Re: The more things change, the more they stay the same
Statistics may not be proof, but they should always be food for thought:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/
Posts by chuckufarley
293 posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
Tech set responds in wake of American protests, police violence and civil unrest
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 18:43 GMT
Re: The next step...
@Anonymous Custard,
Someone down voted your post but left no reply.
Who could think that:
1.) Knowledge of history is bad?
2.) That humanity should go on repeating the same mistakes over and over again for all time?
3.) That points 1 & 2 could ever be irrelevant?
4.) Hope that sense and decency do not prevail?
<**channeling Dana Carvey**> Could it be...SATAN?!?
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 17:06 GMT
Re: The next step...
I'm not even going to down vote you for that. You have obviously lived your life being told what to think and when to think it. Anyone can see that you have never had to go searching for facts because you are content to adopt who ever's opinions best suit your world view. Social Responsibility for you is nothing more than being the first in a line people with your hand out demanding the "Rights" you see as your birth right while doing nothing to earn them.
The only thing about you more willful than your spread of hatred is your ignorance. Correct that and maybe then we can debate proper role of socioeconomic legal constructs in a democracy.
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 13:52 GMT
The next step...
...For Corporate America can't just be social media, press releases, and donating a small sliver of profits to charity. These are the richest organizations in the world. For real change to happen they need to send in their lobbyist armies to demand it. No other organizations in the country can match their political influence individually. If they send a message to US leadership as a united front they will not, can not, be ignored.
Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 09:39 GMT
Trying to get unsupported hardware to work? Reinstalling the OS because you don't know how to copy your browser favorites over?
If this is "The Year Of Linux On The Desktop" we have less than six months to get this into production. All end user edge cases must be addressed before the end of the year. For the corner cases we can make excuses about "holding it wrong."
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 08:14 GMT
The most likely cause would be laziness. The second most likely cause would be exhaustion after having to do this for the 10th time in a week. That is what micros~1 gets right. No matter what you as the user fuck up you have restore points to fall back on.
In Linux if you fuck up big time then by design you are in over your head and better off starting with fresh install. For the average person this is not acceptable. If it isn't done "automagicly" in Linux the end users will grow to hate it. You can think of at least one thing you are sick and tired of doing in Windows and I bet it isn't nearly as important as getting a network driver installed.
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 07:58 GMT
Re: Vendor support is one thing...
Oh, I thought no one liked the truth. The truth is that this is at least the third article in a month with the headline "Year Of Linux on the Desktop" that El Reg has published. I prefer broken clocks over broken records.
As much as I value the fact based journalism they bring this industry I cannot ignore reality for them or myself. If that makes me a troll or parasite your eyes so be it. At least I will say how, why, when, and where I disagree.
Otherwise if I can't speak the truth with out getting down voted then I will be down voted and like it until the day I am banned from these forums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNx8KtzZXkM
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 07:06 GMT
Re: Vendor support is one thing...
Oh, I got *another* down vote with no reply. Such a shame.
Pro Tip:
If you are too busy to tell people why you disagree with them you are better off just ignoring what they have to say. Then they can't make arguments about you being a lazy git down voting because you have some other sock puppet account you are busy with.
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 05:11 GMT 
Vendor support is one thing...
...But developer support is another. The Open Source Zealots and the We Make Money Now content distribution platforms and the We Refuse to Help chip-set manufactures will not be onboard. With out them it's like owning a Rolls Royce and having no roads to drive on.
Do not misunderstand me. I gave up Windows 10 Pro a while back. The exact date escapes me but it was when I found that even using the combined power of RegEdit, gpedit.msc, and secpol.msc I was unable to disable Cortana. My two Ryzen 7 3700X machines both run Ubuntu. One is my desktop and the other is my server.
Here are some example of what needs to change for something like this to work on a large scale:
1.) Content providers like Amazon, Google Play, Apple, AAA game developers and publishers, and subscription based cloud services from Microsoft (looking at you MS Office), and the MPAA need to realize that they are missing legitimate profits (not just income) from the Linux Desktop. In the best cases they do offer partial support or content at a reduced quality but in most cases the offer nothing at all to Linux users. That means you as the user must breaks the T&C's of their platforms to get high quality content. Have you ever tried to play a Blu-Ray DVD in Linux or *BSD? What about streaming 4K Video from Amazon? How about playing "The Division" or "Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord" or "Destiny 2"? All of these will required breaking the T&C's to work, if they work at all.
If I have break break the T&C's how can I claim to be a legitimate source of income let alone profit?
