* Posts by jake

26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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'Developers have lost hope Microsoft will do the right thing'... Redmond urged to make WinUI cross-platform

jake Silver badge

Re: Because ...

"Do really people prefer Qt or web UIs?"

I honestly don't know. I do know that I know quite a few people who have shifted from Redmond or Cupertino to FOSS solutions primarily because of the interface. I can't say I've ever heard of anybody moving in the other direction because of the interface. Nor have I ever heard of anybody moving from Cupertino to Redmond for the interface, but I have heard of people moving the other way for that reason.

I'm a sample of one, this is a testimonial, yadda yadda.

jake Silver badge

Because ...

... the UI from Redmond is so universally loved?

Makes sense. If you live in Crazy Town.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

jake Silver badge

Re: So...

"Killing someone by shooting across the US border into Mexico isn't a crime"

Yes, it is. In fact, you will commit several crimes if you do that.

jake Silver badge

Re: US Homeland Security

"Seems like it is time for a revolution, you are overdue anyway."

If you are talking to us Yanks, we are civilized. We vote instead. Sometimes it kinda works. Sometimes we cock it up. But at least we can attempt to fix our mistakes in the next election.

If you are talking to the Brits, I suspect they are closer to that awful last result than we are.

jake Silver badge

Re: US Homeland Security

"At the time the TLDs were created they were all international"

Incorrect. .MIL was never a part of DARPA, it was always owned outright by the US military, and administered initially by the Defense Data Network Program Management Office (DDN-PMO). See RFC-920.

You are quite correct in saying that .GOV could, in theory, have become international, but the idiots in charge said no.

jake Silver badge

WTF?

What the fuck does prostitution have to do with so-called "homeland security"? Shirley that's Vice, and up to the state and local authorities?

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

jake Silver badge

Re: Unequal clothing options

" would have loved to downgrade to T-shirts, shorts, and sandals"

When I was at HP, I fairly regularly wore tshirts, shorts and no shoes to the office.

jake Silver badge

Re: SPARC burn?

"That is one of the problems with the UK standard ring circuitry"

FTFY ... there are other glaring problems.

jake Silver badge

Re: Oh so special's

"we all had them in '76"

Who is "we", Kemosabe?

On the other hand, do you think it would have gone with my Rastaman Vibration Tour tshirt?

jake Silver badge

Tricks of the trade.

Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there has been a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist ... One side always says it's too hot, the other side always says it's too cold. Facilities says "set it all to 72F, that's what the HVAC is optimized for" ... and so we listen to pretty much everyone bitch about the temperature.

Until one place I worked at upgraded the AC, and all the controls that go along with it (had to do with a couple of new clean rooms). Naturally, the folks installing all the new gear left all the old thermostats in place. They were no longer connected, so why worry about them. A friend of mine noticed one of the secretaries would inevitably turn one of these controls up, and then keep an eye on it from her desk. Within an hour, one of the engineers would stroll by & turn it down again. Then she'd turn it back up, and so on ... This dance went on all day.

So we hatched up a Plan ... with the Boss's permission, we installed unconnected thermostats quite near both the secretary and the engineer ... and removed the one they were "fighting" over. Now both could happily set "their" temperature to whatever they wanted. It worked. Both were happy, and both commented how comfy the office was with the "new, improved" controls. People in their circle of friends made similar comments. The complaining about the temperature stopped, virtually overnight.

That would have been the end of it, except ever since then I've installed faux thermostats for 'special" people. It has never failed to shut them up about the office temperature. However, be warned ... that type can always find something else to bitch about. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

jake Silver badge

Re: I suppose they'd raise an eyebrow or two ...

""The Birdie Song" by The Tweets."

Having never heard of this, I DDGed it. It would appear that my little corner of the world somehow missed out on this piece of culture. Thankfully.

(Or perhaps that bit of my brain suicided to protect the rest?)

jake Silver badge

Re: Alistairdon't forget...

