Posts by Mike 16

Re: Wake me up...

No Volkswagen (or other vehicle) manufactured today is even remotely likely to start and run in 2173 (or 2073). It's antique 27G IPV6 network will be unable to contact modern servers to get permission to transport the scruffy meatsack that hopped in. Sure, it will have a DNA sample from what you thought was an errant seatcushion spring, but the Java application that translates it to do the "criminal/deadbeat/voter-wannabe" check will be _way_ behind the current libraries.

Re: Colour

When starting a new job I was impressed by their rules for stuff like audible alarms and indicator colours. What a "Woke" company that paid attention to users needs. Then I found out one of the founders was CVD.

Re: Incredibly shady...

"When you're a star, they let you. You can do anything"

Don't assume that the rich and connected are bound by the same laws as you.

Re: Better to be an outlier?

OTOH, some mischief makers concentrate on computers and software made by a company known to be favored by folks with more money than the average bear. A company that lately seems hell-bent on achieving parity with MSFT in the "how much damage can we do with an update" contest.

Re: a known issue for years?

@John Brown

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Isn't that as much of an Apple issue as a a car issue? Do iPhones routinely connect to any random Bluetooth device without asking permission or is that a setting you have changed yourself?

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Almost certainly at least partially an Apple issue. There was no reason for me to faff with BT settings, as I do not enable BT at all. Then again, I also try my best to disable iCloud, but Apple gets more clever about stealth re-enables with every "upgrade". I will say that the Apple computers (i.e. MacOS rather than iOS) have some of the same annoying iCloud behavior, but so far have paired with BT mice and keyboards only as and when explicitly directed to do so. Of course, "Tomorrow is another day"

It is the whole ecosystem of cars, phones, appliances, dustbins, dog-collars etc. that gets me wondering if Douglas Adams was a time traveller.

Nothing to like?

Danica Patrick?

OK, other than her, no, nothing. Run away now if you value your money and sanity.

Re: NZ cabinet used it too

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weren't doing the same re restricted materials.

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Well, if they were using the zoom app, rather than the web client (which zoom tries _really_ hard to prevent you finding out about), the persistent surreptitious web-server with access to your mic and camera could be grabbing conversations being held in a room when the occupants _thought_ they were not "on zoom". Perhaps all zoom meeting should be held in a dedicated Cone of Silence.

Ah: further research

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20688113/zoom-apple-mac-patch-vulnerability-emergency-fix-web-server-remove

says this (_particular_ "bug") only affects Macs, and there is a patch. So if either No 10 is Windows only, or they diligently apply patches, No problem...

Telcom overhead

My brother in law gave up his landline a decade ago. Removal of the wire itself was handled by a slightly too tall box truck a few years later.

Drones capable of carrying a week's groceries should be up to the wire-clearance job.

Re: Really!

Wow, Vegas must have very different unions than, say, Chicago or New Orleans, where so much as moving an extension cord can get you and your company embroiled in a prolonged and tense discussion with the venue management and shop stewards.

Local?

In the U.S. the ATMs of at least some banks allow you to set the language to be used for your account. One fellow of my acquaintance set his to Italian, because he was studying Italian and wanted a bit of light "immersion". Apparently his bank stored (for his account or possibly on his card) not the language per se, but the index into a table of languages supported by a given ATM (or group of ATMs?)

At least that is the best we could guess for what happened when he was across town in a Polish neighborhood.

Re: Sometimes

So, basically a very small Spark-gap transmitter?

(Yes, I have been a plasma donor via that path)

... and expecting me to open it ...

As I read the article, you don't _have_ to open it. All you need to do is fail to catch one of the many "features" that include Preview (E.G. Lookout or Windows Exploder). That _preview_ will invoke a series of unfortunate events.

Last time I had to use Windows at work, the Outlook preview pane seemed to be the main enabler for malware. And yet many (most?) in the office found it too convenient to lose. Apparently nothing has changed in a decade.

(Yes, other handy applications, and websites (gmail?), will obligingly load images etc. "just in case" you want them. It is the usual Whack-a-Mole to keep disabling it after "upgrades".)

Re: I must say I'm surprised....

Parity?

