* Posts by jake

26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

jake Silver badge

Re: my wife

The Wife doesn't find it insulting at all ... she is THE wife, after all, there is only one, and will never be any others. Likewise, I'm the husband.

jake Silver badge

Tracey is a man's name in GB, too. Came over with the Normans (placename, from any one of a number of Tracys in France), or possibly with the Romans a thousand years earlier (man of Thrace). Seems to me that there are also Gaulish, Celtic and Irish versions that differ in derivation, but I can't be arsed to look it up (my Big Dic is down at the Sonoma property).

jake Silver badge

Re: Poor little Alice.

Cooper.

jake Silver badge

Poor little Alice.

She wanted a career in IT, but thanks to this policy she now knows she isn't wanted.

Ubuntu 21.10 brings GNOME 40 debut and a focus on devs

jake Silver badge

Re: I think the numbers speak for themselves...

Ransomware works, too. Doesn't mean I want it on my computers.

jake Silver badge

Re: Desnapify ubuntu

Thanks, but I much prefer Slackware.

Avoiding annoying software is easy ... Slack is still free of the systemd-cancer. It also doesn't mandate Wayland, although Slack makes it optional if you like. GTK is included, but no Gnome desktop. Snap was looked at, laughed at, and summarily ignored. What's not to like?

Apple warns sideloading iOS apps will ruin everything

jake Silver badge

Re: How to void your warranty

I dunno about your country, but here in the United States all motor oils for sale to the general public meet the standards required by the manufacturer's warranty. Same for brake parts.

Legally, the manufacturer can not refuse a warranty claim if you (or your mate) change the fluids and filters in your car ... unless you put brake fluid in the engine or other stupidity.

The brakes are covered by the warranty and will be replaced by the manufacturer if they fail prematurely. After the warranty has expired, you are on your own anyway.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: "What we are discussing is Apple and it's marketing ethics"

Thank you. Have a beer :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: "Great Unwashed"

The V-chip is completely opt-in, per household. It is used by almost nobody. Quite frankly, I had forgotten that it even existed until you brought it up. A quick call-round to a dozen friends with kids between 4 and 11 years old returned the following: 9 "What's a V-chip?", 1 "I thought that thing died a death years ago!", 1 "I see no need", and last but not least, 1 "Hell no!".

Do with that what you will.

Seems to me that TehIntraWebTubes has put the kibosh on such things ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Because jake what?

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Hello. Running out of people to talk to?

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

How? The OP wrote "I'd settle for being allowed to do anything I want with anything I own."

I answered "I pretty much can[0]", and added an example of a thing I can't. In other words, we have laws to (hopefully) protect people. We don't need Apple (or any other tech company) protecting us from ourselves. Next thing you know, hammers will come with built-in padding so we can't possibly hit ourselves in the head and hurt ourselves, and Xacto knives will come unsharpened. Chainsaws will be right out. They are already banning the sale of gasoline powered garden tools here in California (thus opening up a HUGE grey market, which I intend to get filthy rich from ... ).

The nanny-state is upon us, aided and abetted by the Tech world. Are you sure you want that?

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Out of curiosity, do you honestly think that replacing the i with a 1 somehow sanitizes the meaning behind your post?

jake Silver badge

Re: Right Hand/Left Hand

You've obviously never talked to Linus about the subject.

Here's a rather famous rant of his from two days before xmas, 2012. The concept was in existence over a decade earlier, thus his ire.

jake Silver badge

So Apple spent umpteen million dollars on lawyers to draft a 31 page response just to swat a mosquito?

OK. If you say so.

jake Silver badge

Re: Right Hand/Left Hand

The first rule of OS development is "Thou Shalt Not Break Userspace!"

jake Silver badge

Define "sideload a car", please.

I rather suspect I do it all the time ... depending on your definition, of course.

jake Silver badge

Re: "Great Unwashed"

We are not referring to changing banking rules back to those of the 1800s. Or a mythical world where video players have the intelligence to decide appropriateness of content. What we are discussing is Apple and it's marketing ethics (or lack thereof).

Misdirection noted. Care to try again?

I, for one, don't owe my soul to the company store ... neither do you.

jake Silver badge

Typical of ElReg's own GreatUnwashed ...

... putting words into the mouths of others.

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

"you don't have to take your car back to the franchise dealers for a service to maintain your warranty."

Might want to let Tesla know.

And John Deere, for loose values of "car".

jake Silver badge

Re: Installing malicious apps is not just done by "Cybercriminals"

I've told you a million times that one must never exaggerate.

jake Silver badge

Re: Installing malicious apps is not just done by "Cybercriminals"

Hyperbole isn't becoming.

jake Silver badge

Re: Law of unintended consequences

I pretty much can[0] ... but then I ignore marketards and don't purchase sandboxware.

[0]Barring things that are illegal, like shooting people.

jake Silver badge

I believe the expression everyone is looking for is ...

... ODFO, Apple.

IOW, nobody believes you, chiselers.

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

jake Silver badge

Re: Dare I admit to the govenor ...

