Posts by bombastic bob

Re: Active and Passive

yeah, the NAT stuff was worked out like 2 decades ago via netfilter, and similarly in other OSs. it's not that hard, really, to alter TCP frames and their related ACK packets. Check out the ftp protocol NAT handler for netfilter some time. Really NOT that complicated, ya know? [unless some DWEEB rips the utility functions out of netfilter, because it's "old fashioned", which would probably send Linus into an explosive meltdown]

And, as we all know, a YUGE number of NAT routers are running Linux, and NAT'ting with netfilter.

Re: If FTP is disliked what about TFTP ??

correct - an anonymous FTP site that ONLY allows downloads is reasonably secure. SFTP, on the other hand, gives you access to the shell, and if you don't set it up properly you can basically expose a shell to anyone who uses it... might as well include ';ssh' 'scp' and 'rsync' with your server offerings, and if you can manage to lock THOSE down in a reliable and trustworthy manner, thumbs-up to you.

But for an archival data site - anonymous read-only ftp works JUST fine!

["they" got rid of gopher in a similar manner - "they" forget that not ALL of us are windows-using content consumers]

Re: did not watch

I thought the superbowl game itself was one of the better ones.

Mostly I ignored the ads. the only one worth watching was the 'Groundhog Day' one featuring an aged Bill Murray reprising his role in the uber-funny movie, driving a particular brand of car (which as I recall was ALSO in the original movie, at least at some point)

Some people watch for the ads. Some ads are funny, including a running joke about a guy with a stain on his shirt that showed up (with a basket of laundry and a particular detergent) as a cameo role within several OTHER commercials like a Monty Python running gag. There was also another one where a company with many products had their product icons doing things related to the products they represent in a humorous way, all at the same time, many being products that have actually been around since the 1960's (so the images representing those products were all very well known).

But yeah the tech ads - they seemed WAY too agenda-driven for my taste. I hope the return on those ads is SO PATHETIC that "they" NEVER try that kind of crap AGAIN...

Re: Jeez

Take a look at a typical port for a major application written "for Linux" such that it runs on FreeBSD, and this becomes VERY clear.

Linux-isms are often all over the place, from the assumptions about /proc or /sys to the presence of D-bus or hald or (worse) PULSE AUDIO or (even worse) SYSTEMD.

They should build/test on FreeBSD and Devuan and maybe even Slackware first, before releasing.

Re: Jeez

"To this day, I still do not know what possessed the Debian Project to go with systemD as the init system"

This might help: http://blog.jorgenschaefer.de/2014/07/why-systemd.html

His summary: the insight from this blog post should be that SysV init is simply outdated and The race for the standard to replace SysV init was won, for better or worse, by systemd.

Translation: he "felt". I use the 'F' word 'feel' in a pejorative sense. If the individual processes were to use the 'daemon' utility, and/or manage themselves, this would NOT be "needed". Fixing the init scripts to comply with a standard, would have been better. and in fact, they did. 'service blahblah command' would do the trick. But I digress...

My initial impressions with this blog were POOR, noting the "light grey on blinding white" color scheme, for starters. That's pretty clueless and irritating to ANYONE over 50 (and quite possibly younger) because, dammit, even THICK GLASSES aren't enough to see THAT kind of irritating color scheme!!! It's actually WORSE than the light blue on blinding white that GOOGLE and APPLE use! And so you can assume that THESE guys (who make their allegedly-cool-looking web pages UNREADABLE by half the people on the planet) are arrogant, just based on the color choices, with NO clue as to the reality outside of their tiny little circle.

Re: Jeez

I visited that link - wow! thanks for that, I now have new material for nightmares (heh)

Re: Jeez

"as it is optional..."

For NOW... for now...

The mentality of these "Feature Creepers" is to *EVENTUALLY* *CRAM* *IT* UP OUR DOWN OUR THROATS because they *FEEL* we *MUST* do it *THEIR* way. or else. Because "they" are SMARTER or something, and know better for what WE should have.

