Posts by jake

Re: Tell your friends

The *real* annoyance is all the xenophobes cluttering up the comments section.

Re: "......the mine had closed."

Leaf-blower in a nice sunny corner.

Re: Dickensian

Worse than ink is paper dust, the bane of print shops everywhere. I've seen it literally ankle deep in places (both the Peninsula Times Tribune and the Palo Alto Weekly, circa 1980ish).

A lung irritant, carcinogenic, grinding compound AND a fire hazard! Woo-hoo!

Re: Dirt

"Another reason - aside from a sensible layout - to use my own keyboards all the time."

Layout? Shirley you just remap keys that are located in the wrong place, right?

Re: Dirt

"Just takes two days to dry out and it's all good!"

If you use a dishwasher, don't use added detergent! The residual soap left behind from last night's dinner dishes will be plenty. Also, do not use the heated dry option.

I use a Makita cordless leaf blower. The thing has a throttle, simply set it to about as low as it'll go, point it at the keyboard and walk away. It'll be dry in under an hour, unless you're unfortunate enough to live in very humid conditions.

DO NOT USE A HEAT GUN! No, it wasn't me, but naturally I got yelled at for it (how was I supposed to stop the kid? I was at lunch!)

A hair-dryer will work, but keep it set to low heat and keep the thing moving.

There are a zillion HOWTOs on keyboard cleaning available online. Check out a few before trying to clean your own, just so you don't make the same mistakes that have been made thousands of times in the past.

The above is for well made keyboards, like IBM's legendary Model M. Modern flimsy keyboards are one-time use crap. Just toss and replace.

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

"the maximum cable length for the terminal wasn't enough to reach"

That's why the line driver was invented. It was a solved problem as early as the mid 1950s, perhaps earlier.

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

To collect them again, we would first have to have collected them previously.

Tall tails invented to frighten the children aside, reality would suggest we haven't.

Re: Ah, the 80's...

"A company isn't likely to send their tech into a warzone to support a computer"

I was sent to Beirut a couple times in '82 and '83, and again in '89. Got to keep the money flowing, regardless of anything else going on.

"I'm surprised they were willing to send him down a mine which is equally dangerous!"

Nah. Mines are a lot safer.

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Gandalf was selling what was then called "line drivers"[0] specifically for this kind of thing in the very early '70s. Their trade advertising included mining. No carrier based solution involved, assuming you had right of way for the wire. I assume a tin mine in Cornwall would have that.

They cost far less than calling a tech out from London to Cornwall. Or, as in my case, from Palo Alto to a cinder operation outside Baker, California (about 900 miles round-trip).

[0] Kind of an extension cord for serial communications.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

Let's not forget that Blighty is also has its share of dunderheads.

https://www.theregister.com/2009/03/25/satnav_mishap/

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

"I'm not sure if the US has an equivalent of the UK 'public right of way'."

No, not really. The rules and regs are quite different regarding who owns what, who can travel where, and who is responsible.

Amusingly, it doesn't keep the armchair lawyers from pontificating, though.

"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." —Unknown

Re: Process failure at Google

" I've always been very cautions about following GM directions since."

And people wonder why I don't trust self-driving cars as far as I can throw one.

Re: Pointless to complain.

Perhaps HP donated a bunch of computers to google when they were working on that section of map?

Re: Pointless to complain.

Perhaps they can't help you because you don't bother to mention the jurisdiction(s) involved?

Re: Where is the liability?

To be fair, nobody around here thinks of modern Jeeps as being particularly reliable, especially when taken off-road.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

"but it's standard practice in cases like this to make everyone who might have liability a party to the lawsuit."

Especially if they have money.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

"But maybe if they have other sources of data that keep insisting the bridge exists"

Like backups, for example.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

"I know that leftpondians hate rules and regulations, but one would have thought that mandating a "bridge closed" sign be displayed is rather obvious common sense."

As a Left Cost leftpondian, I quite agree with you. I know of several bridges, maybe a dozen, that were washed out in the last year[0][1]. Every single one of them was blocked on both sides by a police car, 24 hours per day, until a more permanent (and solid) solution was applied. Usually said solution's only option for vandalism was graffiti. Most of these bridges have been rebuilt or replaced already.

But we're talking about a place called Hickory, North Carolina. Things are a trifle ... uh ... slow in them there parts.

[0] The weather last winter was rather wet, at least for California.

[1] This does not include bridges recently washed out by flash flooding down in the desert

Re: RMS contribution

And of course the original Mach kernel started life as 4.2BSD, but re-written with the message passing concepts originally experimented with in the Accent kernel, also from CMU. This allowed Mach to use the tool chain and userland from BSD pretty much unchanged, and also port it to various processor architectures pretty easily. I played with all the above throughout the '80s as an interesting side diversion to what I was doing with BSD.

Fun times.

Re: A Complicated Man

"Why distribution of “free” software has to get all legal is beyond me - it’s nonsense"

Because hierarchies of paper-pushers bring in the big bucks ... even, it would seem, if you have no actual product to sell.