2.) Chip-set manufactures for all manner of hardware will need to provide full support to developers. As it stands very few actually do this (AMD? Qualcom's Atheros?). Others provide little more than a set buggy reference drivers (RealTek?) and still others force otherwise legitimate users and developers to break their T&C's to reverse engineer drivers (Broadcom?). Still others refuse to publish any form of officially supported open source drivers at all and therefor force users to pick their poison of a partially functional open source driver or using a high performing closed sourced driver with a tainted kernel (Nvidia?).
3.) The Linux and GNU developerss themselves need to put functionality first for a change. Their zealotry has been the number one factor in keeping the first two changes from happening. People will almost always buy the best hardware that they can afford but very rarely will they buy lower grade hardware just because it's fully supported by the Linux distro they want to use. Why should they when they can just dual boot or better yet, only use Linux on a subset of their older hardware?
None of this even takes into account the rapid shrinking of the desktop market in the home user sector. In short I think any headline proclaiming a possible "YOLOTDT" is just click bait. I, for one, stopped clicking years ago.
AppGet 'really helped us,' Microsoft says, but offers no apology to dev for killing open-source package manager
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 02:53 GMT
Re: Mandatory...
That is just going to far.
Muppets can't help being Muppets. They are as they are created. Therefore they should never be compared to people who use their free will to make ill informed and illogical choices in life. Doing so is irrefutably unfair to the Muppets. I am sure that if Muppets had free will they would demand an apology.
Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays
Sunday 31st May 2020 07:25 GMT
Re: up to 2TB, it makes no sense to go mechanical
Here are some more recent figures from a company that has over 1 exabyte of storage. These links are in order of oldest to newest:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/smart-stats-exposed-a-drive-stats-remix/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/
Finally the link to the links for all of the raw data over the last six years and hints, tips, and a few limitations on how this data can be used:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/
SMART data is useful if you have the tools to understand it. The hardest part is learning all that you need to because it is a data space convoluted by vendor choices and obscured information. I rarely learn anything about it that I don't have to because of this but there are people who do.
Sunday 31st May 2020 03:28 GMT
Re: Storm in a teacup?
Personally I can't say I have first hand knowledge of why they fail in every case. I have read (see below) that certain versions of the Red firmware may be to blame. I think that only WD could answer that with any certainty at this point and would invite anyone with evidence to the contrary to post a link or two.
As for the what happens when things don't fall over during a rebuild:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/
Saturday 30th May 2020 20:01 GMT
Re: Storm in a teacup?
Of course this is about lawyers trying to make a buck. But that doesn't mean there isn't a real problem here. Read the stories over at blocksandfiles.com and do some searching of your own. You will find that most of issues with these NAS drives are when one of the drives in RAID array fails and a rebuild is triggered. Because of the way the SMR tech in the drives works The rebuild fails time and again even with brand new drives received via RMA. That defeats the purpose of having a RAID in the first place and therefore these drives are "not fit for purpose" which legally is a lot different that an Emptor failing to Caveat.
Friday 29th May 2020 23:11 GMT
These lawyers will make a lot of money...
...but I wonder how much the plaintiffs will get. Hm, what? How do I know that they will make a lot of money? Because they will wind up probing the reasons why groups like FreeNAS "highly recommends" WD Red drives to their users:
https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.3-U3.1/intro.html#hardware-recommendations
Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager
Friday 29th May 2020 20:35 GMT
Re: Hang on...
"...Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?..."
Yes, forking is an allowed and sometime even desired course of action. However, giving credit were credit is due happens to be the corner stone on which the Free Software/Open Source movement was founded. You can trace almost every line of open source code to it's original author this way. You can also see who forked this code, how and what they did in the forking process, and even find out why they thought a fork was needed. See the link I provided in my post way up there ^^ to find out why this is so important.
Thursday 28th May 2020 18:12 GMT
The Many Faces of Reputation, "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric Steven Raymond
"There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute (prestige) is worth playing for:
First and most obviously, good reputation among one's peers is a primary reward. We're wired to experience it that way for evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as ``honor'', ``ethical integrity'', ``piety'' etc.; this does not change the underlying mechanism.)
Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy, the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others. If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you.
Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation may spill over and earn you higher status there.
Beyond these general reasons, the peculiar conditions of the hacker culture make prestige even more valuable than it would be in a `real world' gift culture.
The main `peculiar condition' is that the artifacts one gives away (or, interpreted another way, are the visible sign of one's gift of energy and time) are very complex. Their value is nowhere near as obvious as that of material gifts or exchange-economy money. It is much harder to objectively distinguish a fine gift from a poor one. Accordingly, the success of a giver's bid for status is delicately dependent on the critical judgement of peers.
