* Posts by jake

26591 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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LIGO cranks up the sensitivity to sniff out gravitational waves

jake Silver badge

"and the universe will be even stranger than we thought, cubed."

I'm with Arthur C. Clarke on this one, and default to paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

Note that this does not mean that I think we should stop bothering to learn about it, though.

jake Silver badge

The answer isn't "42", nor is it 'because". The answer is ALWAYS either the actual answer, or "I haven't the foggiest ... let's find out!".

Never lie to a child, and never waffle. All that does is teach them to lie and waffle. Unless you're trying to raise a politician, of course.

jake Silver badge

"Let's be honest, at least some of them are hoping to find a loophole in it..."

Any scientist should relish the thought of finding a major flaw in the general scientific consensus. Most major scientific breakthroughs in human history have begun with an observant person watching an event and saying "Now, THAT'S peculiar ...".

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

jake Silver badge

Re: Not bad, not bad at all.

I use Sendmail, mostly out of sheer inertia. Started using it before general release, evaluating it as a replacement for delivermail in the early 1980s and have been using it ever since. I fully admit that today it is way overkill for my personal needs, but I know how it works and I'm loath to throw away four decades of experience. I setup most of my clients with something that has a much smaller learning curve.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Change is GOOD!

However, change for change's sake, or to put loot in the pockets of the shareholders, with absolutely no benefit to the userbase ... and in fact, negative impact on the userbase (being larger, it has more bugs, is less secure, takes longer to patch, retraining is involved, training for newbies takes longer, etc. etc.) is BAD.

"Sorry, this coffin dodger just got triggered."

Don't ever be sorry just because you have lived long enough to know better! Have a beer instead. You've earned it.

jake Silver badge

Re: DNS-over-https

Wait ... Chromium REQUIRES the English name and barfs on an actual Internet address?

That is very, very b0rken behavior. What are the alphagookids thinking?

jake Silver badge

Re: Not bad, not bad at all.

Agreed. Not bad at all.

I'll still be using (Al)pine into the foreseeable future, though. Works fine for my needs, and my fingers know it.

Probably doesn't hurt that I run my own email servers, at least for important stuff ...

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

jake Silver badge

Re: I'm sure

"Russian equipment being all equally good/shit works for the Ukrainians."

If you mean so-called "Molotov cocktails", they were named by the Finns and used against Russian tanks during the Winter War. It would seem that the Ukrainians have discovered that Russia's tanks are still vulnerable to such primitive weapons.

Remember back when Western Europe was ultra paranoid about the dreaded waves of Russian tanks crushing everything in their path on the way to the Atlantic? Seems somewhat sad and pathetic as a concept these days.

jake Silver badge

Re: Capital idea comrades!

"I haven't seen the movie. I probably should."

Probably not. As usual, Hollywood took liberties with the original to make it palatable for the lowest common denominator, and the film is quite lacking as a result.

jake Silver badge

What do you expect?

Send a good portion of the workforce off to die just to massage the ego of the Dictator for Life, naturally the rest of the workers have to work longer hours in order to maintain productivity. Makes perfect sense ... if you are an insane card-carrying despot or one of his sycophants.

In other news, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Before you sprinkle AI on all your analytics, check data quality

jake Silver badge

tl;dr version

GIGO

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

jake Silver badge

Considering how much time the lazy bastards waste on grade-school name calling, actually getting ANY legislation addressed and passed is an improvement.

jake Silver badge

Two different issues.

One's a supposed "public safety" thing. The other is RF interference that should have already been addressed, but hasn't.

jake Silver badge

The only question remaining is ...

... WTF don't cell phones have an AM receiver[0] built in?

Shirley you're more likely to have a phone than a car at arm's reach in an emergency, even here in the car-crazy United States.

Yes, I know, the manufacturers can't charge for each individual song or over-the-air broadcast ... greedy bastards.

[0] May as well throw in FM, as well ... both come together on a single die package these days.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

jake Silver badge

Re: "... but no pictorial representations"

I used to access playboy.com from $orkplace ... using lynx.

I was honestly only reading it for the rather well written technical articles.

I still use Lynx regularly ... roughly 99.9% of everything useful online is text.

jake Silver badge

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

"I was bemused by how much imagination would be required to extract anything vaguely NSFW from ascii art"

The current crop of hand-wringers and namby-pambys seemingly find offense everywhere they look.

Prudery runs in waves. This too shall pass. And return. And pass ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

From Wiki:

"The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has published a braille edition of Playboy since 1970.[99] The braille version includes all the written words in the non-braille magazine, but no pictorial representations. Congress cut off funding for the braille magazine translation in 1985, but U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan reversed the decision on First Amendment grounds.[100]"

[99] Not my footnote.

[100] ANMF

jake Silver badge

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

Here's a few old men doing important historical research at the Computer History Museum. No, I am not in this video, but I may have contributed to the delinquency ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg

jake Silver badge

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

"back in the days of line printers or otherwise text only printers"

These are still those days ... I use line printers, dot matrix and daisy wheel printers near daily.

