apparent.

It is an improvement over the venerable DOS shell, however. Import-CSV is worth its weight in gold and is the primary driver for using powershell at all, IMHO.

I'm sure the clean-shaven MS fanbois will apply the appropriate number of downvotes to this post. Fire away, guys.

Re: Misconceptions...

"Finally, referring to XBT as "newfangled fad-inducing social crap" is just revelling in ignorance."

In my own defense, I was referring to the OPs question about why us old guys use the Internet, not Bitcoin in general. My limited understanding of Bitcoin is that it's mostly popular with uber-nerds on whom anything "social" is completely wasted.

Re: Protection

"And for those who STILL can't get it? Especially those who happen to carry the immunity of an executive position?"

I honestly don't have a good answer for this. I've realized that there's a small percentage of idiots who will ALWAYS do the wrong thing. in spite of my years of lecturing and harping, and sometimes some of them are C-level. For those, it's like dealing with a 2-year old - I know there are going to be messes to clean up and no way around it, so I just hope they move on to another job soon.

Vigilance does help somewhat - if I see a new type of scam/virus email that gets past our junk filters, I immediately send a warning to all employees saying it is a scam.

I work at a university - some things never get "done", they just get forgotten about with the passage of time...

"Oh - and if you could put in a big TELEMETRY OFF button (that actually really works) for home users"

And don't forget a similar button to turn off Cortana. It totally irks me that there's no (reasonable) way to completely kill that software and prevent it from chewing 25 Megs of RAM for no reason whatsoever.

Re: PSU quality

Agree wholeheartedly about PC Power & Cooling's PSUs. I ran one here 24/7 from 2000 until 2012 when the fan finally died (and motherboard tech had moved on from PIII's), and I still have a few running here in boxes I built in the mid-noughties. Good, quality stuff.

Re: Haven't heard of R

"Once upon a time, when dinosaursmainframes roamed the land there was the proprietary SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences)."

I'm still paying a butt-load of money annually to use SPSS in our computer labs. But that may be because the current crop of PhD Sociology profs grew-up using SPSS so that's what they are sticking to and don't talk about anything else...

Unlike the dinosaurs, SPSS is still around and IBM (who owns it now) is more than happy to take (a lot of) your money for it every year.

Re: Have Laserjets gone out of fashion?

The 4000/4050 printers were good, Maybe the 4100 too. But I think it was the 4200 or thereabouts where HP changed the fuser roller sleeve from mylar to metal. They are probably more long-lasting for general printing, but not so good when you print a lot of envelopes and get the bands on the sleeve where the edges of the envelopes have eaten-off the teflon. I found a local printer-parts company that "imported" replacement sleeves (and most all the other parts) from unknown parts of China and would sell the mylar sleeves for $25. Call HP for that and they'd say "it isn't a user-replacable part, here, buy a $200 refurb fuser assembly, that's all you can get." So we saved a lot of money over the years - the mylar sleeves would get the envelope bands after 6 months or so with heavy envelope printing, but $25 would fix them right back up.

But then HP went to metal sleeves. I could get them from the same importer for around $70, but I never could figure out how to grease them properly, and after a month or so they'd start making a horrible racket when the grease got pushed out of the way and it was metal-on-metal contact between the fuser bar and the sleeve. After that happened 3 or 4 times, I decided it wasn't worth the effort and told the users they'd have to spring for the $220 refurbed fuser from HP. I don't think the HP refurbs ever made the noise, so there was either some trick to putting the grease in, or they were using a grease that the importer couldn't supply.

We did look at the specially modified inkjets that were made to print insane amounts of envelopes. But most of them were in the $4000+ range, which was more than anyone here wanted to spend, and it seems like the print quality wasn't too great. This was back in 2001-2004, maybe things have changed now.

It's all water under the bridge now since we send our envelopes out for printing.

Re: Universe, life and everything

"Photons that when you consider them individually had near zero chance of actually hitting us."

I was thinking of something along those lines several months ago when I was out stargazing. It hit me that there were uncountable numbers of photons from all over the universe that had been traveling for millions or billions of years just to hit the gravel beside my feet and be snuffed-out. They had left their star long, long ago, so full of energy and so full of hope that they could change the universe just a tiny little bit, but they couldn't even visibly illuminate a piece of rock beside me that didn't even exist when they began their journey. Kinda sad if you think about it too long or too deeply. Which is why anthropomorphism is a bad thing, I guess... I must have been in a funky mood that night.

