Posts by jake

Re: Hearken to Prophet McNealy

"I refuse to carry an electronic leash 24X7 unless you PAY me 24X7!"

Me, about the pager & DynaTAC my employer wanted me to carry, roughly 1985.

Today's kids happily pay for and carry their own equipment for their employer's pleasure. Sad, that.

"Don't comment on Usenet or in email what you wouldn't shout from the rooftops!"

Me, addressing a Freshman "using the network" class at Stanford, also around 1985.

Today's kids see nothing wrong with spilling their life's history and other details all over twitter and facebook. Even sadder.

Re: observation

ITYM "Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither." —Thomas Jefferson

Re: try turning off GPS, bluetooth, WiFi.

"Likewise those, who decide to inconvenience themselves by leaving their mobile at home."

It's not an inconvenience. Far from it ... quite the opposite, in fact. Try it for a month.

"WHY would you want to do that?! VERY suspicious..."

Why do you have a door between your toilet and the rest of the house? Why don't you have a plate-glass window to the street in your shower? Why do you have curtains on your bedroom windows? What are you hiding? VERY suspicious.

Re: " its a simple start ..."

The Wife and I haven't routinely carried our cell phones for several years now.

Life is much freer and easier than when electronically leashed.

Try it for a month. You might be pleasantly surprised.

"Can I please have an operating system that says this"

Linux BSD and Minix are open source (as are others), so there is nothing to stop you from making it so.

Has the systemd-cancer taken over the sound system yet?

Oh, wait ...

Re: -9

L1-A does the STOP-A thing on some Sun keyboards ... Note that doesn't actually shutdown the system, it takes you to the OpenBoot prompt.

As long as I'm typing anyway:

sync

sync

halt

is just as fast (no need to reach for L1), and actually halts the system. Note that the second sync isn't necessary, it's an example of cargo-cult programming. The first sync doesn't do anything obvious, so people issue the second sync command just to make sure.

Re: Why so long?

My 17ish year old laptop running Slackware-stable takes about 7 seconds to shutdown.

This one, 15 years newer, running the same thing, also takes about 7 seconds.

Re: meh

Mine don't even bother to haul them behind the shed. They just get killed where they stand.

When my daughter was learning to program for X11 she managed to create a child window that refused to die. So I introduced her the the xkill program. Naturally, being the rebellious teenager that she was, the primary thing she learned from the exercise was that she could change her mouse pointer to a skull and crossbones. Which she promptly did.

Probably get her kicked out of school and/or jailed these days. Sad, that.

Re: FOSS

Exactly. Free.

I didn't contribute expecting to get paid ... although a nickle for every instance of TCP/IP which contains code that I wrote would certainly be nice, to say nothing of the myriad of patches I've contributed to the Linux kernel, BSD, GNU and FOSS in general over the decades :-)

Re: What about the people in the software world?

More likely you'll see a tax on people working from home to pay the owners of all that office space who aren't getting paid anymore, and more tax on fuel to pay all the poor gas(petrol) station operators who have been missing revenue this last year. These have actually been suggested here in the Bay Area.

Bridge tolls are going up, partially because we've had less traffic. I kid you not.

And don't forget schools ... Schools are funded according to how many students they have had in the classroom recently. Not enrolled, mind, but the language actually states "in the classroom". Guess what happens when a pandemic ensures there are no kids in the classroom?

It works the same way you pay taxes on all income ... including income received from doing illegal things, like dealing drugs or selling stolen property.

Re: Blank media tax V2.0

Just like your common or garden pyramid scheme.

Re: She was trying to open the hinges.

Make it spring-loaded and slightly weighted so it faces the owner/operator when closed, but spins around and displays upright to the observer when open.

Re: Excellent

"I am disappointed in parents that hire a lawyer to make sure their obnoxious child continues to remain so."

Wrong way of looking at it. The parent hired the lawyer to ensure that in the future, parents are allowed to parent and the schools should butt the fuck out when the kid is off school premises, outside school hours, not under the supervision of the school, and not using school equipment.

Basically, the Supreme Court of the United States told Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania to fuck off and mind their own business. I heartily agree with them.

As a side note, the kid may or may not have been an obnoxious teenager. I don't know, I wasn't there (but I'm not so old that I've forgotten how bad my friends and I could be at that age!). However, I saw an interview with her and her dad a week or so ago, and she seems to have grown into a well-spoken, Uni-bound, respectful young adult. Clearly her parents were doing something right.

Re: US prison system

It's ALL subjective. But it's the law. And the law is an ass.

Re: As opposed to what, exactly?

"Losing your liberty without going to prison is easily achieved: it's called a curfew, enforced via an ankle tag."

And that's not jail? Try it for a couple years. Report back.

You won't ... you value your freedom.

Re: Why was he in a Spanish prison?

"in a country she hadn't lived in since the late 70s (and had no plans to go back to)."

If she wanted no part of it, why was she still paying all that money to remain a citizen? Sounds rather foolish to me.

"It will all be stored in 'teh clouds' in a leaky, unsecured bucket that anyone with the ability to right click on a mouse will be able to access."

