@Gern_Blaanston I mean, it can be a little bit weird in that in many languages, 0 is falsey and 1 is truey, so one might think of a program's "return value" as returning "did it fail" rather than "did it succeed" which may be backwards of how one would expect most boolean functions would work. But I'm pretty sure the convention for an application's return value goes back to before Microsoft's time, and was not really originally considered a boolean.
Posts made by pcooper
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RE: WTF Bites
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RE: WTF Bites
@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
Wait ... what? Isn't this backwards from the way everything else works? Isn't it supposed to be 0 for failure and 1 for success?
No, I think Microsoft is consistent on this part at least. 0 is success, and higher values indicate more severe levels of failure. (See the exit codes of xcopy, for instance.) That's why the
if errorlevel
batch command does a greater-than-or-equal-to comparison, so you can doif errorlevel 2
to "catch" all errors of severity 2 or higher. -
RE: Is there a guide to certificate algorithms?
If you're looking for something a little more authoritative than what I as a random person on the Internet says, then I'd suggest looking at Mozilla's configuration recommendations:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS
If you're a bit more paranoid, it's worth noting that the NSA's guidance as of a few years ago was to use P-384 or 3072-bit RSA for securing government systems, as they didn't seem to think P-256 or 2048-bit RSA was good enough, though I haven't seen any compelling reasons as to why.
It's also worth knowing that ECDSA uses curves that have parameters hand-picked by NIST, and so doesn't qualify as a "Safe Curve". I figure if the US government recommends the military use it for important things then it can't be too bad, but just throwing that out there. That's the main argument I'm aware of for using Ed25519 instead, but it isn't generally supported by CAs/browsers/etc. for "normal" TLS yet (which I'm guessing isn't due to a vast conspiracy, but one never knows…).
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RE: Is there a guide to certificate algorithms?
@Bulb For general "web" TLS usage, use ECDSA P-256 if you can. If you need compatibility with old systems for some reason (like an email server, or old embedded systems, or whatnot) then stick with RSA 2048-bit.
For things like SSH and GPG, use Ed25519. (Web stuff doesn't generally support it, or I'd recommend it there too.)
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RE: Wow! "NEW" Microsoft Teams!
@Luhmann My crystal ball tells me that you turned off "Optional Connected Experiences" in the Privacy tab of the Options.
Since getting a gif would involve sending all your personal data to Giphy, which isn't owned by Microsoft.
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RE: Aviation Antipatterns Thread
@Bulb I think the issue is not so much the specific actions they were taking or tools they were using, but that those actions and tools weren't in the Official Documentation of what they were supposed to be doing.
I'm guessing it's the kind of "certification" where one could have a step of throwing a part across the room into the wall and bounce into a bucket to be collected for the next step, as long as that's the procedure that's written down.
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RE: Killed by Google
@accalia said in Killed by Google:
if it wern't for the fact that i need a TOTP authenticator app
Those exist on desktop. (I tend to use the one built into KeePassXC, but there are certainly others.) And even on mobile/tablet, you don't necessarily need it to be the same device you use for anything else, or (if pure TOTP) one that has network access at all as long as you keep the time on it somewhat in sync. Basically rolling your own hardware token, which can be pretty cheap to free if you're looking for an old device that doesn't get updates anymore.
@accalia said in Killed by Google:
and work is forcing microsoft authenticator down my throat
Well, I just told mine I don't have a phone and they got me a hardware token.
@accalia said in Killed by Google:
getting a dumb phone. or just.... not having one at all
There are dozens of us! Just a dumb phone in the car for emergencies, and VoIP at home & office.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@hungrier Are you sure? I kind of think he would just be shuffling over to one corner of his grave.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Mason_Wheeler Yeah? Incandescent lighting isn't exactly new…
(Now having a surface-mount incandescent light on a circuit board, I guess that might be less common.)
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@hungrier said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
January 2024 seems like a bad time to update anything
Well sure, everybody holds off on releasing anything risky in December (kind of like avoiding deploying risky changes on Fridays, only more so with the holidays), so they all get pushed forward into January.
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RE: The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!)
@Mason_Wheeler How have I not seen this before? He has a whole bunch of tech parodies. Thank you so much for sharing.
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RE: Internet of shit
@Tsaukpaetra Yes, but that doesn't answer whether it was (1) someone who just woke up to go to work and found out their car wouldn't start because of an automatic update it tried doing overnight, or whether it was (2) someone who loaded the wrong firmware image onto a USB stick, entered the super secret debug menu, bypassed all the warnings, and tried to install it anyway.
We're assuming it's the first option, just due to the general terribleness of the current state of the industry. I'm just saying that from the picture alone, someone might still have some small shred of hope that it was the second option.
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RE: Internet of shit
@boomzilla I feel like if instead of giving the "friendly" full-screen message like that, if all it did was turn on the check engine light and refuse to start, people wouldn't be nearly as upset about it. Which I know is saying more about how people relate to technology then about the idea of a car update that might brick it in an inconvenient place. (From the picture alone, one can't tell if it was an automatic-over-the-air-overnight kind of update, or one that was specifically attempted to be installed, maybe even from removable media or whatnot.)