Re: 1991

I wouldn't know. I stopped supporting products from Redmond nearly 14 years ago.

Re: 1991

When you consider how the FOSS world uses version numbers, nothing surprises me anymore.

Re: A Complicated Man

"like literally standing behind students and dictating the code they should write when his carpel tunnel got so bad he couldn't do it himself"

rms has never battled with CTS. He did, however have typists hired by the FSF to do some of his typing for him due to non-CTS related hand pain. Some or all of those typists were undoubtedly students. (I'm pretty sure I got that info straight from rms, but I can't for the life of me remember when, where or how. Might be on his stallman.org site somewhere ... not that I'm prone to read his ramblings, mind.)

_{Gut feeling? He should have stopped using EMACS and switched to vi years ago.}

Re: A Complicated Man

To be fair, nowhere did I suggest rms would be easy to live with.

_{Note: The guy with the bathing issues was the young Steve Jobs. Ask anyone who attended the Homebrew Computer Club.}

Re: Don't Forget gcc

GCC, while extremely useful, was not strictly necessary.

Linux could have been developed with PCC (as shipped with BSD, until 4.4BSD in 1994). It was nearly ubiquitous in the tool sets of the kind of people who drift into working on things like Linux.

Re: A Complicated Man

Please do not feed the troll. Ta.

Re: A Complicated Man

Oh? Do tell. We're all on tenterhooks.

Re: RMS contribution

"Actually, it was because he couldn't hack the printer driver in AT&T unix in order to fix it to work with his printer."

Actually, the problem was that he COULD fix the print driver, but Ma Bell's lawyers said it wasn't allowed anymore. Which made zero sense in his mind, and the minds of a lot of other people. GNU was one result. The current BSDs are another.

Re: A Complicated Man

Just for the record, I've never found rms to be a pain to deal with. He's actually quite easy to work with ... as long as you don't expect him to change to fit into your image of what he should be.

Re: coccyx-centered comforts in cold climes

Here in the Real World of Northern California, I spent the day doing Field Work. I was planting peas and beans for a late fall or early winter harvest. (Yes, really. We get three crops per year here in Sonoma.) Tomorrow I am also doing Field Work ... I'll be installing a couple new servers for a company who is bailing out of the cloud and bringing it all back in-house.

Anybody who has a problem with that has severe problems and should probably seek help. Including the Regents at USC.

_{I shall refrain from saying "I told you so!" ... the owner is a friend of mine. Not USC, the computer work.} ..

"what the fuck is a cup? so many dumb recipes that say use 4 cups of this and 2 cups of that... I've got cups of all fucking sizes... PICK ONE YOU INBRED MORONS"

A measuring cup is a calibrated tool. A drinking cup is an uncalibrated device, the size of which is decided by the host(ess) for purely decorative and/or esthetic reasons. I take it that you are more hostess than scientist?

The standard British measuring cup holds 10 ounces. That's half an imperial pint. Shirley you know what a pint is. Perhaps next time learn a little bit about whatever you are attempting to rant about before spouting off and demonstrating your ignorance to all?

Last time I checked, you could purchase a set of standard British measuring cups from John Lewis. Hopefully this will help you with your baking.

"Personally, I'm just waiting for "the big one" to hit!"

"When, not If" is the mantra around here ...

I'm typing a couple hundred yards from the Rogers Creek Fault, probable home of the San Francisco Bay Area's next "big one". We're as ready as we can be at Chez Jake. Not paranoid, pragmatic.

Yes, I sleep quite soundly, thank you :-)

Re: SI police strikes again

"WTF are "yards"?"

1) Don't be disingenuous, it doesn't become you.

2) The Yard is one of the two standard units of length as defined by the British "Weights and Measures Act 1985", which states "the yard or the metre shall be the unit of measurement of length".

This Yank reads this piece of Official British Wisdom as clearly giving the Yard legal precedence over the newfangled French option.

No Windows involved.

It runs the INTEGRITY-178B OS, a RTOS from Green Hills Software.

Re: "The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

The BOFH stories started on Usenet ... and became tired and derivative of themselves before they left. Frankly, I'm flabbergasted that they are still a thing.

Re: "The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

Mine was referencing the years before the Great Renaming in 1987. alt.* didn't exist yet, and almost everybody took the full feed, which was right around 1000 posts per day, averaging about 2.25 million bytes total spread out over around 250 groups and read at somewhere around 6,500 sites.

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.

Re: So let me recap...

"I mean, the WWW was only created for 4 things: smut media, cat media, warez and email"

Nah, at least 8 things: rumo(u)r, lies, conspiracy, sensationalism and gossip, with sides of pR0n, warez and cute cats.

Email is not now, never has been, and shouldn't ever be thought of as a Web thing.

WTF is a Crazy Frog?

Never mind. I probably didn't care back then, so why would I care now?

Re: "The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

"How NSFW could these images be without attracting the attention of the old bill?"

Well, Usenet was available through virtually every major Uni world-wide from the early '80s on ... Once in a while a bit of a stink was raised, but it usually blew over before anybody contemplated attempting to censor the uncensorable.