* Posts by jake

26589 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

jake Silver badge

Re: Big credit

An aging Aunt & Uncle of mine found it faster and easier to use Netware, MS-DOS 3.3 with WordStar, dBase III+ and Lotus on an airgapped 25 year old network than it was to use the latest offerings from Redmond. I finally converted them over to a Slackware based solution about six years ago[0] ... Their final year of using the legacy system brought them a tick over 1.5 million in sales, in 2015 dollars. Not too bad for a small mom&pop family business!

[0] It was becoming quite spendy to get parts ...

jake Silver badge

Re: The other alternative history...

"The Internet" (whatever that is) doesn't give a rat's ass what the wire is. We were running TCP/IP over Token Ring very early on in development, long(ish) before Gary's non-meeting with IBM.

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

jake Silver badge

Re: About that "guided flow"....

Instead of partaking in alphagoo's world takover bid, why not place those photos on a cheap&cheerful thumb drive and store it in a pocket? For important photos, put a second copy in your safety deposit box, and mail a third set to your Great Aunt in Duluth for safekeeping, and (for the folks working on being very paranoid) a fourth set to your Sister in Burgundy and a fifth to your Brother in Australia.

jake Silver badge

Re: Google - great at search...

They are not bad at marketing to other marketards who have drunk the Kool-Aid.

FTFY

jake Silver badge

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

It's not free. It makes you (more) beholden to alphagoo.

Instead, get a cheap thumb drive. Only logical, innit.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

Well, when you consider that you can purchase 64GB of USB 3.0 for under 8 (eight) bucks, keep it under control in your pocket, and never need a network to access it, then your 15G that is held gawd/ess knows where, that you don't own or control, and which requires network access ... well, it looks positively pitiful and somewhat laughable in comparison, doesn't it?

jake Silver badge

Re: Legacy tech baggage is now no longer an issue!

Rights? What rights?

Have you not read the fine print? You have no rights in the Cloud. It's not your computer. (Not even provisionally, kinda, if you squint like your Cupertino and Redmond powered boxes.)

jake Silver badge

Shit at search, too. (Was: Google - great at search...)

I did a google search on my real name about four months ago. Eight of the top twenty hits were companies offering to sell me to myself, all at the lowest prices possible. One bragged about being the only outfit selling GENUINE US MADE jakes![0] WOW! I must get me one!

The other dozen hits were offering re-packaged publically available info to anyone interested in tracking me down, for a price. Page three, four and five were more of the same, at which point I gave up.

Curiously, none of them were professionally published papers which I wrote or participated in over the years, all of which are available online. In fact, near as I can tell none of it could actually be traced to me at all ... and my real name isn't exactly common.

I just repeated the search of four months ago. Same results.

Google search is useless. Absofuckinglutely useless.

[0] Strangely, they didn't tell me how much extra it was costing me to have me manufactured in the US, then shipped to China, and then shipped back to me here in the US ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Dancing to someone else's tune

Contrary to popular belief, the customer is not always right.

Firing customers who are a more of a pain in the ass than they are worth is one of the truly great joys of being self employed.

About three times per year, or thereabouts, I quite literally use the phrase "you're fired" to a client of mine, or of the wife[0]. Frankly, I quite enjoy it. The look on their face when they realize I am dead serious is priceless.

It can work in BigBidnez, too ... All you have to do is make a business case for it ... show that the customer is costing more than they are paying. The costs can include employee downtime due to frustration, time to get back into the swing of things after dealing with said customer, time OTHER customers are on hold while dealing with said customer, etc.

[0] She's a softy, so I draw this detail by default.

jake Silver badge

Hopefully noting the irony of purchasing a T mocking the Cloud concept from cloud-based AliExpress --- Instead, perhaps ask your local Tshirt printer to knock you out a couple dozen shirts and flog the excess inventory to your friends on fleabay.

Researchers warn of unpatched remote code execution flaws in Schneider Electric industrial gear

jake Silver badge

Re: Headline:

It's not hate. It's apathy beyond "Will we make this quarter's sales goal?".

jake Silver badge

Re: Backward compatibility

The task is to place them on a completely separate network, with limited access. In other words, implement real security instead of the commercial crap in common use.

jake Silver badge

Re: Blank document

Pick up any book on Internetworking 101 For Management[0] from the 1980s. In diagrams, "The Internet" is often represented by a cloud shape, with no explanation as to what it was, or how it worked. It was just a magic thing that you dumped bits into at one end, and they came out the other end, untouched and unscathed.

Management STILL thinks that's what the Internet is.

[0]Real titles available upon request. Send an SASE to SAIL, c/o Stanford Uni ... Oh, wait.

