RE: "Under the bloody code over 220 crimes were punishable by the death penalty, it is time to bring it back. Punch somebody in a bar? Death. Set a 5G tower on fire? Death. Etc."
Make stupid and violent comments? Death! Goodbye!
1319 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2009
@Tron
Are you suggesting that El-Reg followers are worthy of being 'Only Fans' creators? Being a creator, as opposed to a mere wide eyed user, is the only way you make money from 'Only Fans', and reading the comments and articles herein doesn't have me releasing the locks on my wallet in expectations of the authors becoming visible on 'Only Fans'. It takes a bit more than wit and humour to make cash on 'OF'...alas.
Ever since 'puters learned to talk to each other we have been enjoying social networks, including BBSs, Usenet, IRC, among others, so I doubt we are going to decide not to bother now. Heck, you could crowbar pen pal magazines into the mix too, without trying too hard.
And there is also a potential contender for Twitters crown flexing itself on the ropes as we speak - Take a bow and introduce yourself 'Mastodon'. The great FOSS hopeful will, perhaps, soon have us all 'Tooting' in twice as many characters. If it manages to hook itself into all the disgruntled Twits muttering to themselves in the corner and makes it easier to take all your followers with you, and makes it easier to find those ex Tweeters you still have an interest in reading what they 'Toot', then...why not the Mastodon era?
What a wonderful world!
Sorry, but I'm done with vinyl. Anyone who grew up with the stuff is surely glad they don't need to muck about with cleaners and brushes and balancing the damn needles and coping with wear and tear and...oooh, a million other aggravations. I was a bit upset when a stupid hurricane came along and wiped out my entire vinyl collection but I recovered and never looked back. Good riddance! Only thing I regret is the loss of my original copy of Bowie's 'Man who sold the world'*** which had the Bowie in a frock cover! Sob!
*** Yes, it's sad; I like to brag about having that fabulous object (which, if I still owned it I would never ever again play it. Just sit there stroking it with an idiotic smile on my face.) Still waiting to find anything digital that can generate that feeling I had when I found my copy.
My HiFi set-up involves hiring the musicians to come and play in the living room. It has a few drawbacks - that Keith Richards was a bit of a bugger, and Johnny Rotten was just obnoxious; my cat is still nervous whenever someone with elevated hair comes in the house. It's worth it though, the resulting music sounds like it's right there in the room! Amazing.
That's interesting...My favored market place for music is Bandcamp.com. Apparently bandcamp takes 15% and the musician takes the rest. As opposed to your figures where the musician gets 15% while the music "Business" takes the rest.
Plus, on Band Camp you get DRM free downloads, in HQ format like Flac, for the most part; and you can usually listen before you buy, just like those listening booths in record shops. Why go anywhere else?
I love giving my money to musicians I love (Barbara Manning..adore...luv...sigh...swoon...). Not on Band Camp? You likely won't get much from me then, or most of my friends either.
"Winds of Winter" seems to be acquiring it's own mythology, rather like Harlan Ellison's third "Dangerous Visions" anthology which in similar fashion was due to be published every year for about 30 years, before Harlan eventually left us in peace leaving the book unpublished, and lots of expectant authors likewise passing from the world without their DV3 stories emerging. And to think there is yet another book after winds of winter...I do love reading his indignation at the harassment he suffers from indignant fans, and likewise his ever optimistic announcements from time to time. Perhaps he needs to upgrade to an older version of MS Word and let Clippy help him in his struggles. A clippy influenced Game of Thrones! I'd read it. :-)
I generally agree with you but would offer a warning: I don't actually sell anything to end users, but work for others who do and one of them, with an old fashioned GUI that hasn't changed much since 2000, regularly gets potential customers who look at a demo of the software and say "You expect me to buy something that hasn't been developed since 1999?" The software is under constant development and changes almost every week and actual users love it, but the GUI remains the same and that seems to put newbies off. However, the developer can't afford to lose so many customers so we are undergoing an intensive project to "Prettify" the software so it doesn't scare potentials away. So looks "Can" be important; it depends on context.
