* Posts by jake

26716 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Eternal September

The Eternal September started in September of 1993.

Google didn't even exist until 5 years later.

Are any of all y'all feeling old yet? I am. This round's on me.

jake Silver badge

Re: Recall what Deja Vu was...

I do not see that with Pan 0.146, but I run Slackware. Perhaps give slrn a shot?

I'm with you on Forté's Agent. If they ever port it to Linux, I'll drop 'em a thousand bucks just because I can ... Even if I, personally, choose not to use it.

Edit: I just had a thought ... If you, like a lot of people today, are not running a swapfile, try adding one to your system. Some old programs, especially those that slurp in a lot of text and manipulate it, expect one to exist. Try 100megs or so to start. Won't hurt, might help.

jake Silver badge

Re: Ban Google

"if some google luser manages to post spam into a newsgroup, it'll get distributed to any other usenet server that carries that group."

That depends on how clued the downstream server's admin is. My system won't see it, because all of my upstreams filter out the obvious crap. Folks who get a feed from me likewise won't see it. Even when one of my upstreams manages to allow junk through, my own filters usually catch it (and drop a note to the upstream in question).

Running an ancient copy of Cleanfeed here. It still works quite nicely. Ta, Mr. Nixon.

jake Silver badge

Re: Denial of service attacks?

Many large Usenet systems move News around internally (and sometimes externally) with UUCP, even today.

jake Silver badge

Re: ABPE

I stopped reading all of Usenet during xmas break in '84, it was getting ridiculous with sometimes 250 posts per day! I stopped scanning all the headers in early 1986 when the number hit 600 posts/day occasionally. I stopped subscribing to all groups when it hit 250 groups and 1000 posts/day in '87 ... but by then I was running my own news server, so it hardly mattered.

And of course, later all y'all subscribed to a.b.p.e for the articles, right?

jake Silver badge

Re: Denial of service attacks?

"So, the modern internet provides an incredibly convenient and easy way to perform denial of service attacks on discussions."

In this example, only the alphagoo view into those discussions is affected. Usenet does not today, did not yesterday, and never will depend on anything that alphagoo does. Hell, Usenet doesn't even depend on the Internet to propagate.

"most Usenet groups were moderated."

No. They were not.

jake Silver badge

Re: Ban Google

So don't get your Usenet feed from the idiot gookids. There are still a few decent commercial News providers out there, some of which will provide read-only access to text-only groups for free ...and some Universities will also give you a text-only feed for free, if you ask nicely. Squeaky wheel and all that.

The spam is trivially filtered, either by yourself or by your news provider, depending on how your personal sensibilities view a filtered vs non-filtered feed.

jake Silver badge

Re: Recall what Deja Vu was...

That was DejaNews.

And yes, the gookids have fscked it up. It would seem that the concept of an ASCII-only archive is alien to them.

Too easy. Microsoft introduces moderation for Winget package repo after spike in bad submissions

jake Silver badge

Remember, Safety Third!

It's the Microsoft Way.

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

jake Silver badge

There is a reason ...

... that I've been making very good money pulling companies back out of the quagmire called "the cloud" for these last ten years or so.

IMO, "the cloud" is a marketing meme that is long past its sell-by date.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

jake Silver badge

Re: hard to support

Trump never was "in charge" in the US.

jake Silver badge

Re: And another El Red official Unit!

"Is there a list of these informational nuggets somewhere?"

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

Whoop! Robot/human high-fives all round! Oh, my fingers have disintegrated

jake Silver badge

Re: The thing to remember about "6 a day" ...

Some are actually killed and gnawed on by carnivores before they expire of old age. Youngsters are prey for larger carnivores, especially if they are ill or incapacitated. After they die, the meat-eating scavengers move in.

Note that my point was that there are no vegan ecosystems on Earth.

Poachers are indeed scum, but that's another story.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: AI suggestions

Sounds about the same size, shape and configuration as the toolbox I keep my steam engine tools in.

A rose, by any other name ... :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: Not too far off the mark though with..

