* Posts by jake

26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Salesforce sued in attempt to block release of Capitol riot info

jake Silver badge

Re: Buttery males

"Why would that lot bother to understand something when every problem they ever faced in life, big, small and insignificant, can be solved by shouting and being angry at the Democrats?"

FTFY

Someone should explain the meaning of the psychological term "projection" to the Republicans.

jake Silver badge

Re: All parties

"If the Republicans have to do it then it should alsobe done for the Democrats"

The trouble with that line of reasoning in this particular case is that the Democrats haven't been accused of being complicit in the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Trump and his Republicans have, for what are clearly obvious reasons. The only question remaining is how far they went in their attempt at the un-American and anti-America activity of overthrowing the United States Government. Thus the request for information.

No point in pussy-footing around, call it what it was. Unless you're a coward, of course.

Ford to sell unfinished Explorers as chip shortage bites

jake Silver badge

Re: liking the new normal

Toyota started selling the software that will allow the removal of the already paid for remote start option with the 2020 Camery. It will go subscription only in 2023 after a three year "trial". This is to be the new normal across Toyota's linup per the Toyota dealership in Napa, California. To which I replied "Fuck that, Toyota is permanently off my purchase list.". The dealer said he wasn't surprised, he's heard a lot of that.

jake Silver badge

Well, they are not exactly evenly distributed around the country, so it is, in fact, a site of unfinished Broncos.

jake Silver badge

Re: $50 Credit

Looks like about 7 gallons here in Northern California.

jake Silver badge

Quite frankly ...

... If Ford (or any other manufacturer) were to start selling a stripped-down line of vehicles with absolutely no computers whatsoever, I'd be first in line to purchase one.

Yes, that includes engine and transmission electronics ... give me mechanical fuel injection or a carb, points, and a manual transmission every time. Far, far less to go wrong, a lighter overall vehicle, easier to work on, and cheaper when things do go wrong. What's not to like?

Bonus points for a hose-out interior and mechanical windows and door locks.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

jake Silver badge

Re: DOS

Proprietary stuff costs money.

I keep my Vet's blood machine running. It's an original Idexx Vettest 8008, and is about 30 years old. It is essentially a PC XT clone, with enough kit grafted into it do do blood tests. It's up-to-date, though ... it runs a version of FreeDOS, because MS-DOS is no longer supported.

I know of about fifty of these things still in use here in the SF Bay Area, because I have worked on them. I suspect there are several hundred more. (I bought a bunch of used units 23ish years ago from Vets with Y2K worries ... I was speculating on the need for spares in the future. It was a good guess on my part. I have since augmented my stock by purchasing them whenever I run across 'em.)

jake Silver badge

Re: I once used MS Access...

"I have at times had roles where when asked what my job is I reply "To make myself redundant!""

As an IT consultant, I tell prospective new clients "It's my job to ensure we see as little of each other as possible".

jake Silver badge

Temporary hacks aint.

If you are reading this, you're probably using the hack that I put together in 4.1BSD (now called 4.1aBSD) for part of the TCP/IP stack to be included in 4.2BSD[0]. It was supposed to be one of those "Just get us through the demo, dammit!" hacks. I got 'er done over Christmas/NewYears break in 1981. Virtually every version of TCP/IP since has used it. Not too bad for a quick hack.

[0] Just to cut the usual pack of idiots putting words into my mouth off at the socks, no, I didn't write the whole stack. That's why I said "part of". It is only about 120 lines of C in total.

jake Silver badge

Re: "Or written a temporary bit of code that ended up becoming too permanent?"

I am always more than happy to do so :-)

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

jake Silver badge

Re: Does Diesel not go off?

So run it on natural gas, with propane as a worst-case scenario backup. Propane stores virtually indefinitely, and most generators make switching between the two fairly painless. (Same for most household appliances, BTW ... switch gas source and jetting and Bob's yer Auntie.)

No space in your yard for a large propane tank? Look into getting it buried.

jake Silver badge

"Dunno about current US prices"

Too high. I have seen $7.499/US gallon.

