* Posts by jake

26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

jake Silver badge

Nah.

Peak Microsoft was Win2K.

It's all been downhill from there.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

jake Silver badge

Options are good.

Back in the day, ElReg had an online store called "Cash & Carrion". I'm fairly certain that they have already made far more money from me buying T-shirts and mugs and other tat than they ever would have made from me seeing adverts. Sadly, it went TITSUP[0] many moons ago.

An attempt was made to reanimate it back in the summer of 2008, and again in late 2014, but it failed both times, possibly due to lack of promotion (???).

Perhaps if enough people ask they will try again? Squeaky wheel & all that.

https://cashandcarrion.co.uk/index.html

[0] Totally Incapable of Transferring Selected User Packages

jake Silver badge

Re: Still too low.

Anybody who calls themselves a "cyber" anything is probably technologically incompetent.

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate

jake Silver badge

Re: Anticipating grid failure is more like it..

"Can anyone comment authoritatively on the magnitude of transmission losses?"

This might help answer your question:

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/

tl;dr version: In California, in 2008, transmission losses were about 6.8%, or 19.7 x 10^9kWh, at a cost of $2.4B worth of electricity in 2008 dollars.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

jake Silver badge

Re: Ouch!

"We have met the enemy, and he is us." —Walt Kelly

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

jake Silver badge

Old stuff.

"This sort of application-layer loop has been a known problem as far back as 1996, the CISPA duo noted."

Further back than that ... We were cautioned to not make multi-party loops possible back in the days of the NCP ARPANET, in the late '70s. A mentor allowed as to how somebody (himself, I suspect) made a similar programming error with the young SABRE system in the early 1960s.

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

jake Silver badge

"What is surprising is that it hasn't been attacked already"

How do you know? I certainly wouldn't bet money on it.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

jake Silver badge

Re: "figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon"

Trolley poles don't have that many moving parts. Make the wear points replaceable (as they do down here on Earth), and put a boot around necessary places with a charged brush to repel the abrasive particles "stuck" to the wire. I'm pretty sure that human ingenuity can make something like this work.

Also, schedule trips for times when activity isn't kicking up a lot of dust. Unlike here on Earth, there is no atmosphere to hold particles for hours or days, they should settle out in seconds.

jake Silver badge

Re: "figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon"

San Francisco has long used Electric Trolley Buses with standard rubber tires and electric motors powered by overhead wires. It is actually less trouble than the tracked Muni trains.

https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/munis-electric-trolley-buses

They actually use trolley poles, I shouldn't have said "pantographs and the like are known tech", it gave the wrong idea of what I meant.

Yes, the SF version runs a battery pack so they can go "off wire" for a bit to get around obstacles.

jake Silver badge

Re: "figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon"

Arkwright's Brush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=29&v=8XOKopHtoJQ

jake Silver badge

What, 4 ft 8.5 in isn't good enough for you?

jake Silver badge

Re: Halfway there

If they emulate Caifornia's HSR boondoggle, it'll be over 10 times over budget, and they won't even have the right-of-way nailed down for the first (and least needed) portion of the track a decade and a half after construction is authorized to start. Eventually, they will open the first 171 miles of the track over a quarter century after it was authorized (if they are lucky), at a cost of at least 40 billion dollars, and absolutely nobody will use it.

jake Silver badge

Re: "figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon"

Wheels similar to those of the Rovers of old, but more of them. A "road train", with (ceramic?) bearings in the axle housings behind a seal or seals to maintain the housings at a positive pressure, thus keeping the dust out It wouldn't take very much pressure at all, and use whatever gas is (relatively) plentiful. Removes the need for any kind of rail system, and allows easy re-routing as necessary. Running overhead wires for power is a no brainer; pantographs and the like are known tech.

jake Silver badge

Re: silicate-rich particles are sharp enough to destroy

Food crops? For non-ideal conditions? Nah ... Food crops are bred for a cushy environment.

jake Silver badge

Re: silicate-rich particles are sharp enough to destroy

Given that most seeds much prefer river-run (or otherwise weathered) rock as a growth medium, it wouldn't surprise me. Trying to force the tender tip of a root through what is essentially broken glass would undoubtedly not be ideal.

jake Silver badge

Re: So what will be the excuses for late trains ?