You seem to be missing a critical element in your thesis. Those of us who raise hogs also know how to harvest them. In fact, most would say that is kind of the point.

jake Silver badge

"well, until a decade later - that's when I need the suggestion!"

Actually, no. You NEVER need the suggestion. The only prompt you should ever need for a new clotheshorse is when you break the old one, or give it away, or sell it, or ... none of which Amazon should ever know about. So Amazon should never offer you another. Period.

Anything else is pure intentional annoyance, and one of the many reasons that I will never purchase anything online ... the assholes in charge of the advertising companies assume that they know more about my needs and wants than I do, and flat out refuse to take "NO!" for an answer.

Fuck 'em, and the horse they rode in on.

jake Silver badge

The thing to remember about "6 a day" ...

... is that it's in addition to, not instead of.

There are no vegan ecosystems on Earth. If you are a part of an ecosystem around these here parts you are either on top of the food chain, or you are food.

jake Silver badge

Re: Zebra Anus!

Supposedly. However, I have seen them eat fieldmice, and occasionally baby birds (especially free-range chickens) and lizards.

jake Silver badge

Re: wacky algorithms

Only just about?

And here I though that was mandatory for algorithm deployment these days.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

jake Silver badge

Re: Tea

"So I assume the equivalent holds for Americans in Europe."

From personal experience, even more so.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dark Monitor

"Not to forget that some lapdogs have a small discrete toggle for "enable/disable wifi"."

I'd rather they had a small, discrete toggle to enable/disable woofi.

A method to permanently disable yip-yip-yip-yip would be even better.

jake Silver badge

Re: Slightly different

My favorite variation on the theme, as personally experienced by me:

The magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake hit us on October 17th 1989, at 5:04 PM-ish Pacific time[0]. It was centered approximately 30 miles SSE of my home. PG&E power and Ma Bell landlines were out over almost all of the Bay Area. My acting boss called my DynaTAC at 5:10 PM & screamed that he would fire me if I didn't fix it immediately. I told him that he needn't have wasted money on the phone call, he could have just opened the window and bellowed. And then I hung up.

I have hated cellular telephones ever since ... not because of what they are, or what they can do, but rather for what they are actually (ab)used for.

[0] The so-called "Bay Bridge World Series Quake".

jake Silver badge

Re: What kind of idiot do you think I am?

Nick: "What kind of chump do you take me for?"

Rocky: First class!"

jake Silver badge

Re: What kind of idiot do you think I am?

"he was quite strict on not having any bullies on his staff"

We used to use the word "asshole" instead of "bully". Yet another example of the namby-pamby hand-wringers sanitizing the workplace?

jake Silver badge

Re: Tea

This Californian has that box ticked ... perhaps I should increase my rates.

Will the real IRC please stand up? Freenode’s forest fire leaves ashes – and fresh growth

jake Silver badge

Re: Excluding people

Exactly.

Also note that I am in no way preaching tolerance. I happily exclude assholes from my property/space, according to my definition of asshole (which can change with the individual and/or situation), and I don't care who knows it. My wife's barn, my wife's rules. We even reserve the right to exclude anybody who makes the dawgs or horses uneasy ... it's a safety thing.

Claiming so-called "tolerance" is for the idiot hand-wringers and namby-pambys who think society can be wrapped up in a big cotton ball smelling strongly of weed and singing Kumbaya.

jake Silver badge

Re: Kinda the opposite of Cancel Culture, no?

Someone will probably bring up the so-called "paradox of tolerance" in reply to Bob. Allow me to head their justification off at the pass by pointing out that it is still hypocrisy, regardless of the highfalutin name you place on it.

One quite simply cannot become inclusive by labeling people you don't like and excluding them.

jake Silver badge

Re: I miss IRC...

Everybody talks about AOL and the endless September with regard to Usenet. People forget that when AOL enabled the use of Winsock software it also unleashed the great unwashed masses of 14 year old boys dying of testosterone poisoning onto IRC and damned near managed to kill that, too.