Access? Or delete, corrupt, intentionally re-write to suit, encrypt ... I love clouds. The potential is endless!

Re: Pramagtically

"At least dogs are (mostly) honest."

Are they? Here's a re-print of a story I told a couple years ago ...

We got four robotic vacuums for Xmas one year (SWMBO's relatives are in cahoots, it would seem). We called them all FRED, short for Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device, and turned one loose on each floor to see what would happen. The cats ignored them, but the dawgs took an instant dislike to them. They all met their demise in under three days.

The first to go was FRED four (the one supposedly patrolling my attic office space). It was found beeping most piteously in a mud puddle under a rhododendron at the far end of the dawg's run. It never rolled again. FRED three disappeared. We never did find it[0]. FRED two kept mysteriously falling down the uncarpeted back-stairs, until the magic smoke came out. FRED one somehow wound up in the laundry sink while a load of wash was running. None of us actually observed the roboticide as it was occurring, so we don't know who the perp(s) is/are ... but my money is on the very elderly Standard Poodle, who had a rather guilty, yet satisfied look about him for a week or so afterwards.

Needless to say, we didn't repeat the experiment.

[0] Update: FRED three was found in the crawl-space under the feed barn about a year later. I have no idea how it got there, the only entrance large enough for it to physically fit is the locked trap door in the floor, and I have the only key.

Re: Pramagtically

One of our Greyhounds found a well-ripened skunk carcass to roll around on a couple weeks ago. Fun times. The other dawgs treated him like the conquering hero for several days ...

_{The only product that actually works is Natures Miracle for Skunk. Trust me.}

Re: He's not your father!

"I look forward to the inevitable celeb pet paternity cases!"

It happens in the world of showing animals all the time. Dogs, cats, horses ... even cows, sheep and hogs. One little bit of cryo-packed DNA looks very much like another. Some unscrupulous people will sell supposed high-end DNA, but substitute whatever they have lying around. The real thing is hard to come by[0], very expensive, and minimal in quantity[1], so of course there is a black market for it. A year or so later, when the younguns don't measure up and the DNA is checked ...

[0] Pun intended. So shoot me.

[1] Our stallions typically do between 50 and 100mL per session, with a maximum in late spring/early summer & a minimum in late fall/early winter. Hopefully I just ruined a few horse porn fantasies :-)

Re: Aren't Pet Microchips enough?

"removal of the chip is not easy for a trained veterinary surgeon;"

Not true. That's just the excuse they give because they don't like knocking out critters (always a risk!) for what they see as completely useless and trivial surgery.

"they're small and hard to locate,"

Small, yes. Hard to locate? Not so much. The reader locates the general area (it's like a metal detector), and then Xray from a couple angles to pinpoint it.

"and they're almost never at the place they were injected"

Immaterial (see above). VERY rarely they will migrate deep into muscles, but a Vet who understands anatomy (hopefully all of them, but who knows these days ...) can dig them out with minimal trauma even in those cases.

Re: Aren't Pet Microchips enough?

" thought it was quite impossible to do"

It's not impossible, nor is it difficult (for a Vet ... don't try it at home!). Normally, you can actually feel the thing under the skin. A local anesthetic, a quick nick & grab, and you're done. If you can't feel it, first take a couple Xrays to pinpoint it, then it's usually a simple incision and you can pick it out. My small animal Vet has done it a couple of times after a divorce ... one party gets custody of the pet, but the chip is registered to the other who refuses to cooperate.

There are cases where the chip has migrated deeper, which requires more in-depth surgery and is obviously more of a risk, but still quite doable and not usually life threatening. Your Vet will be happy to discuss the ins and outs with you.

Re: wishes...

"To this day I can not understand how a law firm, county court, etc can use windows with the telemetry."

Indeed. One wonders why Corporate Lawyers even let the thing in the door ... Especially seeing as the EULA clearly states that anything that goes wrong is NOT the fault of Microsoft, but rather it's YOUR fault for choosing to run their product. Presumably this includes Microsoft's cloud leaking all the telemetry they slurped.

Re: wishes...

I much prefer Slackware, but yes.

Re: wishes...

"I have to use Windows."

No, you don't. You choose to use Windows.

Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

"an outright falsehood"

You are entirely too kind.

I would say it's fucking bullshit, and Satya Nadella is a goddamn liar.

"Tragic"

No. Marketing re-inventing history. Or, as I said above, fucking bullshit and goddamn lies.

Re: A slight to Tim Berners-Lee

"Smalltalk was the precursor of all GUI systems, developed by Xerox."

Not quite. Smalltalk is a programming language, not an OS.

More precisely, Smalltalk-76 (later Smalltalk-80) was the development environment that ran on the Xerox Alto. The actual graphical operating system itself is called the Alto Executive.

Note that while there were prior contenders for the first Graphical User Interface (Sketchpad and NLS come to mind), the Alto was the first Graphical Operating System.

If you want to drive your favorite Apple user nuts, point out that their favorite computer interface is just a GUI pasted onto a CLI ... it doesn't actually have a graphical operating system.