"Moon trees do not exist"

Sure they do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_tree

When life gives you Lemon, sack him

jake Silver badge

Re: Jellied Eel, are you related to Marjorie Taylor Greene by any chance?

"I never mentioned typical, that was not my quote nor anything I've cited."

It was the word of the AC you responded to, and a rather important keyword in the conversation. As you are undoubtedly fully aware. Were you taking the conversation out of context and twisting it to your own purpose, again? Typical.

Deflection doesn't make you look important, rather it makes you look silly ... and it becomes mind-numbingly boring when it is so predictable.

And of course, lying by omission is still lying. Do you want to be known as an intentional liar?

jake Silver badge

Re: Dominion and logins from Kosovo

When it finally got to the New York Court of Appeals, the Republicans lost. It wasn't illegal according to NY State Law. In other words, as per usual the Republicans generated a lot of hot air, wasting everybody's time and money, on totally meaningless bluster and bravado. It's all the GOP does anymore. Quite sad.

https://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/Decisions/2023/Dec23/90opn23-Decision.pdf

When was the last time your Republican Representative did anything for the district s/he is supposed to represent?

jake Silver badge

Re: Dominion and logins from Kosovo

Immigrants CAN vote in the US ... if they become naturalized.

But being "illegal immigrants" (per the OP), the folks we are discussing have no way to get an actual ballot.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dominion and logins from Kosovo

"Meanwhile, gerrymandering is ongoing, eg importing illegal immigrants in a hope they'll become future Democrat voters.."

That's not even wrong ...

Do you enjoy embarrassing yourself all the time? Is it fun for you? If not, I'm pretty certain you can find help in your country. It might not even require meds.

As somebody once said, "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

jake Silver badge

Re: I can't stand any of them.

My Dad caught me reading Marx (Karl, not Groucho) when I was about 12. Instead of getting grumpy about it (this was the peak of the cold war era, people were touchy about such things), he recommended that I get a translation of Mein Kampf, Lenin's works and a newly published English translation of Quotations of Chairman Mao (if they had a copy) next time I was at the Stanford Library. So I did. And discovered these "dangerous" writings were boring, incredibly daft, quite silly in places, and certainly not worth banning. That phase of my life went away in a week or two. Funny how education often has that effect ...

Quite a bit later, I found a scanned copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook squirreled away on a Berkeley FTP site. I printed it out, and Dad and I had great fun finding all the flaws in it ... Yes, I still have all my extremities, and they are still properly attached. Dad has his, too.

"where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people" —Heinrich Heine

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

jake Silver badge

Re: "if there is a real Luisa Florence writing these books, we can only apologize"

Last time I made I made Coq au Vin it definitely had coq in it. A friend finally got sick and tired of listening to his roosters dueling for the right to signal the crack of dawn. How he managed to put up with it for a couple years is beyond me ... But the four of them made a nice large pot of stew.

jake Silver badge

Re: What's a crock pot?

You do realize that hacking food was one of the first hacks that humans invented, right?

I won't go into the chemistry and physics of cooking ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Recipes that stretch out over 2,000 days

But be careful of which breed you breed. Nobody like to find hares in their rabbit pie.

jake Silver badge

Re: Then again

More to the point, who does the publisher notify when it gets remaindered?

That's kind of another way of saying "follow the money" ...

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

jake Silver badge

Re: Blending

"Huh, didn't know y'all had somebody different doing the voice."

No? It was one of the most requested changes I got from friends and family, once word got out that Lumley's dulcet vocalizations were available.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

jake Silver badge

Here in Northern California, people are finally realizing that POTS is fairly good thing to have in an emergency, just as AT&T is petitioning to remove the capability forever.

After the Napa Earthquake (ten years ago in August), PG&E power went out, so the cell towers switched to battery backup. Some towers lasted all of a couple hours, some failed immediately (most batteries hate being kept at a high charge level). PG&E was out for a couple weeks to some areas ... so many people were without telephones for the duration of the emergency.

And people laugh at me because I insist on keeping POTS capability. I'm not a neo-luddite, I'm an aging techie who knows how things work.

jake Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

"I bet the building owners were amazed to get a quote at a fraction of what everyone else was quoting."

