Posts by Munchausen's proxy

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Damn. I wish I had ever worked for her.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Re: Software Junk

Oh, lots of IT-related companies offer excellent customer service. Just remember that you aren't the customer.

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

"Like the article says, if you don't have any sound daemon then you can only play one thing at a time. Anything else that tries to play audio will get an error when it tries to open the sound device if something else is currently playing, which is not what most users expect."

And yet, I have pulseaudio and pipewire both on my "taboo - never install" blacklist (OpenSuse Leap), and have no problem listening to a music stream while watching 2 simultaneous videos, each with their own volume control, working perfectly. Maybe I'm holding it wrong..

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: The original Internet can still be found in remote corners

Thanks. You just cost me an hour and a half -- to start.

The internet has been useful today.

(No really, thanks!)

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

Most people are pretty useless anyway.

To be fair, so is most software, and a lot of hardware.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Re: Happy Days

"VS Code is a bit fragile with some of the plugins, particularly for git under Linux, but it has a decent number of addons to handle syntax highlighting, editing, and good enough vim emulation."

You know what else has decent syntax highlighting, editing, and a pretty good vim emulation?

Vim.

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: As part of its human resources initiatives to strengthen its status as a DX company

"HR departments being of course notorious for their young, dynamic, innovative and transformative nature, and not at all stuffed full of unimaginative dullards who can't scratch their own arse without first having consulted the company policy on arse-scratching."

I think you mean there, "...without holding internal meetings with "senior leadership" for a year and a half to create a company policy on arse-scratching."

And then not telling anyone about it.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Re: Got complacent there

"Bit complacent of Simon to not check the seal and content before leaving the store. "

I wonder if he was distracted by Catherine. I'm interested to see how that works out.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Re: Quit vim

Use Emacs instead:

Ctrl-C,Meta-Bucky-M, "(close-this-buffer-and-the-other-buffers-and-exit-while-saving-probably)"

Not only simple, but totally intuitive!

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Etymology help?

I'm not familiar with 'drum printer'. Is that the same as what I've always referred to as a 'chain printer' or is there another dinosaur in our collective past?

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

External help may be required

I wonder if the BOFH takes on consulting jobs?

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

"R. (The language, not the letter)

The correct answer is AWK"

Why not both? The combination of subsetting and selection in AWK followed by fancy stats and pictures in RStudio seems very powerful in my somewhat limited experience.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: Not really concealing anything, more like technically accurate shorthand.

My favorite is from the pharmaceutical world: NSAID - New sorts of aspirin in disguise.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: It's not just the names ...

Good lord. The things TECO could have done with a Unicode instruction set.

Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd

Re: Ok, I'll switch!

Pipewire gave me almost as much trouble as pulseaudio, so it joined pulseaudio on my 'taboo never install' setting.

I still have never found a need for either in what I do with a computer (including listening to multiple sound sources simultaneously)

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

In a mine full of nuggets

for some reason it was the 'coloured pencil office' that shone the brightest for me.

Happy Friday, all.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Re: Interesting

"Anyone know of other programming languages that use another language or glyph system (Cyrillic, Hiragana, etc) at their core?"

APL

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Re: Surely you can set up a mail sever using Red Hat ...

Sendmail on one of the BSDs. Absolutely rock-solid, scales to any size, been around for yonks, etc. etc., what's not to like?

sendmail.cf

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

"Ah yes CentOS the linux distro for those who like their packages years out of date. Personally I'm glad that stagnant pool has gone."

How many disparate users do your clusters support? How do you handle continuity of service while upgrading to new hardware?

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

Re: Poor cyclist

"The gentleman obliquely referred to was found several centuries later, buried under a car park."

Aha. NOW I get it. Thanks!

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Re: Making Python faster

-- " the Python code is likely to be trivial and therefore reliable."

Haha. Until you import a package from the community.

https://xkcd.com/1987/

FBI deletes web shells from hundreds of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers before alerting admins

Re: So all you businesses running Redmond software ...

"and they didn't plant private backdoors on anything,"

Then put a pass-through system between your exchange server and the outside world, and audit its network traffic.

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

Re: Perhaps Elon Musk...

Can we just say that, as a general principle, a supersonic aircraft in ground effect would not be a safe vehicle in which to ride?

As if a supersonic wheeled vehicle on the ground is?

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also installed backdoor

"this is just a who me column article misfiled"

I don't know how I should react to this intrusion until I find out if the BOFH is looking worried, or smug.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Jumbo quarks involved?

"African elephants can be broken down into Savannah elephants and forest elephants"

I'm envisioning something like neutron decay here - do we have a Playmobil data visualization of this process?

