Posts by bombastic bob 10283 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
@chuckufarley
uh, telling people to STFU just because you don't agree might be popular among the "silence the opposition" crowd, but it makes for poor discussions. Obviously you missed debate class.
/me holds up a mirror. 'why' do you ask? well, that's the problem, now isn't it?
"Truckers didn't just "drink tea"; they 'downed it by the pint'."
Not surprising. Those with non-linear minds tend to crave stimulants like caffeine, and also go for careers that are either creative (engineering), high risk (fire, police, military), or require fast thinking for rapidly changing 'never the same' situations (like truck driving).
I get a lot of this from the 'Hunter/Farmer' theory, the idea that linear minded farmers have brains that work much differently from non-linear minded hunter/gatherers, as far as human evolution goes. Hunting is less efficient than farming, and so most people are linear minded 'farmer' types who work well according to schedules, times, seasons, and regular patterns. Non-linear minded people, however, don't. In fact, they (or 'we') usually HATE such things. There are varied degrees of linearity and non-linearity, though but one thing is common among non-linear minded people: heavy use of stimulants LIKE CAFFEINE.
One nice thing about the computer revolution: The geeks (aka the non-linear minded, in a lot of ways) WILL inherit the earth, at least for now, for natural selection in a modern world actually DOES favor the non-linear minded over the linear minded, for the highest dollar careers, and for excelling in your field...
And keep that coffee, and especially the BLACK TEA, coming.
well, I started drinking a lot of iced tea in the mid 80's, and black teas like Earl Grey in the very early 90's [easier on my stomach than coffee]. Keep them caffeine levels maxed out!
But, in general, those who have non-linear creative minds also crave caffeine. it stimulates the slower parts of the brain so everything is working at maximum speed. Gotta have MAXIMUM BRAIN SPEED.
So it is a bit like 'brain fuel'. (I saw that as a T shirt for the 'Girl Genius' comic, something like "You call it coffee, I call it BRAIN FUEL" - except in my case, it's black tea).
Microshaft is too invested in things like political correctness. If there were a MORE politically correct term than 'reycle bin' they would have used it. But hey, I wrote the 'toilet' trashcan for 3.x and I typically use the icons and name on later windows desktops. One of my requests during the '95 beta program was to be able to change the icons and name and MS actually DID things like that for the beta tests back then...
In Mate the default name is 'Trash'. Same things apply [icons, change name] except you might have to create a theme for the icons...
(my windows 7 box uses the toilet icons and a profane term for a toilet as the name)
I was one of several software authors who wrote a 'trash can' desktop application for windows 3.x . Mine looked like a toilet. Made a flushing sound when you emptied it. Simple, really, and the '95 trashcan basically worked like mine did minus the flushing sound [naturally I often changed the icons to match mine in the '9x versions].
(the 'full' icon has green water)
As I recall, you right-clicked the icon for the menu to empty it or restore a file, like all of the others.
slow-walking coupled with FUD and outright gummint OBSTRUCTIONISM.
What, is everyone involved in the process a PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE ESTABLISHMENT POLITICAL HACK putting POLITICS BEFORE PUBLIC POLICY???
Business as usual among politicians and bureaucrats, no doubt.
As some might say, SHIT or GET OFF THE POT
they used to be called 'beta testers', to test the latest/greates [potentially broken] code.
NOW they're just "testers", one step above the general public's testing of rolled out fixes (read: buggy crapware spit+bandade+chewing gum+bailing wire "fixes")
That's right - MS Fired their QA staff shortly before Win-10-nic rolled out, intending to USE THE CUSTOMERS to test things, and anyone desperate enough to become "an Insider" after the rollout.
yeah this all makes me wonder WHY Micro-shaft is *WASTING* *DEVELOPMENT* *TIME* on something WORTHLESS like this, when they COULD be...
a) scouring their code for potential security problems and bugs;
b) doing *ACTUAL* *TESTING*
c) back-porting to Windows 7 so they can sell it again, with it's EXCELLENT 3D SKEUOMORPHIC INTERFACE, as compared to the 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO FLATASS interface in Win-10-nic
and so on
RPi 3 (and later 2's) _DO_ have a 64-bit capable CPU, yes.
Putting any version of Windows on one of these, however, is heresy.
