Posts by jake

Re: Looking forward to a China world

If not just a troll, this is the kind of abject racism that Trump supporters feed on. You should be ashamed of yourself.

There is no wall. Trump never built one. Just another campaign lie, one of many. (Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!)

What the fuck is a "militia police force", and what does it have to do with the much hated Bureau of Land Management supporters?

Re: Move over Kardashians

Drown themselves live on YouTube?

Re: Four more years

I don't know what game Trump plays, but it isn't golf. Golfers don't cheat at their game.

Re: Yay! Party time!

Wrong way of thinking about it. Remember, the Presidential candidate chooses his own running-mate, the Party as a whole doesn't get a say in the matter. Trump chose Pence because Trump knew that he could do almost anything with impunity without getting kicked out, as long as he had somebody even more batshit crazy than him as a cushion. See the impeachment, for example. By late 2019, even the Republicans were sick and tired of Trump's antics. If the Vice President was even close to being sane, Trump would have been removed from power last February.

Re: I'm fairly sure Senator Lindsey Graham has received appropriate guidance regarding US laws

The Constitution (Article VI, clause 3) sez:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Re: Yay! Party time!

Actually that was about a long-needed clarification of the law on succession. We've needed it for over a hundred years, but every time someone brings it up, someone else always feels that it'll take power away from them and so they object. Doesn't alter the fact that it's needed, though.

Even if it had passed this time around, it would not have been used on Trump, for the simple reason that nobody, not even most Republicans, wants to see that fucking nut job Pence in the Oval Office. He makes Cheney look like an educated, tolerant pussycat.

And anybody who thinks it had anything at all to do with Biden probably also thinks that X-files was a documentary.

Re: ...letting someone else carry the can...

"Vandalism? That's what poor people do."

Nah. These days destroying a city center is merely exercising your freedom of speech.

All I can say is that I'm glad the local nutcases are still up in their Summer homes in Portland & Seattle and haven't moved back to Berkeley/Oakland/San Francisco for the winter yet. Hopefully the good weather will hold ...

Re: Joe and the Onion

"I want to know why."

Formosa's Law would be my guess.

Re: Yay! Party time!

Oh, please. That's one of the most half-witted bits of conspiracy bullshit I've heard in decades.

Re: Congratulations you poor bastard

Joe drink like Yeltsin? I seriously don't think that's a good idea. He's only Irish, they can't drink like a Russian .... That would take a Finn.

Re: And now for this...

Last time I checked (about ten seconds ago), the Senate hadn't been decided yet. Yes, I know, chances are it'll have a Republican majority ... but with the mail-in ballots favoring the Democrats (because Trump told all the Republicans they were "bad", despite the fact that Trump uses mail-in ballots ... there's a word for that, isn't there?), there is still a small chance they will gain the seats needed. I'm not holding my breath.

Re: One down ...

"Maybe even time to sort out his taxes?"

I think New York State has volunteered to help him with that.

Re: FCC

He's celebrating, too. Once out, he can collect his Industry payoff seats on the boards of the various corporations he helped.

Honestly, there ought to be a law ...

Re: Yay! Party time!

IF someone had both the inclination, and the ability, to fix the elections[0] in any way here in the United States, do you REALLY think they would have forgotten to also fix the House and Senate? Because here in the US, without those two, the President is pretty much nothing more than a figurehead, as Trump found out (thankfully).

[0] Yes, I said "elections". Plural. We didn't have just one, we had one for each State, and for a few territories, and the odd hanger-on.

Re: Should ..

No. Just no.

Re: That's interesting

"Maybe it needs an "Are you sure you really want to fuck the network completely? (y/N)" prompt"

No. That way lies madness. Where do we draw the line on commands that require a yes or no to proceed? What about in scripts/aliases? Etc.

Re: That's interesting

"That doesn't sound like a useful thing to me."

Then don't use it to do that. SImples.

Note that you can do the exact same thing with perl. Or C. Or assembler.

Re: I wonder..

Whimsy in naming things like this has been common since at least the 1960s. It's one way that grad students attempt to remain sane in a rather stressful time of life. Some make it out of the lab, some don't, alas.

"Are there other sysadmin type commands that can total a network or computer"

Almost all of them, when used (im)properly. This is why important systems shouldn't allow users to run as root.

