Posts by bombastic bob

Re: This is exactly what the internet was designed for

maybe just bite the bullet with a) a browser that destroys all history/cookies/cache on exit, and b) 10 minute e-mail address

(assuming the video is worth watching...)

/me wonders if youtube-dl will download it ANYWAY

["restricted content" usually means pr0n and THAT would make sense, as a joke]

Re: Death to Flat Style !

from the article:

But if there is a particular bit of Windows 98 UI design that needs to come back in 2020

How about 3D SKEUOMORPHIC!

(I would like VERY much to say "IT IS HAPPENING" but not *quite* enough activity for THAT claim... yet)

I should look at this and see what could be ported over to FIREFOX'S CSS somehow...

Re: Repeat Offenders?

"can the Pythonistas be trusted to not do this ever again? It’s been fairly off putting."

No. Good point.

Re: lol

Django? I had to deal with that, at one time. *shudder* - it re-defines new levels for BLOATware.

My solution to MANY of the problems it CAUSED by Django (and bad python code) was to write C language utilities to do REAL work with reasonable performance, and then call the programs from the Django Python code [instead of trying to gerrymander Python code] and not only made it work properly [from the user perspective], but made it way more than 10 times faster in the process. That code should NEVER have been done in Python to begin with...

It was also the first time I'd seen upstream feature creep break an installation. I figured out how to force Pip to ONLY load specific versions of things to prevent breakage, just so I could work on it. It was sad.

Re: lol

I have a suggestion: why NOT add backwards compatibility BACK INTO THE LANGUAGE?

You know, like a COMPATIBILITY MODE ???

can't be THAT hard...

(or, is it MORE important to WIELD CONTROL and FORCE DEVELOPERS to "do things the new way" ???)

WHY make the older code IN-compatible like this?

I saw THIS which explains SOME of it... but it does NOT explain why there isn't a "backward compatible" setting of some kind.

This seems to be one of those things that came about in the mid to late naughties, after which a bunch of VERY ARROGANT DEVELOPERS over the next few years just "DECIDED" - culminating in gnome 3, Australis, 2D FLATTY Windows 8, systemD, Pulse Audio, and of course the changes in Python 3 - they "JUST DECIDED" that ALL OF US MUST CHANGE and do things THEIR WAY!!!

And of course, it *WAS* *RESISTED*, to the point of forking gnome 2 into Mate, creating Linux distros withOUT SystemD, and "forcing" the extension of the life of Python 2.7 ...

maybe a FORK is in order? [are there enough people to support such a thing?]

I don't do a lot of Python coding and so I may just deal with it and do things "the 3.x" way, but it might be nice to be able to write old-style code, which I had gotten used to, using a "compatibility" flag.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

that's two hundred people before you show symptoms - if you ever show any.

The numbers from a compelling Stanford University survey [as reported by the S.F. Chronicle recently] says that the infection rate of the Wuhan virus could be 50 to 85 TIMES HIGHER than expected, mostly people with mild or NO symptoms at all. So take that 200 people, times 85 [for the people who do not show symptoms] and extrapolate the new infection rate...

Seriously contagious, isn't it? Yet, not so fatal when the denominator is multiplied by 50 [this puts it VERY close to influenza, for which we DO NOT SHUT DOWN, EVAR]. And with those kinds of numbers, tracking "known cases" (one in 50? one in 85? or WORSE?) doesn't sounds so useful any more... [and neither does HUNKER IN YOUR BUNKER or even wearing masks to prevent spreading it]. Though I'd expect if you're coughing or sneezing you should PROBABLY wear a mask... (I would).

A few weeks from now people are going to realize I was right about this all along. If your infection rates do NOT look like New York City did, or Italy did, chances are they won't. And the USA will have plenty of masks, ventilators, and gloves to share in case they do. [already happening]. So living paranoid about "was I near an infected person" - and a PHONE APP to track you - pointless indeed.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

YES! (why would ANYONE downvote that?)

the first person who's furloughed or fired for having been NEAR someone that "tested positive" for the Wuhan virus, and "just has to accept it", will prove the point.

Re: And the non-centralised approach

"Or I will uninstall the app"

that's where you got it right.

NO privacy violations! [whatever happened to GDPR ???]

I guess when Henny Penny and Chicken Little decide the SKY IS FALLING, then all privacy-protection bets are OFF.

I like what the academics warned about this at the beginning of the article, but the "ruling class" elite learned LONG ago that manipulating a population through Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt leaves a LOT of citizens willing to give up freedom for a FALSE sense of security.

