Posts by CRConrad

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Sir Humphrey: Yes, Minister.

That was cleverly disguised as a comedy, but actually a documentary.

Unity and Trinity: New releases for forks of abandoned Linux desktops

Unity, Trinity... Something missing in between.

When I finally get my thumb out and create the One True Desktop Environment To Master Them All (and usher in the year of Linux on the desktop), it will obviously have to be named... Is there such a word as "Duity"?

I mean, there is "duality", but that seems to mean the opposite of the other two: While "unity" means the wholeness of the one, or everyone / everything coming together as one, and "trinity" means something like the one-ness (or unity) of three (cf the Holy one), "duality" emphasizes how the one is split into two.

Is there any word that emphasizes the same as the other ones, that two come together as one?

Devian 11?

The bastard love child of Debian and Devuan? What does it use for an init; Schrödinger's systemd?

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re: "It is eminently fungible"

Naah, it's Dilbert who's wrong there. Price is determined by supply and demand, and the crude oli market is a commodity market; the price is pretty much exactly the same for all transactions. Dilbert's demand is shifted to some other provider, but replaced by the same amount of demand from someone else who previously would have bought from the provider Dilbert shifted away from. He's just shuffling deck chairs.

NHS Digital's demise bad for 55 million patients' privacy – ex-chairman

Sad and not true

> I'm not young (early 30s).

Early 30s IS young.

> So yes I may be an idiot,

Apparently.

> but I am a person who considers my decisions carefully.

Apparently not.

RISC-V keeps its head down amid global chip war

Re: Argumentative chap this ST, seems a bit triggered.

Claims not to be a MAGA-hat, but if so, obviously belongs to some other very similar and just as stupid variety.

This commenter "ST" is so confused and ill-informed it's almost funny

> > [ ... ] your "we" should not have released it as "open".

> I don't quite follow the logic here.

Probably because you, oh-so-conveniently for your crooked argumentation, left out the first half of the sentence. (That couldn't by any means have been intentional, now could it?) Here, to remind you:

> > If your "we" want to claim "ownership" then your "we" should not have released it as "open".

And here, the crux, the central point you seem to be yammering about:

> "Open" doesn't mean it's yours, or that you invented it.

So f--king what?!? Is anyone claiming it's "theirs", or that they "invented it"? (Besides you, that is, who by virtue of being American are apparently an avatar of mr D. Patterson.)

No, nobody (else) is claiming that. So stop fucking gibbering about something that isn't happening.

Re: "why Linus Torvalds retains the Trademark for Linux"

Yeah, that's probably why Samsung calls their ARM processors "Exynos" for trading, etc, etc.

Forthcoming RISC-V implementations will probably also be sold under varios more or less imaginative trade names.

So, let's get back to you when this argument becomes relevant. Pro tip: Don't hold your breath waiting.

Please stop arguing like such a moron.

> Where does this notion of collective right to appropriating someone else's accomplishments come from?

Oh, I dunno... That's just how the world works? That's why patents, and even copyright (so far, knock on wood...) still do expire sooner or later.

Otherwise, you know, you wouldn't be allowed to express yourself here, in writing: The art of writing was invented by the Sumerians or the Egyptians or somebody, so Americans aren't allowed to do it. Or the wheel, also Sumerians or Chinese or whatever; so close all those car and truck factories, scrap or export all the cars and trucks, and go back to doing your land transport the American way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travois

> Individual accomplishments are never democratized.

Oh, good. So then that accomplishment was Mr Patterson's, not "America's", to begin with, and since you claim that means it still is and always will be, you've just admitted that you haven't got a leg to stand on "as an American".

Sheesh. Can't you even see how stupid you're being? No? Well, that just confirms it.

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

Re: My Rant - was Happy days

That's one of the resons Devuan exists: no systemd.

Yes, and the commenter you replied to included that in their list of primary reasons for using it. Like, you know, like one does in a discussion of a new release of an OS distro: The article says "It has this and that and those other features...", and reaaders chime in with "I don't care about that feature" or "This feature is why I use this distro" and so on.

D'oh! yourself, Sherlock.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

"Information". The Internet was called "the information superhighway".

Re: Wondering if some monetary damages would make sense. The "american way"

Why does everything have to be about race? Can't he just be a plain idiot?

Yeah, sure, but "just plain idiots" in power in the Southern States overwhelmingly tend to be white.

Depends who you mean is continuing to say stuff.

The governor is obviously still a moron. But the prosecutor is just being diplomatic: Sure, "an argument can be made" that it's criminal -- the governor is making it, after all! -- but then so can "an argument be made" that the moon is made out of green cheese. Doesn't have to be a good argument, after all, and that's kind of what the prosecutor means.

What he's saying is: "We have determined by non-legal means -- i.e. by asking people who know what the heck they're talking about, and finding out there was absolutely nothing to see here, so 'technical means' -- not to prosecute. But I want to cover my behind and not explicitly call my boss an idiot, so I'm going with the old 'an argument could be made' pablum for his idiocy."

FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

Wrong reason

Downvoted for being against pedophillia?

No, probably in most cases for blithely assuming your particular age limit is what defines "pedophillia".

Absolutely not what he said.

But he said “so what if she was too young, she knew what she was doing”.

No he didn't; that's so wrong it's not even in the same ballpark. What he said was (paraphrasing): "Minsky may well have had no idea that she was underage or coerced, because Epstein would very likely have ordered her not to tell him that."

European Commission outlines appeal against Apple's €13bn tax ruling

You're still making stupid statements.

Hey long time for you to come up with that reply.

I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to you, but I'm not constantly monitoring your posts. (Nor even my own.)

