Posts by jake 26710 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Remember those days when a mobile signal outside an urban area was the exception rather than the rule?"
Come wine tasting in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake Counties. You can find any number of winerys and tasting rooms without a mobile signal. The lack of morons sharing their telephone conversations with the rest of the world is very, very nice :-)
"No kid will accept a phone that doesn't have the Apps other kids are using."
My granddaughter discovered my 1952 Model 500 Western Electric when she was about 5 years old. I gave her one of her own for her 6th birthday ... complete with a switch & circuitry to convert from pulse to DTMF as insurance for when her local CO drops pulse capability. She thinks it's wonderful ... and her friends think she's weird, which she also thinks is wonderful. Mission accomplished.
(She's nearly 10 years old now and claims that that ancient dial telephone is one of her most prized possessions.)
Actually Peter, I know many young people who would welcome a phone with many, or all, of your list of attributes. Not everyone who has issues with hearing, seeing, grasping & etc is old.
Frankly, I'd probably buy a phone if it had your specs ... especially if it had a rugged case, an easily replaceable battery, a seven or eight day stand-by, a very sensitive receiver, and the highest powered transmitter allowable by law.
... and I don't really need/want any other Internet access on my phone, either. I'll probably try one anyway, it may be exactly what I've been looking for. The game I can ignore, just as I did on the late, much lamented 5185 that lasted almost a decade and a half ...
I was channeling Honorius and translating his vernacular in a way that wouldn't have got me a clip 'round th' ear 'ole when I was at school ... But with the exception of "Europe" (which wouldn't have been used in that way at that time), you are absolutely correct.
"Dublin had a big slave market at one point. Up until the 11th Century. That wasn't the Romans, was it?"
No, that wasn't the Romans. They didn't have a foothold in Ireland, and besides they pulled out of the British Isles in the early 5th century ... it would seem they were having issues with the Visigoths a trifle closer to home and didn't feel the need to hold a nondescript little island in the far western reaches of the Empire.
"I find it odd that a new technology would employ such casually racist terminology."
I would find it extremely strange if Engineers didn't use the words associated with common technological concepts on new technology.
Besides, since when did "slave" (for example) only apply to one particular race? Last time I checked, members of every single race on the planet have been enslaved by members of pretty much every other race on the planet. The word "slave" is a generic word denoting a relationship. To suggest it is a racist term, targeting one specific race out of all the races which have been enslaved, is very demeaning to the memory of all those other slaves, who not being the right colo(u)r, are in your mind apparently insignificant and forgettable. How dare you!
So, Dr_N ... you actually deny that black folks enslaved other black folks in Africa? And that Europeans bought those enslaved black folks from the black slavers for the Atlantic Slave Trade?
And further, you deny that even today black people are still enslaving other black people in Africa, and then selling them on?
If you were responding to Gene Cash, he clearly said it was a Data General.
Computers didn't start storing passwords in a hashed format until Unix 6th Edition, in '74[0]. Prior to that, they were always stored in clear text. It took a long time for other systems to follow Bell Labs in this. Many companies continue to store passwords in clear text even today, alas.
[0] Invented by one Robert H. Morris, the father of the Robert T. Morris of "Morris Worm" fame.
Not naive or trusting at all. The computer was in a glass room, behind lock and key, for much of its early life. These new-fangled remote terminals are security holes and will be used for skulduggery, mark my words!
In early-mid 1981[1] I was working for Bigger Blue when the PC-DOS 0.98 beta & original IBM PC came out in pilot build ... everyone in the Glass House looked at each other and said "WTF is IBM thinking? Thank gawd/ess it can't do networking!" ... The rest, of course, is history ...
[1] I can't remember the exact month, but it was raining. Naturally.
"became Honeywell I think."
No, Honeywell has always been Honeywell ... Founded by Mark Honeywell in 1906. Rather fittingly, they started life as a heating controls company.
SDS was founded in 1961, sold to Xerox in '69 (and renamed XDS), and finally closed their doors in '75.
I was once offered a complete, functioning Xerox 530 for the price of "get it out of here by the end of the month and it's yours" ... I turned it down, because I couldn't think of any reason to keep the old gal running. Now, with the time and space, I wish I had mothballed & stored her ... I don't know of any that are still in running condition today.
Keyloggers have popped up every October (or thereabouts) ever since schools have had access to multi-user computers, call it the late 1960s or early '70s. It happens every year, when Freshmen "discover" the concept. They usually only deploy them for humo(u)r value, but very occasionally you'll get a dude who does it for malicious reasons, or rarely for personal gain. There has always been at least one, usually two or three ... Invariably, they get caught, slapped on the hand, told not to do it again, and then are invited to join the local version of the student hacker's club. I can point to several former miscreants/class clowns who now contribute to one or more of the BSDs, and/or GNU, and/or Linux.
"If you are using an uppercase-only tty"
If indeed. There's always one, isn't there? Shall we explore this?
I have a couple uppercase only terminals, and I'm absolutely certain a few other ElReg readers do as well. A few more of us probably know where to quickly get their hands on one (or several), if needs be. And quite a few more of our friendly neighborhood commentards undoubtedly have seen one in a museum or other collection fairly recently, and actually knew what it was and when and where it was used.
But let's be perfectly honest here. How many of us would you expect to have one of them hooked up to a machine that runs a modern, nominally case-sensitive OS here in this modern era? What would be the point? I hooked one of mine up to a Slackware box probably twenty years ago, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. Today, my ancient terminals are only hooked up to ancient machines that expect them. None of them have enough RAM (core) to run vi ...
