dosman33

MSDOS 4 was reportedly an overall bad release and was not in wide circulation, in all my days I think I only came across it once. This is why DOS 3.3 and 5.0 were much more common to find in circulation together.

I'm sure the source for 4 will make for some interesting bug hunting. Anyone remember the MUF list? "Microsofts Undocumented Features".

While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.

I came to the conclusion a cats tail behavior is an evolved anti-predation behavior. We think of this as "I can see the gears in my cats head turning based on its tail behavior". The wider a cats "field of attention" the slower the tail moves, ie: sitting calmly taking in the entire room so the chance for predators to approach undetected is low and hence the tail is nearly idle. The narrower the cats attention the more the more tail moves. Cat is focused on navigating obstacles to get to a coveted perch in the room, tail wags at a medium pace as only half of the room is under observation as it charts a path across furniture to the goal. Cat is stalking another animal with intent focus on attacking, the tail is in its most agitated state and hence will draw out undetected predators to the tail rather than the rest of the cat.

I realized this after watching a kitten that was unable to resist attacking our other cats tails when the older cats were focused on something. Wagging of the tail draws out any other predators that may be stalking the cat itself when its attention becomes highly focused, such as when hunting prey.

IMHO, it was the correct pivot for them - from hardware to the OS.

I remember the OLPC hardware was harshly criticized by industry, and even the audacity of the project was widely attacked. I considered it proof they were just ahead of the market here and industry realized it was behind the 8-ball. Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and tablets did not exist until the OLPC project was first proposed in 2005. Netbooks wouldn't materialize until 2007, and the ipad launched in 2010. Once industry caught up though it was hard to compete against that, and at the end of the day OLPC was about the mission, not the hardware - but you can't have the mission without the hardware. So pivoting to Sugar was a smart move to achieve the mission once industry caught up.

You can certainly make other arguments against some of the ideas of the project and what it was trying to achieve though. It definitely is a Western idea being applied to problems other civilizations may not have an interest in contending with. Water and food security, let alone electricity and communication infrastructure, are still real problems in the areas OLPC was targeted at.

I've been watching the Home Assistant scene for a few years now waiting for a time to dip my toe into the water. I'm fairly selective about what I would possibly even want to automate. During the stone age I was a user of X10 devices, I had most lights in my apartment wired up with it. Also diddled some with X10 scripting automation at my hackerspace using the fire cracker X10 serial interface. However X10 taught you one thing: it worked when it wanted to. It worked great for me for years and then suddenly it'd quit for a few weeks, then start working again. Even wiring in a phase-coupler couldn't guarantee reliability and I finally gave up on it after it mostly refused to work in my first house. Listening to all these stories seems to reinforce HA is just as reliable as X10 was back in the day, lol.

After moving on from X10 I found another poorly known "automation system" called Home Heartbeat as I was away from home a lot. Having some reassurances the doors were closed and the basement was not flooding was good at that time. Seems like the main thing this system was intended to do was to allow remote water main shutoff and then provide sensors (although the water shutoff valve was unobtanium, lol). I picked up the system and a bunch of sensors on clearance as it went discontinued. This was a system that was just a few years too early to market, it had some features that would be considered hokey today, but could be repurposed into a useful tool. It used an early Zigbee wireless mesh for sensors (door open/close, overhead door tilt sensor, water sensors, motion sensors, etc). The base station had an integrated modem, but also had a USB port for computer integration. I wrote some perl to digest the USB status output and that made its sensor network entirely accessible the way I wanted, I had status updates viewable on my phone from there. I was considering integrating it into HA at some point, but another problem the system had was that the sensors were AVR based rather than ti MSP430 with low-power features, the sensors ate CR123's like candy.

At this point I'd just like a page to view all the wireless temp sensors around my house in one place. I don't need another light-switch-with-more-steps.

On another note, any users of Mr. House here? (Pst, hey kid... you like perl AND home automation? I got just the thing for you!).

Have an upvote, I am dumb.

I didn't say the radar was there to replace looking. All you do is set your mirrors correctly and then there's no more blind spot. That's the entire point of the radar system, to "fix" the alleged blind spot problem. The problem doesn't exist if people were just taught how to properly adjust their mirrors in the first place.

> there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.

...

What's funny is that so much effort is going into these radar systems for non-autonomous vehicular systems that can be resolved by teaching people how to correctly set their side mirrors to cover their blind spots. You eliminate your blind spots by moving your side mirrors out enough that you can't see the sides of your car without tilting your head a little. You don't need to see your own car in your side mirrors.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...