Re: Anybody who identifies as a BOFH is a legend in their own mind.

I've been staying away from Windows for about 11 years now ... Slackware on the desktops, BSD on the servers. But thanks for the suggestion ... others would do well to heed your advice!

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

BOFHs, when you boil it down, are just operators. Operators are, in general, the most junior of IT staff, not even allowed to access corporate data. Anybody who identifies as a BOFH is a legend in their own mind.

Re: Drawer

Or the company cat attacking them as they appeared, batting at them until vanquished between file cabinet and bookcase. I have a video[0] of this one. The cat was awfully pleased with herself after protecting her space from the invaders ...

[0] Betamax, of all things ... must remember to convert it while I still can.

Re: You need balls

That is sometimes the answer. But most of the time it is not. Good support folks know when (and where). Not so good folks are more indiscriminate and are usually universally hated.

Re: Cleaning

It's their job to clean the place, floor to ceiling, board room to bog, watering plants, replacing dead light bulbs & emptying the trash in their wake. The modern world wouldn't run without janitorial staff. Extending this to include the labs that evolved into computer centers in the 1950s wasn't even thought about, it just happened.

Janitorial staff having the keys to the entire kingdom (as it were) was the norm until we in the glass room started putting our collective foot down in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It wasn't until the late 1980s that it became uncommon. By the late 1990s it was as rare as hen's teeth. The last time I witnessed a janitor coming unannounced into a data center "in the wee hours" at a place I was consulting for was 2005 ...

I submit that if anyone still has this issue, it is not the fault of the cleaning staff, it's the fault of whoever it was who decided that servers didn't need to be under lock and key.

Note that they don't necessarily have to be behind a locked door. They make locking outlet covers that fit over an inserted plug or plugs, preventing the removal of same. The locks are trash, easier to pick than a file cabinet, but they work for this kind of thing. Under twenty bucks, and usually in stock at your favorite purveyor of sparky stuff.

Re: Cleaning

"it was a Sun minitower"

Some of that old Sun hardware was built like a brick shithouse. My previously used, fell into my lap, 1988 Sun 3/470 "Pegasus" is still happily serving email, gopher, usenet, ftp (and that new-fangled WWW-thingy) for my friends & family, as she has for over thirty years :-)

I've seen this ...

... in situations where programmers have re-mapped their keyboards to make them more conducive to touch typing (they put the caps lock key WHERE‽‽‽), and then trying to login to their usual computer from a remote location.

Warning! Devs with upwards of twenty years of experience do NOT find this to be funny when they are the person doing it! Don't say I didn't warn you. (Personally, I giggle at myself when I do it ... life's too short to get uptight over little shit.)

On the other hand ...

What's the first thing you look at when you open (or close) a door/drawer that stops abruptly before you expect it to stop? That's right, you look at the thing that it ran into.

I ran an experiment on the 7 adults on the property a couple hours ago. I put my boots behind the kitchen door, leaving plenty of room for people to pass through, and called 'em in, one by one. All opened the door into the boots, looked around the door, found the boots & gently moved them out of the way. Just now, I re-ran the experiment without the boots[0]. All gingerly opened the door, and made sure the boots weren't in the way.

Not certain what, if anything, I have just demonstrated (other than the fact that I'm weird, which all y'all already know). Just throwing it out there as a datapoint.

[0] My smooth collie picked them up and put them away in the mud room, as is her wont. Her kennel name is supposed to be Martha, but I call her Lilo because she's such a good boot manager.

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

"I was on holiday and as my boss "had to have my login credentials in case anything bad happened""

a) In a properly designed system, that is not necessary.

b) Always have your Boss write down the login details ... but transpose two letters/numbers so they are non-functional. After you get home, the implication is the Boss made the mistake. Change the login details immediately afterwards.

b') Alternative to the above: always have a dummy account ready for this purpose. It's not like the Boss would know what to do with the real one ...

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

It is false to assume the user is "dumb" when corporate training policy and procedure is awful. Or do you consider yourself "dumb" because you can't diagnose a dead fuel pump in your car on the side of the road with no tools at your disposal?

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

Exactly, Randolf.