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Re: Built into a keyboard?

"From all the posts I've read, what everyone seems to be wanting is nothing but a netbook with updated hardware."

Remember, this is the internet -- if it were raining beer, half the people would be bitching because there weren't any free peanuts.

Devs strung up about .NET 5.0 string changes that may break working code are told: It's not a bug, it's a feature

Re: "... that doesn't create new productivity improvements for our users"

I've got it! Let's use regexes!

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: El Reg becoming political now ?

"Dunkin' is to donuts as Trump is to Presidential."

Just what I'd expect to hear from somebody who probably uses emacs.

Visual Studio Code 1.50 goes hard on extensions support, but tackling add-on bloat is becoming more onerous

Re: Don't blame the extensions...

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6.2K Apr 8 2020 /usr/bin/geany

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

It's pretty ironic

"while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space"

BTRFS uses large amounts of disk space without telling 'du' or 'df' about it. In my experience, exactly the opposite of this claim is true. When you get an unexplainable 'out of disk space' error, you can't see anyplace it's gotten to, and it turns out you quickly need to learn about a bunch of infrastructure you never knew was there, expertise is at a premium.

And that's why I'll never use btrfs again.

'There is no way we can keep coding local': GitPod's cloud development platform released into sunlight of open source

Really no need for code at all anymore

It's frameworks all the way down.

Pew, pew, pew! Our galaxy is shooting cold, gaseous 'bullets' of high-speed matter. Boffins are baffled

To be expected

Once John Conway moved to a higher plane.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

Re: @Julz

Judging by results proudly displayed on social media, some of them seem to be agents of Zeta Reticuli.

Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing

Re: The lack of u triggers me

Sourry.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: Hypocritical

I was always entertained when we did an upgrade and counted all the abends that no one noticed.

Reviewing and profiling your code is boring? Well, Amazon will now sell you an AI editor to do it for you

So,

They've solved the halting problem, then?

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Can I still say

"Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Or is that too hurtful to the lonely?

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Re: Well

"But I bet they made more profit from those 5 tests than the Koreans made from 3500"

I expect we'll see testing numbers skyrocket here, as soon as Ivankacorp LLC gets the sole-source contract for the tests.

Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months

And it lives again

Multics and a simulator to run it on are freely available.

http://multics-wiki.swenson.org/index.php/Main_Page

is a good operational starting point and

https://multicians.org/

has the history.

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Re: COBOL

"Maybe COBOL developers don't go to StackOverflow the minute they have a problem :D"

These days, it's more like "... the minute they want another problem."

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Instilling new timeframes of thought in a world beset by faster/shorter.

"Visiting the clock will require an effort, a long hike on which to contemplate whatever it is you feel contemplating,"

What time is it? Are we almost there?

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

Re: Why isn't any one offended men were required to wear a blazer and slacks or suit?

"Why are so many in the comments "indignant" about women being told what to wear, but nary a peep about men being told what to wear?"

Because men are such stupid sheep they think being told to dress in stupid clothes (and neck accessories) is actually a compliment on their abilities to select stupid clothes.

ERP disaster zone: The mostly costly failures of the past decade

Re: Can ERP actually be a perfect fit for any company ?

"Good for whoever is in charge of the programming, not so good for the company in the long run."

Citation needed. How many problems are avoided, how much spending is never even planned when you have a more-or-less fixed cost inhouse pool of expertise to draw on?

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

Google is probably not your business partner

Definitely not your friend.

'We've done it, we've wasted further time!' Judge raps HP over Mike Lynch court scrutiny

Re: Pissing the Judge off over a number of weeks

In the USA this tactic works, does it? Looks like it's failing spectacularly here.....

"If you can't convince them with facts, then baffle them with bullshit" has been a cornerstone of U.S. discourse for quite a while, now.

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Re: Eh?

It can be argued the owners of Android don't consider surreptitious data extraction to be a bug.

Malicious code ousted from PureScript's npm installer – but who put it there in the first place?

The question is not "how?", but "why?"

"designed to install PureScript, a programming language that compiles to JavaScript, on the user's system using the npm command line interface. It gets used about 2,000 times a week."

It's muppets all the way down.

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Child-proof reset operation

This is the best goddamn thing I have read on the internet this year.

Maybe ever.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Yes, I'd argue, not sure blockchain is quite as overhyped as "AI"

It's a trick question though. AI is the most overhyped technology over the past fifty years.

Sysadmin's three-line 'annoyance-buster' busts painstakingly crafted, crucial policy

Re: Great system...

"That's precisely the point.

See how we have different answers?"

Of course, in real life, the system will simply use the best config until the worst possible time, at which point it will switch seamlessly to using the worst one.