Posts by bombastic bob

Re: Window of Opportunity?

I actually think that MS would rather make their desktop run on a Linux back-end (like a desktop manager) before they bother open sourcing any of the NT-based kernels.

Reason: too many 'ghosts' in the code

because, you KNOW people will grep it for profanity, unusual comments, and outright poor coding style

A version of Windows that runs on top of a Linux kernel (like Wine but an approved version) would work. There was a subsystem for OS/X that did something like that, XP compatibility - even had a DVD for it in my MSDN when I still got DVDs sent to me...

Re: Exactly!

"React OS is likely to be very useful soon."

YES!

Question: who has something/enough to gain by investing in ReactOS in order to market it, distribute it, support it, and get it installed onto new computers at Dell and Lenovo?

I will continue to target Win32 API and windows 7 or XP compatibility for ANY windows applications I write. I _hate_ ".Not" and C-pound anyway, and this is 'yet one more reason' to keep going in the same well-trodden direction.

Re: Working on that now!

when I went here

https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator

I saw a screenshot of a 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE UI, and "windows 10 required".

I'm thoroughly crestfallen...

(and here I was thinking I could do something good with it)

Fortunately, there's still the 'gnome calculator' which looks 3D skeuomorphic on my Mate desktop

https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Calculator

I suppose THAT could be ported to windows, if it hasn't been already...

Re: Bill Gates 0 - 1 xkcd.com

" Particularly when that single factor can be stolen (giving access)."

or willingly handed over via a simple 'discovery request'. Or used to TRACK you. etc.

Re: Bill Gates 0 - 1 xkcd.com

maybe the really hard part of a long password with a phone is using its virtual keyboard... regardless of how easy it is to remember.

an encrypted password locker (like keepass), one that has some LOCAL method of authenticating you without virtual-typing an irritatingly long password, might do the trick. But _ABSOLUTELY_ _NO_ on the idea of a 'central central logon' system. NO.

Re: It's worse than you fear.

and relying on phone security isn't a good idea anyway. In a civilized non-dictatorship, there needs to be some kind of 'due process' before cracking your phone's encryption, which means you have to at least be a suspect for some OTHER relevant crime to warrant a phone search, and a judge needs to approve of it [at the very least]. In the USA, evidence collected without a warrant can be dismissed from a trial, and the entire trial dismissed if "that evidence" was the only reason for the trial/indictment/charges/whatever.

That being said, it's probably a good idea to NOT do things on a smart phone that might incriminate you...

(not like you can't have multiple intarweb identities, right?)

icon because being just a *little* paranoid is probably a good idea these days...

insecure phone vs overwatching central central login

exactly - insecure phone with 4 digit pin and other "insecure security" involved

As for using a face: if I grow a beard or change hair style, will it affect my ability to log in? And, do I _REALLY_ want _MY_ _FACE_ being stored "all over teh intarwebs" ? No. Just no. Who knows how _THAT_ could be abused!

And this 'central central login' scheme sounds *SUSPICIOUSLY* like 'Passport', which was Micro-shaft's 'start of darkness' back in the early noughties [ok some would disagree that THIS was the 'start of darkness', that it started long before, but at least their products *PRIOR* to this point made engineering sense, mostly].

Keep in mind that Passport was "One login to rule them all", and integrated closely with the whole ".Net" thing, which I un-lovingly refer to as ".Not".

In any case, having some "pay to play" method of centralizing logins is a *BAD* idea. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and even Apple would *GLADLY* provide "that service", for a fee of course. (or, by marketing YOU, like Fa[e]cebook - it's bad enough you see the 'login via' icons too often]

And keep THIS in mind: Do you REALLY want a "central central login" database to *TRACK* *YOU* *EVERYWHERE*??? Because THAT is what it would all be about, ya know!

Icon because we don't need a 'central central login' system that TRACKS US EVERYWHERE. And yes, the 'central central' thing is a reference to a book I read as a kid [and decades later, read to a kid] involving a teenage girl, her father, her little brother, and a giant mind-controlling brain named "It". And a bunch of other characters, yeah.

/me defeats tracking system by having 50+ different gmail addresses, one for each thing I log into. yeah, THAT'll help!

Re: I always thought the LM was the greatest engineering result in reaching the Moon...

ack on the LEM - docking one space ship with another had never been tried before, but it's a necessary step for any serious activities in space, even if it's just a scheduled delivery from a 'space truck' at the ISS.

On a semi-related note... why don't we already have space stations like the one in '2001 a Space Oddessy'? Politics, that's why. Buy rockets instead, and create jobs/technology! [that's Keynsian but I don't care, it works].