A very very very old business principle says: The CUSTOMER is always right. Give the CUSTOMER what he wants, and if he does NOT want something you know he needs, SELL IT with a good convincing sales pitch so that he's ultimately HAPPIER about what you have to offer.

Cramming "new unwanted" creeping features into our body orifices isn't "that".

Re: Abandoned my home directory years ago

"Now it's completely over-run with other programs' crap."

They're supposed to conform to the Open Desktop standard, put things into ~/.config or ~/.local or ~/.programname and so on. If they're NOT doing that, you should complain VERY loud to the developers and tell them to comply with open standards, maybe do a pull request with a patch to do exactly that...

In any case, all of those ~/.programname directories are a bit irritating. I prefer it when they use ~/.config/programname instead. It makes the home dir root a LOT cleaner.

Re: Finally!

"Why can't Poettering go away and write his own OS"

Conspiracy theory: Micro-shaft money is behind it. Part of the 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' plan.

Re: Finally!

ASCII is the latest release, I think. I suggest a clean install with mate desktop using a netinstall image.

THEN, tarball your /home from the existing box, untar onto new box, re-creaet the users and groups with matching IDs, and VOILA!

yeah I've done this a few times, replicating my settings in VMs and on various hardware

Re: GDPR...

suggestion: dollarize (or GBP-ize) what they've done and do a report to supervisor(s) and manager(s) with financial people present in the room. Propose cost savings that include NOT doing those things [and something more sane in its place]. It might even get you a BONUS...

Better idea: put that kind of thing in a cloud storage or cloud-bsed repo of some kind...

got git[hub|lab] ??

also with the way things are right now I have no trouble making a tarball of my /home tree for backup. if I need something more exotic than an SD card or USB drive to move files around, I can consider the cloud storage method of syncing things up.

seriously do we REALLY need to "sync up devices" to that extent, especially when tarball backups have been sufficient since FOREVER...

I would NOT be surprised if Poettering's latest brainfart causes my existing "tarball backup of /home directories method" to IRREVOCABLY BREAK and require much effort on my part to deal with whatever he's done...

I now DISlike systemd even MORE than I did before.

Re: Systemd is devastating

Got Devuan??

Re: One API to rule them all

" but Win32 will always be there."

Don't be so sure. MS has done everything ELSE in a way to try and KILL OFF the Win32 API usage, to get developers to jump on a bandwagon of "Microsoft-Only New/Shiny" when it comes to development.

It's fortunate that the real trend in windows development has remained on Win32. You can still target applications to Windows 7 or even XP with it. So from a DEVELOPER'S perspective, it's not going away. But Micro-shaft... well, I'm sure they WANT it to!!!

Re: DNS 2.0: Who are you? I won't tell 'ya!

"Sounds like some secret data mining op."

like browsers using DNS via https through 'browser maker owned' hoovering name servers... from the "yeah, THAT'll fix it" department.

Cali-fornicate-you's AG has _NO_ jurisdiction here. He's just a "full of himself" liberal, like so many OTHER Cali-fornicate-you politicians.

(hopefully this is as bad as it gets with these idiots. There's another election this year, time to get rid of as many of them as we can! Unfortunately, and sadly, it most likely won't happen...)

I think the AG has more important fish to fry, anyway, like maybe prosecuting people who commit "quality of life" crimes, the way Giuliani did in NYC [made it a safe place to live again]. So all of this is just a bunch of POSTURING and a distraction from NOT doing anything about the REAL problems in Cali-fornicate-you [ like human poo on the streets of San Francisco ].

Re: It's hard to believe that...

Actually IBM bungled OS/2 and PS/2, by tying them too closely together.

