* Posts by Rich 2

1234 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: I Wrote A Script.......

Who the hell writes a 23k Python script to move some files? And thinks it’s worthy of boasting about?

Remind me never to work with you

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Not a Hater

I find it staggering that almost all the Linux distributions adopted this crap so readily. Did they all get a bump on the head at the same time or something? Thank goodness there are several non-systemDread options out there (I’ve used Void for years now) but I do worry that there will come a point that this cancer is so widely used that many normal applications simply will not run without it - which I’m sure is P’s intent

I curse Prickhead for making this abhorrence. I also curse the distro heads for having a “duh ok” attitude and forcing it in the world

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

“ the bigger question is if the harm will result in them reevaluating their decisions.”

I think the chances of that happening are so remote as to give the Planck constant a run for its money in terms of very small

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

A cruel part of me is actually quite pleased Trump got in. The morons that voted for him can reap the tragic consequences and I hope they come away from the experience completely fucked-over.

I’m genuinely very sorry for the rest, who loath the Orange fuckwit as much as much as the next non-lobotomised person, but it’s a great sitcom to watch - more ludicrous and implausible than the 70’s Soap series

Google's 7-year slog to improve Chrome extensions still hasn't satisfied developers

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Google facilitating ad blockers ?

We’ll exactly

relating to stripping out googly redirection links, I read “We can't do it the correct way because when Google engineers design the [chrome.declarativeNetRequest API], they fail to think of this scenario”

I’m sure the Googly engineers absolutely didn’t fail to think about it at all. I’m further sure that they deliberately broke it for obvious reasons

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

Rich 2 Silver badge

“The question is, how do we move forward?”

The way forward is to legislate to force the AI slurpers to remove the stolen data from their models.

And if they can’t do that (and they keep saying they can’t untangle it) then they must delete the WHOLE of their model and’s associated data and start again, this time WITHOUT stealing stuff

Yes it will cost them a fortune. My heart bleeds - they shouldn’t have done it in the first place

Why are governments so utterly shit when it comes to dealing with crap like this?

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

While I don’t disagree with your observation, I don’t think AVs are a solution

For one, I would find it frankly terrifying to be charging along a motorway with nobody but a buggy computer in control. I would find it scary enough pootling around town. And I doubt I’m alone in that.

And I don’t think the whole issue of who is at fault when someone gets killed has been addressed. Not a technical issue, but not a resolved issue either.

Rich 2 Silver badge

Autonomous vehicles

I have never got the push for AVs. It is, yet again, a solution looking for a problem to solve

Trump scrubs all mention of DEI, gender, climate change from federal websites

Rich 2 Silver badge

Upvote for “orange shit gibbon”

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Rich 2 Silver badge

I think the same one-longer was applied to the use of the ducking stool. That turned out great, yes?

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: I look forward to . . .

The whole “carbon tax” is just a means of not doing anything to address the problem.

The idea of “Carbon trading” is just obscene; an idea worthy of a Dr. Strangelove sequel. But again, just a mechanism for not doing anything

Microsoft catapults DeepSeek R1 into Azure AI Foundry, GitHub

Rich 2 Silver badge

Oh the irony

Open AI accusing someone else of copying their data without permission

Pot. Meet Kettle. While my heart bleeds and I dig out my violin

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Rich 2 Silver badge

Christmas Day

Do they only switch the tracking computers on on Christmas day then?

I ask because Apophis was also found on Christmas day; several years ago.

Ho Ho Ho

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Confused

I’m still confused….

@Mage

“ The application doesn't know it wants to read more data till the device driver (in the kernel?) tells it. The application only knows when it wants to send data.”

> No! The application knows full well when it is READY to process more data. The kernel has no idea. Whether there is any data to read is another issue and is the whole point of this change. If the application is waiting for the nic driver to tell it that there is data then the nic driver must be polling the nic or waiting for an interrupt from it - which was exactly the question I posed - ie - dues the work by just controlling how the kernel reads data into its internal buffers?

@Brewsters Angle….

“ Wild guess: the kernel knows whether a process is actively waiting on the socket or busy eating processor cycles. That's probably enough of a clue”

> No! That would be just wild speculation by the kernel. Just because the application is busy, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t rather be processing incoming data and would like to be interrupted and told there is some.

@containetizer

“Applications indicate they want to read more data by notifying the operating system via select()/poll()/epoll()”

> THAT is exactly the point I was making - it is the application that must make this decision. Not the kernel. Of course the application needs to convey that decision to the kernel so the kernel can modify the driver’s behaviour. But it’s still the application that is making the decision

Rich 2 Silver badge

Confused

I’m confused about how this works in the kennel. Surely your application needs to do the switching between interrupt and polling because (a) only the application knows when it wants to read more data and (b) it is the application that needs to implement the interrupt handler or polling calls

So how is this made “automatic” in the kernel? What am I missing?