Re: Yet another example

well cloudy servers have their place BUT yeah, "all eggs in one basket" shouldn't be done either. Somewhere a balance of that would make the most sense. Maybe the cloud system includes a server local to the company on its private connection, and then a good portion of the real work is done "in the cloud" on other servers... so if THEY go down [or YOU], the service is not significantly interrupted - ok performance degraded, but not interrupted. That's the point. Just needs to be properly designed for failure tolerance and failover.

you forgot the troll icon...

well, more people doing deliveries and mail order... retailers were _already_ adapting to that. "More of Same" in THIS case would be a good thing, then!

Then instead of being a checkout clerk or shelf stocker you're a delivery driver... earning tips!

"Let's hope this puts an end on the spread"

it won't. It'll slow it down a *LITTLE* at a *HUGE* *COST* to *EVERYBODY* [except those elitists at the top who manage to make a killing during every disaster, through various forms of manipulation].

(I know everyone WANTS it to work. Reality...)

It's a VIRUS. Chances are EVERYONE will catch it at some point. SLowing things down for a BRIEF period of time ONLY makes sense if your hospitals would be overwhelmed if you did NOT do this [then you take time to prepare, and let it rip]. At some point this highly contagious disease will hit EVERYONE regardless of who you are. If you can prepare for THAT, and mitigate "triage deaths", it's worth doing a shutown. If "triage deaths" are NO LONGER A FACTOR [case in point, *NOW*], it is POINTLESS to try and stop a virus by SHUTTING DOWN EVERYTHING "deemed non-essential" like this. It's certainly EXTREMLY HARD on 1/3 of society who work in service industries, and chances are they're middle or lower class wage earners. [why aren't socialists SCREAMING about THIS right now? Hmmm???]

It just so happens that service industry businesses are my customer's customers, and they're doing poorly, and that's affecting ME, too. EVERYBODY HURTS FROM THIS, in other words. Misery "trickles down", and for WHAT, a FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY?

RECOGNIZE it's a virus, it's HIGHLY infectious, and it CANNOT be stopped without some form of "Herd Immunity". But you CAN mitigate things at the hospitals, protect specific individuals, AND ACHIEVE HERD IMMUNITY, if you STOP THE SHUTDOWNS NOW!

"We have to embrace a sea-change in how everything is done"

NO!!! N !! O !! NO NO NO NO NO!!!

Instead, WHY NOT RESIST STUPID POLICIES LIKE THIS??? Or, how about this: wait until YOUR job becomes "unessential" and YOU are suddenly stuck with no income, the potential of being evicted onto the street without being able to do ANYTHING about it [except wait for big nanny gummint to "help" you], and so on.

SERIOUSLY - this whole approach is MADNESS and needs to STOP...

"New normal" my NAKED HAIRY ASS!

(time will prove that I am right, but I doubt anyone will acknowledge it)

Yes. It's called FREEDOM. And, just to make a point, it's worth DYING for. The FALSE "security" of these RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWNS [which hurts EVERYONE, but "unequally"] is *NOT* something to *EMBRACE*. It's something to *RESIST*!!!

Re: We know what you did ...

"slightly worse than influenza" = 50% higher death rate, which in many areas of the world is the difference of 0.05% . The "Model" numbers are saying this - 60,000 deaths projected (rather than 2.5 MILLION) in the USA vs 40,000 for a typical flu season. SLIGHTLY worse, in the idea that it's 0.1% death rate for flu, 0.15% death rate for COVID-19. Or, SLIGHTLY worse is that, instead of 40,000 people dying, it's 60,000.

Then there is the recent Stanford study using ACTUAL DATA checking for virus immunity. They surveyed several thousand volunteers in the Silicon Valley area and it suggests that the number of UNREPORTED CASES are as much as 50 TIMES the previously expected numbers. This suggests that the death rate projections MAY BE OFF BY A FACTOR OF 50, due to the vast number of MILD and UNREPORTED cases, which means THAT THIS SHUTDOWN BULLSHIT IS EXACTLY THAT - BULLSHIT!!!

You can all act like small fearful rodents who won't dare leave their bunkers for fear of something that *MIGHT* be harmful to you, shut down your lives, your livelihood, and NOT complain about it if you want. As for ME, I shall *NOT* remain silent on this!!!

