Posts by Alistair 3099 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
I've been using trackballs since..... urrr, well I think I've had mice at offices where I *wasn't* a full timer. I still have my ?? 27 year old (possibly 32?) logitec trackball running, the fingertip, not thumb version, the scrollwheel has had its rubber outer liner replaced many times, oddly with a standard faucet filter washer. I've taken one or another trackball with me to work, I just cannot deal with waving all over the desk.
@AMAFM
Many of us listened even *before* the launch, however the launches appear to have fascinated about 29% of the US voting population back in 2016, and it has carried through to the now rather destructive landing craters, including the disaster of global markets lately. Hopefully the fascination breaks before the critters get out of the cylinders.
@VOT - you really need to give up. Most of the folks on this forum are quite well experienced in the REAL world, not your fantasies.
Canada still provides 48 to 60 percent of the base crude oil that the US consumes. Aaaaaaaaand Trump has slapped that crude with a 10% tariff.
Trump is NOT a shark. He's far more like a mudskipper.
Trump has a substantial track record of bankruptcy, lost fraud lawsuits against his businesses, and several cases of having his very own words used against him in courts of law. He's the bully on the schoolyard, facing not one, but in the end 11 countries (Europe, South America, Canada) lead by folks who have amongst them, 7 Phd's and at least 14 Masters degrees. I'm not even counting China, where Xi has a rather long list of core governmental agencies lead by exceptionally smart folks.
@AC
Carney will be even worse than Trudeau. Your economy has tanked and Carney will likely finish it off.
Basically considering the last 9 years, including COVID and the idiot in the WH down south for the *second* time, Canada has done just fine overall. Compared to the rest of the G20 we're in pretty damn good shape. Lower inflation overall, lower debt increases vs GDP drop, lower individual non-capital debt than the rest of the G20. You need to stop listening to the bullshit Pollievre and the rest of the corporatists have been spouting in the social media assault on democracy.
Bluntly, Pollievre has been a lifelong politician, and has NOTHING in the way of accomplishments, nor for that matter does Trump, who has a staggeringly long list of failures. Much like our compatriots in Mexico, we Canadians are deciding that someone with a goddamn BRAIN will do us so much better than someone who can only spout useless cliches about things being broken.
Germany has had the great good fortune to have had a Really Smart Leader for a number of years, unfortunately, Angela has stepped out of leadership. I seriously hope that the UK can find someone as well educated as Macron and Merkel and Carney.
"I just do wish people still put important statically linked binaries in /sbin..."
and
That s was/is for single-user mode. /sbin contained and should still only contain the barest sysadmin essentials that might be needed to prepare a Unix box
Are in no way incompatible. The binaries to bootstrap the system were stored in /sbin and were statically linked on MANY unicies. In fact, in HPUX AIX and (at least the last version that I ran) Oracle's rip off RHEL /sbin is both basic bootstrap code, and statically linked.
Furthermore, /sbin's statically linked code has in my professional System Admin career saved at *least* 25 LIVE running systems from needing to be *rebooted* and thus *restored* from backup.
Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).
At one point about 10 years ago I ended up with a commute that, if taken during *typical* hours, would have been 90 to 150 minutes each way, and my employer agreed that I could work 06:00 - 14:00. This cut my commute to less than 50 minutes in the am and less than 90 in the pm. I tended to get most of my days work *done* between 06:00 and 08:30 each and every day. Thereafter I was harassed by the Stupid Question For You brigade. Luckily, after about 18 months in that state I ended up with a back problem for about 2 months and was thereafter allowed to WFH. Unless, of course, the third party DC staff did something insanely stupid, such as sealing up the *new* Switch Room *BEFORE* the HVAC folks had set up the AC ventilation correctly, resulting in a rather toasty afternoon in the third floor of 3600 (IFYKYK) and taking out the entirety of not one, but THREE datacenters.....
