* Posts by jake

26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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We dunno what's more wild: This vid of Japan's probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt

jake Silver badge

Re: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Bad troll. No cookie.

jake Silver badge

It might be turtles all the way down.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

jake Silver badge

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Adding fuel to the fire ...

My Dad started reading Herb Caen's column to me every morning from the time I was born, followed by the headlines and the first couple paragraphs of the first section of the S.F. Chronicle. One morning Dad was ill and in bed. Mom was flabbergasted to discover that I had gone outside to get the paper, and was making good progress on reading Herb's column for myself. I was three.

I don't remember the events in the above paragraph, but a year or so later I do remember being irritated on the first day of kindergarten because I wasn't allowed to bring my newspaper to read.

If you are a new parent, read to your kid early and often. It's important.

jake Silver badge

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Yeah, he squeezed in before they changed the rules in 2016.

(I'm kind of embarrassed that I know this... I'm not fond of F1. To me it's been nothing more than a game of "follow the leader" for several decades now. Most of us outgrow follow the leader when we get to grade school ... because quite frankly it's boring as shit.)

jake Silver badge

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

It was about 30 years ago that pieces of paper started to become meaningless in the computer/networking world. That was when learning to pass the test became more important than actually learning the subject matter.

People who think that learning by rote is the answer are a huge driving force in the anti-intellectualization of our current society.

jake Silver badge

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Yes. To drive in Formula 1 you are required to hold a valid FIA Super Licence. One of the requirements to receive a FIA race license is that you are licensed to drive on the road.

jake Silver badge

Contrary to popular belief, the customer is not always right.

Firing customers who are a more of a pain in the ass than they are worth is one of the truly great joys of being self employed.

About three times per year, or thereabouts, I quite literally use the phrase "you're fired" to a client of mine, or of the wife[0]. Frankly, I quite enjoy it. The look on their face when they realize I am dead serious is priceless.

[0] She's a softy, so I draw this detail by default.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

jake Silver badge

Re: Gates never made the 640K comment.

"The hardware/firmware didn't support anything more."

Or so said IBM. My original 5150 runs 704K, with the "extra" memory coming from space allocated for my non-existant EGA card. I know a couple people who added another 64K to that, but I had no real need. Hacking around with memory & hardware was a normal part of the personal computing world back the day. Modifying and/or fooling the BIOS was/is trivial. Remember, IBM published the extremely detailed " IBM PC Technical Reference Manual " (36 bucks), making these kinds of hacks fairly easy. Having access to the brains at The Homebrew Computer Club probably colo(u)rs my memories of how easy this stuff actually was ... or wasn't.

Note that games often barfed on the various mods, but most of the important business software of the day ran just fine with the extra memory. Also note that DOS would happily use as much contiguous conventional memory (the RAM between the LMA and the first populated portion of the UMA) as the system reported. DOS itself had no 640K limit baked into it.

And of course there were cards like Tall Tree JRAM that could take the PC up to 2 megs ... but that didn't come out until the PC had been on the market for 8 or 9 months. I rode my bike over to Elwell Court in Palo Alto to get mine direct from Tall Tree ... which I only remember because the "shortcut" alongside Adobe Creek under Hwy 101 flooded out due to high tide and I had to take the long way home, over San Antonio Road.

jake Silver badge

Gates never made the 640K comment.

The supposed "640K limit" was an IBM hardware limit, not an MS software limit. The IBM hardware spec was already firmly in place before Gates even heard about the project, so even if he had made the comment (which is extremely doubtful), he would have just been agreeing with IBM. And it wasn't really 640K, it was more like 704K, if you knew what you were doing. I find it absolutely amazing that this piece of incorrect trivia is still being parroted as fact after all these years ...

OTOH, I personally remember Steve Jobs saying that "128K ought to be more than enough for home users", at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in late 1983, as he was demonstrating the original Macintosh, just before the public unveiling. At the time, he had a point ... people were running flight simulators in 64K ...

