Posts by Gene Cash

Re: Paypal?

Yeah, and is Paypal getting a cut or a fee to distribute this money? If so, that's completely wrong.

Re: Welcome to DARPA-Land where budgets never get cut…

Well considering "DARPA-Land" got me a world-wide innernetz and a bunch of other cool stuff, I'm not complaining. Aside from NASA/JPL, it's one of the few places my taxes are even remotely well-used.

Or has to sniff the other flame-throwing dog's butt...

Re: Great news

I don't think you're taking into consideration how hair-trigger current airbags are.

Yep... "AI is winning at checkers" - nope, we have that and it's not AI

"AI is winning at chess" - nope, we have that and it's not AI

"AI is winning at Go" - nope, we (sort of) have that and it's not AI

"AI is translating languages" - nope, we (sort of) have that and it's not AI

Re: Lass dich ficken, BMW.

"When somebody tells me a job they're doing is pointless I remind them that there's somebody employed in Germany to fit BMWs with turn signals."

Re: Why start at level two?

Yeah, I watched the video, and if I ran into this thing, I would definitely fuck it all up in a massive way.

And I do know some people in mall crawler trucks that would consider it a challenge to go straight across.

Re: What I see all the time

Or it could just be they're governmentally incompetent.

I live in a house that had a long string of renters over the years, so I still get mail for a round dozen people. The procedure from the USPS website is to mark it "Not at this Address: Return to Sender" and put it in the post office box (which is quite a drive away)

Opening it is illegal, of course, but then so is throwing it away.

I also put a label with my name on the inside of my mailbox, as recommended.

So of course I get the same piece of mail redelivered, complete with my large Sharpie marking on it. I marked it in red Sharpie and tried again, and it was delivered to me again. One more try with a green Sharpie.

I then put it in an envelope and sent it to the nearest Postal Inspector's office, with a letter explaining the circus, and I haven't gotten the wrong mail for at least a week now.

Re: Why are they controlled remotely anyway?

> But is it really worthwhile?

Sure, if you're a responsible organization and don't cock things up so badly.

Same jarring arbitrary crap as the Bbc declaring acronyms will no longer be all-caps (except they still fully capitalize Bbc)

Sorry... it should be NASA, and not Nasa. Even El Reg follows this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/23/voyager_1_engineering_updates/

Re: If it wasn't for the Z80

I got my TRS-80 Christmas '79, which was almost 45 years ago.

The "expansion edge connector" at the back was some PCB traces extended past the reset button. When fumbling for the reset button, I discovered these traces connected directly to the Z-80, no buffer chips, nothing to protect it from static. I then discovered that TRS-80 warranty returns came directly out of the Radio Shack store's income, so the store manager was as distraught over the machine's demise as I was.

Well actually FVWM is mostly a toolkit that exposes window operations (move/resize/open/close/iconify) and sets certain standard behaviors, such as "keep this window on top" or "put titlebars on the left side" or "no frame for these windows"

The important part is it calls certain functions when something happens to a window, so that for example when a window is created, you can maximize it automatically, or place it in a particular position, or do an animation. You can also write functions for keystrokes, so F1 lowers a window to the background, F2 iconifies a window, F6 can minimize all the current windows and get them the hell out of your face, or ctrl-shift-left-arrow can send a window to the left monitor.

I don't think Wayland would have too much trouble. Most of the stuff has to be common to all windowing systems, like "maximize window" or "hook to this event"

Or is Wayland that shitty?

But yeah, until Wayland can do FVWM... they will have to pry X11 out of my cold dead hands.

Re: heteroclinic connection*

I remember finding a paper by some SpaceX guys on the booster landing guidance. My meager maths abilities instantly noped out of there and was last seen running for the hills.

In 50+ years of being a space geek, and 10 years of playing KSP, this is the first I've heard the term "heteroclinic connection"

I do like how "heteroclinic connection" in Wikipedia redirects to "heteroclinic orbit" which has a link to "heteroclinic connection", which actually goes to "homoclinic connection"

Out-of-context statement of the week: "Homoclinic tangles are always accompanied by a Smale horseshoe"

So you're saying you work for Amazon AWS then...?

Re: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

In the US at least, it's the shitty doctors.

I fell out of my chair not paying attention sitting down, ended up really hard on the floor and messed up my back.

I went to the doctor looking for an x-ray or something to find out how bad it was. It really hurt.

The doctor went off on a tirade about pain pills and how he wasn't going to give them to me. I could not make him see I DID NOT WANT the pain pills, I just wanted him to do his job and diagnose what sort of condition my back was in.

Nope, can't do that.

Re: Dependency

> Apache, Debian, Canonical or the Linux Foundation

F*ck that. Those people suck. I might work with Apache, but the other 3 are dicks.

That's not printers in general, that's HP. You need to look at real printers.

Yup. In the Regan era, they decided to protect Harley-Davidson by huge tariffs on any Japanese bike over 750cc.

Result: A shit-ton of 700cc bikes in that decade. Job done.

Actually the usual version of TurboTax I have to buy (because I sold stock from my ESPP) is now $65.

I spent 30 minutes trying to buy & download TurboTax, to save myself a trip to physically buy it.

It was a maze of twisty little links, all alike, and I wasn't able to do it. It was the CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD! that we're all familiar with here.

This was back in February, and I notice they now have a footer with a "Desktop Products" section that wasn't there before.

Re: Maybe…

Unfortunately, the web is a bit bigger than that. Manual curation does not scale. You'd need tons of people, and they would probably want to get paid. That's one of the big reasons why Yahoo! eventually failed If they don't get paid, then how do you know they're not SEO bods and vet them properly?

Who are you going to get to do the curation? Do they hate webcomics and round-file them, like Wikipedia did for a while? Do they get into arguments about what category a website falls into? Is it possible to put a website into multiple categories or do they just shoehorn it into one? How the hell big is the category list and how do you even write a UI to bin things with that?

Re: EPOS - not Tesco

BBC is saying "China is wot dun it" making counterfeit stamps.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68786782

Now what's interesting to me is the 2 stamps labelled genuine & fake in this article are visually identical, except for the different barcodes. Why aren't the Chinese (or whoever) copying the barcodes? Why do they do such a picture-perfect effort on the rest, only to obviously fail at that?

(American stamps don't have barcodes, so I don't know how they work...)

Re: TSMC

Sure, but after all the other industrialized nations regulated their industries to death, this is what happens.

You offshore everything, it ends up on someone else's shore.

Re: Meh

I just install EMACS.

It doesn't shit its pants at having to search and edit some 3GB XML that some other tool has crapped out. It'll say "it's a really big file, are you sure?" but that's the only speed bump.