With that said, there have always been islands of sanity on IRC. They have been, and still are, well worth searching out.

jake Silver badge

Re: IRC was the CB of the '90s

"Whilst CB had government moderation enforcement"

In theory. Reality was quite a bit different once CB's popularity exploded in the late 1970s. Many people bought used radios, and ignored (or weren't told of) the need for a license. Likewise chain-stores (Sears, Montgomery Ward, et alia) sold the gear without forcing the new owner to fill out the paperwork. By the early 1980s, the government had given up entirely, and the FCC got rid of the licensing requirements by mid-'83. CB has been a free-for-all in the US ever since.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

jake Silver badge

Re: PICNIC?

That would be an IBM error.

jake Silver badge

Re: 10,000,000 3" nursery pots

No, not terracotta. Cheap, black injection molded plastic. Some folks call 'em 4 inch pots. They are 3.25 inches square at the top, and 2.75 inches square at the bottom. 18 fit into a standard 10x20 tray. It was the first year I sold heirloom tomato and hot chili starts. It's quite profitable, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty ... and you can figure out how to automate most of the repetitive work.

Just don't purchase a million pots when you only want ten thousand :-)

jake Silver badge

"Fortunately they were sequential so it was a little easier to search through."

For me it was a Texaco station, also in the 70s. We pretty much ignored the list because it took far too much time back in the days of Full Service. (Oil, water, air, windshield, brakes, power steering, automatic trans, battery if asked, no extra charge for topped up fluids ... and occasionally freebee new wiper blades. The good old days were, in fact, good in this case!)

Fill 'er with Ethyl.

jake Silver badge

Re: I found it best to...

When ordering a lot of small parts make absolutely certain that the vendor actually means "per 1000" and hasn't helpfully modernized the use of "M" to mean one million. If you don't, you'll wind up with an argument over who owns 10,000,000 3" nursery pots ... I got the shipment stopped at about 1,000,000 delivered or in transit. We settled out of court, with me purchasing the shipped lot at manufacturing cost. I'm still using them about 15 years later ... the vendor told me later that it took them 18 months to shift the other 9,000,000.

If you want manure, come and get it. 30 sacks, 300 sacks, 3,000 sacks ... it's all the same to me, but I recommend a truck, not sacks. You load.

jake Silver badge

Re: PICNIC?

In some quarters it is PEBCAK.

POBCAK/POBKAC (Problem Occurs Between Chair And Keyboard)

Or "an IBM problem" (Idiot Behind Machine problem)

And many other variations on the theme. Or, in automotive lingo "The problem is the nut behind the wheel".

jake Silver badge

Contrary to popular belief ...

... OS/2 is alive and well and still doing good and useful work, world-wide. You can purchase a brand new, shiny license to run OS/2, complete with support for (some) modern hardware. And telephone support. I've used two different versions in various places over the last couple years ... Serenity Systems has sold eComStation since 2001, and Arca Noae LLC has sold ArcaOS since 2017. Both with IBM's blessings. Wiki for more (and links). Recommended.

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

jake Silver badge

Re: Carbon neutral

You are over estimating the MPG of a loaded tow vehicle. The Wife and I, four teenage girls, a four horse slant, four horses, and enough kit (including horse chow) for all ten of us over a long weekend makes for quite a bit of mass. The rig eats fuel.

Call it 6 to 6.5 MPG. The long range tank holds 30 gallons (stock is 20). That's 180 to 195 miles, or three hours between fillups in this configuration. Distance between Sonoma, CA and San Diego, CA is about 550 miles. Typically, I'll drive that one myself, it only takes nine hours or so. If we are going further, the Wife and I will spell each other at every other fuel stop or thereabouts.

Distances here out West are further than you probably realize.

Sonoma to Provo, Utah is about 750 miles. We do it in roughly 12 hours.

Sonoma to Tucson, Arizona is about 900 miles in roughly 14 hours.

After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for 'policy violations'

jake Silver badge

Re: Keep those doggies moving ... rawhide!

"What is called a "dogie" is a scrub Texas yearling. Dogies are the tailings of a mixed herd of cattle which have failed of a ready sale while on the market. They are picked up finally by purchasers in search of cheap cattle; but investments in such stock are risky and have proven to be disastrous this winter." —The Breeder's Gazette, March 5, 1885

Grandad told me it is a mutation of the Spanish word dogal, meaning "lariat." His source was from the time he spent on a ranch in the Red River Valley on the Texas/Oklahoma border, in the place now known as Lake Texoma.

