Posts by jake 26682 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Out of curiosity, I grabbed my Wife's pedometer this morning as I set out to do my chores, and wore it all day. Just got in after the late-night barn check with a couple of the dogs, and finally took a look at it.
7.2 miles. Without trying, just a normal day. Means I walk a tick over 50 miles in an average week.
Surprised the hell out of me.
"It produces a total of 1,914 horsepower from its four motors, and can reportedly get 330km (about 205 miles) to the charge."
Shirley that "and" should be an "or".
One wonders what the cool-down time is after a quarter mile of 1.9K HP ... or if a two-mile airport run will risk melting anything.
The canonical work is Charles Mackay's "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions" from 1841.
The 1852 reprint, now titled "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is available on Project Gutenberg. It is well worth a read.
For folks who prefer copy/paste to point&click:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
How do you protect the second, dedicated network from perps with access to the hardware?
Probably better to scrap what was a daft idea in the first place and replace it with something designed from the ground up for such critical controls, and allow the non-critical systems to piggy-back on a subset of that new system.
"And this formed the Genesis of all the 'Acceptable Use Policies' we now have to deal with."
Nah. We kicked a kid off the Stanford network for policy violations after he sent a "Wanna Buy My Bike?" message to every email address on campus in about 1982.
Every Datacenter in the Mainframe World had rules and regs about what was proper and what was not. The rules changed if you were on or off campus ... and if you were a part of the company who owned (or leased) the Mainframe, or were accessing it as a service bureau or (later) as a timeshare. Some of these rules were quite complex.
We had an AUP (of sorts) for the ARPANET in the early 1970s, although I could make a case for there being one as soon as the first bits were sent and received between two University campuses in 1969 ("Proper use of University Equipment" and "Sharing of Research between Universities" or similar went back decades before this).
Almost all BBSes had AUPs. Almost :-) [0]
Delphi had an AUP in 1983, BIX in 1984, AOL (as QLink) in 1985. The granddaddy of all of 'em all, CI$, by at least 1979, possibly as early as 1969.
[0] The AUP of mine read "Anything that unnecessarily increases jake's workload will get you terminated permanently. Other than that, have fun!" I never had to terminate anybody.
"It also goes the otherway: when I stop doing business with crappy clients and put them on our black list."
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.
And yet another similar experience ... I've posted this before, but I think it fits here.
Just over a billion years ago as the Internet measures time (call it roughly 1984), I received a brand new Sun 2/160. It was a dual pedestal beast, with all of 8 Megs of RAM and a pair of 380 Meg CDC SMD drives. Roughly 65 grand worth.
I decanted it from the boxes-on-pallets, plugged all the cables in, and fired the thing up. Into a beautiful new GUI on the Sony Trinitron monitor, just as advertised. Logged in as root, on purpose as there were no other accounts as yet(!!), using the default password(!!!!) ... and poked around. All was well, near as I could tell.
The plan was to repartition the disks to better suit our needs and then reinstall the OS. So I made absolutely certain I had the correct tapes, and did the one thing I had never done as a sysadmin ... closed the GUI, and from the # prompt ran rm -rf / intentionally. I was curious to see how long it would take to lose it's tiny little mind. It trundled away to itself for a few minutes, but seemingly was still working fine, enough of vmunix and the shell were in RAM and the swap partition to keep doing simple stuff. I was quite surprised, but that wasn't really what I was there for ...
So I shut her down, went and got a cuppa coffee, reached for the first tape and went to fire up the machine ... only to discover it didn't ship with a tape drive, despite one being listed on the packing list. It had a lovely bezel that LOOKED like it might be a tape drive, but the space behind it was empty. Oops. So there I was, 8AM and stuck with 65K worth of dead Sun hardware that I was supposed to demo for the Brass at 4PM.
Fortunately the 1980s Sun had Clues about customer service. One call, and their field service rep had the SCSI tape drive, the requisite cables, and a couple of VMEbus cards, (E)EPROMS and spare OS tapes "just in case" on my desk in under forty minutes. She even hung out and made certain that the system worked properly after we took it apart to install the bits that needed installing, and then partitioned it and re-installed the OS.
I made the 4 o'clock deadline ... and bought the Rep the first of many well deserved dinners.
Silly Con Valley was a very small place back then ... Sometimes I really miss it.
"if it actually does get produced and sold"
It will not. No government in the civilized world (whatever THAT means!) will allow it. Can you imagine the uproar the first time a kid used it, with the obvious result? And you know they would, in droves.