For a tariff on Aluminium to work it would have to make smelting in the US cheaper than buying in from Canada. And, of course there is a lead time on building smelting plants etc
Eclectic: The etc would be, hmmm, lessee, dams on the Mississippi river or perhaps 7 or 8 nuclear plants? Smelting plants they may well already have, and likely could revitalize several in Ohio that are already mothballed. The powersource lead times are 10 to 20 years.
Your copy of economics 101 is about 95 years out of date.
You could do yourself *one* favour on the front of understanding how tariffs can affect production and economic process, Look up something called the Smoot-Hawley tarrif act, and how and when it was applied, and precisely what occurred over the ensuing 18 years. Makes for interesting reading. As a result perceptions of tariffs changed over the ensuing years.
"We have increased our subscriber base by 23% over the last six months because of this change" /s
Microsoft, much after DOS 6.2 became a seriously traded stock, and an awful lot of folks rely on that stock, so Wall Street BuzzWord Bingo applies. More "subscribers" means more income, means more value, means better stock value, means higher paypackets and golden parachutes for the C Suite. Thus such nonsense will continue unabated, not just with MS, but with pretty much any WallStreet BuzzWord Bingo victim technology corporations. Sadly, there are very many of them.
squid and HTTPS is doable, especially if you control the downstream network connections and systems, and in that case is not particularly difficult. Perhaps it helped that we had CA level certs that we could use to sign things, and indeed could drop those certs on all the systems downstream. Since it was an enterprise we could manage redirects at the core routers.
I makes no comments on the nightmare fallouts that security had to cope with after the fact............
No one ever said anyone was going to cut people off.
Douggie F did indeed say he'd throw the switch on the electricity output. Between Ontario <Nuclear and Hydro> and Quebec <Hydro> there's a fair bit of overproduction up here that gets sent south. I'll point out that there was a TON of work done to improve interlink and bridge linking after a loose wire between Ohio and Kentucky blew out the grids a few years back, but that work *did not* include boosting the amount of energy the NE US was actually producing. We're building 2 new nuclear plants in Ontario and I believe there may be a third going up in Quebec to bolster our energy stability. The numbers vary by season but we ship about 22% to 35% of the NE US electricity from my reading.
If you've read any Motie books, you know that the (lightsail+craft) can be reversed to (craft+parachute) once one is close enough to the target star, and the star will provide some braking force. Orbit *might* be a possibility with some care and planning. It would also overall lengthen the timeline of the journey, but it should be technically possible.
Staggered launch concept works for the step signalling, but there we get to the "can we keep the damn thing running long enough* equation far faster, the key element being where in $(deity)'s name are we gonna find the powersource to keep all these radio signals going over the lifespan of the mission. Masses are gonna be a serious consideration and just about anything that makes zapzap for the beepbeeps is gonna be a problem.
I'm not seeing why it wouldn't be better for the government to string some fiber along the same pylons if they're subsidizing service and keep the whole thing owned within the country.
Firstly, Ice storms happen, and wind storms. We bury our comms as much as possible these days.
Secondly, *all* of the EU would fit inside Ontario and Quebec. The distances involved in some cases are 600 to 800 Kms.
Third, many of the more remote communities generate their own 'leccy, sometimes with small waste incineration plants, sometimes using renewables.
Bebu:
oracle/oracle was still the install default in 2003.
The DBA's were furious with me since I made the automated installer I created for it override the default on a per (server/cluster) basis. Its not like I didn't hand the user/password to the fellow who was the TL for the DBAs less than 20 minutes after the install was done.
I'm pleased to see 10 coming down the pipe. I've been using WINE from about 1998 or so, and have (back in that time frame) contributed some work on the codebase. I have been playing rather a number of windows only video games in WINE since. (Notably WoW from about 2004 or so, Diablo, Wolfensteins, and a few others, recently FFXIV). MS office stuff up to 2000 *just worked* but after that there were specific patches required for some MS office code. (Crossover maintained them and did charge license fees for the full package *cough*) I'll note that I build my own WINE from the wine *staging* repositories, and I can point out that a) with the switch to Fedora 40 and Wayland based display (I included the X overlay for wayland) b) with the wayland components now built into WINE, and c) using a slightly out of date Nvidia card and proprietary drivers, I actually had 0 issues, and likely due to both mesa and Vulkan improvements I saw about a 12% increase in framerate.
