* Posts by jake

26589 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

jake Silver badge

Re: Not lost in translation

"Long before 'tinternet ...mercy snip... "le floppy disque"."

The thing we now call "The Internet" existed a couple years before IBM released the first commercial floppy disks to the world, in 1971.

jake Silver badge

Re: At long last...

TINC

jake Silver badge

Re: Figured out what THAT meant

DOOM was the game of choice among networked computer users of the time. The unimaginative used it as a template for almost everything. Was a bloody boring time for a couple years ... everything was DOOM related. Worse even than everyone and the dog attempting to get the first bloody obvious reference to Red Dwarf ot HHGTTG in before everyone else does ...

No, Cisco didn't semi-officially ever call a router that. They sure had some other good names for them, though ... some were even repeatable in mixed company.

jake Silver badge

Accidentally? No ...

... but in the early days of the spam wars, I very intentionally dropped two /8s on the floor. Twice. At the time, they needed killing. I also dropped several other smaller, but still largish blocks. I even intentionally dropped entire countries more than a handful of times ... A couple of those blocks and countries are still in my personal blackhole list (probably only used by ~2 million seats these days ... was considerably more back then).

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

jake Silver badge

Re: Dickheads?

"He's just doing what other MAGA sheep do"

Remember, kiddies, MAGA stands for Muppets Annoying Genuine Americans. Please, pass it on wherever you see an idiot wearing the hat.

This public service announcement brought to you by the letter T and the number e; we now return you to your usual ElReg weekend warriors bickering.

No actual republicans or democrats were harmed during the making of this PSA.

jake Silver badge

Re: Which scheme did the democrats use to steal the election?

To say nothing of the fact that whoever supposedly "stole" the election didn't bother to similarly steal a couple seats in close races in the Senate (they already had the House), which would have given the Democrats actual power on Capitol Hill, as opposed to just the appearance of power by gaining the Oval Office.

jake Silver badge

Or perhaps a stoned asshole muttering to himself via twitter from the safety of his Sooper Sekrit Lair.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dickheads?

Pointing out that a shitpost is a shitpost is "woke" in you mind?

Interesting view of the world you have there.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dickheads?

Being a dickhead is who you are, not what you've accomplished.

jake Silver badge

Re: scanning the anon posts in this thread.

"a certain rocket company dude!"

Shirley you mean Head Space Cadet.

jake Silver badge

Re: Whose money?

And if you owe USD $25,000,000,000,000,000 to anybody: you're a Government.

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

jake Silver badge

"If it can't be connected to the web, it can't easily be bricked"

Unless it has a cellular connection designed specifically for the factory to connect to the equipment. Which they do.

The web? WTF said anything about that particular subset of TehIntrewebTubes?

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment?

"but there's another option"

No, there is not. You are not listening. Deere is not going to do this unless forced to do so by legislation. It would put a serious dent in their profits from their repair scams schemes.

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment

"But in fact you can buy stuff manufactured by third parties, if there's demand."

You can BUY it, sure ... but will it work?

You;d be surprised how much stuff is computer controlled these days, even on tractors. And the computer won't let the vehicle run if the "wrong" part is installed. This is evil, evil behavio(u)r.

jake Silver badge

Re: If the manufacturer can remotely brick something you bought, then you don't own it.

"I know it's cool to say things like this"

It's not cool, it's reality. John Deere will not allow farmers to work on what is supposedly their own kit, despite the fact that most farmers are vastly better mechanics than the so-called "technicians" that come out of John Deere Indoctrination Camp School. In our mind, this makes JD kit virtually worthless, and many of us are voting with our wallets. (Eyeball the ratio of JD sales profits to service profits over the last decade if you want a real eye-opener.)

"You can buy cars which are forced by GPS to have speed limiters in place based on where you are located, and the ability to call some sort of AAA company and get them to lock down your stolen vehicle has been around for years."

You can, maybe. I will not. That kind of shit is just asking to be abused by whoever passes for "the authorities". And seemingly, it increasingly is. Slippery slope and all that.

Enjoy your serfdom, consumers. I'll continue the fight. You can thank me later. There will be no charge ... unless I lose, in which case we all pay with our freedom.

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment

Chances are they'll just drive it into the nearest ditch or hedgerow, from which it can be retrieved.

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment

"Thieves drove up in a lorry - picked up the bike and concrete block - put them on the lorry and drove away."

Sounds like a job for a self-loader on a flatbed to me. Hydraulics are a lot stronger than they look.