Old Usenet is no longer an issue, thanks to the gookids fucking up the irreplaceable DejaNews archive.

Hoinestly, the twats are worth HOW much? And they can't even properly handle a simple text archive? The mind absolutely boggles ...

jake Silver badge

Re: I suppose they'd raise an eyebrow or two ...

"until replaced with "You've never met a nice South African""

Huh. It's a small world.

jake Silver badge

Re: And if you don't do social media?

And I wouldn't work for 'em either. Their loss, not mine.

(My anti-social media footprint is probably somewhat smaller than yours.)

jake Silver badge

I suppose they'd raise an eyebrow or two ...

... over my mid-to-late '70s punk collection ... but frankly, I don't give a fuck.

Never thought we'd write this headline: Under Siege Steven Seagal is not Above The Law, must fork out $314,000 after boosting crypto-coin biz

jake Silver badge

Re: Seems more like...

Bootnotes? Be warned: To learn it's ways, you must learn the ways of your own soul. Let us meditate on this wisdom now.

jake Silver badge

I was going to make up a bad three-way pun ...

... based on the three primary meanings of the phrase "bad actor" ... but you know what? I can't be arsed. I have better things to do with my time.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

jake Silver badge

Re: A second chance?

So let me get this straight .. a company went under, a new company took over it's assets, and now this new company (which you know absolutely nothing about and do not have a contract with, mind) has a direct line into your house and phone?

Do you honestly not see anything wrong with this picture?

jake Silver badge

Re: What?

"Double glazing and good insulation has the best return."

Couple that with a solar powered (mains backup) GSHP for your HVAC needs and you're in the handful of bucks per month territory for the life of the product. My setup is about 15 years old and shows no signs of failing ... although I'll admit the solar is a little long in the tooth, and the battery bank needs a second rebuild. Plan is to swap 'em out for LiFePO4 within the next year or so, the rest will be fine for our needs for a few more years (decades?).

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

" do think that for people doing high annual mileages in the US, buying a Tesla is a lot better than that other fashion accessory the F-150."

I completely disagree. Quite the opposite, in fact ... Stopping to recharge several times just to go to San Diego and back would completely cock-up my itinerary. Besides, have you ever tried to tow anything with a Tesla (or other electric vehicle)? The range positively plummets! As for off-road use ... forget about it, the range is even worse. I'll stick to my pickup, ta you very much.

"But the really big elephant in the room for the US is how their cities and transport system are designed so people have to drive high mileages."

Well, the place is a little bit bigger than Blighty. Kind of hard to change that aspect of the equation, now isn't it?

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

"Only if they've all experienced the same training, which isn't the case."

Even if they do experience the same training it's not the case. Some people are naturally good drivers, while others probably should never be allowed behind the wheel. This is true regardless of training. (Why is a matter of conjecture; I'm not getting into that issue here.)

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

"I would think the worst of the worst would ignore the bans and drive anyway, meaning it's either prison or the grave required to keep them off the road."

So that part doesn't change. Does the rest of the argument make sense?

jake Silver badge

Re: Alternatives to Autopilot in the USA

"one can drive from one side of England to the other pretty easily in a single day"

Try a couple hours. The furthest point from the sea in the UK is only 70 miles. It's really a tiny little place in the great scheme of things, which tends to colo(u)r their perspective on World events. It doesn't help that for some reason they tend to think that anything more than a day's walk away is "far". As a Californian, living in Blighty is an adventure.

jake Silver badge

Re: Autopilot is the correct term.

Automobile means self powered, not self driven. The word autopilot is short for automatic pilot, which is quite a different context, n'est-ce pas?

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

"The 'car' doesn't call it autopilot"

Go eyeball the controls for yourself. Looks like it says "Autopilot" to me.