Fortunately I had my bulk tanks filled about three weeks ago. Hopefully we'll have enough to last the current bit of stupidity.

jake Silver badge

I have done similar ... Bust a hole in the fuel tank of my truck after kicking up a branch in the wilds between Mono Lake and Yosemite. Climbed a hill to get my bearings (and hopefully a cell signal), and discovered a ranch off in the distance. Hiked about 8 miles with no trail to speak of, only to discover it was an unoccupied off-grid line-camp. Poked around a bit, and discovered a 5 gallon can of gas about half full ... I left a short note and the hundred dollar bill I always carry for emergencies, and carried it back to my rig. Not fun, but after strapping it under the hood, with a length of fuel line running to the pump, I made it back to civilization.

The following weekend, having located the line-camp on a map, I returned with a now full gas can, and a second as a "thank you". Nobody had collected the hundred as of yet ... so I added to the note, and left both gas cans and the money.

jake Silver badge

Re: Stealing more than fuel

I have cameras (and two-way voice, if I need/want it) out there now. Back then such things were cost prohibitive.

jake Silver badge

No. They don't offer stamps for kids on dirtbikes.

On the other hand, it's nearly always tourist season ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Flashlight

I always carry a AAA-powered single-cell Mag-lite. Little bits of good light are more useful more often than you might think.

Yes, I know, I should swap it for a more modern rechargable light with LED bulb ... trouble is I can't find one that is as easy to carry as what I have now AND seems to be built for the long-haul like the 30+ year old unit in my pocket.

I'm open to suggestions.

jake Silver badge

"Rural folk don't steal from their neighbours"

Transplanted city folks sometimes do. Once.

jake Silver badge

I'm sure it happened somewhere.

I had someone steal the fuel out of a riding lawnmower once. I had topped the thing up (three wimpy US gallons), then headed back to civilization, intending to return the following weekend to mow the verges of our access road. I got back two weeks later and discovered the gas cap removed and the tank empty ... but everything else was exactly where I had left it. This was down a 5 mile driveway, behind three locked gates.

Judging by the tire marks, it was three kids on dirtbikes.

jake Silver badge

Single points of failure always do.

I landed a contract to install two big, garage sized, Memorex tape backup robots at a large number-crunching outfit once. Before I bid on the job, the VP of operations gave me the grand tour. He was proud of all his redundancy. He had two power lines coming in to two separate rooms, with a motor-generator, a large battery consisting of dozens of telco-style lead-acid batteries, a generator, and monitoring systems for each room-full of gear. The 48 Volts was switched by a box at the corner where the two rooms met, brought into the main building via a 5" conduit, where it was switched to two separate computer rooms. Even the links between outlying offices were redundant T-1 and T-3 lines. There was a third "data center" that was dark, to be used for spares "just in case". It was designed to provide non-stop operations, and it did a pretty good job of it. Even the Halon had built-in redundancy.

Until a semi-truck carrying some of my Memorex kit backing into the receiving dock went off course & cut the 5" conduit. The security cameras caught the sparks quite nicely.

Two weeks after getting the tape robots installed and signed off, I had a proposal for a more geographically diverse version of the same thing on the VP's desk. I didn't land that contract, alas.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

jake Silver badge

Re: Ice cream full of air was a stroke of genius

Without air, you don't have ice-cream, you have a solid block of blech.

Ice-cream is a freeze-stabilized foam ... The milk/cream/sugar/flavo(u)r mixture is foamed with air while being frozen. Without the foaming process, the individual ingredients will separate out during the freezing process (fractional distillation by crystallization), leaving a mess. You can demonstrate this for yourself by mixing up any recipe for ice-cream and popping it into a freezer without using an ice-cream maker. Then thaw it out and make it it properly, waste not want not.

Think you don't have an ice-cream maker? Think again ... use your favorite webby-pointy-clicky-searchy-thingie to look up "Tin Can Ice-cream".

jake Silver badge

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

"Incidentally, she hates computers with a passion despite being around them for 40-50 years."

