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* Posts by fourth of three

11 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2011

Are you aware of the gravity of the situation on Mars? Why yes, say boffins: We rejigged Curiosity to measure it

fourth of three
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Push out s/w mods and they WORK

Kudos to them all.

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Red alert! Intel patches remote execution hole that's been hidden in chips since 2010

fourth of three

SPARC core?

"These days, the Management Engine uses a SPARC core."

Being a sparc fan, this brought a sad smile to my face.

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Last Concorde completes last journey, at maybe Mach 0.02

fourth of three
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Re: Good looking

Indeed -- a magnificent looking bird! We saw the last take-off from Pearson in our office just south of the airport. Facing awway from us, all the windows shook as she lifted up at a steep angle, and flew off. Not a sight and sound to forget.

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Spies would need superpowers to tap undersea cables

fourth of three

Are these cables insured?

A glance at the risks section of the policy would be highly informative.

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Fujitsu's King K thrashes Top 500 rivals

fourth of three

What OS is it running?

That's a lot of hardware to track.

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Popular FTP package download tarball poisoned

fourth of three

How many would check?

"it is unlikely that too many of the tech-savvy users of vsftpd fell victim to the hack. "

Wc reports >16k lines in the source files. Fairly compact but how many are going to look through them before invoking make?

Even if you wrote "Please note that this distribution contains malicious code" in the INSTALL file, I doubt that few would notice. This is human nature.

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Oracle Solaris 11 to abandon elderly servers

fourth of three
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OpenBSD preferred

OpenBSD was born on Sparc and is my choice.

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Scientists reveal eight-legged Jurassic beast

fourth of three

Is 15cm really that large?

Okay, so I have not checked -- because I would rather not -- but surely present-day weavers exceed 15cm in leg-span. Nearly ran into one of their webs when I was young on vacation with my parents. At the time, the thing seemed absolutely monstrous and gave nightmares for some time.

Present phobias aside, a beautiful specimen.

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One-armed Maine residents whip out switchblades

fourth of three
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Dragged behind

"where a participant was dragged behind a horse"

Ahh -- I did not know that. We use the break-away stirrups.

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fourth of three

Switchblades and horses

When I was a lad, a kindly surplus-store salesperson once tried to sell me a switchblade sans spring with the spring sold separately. (He cut himself illustrating how to put it together. I declined to buy it.)

Horses are tied -- not literally, this is terminology used to indicate attaching reins or lead shanks to objects. In the event of panic, one may wish to free the horse quickly by cutting the reins or lead. One really should use leather reins and leads, as these can be easilly broken by the horse but "western" riders tend to use very strong nylon rope, hence the need for a cutting tool.

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Croatian brainboxes deploy calculus-based CAPTCHA

fourth of three

I could not remember ...

whether Dsin is cos or -cos. (Sigh.)

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