Office wise I have an OLD copy of outlook that just works (circa 2002), although I do have it talking only to my own mail server. Visual Studio has a snap that works on linux -- I've used it on occasion to tear into code problems for someone I know who never learned why functions exist in codebases. I've found that anything Windows based that needs *direct* hardware access can be clunky on WINE and on occasion will not work.
The BEST tool in WINE when one has windows programs that start, but fail shortly after is to a) have multiple WINE prefixes, and b) keep a copy of WineTricks handy and *up to date*. 75% of the launch failures are having incorrect or missing NATIVE .NET components in the wine prefix.
But I may be far far far too familiar with how it works.
Capitalism back in the 1950's 1960's and 1970's and for a very brief period in the early 80's was
Well Regulated
Regan began the dismantlement of the regulatory structures, and it continued with ensuing governments, Mulroney up here, GHBush, and others along the way, GWbush handed the investment banking industry access to the commodities markets, and dismantled the last of Glass-Stegal.
Both parties in the US are effectively advertising agencies for the investment banks due to a little decision made by the US Supreme court calls Citizens United which has basically decided that the richest citizens get to buy all the politicians they can, and businesses have WAY more money that individuals.
2 dead, one drunk.
I suspect that there have been auditors. I mean, this is a government agency right?, and they do get audited, right?. And The Government *pays* for those audits, right?
And in the x years that this platform has been around there are THREE people who support it, and the auditors have *never* raised the But There Are Busses red flag on this?
I forsee LA County suing the crap out of a stack of auditors, ending up with sufficient funds to resolve the issue. Either that or several ex senior staffers need to be pressed back into service as data entry clerks for the officers affected.......
This is quite a stinky stinky situation.
Martin:
Check your scheduler settings, I'm on 39, and it appears that they've retired both of my preferred schedulers. This has resulted in my VMs doing rather strange things, since one is Slackware and the other is NetBSD, such that they don't seem to be correctly handling multiple CPU allocations. (Basically running single threaded) So far, I've gotten the host scheduler sorted, but I've not found the correct sysctl param to fix the vm behaviour.
So Linus pulls Russian maintainers off the MAINTAINERS list for whatever reasons. And the commentariate get together and we get a multi-perspective world history lesson in a discussion thread.
The single largest issue within this comment thread is perspective. I personally feel that there is substantial reason for Vlad to want to recoup Ukraine into Russia, both politically, economically and for reasons of personal self aggrandisement. I don't personally agree that it is in any way beneficial to either the peoples of Ukraine or the peoples of Russia, but almost purely for Vlad. However my perspective is coloured by a western upbringing, a classical education, and a study of history that includes periods prior to the 1940's.
Part and parcel of the process to reaching accord, or peaceful resolution of conflict, is comprehending perspective, and finding common cause. Sadly with the influence of social media over the last 20 odd years, polarization and extremism have taken over far far far too many people who will no longer be willing to, or possibly even capable of, comprehending other perspectives. They will be very unwilling to seek out the common ground.
I have Ukrainian neighbours. They arrived in my neighbourhood barely 6 months before the invasion. They have Russian relatives on both sides, and are very clear about their position on this issue. Their families are all convinced this is purely for Vlad's position in Russia. I'm willing to accept their perspective.
Definitely an under acknowledged hero to the digital community.
Fidonet, Bluewave, L.O.R.D., and dozens of other BBS platform apps were built on the shoulders of the work he'd done.
In the late 80's I was living in an apartment that was on the *one* street that could call two different area codes as "local". I ended up being the Bluewave bridge between those two area codes. I still have quite a few friends that were part of the BBS community in both regions.
And I think I indoctrinated rather a lot of bodies into the BBS communities from the mid 80's on. I still remember my fidonet mail address.
BTW => KERMIT!