I recall a talk on the early Cray 1 computers. They were originally designed with only parity, but soon (after experience with the "production" use of Serial #1) switched to ECC. Serial #2 was too far down the assembly line to be worth the retrofit and was scrapped. All later systems were a bit taller than #1, to accommodate the ECC mod.

(I assume the case of Leinenkugel beer intended for shipment with #2 was properly disposed of :-)

Re: Not room temperature?

Not so sure. I recall some computer rooms early 1960s. "Room temperature" was a bit low for storing American beer. :-)

Re: Who expects honesty and decency from Oracle ?

Another possible reason for "conservatives" to be unconcerned is that a lot of the (most active) ones are lawyers, who can monetize outrage via lawsuits or cut-and-paste legislation to benefit a specific class of people they just happen to be members of. (Look Fred Phelps for example)

Much like "liberals", that way. Neither label really means much anymore. Liberals are much more about "Free Beer" than "Free Speech", while all conservatives seem to want to conserve are their own hard-won (aka stolen by their predecessor) privilege.

Maybe we _should_ welcome our insect overlords f they promise to eat the current lot.

Re: But!

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But those consequences were not unintended.

Totally different concern. (Gun Control mean hitting what you shot at)

Re: Beware survival bias

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"bit banging" style...

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Or just get a Kryoflux unit. Works with a variety of disk formats, but only directions for 5.25 an 3.5 drives.

A typical older (soft sectored) 8-inch drive is electrically very similar to the early 3.5 drives, so could be just a cable re-mapping of wires. The unit does, IIRC, have an ARM or some such but it does not decode the disk. Rather, it ships a stream of timed flux transitions (imagine something like the Roland MIDI interfaces) to the host, where software of varying sophistication does the actual decoding (and for some formats, encoding).

That's the good news. The not-so-good is that at least when I got one several years ago, they were pretty WIndows-centric and a bit user hostile. And a bad combination of "won't state system requirements" and "Well of course, you idiot, we expect you to use the exact same OS and hardware we do".

I recently revisited the website, which has changed, and is a bit more forthcoming, so maybe the cowboy coders have moved on. I'll be giving them another try when the stack of 8 and 5.25 disk makes its way to the top of the (virtual) to-do stack.

Re: Obligatory Yakov joke...

In Freedom-loving U.S. of A.Television watches YOU.

See, we have something in common.

Re: And before, the web was the land of Internet Explorer

Sort-of.

I am not a big Windows user, but IIRC, the Mosaic (via Spyglass Software, an amazingly prescient name) based Internet Explorer has been replaced by the Chromium based Edge browser. I'm pretty sure this "child of Chrome" is at least the default browser for Windows 10.

But, yeah, you _can_ run IE on Win10, much as you _can_ swim in the SF Bay in January. That said, most employers will not require you to do that (the swimming bit, not the "use IE until we can fix some crucial company sites". That's still a thing)

Re: Been a long time coming

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Backwards in that its unable to update a small bit of data without rewriting...

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Let me introduce you to my little friend "Shingled Drive". Long before HDDs become obsolete for nearline storage, the rush to "SSD in the box, Shingled HDD for long-term backup" will probably make "OK" (for price per bit and data rate) HDDs hard to find. You have to read the advertisements with a lawyer's eye to be able to tell if the wonderfully priced drive will be useful for anything beyond "Write Once, read by somebody else when I'm gone" backups.

SSDs are really nice in general, but I fear the "race to the bottom" has already started. Which may be OK because "why should my disk last any longer than support for my computer, which means in practice 3-5 years?"

Re: How long before things would stop working properly?

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I'm surprised there isn't at least a third safe!

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With the current ICANN, I would not be surprised to hear that there was a third safe, and it was in the undersea lair of some fabulously wealthy Bond Villain.

(I also question the premise that "things" are currently working "properly", with the plain-English definition of the word, but that's another thread.)

Re: So what?

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rolling out 5G is some kind of national security thing

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Of course it is.

When a city, or even a neighborhood, votes "the wrong way", the granularity of 5G location info makes it much easier to "round up the usual suspects".

C64 not a PC?

Those of us who get senior citizen discounts without asking may remember a time when "PC" simply meant "Personal Computer".