America to get world's 'most powerful' AI supercomputer to create the most detailed 3D map of the universe yet

jake Silver badge

Re: Long after we are dead and buried.

My first language was the Babble dialect of Gibberish.

I should have become a politician.

jake Silver badge

This thing is LATE!

It was supposed to be online last year ... Here's an article on the subject written by a name that long-term ElReg commentards will either love or hate, from back in 2018. Needless to say, the specs have changed a trifle in the last couple years.

jake Silver badge

Re: Perimutter?

I had a mental image of Larry Wall's head floating in a nutrient bath, quoting snippets from the Camel book under his breath.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not leased out to the NSA, no siree.

None. It's not optimized for that kind of work.

NASA to return to the Moon by 2024. One problem with that, says watchdog: All of it

jake Silver badge

Re: I remember

"Can you imagine the "One small step ..." speech written by Trump ?"

I'd really rather not, quite frankly. I've seen Trumps "writing", there are thousands of examples of it available for anyone's perusal in the twitterverse. The man is quite clearly an illiterate, bumbling boob who can't even put two coherent paragraphs together without making several egregious errors. Trying to imagine such a document would probably give me hives.

jake Silver badge

Re: I thought they were just going to buy a Chinese one and slap their own label on it....

It's not just the NIMBYs ... one of the biggest hurdles to progress is when a very small group claims their rights are being trampled on, so the vast majority of the rest of the population can (in their minds) just sit and spin while the Government caters to them, a minuscule percentage of the population.

It's supposed to be "We, the people!", not "ME, the subsample!".

Look at San Francisco and Oakland for good examples of what happens when single individuals can completely fuck things up by placing their own interests above those of all of their neighbors. And of course good old Berkeley, which is proof that Government by whoever can scream the loudest clearly does not work.

jake Silver badge

Re: I thought they were just going to buy a Chinese one and slap their own label on it....

"BTW -- The Amtrak service to Las Vegas used to take a touch under 8 hours. Not really a practical proposition for a weekend visit."

Trains in the US are slow. Very slow. How slow? Thanks for asking ... A little quick research shows it is about 2430 train-miles from San Diego to New York. There are 9 trains leaving SD for NY per day. The fastest makes the trip in just over 72 hours on a good day (or three). That's an average of about 33.7 MPH ... I can drive cross country faster than taking the train.

In fact, the Wife, Daughter and I spelling each other in the Peterbilt have made the drive from Sonoma, California to Allentown, New Jersey and back (5,800 miles, give or take) in under 100 hours. Not once, but several times. Without even bending the speed limits. (Yes, "limits", plural ... interstate highway truck speeds vary by state. Here in California, it's 55MPH, cross the border into Nevada and it becomes 80MPH.)

With that said, I actually enjoy traveling by train. Amtrack is the vacation, not transportation to a vacation.

AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'

jake Silver badge

"I wonder how many others are billed the same thing for ghost processes?"

I hear this so often, I suspect one answer might be "all of them".

jake Silver badge

Re: Free tears

"as that would increase their overheads and decrease their income"

FTFY

jake Silver badge

Re: unable to delete either

"I've closed the account completely now, gone to the opposition."

Brought it all back in-house, then?

All "cloud" providers are selling the same snake oil.

jake Silver badge

Re: Free tears

Just remember, if they are providing "services", you are the one getting serviced.

Easier to just avoid the money skimming assholes & be done with it.

jake Silver badge

Re: Free tears

And so they automagically pad everybody's "timecard" with an extra 15 minutes. I know people who have been fired for trying that.

Nature is healing: Shhh. It's a lesser spotted Pi Bork nesting behind the bushes at IKEA

jake Silver badge

Re: Börkäge

That's Spın̈al Tap, Shirley. But only them?

If I were paranoïd, I'd suspect you had something against Lemmy and contemporaries.

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