/me points out that FreeBSD has a 64-bit native OS for the RPi 3, whereas Raspbian is still 32-bit. however, 32-bit works JUST fine, so it's no big deal. besides, with <4G or RAM, why do you NEED 64-bits? It actually makes the code just a *bit* slower due to more RAM needed to store pointers, etc..
"It would be madness to end up with a hotch-potch of different laws across the USA"
This should remain AS A THREAT to the "data slurp" industry, making them willing to allow something with enough teeth to do any good... but these days, in THIS election environment, I suspect they've already gone TOO FAR with the politicians they're buying. So the people to convince about GDPR-like laws are Republicans that support Trump. Most of THEM don't like Federal overreach, and so whatever laws DO exist have to be like the Anti-trust laws from a century ago [which were, incidentally, accomplished by a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt].
The 'hotch-potch' as you call it [not sure what the correct spelling is, maybe yours?] would make compliance difficult if they CONTINUE TO SLURP AND TRACK. So in a way it drives them to STOP IT with the evil data slurp/leverage even FASTER, due to the cost of continuing it.
Elitists ONLY think of themselves, specifically their power, and maintaining that power. And they *KNOW* they can exempt themselves, later, with a nudge nudge wink wink know-what-I-mean
Politicians *NEVER* suffer under the legislation they write. Only THE PEOPLE are subject to that legislation. Politicians have rigged it that way for DECADES. Obaka-"Care" was one of the PRIMARY examples, how the HR and Senate had "their plan" and everybody ELSE gets SHAFTED with Obaka-"Care". So typical.
Or the 'do not call list' - political robo-calls are EXEMPTED.
yeah DEMO[N,c]RATS just have DIFFERENT corruption than DC Establishment-type RHINO Republo-crats. Having either group in charge (i.e. non-TeaParty politicians) is bad, but the DEMO[N,c]RATS are particularly heinous. Yet when I read between the lines of the original post, it seems he _really_ meant "anybody but TRUMP" [which of course I disagree with - I want MORE Trump and people like him].
In this regard, Trump's not too happy about what Facebook and Google are up to these days... with their biased filtering and banning algorithms as one example. He's likely to SIGN anything that restricts their influence and power over individuals (even if the DEMO[N,c]RATS write it), as well as stand up for individual rights with respect to data slurping tracking, etc.. The ACLU's been WAY too quiet...
But try and convince LIBERAL and D.C. ESTABLISHMENT politicians, who get ZILLIONS of dollars from these *evil* entities, to do anything that in ANY way puts a leash or a muzzle on whatever they're up to, and, well, you get the idea.
This is ALSO why Cali-Fornicate-You rules are more likely to be Google-friendly. [how DO they determine 'household' anyway? by SLURPING your data and THEN using an AI to decide?]
GDPR seemed to be on the right track, a real stroke of "doing the right thing" by the EU, giving INDIVIDUALS (not groups nor anything 'fuzzy') control of their data, with some transparency.
(too bad they still can't enforce it properly, as it seems there are constant violations going on from the same people BUYING liberal politicians in the USA)
back to my existing policy: PRACTICE SAFE SURFING
1. do NOT access 'teh intarwebs' from a windows machine using a micro-shaft browser
2. do NOT read (or preview) e-mail in HTML format on a windows machine
3. do NOT allow script to run in your non-microsoft browser, except for SPECIFIC sites, and particularly *NOT* ad servers! This basically means running Firefox or similar with a 'NoScript' or similar plugin.
4. do NOT "open content" when prompted. Always save to disk FIRST, then open it with the program that's supposed to open when you double-click the file in a file manager type browser. NEVER trust the 'open with" default unless you have 100% control over what will happen.
5. avoid using a windows computer for ANYTHING involving the internet, from web surfing to e-mail. If it can be sent to you from a malicious source, just previewing an e-mail or opening a link you saw in a search engine MIGHT be enough to infect you!
etc. - in short, no Edge, no IE, no Outlook, no click-open, and no SCRIPTING in anything web-related.
[even sandboxing in a VM might not be enough, especially with spectre]
if you can still read from your hard drive, you could use a
*AHEM*
LINUX box to recover the OS and all of your files from the hard drive. I've done this with FreeBSD before, in short by creating an 'external' VDD that I can actually BOOT UP with virtualbox.
Once you manage that, you can essentially (using LInux, anyway) image the hard drive into an image file, which you can then use to create a file system. Once you have your stuff booting in a VM (hosted on Linux, not a Micro-shat OS) you should still be able to run any applications that aren't timing-critical [like games, media editing, etc.] which is most likely EVERYTHING you use, for most people anyway.