Nobody wanted to shell out $3k for a computer just to run OS/2, no matter HOW good it was. The PS/2's hardware was proprietary, on top of that. 386 and then 486 clones destroyed the PS/2 by dominating its market, and the OS/2 connection along with it. And Windows 3 (which was ALSO 3D Skeuomorphic like OS/2 1.2, unlike previous versions of both) rapidly outsold OS/2 and made GUI desktops "the norm", NOT requring a PS/2.

THAT is where IBM blew it. They've never really recovered...

Re: The Free-Fall Continues...

Well, the RH guy might have a different take on cloud and kubernetes and OTHER such things, using Red Hat solutions [let's say] for PRIVATE cloudiness.

My personal opinion: public clouds are subject to many problems, like widespread outages. A private cloud with a public fallback seems a LOT more reasonable to me, and would likely be more cost-effective as well. hard drives are cheap, hardWARE is cheap [for that matter[, and running Linux gives them ALL of the advantages.

THAT is the kind of cloud solution that IBM could focus on, and I bet it would work. Outsource to Azure? Not so much, really.

Re: Can someone...

reminds me of the PDP-11 clock+date thing. For Y2K there were patches made. For grins I worked on patching an older version for RT-11 that I had source for. The published mechanism works at the OS level, but the software itself can't handle it very well. And I only had source for the kernel... [other people have done re-writes of the user software, though, which DO fix the problem there as well]. yeah ancient computer emulation using 'simh' for fun and nostalgia. [studying the old code, though, can be educating]

Re: Can someone...

has anyone offered to write a Linux-based OS solution for that old hardware? I have to wonder whether there are less expensive solutions that could be less than 1/10 of that [something like "me working on it for a couple of months"]. In theory, you could port C/C++ applications that were written for Windows using existing libraries and toolkits. I have proved the concept by turning MFC applications into POSIX applications using wxWidgets. It's not 1:1 but there is a correlation that, with a reasonable level of effort, can be ported in a month or two [per application] when _I_ do the work. I'm sure there are others who could even do better than me with this sort of thing. Or it could become a pure GTK or Qt application, by carefully re-writing just the UI and dealing with any other windows-isms using some kind of compatibility lib [home-grown or already written, whichever].

In any case, 250k (USD or GBP) is a bit steep. that's like an overpaid team of "paid by the line" coders working for a top-heavy consulting firm. An indie can probably do it for less than 1/4 that... and if you could patch Wine or even CentOS to do the job, you're getting closer to the "1/10 of that" mark I initially suggested.

Re: Can someone...

"It's proprietary apps on Linux that used to be compiled 32-bit only, and now sometimes are compiled 64-bit only."

in a few cases, old versions that were shipped binary-only (let's say you bought a license for an old version of "something" and you don't want to pay for a NEW one) might not work, but you can always run Linux in a VM with an older kernel just for THAT...

The 'Eagle CAD' version I'm using is like that. I had a license before it was bought by AutoCAD that lets me use the 'free' version for commercial purposes. So I still use that version because I don't want subscription licensing. But if I had to I'd use a VM with an older LInux, and it would still work just fine.

[actually I run it on FreeBSD, too, with it's Linux compatibility stuff, and if I design more circuit boards for clients I'll probably have to convince the companies I do the work for to get the subscription version - I've done 2 boards so far with a recent client, using my purchased license, as an independent contractor, with the older version, which I'd like to keep using...].

Of course, if AutoCAD did a similar one-time license that was more sensible for small-time contract people that only OCCASIONALLY do board designs, I'd be interested... (this reminds me to surf around their web site to see if such an offer already exists)

* admittedly I had to 'hack' a symlink or two for shared libs that had a minor version change, and FreeBSD doesn't have "that version". The symlink to the slightly newer library works fine. No problems noted.

Re: I can...

ack on usable old laptops, even ones that can't do 64-bit. I have 2 of those [one has win 7 on it out of necessity].