This was a bit before PC was re-purposed to mean only "bit for bit and bug for bug compatible with the IBM 5150 [1], complete with the BIOS and DOS not being able to agree whether the COM ports were numbered from zero or one, and for the love of all that is holy, _NEVER_ press the Turbo button"

[1] Those in the intersection of (computer nerds) and (union of (Van Halen fans), (law enforcement personnel), (police scanner obsessives)) got a laugh out of that designation. I guess Rat Mouth Florida never has any instances of people acting crazy in public (or has so many that they are not noticed).

Re: I aim to misbehave!

Until your phone pings and you open it to see a photo of your child dangling over a tank full of sharks with friggin lasers. Pretty much everybody over-estimates their own capacity for acting bravely (and effectively) against a better provisioned set of villains.

Historically, we know about the ones who actually did, because they were rare, and thus noteworthy.

Anti Monarchy?

The most famous French participant in the U.S. War of independence, the Marquis de Layfayette, was a French Nobleman, and was apparently put up to it by Mad George's younger brother. _Much_ later (1830?) although he helped dispose of one (corrupt) french king, it was to install another (less corrupt) one (Louis Phillipe?), albeit as a constitutional Monarch. So it was not exactly full throated anti-monarchism that motivated him (and others).

Internal Better?

Depends on the use-case. My "media computer" has an internal DVD drive, but I also added an external drive. Why? Because the public library insists on slapping "inventory control" widgets on the DVDs, and despite their apparent "low profile", they sometimes have issues with the internal slot-loading drive. Plus it seems that player software (or maybe the OS) delights in revving the drive to where I imagine relativistic speeds at the rim, and the imbalance of the stick-on fink-tags can create scary vibrations. If that happens to tear the gizzard out of the external drive, a replacement is cheap and easy. The internal drive? Not so much.

Re: Sounds OK

"not everything is life or death", exactly.

I already have to rename "peculiar" file extension to .txt just to get some browsers to download them at all (anything that isn't found in their list of extensions for special handling might as well not exist). So here is the scenario:

Some enthusiast has set up an http site documenting everything you could ever want to know about some obscure computer from the 70s. (alternatively, a homebrew computer with exactly one instance. Yes, I know of such, and if you do too, please don't name it here lest it be SlashDotted, er, Registered)

As an extra thrill, they actually have a restored instance of that rare beast serving that site.

Now, completely aside from the question of how long there will be more than one browser, and how mere mortals can use Let's Encrypt without professional help (putting themselves at the mercy of that professional help forever), who gets to patch a webserver from the 90s to run on a system that runs http just fine, but has something like 512K of RAM and has not had an OS update since everybody was doing the Macarena

Not another fan of this system finds this wondrous trove and make a page with links to all that lovely content (http links, of course), and publishes that page on their own "managed" site, using https because that's how it came. Bingo! "No old .txt for you!"

If you try to do the obvious, and just serve that page of pointers on http, you have just become invisible to <major search engine> that will put you (f it shows you at all) a few hundred pages behind pages serving JS bitcoin miners. So the _third_ fan will never even know this cool site exists.

Just a mix of opinions and thought-experiments from someone who would really like to know why slick corporate malware is OK, but amateur "created with ed" websites are clearly the devil's spawn.

Re: Harrier

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Chinese can sell you folks an aircraft carrier.

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Just make sure you strip out all the Huawei comms gear, or U.S. won't let you have (well, _buy_) those F35s.

Hmmmm, might be just the strategy.

Re: Oh how I used to love Atari...

Jaguar was only sorta 64 bit, and others were selling "sorta 32 bit" devices at the time. Tom and Jerry (The Jag custom chips) were buggier than a cheap hotel (under any brand name). But one could do some cool stuff, if willing to endure VCS levels of development pain. I was, and then I wasn't.

The check is in the email

Unfortunately, email service to FCC accounts receivable is via an "unlimited data" account that gradually throttles rate, and is currently running at 45.45 baud. Since the check itself is one of those 3x12 ft checks often shown off by politicians and "philanthropists" to show their dedication to all things wonderful, and is being sent as a 4K dots/inch uncompressed ,BMP file, it _may_ arrive before the 2020 election, and may encounter an unfortunate error that requires complete retransmission.