For example, I had one end user refer to the fingerprint reader as "the button". Seems he thought he was simply pushing yet another one of those magic buttons in our modern technical world. Like the CEO's assistant above, he didn't connect the b0rken login with the finger cots he was wearing. It wasn't his fault, it was his training's fault. A simple upgrade from "place finger here" to "place bare finger on the fingerprint scanner" fixed the problem forever.

As a side note, don't discount the corporate secretary. They might not all be techno-nerds, but make no mistake, they run the company, know everybody, know where everything is, and can expedite whatever needs expediting. Their care and feeding is vital to any decent consultant, along with that of the janitorial and security staff.

Re: Sometimes there is no need for the curtain ... other times, though ...

Never happened. I can read blinkenlights.

I know a gal who is absolutely convinced that her stash of over 5500 Beanie Babies (and climbing) will be worth tens of millions of dollars when she is ready to retire.

Re: Colouring books

It might as well be the name of a frat ... it's certainly not English. Nor is it Latin.

I dunno about that ...

I know of two wrecked, gas powered Lotuses which have been rebuilt using scrapped first gen Teslas. Proper Lotus parts are hellaciously expensive, Tesla parts not so much.

Pay is relative.

70K/yr is sub-poverty level wages for a family of 4 in Silly Con Valley. An aging, under-maintained, two bedroom apartment smelling vaguely of cat piss and rotting cabbage can easily set you back half of that within a dozen or so miles of the Tesla plant.

Re: My mother

"Most can not understand that the English language is so called because it reached them from England."

It's not our fault we speak it the way it was spoken when we bailed out, while you lot have, over time, perverted the beauty of the language.

Re: My mother

"Don't forget that they are Murkans, and so know nothing about geography."

You Brits aren't exactly immune to this kind of thing ... A friend of mine's Wife was absolutely certain that London was south of where they lived, because "my Uncle lives in South Kensington, which is near London" ... Their abode? Croydon.

Another example: This Yank workedvolunteered[0] as a tour guide in York during his time in Yorkshire. You wouldn't believe how many British folks asked where "Old York" was ... usually while standing in The Shambles or in the castle or on the wall. Their logic was that they were in York, they knew of New York, so there must be an Old York, right?

[0] It was part & parcel of the archeological work I lucked into helping out with.

About three years ago my large animal Vet came in with a funny bit of advertising. This guy's in his second career, he became a Vet after 25 years as a DBA working for IBM. He knows I'm a computer guy, and thought I'd be amused. The ad was for a large animal veterinary practice management software package "NOW WITH AI!!!"

The Vet was laughing, and wondered how many times the company in question got Vets inquiring about their new Artificial Insemination package. Without a pause, I dialed the 800 number ... the answer was over 80% of calls! The guy on the other end wasn't amused when I suggested they fire their marketing genius and hire an AI expert ...

Re: US Census in 1890

Hollerith's company, rather imaginatively named The Tabulating Machine Company, was one of four that were merged together by Charles Flint to form The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, AKA CTR, which was later renamed IBM.

The combined company had a rather diverse output ... for example, I own a CTR meat slicer in need of restoration ...

Re: Didn't take long for the Brexiteers to go AC did it?

We're all pseudo-anonymous (ElReg has your email address, and (probably) your IP address). I agree with you in principal about AC postings, but the reality is that collectively they are mostly just noise.

Note that I am in no way calling to abolish of the AC post! They have their place in modern society. I'm just pointing out that they are faceless by nature, and tend to merge into one incoherent whole.

Re: "Also there was Zero obligation to trigger Article 50 on ANY particular date. "

"Re Mrs Thatcher, Mr Johnson seems to have forgotten that she signed the Maastricht treaty"

No, that was John Major. Thatcher was against it (and a fairly quiet backbencher by that time). Here's a transcript of her addressing the House of Lords on the subject from June of '93. Perhaps this paragraph sums it up nicely:

"I could never have signed this treaty. I hope that that is clear to all who have heard me. The Bill will pass considerable further powers irrevocably from Westminster to Brussels, and, by extending majority voting, will undermine our age-old parliamentary and legal institutions, both far older than those in the Community. We have so much more to lose by this Maastricht Treaty than any other state in the European Community. It will diminish democracy and increase bureaucracy."

How is it that I knew this, and I'm a bloody Yank? One of the mysteries of the Universe, I guess. Have a nice weekend.