The older of the 2 laptops I have has Linux on it. When I started a new contract last year, I needed Linux to do RPi-related development. They didn't have any Linux machines so I brought in a 2003-ish Toshiba laptop with Linux on it. With that old thing I was able to get work done [good luck doing work under Win-10-nic, it was SO in the way it was pathetic]. I quickly set up the RPi to run X11 applications remotely on the laptop (using the 'export DISPLAY' trick) and I was quickly getting things done using pluma to edit files directly on the RPi from the keyboard+mouse+display on the laptop. After a couple of weeks of that they found an old computer nobody was using and I put Linux on it. [quite obviously they were "sold" on the idea and maybe a *bit* embarassed that I was using a 17 year old laptop in lieu of a "modern" computer running Windows 10, and getting MORE done that way]

In any case, 32-bit devices _definitely_ have a use. Why throw them away if they still help you get things done???

Re: Can someone...

32-bit linux is more suited to embedded systems like your wifi router

And I think there are more devices than desktops running Linux, unless you count Android as a 'desktop', but even THEN, I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the Android stuff is 32-bit (especially on ARM). So in reality, there are a LOT of systems using 32-bit Linux.

32-bit makes sense up to 4Gb, because it's slightly faster and slightly smaller (code footprint and RAM usage) depending upon how it's written.

Personally I've been making noise about 64-bit time_t for a while now. I'm glad they're doing it. I want to see the BSDs follow suit on this [and no doubt they will, since it makes so much sense].

More than likely it won't affect anything for end-users. Users who upgrade their kernels will almost universally be updating userland packages as well. And package maintainers will just need to make sure everything is recompiled for the new kernel with a kernel version dependency (I've seen that kernel version dependency before, with Debian, years ago, but I forget why it was needed).

All good!

Re: What's the problem?

don't forget bad grammar and spelling errors

Re: Wow!

" I have met quite a few people that couldn't pass the Turing test."

The equivalent of a Turing test for artificial intelligence is actually a GOOD idea...

(or actual human intelligence, for that matter)

Re: Broken by design

why did the turkey cross the road?

It was stapled to a chicken

Re: Broken by design

"How's Wolfie?"

"Wolfie is fine" (etc.)

"Your foster parents are dead."

Re: HE-LL-O

yeah you have to wonder how many bot-calls you'll be getting that attempt to use an AI to lure you into pressing 5 to continue...

Even when the law cracks down on them, I've been getting more, recently. Most of them are hangups. A couple of them are the usual "you have problems with your Micro Soft computer" or "your Micro Soft license has expired" in one of the old windows text-to-speech voices. But the worst ones of all have a natural sounding male voice saying "Is XXX there?" [personalized to YOUR name, of course!] which is then followed by lengthy silence...

You have most likely identified the ONLY use for conversational robots within the next 20 years, until they start walking around and going to the grocery store to buy our food for us. Or, deliver our pizza.

Re: Hummm soo...

I used to watch Monty Python a lot when I was a teenager, when the local PBS station played them [back in the 70's where they were still mostly 'new']. I got used to British-style humor, even looked forward to it. But I know what you mean when a couple of the Python troop were on Saturday Night Live, and they did the Parrot sketch, and nobody laughed... [I'm like WHAT?]

then again the Saturday Night Live audience is often hostile to REAL humor [but they overtly laugh at 'pandering to the perception' "humor" so go fig]. Real humor is like John Cleese doing silly walks, or Terry Jones as Mr. Gumby, or accidentally walking in on Graham Chapman, looking for an argument, but getting 'abuse' instead...

I generally don't watch US'ian sitcoms. I just don't think they're funny... except the Roseanne show. THAT is funny! [kid #1 rants about unfairness, storms out. Kid #2 does the same. Kid #3 does something similar. Then the parents high five each other]

But if I need an injection of humor I've always got the box set of python shows on DVD...