Martin:
This is the modern era. Information's going to leak out. The more you try to keep a lid on things the more people are going to suspect you're full of it.
I'm *mostly* inclined to agree with that statement, however, the ambient stupidity amongst the general public in the last 15 years has become ..... hmmm .... somewhat stifling. And unfortunately, stupidity tends to be subject to bafflegab and bullshit insertion. This is unfortunate, since we've basically spent the last 30 years removing the vaccination of logic and reasoning from our education system.
I'll be honest, there were not *really* that many instances where I invoked RH support for our fleet, but when we did it *always* got escalated quite quickly, (Thanks to our RH contract support admin, great guy) and at one point we had over 4800 instances, BM, VM, clusters, etc, I know darned well we were *not* paying $4,800 per instance per year, but I know also that $25,000/year would be an absolute bargain compared to what we *were* paying. My question would be how long would it take *these guys* to get a body on the ground at a data center or a command room to do hands on? I know RH managed it twice, in less than 72 hours, and it wasn't an *huge* additional cost. I think we paid for the hotel and the cabs while they were around.
@AC
Are you like a human equivalent of "The Onion"?
Very clearly this one is NOT like The Onion. The Onion is definitely in the category of high value media, as it tends to take the piss out of those that are too full of themselves, or shit, or sometimes both, with a fairly outrageous sense of humour. Very much unlike the one you target, that one, clearly, has no sense of humour.
From TFA:
Five other companies that we know of sued by Sable – Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks – settled out of court.
Five other companies that we know of sued by Sable – Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks – provided sufficient investment funds for someone to retire on
It isn't as prevalent as some other tools out there, but it *does* get a fair bit of use. It is frequently well hidden as far as end users and even some middle level IT admins perspective. It is awesome once deployed and tuned. Makes some of the virtualization platforms look positively archaic.
Your final line is the absolute rock bottom of the political issues across the entirety of the modern "Democratic" world at the moment.
The one total sin created by the combination of a global internet, the death of print news, and "FREE" social media is the absolutism that exists on both sides of any political argument. Advertising drives revenue, clickbait drives views, views generate advertising, so, make the headline reactive, people will click, and have the article push ONE VIEW only -- generate controversy, more clicks! MOoooooooooar AD revenue!!!!
As for Vlad liking the Donnie, basically, Vlad is a dictator, and Donnie has made it clear he wants to be King Of America, with clearly dictatorial approach, and dictators share a common interest, and common goals, so makes for easy friendships. And neither of them have many real friends any more.
Geoff:
I'll say it again.
Elon has *money* and lots of it at times. He himself is a goddamn doorknob. What he has, several times, done, is take a set of decent ideas, found or buy a company that engenders those ideas, and then find bodies with the relevant experience, talent and skills to bring those ideas to life. Gwen Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX has made it to where it is. Elon is the mouthpiece that happens to have the bulk of the stock, Gwen runs the show, and found the engineers, designers and other staff that make things happen. The only credit he really deserves here is splashing cash around at the right moments.
As for Twitter/Twatter/X or Xitter or whatever that cesspool is being labelled these days, I'm fairly sure it will become a business management course study in how not to run a company in the future. I suspect the whole episode is Elon's midlife crisis writ large upon the internet social media history.
Dozens of Invisible Teenage Males Admitted to Hospitals
UC Berkley medical staff called for ambulance buses to tranport dozens of male teenaged first year students to hospitals suffering from a variety of heart problems and a lengthy variety of physical injuries after the male first year chemistry students injected themselves with tartrazine believing it made them invisible, so that they could invade the female dorms and steal the most panties. Unfortunately the female boxing teams were holding a training session in the lobby.
<I'm sorry about the keyboards, but I honestly expect this fallout. Soon. The Stupidification has begun>
Dave K:
Please don't mention that horrific device again. I gagged a bit.
Even our networking team despised the creatures, and they were the one's who'd suggested them.
I have memories of cfnroenec sllac where sklof at the remote dne appeared to eb gnipmuj up and down in their staes.
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