This way you can avoid the Win-10-nic tarpit.
I recommend using the 'dd' command to back up your old hard drive as an image file, before trying to boot it into a VM. Most likely you won't have trouble. But occasionally you might. Should be ok though.
"Dnssec on the other hand is a better well supported protocol"
from what I've read about it, yes. Still imperfect and NOT being supported by the root servers (last I heard/checked) but who knows, put AS MUCH EFFORT into getting DNSSEC to work properly, and UNIVERSAL SUPPORT at the client end, and now you have a reliable system that's not easily hijacked and still has decent performance... [from what I recall, reading about these things].
I should look at DNSSEC again, with my own server. The lack of wide support kept me from messing with it before. Maybe now it'll b better?
"although in that narrow context it is an improvement"
I'm having a REALLY hard time seeing a central bloatware cloud bank, one that uses TCP+HTTPS+TLS, as an _IMPROVEMENT_ , over even hitting the root servers to look up the domain server and then sub-domains [as needed], as compared to the somewhat simple mechanism of CACHING DNS SERVERS (with UDP requests) which have been used since the very early 90's as I recall...
So please explain, HOW this improves things?
you can always set up your own DNS that does queries directly from the root servers...
DNS is what the internet is framed around. Without it, the internet BREAKS. Mozilla is attempting to do a hijacking of the internet's basic functionality. What makes them (and Cloudflare) *FEEL* so powerful? This change wasn't agreed upon, it wasn't proposed, it wasn't voted on etc.. There may have been documents submitted at one time but if MICROSOFT or GOOGLE were to do this, what would the reaction be?
How about "from now on all windows operating systems will do DNS 'like what WE want' and invoke Microsoft's DNS servers". Would *THAT* go over well? I doubt it.
WORST! FEATURE! CREEP! EVAR! [even worse than 2D FLATTY]
For MY network, MY DNS specifies domains differently for "inside the net" vs "outside the net".
Is their "DoH" gonna be able to FIGURE THAT ONE OUT correctly? or will CLOUDFLARE attempt to RESOLVE MY INTERNAL ADDRESSES ???
http://badmachine/ -> link hijack page
http://my-internal.lan --> link hijack page
uh, huh.
icon because, 'DoH' !!!
The fact that it's going through CLOUDFLARE is what bothers me...
Might as well go through Google's 8.8.8.8 resolver, which is better than an ISP "spelling error hijacker" resolver, which is better than a zillion other possibilities, BUT INFERIOR TO DOING THE QUERY YOURSELF FROM THE ROOT SERVERS.
This isn't REAL privacy. For that, you need TOR. And even THEN, it's STILL subject to MITM and hijacking.
None of this makes any sense.
"Then why are they still using Python 2?"
because they WANT to! Nun-Ya-Business!
In some businesss you may find Win '9x still in use, particularly for controlling machinery that's >20 years old and there are *NO* device drivers written for that old machinery for Win-10-nic, if for no other reason that Micro-shaft's "driver signing" policies
And why is it YOUR business whether or not people CHOOSE TO USE SOMETHING THAT WORKS WITH OLD CODE THAT STILL DOES THE JOB ???
"UP"grading is _SO_ overrated... if not for the feature creep and API breakage, I'd do it more often.
(quite obviously I don't - I like stable systems that don't waste my time constantly maintaining them, and instead are fixed targets that don't keep moving like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football.)
icon because, facepalm you'd actually say that
Let's just all admit that Python, being an interpretive lingo with the capability of c language 'things' being called by it [not necessarily efficiently, check your loops] has about the same "power" as a SHELL SCRIPT or PERL SCRIPT that's pretty much doing the *same* *thing*...
It may be a bit more convenient for the programmer than writing a few "filter" utilities to do things in C and spit output to the shell or Perl [which is then further processed as needed] but it's really the same *kind* of thing.
And last I checked, shell (but not so much Perl, these days) has better BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
Or you COULD just write it all in 'C'... yeah not THAT hard and once you get used to it, you'll say things like "why did I EVER use Python for THAT???"
desktop isn't dead. "new computer sales" are not the same as "user base". And when Win-10-nic is pretty much 'the only game in town' as far as a LOT of people are concerned, their likelihood to replace working Windows 7 hardware with "functionally not as fast" Win-10-nic is much lower, hence the PERCEPTION that the desktop is dead, when it really isn't.
for anything else, where Win-10-nic is not needed, but WINDOWS is needed, find an old 7 machine and build a VM of the OS, then run the VM in virtualbox (or whatever) hosted by a LINUX OS.