Oh and for that one member of my "fan club" - "LISTEN" does not equal "BELIEVE". "UNDERSTAND" does not equal "ACCEPT". And one plus one *IS* two [except for binary, when it's 10].

and from a recent S.F. Chronicle article (yeah not Fox News) (link snipped because of captcha and I'm NOT turning script on)

“I think based on our study that it is less lethal” than has been previously reported, said Bhattacharya, who calculated that it is about equal or slightly more lethal that the flu

The study appears to fall in line with another recent study that estimated that as many as 270,000 Californians are infected with the coronavirus, or 0.69% of the population. That’s more than 10 times the number reported. It calculated that 4.8% of the U.S. population was carrying the disease by early April, 39 times higher than reported, and that nearly half of New Yorkers were probably infected.

that particular article has many different perspectives on the argument but the one thing you can determine clearly from all of this is that THE DEATH PROJECTIONS ARE JUST PLAIN WRONG, and the WORLD is PANICKING UNNECESSARILY over a virus that is only *SLIGHTLY* worse than influenza!!! And 'herd immunity' is PROBABLY the BEST way to combat it!

(and NOT a TRACK YOUR PRIVACY AWAY "phone app")

Re: another nanny state idiocy

at least being UK and not EU you can tell the 'powers that be' how far and how hard and even WHERE to pack sand! You still make YOUR OWN decisions, and everybody involved has to get RE-ELECTED somehow [this is the SAME process facing U.S. politicians at the moment, so they BETTER watch their asses!]. THAT as opposed to a bunch of EU bureaucrats "DECIDING".

"Problem with carriers and governments is that they can't, in general, be trusted."

EXACTLY!

(I have an old 'dumb' phone with a no-data prepaid plan that I rarely use, nearly always OFF, but handy when needed - prepaid is $100/year and it rolls over if I renew it in time)

Re: The Oxford paper doesn't say 60% is really enough

"It looks far more than 60%."

just wait until "powers that be" INSIST compliance be MANDATORY... so you should NEVER let THIS kind of thing "become popular" in ANY WAY - or kiss your privacy GOODBYE!

Because... it is the NATURE of gummints to GRAB POWER in the face of a crisis, and THEN... NEVER! LET! IT! GO! AGAIN!!! (encroach, encroach, encroach, as long as you LET *THEM* !!!)

Re: We know what you did ...

there is NO NEED to VIOLATE YOUR PRIVACY with this.

Just END THE SHUTDOWNS, NOW!

The REAL numbers CURRENTLY show that it's about 50% worse than influenza. PERIOD. Hospitals are even LAYING PEOPLE OFF due to LACK OF DEMAND!

Why are we shutting down for something that's ONLY 50% WORSE THAN INFLUENZA? We are WAY PAST the peak where it MIGHT have overloaded the medical system.

So, WHY ARE PEOPLE SO WILLING TO GIVE UP THEIR PRIVACY AND BE TRACKED???

WE HAVE the EQUIPMENT, and WE HAVE the MEDICATIONS.

JUST *FEELING* *END* THE *FEELING* *SHUTDOWNS* *NOW* DAMMIT!!!

(and stop acting like a bunch of RODENTS "Hunkering in the Bunker")

Re: 20H1 - a longer wait for WSL2

Here's what *I* think MS should do instead: write a Wine-like layer that does NOT take over the desktop, but rather allows us to run Windows applications (even "The Store" stuff) on a LINUX MACHINE!!!

I'd pay MONEY for THAT. It wold solve EVERYTHING for me. Wine is unreliable. An MS-blessed version that is SUPPORTED would be AWESOME! [they did this once for Macs, back in the noughties]

But it makes TOO MUCH SENSE, yeah...

one more thing - there was a subsystem called 'XMing' that let you run X11 applications on a windows desktop. I think it still exists.

Re: Surp is run by idiots

no disagreements, though I think the problem is in their choice of project managers.

Even though Sinofsky and Larson-Greene are *GONE*, their "legacy" lingers on... [to our ultimate dissatisfaction].

Don't forget, Larson-Greene is ALSO responsible for "The Ribbon", and Sinofsky was actually FIRED over the tile-based interface of 8.0 . And from what I've seen, 8.1 isn't/wasn't much better.

So I guess the *REAL* problem: Why is Micro-shaft DOUBLING DOWN on STUPID???

Re: daubing the veteran OS with the Fluent Design brush.

at least you COULD stick with the Win2k look. I did that, too, initially. At least 'small icons' fixed most of the problems with the XP UI, no longer so bulbous and oversized with 'small icons'. Same with 7, I think.

I don't like the "message center" at ALL and want it to go away and die a horrible tortuous death in HELL. I always shut OFF "Defender" because I don't need my compiled work-in-progress SCANNED [and delayed] by some stupid *THING* trying to "HELP" me... and all of the OTHER "notifications" are merely "irritations" and need to JUST GO AWAY.

but anyway... I'll tolerate THAT in lieu of the OTHER things that 8 and later do.