After I got my most recent vehicle I discovered it has a 24GHz rear-facing radar in order to alert me to a possible car in my blind spots. It misfires all the time and alerts me to guard rails and phantoms that don't exist. I don't need it, because I now keep my side mirrors set correctly I know where cars are beside me before the radar knows. I turn it off but now I'm curious if that actually deactivates the radar emitter or just stops alerting me to hits.

I think what's important here is not this first low-level stab at manipulating car radar systems. It makes a beach head on what adversaries can possibly do and demonstrates that manufacturers need to try harder.

I was meaning to ask, was the group of German hackers you encountered affiliated with the CCC/Chaos Computer Club at all? It's been a while since I read the book and NOVA didn't go into any detail there.

I know some of the CCC folks went on to start the SSDev lockpicking club. The first time I attended the TOOOL lock picking conference in Sneak NL I met some of the SSDev guys and their then-president mentioned that they "learned lessons" from the early days of the CCC and applied those when they started SSDev. Lessons such as having members/friends "disappeared" by the Stasi/etc. and trying to play nicer with the authorities this time. It had never occurred to me until recently that the guy who met an unfortunate end in the woods in The Cuckoo's Egg could be related to these other stories I had heard years later.

Here here. I love Cliff and have my own Acme Klein bottle, a wedding present from my wife.

I read the book ages ago of course, but I just discovered the NOVA documentary last week. It's quite amazing to see the original people involved recreating events just a few years after they took place (docu was released in 1990). So... I can't believe Cliff's wife agreed to do a shower scene as part of a recreation for the documentary... Just sayin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5AE-qYan8

I remember this site from back in the day! Somehow the profile view of Flo's head/shadow was still taking up space in my cranium after all these years.

Usually starts with "this can't be THAT hard to add this to my project, let's try it". Six months later you've got a solid working knowledge of running a lathe and you've started teaching workshops to other hackerspace folk on how to run it because everyone has seen you running that machine and needs help on it. Then you realize you forgot to finish the project that sent you down this road in the first place. You get bored and stop using the lathe for a few months. "Hey, it can't be that hard to design a PCB for this project, lets do some of that now..." Six months later you're teaching workshops on it...

And then years down the road you know how to make most things from scratch from the electronics design, PCB gerbers, and the enclosure both in metal (both machined and fabricated), laser cut, and 3D printed. But just conjuring up any cool thing you want to make summons a mental spreadsheet of the time it will take to complete the project, possibly including making a small-run of extras to sell for much less than your time is worth, and then you set your drink back down and shake your head because ain't no one got time for that any more. And then you buy the Etsy/Kickstarter version instead because you realize they have woefully underpriced their super cool widget.

This is all amusing. Not that it matters, but when I said "expert" I really meant any user that understands how to use PGP. Those of us born during the construction of the pyramids know how to use it because it was the only option that existed back then, and we still have that knowledge despite other options existing. Signal and other options are great, but you can't encrypt arbitrary data with it. PGP is really a different use case these days. And the ancients that still write emails.

These are all overt techniques. Subliminal techniques are still used if you are paying attention. For those that still consume traditional TV media you can sometimes spot these things. In 2021 I noticed yet another new car commercial running. After about the 2nd or 3rd instance of it I noticed a VERY short 1/2 second clip of a hand scooping chocolate ice cream out of a container between two jump shots of the car driving. I had never noticed that the first few times the commercial ran. I started deliberately watching this commercial each time and I only saw the version with the ice cream scoop once more, after that they changed the commercial so it no longer included this. Marketing groups pay close attention and will continue to make adjustments to ads after the campaign has started. You can sometimes notice ads changing through the campaign. Typically they seem to start changing the ad to be less polarizing if it's pushing some side-ideology auxiliary to the main product. And this is just good business, if you are trying to sell widgets you will sell fewer of them if your marketing campaign includes content that goes against the grain of half of the population. Unless your product strategy includes the ability to market the same product to the other half of the population of course (like having his and her's versions of a widget), then you can afford the consumer attrition on an individual widget.

You can also see a lot of co-branding of ideologies with commercial marketing campaigns and that's not an accident. There are very powerful international NGO's that are paid to market ideas rather than products and they specifically seek out partnerships with commercial businesses and their own marketing campaigns to sell products. They also partner with the media industry of course.

This sucks. At the same time, only experts use OpenPGP so I guess maby it's not a big deal?

I've been using PGP for decades at this point and I'm still somewhat surprised when I encounter security professionals that either can't figure out how to use PGP or just ignore it because "its too complicated, and I already have Signal". I have no beef with encrypted messenger services but it's not the same use case as PGP for email and other needs.

