Posts by jake

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Re: Honest inquiry

Frankly, I don't see systemd solving any problems. It doesn't actually fix anything. I do see it adding complex code unnecessarily, which is totally against the entire design philosophy of un*x.

I've been watching this (and contributing, a bit).

It looks like a good option to me.

Personally, I'm sticking with Slackware on the desktop (it works the way I expect a un*x to work), but one of the "guest" machines here will be running Devuan for the foreseeable future.

Re: It is not that clearcut

To say nothing of the fact that systemd goes completely against the entire un*x design philosophy ... kinda like EMACS ;-)

China 'hacked' South Korea to wreck Star Wars missile shield

What kind of numpty ...

... makes things like this available to the Internet at large to begin with? Even via SneakerNet? Have the idiots in charge never heard of security?

Peer pressure, not money, lures youngsters into cybercrime – report

Re: A pint...

I was a big John Peel fan, starting with the last couple years of "Top Gear" (no, not that one!). I was listening the first time he played "Teenage Kicks" ... I never did understand his fascination with the song, I thought (and still think) it is simple dreadful pop. Just goes to show, if we all liked the same thing the world would be an awfully boring place!

RIP, John. This round is on me.

Will the MOAB (Mother Of all AdBlockers) finally kill advertising?

Re: People DO hate adverts

Bad advice, Bernard M. Orwell. The post office will not pass along obvious abuses of the system ... and in fact has been known to prosecute people who won't knock it off. A friend of mine was fined around $3,500 for this practice (in 1998ish), and had to pay all the court fees. (I'm in the US, other jurisdictions may vary, check your local laws etc. etc.)

@AC

"BBC America" is full of advertisements, gets more eyeballs than the BBC in Blighty, and I'm willing to bet that as a result the BBC overall is actually a profit center ... before the accountants fiddle the books, of course.

@Lord Elpuss

/Especially the StupidBrawl.

Alaska dentist 'pulled out patient's tooth while riding a hoverboard'

After the oral arguments, I guess he's finding out that ...

... the law isn't completely toothless. It must bite to be him, he can't just brush it off.

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

Re: The screenshot in the article says it all for me

It's been all recipes all the way down since the year dot ... See: Honeywell's H316 "Kitchen Computer" from 1969 ;-)

http://valerieaurora.org/kitchen.html

Re: How times change..

Dave 126 scrive: "It's just not ideal for all users though."

That, my friend, is reality. Because NOTHING, that's NOTHING! made by mankind is "ideal for all users".

And that's precisely where Redmond, Cupertino and London are going wrong ... They are trying to be all things to all people. The result, as we can see, is nothing short of a clusterfuck. It's also why I don't use or recommend Redmond, Cupertino or London products. KitchenSinkWare wastes disk, burns CPU, eats bandwidth and frustrates the user.

Re: Nemo ... Files ... pah!

Both Files and Caja are based on Nautilus. All suck, IMO.

When I want a file manager, I reach for an xterm and type "mc" ... Does everything I want in a file manager, without having to lift my fingers from the keybR0ad.

(You can't) buy one now! The flying car makes its perennial return

Fly one that close to the Golden Gate Bridge[0] ...

... and you'll probably discover just exactly how cold The Bay is. I seriously doubt it's built to float, especially not with a couple dozen 20mm rounds run through it.

[0] Insert your own local high profile landmark and LZ as you see fit.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Jim didn't pull the hard drive & try to save the data?

So the dumpster diver who bagged the machine did it for him, and retrieved who knows what kind of proprietary information.

I'd fire Jim. Corporate policy.

Hard-pressed Juicero boss defends $400 IoT juicer after squeezing $120m from investors

Sadly ...

... the people investing in this product probably don't know that people have been squeezing fruit for juice at home for a very long time. Wine making has been dated to over 10,000 years ago ...

Ye Bug List

Looks like "The Week In Summary" is being worked on.

Lotsa white-space in there, guys. Intentional?

Guess who's back at Microsoft? Excel, Word creator Charles Simonyi

Re: Dear Mr Simonyi

For division, see "another story", above.