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Gustav said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
I wish I could find the original law.
I suspect it's Mass. General Law Chapter 89, Section 7A. But of course what the driving manual says, what the law says, how law enforcement interprets things, and how courts interpret things, can all sometimes end up being quite different in practice.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@izzion
Fair enough. How about California's manual, page 47,You can be arrested if you drive to the scene of a fire
I'm guessing that one can misuse many states' manuals to come up with an answer, though not necessarily a good one.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@TimeBandit (pushes up glasses) It's actually very clear in the Massachusetts Driver's Manual, bottom of page 102:
It is illegal to drive by or park within 800 feet of a fire.
Clearly the solution is to see if you can raise the traffic light 800 feet off the ground, so that you can then safely drive under it.
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RE: Unit of Measurement WTF
I don't think it's that that weird that when specifying minimums & maximums in multiple measuring systems, doing rounding in the direction such that the rounded value is compliant with the rule. Those look to be initially specified in yards, and then rounded to meters, where for things that are minimums they round up to the next meter, except for things with tighter tolerances they round up to the next centimeter. Except for the field minimum dimension, where they look to be initially specified in meters and then rounded up to the next 5 yards. Uh, never mind, forget I said anything.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Zecc Hmm. "Massachusettsan" is a bit of a mouthful; I thought that the official term was "Bay Stater". Maybe that's specifically for a citizen and not just for a resident, though. (see also the Boston Globe's hard-hitting journalism answering this question, which includes the fun tidbit that "Masshole" is now officially in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
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RE: WTF Bites
I can't fix it (assuming I could...) because this is in IT's hands
Sure you can fix it, it's all open source now so all you need to do is submit a pull request and then wait for Microsoft Store to update to the latest version once it's merged.
Perhaps you can at least see if you can add lines to the Manual Tests Script
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RE: WTF Bites
Some_Book_with_a_Subtitle.pdf, that I will end up having to name Some Book — Subtitle.pdf even though there’s a : printed in the book to separate the subtitle from the main title, and I don’t like having to replace it with a dash
I've occasionally abused Unicode U+2236 RATIO
∶
for that sort of purpose when organizing my files. -
RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@hungrier Coincidence. They're just spamming advertising everywhere in Windows nowadays. I saw that same ad at some point, and I have not used an Xbox since the original (which was not on "Xbox Live").
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RE: The Belt Onion club
@boomzilla There was originally a 1, and then they reallocated frequencies and didn't want to renumber everything.
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RE: Quest for funny sayings: rewrite it in F̌
@PleegWat said in Quest for funny sayings: rewrite it in F̌:
invent one more language before we can speak of go, forth, and multiply?
Well, just about every single-technical-word name has been co-opted by somebody as the name of a toy esoteric language.
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RE: WTF Bites
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Since they introduced the fancy TLDs, there are very few options. The most interesting is .invalid
The closest there is now to an "official" internal-use-only name is
.home.arpa
, though I don't understand (nor do I really want to) the committee-thinking that didn't define a similar name more suited for businesses. -
RE: Internet of shit
@pcooper
If anyone's interested in the follow-up to the school which had a lighting system so complex that they couldn't turn it off, the state's Inspector General has now officially issued guidance that it served as a good example of what not to do. -
RE: WTF Bites
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pcooper said in WTF Bites:
without giving an easy-to-find "go back" option isn't very endearing.
Haven't been using software for very long, have you?
Oh, I have. None of it is very endearing, though.
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RE: WTF Bites
In Settings, General, Language & Appearance, Window Layout: uncheck Hide system window titlebar
Thank you! That's the one I was looking for. Silly me, thinking that somehow everything relating to how the window looks would be in the View menu.
It's always a struggle to balance doing what they think will attract new users vs. not alienating the old crotchety users who switched to Thunderbird from Eudora twenty-odd years ago.
Yup. I don't even really mind having multiple themes and styles for people to pick from if they really want to do that, just that changing the look of things dramatically without giving an easy-to-find "go back" option isn't very endearing.
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RE: WTF Bites
I'm with you. At least you can beat it back into some semblance of its former self:
Do you have some pointers for me? I can't figure out how to get something resembling a normal title bar and toolbar back.
I'm quite amazed that their what's new highlights specifically says things like "perfect for people used to modern webmail", "emulates a mobile interface" and, like, do they just not realize that people might be using their product specifically to avoid those things?
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RE: The Unofficial Funny Comic Strips Thread®
@dcon I'm more amused by the fact that the sound of a phone "ringing" is being onomatopoeia-ized by saying "Tweedle!" That's a new one for me, but I can see how it might be more accurate than "ring" given what phones do to alert people to an incoming call nowadays.
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RE: Getting kids jokes past the adult censors
@DogsB said in Getting kids jokes past the adult censors:
I’m honestly confused how this didn’t get caught at any stage.
In my (limited) experience, the people designing stuff for print sometimes have very little contact with the people running the web end of things. They just get a URL from someone and stick it on, if they remember to update their placeholder text at all. Or just pick a URL they like, and then once it's out there they realize that they should tell the IT guys that something should get put there.