/me walks off chanting "spam spam spam spam"

I have to wonder if that kind of joke is now "formulaic" enough for an AI to appreciate... [but the rest of us just facepalm]

I'd laugh more if it were something like this:

Q: how many robots does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One, but it has to be a "light bulb changing robot"

or maybe this:

A man, a woman, and a robot went to a bar. The man ordered scotch on the rocks. The woman ordered a strawberry daiquiri. The robot didn't order anything. Why?

Because it's a ROBOT, that's why!

(In Final Fantasy XIII-2 there's a bad jokester that you have to interact with as one of the in-game quests. You basically need to throw bad jokes back at him until he reveals something to you - "This medical book is worthless - it has no appendix!". Reading the back/forth between Human and Meena kinda reminded me of that, at the end...)

I disagree when you say "heavily subsidised" - I would be more inclined to saying there ARE government contracts with these companies for the Department of Defense and whatever the DoD equivalent is for Germany and France [this is NOT the same as "subsidised"].

But this brings up something else: WHERE is the actual INVENTING happening? I don't see a communist country (China) having a whole lot of really innovative ideas. Sure, you'll find a few, and I'm sure China's engineers are as smart as any other around the world. BUT... the "overshadowing communism" environment is directly opposed to freedom and creative thought. It's like that proverb "The nail that sticks up gets the hammer." In an OPPRESSIVE society (and COMMUNISM *IS* OPPRESSIVE) creativity and innovation is *STIFLED*. Not in every detail, but as an overall effect.

Meanwhile, it seems that various engineers in the UK have been focusing on things NOT in the telecom industry, like ARM cores [as one example]. Engineering companies put effort where it makes economic sense, after all, and if there's just TOO MUCH competition in the internal workings of 5G, then "smart money" is likely to invest its time/effort elsewhere...

Re: Reg units

half an Alaska then? Or would that be a quarter Alaska?

We need these new measurements STANDARDIZED, dammit!

Until then, I guess we can measure it in Wales' (we're still using inches and feet over here, might as well use Wales')

Re: Why not set an easier goal?

I think MOST of the windows 7 holdouts [like me] aren't "up"grading to newer versions of the software we run on it, either. If what you ALREADY BOUGHT STILL WORKS, why "up"grade?

[especially wnen those $$$ "up"grades are JUST to support Win-10-nic "features"]

A few years ago, while I still could, I got a box with Win 7 pre-loaded. It runs accounting software (in my case Quickbooks 2007) and music production software (an older version of Cakewalk, specifically), and "other things" not related to an MSDN subscription. I don't plan on buying newer versions of any of that

My dev-only boxen get MSDN licenses, and I target windows 7 for executables DELIBERATELY. [sometimes I target XP even].

Not so amazingly, targeting win 7 compatibility covers a ~90% use case for windows users, as opposed to JUST targeting Win-10-nic. So I bet I'm *NOT* the only one!

Re: This is about as deluded..

Vegans eat _WAY_ too much soy, including those "fake meat" burgers and soy milk. (ok this is a bit OT but maybe related to the word 'deluded')

Soy contains phyto-estrogens. Excess estrogen in women can cause real serious problems, and in men, well, "chemical castration" and "gynecomastia" come to mind. And you can't be a Vegan without taking special vitamin supplements unless you want deficiencies that cause serious health complications.

The REAL delusion is FOISTING this upon THE REST OF US. [if they want to do that to themselves, vegans are welcome to abstain from meat and animal products. just don't foist that on ME].

(Just thought I'd point all that out)

Re: Not holding my breath

as I understand it, MS's JVM was NOT part of the OS, but an add-on.

MS has _also_ shipped versions of windows 7 that exclude multimedia stuff, because of certain EU-related restrictions (as I understand it).

NOT a problem, really. Just don't include the JVM. It wasn't needed for anything but IE anyway, and ONLY if you ran a Java "applet" with it.

Re: Not holding my breath

"When do you think NT4 would be open sourced? That would actually be quite useful for the Wine project and ReactOS."