Posts by jake 28818 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
No on the fuse idea. I paid for the capability, there is a small chance I might want to use it for something, someday. A true hardware switch (jumper) is a good compromise.
DougS, corporations have been opening cases and setting jumpers since the year dot. Adding one or eight more to the mix won't add appreciable cost to the corporate bottom line. And with more switches comes more granularity ... a hardware customizable/settable version of something like ME, where you could pick the options you want[0] according to jumper selection, might be something I could get behind.
[0] or more importantly in this case, options you do not want ...
"Manufacturing Mode can only be accessed using a utility included in Intel ME System Tools software, which isn't available to the public."
But it will be available to the public. Eventually. If it isn't already. These things always leak, without exception. And then they are taken apart, re-coded & enhanced by "the bad guys" (whoever they are). Security by obscurity never works for long. You'd think that the so-called movers & shakers in the tech world would have noticed this by now ...
The US is rather large, and a lot of people live here. What, exactly, could ever be so important that every single one of us needs to get an emergency notification? That's Alaska to Florida, Maine to Southern California, and what the hell, let's throw in Hawaiʻi while we're at it.
I live in California, and frankly I can't imagine a state-wide emergency so vast that all of California needs notification immediately. Or even half of CA. Or even a quarter, for that matter.
All this thing is is an ego-massager for all parties involved with the broadcast. Starting with the Idiot in Chief, whose office has absolutely nothing to do with it despite the name.
What a fucking waste of taxpayer money.
I damn near killed an idiot who insisted on commenting in Klingon, but only on bits of inline assembler embedded in C ... I wouldn't have cared, but the comments popped up during a surprise visit from the CEO with a couple clients in tow looking to see how their customized version of the code was coming along.
C and unix were written at Bell Labs, not "some US uni".
The basic guts of the pair were written by Kernigan and Ritchie (C) and Thompson and Ritchie (unix), not "a bunch of engineers".
The keyBr0ad used was the one attached to the computer that they had available to them at the time. Keep in mind that back then, having a "spare computer lying around to play with" was an anomaly, having multiple keyboards would have been a bloody miracle. It's actually a testament to the ability and foresight of the three that C and unix are still with us and in wide-spread use, and on nearly all hardware platforms, nearly half a century later. They may have their flaws (doesn't everything?), but nothing else in computing comes even close to them in their ubiquity.
Likewise, like it or not, American English is the lingua franca of computing (and by extension TehIntraWebTubes). That is the only real reason that many programming languages are US-keyboard centric. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make those decisions. Thankfully, remapping keyboards on a per-program basis is almost laughably easy with modern operating systems.
"katrinab shall be hearing from my legal people."
I know you're joking, katrinab probably knows you're joking, but katrinab's lawyer knows what the term "barratry" means[0]. Let's all be careful out there!
[0] Strangely, the spall chucker that Firefox uses doesn't. Firefox also has a problem with spall and chucker, go figure.
Some unis (Stanford and Berkeley for certain) were doing that with an early version of Sendmail 8.x back in the 4.4BSD days. Probably late '93ish, just substitute uuencoding for MIME ... and I vaguely remember somebody working on something similar with delivermail prior to that.
Milters were invented partially because asking sysadmins to learn Sendmail's internal syntax wasn't really within the bounds of decency.
Also note that originally we were tasked with removing and/or bouncing bunnies rather than the malware du jour, but it wasn't very long before the later entered the email admin's jurisdiction.
"How much did it cost your friend to get the case tossed?"
It cost him a stroll to the Palo Alto courthouse from his office at HP (maybe a mile, round-trip), his lunch break and a couple hours in the afternoon. He represented himself, on the advice of the Court. He actually received damages for his waste of time, to the tune of $1,500 (the Judge was not known for coddling idiots). I just called and asked, it turns out that he never collected ... seems the drunken lout flunked out of Stanford and was never seen or heard from again.
Mark, yes the signs are still there (in some places). Yes, the property owners in question are covered. As a friend who owns a place a trifle further south of the beach in the article found out when a drunken lout tumbled down a path & wound up in the hospital. My friend got sued, the judge told the lout something along the lines of "Stupidity SHOULD hurt!" and threw the case out.