I have a C compiler, and know how to use it.

Mind your Ps and queues: Bork makes a visit to the A&E

jake Silver badge

Re: OK, I'll bite

"tends to do odd things to their heads."

I find it fun to point out that Texas is hardly a Western state.

As a side note, any NASCAR fan can tell you that Darlington is some 200 miles South of the Strait of Gibralter ... or just about 15 miles North of Beirut, if you're on that side of the Med. Oh, wait, I seriously doubt any NASCAR fans know that either of those two locations exist ... much less the original Darlington.

In other news, it always surprises people on both sides of the pond to discover that Pelican State Beach, the most northern beach in California, home of misty Redwood forests, is roughly level with Barcelona, Spain. The Southern most beach in California is roughly 10 miles South of Nazareth, Galilee.

NASCAR fans think Nazareth is in Pennsylvania ... the Texans, in the Llano Estacado.

Nine floors underground, Oracle's Israel data centre can 'withstand a rocket, a missile or even a car bomb'

jake Silver badge

Caravan were "in fashion" ...

... in the late '60s through the '70s or thereabouts. Part of the so-called "Canterbury scene", if I recall correctly.

"Standing on a golf-course, dressed in PVC ... "

jake Silver badge

It will withstand "rocket attacks"?

Cool. And my house can withstand pea-shooter attacks.

Personally, I wouldn't want any of my important data stored there ... nor would I want to live in the neighborhood. Oracle has essentially stuck a great big "kick me here!" sticker on it's own ass (or arse, if you're not of a left-pondian nature).

Twitch increases bug bounty payouts after source code leak by... wait, is that it?

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

"the whole Silicon Valley attitude “I don’t pay for failure”."

Assumes facts not in evidence ... How many billions in Sand Hill Road venture cap dollars have been spent on vapo(u)rware (and out right scams, see Theranos for example) over the last half century?

There is a reason that us locals call it Silly Con Valley ...

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

If you invent needless functionality to sell updates, you'll bog down perfectly good equipment.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

"Worth pointing out that things are several orders of magnitude more complex than back then"

Correct. I don't consider this to be a plus.

Consider that I can fire up a computer running DOS 3.3 and then create and print a document using Wordstar or create and print a spreadsheet using Visicalc MUCH faster than I can perform the exact same task(s) using anything that Redmond is currently pushing. This is an improvement?

(So-called "super cars" are fairly useless playthings of the idle rich. Having driven many examples, in my mind they are merely objet d'art. Useless to real people, unless you enjoy garage queens ... or worse. I knew of one guy down in Belvedere who had a '78 Countach on a rotating plinth in his living room). Their engineering is, for the most part, more form than function.)

Note that none of this has anything to do with what I wrote.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

As I said, there are exceptions. You and I have been in the business long enough to know that the exceptions are far from the rule.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

Exactly.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

There were other security issues ... modem access, social engineering, MITM attacks on switched56 lines, etc. Keep in mind that very little was encrypted, at any level.

Also note that in the early '80s, if Twitch had actually existed, they almost certainly would have freely shipped their source code with the hardware needed to run it. The concept of closely-held source is a modern invention ... What we have today started with Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976, and culminated in Software Publishing Association's "Don't Copy That Floppy" nonsense in '92.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's a market; place your bid

Something to remember is that the kids who graduated Uni/College and got into the corporate computer and networking world back when computers started becoming ubiquitous on desktops all over the corporate world are now roughly in their mid 50s.

Note this is managers, users, coders, programmers, systems folks, everyone.

They started commercial computer work with DOS 4.0 and Windows 2.x (or thereabouts), and have become conditioned to the Redmond Way ... In their minds (and the generations following) it's supposed to be shoddy code, it's supposed to not be secure, it's supposed to break at the least convenient time, it will crash at random, updates will make things worse, over time it gets bigger and worse, if you turn it off and back on again it might fix it (maybe; try flicking the switch again) ... these are all enshrined in the corporate attitude.

What would be the point in building clean, elegant program code that just works when the underlying OS doesn't support such a concept?

Those of us who started coding in the 60s or earlier are just left shaking our heads. Can you imagine what the reaction in Corporate America would have been if DEC or Burroughs or Sperry or IBM had made just one release that was as buggy as the code that is run as a matter of course on modern computers? Or worse, the drek in "the cloud"? The company's stock would have tanked, they would never have been trusted again, heads would have rolled ... ugly wouldn't even begin to describe it.

But these days? Navigating through crap, buggy, crash-prone bullshit has become business as usual. Because THAT'S HOW COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK! Ask any manager. Or coder under 50. (Thankfully there are still a few real programmers out there in each generation.)

So why bother paying money to fix it? The shareholders will just bitch about the expense.

I have no answers. I'm not sure there are any. It's probably too late.

jake Silver badge

Re: And this offer comes

"There's a sucker born every minute." —David Hannum

(Probably. Supposedly in reference to PT Barnum's roll in the Cardiff Giant hoax. Or so the story goes. My gut feeling is that the very same phrase was in widespread use long before humans invented writing.)