Or does this switching only relate to feeding data into the internet buffers for the application to read later? If yes then it still doesn’t answer point (a)

White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Eh?

Is an idea but from what I understand, some of these drones have come very close to other aircraft and have been seen buzzing around airports.

Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a gov body with responsibility for air safety should have any hand in, even if it is a “test”

Rich 2 Silver badge

Eh?

This makes no sense at all. It’s not like the whole thing wasn’t widely publicised. Why would the FAA not say anything at the time? Indeed they seemed to deliberately “forget” to mention any involvement at all to the point that they were happy to sit back and watch the FBI and other agencies run around looking into it.

I’m not into conspiracies but this is definitely bollox.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Save fuel

What if we blast them towards the sun and let gravity do the rest?

Rich 2 Silver badge

Dickheads. The pair of them

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Rich 2 Silver badge

A better plan….

….would be to use the extra cash to keep whoever is responsible for this blinding incompetence at his majesty’s pleasure.

Whether that be people at the council, their consultants (there HAS to be some consultants) or people at Oracle (obviously guilty).

What a shit show

Exchange update refusenik? Consider yourself warned by Microsoft

Rich 2 Silver badge

Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service

How many other email servers can anyone name that need an “Emergency Mitigation Service”?

What an utter shit show.

How old is Exchange now? And how shit does it STILL manage to be? God I hate MS

ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

Rich 2 Silver badge

The generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot fell over on Thursday

Yay - some good news for once!!

Meta's pay-or-consent model under fire from EU consumer group

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Third Option

That’s where Pi-Hole or some other traffic filter comes in

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Do we even need to ask this question?

Exactly this. It’s exactly the same as advert consent popups defaulting to “yes, of course I want to be tracked by all and sundry so they can sell my data”

The puzzle with AI though is why? How can you make any money from it? Answer ….errrr ….. at the moment, you can’t. So that leaves the only other revenue stream - sell your user’s data to the advertising industry.

Sounds familiar?

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Rich 2 Silver badge

I’m sticking with my iPhone 8

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: There is no improved Windows Search

Windows’ inability to find a file that is RIGHT THERE (!!!!) is one of the biggest mysteries in the cosmos. Another is just how can MS possibly write software that is so consistently utterly shite and dysfunctional.

Jeeeez - I really f@&£ing hate everything to do with MS

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Rich 2 Silver badge

Infinitely. Apparently.

I was complaining about some other MS shitware the other day at work (can’t remember which particular pile of steaming turd was the subject of my wrath) and a colleague of mine gave me a withering look and said something doing the lines of “oh it’s not that bad…”

The thing is, it IS that bad. It’s just that there are STILL many many people who think this kind of shit is “normal” and “acceptable”. Someone else a few weeks ago even pointed out to me that “Windows is good”. What can you do with that? Compared to what? An actual turd? Could you tell the difference?

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Typical microsoft arrogance

Using the words “Microsoft” and “productivity gains” in the same sentence is an oxymoron

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Proof that marketeers have heads full of air

I was going to post the same thing

MS really do live in a parallel universe. People want to switch this crap off? REALLY? Are you sure? Well if they must, I suppose…

It just proves what we knew already - they really don’t take a blind bit of notice to their user’s comments. If they did then we wouldn’t see quotes like this

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Money talks

I completely agree with you, This whole pile of ordure is exposing just how utterly amoral, spineless, and corrupt the likes of Zuk, Musk, etc are. Not that it comes as any surprise at all - I’m just impressed by the bare-faced unapologetic cowardly way it’s playing out.

Zuk is a psychopath (and if that conjures up images of axe-wielding loons then I encourage you to go and look-up what the word actually means), which makes his toadying-up to the Great Orange One all the more interesting and exposes exactly where his morals lie (not that we didn’t know already - he doesn’t have any). Obviously Musk is getting a job out of it, so his toadying is less surprising.

Utter shitesters the whole lot of them.

As an aside, I was interested to read Zuk’s reasons for getting rid of moderators from his web shites; something to do with “getting back to original values”. I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong but wasn’t his first version of faecesbook put up so his fellow collage mates could vote on which of the girls were hot? Yep - that’s where his “original values” lie

Biden said to weigh global limits on AI exports in 11th-hour trade war blitz

Rich 2 Silver badge

PLEASE ban it all

I think all American AI products should be blocked completely from the rest of the world, especially anything to do with MS, Faecesbook, Googlies or Amazon.

For the sake of the kids/self-interest/whatever of course.

Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs

Rich 2 Silver badge

Here’s hoping

Off prices are going to be so high that nobody odd buying the kit then hopefully it will prompt manufacturers to continue to make non-“AI” stuff

To save the energy grid from AI, use open source AI, says open source body

Rich 2 Silver badge

Unbelievable

That is the most bollox headline I have seen in a while. Which is a tough accolade to acquire given MS’s (and others’) recent loonacy with everything “AI” (no such thing) and people like Musk in the news.