On the gripping hand, none of this matters any more. It's all just an accident of history.

jake Silver badge

Re: No reference to Babage then?

Oh, our Ada ...

jake Silver badge

And so you heartily approve?

jake Silver badge

They are hardly necessary, so ...

... The Irrelevant.

jake Silver badge

"Oh Grandad! You’ve made me reboot the computer! AGAIN!"

In the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel, of course.

jake Silver badge

Re: The Redmond Redwood

Nah. Redwoods are useful.

jake Silver badge

Re: How about

But ... but ... but ... We LIKE ol' Hol!

(I know, TINW ... but I'm pretty sure I'm speaking for most around these here parts.)

jake Silver badge

Re: Chocolate Factory alternative?

The Onion already exists.

jake Silver badge

Nah.

That describes all the big players.

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

jake Silver badge

Re: You will obey!

Updates that break userspace are one of the deadly sins of computing. Microsoft has been guilty of breaking userspace at least once a month for over thirty years ... and yet STILL people insist on using it? What the fuck?

As Anthony Weldon wrote in the 1651 tome The Court and Character of King James "The Italians having a Proverb, ‘He that deceives me once, its his fault; but if twice, its my fault.'.

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

"to somehow encapsulate all the frustration, annoyance, anger that MS continues to deliver"

Or, you could just stop using their bÖrkenware. Cleaner that way.

Yes, you can. I stopped all work on Redmond products over 10 years ago. My health, pocketbook and sanity are much better now.

jake Silver badge

Re: Good taste?

Like most humans, you probably taste like pork that has been on a junkfood diet.

jake Silver badge

Re: Bob

Hey! Leave our bob out of it! What did he ever do to you?

jake Silver badge

Re: hmm

Any reference to Edge will be seen by the marketards at Redmond as free advertising. Stop using it. Likewise, don't encourage their delusions of grandeur by even hinting they might be lords of anything.

jake Silver badge

Nah.

The shaft of blaxploitation fame is a hero, of sorts. Redmond isn't, wasn't, and never will have that status. (Ever read the book? Shaft was originally white ... Surprised me, anyway. Now you know why I always read the book before watching the Hollywood hackjob.)

ANYway, the "shaft" in Microshaft is more of the she got the goldmine variety ...

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

"the MS upgrade process can grind on for hours."

Days. I've personally seen it take over three days before the thing finally settled down into something resembling a working OS. Not exactly inspiring, that.

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

To be fair, Ubuntu has many of the same problems that Redmond and Cupertino have, and for the same reason. That reason? Trying to be all things to all people ... a task that not even one of the many "Gods" invented by humans have managed to do, even in myth and fable.

jake Silver badge

Re: bin there

"On the other hand , its a bit old , predictable , boring and childish."

You say that like it's a bad thing ...

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

jake Silver badge

Re: Essex MUD and BCPL

Sorry about that ... history.

jake Silver badge

Re: Odd? We already had this?

People have MDL compilers from the era (see the DECtape bugfeature, above, among other vectors), the only issue is are we really allowed to release what we have? My lawyers say no, not at the moment anyway. People are working on this quietly behind the scenes.

jake Silver badge

Re: It is dark

I'd rather have it eaten than spat out for being unpalatable!

jake Silver badge

Zork on BSD was the PDP-11 UNIX port in C, starting in 2BSD. I know a few people ran it on the BSD MDL port, but in that era everything (including the kitchen sink, as legend has it) was being ported to C by grad students learning the ins and outs of the language.

As a side note, porting a game, even a small one, is a good way to learn the piddly little details of not one, but two languages. If you've never done it, try it.

jake Silver badge

Re: Played this when I was a kid..

I don't think it was ever ported to Fortran (I'm prepared to be wrong ... if it exists, I'd like a copy, I collect such trivia ... anybody?). In the PDP-11 days, it was probably an MDL implementation[0] ... However, if it was on a PDP-11, there is an equally good chance that it was in C and shifted over from BSD.