Windows 7 in a VM o a Linux host works prettry well. Also FreeBSD host. But *NOT* the other way around...
(and you don't do your web surfing on the windows VM)
"if your time is so critical then please ask your company to at least consider replacing those mechanical HDDs with SSDs"
Blah blah blah. It was a VERY NEW Dell "all in one" (where it's a touch screen with wireless kb and mouse etc.) and I'm pretty sure it has an SSD. I'm not responsible for procurement of computer hardware. I _do_ know that Linux works VERY well on a slightly older Dell model where I uninstalled Win-10-nic because I needed a Linux box [and it has an SSD and a regular hard drive in it - hard drive got /home, SSD got the rest of the OS]. So I'd say the hardware is JUST fine. It's the OS - Win-10-nic.
Strike 1! Strike 2! Strike 3! Yer, OUT! [a little baseball analogy]
See, I _KNEW_ that Win-10-nic FANBOIS would say things like this!
A big fat thumbs DOWN for the "did not ask" and "made an ass out of U and ME" and got it WRONG [of course] which was predictable but still...
"I haven't downloaded or installed any Windows updates since 2016."
The last time I did 'windows update' was when I installed 7 on a reconditioned machine that I'd just bought on E-bay, while I still could... and I ran all of the updates through my manual "do not install these" list and left out a BUNCH of them (GWX was still a problem then), and after that, I've left it 'as-is'. NO updates.
Why do I need them when they ATTEMPT TO INSTALL WIN-10-NIC? Why do I need them WHEN THEY INSTALL SPYWARE? And so on.
If I don't surf the web from a windows box, I doubt I even EVAR need updates, unless there's some REAL problem to solve.
And I'm very much considering putting all of that into a VM, and running it with LINUX AS THE HOST, for whenever I need anything that requires windows...
ACK on the title. "upgrading" (to Win-10-nic) is HIGHLY overrated.
Worst Win-10-nic story evar: Today, my supervisor with a semi-on-site contract couldn't use his computer today. WHY? Win-10-nic "updating". For 6 HOURS. Finally at 2Pm it was "usable" again, but still doing 100% disk access and 25% to 100% CPU while scanning things.
"Oh but all you had to do" is what you Win-10-nic FANBOIS are saying, right?
Tell that to people who USE COMPUTERS TO DO WORK, where the OS is not the "End All" "Be All" TARGET of their daily activities!!!
Basically THAT machine was DEAD between 7AM and 1PM. It was "sort of usable" after 1 PM, when the updates were done and it actually LOGGED IN. That's 6 HOURS of NON-USABLE TIME. The 1 hour between 1PM and 2PM was SO full of maxed-out CPU and disk activity, though, that it was STILL unusable for any practical purpose...
There is _NO_ excuse for Micro-shat's "operating system" for ANYTHING LIKE THAT to EVAR HAPPEN!
And we ALL know it.
Got, Linux? [I _did_ offer to install it]
and WORSE, if you make the photos SO HARD TO READ that you CANNOT SEE THE OBJECTS, and you have to CLICK ON MULTIPLE SCREENS to get past it... kinda like NOW.
I had to use CAPTCHA on a California government web site the other day. IT REALLY PISSED ME OFF.
Find all of the traffic lights - ok a walk signal, obvious on the pole, is it a "traffic light" or not. Then there's one WAY off in the distance, do I included THAT square too? Seems like including it GETS YOU ANOTHER CAPTCHA because YOU FAILED IT.
@#$% captcha is the BANE OF TEH INTARWEBS. A _BOT_ that solves it BETTER THAN I CAN would be a WELCOME PLUGIN to my browser!!!
I noticed a REALLY long time ago that Win-10-nic (paticularly UWP and 'The Meto' CRapps) was a CPU waster. Often (running in a VM) during startup I'd see two or more of these CRapps attempting to communicate with each other (including the 'start thing' and presumably search and Cortana), only to SPIN on CPU utilization at 100% while wasting wall time.