Re: 'I'm no good at ancient Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphics'

Hungarian Notation makes sense. (So does Polish Notation (pre and post), but that's another story ... ). Redmoglyphics? Not so much.

Easy answer.

Originally they weren't ... The harder to answer question is "who changed it, and why?"

Regulate This! Time to subject algorithms to our laws

Re: Sounds like the makings of a witch hunt to me.

Tom, if you have enough energy to boil your blood & yell at DearOldTelly, you'd probably be better off spending your copious free time educating the voters in your neighborhood. If we all did, something might actually get done.

(Can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day walkin' in, singin' a bar ... Oh, wait, that was a different protest entirely. But it just might work ... )

Re: Sounds like the makings of a witch hunt to me.

It wouldn't be scary, per se ...but my gaster would be well and truly flabbered.

Sounds like the makings of a witch hunt to me.

Fear of the unknown on a societal level can be a very ugly thing.

Out of curiosity, has anybody put these politicians on the spot and asked them point-blank to define exactly what they mean by "algorithm"? The answer (or lack thereof) might be amusing ...

RIP Bob Taylor: Internet, desktop PC pioneer powers down at 85

I worked with Bob at DEC.

He was one of the folks that kept Ken Olsen off the backs of those of us who were working on BSD ... Ken was a un*x hater, Bob saw it as a useful tool,

He was a really good guy, totally down to earth, despite his ability to envision the future. No reality distortion field, he didn't need one. One of the best people I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

On a personal note, he is the person who brought what would become my house to my attention after seeing the for sale sign go up while on a walk during his lunch break (we worked at DEC SRC on Lytton in Palo Alto).

Old Silly Con Valley is much smaller with his passing.

RIP, Bob. You'll be missed by many.

Burger King's 'OK Google' sad ad saga somehow gets worse

Re: Correction!

Actually, they are sweet & sour with a hint of bitterness.

Re: How much brand awareness does the Whopper need?

Yeast will NOT raise a loaf in the absence of simple sugars. In proper bread, the simple sugars are made by enzymes in the yeast and the flour causing large starch molecules to break down. Adding to this with the addition of table sugar (or other sucrose) makes for a one-dimensional end product. If you must add simple sugars, use honey. Sometimes I'll spike the honey with unsulfered molasses. (The sulfured stuff is bad for yeast.) ... if you go the honey/molasses route, pay attention to pH if you want proper browning.

Re: How much brand awareness does the Whopper need?

You do NOT need to add sugar to ferment a loaf of bread. Flour, water, yeast (or starter culture) and salt are all that is needed. You can do without salt if you like flat tasting bread ... but you'll have to watch it so it doesn't over-proof. Salt helps slow down the yeast.

Re: medium-sized child

The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive ...

Re: Correction!

"At least a Whopper is a decent burger"

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAA!

::whew:: I'm done, but thanks for asking.

That was almost as dangerous as The Goodies "Kung Fu Kapers" ...

'Tech troll' sues EFF to silence 'Stupid Patent of the Month' blog. Now the EFF sues back

PDNFTT.

Ta.

What is your favourite cider?

With a name like "Cox" ...

... I'd assume you'd prefer apple. I often put a bushel of Cox's Orange Pippins in with 5 bushels of Gravensteins for a nice change in my own cider.

Perry's tasty, but tell me you don't like that atrocity called "babycham" ...

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

If the Boss has a problem like Roger's ...

... don't fix it! It will keep him out of everybody's hair for weeks, or maybe even months if you are lucky!

Machine vs. machine battle has begun to de-fraud the internet of lies

Re: New Turing test needed

The IdiotInChief & cronies/hangerson/sycophants are hardly anonymous, and between them seem to go out of their collective way to generate a metric buttload of "false news" ... at least the daily back-peddling sure makes it seem that way.

Re: More cat belling....

I think I'd rather be "one of them" than part of Charles 9's "us".

Re: Choice

It was a typo! I was trying to find out how to make a Sarni! Honest!