But someone actually typing the URL on the packaging to test it? And typing it in exactly the same, without accidentally introducing or fixing typos and typing the path in the same case as what's printed? Only if you're lucky, or have an IT side that manages to inject themselves into the process early.
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RE: The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!)
@Mason_Wheeler I'm assuming it's supposed to represent "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish", but I'm not adept enough at music to understand how simultaneous C & G whole notes represent "fish".
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RE: WTF Bites
There are at least 7 JSON specifications, but I don't think any of them care about key order.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@dangeRuss said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
I thought 555 were fake numbers used in movies and didn't go anywhere.
In the North American Numbering Plan, only numbers in the format yyy-555-01xx are technically reserved for use in fiction, where yyy must be a non-toll-free area code. But the authors of fiction don't always know that.
555-1212 has been directory assistance since well before 411 was a thing (at least in my recollection, though looking it up it may have been highly area-dependent). But they've just about given up on using 555 for anything else at this point.
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RE: Fun with maps
@LaoC said in Fun with maps:
the award for the most obscure thing to map on OSM goes to …
Seems to be from somebody who really likes mapping obscure things:
OpenStreetMap doesn't have a "notability" requirement like say Wikipedia does; they're fine with their database filling up with any random thing that anybody wants to put in there, as long as it represents some sort of real-world something.
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RE: Intentionally bad UI
@jinpa The usage of percent keys in calculators goes way back before Microsoft & Google. This is pretty typical usage on basic calculators for decades, where if you want to add 6% sales tax to a number, you just type +6% and it does what a typical merchant would want, even though it's very weird to a mathematician/engineer when you try to actually write down the spec of what that percent key does.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@jinpa Yeah, I'm much more a lurker than a poster, but I occasionally chime in on something if I think I have something to add. Probably wasn't really worth me doing so in this case, though.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@da-Doctah My understanding is that in the Jewish culture of counting days, "three days and three nights" was just a poetic way of saying three days where any part of a day and/or night still counted, and everything was one-indexed due to zero not being a widespread concept. So counting any part of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday would end up with Sunday being "the third day". (Plus maybe some confusion as to what was a "day", since generally it started at sunset which can make things quite different than we usually think of them.)
There are of course other theories, that the death might have actually been on a Thursday, or otherwise counted differently.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@JBert Have you seen Massachusetts's list yet, along with I-think-that-may-be-trademark-infringement logos?
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/winners-of-the-name-a-snowplow-contest-2022-23
(I also don't know if they managed to misspell "Arctic" in the logo, or if missing the first "c" makes it a pun of some sort that I'm not getting.)
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RE: The official 2023 ludicrous predictions thread
@BernieTheBernie said in The official 2023 ludicrous predictions thread:
it will be found out that the programmer mixed up latitude and longitude.
It is endlessly annoying that while the common convention for verbally describing coordinates is latitude-first, many (but not all) data formats put longitude-first, because it's kinda the x-coordinate.
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RE: JavaScript Date Object
@sebastian-galczynski Well, there's at least a proposal now to have a better library built into Javascript:
I have no idea how long it might be before one can actually use it, or if it's just going to end up swapping one set of pain points for another.
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RE: No one ever got fired for hating Oracle
I'm amused just how much effort has been expended by various IT organizations at figuring out how to optimize costs by minimizing whichever attribute the licensing cost uses as a multiplier. If the software costs per user, then having as many human beings as possible share a "user" account. If the software costs per computer it's installed on, then have all the users connect via Terminal Services or equivalent to one computer. If the software costs per CPU, then do things like this to minimize CPU count. I've seen all of these in my career, and I'm guessing there are much crazier examples out there.
(Of course, everyone knows the proper amount to charge for software is $0.05.)
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
Matt Levine, the best finance writer ever, has written a Bloomberg Businessweek issue all about "Crypto" and its efforts to rediscover all of modern finance.
I don’t have strong feelings either way about the value of crypto. I like finance. I think it’s interesting. And if you like finance—if you like understanding the structures that people build to organize economic reality—crypto is amazing. It’s a laboratory for financial intuitions. In the past 14 years, crypto has built a whole financial system from scratch. Crypto constantly reinvented or rediscovered things that finance had been doing for centuries. Sometimes it found new and better ways to do things.
Often it found worse ways, heading down dead ends that traditional finance tried decades ago, with hilarious results.
Often it hit on more or less the same solutions that traditional finance figured out, but with new names and new explanations. You can look at some crypto thing and figure out which traditional finance thing it replicates. If you do that, you can learn something about the crypto financial system—you can, for instance, make an informed guess about how the crypto thing might go wrong—but you can also learn something about the traditional financial system: The crypto replication gives you a new insight into the financial original.
Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny. Crypto has a very high density of stories like that.
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RE: Fun with maps
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
And, well, the only aspect making it specifically Lord of the Rings style is the font. Otherwise the maps in the Lord of the Ring are drawn in a very typical style of maps from before topographic measurements were accurate enough to try to draw the actual terrain.
Hmm; I thought that besides the font, it focused more on things like plains and mountains rather than populated areas, and the tilted-perspective look; but maybe I was too focused on looking at the US.