Posts by jake

Re: One Can...

"Thinking men don't pay any attention to Sheena Easton." —jake

Re: Pottering around not doing much

My job title at Bigger Blue was "Boffin at Large"; it was even on my business cards (only because they wouldn't let me use my preferred "Chief Cook & Bottle Washer"). My actual position? Floating Senior Member of the Technical Staff. I wandered from department to department, world-wide, putting out fires. Outside of running my own businesses, it was the least boring, most stressful and most satisfying job I have ever had.

Re: One Can...

... and if thirsty, the horse will drink.

We moved the thing across the room at least once a month when nobody was looking, and added "Not Very" above the original. The woman in charge of office supplies wasn't amused ... but the Boss was.

Re: aaargggh!

When I worked for Bigger Blue (Satellite Division), one of my jobs included verifying one-off wiring harnesses. Each bird had it's own, and I had a new QA[0] stamp for each one, with the project's logo (mini mission patch) and my QA number. I used each precisely twice ... once when I passed the wire (centered on connector #1, pin 1 side), and again on the paper traveler (where the ink promptly blurred into the paper and became unreadable).

I have a nice round baker's dozen of these stamps in my trophy case ... Nobody could figure out who I was supposed to return them to, so I took 'em home.

[0] I wasn't part of QA officially, I got press-ganged into this job when the Boss of the division discovered I was making a wiring harness for my gasser ... Soon after the first one flew and was put into service, I recieved a largish coffee mug with the mission patch surrounded by the phrase "Hotrods in Space!".

Re: Why do anything?

"I'm not sure what they did when they needed a symbol like ! ."

THEY PROBABLY HIT <SHIFT>1, LIKE THIS!

HTH, HAND!

Re: Copies!!?

For the last 45 years or so, every time someone suggests that going "paperless" is a good idea, I buy more stock in Boise Cascade, Crown Zellerbach, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, Plum Creek Timber and Crane&Co ... I haven't lost a dime yet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

_{This is not investment advice, it's just is a testimonial, consult an expert before investing, etc.}

National Cash Register made a lot more than niche UNIX boxen ...

It's not all that arty. Simply print them, then once the ink is dry enough not to off-set too badly, jog 'em up all nice & neat a couple hundred sheets at a time, stick 'em in a padding rack, clamp them down, & paint the special "glue" that activates the sticky bit that sticks 'em together properly when dry ... three part, four part, five part, six part NCR, it's all the same.

The only "hard" part is setting up the numbering machine to crash-number[0] them, if they need individual numbers. A Heidelberg Platen ("Windmill") makes that a cake-walk.

[0] In crash numbering, ink is only transferred to the top sheet. The image is transferred through all the sheets, just like when you write or type on them. Obviously, this is done after you glue them together.

Re: It is always a good idea to talk to the end users

When consulting, ALWAYS ask the secretary about the Boss's computer knowledge. You can save a lot of time and trouble for a lot of people over the long haul.

I know of several C*-types of Fortune-500s who make a big show of "checking the computer", even though their network cable was "accidentally" never installed.

I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU, gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing.

After one consulting job, I didn't give a Sr. VP of a Fortune 150 the password to his brand new, triple-headed, US$7,500 desktop PC. This was back in 2007. He never even tried to log into it for the four years that it sat on his credenza, artfully cycling through screensavers. How do I know? Because I'm the only person who ever had the password. He never asked me for it, and his secretary refused when I offered it to her ... Over that four years, about once a quarter he called me up to take a look at it under warranty because "it did something funny". When I checked the logs, the last person to login was myself ... three months earlier. So I closed it down, opened it up, vacuumed it out, buttoned it back up, turned it on, cleared the logs and proclaimed it "fixed", The Boss thanked me every time. The secretary & IT staff also thanked me every time I came out, for keeping him out of their hair. I almost wish that I allowed them to renew the contract after the four years ...

_{As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...}

Re: What's Vi?

Just trolling? You should be ashamed of yourself.

I'd have blamed ed. _{[Over my dead body. —ed]}

Re: Others preferred

You're right. It was probably only 1200. Was a pair of Hayes Smartmodems. The 2400s (and v.22bis) came around a year or so later. One thing I do remember is that it was a Pilot build Sun 2/170, making this roughly late 1983.

Re: Vigor

vimgor exists, but is badly in need of updating.

https://vim.sourceforge.io/vimgor/

Maybe if I get a free minute ...

Re: What's Vi?

"I see your mistake"

My mistake?

Re: Others preferred

These days, ex is usually a symlink to vim. In the old days, vi was built on top of ex.

Re: Others preferred

ed is a small, stand-alone line editor and has nothing to do with vi. Handy when scripting. I think the last time I used ed to manually edit something was back in 1983ish (over a modem at around 2,400, fixed a b0rKen Sun 2/170).

Re: Others preferred

For you Slackware users out there, mc and mcedit are both included in the default installation.

For those of you who don't know, mc is Midnight Commander, a clone of the old MS-DOS utility Norton Commander that has been tweaked for the *nix environment. It's a useful tool, and a lot more powerful than it looks at first glance. I use it near daily. Recommended.

