Posts by Gene Cash

Re: or a wrong flight might be booked

> I have punted the pain of cancelling it 12 months down the road

Which you will totally forget to do, and BANG, they will have made their money.

It's like when you get arrested and have to keep saying "I want my lawyer" - you have to keep saying "I want to cancel" and never ever back off.

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

> People use tablets

Citation needed. I have never seen a tablet in the wild other than the Motorola Xoom I bought.

I'd like to have a tablet for Google Maps, but they're locked down harder than a Disney IP.

So I got a laptop, for a hell of a lot cheaper than a tablet, and I got a bonus hardware keyboard and mouse.

US ends penny-making run after more than 230 years

Nah, it's not in-band signalling, they just want to make sure people associate that sound with an emergency, They don't want morons to dilute the urgency of it by using it as a special effect or something.

Re: next stop:

About a decade ago, while maintaining an internal website, I found an Asteroids game JAR so I dropped it in there and put a "play asteroids" link at the end of the help file.

It took 11 months before I was yelled at to remove it.

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

> Philips CRT which was very, very nice. It had been bought for a Novell Netware 4 server

Why the hell would you have a huge monitor on a server? Am I missing something?

Re: "Whatever your job, mentoring is your job – and the one that matters most"

I'm neurodivergent too, and yes, one of my major faults is banging on for hours trying to do something when I could ask a colleague.

To quote my long-suffering DBA: "No, your WLS is 12.2.1.4, and that's the patch you're looking for... it's FORMS that's 12.2.1.19..."

I have been very lucky recently to have a co-worker show me the meta of patching, as in "here's how you find the patch, here's where you download it, here's what you look at once you unzip it" instead of the usual "here's the URL to the current patch, download it and type 'foo, bar, baz'"

No kidding. On YouTube, if you swear (or even bleep swearing!) you can get demonitized.

If you show a gun or even a gun-shaped object like a carpenter's square, your livestream won't just get demonitized, it'll get frozen.

If you put up a video saying "if you use microwave oven transformers to do plastic burning you can get killed!" like Big Clive did, not only do you get demonitized, but you also get a channel strike.

You can also get randomly demonitized for a video that's just like all your other videos. With no explanation given.

That sounds 100% like editorial control, and Section 230 should no longer apply.

The deal is companies publish user content with NO editing or changes or control and Section 230 protects them.

YouTube and other companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Moving up production

> begin production of spacecraft

Why don't they have reusable ones like Crew Dragon?

SpaceX just launched 2 Falcon 9s within 4 hours this weekend in Florida, so they certainly have the tempo up.

> It's poor PR to lose people

Well, the crew certainly thinks so!

Re: Closing the door after the horse has bolted...

Note this is the same YouTube that banned a woodworking channel for "showing a gun during a live stream"

The AI can't tell the difference between a gun and a carpenter's square. Apparently he was holding it wrong.

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

You mean the Ken Olson that said "There is no reason for an individual to have a computer in their home" in 1977?

Re: If its not Trump backhander than it won't continue

> Problem is they are not advancing space for mankind

Really? You mean the company that is able to recover and reuse expensive boosters, that nobody had been able to do for 50 years?

You mean the company that has reduced the cost of access to space 30-fold? (it needs to be reduced another 30-fold but it's the best anyone has done)

You mean the company that's launching better than once a week, improving things from once every 3 to 12 months?

You mean the company that can 3D print rocket engines, and turn them out in weeks instead of 7-9 months?

You mean the company that's launching satellites that give people internet access? People like me that have a choice of "AT&T at $80/mo for 100mb and shitty customer service, or fuck you"

You mean the company that's working on a Saturn-V class fully reusable booster?

Oh yeah, they haven't done anything useful.

Re: Type checking and compatibility

> On a side note, Boolean types are defective by design. In real life, they should be TRUE, FALSE, UNINITIALIZED, and ERROR. It's only two bits, but it avoids making stupid assumptions. Just my two bits.

No... that is just not a Boolean. If you want that, declare your enumerated type. Leave my Booleans alone.

Re: Bell labs

Are you serious?

The saddest thing about all this is IBM WAS the "Bell Labs" think tank of the planet. They invented the punch card, the disk drive, virtual memory, software that could run on more than one model of machine, the floppy disk, the original book size PC hard disk, magnetic tape, DRAM, printed barcodes... and that's 20 seconds of Googling.

IBM used to be THE well-funded R&D shop. When I was a kid, computers were called "IBM machines" like copiers used to be called "Xerox machines"

They already threw that all away.