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

jake Silver badge

How did I know from the headline alone ...

... where this "researcher" was located?

Shatner breaks the age barrier, goes where no nonagenarian has gone before with Blue Origin rocket trip

jake Silver badge

Re: Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship

I'm pretty sure that he just took a ride in a silver machine ...

Lemmy, I owe you all the beer if we ever meet on the other side ...

jake Silver badge

A 10 minutes 17 second ride ...

... in a billionaire's version of a little kiddie's bounce house.

This is news?

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

jake Silver badge

And who pays those corporate taxes?

That's right ... they pass them along to their customers.

That's YOU, consumer.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

jake Silver badge

Re: So what happens...

In the case at hand, and in my experience, absolutely nothing.

Feel free to experiment and report back. Old used PCs can be had by the ton(ne) for the cost of shifting them. Good luck getting rid of them again.

jake Silver badge
Pint

From debug, G=C800:5

Works with 8-bit WD controllers (and clones), and most (not all!) WD or Seagate ST-506 type drives (and clones). What it does is run a low-level format utility that is built into the drive controller. 16-bit controllers brought us disk based low level format tools. Note that the Seagate ST-01 and -02 drive controllers were actually made by Western Digital.

Other addresses that might work are G=CA00:5, G=CC00:5 or G=CE00:5 ... check the jumpers on your particular card. If no pins are selected, they usually default to C800:5

This info is long out of date, and only useful to folks who are restoring old kit. You should not attempt it unless you know exactly what you are doing. I have seen this brick a couple of Maxtor 80 Meg IDE drive (no idea why), so don't just run it blindly. The results of running the command blindly on random hardware are undefined, and apt to do anything.

This post should give you more than enough info to DDG for more. Please educate yourself before ignorantly jumping in and breaking old kit needlessly. Ta.

All disclaimers aside, I suspect modern drives will just ignore it.

jake Silver badge

That's OK ... The 225 had a 1kW linear motor for a head actuator. It needed that kind of power to overcome the inertia of the 20 R/W heads to meet the sub-10ms seek times ... Or, rather, to overcome the inertia of the entire head tower, which weighed around two and a quarter pounds. One wonders what kind of magnetic fields were generated inside the drive when in operation ... I seriously doubt the Tube could match that inside a passenger car, at least not under normal operations.

jake Silver badge

Just checked a dozen or so that I have here in the office ... They are oriented such that either the N or the S is towards the "fridge". It seems to be truly at random.

jake Silver badge

I've seen PCs running with zero problems in places with rather strong magnetic fields. At SLAC, for example.

jake Silver badge

Tales from the trenches.

Many moons ago, I witnessed a field engineer open the back of a piece of equipment, pull the diagnostic floppy (8", just to date myself) off the inside of the door where it was affixed with a magnet ... and the fucking thing still worked! Observing my surprise, he just shrugged and said "I know. I don't get it either. They did it this way for years before I got here. I don't ask questions, I just go by their playbook and collect my pay." He claimed to have seen several tens of these things, and the disk was only dead once ... and that was caused by a couple of rather obvious staple holes.

Magnetic media is a lot tougher than most people think. I would be absolutely astonished if something as weak as a fridge magnet could affect a hard drive. Even several tens of fridge magnets. I'd be even more shocked if a fridge magnet or magnets attached to a desktop PC's case could affect data in transit between CPU and drive media ... especially if the magnets were immobile.

With that said, I have heard this story many times over the years. But it has always been a FOAF telling it, not the person it supposedly happened to. And for the record, we tried on numerous occasions to cause the so-called corruption, with weak little fridge magnets all the way up to rare earth magnets. We observed no data corruption at all.

If anyone can tell me how to replicate these results I'll be more than happy to believe it is possible, but until then this is in Urban Legend territory.

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

jake Silver badge

Ads?

What are these things you call "ads"?

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

jake Silver badge

Re: I like

If anyone here in North America is sick and fucking tired of replacing mass-market washers and dryers after three to six years, there is an alternative: SpeedQueen.

SpeedQueen, the folks who make the coin-op machines at laundromats, also make home machines that are just as bullet-proof as the commercial cousins. Better, they are NOT computer controlled, so you can actually fix them on the rare occasion that they break.

They are not inexpensive, but chances are you'll not have to replace it in your lifetime. If anything, they clean better than mass-market machines. If you care about such things, they are made in the USA. And no fucking "lid lock"; either. Recommended.

Hint: Spend the extra money and get the big one. On the rare occasion you need it, you'll be glad you did ... and when you use it with lighter loads than it is designed for, you under-stress it, making it last longer before wear-points need replacing.

If the obvious escapes you, try speedqueen.com ...

Not affiliated, don't own stock, just a satisfied customer, yadda ...

Things that are not PogChamp: Amazon's Twitch has its source code, streamer payout data leaked

jake Silver badge

You honestly think a multi-billion dollar multinational has any morals or code of ethics beyond "make a profit"? Ah, the naivety of youth ...

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