What the hell are they smoking at “LF Energy”??

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

Rich 2 Silver badge

Why?

While very impressive, are the samples this will collect any different from the rocks and samples brought back by the Apollo people?

I’m guessing the latter was specially chosen to provide samples from a diverse range of possibilities

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Doing less worse faster

Doing less worse faster?

That’s “Agile” isn’t it?

Honey co-founder's Pie Adblock called out for copying GPL'd uBlock Origin files

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Honey Lawsuit Summary

One simple answer to this is for all effected websites to deny any affiliate links that are connected with PayPal

That should reduce the value of their 4 billion investment quite quickly

PayPal was a shitty company at its inception and one that I will never have any dealings with. Clearly not much has changed

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Pfft, Sprites!

Ah PMG :-)

I had an Atari later on. But documentation wasn’t easy to come by and I had to rely on magazine articles etc to try and work out how to do stuff. As it was (by then) very close to the end of the 8 bit era, I decided life was too short and sold it for a song

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: GOTO

“6502 assembly helll”?

At least 6502 assembler is incredibly simple - you can easily write all the opcodes (plus addressing mode options) on the back of a fag packet.

I remember making my first C64 animated alien sprite, written in assembler. It had a club foot and a bent antenna but I loved it and it was great fun to play with.

UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting

Rich 2 Silver badge

I hate the tech world

“… cited connected TVs as one device type that needs to serve ads that can't collect user data…”

No. It doesn’t NEED to serve ads. NOTHING NEEDS to serve ads.

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: The Feds know what's going on

I suggest you take a look on YouTube. There are literally dozens of videos of these things.

I’ve also seen several pics (again on YT) of what looks like a (very) large drone that apparently crashed and was later carted away on the back of what looks like a low-loader. If genuine (and I have to admit it looks so, and yes, I’m not blind to the fact that this stuff is very easy to fake these days) then clearly SOMEONE at US gov level has SOME idea of what they are

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Doesn't affect me

Well therein lies the problem. It started as an alternative init system. And since then, it has grown like a cancer to replace stuff that never needed replacing and fix stuff that never needed fixing. And bringing a whole tanker of shit with it.

It is an ego project for some wanker that just can’t leave stuff alone.

What’s infinitely more fucking annoying is that almost all the Linux distributions jumped on the wank wagon and decided to use it. Fuck-knows why! Maybe the maintainers got back-handers to do so, or they’re just bloody morons. I don’t know

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: Doesn't affect me

Thumbs up for Void. I’ve used it for years. No system-dunce is def a selling point but it has a lot more going for it.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Rich 2 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Aliens...

Double A!!!

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Rich 2 Silver badge

I was about to say the same thing. If (as I’m sure they will) MS force copilot to start on boot (even if you tell it to fuck off and die) then how is any other application going to get in first to set the shortcut?

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Rich 2 Silver badge

Shitstorm

While Mullenweg‘s behaviour in this has been ….errr ….questionable AB’s I’m in no way defending him, I can’t see how a judge can force him to open up access to the Wordpress website for WP. It’s HIS website (ok - technically it might not be his) - surely he can do what he likes with it

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

Rich 2 Silver badge
Pint

Re: It's not just Brits...

@heyrick

Fucking TOP post!!!!

Cloudy with a chance of GPU bills: AI's energy appetite has CIOs sweating

Rich 2 Silver badge

AI - yes, THAT again

“… in response to ballooning AI demands…”

Why does every story have to suggest that everyone is scrambling to use “AI”?

Can we just stop this bollox please. It’s bloody infuriating

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Rich 2 Silver badge

Dumbing down

“Archinstall 3 is still very basic and text-based…”

I have seen this comment many times over the years; often applied to BSD installers.

Why does an installer need to be anything but text based? Being text based does not mean it’s primitive or old. It means it’s probably a heap more reliable and will likely run on anything without much fuss, compared to an unnecessarily complex, resource hungry graphical interface that needs to install drivers etc etc just to get off the ground.

Google offered millions to ally itself with trade body fighting Microsoft

Rich 2 Silver badge

Get what they deserve

Well if this isn’t getting into bed with the devil then I’m buggered if I know what is.

Anyone who has anything to do with Googlies in this way fully deserve to get fleeced when the honeymoon is over

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models

Rich 2 Silver badge

And the justification?

Even if there is an option to opt in/out of this data slurp, what possible justification is there for building-in such capabilities?

Nobody with half a brain cell would want MS to trawl through their word documents for any reason whatsoever, so what possible twisted thinking goes on at MS to think such an option is viable?

Years back, MS used to be run by arseholes. Now it’s run by fucking megalomaniac scum

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