If you want a more positive brain-exercise, try to guesstimate the cumulative number of photons still "in-flight" between reionization and now. Photons we'll never, ever see or even know for sure they exist, but that are still out there, traveling through the universe at the speed of light. Even to a pea-brained ape like me, that's pretty fucking staggering.

Re: Sounds like a whole lot of crazy

"Silicon Valley lately is clearly showing how capital doesn't always get used in the most efficient manner possible."

Amen to that. Back in mid-June, I got an unexpected FedEx Express package. Inside of the package was what looked like an anti-static ziploc bag slightly larger than the ones they ship 3.5" drives in. Inside of that ziploc bag was some crappy little fold-up brochure from ProofPoint. I've never done business with them, so I was weirded-out by their strange shipping method. I mean, they could have mailed that brochure to me snail-mail and it would've cost them maybe 50-cents, but instead they sent it 2-day FedEx. Needless to say, I won't be spending my money with a company that wastes their money in such a frivolous and pointless fashion. It's like they're saying "Look at us, we've got money to burn."

I think your scale is off a bit. 14.3 Linguinis seems a bit too small of a distance to me. Even if it's kilo-Linguinis since you used a capital "L", it's still to small.. Maybe tera-Linguinis is getting closer to the proper scale.

Re: "Kleenex"

"What's wrong with saying "tissue" or "plaster", I ask?"

Well, as a 'Merkin, "tissue" is the stuff in the bathroom - aka - Toilet Paper, whereas Kleenex is the stuff in a box for blowing your nose. Same stuff for the most part, just different location and packaging.

Plaster? Eh, isn't that what used to be put on walls? Oh, yeah, it's the stuff you smush your baby's feet and hands into so the wife will have an eternal memento as they grow older. "I remember when your hands were THIS small..." And {Deity} help if you (the man) ever drop and break said memento...

Really, you guys call a band-aid a "plaster"? I honestly didn't know that.

Re: Tried it?

I'm just GUESSING, but I think that means no Wendy's in that state had the malware. At least that's how I took it when there were only a few cities in the list for my state, and none of them were my city.

Re: Only one rectal teaching assistant in the country

He was a bit behind on Job Assignment Day. He'd had a long night at the pub and was a bit pooped, which tainted his assessment.

Re: gummint shouldn't pay for anything

"how the hell is a potential employer supposed to contact them?"

eh, we didn't have potential employers or jobs before we had cell phones? That's good to know. How the fuck did we ever get anything done prior to the 1990's when practically nobody had mobile phones?

It's like I told my teenage son a few years ago when he was looking for a job - "Get off your lazy ass and go by to see if they want to hire you yet." Nothing says "I really want to work here" more than bugging the manager to hire you. Certainly beats lounging around watching TV while waiting for the phone to ring about your dream job.

Sorry, cell phones aren't necessities. Neither is the Internet. Both are handy at times, but neither is required. We'd probably be better off with a lot less of both of them. I realize that's going to be a very, very unpopular opinion on a nerd site like this, but that's the truth that I tried to instill in my kids.

Re: Take a dip

I am a dipper, have been for 35 years now. I think it's a by-product of growing up on a farm in the Deep South (US) in the '70's and '80's. There aren't many of us in the IT world. Not a nice, civilized habit for the Corporate world, to be sure, but the gentle touch of nicotine keeps the internal bastard at bay so I seem like a super nice guy with a level head. I've read that dipping and chewing are much worse as far as addiction and nicotine levels than smoking - I dunno, never smoked. At least for me, dipping is a jealous mistress and kept me away from drugs and (heavy) drinking in my younger days.

Spitcups are just accidents waiting to happen anywhere but in the workshop (shed). Better to use a coke can, or better still, a plastic bottle with a cap. And bonus points if the bottle is opaque. The wife will really appreciate that. Spittons and the rest are just nasty things that have to be cleaned out at some point and are really a last resort. IMHO.

Re: 'An "SOS" function that automatically places an emergency call...'

@ephemeral: man, El Reg won''t let me do it physically, but spiritually, you can have all the rest of my upvotes today for that...

Re: quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

Romanes eunt domus