Horses for courses & all that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Shared printers

What boggles my mind is why anybody would print it out in the first place. Makes no sense.

Not being a pr0n aficionado, I'm probably missing something ...

jake Silver badge

Well, yes. Of course.

Where do you think the magazine got the name?

jake Silver badge

Perhaps I should have added "and without risk of going to jail here in the real world"?

jake Silver badge

"That sort of boss doesn't squirm, and such an act could have been literally suicidal"

Oh, I don't know ... Back in my 9-5 career, I very much enjoyed thwacking manglement over the head (individually or collectively) with large piles of wet-ink paper-trail.

Until I discovered that I could make a lot more money doing the exact same thing as a consultant, with absolutely no danger of getting fired.

It's amazing how heavy even a signed post-it can feel when wielded appropriately.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

jake Silver badge

Re: Seriously guys…

Who cares what the Fedora set have to say about Plasma? This is part of the same crowd who brought us the systemd-cancer ...

Instead, for KDE related matters perhaps ask KDE instead[0]?

Quoting from that document:

Why not a new Compositor?

Given that KWin was designed as a X11 Window Manager and later as a X11 compositor the question is valid, why not to implement a new Wayland compositor from scratch. Most parts of KWin are X11 independent. E.g. the Desktop Effect system is able to integrate Wayland clients without any change, the same is true for Window Decorations and other parts.

Another reason is that the KWin development team does not have the manpower to maintain an independent X11 window manager and a Wayland compositor. Starting a new Wayland compositor would mean to stop the work on the X11 window manager, which would be a bad move as we cannot know yet whether Wayland will succeed and will be supported on all hardware. Also in future KDE will have to provide an X11 window manager.

So no. KDE/Plasma will be running with X11 into the foreseeable future.

[0] For the copy/paste folks: https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Nope

Obvious post is obvious. Wish I'd thought of making the point.

During the meanwhile, until that better replacement comes along, I'll happily(ish) stick with X11.

Have a beer, Mr. Dawson.

jake Silver badge

Re: Nope

"Microsoft has done really well with RDP."

Sure, if you're a crook. See this ElReg article, posted this afternoon (Wed 17 May 2023 // 20:32 UTC).

jake Silver badge

"My MacBook air has no display output whatsoever just 2 USB-C."

Presumably you send a login prompt to one of those serial ports ... Man should not live on GUI alone, it's bad for the soul.

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

jake Silver badge

We introduce the littles to text-based adventure games. By the time they are ready for NetHack they are already programming the old classics (wump, trek, et alia) to introduce new trips, traps and tribulations for their friends to work around. Actually learning how the computer works, and no network needed, go figure. Recommended.

jake Silver badge

Re: Two and a half grand on a game

"The worst I ever did as a child was discover the joy of modems and run up a six hundred quid phone bill..."

I rode my Bultaco to Stanford with a handful of 8" floppies. The latency sucked, but my bandwidth was much higher than your modem.

I didn't have your phone bill problems, but did run the risk of getting busted by the cops (the Stanford Police hated dirtbikes on campus ... ).

jake Silver badge

Re: Dystopian

"Meanwhile the bastards are allowed to keep extorting as much money from kids with impunity as they ever did."

There is no extortion, the kids are voluntarily paying the money.

HOWEVER, and the elephant in the room, is that kids in most countries are not legally allowed to enter into a contract without parental (guardian) consent. No matter how you look at it, these so-called "microtransactions" are just as much of a contract as purchasing a car or a house. At some point, some hot-shot lawfirm is going to file a class action asking that all these transactions entered into by children should be nullified and the monies returned to the parent/guardian (less the lawyer's fees, of course!) ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Dystopian

"The parents thought (and why should they not, they are not experts) that the ipad was locked."

What ever happened to the concept of due diligence?

jake Silver badge

Re: Dystopian

"Yeah, the parents can't really be blamed."

Of course not! Why on Earth should parents be required to actually parent? That's what the nanny-state is for!

jake Silver badge

Shirley ElReg's backend programmers are aware of perl's arbitrary precision floating point maths modules?

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

jake Silver badge

Re: DB9-to-SCART

"DB9 was used on the original IBM CGA graphics adaptor for the monitor interface."

That was actually a DE-9 ... the "B" or "E" is the size of the connector. The early PC crowd got the nomenclature wrong.

With that said, I've actually seen a D-sub, B-sized connector with only 9 pins, in a single line down the center ... a true DB-9. They were in some old test equipment that we were re-purposing. I have absolutely no idea why they built it with such a non-standard part ... In about 1990 I called Amphenol for spares, they told me that they made them for a limited time in the early 1970s for a government contract, and they sent me a box full of old stock, gratis (individually wrapped, complete with pins, hoods & hardware). I probably still have a couple dozen or so of each (male and female) in my junk collection. I've never seen 'em anywhere else.

A pedant of the genre might point out that the D-sub connectors are all supposed to have two rows of pins, but what else would you call the things?

jake Silver badge

Re: Its always the simple things

There was always the Honeywell H316 "Kitchen Computer", from 1969.

Perhaps of interest to ElReg commentards, this same basic computer was used for the first Interface Message Processors (IMPs) in the early ARPANET.

https://www.vintag.es/2018/11/honeywell-kitchen-computer.html

jake Silver badge

Re: Re:Lights on the same circuit as power

Standard practice the world over, except in places (mostly third-world nations) where they think "ring mains" is a good idea.

jake Silver badge

Re: Its always the simple things

Again, asking a question about the origin of a phrase is not making a racist comment no matter how much you wish it were.

jake Silver badge

Re: Its always the simple things

"I plan to redo the siding on the house"

No need, it'll take care of itself any day now.

In a stand against authoritarianism, Montana bans TikTok downloads

jake Silver badge

Re: Shoe, meet other foot....

And now we're having a completely different conversation about a completely different subject.

You point, exactly?

jake Silver badge

Re: Typical of the anti-American extreme right-wing Republicans.

I have absolutely zero confidence in the current SCotUS. In fact, if push comes to shove you might say I am in complete and utter contempt of that Court.

HOWEVER, I really don't think even those hand-picked fuckwits would have the damn gall to proclaim Montana's latest tomfoolery Constitutional.

jake Silver badge

Re: Typical of the anti-American extreme right-wing Republicans.

Voter rolls are filled by physical place of abode, not where you are remoting into.

Unless you are a politician, of course.

jake Silver badge

Re: Anti-alcohol laws

"This is America, THC gummies are legal and available everywhere"

And because it's legal, the scofflaw side have stopped getting stoned. Now they are killing themselves off with fentanyl.

"but they don't light up very well"

Just exactly how stoned would you have to be to even try that? Remember, kiddies, don't smoke dope when you're already stoned. You don't get any higher, you just get lower on dope. (Apologies to Gallagher.)

jake Silver badge

Re: Seems strange

This is nonsensical. There is a reason the two concepts are called out in different line-items in The Constitution. It would seem the authors and signatories understood the difference, and why they shouldn't be conflated into a single whole, and indeed require their own completely separate conversations.

jake Silver badge

Re: Shoe, meet other foot....

Nobody ever backed over their little sister in a driveway with Tik Tok.

Fuck your cars.

Non-sequitur is as non-sequitur does ...

jake Silver badge

Re: "BOTH groups of wingnuts are trying to dictate what I can and cannot do and say"

"The left-sided wingnuts (twist on / twist off!) have never passed legislation to ban books"

The left wing nuts are trying to ban specific WORDS, regardless of the context in which they are used.

What's worse, burning books or brainwashing the population with newspeak? Burning books inevitably leads to burning humans (read your history), but the idea of massive, wide-spread thought control by intentional language modification scares the ever loving shit out of me.

jake Silver badge

Re: more unsafe

"Instead you will have to download it from third party sites"

Nope. All you'll have to do is cross the state line and you'll be able download it to your heart's content without fear of the Montana Thought Police kicking in your door. Nothing in the law says anything about using the spyware, it just says you can't download it while in the state of Montana ... and in fact, it puts the onus on the "mobile application marketplaces" (whatever that is) to ensure it's not possible in Montana.

Similar to some anti-alcohol laws, and just as effective I'm sure.

Also, it doesn't take effect until January 1st next year. It'll be struck down long before then.

"there are some really good ones"

From what I've seen, only if you have the attention-span of a cocaine addicted weasel.

jake Silver badge

Re: Typical of the anti-American extreme right-wing Republicans.

"And no this is not a both-sides problem."

Yes, it absofuckinglutely is!

BOTH groups of wingnuts are trying to dictate what I can and cannot do and say.

jake Silver badge

Typical of the anti-American extreme right-wing Republicans.

Who are they to tell me how I communicate, and with whom? Have they never heard of freedom of speech? Does the Constitution mean nothing to them?

With that said, I do not use Pooh-bear's spy tool, and nothing will coerce me to change my mind ... but it's MY decision, not the decision of some wing-nut fuckheads on Capitol Hill.

On the bright side, the Trump-stacked SCotUS will have no choice but to strike this new law down, thus demonstrating that the Republicans in charge of Montana are really, really good at wasting the state's time and money. Perhaps the electorate will take note of this and do something about it.

The answer, as always, is education of the general public ... but the wing-nut politicians of all stripes can't have that, now can they?

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

jake Silver badge

Re: End of an error

Walmart?

Shit, I knew it was fraud, just from the description. So did many of the other commentards here on ElReg, and elsewhere online. We commented on it at fairly great length. The technology just isn't there yet.

It WILL be. Maybe in 10-20 years or so.

jake Silver badge

The cynic in me wonders ...

... how long before she "suddenly" finds herself pregnant again, and uses that to beg house arrest instead.

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