This also hints at a separate cultural divide. Young people only know email as that thing you need in order to setup other accounts. They use IM for the bulk of their real communication and at best consider email something they only use for work. Only old farts think of email as something they use for personal correspondence. And frankly, most of the people I interact with are younger than me so most of my communication has shifted to where the people are that use it, which is IM services.

Amazing, I actually saw one of these today at a flea market. I noticed it was hydraulic powered but didn't suspect it was for use under water.

In the 2010's I had a project I'd do about once a year where I needed to print ~100 pages of directions that was mostly text with light-duty images mixed in for products I was selling. I was using my trusty inkjet printer, but over time the capacity of the carts degraded to the point I could only get ~80 pages of B&W printing out of a single inkjet cartridge. I had tried buying refill carts but they consistently failed and cost me time I couldn't afford to loose so I also gave up on non-authentic carts. So that meant I was having to buy two inkjet carts each run which pushed my cost per print up towards nearly $1 per page... for a product I was selling for $20.

I finally had enough and bought an HP full color laser printer for $250 around 2015 or so. Even with the degraded toner carts that came with it out of the box I was able to cut my cost per sheet down to about 25 cents or better. The last set of toner refills I got hurt my wallet at ~$450, but my price-per-sheet gets down to a dime per sheet on those. I'm thankful my printer proceeds these nutty subscription drivers though! I swore off ever using inkjet again after my first season of use on this laserjet.

But of course I'm thankful this printer proceeded these nutty drivers that disable your printing without a subscription. We've reached the end of the infinite expansion economic system and subscription services are the natural next step to that. Market forces have driven down the cost of durable goods to the point most consumer goods have been disposable for decades now. The next step is subscription models of everything to maintain similar profit margins. Likewise, CBDC's are a natural extension of the banking system as it hits the same growth limits. They outright state in their whitepapers that one of their core purposes is to "prevent recessions" by setting expiration terms on funds held by consumers which will "induce spending" as needed. It's all the same ball of wax.

I was disappointed too, this article was very light on details about the subject matter. I wasn't expecting a blue-print, but what was presented was all very hand-wavy.

In large systems (albeit smaller than S3) the way this works is that you slurp out some performance metrics from storage system to identify your hot spots and then feed that into a service that actively moves stuff around (below the namespace of the filesystem though, will be fs-dependant). You have some higher-performance disk pools at your disposal, and obviously that would be nvme storage today.

So in practice, it's likely proprietary vendor code chewing through performance data out of a proprietary storage controller and telling a worker job on a mounted filesystem client to move the hot data to the high performance disk pool. Always constantly rebalancing and moving data back out of the fast pool once it cools off. Obviously for S3 this is happening at an object level though using their own in-house code.

HSM is a neat technology, and lots of ways it has been implemented over the years. But it starts with a shim to insert some other technology into the middle a typical posix filesystem. It has to tolerate the time penalty for data recovery of your favored HSM'd medium, but that's kind of the point. You can do it with a lower tier disk, tape, wax cylinder, etc. There's no reason it wouldn't be tape though, tape capacity has kept up and HPSS continues to be developed. The traditional tape library vendors still pump out robotic tape libraries.

I remember installing 20+ fully configured IBM 3494 tape libraries for AT&T in the mid-2000's. These things were 20+ frames long with dual accessors (robots) in each. The robots were able to push a dead accessor out of the way into a "garage" and continue working in the event one of them died (and this actually worked). Someone will have to invent a cheaper medium of storage than tape before tape will ever die.

Not trying to be an arse, but the guy spent a lot more time talking about himself and other unrelated stuff than about how S3 works. And I don't mind a good article on RAMAC, but that seems... out of place in a discussion about peta-scale storage. I got the strong impression he doesn't really know the finer details of how S3 really works. And that's probably fine for what he's doing, there is plenty of room for application coding, firefighting, and problem management without having to get into the finer details of how it all works.

I miss using my Palm Pilot III. I still keep an emulator with the rom and my last data backup around, once in a blue moon I need to pull something off of it still. The graffiti input system worked great, I could enter data way faster than with any smart phone. I used to take lots of notes on the spot with it for work and personal use, but now I'm reduced to taking photos of any text data I need to save for later. I've used Palm and Blackberry through the years, and somehow the input devices that survived are the worst possible that could have survived. Everything that came before smart phone keyboards was better. The Palm Pilot was a more civilized tool for a more civilized time.