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

It allows drivers much more awareness of surroundings ... starting with the insides of their eyelids.

jake Silver badge

Re: Alternatives to Autopilot in the USA

"I would say the U.S. has the monopoly on manufacturing "gas-guzzlers" though."

Starting with those great Yank marques like Rolls Royce, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Ferrari, right?

jake Silver badge

Frankly ...

... anybody who trusts a computer to drive their car within a mile or so of the Northern 85/101 interchange is asking to die. It's one of the worst sections of freeway in the country, and has been since the intersection opened in 1965.

jake Silver badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

Pretty fucking thick. Which Tesla owners all seem to be, at least from a technological perspective. And sadly, the so-called "autopilot" seems to be better at controlling the vehicle than most of the dim-bulbs behind the wheel.

(Source: Direct observation in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties these last several years.)

'I give fusion power a higher chance of succeeding than quantum computing' says the R in the RSA crypto-algorithm

jake Silver badge

Re: Teleport Heat = no quantum computers

The post you replied to is not amfM. amfM is usually mostly lucid.

jake Silver badge

Re: Glib rejoinder

Cold fusion? Probably not. But I agree that quantum computing isn't going to be all that useful even if it does take off. Fusion power, on the other hand, will probably be more of a game changer than steam power was.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

jake Silver badge

Re: I once met..

"opposed solar power because it might use up the sun."

Not just the odd Yank. Odd Brits, too. I first heard that proposed at York Uni in 1978 or thereabouts.

jake Silver badge

You don't buy tin foil hats, silly. You have to make them for yourself ... the purchased ones are all bugged by the government. Everybody knows that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Stupid is as Stupid does

"What do you call things like this?"

That would be a retired space probe. What do I win?

jake Silver badge

Snowdon's an interesting walk. Recommended. Just don't confuse it with an actual mountain. And you can even get a cuppa at the summit, and take the train down if you're tired from the walk! Very civilized. Unfortunately.

jake Silver badge

Ben Nevis is nobut an 'ill, lass.

Tioga Pass in California is over twice that height at 3,031m ... and that's a pass, not a peak. Tioga Road, aka Highway 120, is a very a pretty drive, being the Eastern entrance to Yosemite. Recommended. (Note that it's currently closed for winter. Check CalTrans for road conditions before setting out.)

jake Silver badge

Re: I doubt he was bright enough to build a rocket

To be fair, California has by far the largest population of any state in the Union with about 40 million people. The second most (Texas, with about 75% of Califonia's population) also is a hot-bed of nutters. As is the third (Florida, with about half). And the fourth and fifth (New York and New Jersey, with just under half and under a third, respectively).

Large populations equal a large number of stark raving loonies, at least in a fairly free society. Only stands to reason; it's the ol' bell shaped curve, innit. Try to remember, the mundane lives of the vast majority of us don't make the news in your tiny little corner of this dampish rock that we live on ... you just hear about the statistically meaningless ones that are out of the ordinary (or "newsworthy" if you prefer).

jake Silver badge

No, bob.

So-called "creation science" is not even wrong, and you know it.

jake Silver badge

"You can't move heat from the cooler to the hotter"

Your refrigerator and air conditioner do just that. They take excess heat from the coolness inside and dump it to the warmer outside.

Microsoft uses its expertise in malware to help with fileless attack detection on Linux

jake Silver badge

Since when was a running process ...

... not a file on a un*x system?

"Fileless" ... They keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.

jake Silver badge

Re: detection feature scans the memory of all processes

Not talented so much as a good admin.

It's not exactly rocket surgery.

MWC now stands for Mighty Wallet Crusher? Smaller firms counting the cost after mobile industry event scrapped

jake Silver badge

Whenever I see MWC ...

... my brain parses it as Mark Williams Company.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

jake Silver badge

Re: Those were the days

No, it wasn't the millennials; as it happened in the 17th century. It should come as no surprise to anyone reading here that it was the publishing industry that foisted this model on humanity ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Hybrid children watch the sea

I have 10 digits (plus a carry bit, but that's irrelevant in this situation) ... that's 1,048,576 servers, or several hundred thousand more than I personally have stashed around the place.

