Published at: 06:04 pm - Thursday April 23 2020
In the spam trap today, I turned up this piece of “fan mail”: Good afternoon there, I became even more concerned about our future after reading your http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1299 page. Our government continues to use surveillance technologies to collect sensitive data and then there’s a real risk that this data can be leaked. Did you know […]
Published at: 07:05 pm - Friday May 17 2019
A half-written draft of this piece has been living on my HDD for nearly half a year. Recent discussions re: the subject of “aging and death of PC irons” prompted me to dust it off and quickly post. Regularly-scheduled programming will resume shortly… “The tools, the means and the methods disappear under the overwhelming dead […]
Published at: 05:09 pm - Monday September 24 2018
Linux. ( 1991 — 2018. ) No disrespect is intended for Stepan Mitrofanovich Gudimov (1913 – 1941), died heroically in aerial ramming maneuver… whose beautiful tomb I stole here. But IMHO a dead project of Linux’s stature deserves a tomb, even if only an imaginary and stolen one. Especially a stolen project…
Published at: 09:01 pm - Wednesday January 17 2018
The Seiko DPU414 is a small (110mm paper tape, ~90mm printable width) thermal printer, similar to the type used with cash registers everywhere, but slightly wider. It is quite unremarkable apart from the fact that no thermal printer of similar or greater width appears to be widely available; and also for the price (typically around […]
Published at: 02:10 pm - Monday October 03 2016
Stay classy, YCombinator.
Published at: 10:09 am - Friday September 23 2016
The WWW of Brian Krebs, perhaps the second-most-worshiped1 patron saint to all English-speaking “computer security” charlatans — is sitting sadly offline today on account of a ~TB/sec DDOS flood.2 His titanic bandwidth, it turns out, was provided gratis by Akamai – spamatronicists par excellence and industrial-scale enablers of everything that makes the modern-day WWW a […]
Published at: 09:06 pm - Monday June 09 2014
But, of course – it won’t. But let’s imagine that it were in someone’s financial – hell, geopolitical! interest – to convince the public that it will. The New York Times editorial might go like this: ‘you may have heard of tungsten, a metal, just like gallium; the latter, a favourite among stage magicians for melting at body temperature…’ […]
Published at: 01:03 pm - Friday March 07 2014
From the ‘Dear Idiots, ‘1984’ is Not a How-To Guide’ department: He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. […]
Published at: 05:03 pm - Monday March 03 2014
A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts. I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, […]
Published at: 11:12 pm - Sunday December 15 2013
The following is a conversation I recently had with an alert and inquisitive reader. It has been redacted for brevity; handles/names/irrelevant things have been removed. Some text has been turned into links to relevant material. Anyone still reading this page for reasons related to its original purpose is encouraged to read this; it may help […]