Free hint: Be extremely careful if you choose to run mc as root ... it will do exactly what you tell it to do. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Re: re: Stuxnet

If sneakernet is usable, that system is not airgapped. As the Iranians discovered.

Re: Mom! Jake is being toxic again.

Jake is posting again? I must have missed it.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/user/26670/

Nope, he hasn't posted since November 2008 ... maybe the other Jake?

https://forums.theregister.com/user/27355

No, no new posts since March of 2009 ...

Re: "This code makes my shoes sad."

Now, now, keep a civil tongue in your head or you'll wind up toe-to-toe and probably end up feeling soleful.

Re: Hoping they can publish a fix soon.

"The open source community is faltering"

Post proof or retract.

"because of the behavior you'd expect from unsocialized men."

What an awful, sexist comment. Have you reported for reprocessing yet?

Re: Racist, Sexist, and Antisemitic

"Thank you, vituperative added to my personal lexicon."

You'll probably love contumelious and opprobrious, too :-)

Re: Eh?

When one feels pushed into a corner, one usually pushes back.

Both "sides" seem to be punch-happy. It could have been handled more gracefully by all concerned. But it only grew acerbic[0] with give and take.

As they say, it takes two to tango.

[0] IMO, the word "toxic" is far too toxic to be used in this kind of context. It implies the writer is automatically correct, and the writee is automatically incorrect. That's toxic in and of itself.

Re: Eh?

"One might argue it's passive aggressive, unprofessional, and not particularly constructive."

One might ... if one is actively looking for things to get upset about.

Personally, I'd just answer something like "Your opinion is noted. Thank you.", and move on with more productive things to spend my time on. It is the fighting and bitching about trivial little shit like this[0] that is toxic, not the mere voicing of an opinion.

As Jon Postel put it "Of course, there isn’t any `God of the Internet.` The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together." He also said "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send". Smart man. RIP

[0] Come to think of it, if this is the most "toxic" thing the authors could come up with as an example, I guess the FOSS world isn't very toxic at all, despite the efforts of many over the last few years to make it appear so. Which might be a bigger, more important story.

Re: Accidental?

So many "ifs" in there that I'll bet you a plugged nickle you can not now, and never will, be able to point to an actual RealWorld example of your little fantasy.

Swatting at shadows is counter-productive, IMO.

Re: Who cares?

That dipwad in Uvalde had been pestering family members to illegally buy him a gun for months before his 18th birthday. The refused, because they knew he was a very disturbed individual. They could have flagged him, but choose not to.

"Being told how to vote"

Nobody said anything about telling people how to vote. Political debate has been normal since politics began. People have been changing their minds as facts become clear(er) for the same time frame.

MAGA ... Muppets Annoying Genuine Americans

Re: Are You Daft?

So-called "smallpox blankets" came about during the siege of Fort Pitt, during Pontiac's War in 1763. The United States didn't exist yet. It was Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, who was attempting germ warfare. As he wrote in a footnote of a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet on July 16th, 1663 P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race.

In other words, he was knowingly attempting genocide under the authority of the Crown. Nice group of folks, you Brits. Have you hugged your Golly today?

From what I've read the info doesn't actually include whether or not the listee actually owns a gun, just that they applied for a CCW ... It also doesn't mention how many dawgs, and of what breed, said home contains.

Re: Our privacy laws only punish data blunders

"None of the information listed needed to be stored in an internet connected system."

FTFY.

Something most people are missing is that SCotUS has, even at it's most "liberal", always ruled in favo(u)r of a literal reading of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

Now, after getting loaded by right-wing whack-jobs by the Trump regime, the anti-gun zealots might as well give up for a bit. It's a completely lost cause, as is the abortion debate. All that energy and angst would be far better spent trying to convince people to stop voting Republican. If the House and Senate manages to become overloaded with Democrats, some of this can be reversed ... and legally, without resorting to tricks, at that.

But it won't happen, because nobody can see the long term. They want it their way, and they want it now. Nothing else is even to be considered. The myopic fools.

"Any modern pistol is semi-automatic."

Untrue. There are many modern[0] single shot pistols in both break and bolt action, some multi-shot in break action, and of course all the single-action revolvers.

[0] Modern in metallurgy, mechanical design, and esthetic.

The cops here in Northern California, where we have gun buy-backs quite regularly, say that they do absolutely nothing to curb violence because criminals can always get a gun if they want one, and pay no attention to the law (kinda by definition ... they are criminals. DUH!) All the buy-backs do is make for feel-good media clips, along with politicians saying "look, we are doing something!". The psychos are still at large, though.

"Have I been mis-lead by Hollywood?"

What kind of dumb-ass question is THAT?

Virtually everything you have seen on TV about America is either made-up to sell a script, or an anomaly that is so far out of place and abnormal that it makes the news as far away as your jurisdiction.

Remember, horrendous acts by psychopaths aren't "normal". That's precisely why they are "news". You never actually hear about what normal people are doing, day to day. Which is pretty much exactly the same thing as every other human on the planet does day-to-day.

For example, I'm about to go pick some veggies for our evening meal. Tomatoes, chilis, squash, salad stuff, some onions .... whatever looks tasty at the moment.

SHOCK! HORROR! Yanks eat food! Details at 11!!!!!11!!one!!!111!!!!!!eleven1!!!!