@mcc My first interaction with Oracle happened around 1980. I was at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, in Santa Monica). We had a Unix layer on top of VAX/VMS and Oracle sent a sales team to us to make sure that their database worked on that foundation. However, the Oracle people insisted that we modify and tune our OS code to make Oracle run better and faster than their competition. They wanted us to cheat for them.
Notices by Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Sep-2024 11:36:51 JST Karl Auerbach -
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 06-Sep-2024 03:19:21 JST Karl Auerbach Yet another sign that the R-party is going to actively overthrow the election:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/05/fake-electors-republicans
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Jul-2024 12:01:08 JST Karl Auerbach Wow, US medical insurance is so bad that today I discovered that my Medicare coverage was cancelled. How is that even possible?
It had everyone at the doctor's office wondering.
The answer is that I was on a Medicare Advantage plan - which I now know is something that every person should avoid. And they simply change me to a new medical provider - at a new location with new doctors and no records - without ever telling me.
You know who created the Medicare Advantage program - Republicans.
That's the same people who created various "health savings plans" in which those savings vanish at midnight each December 31.
I will be getting out of that "Advantage" plan at the next registration period, but that means that I'll be going the rest of the year without medical insurance, even though I am paying monthly for it.
Sheesh, the R-party really knows how to screw the public pooch.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 07:27:31 JST Karl Auerbach @blogdiva Would they say that Clarence Thomas got his seat on SCOTUS via DEI or would they say he got it via an act of Senatorial affirmative action?
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 05-Jul-2024 08:04:33 JST Karl Auerbach @GottaLaff One might thus wonder which Biden, the one Newsom met or the one the rest of us saw at the "debate, will be answering that 3am phone call made famous in that Hillary C. ad from 2008.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jul-2024 00:30:46 JST Karl Auerbach @msbellows Quite independent of the new found claims of immunity even from state criminal laws by El Presidente if I were in Marchan's shoes I would go for the maximum sentence of incarceration because it is well deserved, indeed even inadequate.
And yes, I'd ignore the SCOTUS decision because it that is a Federal court and this conviction is in a state court. As a judge in that state court I want my instructions to come from a higher-than-me court of my own state. Absent that, I'd follow NY state law.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 11:21:55 JST Karl Auerbach Did TFG just call Biden "Brandon"?
I wonder if Biden is going to directly remind everyone that TFG killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with his Covid stupidity.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 09:31:17 JST Karl Auerbach First words spoken to us when we arrived (by car, from New Mexico) in Texas this afternoon:
"Are you US citizens?"
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 11:17:03 JST Karl Auerbach @SteveBellovin @mattblaze Orders? Orders?! We don't need no stinkin' orders!!
By-the-way, I have an interesting book from the Union Signal Company about the history of railroad signals. It's really a book about Murphy's law - pretty much everything that could have possibly gone wrong with signals has. at one time or another, gone wrong.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 11:17:01 JST Karl Auerbach @mattblaze @SteveBellovin It's "the Search for Safety - A History of Railroad Signals and the People Who Made Them"
by the Union Switch & Signal Division, American Standard Inc. 1981
No ISBN number.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 11:16:56 JST Karl Auerbach @SteveBellovin @mattblaze Thanks for the pointer to that article.
I've long considered the electrical telegraph system to be the first electrical packet switching network. Telegrams are an analog to IP packets - and often several telegrams had to be assembled to form a more complete message - and telegrams were relayed, store-and-forward style. I do not know how the telegraph systems figured out telegram routing.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 11:16:49 JST Karl Auerbach @SteveBellovin @chris_bloke @glent @mattblaze I have long considered SIP based VoIP to be vulnerable to the same kind of "route it through my country rather than yours" attack.
SIP is built to use proxies and it tends to use SRV records to find those proxies. If one gets hold of DNS in a way to forge those SRV responses, one can send the SIP data stream (typically RTP) via a spying proxy. Usually any encryption to the actual media stream is piecemeal source=>proxy=>proxy=>destination.
And watching the SIP headers, which also tend to be visible at proxies, opens the door to traffic analysis.
I wrote about this long ago...
What Could You Do With Your Own Root Server?
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2024 06:44:04 JST Karl Auerbach @thomasfuchs A 30 year old HTML page may still render, but the Flash video it contained probably can't be played. I consider the removal of Flash (despite its security flaws) to be a kind of vandalism by Adobe.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Nov-2023 08:44:42 JST Karl Auerbach @lauren Do you know about the later collection of stories in "Machine of Death"? The stories are about a machine that can predict the way a person will die, but there is always a twist.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Nov-2023 05:11:36 JST Karl Auerbach @feditips For me the playback does not work - it's just an image with a non-functioning start-play (triangular) icon and a couple of never changing time numbers.
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Oct-2023 06:38:04 JST Karl Auerbach Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb ...
Here's a piece from WaPo that suggests going slow, or not even, expelling Santos from Congress.
He should have been expelled yesterday, or last month, or the day his lack of ethics became obvious.
But no, here's piece that says "oh no, we can't set a precedent that might someday be used badly". Oh, no, not a bad precedent that might someday be possibly used in a way we don't like.
That way just encourages bad acts - because they are never punished.
Politicians who lie and cheat - whether in Congress on SCOTUS or as governors - are a fetid scum on our political pond.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/28/george-santos-censure-house/
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Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 12:53:49 JST Karl Auerbach @fu @pluralistic @vonubelgarten On the other hand, I get the feeling that many drivers are rejecting Tesla's touch-screen-for-everything model of driver control. Most new EV's are reverting to the concept of having distinct physical knobs, buttons, and levers.
(Sometimes in our Tesla the passenger has to act as a co-pilot to figure out where some control is to be found this week [Tesla updates often change the loction of the controls on the screen] on the touch screen - and because those controls are often so small the passenger is the only one who can put a finger on the right activation spot on the screen without risking driving off the road into the bushes.)