Re: Speaking Truth unto Nations in the Absence of Nations Speaking Peace unto Nations.

amfM, I know I can't speak for anybody but myself, but speaking as a sysadmin I'm not "in terrified crisis", nor am I "terrorising all and sundry" around me. Perhaps you could elucidate why you feel this way?

I think most of us, if pressed, would cop to "in their own little compartmented spaces with limited place and a distinct lack of novel vital intelligence." ... at least to one degree or another.

As for: "The BBC has lost the global plot and the lead initiative, has it not? What a sad relic and blunt useless lick spittle tool it has become."

Oh, I dunno ... With all the advertising revenue they get from BBC America, I rather suspect they are a pretty happy and sharp organization, overall. They are certainly paying their own way, and probably turning a handsome profit!

Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti-social' and 'love to hate'

Re: Revisionist history

Feynman was at Caltech.

However, he did speak at both Stanford and Berkeley occasionally. I saw him a couple of times at both schools. One of the talks was his take on Cargo Cult Science, or maybe it was two of them a year or so apart. It was forty years ago, and he was a guest speaker, I'm surprised I remember that much ... my major(s) occupied most of my thought processes at the time.

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list

Re: Don't like it?

What if they had told your (great)grandparents to "stay home"?

Official science we knew all along: Facebook makes you sad :-(

Eye of the beholder & all that.

During the meanwhile ...

... my wife just came back in after spelling me walking a horse that we board that tends towards colic. I'll be out again after the foreman's 20 minute shift. She has shit on her paddock boots, horse snot on her shoulder & hay in her hair. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. The whippets & greyhounds agree with me, so we must be right :-)

"Plastic People" --Frank Zappa

(First posted June of 2013)

Questionable.

"The mean age of those who provided Facebook data was 48 – an age at which people have spent over half their adult lives without the pervasive influence of the internet."

Implying that people aged 48 have been online less than 15 years? I doubt it.

And, of course, anything referencing "BMI" is always pure bullshit.

Enjoy the research dollars while you can, folks, methinks it ain't gonna last.

Re: Interesting research

"Luddite" is used by people infatuated by a technological fad to describe other people who see the fad as just that, a passing fad. I was called a luddite many times when I referred to the iPad as an iFad. Strangely enough, I haven't seen a personal iPad in use in public for several years.

That said, I'll cop to being a neoluddite.

Re: No mention of...

Earth to Sarge: Alcohol is a depressant.

Ugly thought, I know. Have a beer on my tick.

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: @Kain

Well, AC-2 is about 7,000km ... and THAT is a short run!

Apple wets its pants over Swatch ad tagline

Re: Daft thing is ...

Twentieth century. That's when they became as common as muck.

All of you who feel a compelling need to know exactly what time it is, several tens or perhaps a couple hundred times per day, to the point of having anxiety attacks if your watch isn't instantly available ... WHY? What good does it do you? It's not like it's even interactive or anything ... One wonders what would happen if you lost access to TehIntraWebTubes for a day or three ...

Daft thing is ...

Watches are SO twentieth century. Who bothers wearing a watch these days? Nobody I know wears one ... no need, the time is blazoned all over damn near every consumer good made.

Put down your coffee and admire the sheer amount of data Windows 10 Creators Update will slurp from your PC

Re: Wow

Bad troll. No cookie.

Windows 10 Creators Update general rollout begins with a privacy dialogue

Windows has a place.

Win2K, anyway. I use it for ACad 2K, and nothing else. Does the job for my needs, and I see absolutely zero reason to downgrade either of them to something more modern. Naturally, the machine is airgapped.

Recent posting of "About ElReg" and the T&C.

Recent posting of "About ElReg" and the T&C.

Here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/about_the_register/

And here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/terms_and_conditions_of_use/

Seems to be no commentary as to why these were posted at this time, and no place to ask other than here ... so what's up, ElReg? Anything we need to know? Care to share? Can you share? Inquiring minds and all that.

Eric S. Raymond says you probably fit one of eight tech archetypes

Re: ---> Disaster magnet

That's "Brunsviga". I have a couple in my collection.