But I don't have a drove! —B. Bunny, Esq.
Not sure why you equate the badges with user-generated forums ... other than in initial testing a decade ago I don't think badges gave any special privileges other than minimal HTML capability in the comments. Unless you gold-badge users still have the ability to killfile other commentards (the utility of which I question).
The "Forums" were never more than message boards anyway, and they still exist. See https://forums.theregister.com/section/user/ ... I still keep an eye out that way, and comment when it seems like a good idea, but it's a ghost town.
"Is there software that mines a users' comments to try and target forum ads at them anywhere?"
Any halfway decent perl monk could whip something up fairly quickly ... although I question if any would. Most hate advertising with a passion. Especially advertising that targets a field they are interested in; chances are very, very good that (for example) I know a hell of a lot more about where to find beekeeping supplies or steam engine parts than the likes of go ogle ever will. Trying to convince me otherwise has lead me to various forms of adblocking for the useless garbage.
"Is there any targeted ad system anywhere online that even vaguely works as promised?"
No, that software does not exist to the best of my knowledge. As a friend put it "I just bought a new washer and dryer. I won't need to see ads for new ones for at least 35[0] years. So why am I still seeing ads for washers and dryers, two weeks later?"
As you probably already realize, I have nothing against you gold-badgers ... have a beer :-)
[0] Speed Queen. Check 'em out.
Speaking of which ... Have there been any more gold badges issued in the last decade?[0] Or are they still internal only, plus a handful of hand-picked pets from the first day of issue? If so, what is the point of the badges in the first place?
Do we need steenkin' badges?
[0] November 27th, 2012, see this article and this post.
If your teak is that colo(u)r you have grounds to sue whoever refinished it for you ...
Trump isn't a politician. He's a bombastic bumbling boob who managed to get elected President after the third try, when he finally figured out which party's electorate (and potential electorate) was the easiest to fool. He had never held public office before, and it showed. I'm shocked that the Republicans still bow and scrape in the useless idiot's presence.
He wasn't much of a real estate developer, either. How many times has he declared bankruptcy?
It was known as "Episode IV" (not episode 4!) before it was even released. Seems Lucas had been thinking about it for a long, long time. He had the plots in mind, but not the technology for the effects he wanted. I remember talking about with my friends it while standing in line for the first showing at the Century 21 theater across from the Winchester Mystery House ... Lucas had hyped the movie at the Varsity Theater in Palo Alto, during a showing[0] of The Andromeda Strain and THX 1138 a weekend or two before the Star Wars release. Not that he needed to.
I was much more of a nerd back then than I am now ...
[0] Midnight double feature, no less :-)
Indeed.
To say nothing of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Vibrators as the first wave of Punk. They weren't. They were part of the second wave (some would say third). That is not to bad-mouth the doors they opened. I have many, many happy memories of the British music scene from that era :-)
"Why do they do things backwards here ?"
Because you are looking at an old issue from a modern, orthogonal perspective.
When this particular classification system was invented, there were only two "populations". All we really knew was that one population was yellower, and closer to the galactic center, and the other bluer and tended to live in globular clusters. Seeing as we live near a yellower one, obviously that was the most important (or so the thinking of the time went), so that group became Pop. I, leaving Pop. II for the other ones. It wasn't until later that we postulated the Pop. III group.
If Astronomers ever learn to count properly, they may rename it Pop. 0 ...
What's the difference between "small fraud" and "large fraud"? Fraud is fraud, and is prosecuted as such.
Would you be more upset if you were defrauded of one cent 1,000,000 times, or if I defrauded you of $10,000 once?
Likewise, should a judge be more lenient if I steal $10,000 from one person, or if I steal one cent from 1,000,000 people?
"If it's not your money (according to them), and you wire it somewhere, they charge you with wire fraud."
No, they charge you with theft (if the owner was not consulted), and/or being an accessory to a crime (if the money was ill-gotten). Several other charges might also apply.
Driving a stolen car will get you charged with being in possession of stolen material, likewise eating stolen fruit. And again, you may be charged with other crimes (trespassing, crossing state lines in commision of a crime, etc.)
"Except Linux has systemd"
No. Linux doesn't have the systemd-cancer. Rather, some distributions of Linux have chosen to become afflicted by the the systemd-cancer. If you don't want the infection, simply use a distribution which hasn't chosen to become infected. I recommend (and use!) Slackware. YMMV.
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