Blow me down with a feather, well, storage server software update gone awry: Nest vid streams go dark for 16 hours

jake Silver badge

Re: Remind me again ...

One thing you might want to add to that ... deposit an off-site backup onto the server you have hung off your favorite Great Aunt in Duluth's DSL line[0]. Offer to pay for her DSL (she'll probably decline), and promise to only use the bandwidth once per day in the wee hours Duluth time so you don't interrupt her viewing of cute cat videos. Offer to similarly backup her data (and cute cat pics) onto your home equipment. Automating both to happen at 3AM Duluth time should be trivial. Use the encryption method of your choice.

Why bother? Because that home "fire safe" probably won't protect your data in a Tubbs-type event, but an easy to make off-site backup will. You can guess how I know this.

Also, you can invite other relatives into your "circle of archive protection". Once you've got yours and the Great Aunt's automated, adding a few more archive sites is trivial. The first time it's needed, by any any one of them, for any reason, the minimal effort will have been worth it.

[0] Insert other favorite elderly relative+city to meet your needs. An old, low power draw, headless laptop is ideal for this kind of thing. I run a very minimalistic BSD on mine, YMMV.

jake Silver badge

Remind me again ...

... why I should have to upload ANYTHING generated by me, or equipment that I own, into "the cloud" (any cloud, not just the gookid's) before I can make use of it? Shirley it should initially be deposited on MY server, not somebody else's?

One wonders if the GreatUnwashed will ever realize they are being played for suckers by the entire "cloud" thing.

Windows 7: Still looking after business (except when it isn't)

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Elderberries and Hamsters - off topic

Except that hamsters weren't a Middle Ages pet in Blighty. In fact, they weren't recognized by Western Science until the mid 1800s ... and weren't actually bred in Europe until the late 1930s. I suspect that a middle-ages insult based on supposed promiscuity would be more lagomorphic in nature.

As for smelling of elderberrys, other than the obvious[0], this could have two meanings. In the first, the bruised leaves, stems and unripe fruit of the elder have a rather awful smell sometimes described as fetid, thus "your dad stinks!". In the second, the flowers and ripe fruit have a rather sweet smell, suggesting a woman's perfume, thus "your dad is effeminate!".

Note that drinking too much elderberry wine doesn't actually make you smell of elderberrys; it just makes you stink like a drunk. If you don't believe me, it's easy enough to try for yourself ... but try to find a wine that is fermented out, and has little residual sugar. That'll minimize the hangover, which can be horrendous with this kind of plonk. Don't say I didn't warn you. Like most of the poor in the Middle Ages, I suggest sticking to Ale.

[0] The obvious being the Knight is French and is demonstrating his poor ability with idiomatic English, in typical Pythonesque fashion. In other words, the insult was made up by the Pythons for the sketch and had no actual place in history. Hold the Holy Handgrenades, I'm leaving of my own accord.

jake Silver badge

Re: Your local garage's floor jack ...

Sounds like a terrible state of affairs, AGD ... Around there here parts, the owner IS the mechanic ... at least at garages I frequent. There is less overhead when the owner doesn't need or want a manicure, and the savings are passed on to the customer.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

jake Silver badge

Re: carry around my home directory?

Last time I checked, there were plenty of distros without the systemd cancer. And there always will be, as long as the systemd cancer isn't a dependency of the kernel. Which will be forever, according to Linus, and he should know.

Poethead hasn't managed a coup, nor will he. Stop spreading FUD.

Hey, remember Microsoft's IoT Linux gear? After two years, Azure Sphere is finally here

jake Silver badge

Re: IoT and Security in the same sentence?

Worse. IoT, security and Microsoft in the same sentence.

And it's not even close to April 1st yet ...

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