I tracked it down (somewhat anecdotally, some experimentation) to the use of 'instantly returns' timing on synchro resource checks and polling of some kind, things that are supposed to put you into an IDLE wait state while waiting, but don't.
Specifically, like WaitForObjectEx with a 0 timeout... or Sleep(0)... or 'yield()' calls. DECADES ago I discovered that if you have a polling loop (including message loops that do background things) you can NOT specify a 0 timeout, or you'll spin at 100% CPU usage.
For UWP and Win-10-nic "they" apparently stopped using a standard message loop, and apparently use something inside ".Not" or a UWP core of some kind. THIS is where the problem is!
/me points out that THIS problem was solved by ME decades ago, for Windows '9x even, 2k had the problem, XP a bit less so, and it re-surfaced with UWP/Metro CRapps because "our turn now" and they POOCH SCREWED IT.
Some local insight into this... it's been a topic for local radio in San Diego.
the e-scooters have been a plague in San Diego for a while now. The biggest problem is how they're just "left wherever" when people are done with them, and the rental companies need to pick them up to avoid them being scattered all over, etc..
But here's a scenario I was thinking of..
OK you drove to a bar, had too much, realize your'e WAY too drunk to drive, but instead of calling a cab ($50 ride, let's say) you GRAB A SCOOTER, thinking "it's ok to ride a scooter drunk, it's not a DUI".
Anyway, I have to say it's better to just hurt yourself in a drunken accident than to take others and/or their property with you. That being said, unlicensed operation of these scooters may simply have to end if their use becomes ABuse.
So far San Diego has banned them completely on college campuses and at the beach boardwalk [as I recall], and may ban them altogether if the rental companies can't get the "soft GPS wall" system that disables the scooters in those areas to work properly.
"From my point of view, libertarianism is one of the dumbest things to come about in recent years."
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Keep in mind that true libertarianism is to minimize government intervention into your life, not eliminate it. So a true libertarian would also believe that everyone should mind his OWN business, live and let live, and NOT be a pain in the butt to the rest of society (like imposing his "rights" upon others, getting all bent over use of pronouns or "offensive" terms, demanding all of society bend to political correctness, yotta yotta).
In other words, I think libertarianism is that natural human state when people are behaving in a SANE manner. Laws and regulations are only necessary to prevent abuses. when INSTEAD they become "impose the will of the ruler upon the ruled", such laws should be ELIMINATED. This is what libertarianism is all about.
It assumes that people are basically decent law abiding citizens who want the best for their own lives and the lives of their family. It assumes that people will behave and work towards their own bests interests when the consequences for bad behavior have NOT been eliminated nor the bad behavior excused. It also assumes that crime should be punished, that regulations should be enforced, and that society is more orderly when a minimal amount of regulation is present to ensure it.
Anything other than what I just said, unless I forgot something important, isn't libertarianism. It's something else, like anarchy or liberalism or social activism. Or maybe it's just the pot-heads wanting legal marijuana, and not caring about anything else. Whatever. Those people are LOONS anyway.
So yeah it might help to understand what libertarianism really is BEFORE saying it's "unintelligent" or "the dumbest thing" etc.. Because, chances are, you actually want what I just described...
I don't think you fully understand this.
If you were to spend time reading alt-right posts on various boards, maybe 4chan's "/pol" (which is not pure alt-right, but has a lot of alt-right in it) you'll see that many (or even most) people just say what they want for the shock value (or trolling). But sometimes a regular poster goes full-blown wacko IRL (it's happened a couple of times).
On youtube, I doubt you'll see more than the occasional pretenders and wannabes. The _real_ wackos end up arrested and make the 5PM news. Fortunately, not so many of those.
In My Bombastic Opinion, Alt-right is really just a reaction to the left's PC BULLYING. It'll stop when it's no longer "shocking". And when the trolling no longer works.
"Why can Microsoft not understand that user data needs to be on its own partition ?"
(I put my user data on /home and depending on the system, it very well COULD be on a different partition)
For Micro-shat, you have to remember, it's not YOUR computer, it's THEIR computer, for which they now have complete control over updating and installing things.[even if you do not want it].
So by THEIR standards, you use that computer by THEIR grace, at THEIR whim, and from THEIR blessings upon you. You should bow down and worship, sing praises to their names, grovel at their feet, accept their ads without question, and buy their advertised merchandise. Or at least, that's how it appears (to me) for what they want and expect...
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