[0] 4BSD (and the derived SunOS) had an MDL port ... Wheels within wheels.

jake Silver badge

Re: Essex MUD and BCPL

Bartle's still in the business.

Still runs his MUD, too.

This history might interest some.

And the PDP-10 Source, of course.

jake Silver badge

Re: Xyzzy (or PLUGH)

"There was a bug under TOPS-10 such that anyone could steal a mounted DECtape off another user"

That wasn't a bug, that was an undocumented feature.

jake Silver badge

We had UNIX/32V running on a VAX at Berkeley in June of '79 ... and the 2BSD mods that became 3BSD soon after that. If you requested a copy of BSD for your VAX after 1979 there would have been no need for porting it ... and prior to that, whatever was ported to the VAX at Edinburgh wouldn't have been BSD.

jake Silver badge

Thanks for the pointer, Simon.

I have several old copies of Zork, but most are PDP-11 / BSD ports from the late '70s to early '80s ... I think the earliest was for 2BSD, which would have been 1979. I might have copies from earlier, for other hardware and OSes, but I haven't fully cataloged the tapes I have managed to archive yet. Rainy day project that hopefully will wind up at TUHS, once I figure out what I can legally make available.

I have a copy of ADVENT that claims to be from 1976 that runs on TOPS-10 ... will ask MIT for an unmolested copy of ZORK and see if I can't get it to run on the hardware and OS it was intended to run on ... I've been meaning to break out the ITS tapes anyway, a friend wants to fiddle about with SHRDLU in its original home for some reason ... He even wants to borrow a Model 33 ASR & acoustic modem to go full retro. I suspect he's writing his life story, I know he worked with that kit at UNI ...

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

jake Silver badge

Re: It was the Apollo astronauts

People who need fooms in their lives can always get tannerite. There is no need to make their food taste like the exhaust of a Trabi ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Nasty Conservative governments fault

"What’s Greta going to do about carbon emissions from the moon And space?"

That would depend on if her parents ever hear about it, and if they do they decide they have time to coach her into becoming outraged before world science news moves on to something else.

jake Silver badge

Re: And this is why it's always a bad idea...

One wonders how the so-called "history" channel gets away with its obviously incorrect name. Same for the so-called "science" channel. And don't get me started on "The Learning Channel" ...

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: It was the Apollo astronauts

Lighter fluid? Honestly, why do people persist in the myth that food tastes better when liberally bathed in the smoke of a burning petroleum product?

Invest in a chimney starter. A decent one[0] costs about as much as a couple cans of lighter fluid, and it'll work for years running on nothing more than two sheets of newspaper per fire. (If your charcoal is dampish and hard to start, spritz about two tablespoons (two ounces, 30ml) of vegetable oil on the paper prior to crumpling it up. Then invest in a proper storage container so you don't have that problem again.)

Beer. What else would I be serving when the grill is hot?

[0] I suggest, and use, the Weber Rapidfire ... under 25 bucks[1]. Mine is three years old, and shows no signs of failing any time soon. It has been used a couple times per week since new.

[1] If you're even stingier than I am, you can make one pretty much for free out of an old bit of flue pipe or a large tin, a couple nuts and bolts, a short length of broom handle, and some bits of wire coat hanger. It won;t last as long as the Weber, but hey, at least it's free!

jake Silver badge

Seems it was a non-starter. No culture at all.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

jake Silver badge

Re: The problem isn't the silliness

" why would we want to allow the offense?"

We (TINW) are allowing nothing. They are taking it, even though it does not exist! Sounds like a personality disorder to me. Or the beginnings of a new religion. Or, if history is anything to go by, both.

Proof-of-concept open-source app can cut'n'paste from reality straight into Photoshop using a neural network

jake Silver badge

Re: Impressive

So in your opinion, you have to have built something better in order to offer up a negative review of any given thing? And that everybody else has to give happy-happy feedback, or not comment at all?

Do you have any idea how silly you sound?