Which in and of itself should be a huge red flag.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

jake Silver badge

Re: You expect it to "know" facts?

"It just irks me that so many less well educated/informed people are at risk of taking plausibility-optimised random noise as actual truth or fact.."

Humans seem to be pre-programmed to believe any random untruth, if it's said with any amount of sincerity. Especially if it's repeated ad nauseum by someone pretending to be an authority. See the religion of your choice. Even modern variations, like the MAGA cultists.

jake Silver badge

Re: curl -fsSL someurl | sh

Seeing that not only in print, but actually suggested, in an ElReg article made my toes curl ...

WTF, ElReg? Are you SURE the article wasn't written by a 'bot?

jake Silver badge

Or ...

... if you have EMACS installed you could talk to The Doctor.

Simply fire up EMACS and type M-x doctor.

I think you'll find ELiZA is just as useful as this modern tat ... for reasons which should be obvious to the proverbial Thinking Man. If he still exists and hasn't become completely exterminated by Marketing, of course.

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

jake Silver badge

Re: Security? What's that

"The basic "AI issue" is that no matter what you are doing, it is created to generate severe bloating of your wallet"

Really? From here, it looks like it's built to deflate my wallet, not inflate it.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

jake Silver badge

Re: Real Time

The Stanford Dish has been used to talk with the Voyagers (and the Vikings) in the past. All the necessary kit is still available (or was, last time I looked). Presumably, it can be configured to talk with the Voyagers again, if needs be.

jake Silver badge

Not quite the POKE we all remember so fondly ...

A lot of the code for Voyager was initially put together for the Viking program's CCS (Computer Command System) computer, which Voyager shared for cost reasons. The CCSs were hand-built by JPL.

The code for the CCS was initially developed in Fortran IV, then ported to Fortran 77. These days, they mostly use C.

Strangely enough, I have never seen the braying fanbois calling to port it all to Rust. I wonder why ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Real Time

The Stanford Dish will work into the foreseeable future.

jake Silver badge

Re: Perspective

Line printers, Shirley.

I dunno 'bout all y'all, but my daisywheels haven't been ostracized to lead-foam lined boxes.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

jake Silver badge

Re: My, what drama

One of my cousins asked a Buddhist monk about some visions he had been having.

His reply was (paraphrasing) "Git thee to a neurologist, pronto!".

With the meningeal tumor removed, his survival into old age is quite likely.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

jake Silver badge

Re: why don't you start your own?

"Maybe have a forum where only those who have contributed to Open Source projects can post comments?

That would get rid of a lot of this crap, don’t you think?"

a) You clearly don't understand the concept of open source.

b) Feel free to invent your new forum. Enjoy playing with yourself.

jake Silver badge

Re: fiddled "vote" railroaded it through the process.

"Any evidence to back up such a dubious claim?"

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=120652&p=576562#p576502

tl;dr: The "voters" did NOT want to adopt systemd from a technical point of view. It was pure politics that forced the switch, and it looks like the vote was rigged to intentionally do that very thing.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Its design is completely and fundamentally wrong.

Debian foolishly tied their horse to it after a fiddled "vote" railroaded it through the process.

jake Silver badge

Re: You really don't know what you're talking about.

The BSD world is not adopting a systemd-lookalike.

One dude decided to try to port systemd to the BSD world about 4 years ago (and there is nothing wrong with that!). Virtually nobody jumped on his bandwagon. He himself has seemingly not worked on it for over 2 years, and that was cosmetic rearranging some of the source files. Prior to that, nobody had paid any attention to the project for over a year.

It is dead. Kaput. Deceased. Passed on. Ceased to be. Let the thing rest in piece, already.

jake Silver badge

Re: what's left of the commercial Unix world [...] Solaris 10

"The problem is that Linux is NOT UNIX"

No, it is not. But it's a fair-to-middlin' facsimile. Even you and I have to admit that :-)

More to the point in this conversation, Linux is not systemd, nor does Linux need systemd, and in fact the powers that be in the Linux World have stated unequivocally that systemd will never be a requirement for a fully functional Linux kernel based system. Why some people seem to think that this is not true, AND that making systemd mandatory is a good idea is way beyond the realms of sanity and heading deep into cult/religion territory.

jake Silver badge

Re: what is the point in patching it?