Regardless, you're not going to pick up a piece of large farm equipment with a couple guys in a flatbed. Not even with a self-loader.

jake Silver badge

Re: They can be completely bricked, sadly

"A dealer callout for a tech with a laptop to "re-validate" everything before you are going anywhere."

Except Deere won't send out a tech for such a thing ... rather, you have to pay to transport your factory-disabled kit to the stdealership (and back) to unlock it. If you can get an appointment, that is. Good luck with that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Spare parts

Not really. Those spare parts are serialized, and signed with a cryptographic key. Plug in an "unauthorized" part, and the computer locks you out of the controls.

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment?

Except Deere refuses to give the supposed owner any such rights to the control systems.

jake Silver badge

Re: If I owned a piece of equipment

They are as useless as possible to thieves. It's kinda hard to quietly fire up a combine and drive off with it in the middle of the night. Even loading it onto a trailer makes enough noise to wake the dead ... and for the really big kit, you need a permit to transport it, and all the local cops know who has a permit, and for what. Try to transport something without that permit and you'll get busted within half an hour.

"The problem farmers have with DRM is that the way it is used prevents them from making repairs."

Correct.

"The ability for farm equipment to be remotely bricked is something I doubt they have any issue with, because it is to their benefit."

Wrong. We have huge issues with the manufacturer deciding they are allowed to put the equipment into limp mode because they have decided that farmers aren't allowed to change our own fluids and filters. Pretty much anything more than that, and they brick the gear until the factory mechanic can un-brick it. Usually two or three weeks after the planting or harvesting window opens. And even then, only if we pay to transport the equipment to the dealer (and back) for the privilege. Fuck that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Deere me

"it is impossible to know where it is now."

Incorrect. They are GPS equipped.

As for the rest of yours, Deere doesn't care. As far as Deere is concerned, they own all their gear. You are merely permitted to operate it as long as you don't break Deere's very capricious rules.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

jake Silver badge

"with only one screen I cannot remember the password long enough to transfer it."

You've never head of paper and pencil? Note that this intermediary step is trivially destroyed by fire. Or ingesting. Or any number of other methods.

jake Silver badge

Re: It's def about money. Just not yours.

Sez the dude/tte who created an ElReg account for this one, single post.

Shill away, dude/tte, shill away. We smell where you're coming from.

jake Silver badge

Re: Upgrade!!!!

I've got all kinds of old kit still doing useful work. None of it will ever be downgraded to this new, about to be forced upon the rubes, "standard".

Thankfully, I see no need to do business with the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google and their ilk ... Not now, and not into the foreseeable future. The Internet (and my old kit) will still be trucking along quite nicely long after they and their megalomaniacal ideas are dead and buried.

Did you know Twitter has an open-source arm? This is what it's been up to

jake Silver badge

What a brilliant idea. I wonder why nobody's thought of it before.

"Independent accounts, which can be used across multiple separate, federated, social networks, but which don't rely on any single hosting site. An account which can survive the disappearance of the server, or service, that it originated from."

They could call it Independently Relocatable Contacts, or IRC for short :-)

Rocket Lab successfully catches falling rocket booster with a helicopter

jake Silver badge

Re: Does it work economically

My money is on a computer controlled glide back to the launch site, with a parachute for the final landing.

jake Silver badge

Re: Wish there was a video

The camera is looking straight down. The installer didn't take into account little things like momentum and inertia in a rope hanging from a platform that is constantly changing speed and direction. Not certain how they could have, either.

jake Silver badge

Re: Wish there was a video

You can change that to t=3150 to avoid wasting too much time.

Or, for a wrap up, try t=5707

jake Silver badge

Re: "a supersonic ballet"

Peter Beck's babble is pretty much all marketing fluff. Last time I checked, helicopters find it to be rather difficult to get even close to "supersonic". Nothing to lose sleep over.

On the other hand, catching stuff falling from orbit has been fairly common since the late 1950s (see the CORONA program).

jake Silver badge

Catch and release, then.

Takes all of the fun out of it if you can't bring it home & show the neighbors.

Human-made hopper out-leaps rival robots in artificial jumping contest

jake Silver badge

Re: The next hurdle

"There's plenty of instrumentation available for much lighter birds and insects."

What kind of G forces can that instrumentation repeatedly take without failing?

jake Silver badge

Re: The next hurdle

"but it seems to me it solves a problem nobody had."

There is an awful lot of that going around these days.

jake Silver badge

Re: The next hurdle

"The problem with flying robots is that the don't work well on the Moon."

That would depend entirely on how much reaction mass the robots have access to.

jake Silver badge

Re: The next hurdle

"How many bounds before it breaks?"

That was my first thought. Longevity can't be good. Too much stress in components designed to be as light as possible.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Just one jump?