Re: What's the opposite of 'progress'?

the opposite of progress is:

a) stagnation

b) regression

c) socialism

d) all of the above

I swear there are people in positions of power DELIBERATELY HOLDING BACK PROGRESS for their own egotistical reasons... "for our own good" naturally

icon, because, snark all over that

"It has been 50 years and look at how far we've come since then"

Yeah if it weren't for all of those whiny [insert pejorative political term here] we'd be COLONIZING MARS by now...

Re: Apollo 13 - blows corporate "team building" back to the stone age

this sort of scenario happens more often than not, especially in small startup companies where 'crunch time' actually means what it says on the tin...

It's the semi-bloated mid-level company trying to be what they used to be when they were small that have the useless 'team building' exercises on the advice of overpaid consultants and newly hired HR managers.

The REALLY good thing about really small companies: They rarely have a budget for an HR department. If they're not using an HR service to process payroll and benefits, so much the better!!! If they hire contractors (even through an agency) to avoid all that, BEST OF ALL!

And now that you have a small team of highly qualified individuals, and some kind of crisis to overcome, you'll generally get "that kind" of teamwork.

(because, at a large company, you can afford to hire people who would mostly be 'dead weight' in a small one)

Oh, and a nice thumbs up for the rest.

Re: Brown Ring of Quality

the "O-ring"

For some reason, the first thing I thought of was a sphincter

Re: Does anyone bother with Windows anymore ?

"No suppliers have dared suggest they'll force an application that uses Win10 only."

Hear THAT Intuit? Please continue to support windows 7 (k-thx).

Good news to me. I'll effectively 'sandbox' my 7 machine and VMs until doomsday, to avoid Win-10-nic.

Re: Is this real, or just the latest panic?

“Playing heavy metal records backwards summons the devil”,

PROMISE???

Re: One of the YouTube channels I watched got its comments deleted in this manner

A 'blunt instrument' - probably automated moderating, which is likely to be abused (for political purposes) and end up more like this:

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/02/27/facebook-insider-leaks-docs/

I really don't want Google + Youtube + Alphabet going down that same path as Fa[e]cebook with shadow-banning (etc.), or even 'punishment' or 'retaliation', whether or not they've actually done so already.

but, since WHEN did Google/Alphabet/Youtube EVER care about 'false hits' on such things...

Re: Has anyone else noticed that these reccomendation algos are basically cancer?

and these algorithms are being 'gamed' apparently. this is not a surprise. inevitable is more like it.

it's like a new form of steganography... to game the algorithms into revealing the information you wanted to be revealed, but only to those who know the 'code'.

I don't know whether to high-5 these people, or throw rocks at them... because it _IS_ a very clever hack!

Re: Went on vacation...

it's probably cheaper to give everyone a "blue can" for recyclables [and ask nicely that they be rinsed, etc.] then hire a few people to separate them at the trash collection facility, recycling stuff and getting money back for it... (that's what San Diego does, and it's my understanding that there's a net profit from plastic+glass bottles, paper+cardboard, and aluminum, or at least a great reduction in cost)

so yeah toss those 'have a deposit' bottles into the blue-can, avoid the inconvenience of taking them to someplace to get the cash back for them, and let the city keep it. they should be happy about that, right, and NOT try to tax sodas out of existence...

Re: What's wrong with these people?

back in the late 70's I worked out a math equation for a "thigh gap" and then occasionally caused it to print on a Tectronix vector graphics terminal with an attached thermal printer...

it involved a 3rd order equation of the absolute value of 'x', as I recall where the coefficient on x^3 was negative (so it disappeared off the bottom of the screen, like legs...

Re: Power unchecked

_I_ don't want to be ruled by the California legislature, either, but I live here...

Re: Power unchecked

ahem... had the rules been different (popular vs electoral college), the campaign stops and overall strategy would have also been different. Trump would still have won but would have spent more time in high population areas.

Trump efficiently went for the electoral votes. The popular vote didn't matter. So regardless of whether anyone likes it, those are the rules of the game, and you play it by those rules if you want to win.

Re: Tom Lehrer says it best

I guess the piano-playing professor (apparently the chem prof I had at a university in the SF Bay area knew him personally, before he went on the night club circuit) must have invented 'Rule 34'. It just lacked the more familiar intarweb name, that's all.

careful of the ice, you might have a Freudian slip

/me wonders what kind of snow-shadow pattern you'd get from a Plymouth Prowler

The neighbor doth protest too much, methinks...

And isnt it just like an SJW to see offense where none is even remotely intended? And, THEN, force everyone to comply with the demands according to 'snowflake' sensitivities?