Gee, I wonder where they got today's "cloud" meme from ...

jake Silver badge

Re: air gap - Air Gap - AIR GAP

1) Rephrase that to "no externally accessible network".

2) Not Linux. BSD.

More than 20 years ago ... Many decades ago, actually. Try connecting to the gear that monitors The Beam at SLAC, for example. Or the controls for the Stanford Dish. Or San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy water supply. Or rather, don't bother. You can't. Grad students wanted to hook 'em up to the 'net back in the late '70s or early '80s; the sane among us put the kibosh on their plans.

Commercial interests of today, however, are truly insane. We tugged on their capes, and were shrugged off. We tapped 'em on the shoulder & were elbowed away. We pulled on their shirts, and were thrust aside. Some even kissed their boots, and were trodden upon. Our message was always the same: "Please, PLEASE, **PLEASE!!** don't connect SCADA to publicly available networking systems!"

But did they listen? No. They did not. The idiots.

On the bright side, those of us with a clue are making a pretty penny in our retirement, cleaning up the resulting mess :-)

Yes, I know, I've posted this or similar before. It's still accurate.

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

jake Silver badge

Re: PATA / IDE are still supported

The Slackware 14.x series has no listed EOL as I type ... Slack-stable (14.2) uses the 4.4.x SLTS[0] kernel series, which will be maintained until 2026 and possibly until 2036. If I know the Slackware maintainers & other volunteers, it'll still be maintained at least that long.

Running it in several places. Makes older hardware sing. Recommended. (I also recommend Slack 15.x for more modern hardware, now in 15.0 Beta & running kernel 5.12.16 ... it might be in Beta, but it's more stable than many other distros that I've tried.)

[0] "Super Long Term Support", also known as the Civil Infrastructure Platform. Somehow, I seriously doubt that kernel support for IDE drives will be going away any time soon.

jake Silver badge

Re: PATA / IDE are still supported

With a laptop that old (this one is ~17 years old) you hardly need a modern kernel. Any of the LTS kernels will work quite nicely, and will possibly be quicker than a more modern, "bloated" kernel. Obviously, if you compile your own kernels the modern one might not be all that bloated ... but then the LTS version will be slimmer still.

The fanbois who insist on using the most modern and up to date kernel on older hardware boggle my mind. Save some CPU cycles and HDD space and use the LTS code, knuckleheads ... That's what it's maintained for!

If you compile your own kernel you already know all this, so why are you still reading?

Biden order calls for net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition – and right to repair your own damn phone

jake Silver badge

Re: Companies should also be required to open bootloaders

Horseshit.

The bootloader has no bearing whatsoever on the banking code. Nor does the OS. If it DOES, the bank is doing something very, very wrong in their code. Same for any other example you can come up with.

jake Silver badge

Re: "if you buy a product, you own it"

A Tesla isn't a car. It's haberdashery, an affectation of the well-off.

jake Silver badge

Re: "if you buy a product, you own it"

No, in America we're allowed to choose our own oil. For warranty work that oil has to meet certain standards ... but virtually all motor oils sold here meet those standards, so that's no problem.

jake Silver badge

So when and where are you taking your Mom for her first race? Most drag strips will happily allow your mom to run her minivan down the track ... usually Wednesday evenings for this kind of thing. She'll also probably be made welcome if somebody has rented the track for a private test & tune day ... they'll welcome the distraction, and probably go out of their way to help her improve her times.

Be careful ... I've seen people (moms included!) become addicted to it after one time out. Even in a slow vehicle.

jake Silver badge

Street racing is NOT illegal across the US. Plenty of cities and/or counties hold street races fairly regularly.

I think you are talking about the dumb-shits who illegally race on non-closed roads with other traffic using them. Those asshole give the legal racing community a bad name.

jake Silver badge

All kinds of racing. There are amateur racing classes for almost all forms of motorsports, with venues located all across the United States.

jake Silver badge

Re: Must be seen to be doing something

We're not suing to get money from the government. Get that thought out of your pointy little head.

What we're suing for is to be allowed to fix/repair/augment equipment as suits ourselves, the purchaser of the equipment, not as suits the manufacturers of that equipment. And for the right to choose a third party to make that repair if we like. And for the right to become that third party. And for the right to be a third party supplier of replacement parts. Etc.

This is about empowering the intelligent consumer, not making money for a few lawyers.

jake Silver badge

Re: Must be seen to be doing something

What it does is give us liittle guys the ability to sue said agencies for over-stepping their bounds. And trust me, the sue-balls are coming if they don't back off. Lots of money involved (in aggregate), and we're pretty pissed off.

jake Silver badge

"the FTC will be asked to "issue rules against anticompetitive restrictions on using independent repair shops or doing DIY repairs of your own devices and equipment."