::snort::

Have a beer :-)

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

jake Silver badge

Re: Missing the larger point

"This is our real future."

Future? It's happening right now. I know a guy who, at age almost 60, was just turned down for a seat on The Board of a Fortune 150 because of something he posted to a private Usenet group (propagated to his Uni only) some 40 years earlier ... when he was 19 years old. It had been picked up by his rival for a seat in school politics and reposted to the school newspaper. The post was obviously just trolling, which he pointed out in the following issue of the very same paper. Ultimately he was voted into office at the Uni ... but today's Board decided that one joke post, made four decades earlier, trumped his 40 years of unblemished record in Corporate America.

Enjoy your future, Millennials and Zoomers ... You asked for complete, total and utter political correctness, and it looks like you'll have it. It's OK, though. Your kids will rebel. Kids always do. Everything's cyclic.

jake Silver badge

Re: Heavage

"The exposure of the Dabbs "Heavage" would be allowed."

I suspect the lovely Mlle Dabbs might have something to say about that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Metaverse metafictional metaphorically

"or Eliza (a program that pretends to be a therapist)"

ELIZA was only a therapist when she donned her Doctor persona; as ELIZA she was a general purpose chatterbot.

If you have a copy of EMACS handy and would like to see ELIZA in action in her DOCTOR persona, fire up EMACS and type M-x doctor.

Ex-Googlers take a stab at building 'general intelligence' that makes software do what you tell it

jake Silver badge

Re: Pizza

Personally, I always keep something handy that'll allow me to get me through a few extra hours without getting hangry ... Again, it's hardly my fault if you are unprepared.

It's also hardly my fault if you're going to hold your breath until you are sick if you don't get your pizza when you demand it. Some of us don't sweat the petty stuff, life's too short.

jake Silver badge

Re: Pizza

All of what you wrote indicates a distinct lack of planning.

Your lack of planning does not equal my problem.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

jake Silver badge

Re: Systemd-hate

There is a reason that an init, traditionally, is a small bit of code that does one thing very well. Like most of the rest of the *nix core utilities. All an init should do is start PID1, set run level, spawn a tty (or several), handle a graceful shutdown, and log all the above in plaintext to make troubleshooting as simplistic as possible. Anything else is a vanity project that is best placed elsewhere, in it's own stand-alone code base.

Inventing a clusterfuck init variation that's so big and bulky that it needs to be called a "suite" is just asking for trouble. The systemd-cancer is b0rken by design and implementation.

A cancer? Yes, by any definition. Consider: systemd takes root in its host, eats massive quantities of resources as it grows, spreads unchecked into areas unrelated to the initial infection, and refuses to die unless physically removed from the system, all the while doing absolutely nothing of benefit to the host. That sounds an awful lot like a cancer to me ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Auto update and reboot anyone?

I have very definitely removed pulseaudio without rebooting.

Rocket Lab to attempt mid-air recovery of descending booster

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: I'll only watch....

"If they make a film of this it will sound like a Huey..."

Not if, when. And yes, it undoubtedly will.

About a million years ago, I watched a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane placing a satellite dish on the roof of ::mumble:: ... Naturally, they hired a professional video crew to document this exciting day. When the 10 minute film was shown to The Board, the Sikorsky's very distinctive twin engine sound had been replaced by that of a Huey. I laughed, and got yelled at :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: Sample returns

The conspiracy nuts must be wondering if that plinth that was out in the Red Rocks area was broadcasting a signal as a test target for this kind of thing :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: I'll only watch....

It's not a Huey. It's a Sikorsky S-92.

jake Silver badge

::mental note::

Don't volunteer for helicopter "special duty".

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

jake Silver badge

Re: Bears in a forest

Nah, Tracing paper is much more absorbent. And machine shop waste is softer.

jake Silver badge

Yes, whataboutism. People who live in glass houses & all that.

"I occasionally have to buy Chinese goods because I can't do without"

What flavo(u)r was the coolaid?

"and feel that other nations should copy China here."

You do realize that if your nation emulated China, you would very probably be one of the first up against the wall, right? Be careful what you wish for ...

As for the pinto, virtually everything you typed was wrong. But don't let that stop you. I just love the sound of a good knee-jerk in the morning. Now read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Subsequent_analysis

Don't you just hate it when facts get in the way of a good rant?

(tl;dr version: The Pinto was a heap of shit for many reasons, but it was hardly the firetrap that the Popular Press made it out to be, and in fact was safer than most other cars in its class. Ford was subjected to mass hysteria in much the same way as the "Salem Witches".)

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