Don't get me wrong. I have some very old hardware hooked up and running under Slackware and BSD. But it's all functional. It has a purpose. For example, my ComDesign StatMuxes from the mid 1980s, a nice friendly late '70s Daisy Wheel printer, and my decidedly menacing (to some) IBM 1403 from the early '60s ... But an uppercase only terminal? Nah.
Back when I was learning proper British English as a Californian transplanted into Yorkshire in the 1970s, the prefix was usually "daft", and it was applied to (and by) the girls at school just as much as the lads ... and the staff, both male and female, were known to apply it, too.
Perhaps things have changed.
Neither.
It's an interesting historical artifact turned into a war trophy for wealthy people. Today, it is no more than a bit of haberdashery, squirreled away in someone's sock drawer, never to be seen again until auctioned off to another wealthy squirrel by the first squirrel's heir(s) (unless the first squirrel decides to make room for another shiny bauble). Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sad, that.
You have three numbers to worry about. Either not enough deer, or the right amount of deer, or too many deer. Figuring this out isn't exactly rocket surgery, just observe the effect that the population being studied has on the surrounding environment. Note that local "hot spots" are inevitable, and may need individual attention.
For the first two numbers, management is easy: Keep a hands-off approach and simply monitor the situation, unless numbers are ridiculously low, in which case a captive breeding program & subsequent release back into the wild might be in order, after ensuring an adequate food supply for the returnees.
For the last, it's steaks & sausages all 'round until the numbers fall to whatever arbitrary number The Authorities deem "normal". After which, a routine harvest of the stock should be considered a normal part of herd management.
Sadly, however. I'm sure the PTB want exact numbers with day-to-day resolution. The only way to do this is to catch and radio-tag every single deer on the island, and do it again at the end of each and every breeding cycle to tag the newborns. Until you do that, it's just an estimate, and we can't have that now can we?
At what point does wildlife become domestic?
Four bears? I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that. Bears are the single most asocial predator on the planet. They are solitary hunters, and don't work in packs.
I could believe a couple of youngsters who have recently been kicked out of the den by their mum, but these weren't youngsters (as evidenced by the fact that they supposedly couldn't be scared away by simply yelling at them). Four adult bears working in concert? That just plain doesn't happen.
src wonders "Does the new API allow easy censorship of conservative opinions?"
I dunno. Have twit app writers requested a method to censor[0] certain thoughts of non-like-minded people from appearing in their apps?
Presumably, the same API would allow the censorship of liberal opinions. Or "other" religious opinions. Or swearwords (whatever the fuck that means). Or adult themes. Or ... Huh. Come to think of it, one would think that the conservatives would welcome that option with open arms!
[0] In this case, Shirley that should be "filter" not "censor". Consult your local dictionary for more. Unless your local PTB have banned dictionaries because they contain bad words concepts that suggest learning to think for one's self might be a good idea ...
"users and admins must decide between using an insecure email client, or no email client at all until Microsoft fixes the glitch."
Or perhaps they can scream "ENOUGH!" and change to a real email system that doesn't provide headaches like this at mind bogglingly frequent intervals?
Just for the record, those "known to cause cancer" signs haven't actually changed anything here in California. They are a fine example of feel-good legislation that does absolutely nothing at all, except make a few very wealthy curtain-twitchers & namby-pambies happy to make large contributions to politicians.
You can still get a gallon of motor oil, ignore the labeling, and drink it on down if you want to. Likewise, we pump our own fuel despite the "don't breathe the fumes, causes cancer" signs. And some normal foods have to be labeled "contains minute quantities of thing which some judge somewhere, despite having no training on the subject whatsoever (Duh! He's a judge!), thinks might, possibly, contribute to cancer somehow, although he refuses to let us all know how he came to that conclusion" ... but you can still purchase and consume it here. Useful labeling, no?
Actually, I lie. They have changed something else. The signage is fucking ugly, and has made California a visually less pleasant place to reside. And they have made California the butt of jokes worldwide, for absolutely no reason at all. But that's about it. They certainly haven't made the place any safer. We still have mountain lions and bears about the place (he says, drifting back on topic) ... but I'll bet the idiots are trying to figure out how to get rid of those, too ... in an environmentally friendly way, of course. The fucking idiots.
"Didn't necessarily used to need to be an actual Satanist to be considered a heretic."
Used to? Shit, I know supposed xtian groups who call each other heretics today, in 2020! The mind absolutely boggles at the vastness of human stupidity.
(Yes, I know the Einstein, Ellison and Zappa quotes.)
That would be Southern California. California is a rather large place (over three times the size of England), trying to tar us all with a single brush is about as sensible as saying Liverpudlians and Mancunians are the same ... they are only about 30 miles apart, after all.
The early film studios tried to establish a foothold here in Northern California, but we're too laid back for those uptight weirdos, so they ran off to LA with their tails between their legs a century or so ago. Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin KBE did some of his best work up here; he loved Niles Canyon. Some say he never recovered after the forced move South.
Santa and Satan are the same being, everybody knows that.
As proof, one is an anagram of the other.
Secondly, Oct 31 and Dec 25 are the same number.
Thirdly, have you ever seen Saint Nick and Old Nick in the same room together?
This makes even more sense when you think about it further ... For example, who would YOU pick as the patron saint for a holiday best known for hedonism, libertinism, decadence and debauchery?
Messi is not exactly what I would call a typical Cougar/Puma.
He's not even what I would call a typical cat. It is fairly obvious that the disease that left his body stunted & somewhat twisted when he was a kitten also affected his brain. He and his humans are very lucky to have run across each other at the exact right time and place.
Long live Messi!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