They're already the zombie walking dead, and have been for about 10 years. They are much too far gone. They've lost all their genius technical long ago.

Re: 2/10, Must try harder

Heck, over here at UCF, we had a school of engineering whose building was sinking into the ground and cracking in two, and a school of business that went broke.

No, I don't mention my degree, why do you ask?

Re: I don't even trust Google with basic email

I moved away from Gmail a few years back when they went on a rampage about "real names"

They suspended quite a few of my friends for "not using their real names" who were indeed using their real names. And insisted on seeing birth certificates and driver's licenses.

Since I go by a shortened version of my middle name, like one of my friends that got suspended, I GTFOed.

That's the sort of arbitrary thing Google does, which makes them impossible to use for anything you depend on. I make damn sure to have my phone rsync-ed daily locally so if they decided tomorrow to suspend my account for whatever, I don't lose everything.

Re: "designed so staff without IT skills, such as managers in a retail environment"

Is that Latin for "Sure, I can break that!"? Because that's my family motto...

Re: There's a lesson to be learned here.

It looks like they already know them:

"Alaska Airlines, however, was able to stand up its backup infrastructure, allowing customers to book and check in for flights."

That's a hell of a lot better than most people were able to do during the outage.

Re: "I've accidentally deleted some relations.”

> learned to back everything up in 2 places the hard way

Isn't that the way EVERYBODY learns?

"There are those that make backups, and those that have yet to lose irreplaceable data."

"You don't convince family members to take periodic backups. Repeated, tragic data loss convinces family members to take periodic backups. Same as everyone else."

Re: Not just AI

Not around here... things change often and streetview does not seem to be getting the money it once was, so it's often years old.

I've noticed the last couple times I did this, the landmarks I'd picked were not there.

Also, another irritating thing is Google calls major roads a different name than what they're signposted. It's NOT "Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway" it's State Road A1A and has been for decades, and is signed as such.

Re: It's not snap that bothers me...

> Back around the year 2000, I often had to dig around rpmfind to get the exact version of a library to get something to work

Me too, which is why I ditched RedHat for Debian, where apt actually figured out package dependencies and automatically downloaded and installed whatever you needed in addition to the package you were installing, without "RPM dependency hell"

So it's been done.

People just don't want to put forth the effort.

Re: Ghost in the Machine

Sounds like it turned off the focusing coils which started losing power, but the electron gun still had a bit of charge, leading to a beam that gradually funnels down.

I had one that would leave the gun on high power for a while, so it would have a very bright spot in the center (and corresponding burn-in)

Re: Not. prize I'd want but...

Then I might find where FedEx finally delivered my packages!

Re: This is a bug in npmjs.org

> The article also states the execution takes place during the installation

I don't think I've ever seen an installation process that doesn't have hooks for running things to do custom setup stuff.

Re: Cloud of smoke

> Does China also rely on single point failures

Probably, but you don't hear about it because of the Great Firewall and because they've been put up against the (great fire)wall and shot.

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

Yeah, then you have trash like GIMP that tells you you're going to lose changes on exit AND DOES NOT OFFER TO SAVE IT.

That stopped being a thing in the MS-DOS 3.3 days in the Microsoft world.

And I'm not just picking on GIMP in particular. Nothing is integrated with anything else, outside the LibreOffice suite. It took forever for Firefox to even get a working calendar, and that's still not integrated into anything.

Half of the "file managers" out there can't bring up the browser for a .html file.

I've using Linux on my desktop as a daily driver since 0.99pl13 in '95 or so and it is still not something I could recommend using at work, even for my own use.

Re: It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

IBM: Once, we dared. Now, we simply reminisce.

Re: Keeping it up is hard

Sure... my garage door Raspberry Pi has uptimes of months because that project is done and dusted, and no longer changing. That's the only time you get big uptimes.

Re: To be fair ...

It's all bullshit.

Look up the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect"

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Re: I'm not surprised

This is funny... but I was banned from my school's computers[1] in 1978 because I dared question the "science" teacher about dinosaurs and evolution.

So this is not something new. On the good side, it motivated my mother to buy me a TRS-80 Model I

I hope Michael Kratzer is burning in hell, if there is one.

[1] a couple TRS-80 Model Is and a Model III. The powah!

Re: FFS...

> He's not one for reading manuals.

I don't blame him. They make Oracle manuals look like Shakespeare.

The ones for my bike were so bad, I finally had to draw a diagram for the menu myself so I could figure it out. One image could have eliminated over 50 pages of useless confusing words.