Yeah, the 'snowflake' and 'snow pattern' coincidental comparison did not go unnoticed, either.

icon, because I'm not sure whether to facepalm or just snark

Re: Too many cores

not just heat, but the laws of physics, distance being one of them. The physical distance of the wiring between one part of the CPU and another part, or between the CPU+socket and the associated bus [like memory], limits how fast it can possibly go. At ~3Ghz, that distance is (for all practical purposes) less than 1 inch. Keep in mind you need time to send a signal out and get something back, so you double the distance, then factor in settling and response logic times and whatnot and there ya go. If you're lucky you might get away with a longer distance. But the wavelength of a 3Ghz signal is about 10cm. At that distance, an entire clock cycle will have passed before a signal gets from the start to the end of the wire. So the best practical signal length is about 1/4 of that, accounting for logic time on each end, plus some settling time for a pulsed signal. That applies to anything running at 3Ghz. And higher frequencies, of course, are even SHORTER.

The current solution: have a wider bus, more cores, and more levels of cache. Make the cores able to predict branches and hyper-thread and super-scale and do other things to limit "logic time". Otherwise, Mr. Physics makes things impossible.

Heat also being a factor if you reduce distance too much to allow for higher speeds, since with less silicon to transfer this heat to a heat sink of any kind, you could end up with 'hotter localized hot spots' which create entropy and allow "other bad things" to happen, eventually damaging the CPU and rendering it useless... yeah Mr. Physics again.

Then if you reduce voltage even more, you run into the limits of silicon-based [or germanium, or anything else for that matter] materials to act like logic gates, and switching logic levels become less tolerant and settling times may be longer and currents might have to be THAT much higher [rendering the drop in voltage less effective on overall power consumption].

And "idle cores" are more likely the fault of programmers not writing multi-core algorithms, Windows background processes notwithstanding [they're "scampering" instead of "running", i.e. unproductive motion, as far as I'm concerned, so I'd rather have idle cpu cores instead of "doing that"].

Re: Big demo. Should we test?

A demo is an integral part of the development process. A functionality "proof of concept" demo should be a part of the initial planning phase of any 'waterfall' project, even if it's just dummied up for the dog and pony show.

not sure what the article meant by referring to 'that' as a 'a classic waterfall affair', when there's apparently NOTHING to demo progress along the way, for 12 months even!

In just about every project I've worked on, especially my own, there's a demo that must be done early on as a "proof of concept", and some occasional functionality tests to make sure integration is working properly. And in one specific case, a team of 3 (minus me) went off to do something that was initially called 'agile' but was later deemed to be 'cluster-@#$%', and spent a YEAR on something I'd dummied up and demo'd in about 3 weeks... [and my version was used in several subsequent potential customer demos to show what the company was working on].

The 3 man team version was a re-write of what I'd done, with my version as a 'guide' of sorts, and the specs kept changing. They _NEVER_ implemented the functionality in the 3-man version until after one member was lost from the layoff cycle and I was brought in to help finish the thing. That project was always chasing the mayfly of "features" without FIRST getting the core to work.

In any case, what was described in the article is NOT a 'waterfall' process. A 'waterfall' process would focus on the big stuff up front as part of the overall design spec. And, a _PROPERLY_ done waterfall process would have a "dog and pony show ready" demo of the features as a proof of concept. I'd actually use that to test the system along the way, from time to time, swapping in 'real features' for dummy ones as needed to test things. [this differs from 'test driven development' in that I'd just make sure it all fits and works, rather than doing 'unit tests' all of the time and wasting effort re-testing trivial things over and over]

Typically my bosses/managers/customers would want to see this kind of demo from time to time to make sure I was getting work done. It makes them happy to see something, to see "progress", and they usually gave feedback which helps me to make them happy. Then you can tell them 'yes' 'no' 'it will be expensive' or 'it will take too long' and discuss stuff without having to move the target a whole hell of a lot.

Anyway, if the project went on for a year without any kind of dummied-up demo to at LEAST keep the client from asking too many questions, that's not 'waterfall'. that's more like 'poorly managed'. And from what I understand, 'FRagile' projects are well known for 'poorly managed' more often than not.

I would say that 'Agile' should look like 'waterfall' the way I described it, with only occasional 'scrum' meetings and more frequent one-on-one's with the project manager. But just like your average cluster-blank isn't Agile, it isn't waterfall, either.

Re: Smells like a protection racket

you forgot...

create shadow company to 'domain squat' deep pocket targets

yeah, NOBODY is gonna 'domain squat' any '.dev' names, right?

Re: .dev! .dev! .dev!

I remember seeing him do that. I think it was the PDC for Win '95, in Dec of 1993 [they rented Disneyland that time, and Penn & Teller did a show sponsored by Motorola for their PPC processors].

Re: daffyd.gay

you'd have to use ".alphabet" for all of that, but I think Google's owning company will want that one...

Re: HTTPS?

ack on the "tollbooth" part - of COURSE the IANA and ICANN "recommend" using ONLY registered TLDs, even for your LAN's RFC1918 address space, and (apparently) no self-signed certs for HTTPS, either.

(next they'll somehow invalidate 'letsencrypt.org' if they get a chance, and follow the money on why)

*SCAM* and *TOLLBOOTH* indeed...