Will the Biden Bunch reign in the EPA illegally putting a stop to small businesses building, selling and installing aftermarket parts on automobiles? To say nothing of the very same EPA claiming that it is illegal to convert a vehicle built for street use into a race vehicle, thus destroying the livelihoods of untold numbers of small Mom&Pop race shops across the USA?

Massive 3D catzilla gets crowds purring in busy Shinjuku district of Tokyo

jake Silver badge

Re: The Japanese…

... verbing weird since time immemorial.

jake Silver badge

"The whereabouts of a similar-sized litter tray have yet to be disclosed."

No need to disclose it ... the cat will find the nearest appropriately sized karesansui all by itself. They always do.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

jake Silver badge

Re: I don't understand

a) Mixing memes is never original, but can be funny iI you get the joke(s).

b) Read the mouse-over ... us consultants know the actual price of tools.

jake Silver badge

Re: The Only Safe Password

I have a set of dice. I'll let you roll them. And I'll clean up ... I am The House, and you are The Sucker.

Generic "you", not you personally JWL.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not a bug

What else would you expect from purveyors of Snake Oil?

jake Silver badge

Re: I don't understand

A simpler way to brute force my way into your cell phone would be with a red-hot poker.

Or a $55 wrench.

jake Silver badge

Re: "without a lot of testing we'd neer know"

"Who after the seventeenth century would mis-spell it that way..."

Somebody with toast crumbs under the "v" key. (The "v" key, being little used in day-to-day typing, tends to attract crumbs shifted out from under adjacent keys by the act of typing.)

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

jake Silver badge

I suspect it's a reference to the hand-wringing, namby-pamby curtain-twitchers who seem to think they are in charge of the world these days.

jake Silver badge

Re: Tongue in cheek

A little late, don't you think?

I mean, Linux has been my desktop of choice for about 28 years.

jake Silver badge

My daughter and I have worked out a design ...

... over the last year or so. (It's not like this anniversary has been a deeply guarded secret or anything ...

If we win, we'll donate the value of the prize to the charity of Linus' choice.

After 15 years and $500m, the US Navy decides it doesn't need shipboard railguns after all

jake Silver badge

Re: It’s not 15 years

You weren't bad then. Your political leadership, on the otherhand ...

jake Silver badge

Re: A cunning plan

"to the detriment of the standard of living of their citizens."

Oh, I dunno. Seems to me that side has more folks from other countries clamoring to get there than any other nation on Earth. Things aren't all that bad in that neck of the woods from what I've seen, despite the odd political speed-bump, most of which are ephemeral (by design, I might add ...).

"And the other collapsed"

The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. But don't forget there were more than two sides. And the collapsed one is struggling back to it's feet. We're not out of it yet, alas.

jake Silver badge

"Isn't there a medical term for that?"

Yes. Technically it's called "Military Budget Spent In My District", an 'orribly contagious affliction as can be seen in all the denizens of Capitol Hill who are afflicted by it.

jake Silver badge

Re: It’s not 15 years

Diesel is really, really hard to make go "BANG", unless it is mixed very, very thoroughly with an appropriate oxidizer in the correct proportions. Doing this is damn near impossible when it's kept in a big, closed tank or tanks under armed guard, doubly so when said tanks are floating around on a large body of water.

jake Silver badge

Re: Sharks

Nah. Crocodiles with cannon.

Watch yer head!

Disco classic Rasputin and pop anthem revealed as reasons Twitter suspended Indian politicians

jake Silver badge

Re: To all the haters...

While Ms. Ross and Earth, Wind and Fire both made a few bob off the disco craze, they are hardly best known for that cul-de-sac in their careers.

Next I suppose you're going to claim Blondie was a disco act.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

jake Silver badge

Re: Grifter

International Benevolent Association of Grifters on line one ... something about promoting illusory correlation.

jake Silver badge

Re: Asking for a fiend

Well, seeing as "satan" and "hell" are made-up stories used to frighten children into compliance and well out of copyright, I would think it is OK for you to make up any story you like about them.

jake Silver badge

It's not an episode, it's a strip.

jake Silver badge

Re: Cheers

Interesting echo in here ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Typical slander

But what if the man IS the ball?

When you intentionally stick a "kick me" sign on your pasty white butt, and then bend over in a public place, Shirley the proverbial Thinking Man would expect to get kicked, no?

jake Silver badge

Re: It's the plot of 'The Producers'.

"Ooops. Sorry about that."

I seriously doubt it. It's a small world, after all.

Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name

jake Silver badge

Re: Seriously?

Substitute "The Internet" for "Usenet" in the following:

"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." —Gene Spafford, 1992

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

jake Silver badge

Re: The collective noun of Modesty users

The Modesty I had in mind didn't have time for much blushing.

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