RE: "That necessarily means that they are all the test-until-it-works bandwagon, and some faults are not easy to detect immediately."
And how does being open source exempt you from that situation? You open source guys do test stuff, don't you? And then fix stuff...until it works?
And then someone decides it needs SystemD in it somewhere resulting in multiple forks. And...well, not convinced it would be any better really. We'll all be waiting indefinitely for Linux on the dashboard rather than Linux on the desktop.
Restraint? I suppose so. There's a video of a woman confronting Russian soldiers carrying big guns, asking what they are doing here.
'Exercises' they said.
'So you're the enemy. Fuck off!'
'Don't escalate the situation further. Please go that way.' Said soldier.
'How could it escalate further? You fucking, unwelcome uninvited, piece of shit!' Said the woman before offering them sunflower seeds to put in their pockets 'so at least flowers will grow when you die down here on our homeland.' Of course, all this was spoken in Ukrainian, or whatever language they speak, so I'm relying on other's translation for my approximation of the words.
If she was my mum I'd be proud of her, though trying to contact her to make sure she's still angry and still in the world. Anyway, these days the Russians seem to prefer restrained methods of killing such as poisoned underpants and denying everything! The old Russians would have enjoyed this angry mum then hung her from a lamp post. This is the age of the smart phone camera, after all.
Funny; I'm getting more. A lot of mail using weird character sets - characters that look like E but aren't - and extra spaces between regular characters, and emojis stuck into words. Also an increase in sexy girls asking if I'm alone and would like some company, though using grammar so awful I am simply unable to mimic such atrocities, never mind exchanging fluids with such people. Ugh! I suppose it's small beer compared to real atrocities currently going on but it seems the world is still turning through it's shitty cycles. I suspect we will keep this up right to the next extinction event when the big space rock hits us... Big Bump! Don't Look Up! Don't Look Up! I weep in despair.
Yep. FBReader on Android, but the last time I looked at the Windows version - admittedly a while ago now - it looked like it hadn't been updated since neolithic times and seemed a bit clunky, and I wasn't happy. Real reading, though, is done on a dedicated EReader. I have only bought one dead tree book in the past two years.
I have a few issues with Calibre so I tried Okular. Ugh. I think I have more issues with Okular. It looks dreadful. The font used is horrible and I couldn't find any option to change it. If font can be changed I don't know where it's hidden. Installed it; uninstalled it 30 minutes later. Why is it so hard to find a good Epub reader on the PC? I think I'll stick with Calibre. Just don't go criticizing the thing to the Author - his name is Kovid, of all things - He can be a bit abrupt. :-)
I Agree, but it's hardly a Motte and Bailey keeping out marauders from tinkering with a few innards. Once you're aware how to do it you're off and running and will soon forget there was ever an alternative. And it was already on the start right click anyway so there's already a bunch of people who won't even notice the change.
I can't believe I'm defending Microsoft but, come on guys! Really!
Nothing is burning down except a few commenters. They moved some stuff from the top to the left, and some stuff from the left to the top. So they rotated a few things. Agreed, it's a bit pointless, but it's hardly a great fire of london. It looked pretty much the same since Windows 8.1. I haven't checked with the blessed windows 7 [genuflect...genuflect] because I can't be arsed finding where I stuck those machines.
RE: "Most people only use a tiny %age of Office's capabilities <snip> so teaching them new stuff is hard."
An individual may only use, say, 5% of features. A different user may use a different 5% of features. The larger the company, the more individuals there are, the greater the percentage of features being used - and the greater the amount of support needed. If only it were simple.
Surely the only reason to use WinRAR is to write it's proprietary RAR files, and who really needs to do that? Just install 7Zip. It opens RAR files even if it can't write them, and it even opens some old virtual hard disks I was wondering how to get files out of; 7Zip did it! I love 7Zip so much I asked it to marry me; It said no and my wife objected but...oh well, we'll just have to stay friends.