Re: Just wait

I'm (begrudgingly) allowing a win-10-nic "test VM" to go update itself. I made a backup first. I figure the downloads should last through the night and into tomorrow afternoon...

sad face because I know I need to do this for the testing VM, but I hate actually doing it. Just recently DL'd Win 8.1 "updated" version which in my opinion actually has WORSE "user experience" than Win-10-nic, which is a frightening reality [it even tried to strong-arm me to do a 'Microsoft Logon' - go fig].

But it doesn't have tracking, as far as I can tell, but it's the "updated" release so who knows...

Re: Mindset

hey there are some pretty good 'hello world' examples here:

https://sample-programs.therenegadecoder.com/projects/hello-world/

it didn't have COBOL though..

however a quicky search gave me this, which (from my decaying memory on COBOL) seems about right:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWRD.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.

DISPLAY "HELLO WORLD".

STOP RUN.

yeah you don't need any 88's or data divisions or anything like it, do ya?

Re: Real Question

why are NASA wasting so much on high-end GPU machines and 3D enhanced goggles

a) spend it all, or lose it in next year's budget

b) someone's brother in law or friend owns a company that...

c) looks good in ads, brochures, and presentations

d) cool toys for engineers to play with [so you don't have to pay them as much]

e) expensive stuff justifies begging for bigger budgets

and so on. It's hard to put a direct finger on it, but I'd say ANY gummint contract is likely to have an element of waste, fraud, and/or abuse in it.

Re: Late night Reg posting

a few years back, when 3D movies started to regain popularity, I wrote an application that lets you take simple 3D photos and produce an anaglyphic (in this case, red/cyan) image from two side by side photos. The idea is to be able to produce the combined image from an imperfect pair, and the image on one side can be moved around a bit to try and accomplish this - ad when you like it, you save the resulting anaglyphic image.

I put several demo photos on a web site, from shots at the hoover dam [the 3D shot of the generators is pretty impressive] which I literally did by moving the camera 1 foot to the right and taking a 2nd shot of the same basic view. no tripod, just had my arms braced against a rail.

Also I had written a slightly improved starfield screen saver, simlar to the one that came with windows, and I added anaglyphic 3D t that - stars whizzing past your head, kinda fun.

Anyway, a resurrection of simple [yet effective] anaglyphic 3D is kinda fun. Sometimes you find that the low tech bandade, spit, bailing wire, and duck-tape solutions are just as effective as spending zillions of dollars on overpriced over-technical "crap" that lines your friend's pockets and looks good in advertisements and presentations, but really doesn't make the difference between success and failure.

(Small startup businesses have to "make do" with hacker-type solutions a LOT, due to a lack of deep pocket investors, just sayin'...)

how to do it: produce red-only from RGB image for left eye, superimose green-blue for right eye into new RGB image. Allow creator to move around and rotate [and maybe even skew] one side so that they line up properly. Then you can slloppy take 2 photos, a foot or so apart horizontally, using the same 2D camera, and later tweek one of the photos a bit and combine them so they look good in 3D. Not hard!

Re: Crooks will use this to play on people's worries

POLITICIANS will use this to play on people's worries, and like the TECH COMPANIES have ALREADY done, will SOFT-SELL YOUR PRIVACY AWAY FOREVER!!!

GDPR doesn't protect you FROM THE GUMMINT, you know...

Re: Lets play 'suppose'

in reality electrons exist in a probability 'cloud' that (as I understand it) exhibits some "now you see it now you don't" behavior as well as other unpredictability. My opinion, it's waltzing about through different dimensions, including time, just to make quantum mechanics more difficult for us, heh.

nuclear reactions are all about probabilities, so it's not surprising.

Re: Is it relative to the observer?

assuming 'big bang' which is likely...

It started at a single point, and everything expanded from there. Using relative velocities it's possible to (more or less) guess where that was.

However...

you have to consider one important fact: When you have an explosion, the energy that is transferred to the things that fly away is not uniform. PLUS, you have momentum and kinetic energy to deal with. momentum (total momentum) is conserved. Kinetic energy is also conserved, and the mass of something is inversely proportional to the square of its resulting velocity [with kinetic energy as a constant in this case]. This is very important for inelastic collisions... which might emit gamma radiation to make up the difference.

Saying that more simply: heavy things won't be going as fast as lighter ones, and if one side has more or less heavy things than other sides, the lighter things on that side may also have different velocities (due to momentum conservation).

So none of this should be a surprise. In fact, 'explosion' kinda implies chaotic results, doesn't it?

It DOES suggest that big bang produced particles of varying mass, from my perspective anyway.