Another peculiarity is the relative purity of the open-source culture. Most gift cultures are compromised—either by exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or by command-economy relationships such as family or clan groupings. No significant analogues of these exist in the open-source culture; thus, ways of gaining status other than by peer repute are virtually absent."
Perhaps it's time Microsoft copied more from FLOSS than just the code.
Full text here:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/
Chicago: Why I just grin like a dork... It's my kind of Bork
Friday 22nd May 2020 17:05 GMT
Re: Jumped up quiche?
I know, I know, everyone hates Empirical Evidence. That's why I brought some to the discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tgYYEYz4O4
Now, as you all can see @MGyrFalcon has some very valid points. I hope you have learned a thing or two because like Robert Heinlein said: "You live and learn or you don't live long."
Friday 22nd May 2020 14:35 GMT 
As a current Chicago resident...
...Perhaps I can shed some light on what is happening here. I see these messages once a week or so and I am almost positive I know the cause. The very high tech people at CTA use the very low tech TC&S networking protocol. For those too young to remember TC&S stands for "Tin Cans And String." In order to create a DoS attack in such a network environment all a bad actor has to do is tie an extra bit a string into the system and attach that to a tin can, et viola! Too Many Connections!
Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet
Wednesday 26th February 2020 05:04 GMT
"My ISP didn't have a problem...
...So what ever this "problem" is it can't be that bad."
That is me paraphrasing my neighbor's response to this story. It's his ISP. It's their internet. He is just renting it...
"DARPA? 1960 what? Compound interest on the tax money my grandparents paid?"
Great, now I'm a Communist. Again. His world view can't really be this obtuse. He just needs a reminder that all great science starts with an original thought...
"What the hell do Einstein's daydreams have to do with my WiFi? Would you just let my pick up my dog's poo and go inside?"
OK, one giant leap of logic for me, and one more person on the block that will cross the street twice just to avoid coming within 10 metres of me for the neighborhood.
It's not his fault because it's not his internet. It's not my fault for the same reason. It's *our* fault because it's *our* internet. Just like every person in the world owns a small part of the Forschungs-und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße.
RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80
Wednesday 5th February 2020 19:15 GMT
It's been way more than a decade...
...since I was last disappointed because I couldn't get a file via FTP. For than last "very many" years the closest I have come to using an FTP client is the rare use of ssh's sftp command and that is always to put something and never to get anything. So I don't think I would have even noticed if I hadn't read this article.
At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd
What are those Windows 10 PCs running? Several flavours from 2019, by the looks of things
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare fragged our business VOIP: US ISP blames outage on smash-hit video game rush
10nm woes, CPU supply shortages, competition from AMD... What? Sorry? Intel can't hear you over the cash register going bonkers
Friday 24th January 2020 01:58 GMT
Google translate does not support CorpSpeak...
...So I will have to try to do this manually:
"One year into our long-term financial plan, we have outperformed our revenue and EPS expectations."
That must mean they can make more money by making less chips and then selling them auction style instead of the old fashion method of making lots of chips and selling then at a fixed price point. Oh, yeah, and they made more money without fixing Spectre-Meltdown-L1FT-Zombieload-et-al.
Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on
Friday 3rd January 2020 13:05 GMT
It's not just the Enterprise...
...that will have legacy Python code hiding in the bushes. CERN uses Python 2.7 at the heart of their [email protected] distributed computing project. I suspect that there are many, many other scientific Python 2.7 implementations that will be around for decades to come. It will be like Fortran and COBOL as it goes on living a half-life that would make most radioisotopes envious.
EL Reg Going To Shit?
Friday 20th December 2019 05:27 GMT 
EL Reg Going To Shit?
So I read this article:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/etl_ai_data_scientists/
And I was ready to comment on it. However, comments do not seem to enabled for this article. I don't care who pays El Reg to put a "News Story" on this website. By making it know to your readers that a certain "News Story" is "Sponsored" we will know what to expect but by disabling comments on a "Sponsored" "News Story" El Reg is revoking our ability to give our input to these "Sponsors" and breaking with a system of journalistic feedback that has stood for more than a decade.
Speaking strictly for myself: If I see one more "Sponsored" story that I can not comment on I will not click "Support" on your pop-ups ever again. Unless I am too drunk to click to click my intended option.
Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps
Forget sharks with lasers, NASA kits out an elephant seal with a sensor-studded skullcap
Monday 9th December 2019 08:00 GMT
Re: Why is this
OK, well, think of the big picture:
If the humans cannot sleep on Earth anymore because we shit in our bed where will we sleep? Do we know for a fact the shit cannot washed from our bedding before it's bed time? How do you prove it either way? Is anyone even bothering to work on washing the bedding? Just when is bed time anyway?
Everyone has an opinion as to the answers of these questions, but none of those opinions can be proven to five sigmas. If you happen lead one of world's greatest science organizations then answering these questions has two short term and possibly one long term benefits. In the short term you will get more private grants and Federal funding. In the long term if we have to move Humanity into orbit for the 25000 next years NASA becomes the most trusted player in the newest utility industry: Air Pressure.
Monday 9th December 2019 07:50 GMT
Climate Change bad...
...very bad. The worst Climate. Horrible Change. Bad.
But now I can't decide which is worse: Climate Change or being asked to discard of loyalty to Sharks with Fricken LASERS!
As my Gran said to me when I was small, "If ya go to dance, ya dance with the one that brung ya." I know in my head that the Buddhists are right, "Change Is." However I see no need to exchange the upfront and unabashed honesty of a LASER fueled feeding frenzy for the Cloak and Dagger tactics of Telepathic-Cyborg-Spy-Seals. Brutal honestly has been a hallmark of El Reg since I started reading way too many years ago. It has also been a charming personality trait (or rage inducing personality flaw, depending on who you ask) of Yours Truly for much longer.
Change just for the sake of change makes my inner BOFH speak up and say "Sure, we could do that, but..." and that is never a good sign.
Icahn and I will force a Xerox and HP wedding: Corporate raider urges HP shareholders to tell board to act 'NOW'
Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC: Howdy buck do you get a solid 60FPS in Rockstar's masterpiece?
Monday 2nd December 2019 11:24 GMT
Re: And this, dear friends...
Yes, I just down voted. I don't do it often and I regret that it had to be your post. Soz, Mate.
Let me be clear: I do not like Steam. I have never liked it. I have hated it. I don't hate it now.
Steam is kinda like Democracy: It is the worst form of content delivery and yet is better than all of the others tried before it. What we gamers want is some Utopia of content delivery that makes everyone happy and no one sad. Instead we have a Distopia that works good enough for most. Kinda like Windows. (amirite or amirite?) Every CD platform has it's fatal flaws and those CD platforms that have been killed off by Steam had flaws that killed them sooner rather than later.
Blaming the demise of these platforms on the users of Steam is like accusing one ethnic group of collectively vying for world domination. It's just not well thought out. Too many people hate their own family members for it to work, ever.
I do not think that Steam will remain dominate in the CD market for too much longer.* Once Valve Software starts trying to fuse Iron they will soon after ex/implode and give the world all the building blocks it needs to make a better platform.
*In human terms: 2035-2045 and based solely on market momentum and my own inability to see my biases. However I am only one date point at that.
Monday 2nd December 2019 10:06 GMT
Re: If a game studio wants my money...
It's been two days and this post has two up votes?
Where have all the haters gone?!? Oh wait (looking at calendar) it must be Dim Tech Day. At least the haters will pile up more debt and the sins of fathers (or mothers) with indeed be visited upon their sons (or daughters and/or any gender/genderless preferred pronouns of their offspring's choosing).
The point is that any choices I can make should be choices we can all make. If you don't want to down vote that and you don't want to up vote that then what do *you* really want?
The status quo? There is no such thing. That is just Foucault's Pendulum in super slow motion: the harder you try to keep things they way they are, the harder your children will get hit in the face.
As I said a few posts about: Freedom has Price. Your freedom not to choose at this point in time is their inability to choose. Use it wisely.
Google: We caught a Russian state hacker crew uploading badness to the Play Store
Thursday 28th November 2019 18:43 GMT
About nomenclaturenotes...
...So I was thinking (I know, I know, but if I trying I might get it right.) that instead of using all of these different names each group should just get a number. We could call it almost anything except "The Common Villain Enumerator" and have a web site dedicated to maintaining a centralized database of their activities so the world can more easily track them.
Xerox: Prepare to say cyan-ara, HP Inc. We're no paper tiger. We're really very serious about that hostile takeover
Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos
Saturday 26th October 2019 02:18 GMT
It's just a coincidence of course...
...that a company that recently traded OS and application development for spyware development has won the contract. A totally innocent, unrelated, and in-no-way-covered-by-any-NDA coincidence that this same company has been lobbying for the death of any proposed bill to protect the privacy and freedom of anyone earning less than $500,000 a year. Nothing to see here. Move along...NOW.