"Come up with something better, then."

I did that decades ago, when I helped out with BSD init. It has worked quite nicely for virtually everything I've needed it to work on ever since, with a couple of exceptions, all of which work nicely with the Slackware variation on the theme (and one place where I had to rewrite it, for a project split betwen Sandia, LLNL and SLAC.)

"Funny, though, that the BSDs are coming up with their own systemd-lookalike, isn’t it? It’s called “InitWare”.

"The BSDs", as a group, are doing nothing of the sort. It's essentially a one-man vanity project. Note that initware has also been ported to MacOS. Nobody uses it there, either.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

jake Silver badge

Re: The big question...

"what IBM were up to that delayed the release of theirs for another 2 years?"

IBM and Apple were dating. Look up Taligent and Pink.

Also known as "Your Brain on Drugs" by those of us with fairly close ties to IBM ... Somewhere I still have the T-shirt with that on the back, and a normal blue IBM logo superimposed over a full-color Apple logo on the front. We were informed we'd be fired if we ever wore them to work again ... Fortunately it never went anywhere, but those of us in the trenches back then really wondered what TPTB were smoking ...

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

jake Silver badge

Re: Been done before

"Tap water is treated reservoir water, which is supposed to be rainwater"

Not everywhere.

There are deep wells, shallow wells, some places take water out of streams, lakes and ponds, some desalinate ocean water, etc.

jake Silver badge

Re: Excrement of yeast

Ale is a type of beer. Beer is a fermented grain product. I could make a case for bread being a type of beer.

Ale is brewed warm. with a top fermenting yeast. It used to be bittered/preserved with a gruit (look it up if you care), but these days most ales make use of hops.

I've played around with ancient "gruit ale" recipes. I think I'll stick to hops.

jake Silver badge

Re: Been done before

As a side note, that's not a stream that flows right past your house. That's what most folks call an open sewer. What has it done to your property value, and have you sued the party responsible yet?

jake Silver badge

Re: Been done before

California is the largest alfalfa producing state in the US. We grow in excess of half a million acres of the stuff. The saudis are only responsible for 14,000 acres, or about 2.8% of that. That is far less than a drop in the bucket when compared to California's total use of agricultural water. "Sorting that out" wont affect drinking water supplies at all. And during the meanwhile, the idiot saudis spend way over market rates on tools and supplies here, to say nothing of providing a paycheck to a lot of people in an otherwise depressed area of the state, thus bringing lots of lovely dollars back into the US.

Yes, the almond crop uses boatloads of water that could be better spent elsewhere. To say nothing of cotton and rice.

It's all a fine balancing act between water and interstate/international commerce.

jake Silver badge

Re: Oh please!

Yep.

The squeamish childishness around this subject is mind boggling.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

jake Silver badge

Re: First in, first out!

"The Internet was not commercialized then, so the idea of using this script to be a spammer/scammer never occurred to me or anyone else."

Spam email started (in my life, anyway) when a student at Stanford sent every email account on campus a "wanna buy my bike?" email back when I was stanford!sail!vax!jake (name changed to protect the guilty; I'm archived at DejaGoo under the real name (if the alphagoo kids haven't irresponsibly destroyed that irreplaceable archive entirely)) ... Probably 1982 or thereabouts. He got yelled at, loudly, and had computer privileges revoked for the rest of the year. I'd have hung him by the thumbs in the quad if I had my druthers.

Footnote to history ... According to some sources (and repeated in this very august publication some years ago), HMQE2 personally sent an email addressed to "everybody on the ARPANET" on March 26, 1976. If true, this unsolicited mass emailing touting the Coral 66 compiler would be the first example of spam that we can place a name, face, product and date on. However, I doubt it's true for a number of reasons. First of all, there was no mechanism to "email all" on the ARPANET back then. Still isn't. Thankfully. Second of all, I have searched my archives, and despite having many emails from around and on that date (including roll accounts at around a dozen hosts), I see none that would correspond to the mythical "HME2" email. Gut feeling is that it was merely sent to the list of accounts on that particular machine.

So I'm happy to report that HMtheQ (RIP) was probably not an unwitting international spammer.

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