Doesn't surprise me in the least. There are many of us posting here on ElReg who resemble that remark (minus being your wife, of course).

jake Silver badge

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

But it is denigration, and you know it. She got the positions she got in the late '50s and early '60s DESPITE being female in a world of men. Which means that she worked her ass off. Bringing race into the issue makes it sound like she merely lucked into the jobs simply because she was white, which is total and complete bullshit, and indeed a form of racism in and of itself.

Before you poo-poo this, THINK about it ... The only reason for your derogatory comment is because of her skin colo(u)r. Isn't that the very definition of racism?

I don't remember MLK saying "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will judge white people by the color of their skin, instead of the content of their character." ... do you?

jake Silver badge

Re: Paper tape at first.

I learned card weaving (kind of a cross between simple backstrap weaving and Jacquard ... look it up) back in the 1960s in Palo Alto. It was a bit of a fad at the time, you can see hippys wearing belts and headbands made this way in photos of the era. I made the guitar strap that I still use today in roughly 1970.

Creating new patterns (including lettering in a variety of fonts) is without a doubt simple programming ... Did it help shape my mind for the computer revolution that was to come? Probably. Hard to say for sure ... but I made sure to teach my daughter this deceptively simple technique.

Give it a whirl. It's cheap (you can make all the hardware at home, even if you're not particularly handy), relaxing and a useful skill in that you can make custom flat webbing for almost any need.

jake Silver badge

Re: Nee Petri

Depends on your perspextive.

jake Silver badge

Re: Interference.

Starting and stopping the lift played merry hell with harmonics in the mains.

Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why, not even IBM's field circus dudes.

Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.

Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.

Next-gen Moon buggy FLEX conquers California desert, seeks lunar speed record

jake Silver badge

Re: Ludicrous

No more ludicrous that Europeans bringing horses to help explore the Americas.

jake Silver badge

Re: EVA

Not so much in as on. It's doorless and topless.

jake Silver badge

Re: California Desert

Nah. Contrary to the lies of the greenaholics, there are a lot more square inches of desert than there are square inches of desert rat ... and for the most part, the rats live in loose rocks and largish deadwood (cabins, mine sites), which are usually avoided by desert off-roaders.

jake Silver badge

Mine's faster!

"As well the potential to carry a pair of astronauts, the trundlebot can lug three cubic metres of payload slung beneath it (weighing in at 1,000kg)."

So it's basically a pickup truck. I'll take a dune buggy in that terrain, TYVM.

""The nominal speed of FLEX is 15kph but we hope to push this a bit and set a new lunar speed record at just over the 18kph that Eugene Cernan did in 1972."

Until some enterprising astronaut manages to retrieve and hot-rod one of the original rovers :-)

Read in light of the fact that the first automobile race undoubtedly occurred the first time two drivers encountered each other.

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

jake Silver badge

Re: For those wowed by how much DNA they share with people from other countries

Nonsense. If you go back a glaciation event or two, that was all dry land.

jake Silver badge

Re: Je t'aime...

Out of curiosity, would you expect it to be better or worse than the original?

Personally, my answer to that question would be an unequivocal "Mu!".

jake Silver badge

Re: Melting pot

The Finns were traders, and undoubtedly some individuals joined their Scandinavian neighbors on voyages, but as a whole the Finns were mostly homebodies.

The article linked by the OP has far too many inaccuracies to list here.

jake Silver badge

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

"The singing and the competition aspect were dreadful."

FTFY

jake Silver badge

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

The one useful thing the eurodrival pap contest did was drive me away from mainstream radio and into the arms of Radio Caroline, which lead me to John Peel and sanity.

jake Silver badge

Re: For those wowed by how much DNA they share with people from other countries

"I mean, how can we be more like a banana than a bee?"

Well, bananas and humans are both known for concentrating radioactivity. Bees, not so much.

Bees are also quite cooperative, bananas and humans not so much.

jake Silver badge

Re: Surgically separated five percent?

"He's hung like a bear!!"

It's possible. I have the baculum[0] of a 200 lb adult American black bear, from California. It is just under 5 inches long. Polar bears, at ~1100 lb typically run just under 7.5 inches.