It has been 20 years since cybercrims woke up to social engineering with an intriguing little email titled 'ILOVEYOU'

jake Silver badge

Memories.

The funny thing about "I Love You" is that the first time around, it was a HOAX, and flooded the mail system with massive quantities of people passing along a phony message. IT staff all over the world spent a good deal of time reassuring their users that it was fake, and that there was nothing to worry about.

The message in the email was "don't open or pass along anything with "I Love You" in the Subject line, it's a virus that will send your CPU into an n-dimensional loop that'll burn out your computer" or some such bullshit. The subject line invariably contained the string "I Love You". AOL was hit particularly hard with the hoax, their tech support group (anybody remember "tech live"?) was flooded with questions about it, and people forwarding the phony warning to all and sundry crashed the AOL email system.

It was the first non-threat email that I wrote nuke-on-sight filters for and built them right into Sendmail in what we would now call a milter. In the first weekend that I went live with it (at a couple Unis and six or eight companies), it was rejecting almost 60% of all email with no false positives. That's pretty good penetration, for a hoax with no payload that relied solely on social engineering to propagate.

The real virus came along around a year later. The name came about because the authors were mocking the people who had passed along the hoax. And remember all those AOL users? They were quite confident that it was a hoax, because the AOL tech folks had said so the year before. So naturally, they opened the attachment. I fixed over 300 household computers in and around Silly Con Valley after that one ... at $150 per. The impact on corporations varied with the cluefulness of the folks in charge of the email system.

jake Silver badge

Re: I remember when...

Mitnik is, and was, a putz.

jake Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change

In English, virii is properly pronounced viruses. In Latin, the word virii doesn't exist.

See the FAQ, section F, question 3.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

jake Silver badge

Re: And what about the people ...

"I carry mine around with me all the time, but not using it."

Try leaving it at home for a week. Should be easy, because you claim you don't use it. Note your reactions to it not being there. I'll bet you start feeling anxious, irritable, worried, angry, craving, and many other classic signs of withdrawal ...

jake Silver badge

Thomas Jefferson said: "Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither." I concur.

jake Silver badge

Re: Of course, being centrally controlled

"the amount of damage that a government can potentially do to an individual is orders of magnitude worse than anything any corporation could do."

Except the corporations run the government ... at least here in the United States.

I've often said that the fastest, easiest way to reform government here in the US would be to ban professional lobbyists. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to define "professional" in this context.

jake Silver badge

Re: Testing?

Here in California, Capitol Hill says they will start to lift the stay-at-home when testing reaches results for 60,000 to 80,000 people per day.

Also here in California, the labs are working double-overtime and have peaked out at around 30,000 results per day. They physically don't have the space or personnel to increase that number ... and the existing staff can't keep up the pace indefinitely, they are already exhausted.

So California will apparently never lift the shelter order as currently written.

Methinks folks are about to get very, very restless. And so the rules will change, just to keep the peace. Probably just in time for the existing government to appear to be "the good guy" for the next election.

I voted for Newsom, and had high hopes for the kid, but I think he's reached his own level of incompetence. He is clearly well out of his depth in this crisis.

jake Silver badge

Re: And what about the people ...

"They set up the USGS earthquake early warning system for you."

They did? Where? I've never seen it in operation.

If you mean that thing that Newsom was babbling about last year, it's strictly in Alpha Test ... and even when fully operational, I seriously doubt it'll really do anyone any good. (SpeakTyping as a guy who has been a consultant to the USGS for several decades.) Besides, the end-user app only runs on iOS and Android, neither of which I am willing to spend money on. So no, it's not built for me.

When I was at SAIL, we had several seismographs wired to send an alarm (sonalerts in all participants living quarters, ~100 participants) at the first sign of fairly low-level P-waves. After a year or so, not a single one of us managed to get out of the house before the S-waves got there. Needless to say, the project was dropped as useless. Now, decades later, it's my tax dollars at work. Gee, thanks. I'm sure I'll sleep ever so much easier.

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