Good idea on the island. Last I heard, Red Rock was still for sale. Look for it a couple hundred yards south of the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, about 10 kilometers north-east of the rather exclusive Tiberon. I can't think of a better place for the dude to hang his hat.
The "What if ... ?" aspect of destructive testing was one of my favorite games for several years. I've measured 115,000V after running a standard vacuum cleaner over the floor of a SillyConValley shipping & receiving department. Lots of very small particles moving quickly through a plastic tube caused the static buildup. The next stop on the cleaner's schedule was the stockroom, with shelves & shelves full of static sensitive parts. Much hilarity ensued.
I once measured 61,750ish volts on an empty, unused Styrofoam coffee cup set down on an isolated table after a colleague walked across a nylon carpet wearing Nikes ... Was an example, just to prove the point.
In other news, the average secretary can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking alongside her came up static free. Seems my unmentionables were made of cotton, hers were made of petrochemicals. Her heels were leather, my soles were high-carbon rubber.
Along the same lines as the above, most gas(petrol) station pump fires seem to be caused by females with man-made fiber underwear getting back into their cars after starting the fuel flow ... and then not grounding themselves before getting close to the fumes surrounding the fuel-flap when completing the scenario. (Yes, in the enlightened state of California, we're actually allowed to fuel our own cars! Don't you wish your government trusted you as much?)
"it's whether the image is being used with or without permission of the protagonists"
Considering that's an obvious posed shot, they probably came from a modeling pool, signed a waiver and received a few bucks (scale, perhaps) at the end of the shoot. So no to the royalties (or residuals) ... unless their agent was really on the ball.
The funniest thing about it is that in my experience, the male models in such situations are almost universally gay.
"let's pretend basic human behavior doesn't exist."
FTFY
The ladies ogle the guys, too. And some ogle other ladies. And some guys ogle other guys. And some folks ogle both. And I know one person who ogles couples. But we all ogle. It's part of what makes us human.
Why do you think that company named itself "go ogle"?
Who the fuck said anything about Carter? What is it with you pro-Trump folks that causes so much whataboutery, anyway? Can't say anything good about your guy, so you have to find something negative about somebody else (anybody else, apparently!)?
"Lowest unemployment recorded for every segment of the population, low inflation, low interest rates, booming economy"
All of which started turning around during the Obama Administration; Trump had sweet fuck all to do with it. Next?
... the much hyped and newly opened "Salesforce Transit Center" (the brand new major transit hub for SF) has been closed indefinitely due to a cracked support beam.
'twas true for some kit, back in the day. When the printer ran out of paper, the computer buffered the output until more paper was loaded. If the buffer filled, you crashed. Try to remember, though, this was back in the day when a meg of core memory was considered extremely extravagant ... and I don't think that Honeywell had that problem, although I vaguely remember some people thinking it was a normal problem with computers in general.
Mine just logs an error and continues on, happily toggling transistors without a care in the world. As you would expect from a network aware multi-user system that supports remote logins. In fact, many (most?) pizza boxen ran headless as a matter of course, as did a lot of the lunchboxen (such as the IPX) but it was routine to attach a console to them occasionally. Or to use a KVM switch to move between them.
Having replaced terminals on all kinds of running Sun gear before, during, and after that time frame, I'm fairly certain that unplugging the keyboard wouldn't cause a kernel panic. And having just pulled the keyboard from a running Sun 4/50 down in the machineroom/mausoleum/morgue/museum, I can fairly confidently state that that still doesn't cause a kernel panic.
New myth? Every British schoolboy knows that the British won the war singlehandedly, all the while bailing out the other Allied forces who always manged to get into deep shit. It must be accurate, they read it in their comics! This has been true since at least the 1960s.
With that said, nobody who matters (anywhere!) believes a single word out of Hollywood ... and trust me, us Yanks know about the Polish contributions. Sorry to burst your collective bubble.
Further work continued through the end of WWII and beyond, of course, including building & programming of machines to apply the algorithms required, just because us silly humans are so slow at that kind of thing. But the actual crack happened over 85 years ago.
What the Bombe team at The National Museum Of Computing has just demonstrated is what you more properly call "decryption", not a crack.
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