[0] It's legal, a gift from a tribe here in Northern California when I got married.

Why Nvidia sees a future in software and services: Recurring revenue

jake Silver badge

Re: $1,000 a person per year ... That's one important piece

"This distorted and distorting belief is the root of the problem."

So true. One must always remember the shareholders. So the actual job of the company is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders.

jake Silver badge

Re: Funny how all the big guys think they can turn their hardware into a subscription service

"I don't pay monthly for the right to drive my vehicle... I pay my road tax annually!"

That's for the right to use the roads, not the right to drive your car.

jake Silver badge

Re: Subscription Services!!!

I use water, electricity and gas. I produce sewage that needs to be taken away. These are actual physical things that are consumed or removed.

The heater for my car seat and remote start capability are neither consumed nor a waste product that needs removal.

jake Silver badge

Re: OTA updates?

Again, it would be best not to buy into such a hair-brained scheme in the first place.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

jake Silver badge

Re: What ?

Probably all the ElReg users overloading it.

Not joking ... bumps in traffic after articles like this one are normal. Especially on weekends.

jake Silver badge

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

But Linux gives UI[0] access to EVERYTHING, whereas Redmond (in its infinite glory) has decided that there are aspects of Windows that users (and their admins) are not allowed to access. Fuck that.

Office is not really a competitive advantage, outside the shallow minds of the gullible. Bundles are for the easily lead down the garden path.

[0] UI is short for user interface. Perhaps you meant to specify either Command-line User Interface or Graphical User Interface?

jake Silver badge

Re: @RegGuy1

The buzzphrase you are probably looking for is "focus follows pointer". Windows had it natively as an option starting with Win95 (registry hack ... I believe TweakUI could make the change). It's useful for some things, hellaciously annoying for others. I use it probably once a month or so on Slackware w/KDE (pointy-clicky: System Settings -> Window Behavior -> Window Behavior -> Focus, a slider gives 6 different variations on the theme.)

I have three monitors, the native laptop screen, a much larger external monitor, and a dumb terminal. The laptop has 2 virtual desktops side by side, just in case. I rarely use more than one. I can also hot-key into 6 command prompts (this last is stock for Slackware).

The external monitor has 6 desktops, in a 1x6 grid. 5 are in near constant use, the 6th is kind of a scratch pad.

The dumb terminal is just that ... IBM 3151 (amber) at the moment. Handy if the GUI goes TITSUP[0] (rare as that is these days), and I do most of my serious writing on it.

[0] Total Inability To Show the Usual Pr0n^H^H^Hictures.

jake Silver badge

Re: What ?

To be fair, servers shouldn't need rebooting often enough for it to matter how long it takes. Shit, my desktops rarely get rebooted. This isn't Windows.

jake Silver badge

Re: @RegGuy1

Have you tried the supposedly "hard" Slackware yet/recently? Works for the Wife, MeDearOldMum, and my Great Aunt.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

FWIW, Slackware has worked out of the box for me (including sound & video codecs) on various PCs and laptops I've installed it on over the past decade plus, and neither of the standard desktops (KDE and XFCE, others are available) are wildly unfamiliar to a Windows (or Mac) user.

What was so special about Zorin, again?

Imitation is the ... ah, have a beer instead.

jake Silver badge

Re: Android Apps

It's based on the Ubuntu toy. No need.

jake Silver badge

Re: you will need to pay up if you want access to desktop interfaces styled on Windows and macOS

"Having said that I wish Gnome would stop doing its stupid things'

Some people have been wishing that for a decade and a half or so. The rest of us have decided that Gnome's developers are irrational, and that Gnome is no longer worth bothering with.

jake Silver badge

Re: you will need to pay up if you want access to desktop interfaces styled on Windows and macOS

"Isn't that why people use Linux? Because it's not Windows?"

No. I use Linux because it's stable and works. Windows is fragile, and frequently doesn't.

jake Silver badge

Re: Support for Ukraine

Just donate the same money to the charity of your choice. No need to change your distribution, eliminate at least one middleman taking his cut, and YOU get any tax benefits, not said middleman.

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