I got a sigh of relief when I finally discovered that Myers-Briggs is partly broken. It's designed to not offend anyone by avoiding measuring neuroticism so it's "work-safe". I had been struggling to understand how people were able to understand personality defects of out of the Myers-Briggs system and then eventually it became clear that it doesn't do this, it avoids measuring neuroticism, and worse than that it's on shaky ground because it does a poor job of typing people anyway because a persons personality can "shift" around over time. I'm still new to the Big Five though, I've only skimmed the surface of it, but at least it measures neuroticism and should plausibly give you better insight.

The author tries to better understand introversion but focuses on slicing the pie in the wrong dimensions. There are underlying issues that cause people to swing between introversion and extroversion. When those underlying conditions change that can shift a person's place on the spectrum.

If you are some flavor of neuro-divergent with any awareness of yourself then you realize that you need to moderate some of your own annoying behaviors to fit in better with those you are currently in the presence of. Doing this is draining when you are around "normies", even if you like these peoples company. It's also likely that you only moderate certain behaviors around certain people and again, the degree with which you have to moderate yourself can affect how drained you are over time changing the duration you can withstand others company.

When you detect that you are around similar neuro-divergents a person can relax and just be themselves. The lack of drain on a person in this condition can swing an introvert into a full-on extrovert. Anyone who spends time at a makerspace or hackerspace probably understands this. It can be fun watching new people show up who usually are introverts and then they slowly shift their personality since they can safely be themselves and come out of their shells.

Again, it's the underlying reasons driving a persons introversion or extroversion. When those reasons shift then the personality shifts as well. This is not directly correlated to crowd size, but it's a given that the larger the crowd the less safe it is for someone to be themselves if they are neuro-divergent in any dimension. Only people who are "naturally normal" can safely be themselves 100% of the time in large crowds and not be worn down by the experience.

I was expecting the self-hosted spam cannon service that also went by the name kaboom a few years ago. I assume anyone who hosts a mailman list server is aware of this nuisance by now. Someone had created a list of thousands of mailman mailing lists across the internet and had a simple javascript page that could then be loaded and a victims email address entered. You'd select how many emails they should receive and hit run (increments in thousands). The script would then deep link to initiate a subscription request for the victim. All the victim would receive were requests for them to click the included link to activate the subscription, so they didn't actually get subscribed. But it would generate thousands of unique one-off emails to their inbox. The fix for list operators was to block the deep link into the subscribe url of course, and it's been several years since I've seen kaboom in my referral logs at this point.

That is funny. However Ill postulate this: Why wouldn't someone go to where the most interesting work is to be found though? You don't become a military doctor if you don't find it interesting stitching up bullet holes. And vice versa, you don't become a military doctor if you're not interested in working on the same.

Heh, I remember finding shreds of these news groups threads and news letters posted to Geocities and such in the mid-90's when I was coming of age. "The MUF List" - Microsoft's Undocumented Features, etc. I still have my DOS programming books but I never really did much myself, other than some assembly programs written in debug. The list of dirty things MS did to other companies is extensive. The DriveSpace debacle was the one I remember most. If memory serves, they tricked the company that made a compressed filesystem driver for DOS/Windows to "license" the feature to MS, then MS just forgot to ever pay them. The company was so cash starved they couldn't outlast a lengthy lawsuit to recoup what they were legally owed. MS did every dirty trick they could. Bill Gates is one seriously dirty MFer.

"At first, nothing had gone awry, but at midnight the next day, everything mysteriously started falling over."

Everyone has a test environment and some people have a prod environment too.

When I worked at IBM in the early 2000's I occasionally remember hearing people say "IBM invented RISC!". As a young pup I knew to keep my mouth shut, but in my head I was like "best keep that news to yourself pop, the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's. I didn't doubt IBM did something similar early on though, but it just came across to me as another funny IBM community knowledge thing that was a little off-base which wasn't too uncommon anyway. Obviously the IBM old timers were not off-base though.

But it is nice to see history recognizing earlier pioneers in the field like John Cocke. And this article also demonstrates something I found perplexing as a young pup: IBM's marketing department dictated what engineering did. Obviously the point of the company is to make solutions that customers want to pay money for. Just because engineering has a better solution doesn't mean it's the best fit for customers (or the most profitable solution to the problem). But with my head stuck in FOSS philosophy of the day it was a good education in real life.

I was under the strong impression that sea floor mining was mostly invented as cover by the CIA to operate the Glomar Explorer for the purpose of retrieving a crashed Soviet submarine with nuclear warheads on board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

The US petitioned the UN to open up international sea floor mining rights as part of the lead up for this project. They made up a fake educational film for high schoolers about Glomar as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXUqUpfzgxQ