Posts by jake

Re: Since there was no corrections link...

Try the bottom of the page where it says "contact us".

Re: Not actually a problem

Do any of those still exist? Huh. Who knew?

Re: @Steve Button - .

Or purposely unplug it, just to turn off the insufferable prat.

_{One wonders if it moonlights as a toaster ...}

Re: .

"But most voters aren't qualified to be a judge in the Turing test..."

But I am. He failed.

Re: Google has lost already

If you search on my real name with alphagoo (a rather unusual name, mind), you'll get nothing but stale information, most of which was never valid in the first place (some of which I intentionally seeded in odd places decades ago), until you get to page five (sometimes six) when the papers and publications I have been involved with start showing up.

Alphagoo is worse than useless for many things. Has anyone told the advertisers yet?

Re: To be honest

This IS the second version.

Internet 1.0 ran NCP ... Internet 2.0 running TCP/IP went live on January 1st, 1983.

Re: Don't forget mischief

"Open plan offices"

::spit::

Re: A helpful hint to the readership at large ...

"Yeah. For about 5 minutes. Then it will sprout 4 phone chargers :-)"

Five minutes? It won't be two minutes after the installer turns his back before it gets "borrowed", never to be seen again.

Re: Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

To be perfectly fair, Microsoft didn't invent autorun ... autorun is a logical extension to bootable media. My old PDP 11 can be told to automatically run code loaded from paper tape or card decks ... if the correct code is at the beginning of the media. Earlier DEC kit could, too. IBM kit could do the same in the '50s, as could the rest of that era computers.

Re: Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

All sane kernels can be compiled with various levels of debugging information turned on. These are nominally just for lab use, but sometimes one (or more) makes it out into the wild when it shouldn't. On the bright side, there are usually (always these days) boot options to turn these on or off (all at once, or individually) as needed.

I do not know of any OS that does crash dumps to "random" disks. The disk(s) to dump to is(are) always specified, somewhere (and in what order). However, it might look random to a non-aware observer.

Re: I was commenting on twitter the other day…

That happened in NZ, I remember it well. Fortunately, I wasn't the guy who got yelled at. (Hi, Mike!) Was an easy fix, and nothing was lost.

I did get yelled at in late 1977 when I managed to take down all the PDP10 kit at Stanford and Berkeley with a software upgrade. Effectively split the West coast ARPANet in half for a couple hours. Not fun having bigwigs from Moffett and NASA Ames screaming because they couldn't talk to JPL and Lockheed without going through MIT ...

And some of us carry lockpicks and aren't afraid to use them in appropriate places.

These things protect against mouth-breathers with fondle slabs in need of their anti-social media fix, not techies who know when to keep their hands to themselves.

Re: I was commenting on twitter the other day…

Janitorial staff having the keys to the entire kingdom (as it were) was the norm until we in the glass room started putting our collective foot down in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It wasn't until the late 1980s that it became uncommon. By the late 1990s it was as rare as hen's teeth. The last time I witnessed a janitor coming unannounced into a data center "in the wee hours" at a place I was consulting for was 2005 ...

Re: North Carolina Rednecks Starting the CIVIL WAR...

Trump's a blithering idiot, if you hadn't noticed. His opinion is not useful, to anyone. Including himself, apparently.

And the so-called "off grid survivalists" are too busy trying to be off-grid and survive (it's Winter, you know) to have time for the kind of time-sink you propose.

I seriously doubt the North Carolina (National) Guard would even notice the power outage if they had to come in and keep the peace. Which they didn't, primarily because most people in Moore County are law abiding and more interested in helping their neighbors than they are helping to implement the fantasies of a failed President.

Probably just a local highschool kid.

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

It was probably a couple stupid little kids with daddy's hunting rifle.

Re: Fragile

Dude, that's German, not American.

Re: Fragile

Why waste money on concrete? It's easy to add a privacy screen to a chainlink fence. You can't hit what you can't see ... and there is a lot more air than there is hardware in a substation, so blazing away randomly would waste money (ammo ain't free) and likely not hit anything important. Besides, the shooter(s) wouldn't get to see the pretty light show.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

"To this day I have no idea what it was doing!"

Hacking skankely. Duh!

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Back in roughly 1975, one of my Big Iron mentors had a bumper-sticker:

Tabs are for typewriters!

A woman from the typing pool who much preferred Fresca to Tab took exception to the comment, so he offered to buy her lunch in compensation for the perceived slight. They are still married.

A few years later, another mentor opined "Feelthy TABs are the devil's work, unless you are using them on your Smith Corona".

Personally, I prefer spaces, but I'll use tabs where required. When in Rome & all that.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

"On some keyboards curly braces are more painful"

That's why keyboard re-mapping was invented. Put 'em where you want 'em.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

My mom and dad insisted on teaching me a couple decades before that (I still have the Smith-Corona Portable). Dad was a very early computer guy and could see which way the wind was blowing.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

"I know what's appearing on the screen even while I'm looking at the keyboard because I know exactly what the result will be of all the keys I've pressed."

No. You do not.

"kids need to be be taught to know WHAT to type"

Indeed.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

I was working on early UNIX (pre-BSD) at Berkeley when one of the professors bellyached at me for including too many comments, as in his opinion it wasted paper.

"Yeah, well, get me a glass tty and I'll stop using the '33 ... "

I had a second-hand VT52 on my desk the following morning. JOY! :-)

The very same professor still demanded weekly dead-tree printouts. Naturally.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

"code-smell"

Whenever I hear that term, I take a couple cautious sniffs and say "That ain't the code, mate, it's you" ... Generally gets the point across.

Re: Explosive demonstration

Probably because most of us are not a dumb-ass.

Re: Self inflicted public humiliation

Don't worry, you'll live. And also eventually get over the horror.

Wait until you get hate-email from somebody lambasting code you wrote 40 years prior that hasn't been used for at least thirty years to your knowledge, and only runs on a processor that has been out of support for about as long.

You answered your own question: Some people have far too much money.

You could have added "and nowhere near enough common sense".

Re: So this is a political site now?

You're wearing it wrong. Shiny side OUT.

Re: "Mother of Internet"...Really?

Yes, it is bollocks.

What she did was pretty much single-handedly make DEC networking work. Not the Internet, which had already been evolving for some time, and was working nicely, before she joined DEC in 1980. Basically, she made all the little LANs dotted around DEC's world-wide campus play nicely with each other. Not a mean feat, that. But it was all on a private network, not The Internet at large. That's part of the reason none of her early work is written up in RFCs, it was all proprietary DEC. (Yes, DEC sold this technology to other people who needed similar WAN capability with their LANs. But this was early '80s, the Internet wasn't exactly business friendly at the time.)

That is not to say her STP (and many, many other things ... Check out her prolific RFCs from 2008 to 2018) didn't help out the Internet later on. Far from it. She's a godmother of modern networking, make no mistake, and someone I will always look up to.

Re: Broken? No thanks.

As I've been saying in this forum for years, the Internet is nothing more than an insecure research platform gone mad.

When we built this thing, we knew there were issues, even pre-BARRNet and NSFnet. It was not ready for prime-time back then, and it's still not ready for prime-time. In fact, it'll never be ready for prime-time, no matter how many bandaids we apply. It'll remain an insecure research platform, at least until it is redesigned from the ground up. At which point it will no longer be The Internet.

We tried to keep the corporate world out of it because of this, but we were naive. We failed. We apologize.

_{I'm 99.9% certain that I can speak for us on this matter, especially seeing as TINU.}

Re: Charming

Who will queue for the least?

Re: News article, soon, i'm sure.

"you think" and "if you remember correctly"

How about find the facts, and THEN report them?

Re: Sweden was a binfire

"State by state in the US shows right wing republican states with higher death rates"

Indeed. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Sort on "Deaths per 1M Pop". Draw your own conclusions.

_{I'd like to see that broken down by county ...}

Re: Hard Currency

"You can't eat gold"

Actually, gold is one of the few heavy metals that you can eat. It would be a rather expensive meal, though, and not very nutritious. On the bright side, recovery could be near 100% ... and you wouldn't even have to annoy the neighbors with a hammer mill.