RE: "what we have is Statistical Analysis Machines"
It's even narrower than that implies. We have Expert Systems with a very limited domain of knowledge, nothing like AI at all. So yes, Statistical Analysis Machines, but with a very tightly controlled boundary on that knowledge. A fridge knows about food and dates, but nothing about how to put them together to make a tasty snack...Well, I suppose that example fits me too; I am hopeless in the kitchen - the difference between me and that fridge, however, is that I could learn how to cook if I wanted to (which I don't) but the fridge would need a new brain for it to learn something new. And as for self driving cars: I am coming to the conclusion that the only way a car will be able to drive itself safely, is if all the other cars on the road are also self driving-unless you have a car made in the US running in the UK, or vice versa, and all cars are trying to drive on the same side of the road. With human drivers you never know which side of the road they might be on at any given moment and likely causing nervous breakdown in self driving AI; we better hope they don't learn how to do road rage.
Ahem...I digress. Anyway, my term for these smart things is Expert Systems. It's what I was taught. That's all I wanted to say. :-)
Linux has been very successful, if not on the desktop. Imagine if it had been a commercial project. They would have had way more resources and might have been able to iron out the wrinkles and problems sooner and, dare I dream, have been a viable competitor to Microsoft while Microsoft was still in the early part of their success. Being a FOSS project slows down development and gives your competitors time to develop/market ahead of you. Linux developers still need to live so still need to have a day job, so don't have as much time to spare as those working full time at Microsoft. Imagine if Linux had been commercial then we might be living in a very different world by now, and I don't necessarily mean a world where Linux viruses/virii proliferate (though that would always be a possibility since Linux would then offer a much larger and more profitable target) - you can say I'm a dreamer, am I the only one?
He wants to show off his anti Microsoft credentials and do some virtue signalling, and this is all he has to offer since he doesn't use VS(C) and so can't legitimately criticize it without risk of saying something silly. Either that or he does use VS(C) but wants to keep it secret from all his cool kid FOSS friends and would rather stay away from the subject of Microsoft IDE's in case he gives himself away.
I can say this for MSSQL, it isn't as expensive as Oracles offerings (last I looked which was quite a while ago).
Visual Studio is barely above Vim because Visual Studio Code has eaten it's lunch. You said yourself that VS had a vast majority before VSC came along, so all those VS users simply switched to VSC. VSC is pretty much a stripped down version of VS, and is becoming more accomplished with each iteration. VSC is the new VS. It's still Visual Studio. I'd be more surprised if that were Vim at the top, but it isn't. Nothing has changed really. It's all Microsoft.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread but figured it may not be very visible there, and may be useful to someone...so...
Haven't tried this, as no Win11 machine, but...
During installation when it asks for your MS email account name type something silly such as "1@1.com"
Type in a silly password such as "qwerty" and click "Sign In"
When it says nope, try the password again.
Keep clicking "Sign In" until you eventually get to a. "OOPS Something went wrong" message and it locks the account which doesn't exist anyway. DO NOT USE A REAL ACCOUNT ADDRESS.
Then you get to create a local account!
As I say I haven't tried it but been told it works. It's a bit of a faff, like disconnecting the network was in W10, but not too bad...IF IT WORKS! Which I give no guarantee for and Microsoft still has time to block this faff too.
I'd be interested to know if this really does work.
Haven't tried this, as no Win11 machine, but...
During installation when it asks for your MS email account name type something silly such as "1@1.com"
Type in a silly password such as "qwerty" and click "Sign In"
When it says nope, try the password again.
Keep clicking "Sign In" until you eventually get to a. "OOPS Something went wrong" message and it locks the account which doesn't exist anyway. DO NOT USE A REAL ACCOUNT ADDRESS.
Then you get to create a local account!
As I say I haven't tried it but been told it works. It's a bit of a faff, like disconnecting the network was in W10, but not too bad...IF IT WORKS! Which I give no guarantee for and Microsoft still has time to block this faff too.
I'd be interested to know if this really works.