Slashdot Mirror


User: Improv

Improv's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,594
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,594

  1. Re:RIPTerm on Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    IIRC, that was RIPTerm 2.x, which was considerably less stable than good ol' 1.54 (and also was shareware rather than freeware)

  2. RIPTerm on Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    I suspect it'd be hard to get RIPTerm 1.54 or anything fully compatble running over telnet (that I know of, anyhow). This is a pity - near the end of the BBS era, a lot of them used it (depending on the software - I ran a Searchlight BBS, which had good support).

  3. "Do you have any evidence for any of this?"

    Keep asking that and the whole thing falls apart.

  4. If you can't remove problematic certs by a vendor or penalise them for misdeeds, then they have no constraints. User trust is more important.

  5. Gnome 3.x is non-canon on GNOME 3.22 Desktop Environment Officially Released (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1, Funny

    2.x and then MATE are the real Gnome.

  6. Are you thinking of Metropolis? If so I can see the resemblance.

  7. Looks a lot like another Lost in Space (which was a few years before this). There were plenty of shows of this sort at the time.

  8. Or CTO, or C... on Ask Slashdot: Would You Fire Your CEO? (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    Sometimes the question is more interesting for other C-level executives.

  9. Re:Incomplete title... on Your Political Facebook Posts Aren't Changing How Your Friends Think (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    There would need to be a compelling third-party platform led by someone whom we should want to lead the nation. Right now neither the Greens nor the Libertarians manage both.

  10. Living off the grid means you're worthy of attn on Can We Avoid Government Surveillance By Leaving The Grid? (counterpunch.org) · · Score: 1

    It's pretty simple - living off the grid, whether as an exercise of vanity and paranoia, or because one actually has something worth hiding, makes people more worthy of surveillance.

  11. Gopher wasn't that original on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol (minnpost.com) · · Score: 1

    I remember it, and it was pretty cool at the time. It had predecessors though - France had a system called Minitel that dates back to the year when I was born (1978).

  12. Re:Not a strong enough tie on Conservative Site Argues Profiting from Snowden 'Treason' May Violate Law (judicialwatch.org) · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what "you people" you imagine me to be part of.

    As to the "you never call" bit, FISA doesn't apply or do what you think it does if you're seriously suggesting that. Even if we imagine some alternate world where it were entirely different but kept that name, you might want to look into "sovereign immunity" as a doctrine. It does not alone decide the issue (see also the "stripping doctrine"), but there are many hurdles to meet to do as you say even were it basically plausible. Which it is not.

  13. Re:Fascist big-gov't bastards... on Conservative Site Argues Profiting from Snowden 'Treason' May Violate Law (judicialwatch.org) · · Score: 2

    You're going to grumble about how the way used are words nowadays don't fit some ancient definition nobody cares about anymore, while using the word "fascist" that way? That seems a bit odd.

  14. Re:Not a strong enough tie on Conservative Site Argues Profiting from Snowden 'Treason' May Violate Law (judicialwatch.org) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The founding fathers certainly committed treason. The term doesn't necessarily mean something bad in every circumstance.

  15. I accept and believe Snowden performed treason. No doubt in my mind. But I don't think making a movie about it, absent any other strong ties, amounts to support; we have all sorts of movies about criminals as well as current events that happen to be illegal. Without some actual ties, I'd prefer to err on the side of having robust public discussion of these matters rather than worrying about this kind of thing.

  16. Re:What NEEDS to happen... on Phones Without Headphone Jacks Are Here... and They're Extremely Annoying (mashable.com) · · Score: 1

    I charge those headphones about once a week, using a USB charger. While doing so, the headphones are not on my head, and the other end is in the wall; they're entirely still. I think the much lower frequency and the lack of motion while charging has led this to be entirely reliable.

  17. Re:What NEEDS to happen... on Phones Without Headphone Jacks Are Here... and They're Extremely Annoying (mashable.com) · · Score: 1

    Do you expect those of us who have been bluetooth-only to go along with this?

    I get the DRM reasoning. It makes sense to be worried about that. But I also don't like how physical connectors tend to break. I used to go through a headset every month because I'm pretty rough on devices; the cables always broke. Some years ago I switched to bluetooth headphones and that problem stopped. Entirely. I need to make sure I keep them charged, but it's well worth that hassle.

    What this means is for my current and previous phone, I have never plugged anything into the headphone jack for the entire time I've had the devices. Which means I don't need that port. Which makes it feel about as useful as a PS/2 port on a modern computer.

  18. How does this differ from the Pixel? on Google Ponders About a Chromebook Pro (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm a SRE at a large (non-Google) tech company, and I have a Chromebook Pixel as a secondary system I use all the time, at work and at home. It's incredibly useful and I'm quite happy with it (with ChromeOS in developer mode, which just gives me a shell that's occasionally useful). The idea of high-end Chromebooks makes a lot of sense (for some people) even though I couldn't've guessed it would before I had one. Still, right now to me "Pro" is just a word. It's unclear to me how it'd be different from what I already have.

  19. Brief answer on Is the 'Secret' Chip In Intel CPUs Really That Dangerous? (networkworld.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No. Obviously not and the guy stirring up trouble is either underinformed or irresponsible.

    Most of the hardware in your computer isn't something you get (or could get) a gate diagram from. You'd never know if something is in there that theoretically could be triggered to do something. That's the way hardware is. This guy is fussing over a publicly known feature that people are using in the enterprise to manage systems en masse. It doesn't open some magic wormhole to the control system - it requires a clear path of access and a setup and all that fun stuff. Meaning if you want to use IME, you need to set it up on all the systems for your network environment and debug it and build tooling around it. It's not fun to get that stuff right, and often not that easy.

    It's not impossible that there's a backdoor in IME, but it's just as easy to imagine a backdoor anywhere else in your system. It's hard to imagine how one could ever be confident that that's not the case. So the focus and the anger is misaimed.

  20. Re:Why are people excited about this? on Microsoft Removes 260-Character Path Length Limit In Windows 10 Redstone (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    If I unpack a tarball or zipfile I don't want there to be any likelihood that it'lll fail to unpack in some places because the total length is pretty long. On the other hand, I don't care about bizarrely long filenames - almost nobody does that.

  21. Re:Why are people excited about this? on Microsoft Removes 260-Character Path Length Limit In Windows 10 Redstone (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    Oh. Whoops. Fair point.

  22. Why are people excited about this? on Microsoft Removes 260-Character Path Length Limit In Windows 10 Redstone (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't imagine there are many people who are just dying to have filenames longer than 260 characters.

  23. Two fun books on Ask Slashdot: What Books Should An Aspiring Coder Read? · · Score: 1

    Death March, and also the Unix-Hater's Handbook. Both are fairly educational, and the latter is a bit dated but a funny and mostly accurate roasting of Unix. You don't need to dislike Unix to enjoy it, and it's educational too.

  24. Money laundering for utilities isn't likely... on Swiss City of Zug Will Accept Bitcoin For Public Service Payments (techweekeurope.co.uk) · · Score: 0

    This is probably safer than a lot of other uses of bitcoin. Not sure it's smart to give more power to the bitcoin folk though.

  25. Re:Slashdot is not far behind... on RIP Kuro5hin (kuro5hin.org) · · Score: 2

    You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. Slashdot hasn't changed much (although its interface is nicer), it's just there are more specialist forums that some subcommunities have left for - hackernews (with an interface far worse than Slashdot ever had at its worst), TomsHardware, and so many other places.