You will be considered on par with creationism and dinosaur fossils placed by god to mess with us.

I'm guessing one of us is American. And since I know it's not me, I'm not too worried I'll be the one suspected of creationism. Especially in this case, since that's the belief that stuff only "gets created" once and never changes, so if there's something called "Man", it must have been created exactly as it is now on some Thursday afternoon 6008 B.C. and never changed or evolved from something that existed before.

So the belief that if there's something called "The EU", it must have been created exactly as it is now in 1993 A.D. and never changed or evolved from something that existed before... That's creationism. Maybe you should try and catch up to the Enlightenment?

Re: You sure make some stupid statements.

The EEC was formed in 1957 and, with the CSC and Euratom, incorporated into the "European Union" in 1993. Since the EEC was by far the most prominent part of these previously overlapping-but-separate entities, 1993 wasn't when anything "new" was created, but when the EEC changed its name to the EU. You might be too young to remember, but that was how the world saw it at the time, and is still (and will forever be) the truest description of what happened.

So a conservative estimate of the EU's age is "born in 1957". But, sure, if you want to be generous, the CSC goes back to 1951.

Now stop being such a doofus.

Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

Re: the 'hate' content will fade away ... still accessible

So the 'hate' content will fade away into the dark web, still accessible to those individuals who want to find it.

At least you'll have to want to find it.

That's still quite a bit better than the status quo, where "algorithms" can start nudging you ever closer just because you saw something vaguely similar, and followed up a step or two further from that.

Re: counter the arguments

> to counter the arguments of religious lunatics, anti-vaxers and right-wing racists.

...is a hopeless task -- a Gish gallop.

Re: the one thing BoJo can't be accused of

But he simulates it really well.

Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going

Re: animal of some ill-defined type

You might think it's supposed to be two doggies, but I think it's more likely intended as two people imitating them.

Re: And don't call me surely.

OK, Surly.

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

Re: Its the graphics

A toenail.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: "lots of cryptic commands"

I am using and have been using for amany years Windows Server as much because it has the WIndows GUI through which you can do pretty much everything without having to learn a whole load of cryptic commands

If I really wanted to have to learn lots of cryptic commands to do virtually anything, I'd be using bloody Linux and not Windows.

If you'd been using those "cryptic commands" for even a few years, they wouldn't be "cryptic" at all.

Re: "the refresh was ONLY 50Hz"

Ever been to the cinema?

How could you stand it; didn't the 24 fps give you epilepsy?

Microsoft's .NET Foundation under fire as resigning board member questions its role

Re: "have some devs read the source"

they could easily have some devs read the source, which was freely available, and get ideas that way.

Not quite, not just like that; that's not how that works. Having those same devs then implement the same thing would be copyright infringement.

They'd have to have a second team of devs to create their own implementation, and the first team -- who had read the original source code of AppGet -- could only transfer the ideas, but none of the actual code, behind the app to the other team that implemented their own (WinGet?) version -- and they'd have to make sure they'd be able to prove that this was how it went down. (This is called a "Chinese Wall".) That's not all that easy to do.

Another Debian dust-up with Firefox dependencies – but there is an annoying and awkward workaround

Re: "the systemd-cancer will eventually be left by the wayside"

We can but hope.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Try the CUA one.

And if you want help, there's a "?" icon that you can click on (if there's a keystroke for it, I don't know what it is)

Tried the CUA "Help" keystroke -- [F1]?

Dunno if it's the same thing as that "?" icon -- I couldn't find it to test! -- but it thros up a familiar-looking little window with light-blue links, so I think it is.

"VERY different"?

Borland beat them to market with its own UI widget classes which were VERY different from basic Windows.

"VERY different"?!? AFAICR, they pretty much perfectly embodied standard Windows CUA controls.

Save as text

So does Microsoft Word.

That doesn't make it a "text editor".

Electronic Frontier Foundation ousts co-founder John Gilmore from its board

Re: Everyone knows who Banksy is

I don't.

Doesn't feel like it.

The EFF has been such a stalwart against "The Man" that AFAICS the organisation as a whole would have stood against that, siding with Gilmore and not whoever wants to silence him.

Then again, maybe you too were kidding; sorry if I missed that.

We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingo

Re: You don't meet many poor COBOL programmers.

Most of them probably dead by now.

The *rebranding* worked extremely well.

The comment you replied to meant that the rebranding worked fairly well. Which it obviously did: It was done in order not to look "too German" in WW1. More than a century later, the family still holds the throne.

Re: Rebranding

The comma is not an arrow.

Re: The language that makes you swear - $->$_@#

Less than two years ago, an AC wrote:

> Sigh, here come the haters of Perl.

In response to a post saying: "I made quite a bit of dosh using 5.x and then waited decades for the 6.-1 releases."

> Please try a few dozen [new computer languages]

In response to a post saying: "In the mean time, I learned to love assembler, jovial, pascal, java, scala, even python."

The above comment (and the AC who posted it) must be the most idiotic I've seen on the Reg.

Perl's Community Affairs Team chair quits as org put on ice by code language's foundation

Re: Chairs

I have an old armchair on the balcony, that I literally found outdoors Idunno, ten years ago or so. Monitor on one of those high kitchen "bar" stools in front of it, laptop leaning against the legs of the stool, mouse on another lower stool beside me, and wireless keyboard in my lap.

Alas, come autumn I'll have to move my workplace in to the dinner table again.

Re: FFS

Write better SQL and two connections leaves you with one to spare.

Paperless office? 2.8 trillion pages printed in 2020, down by 14% or 450 billion sheets

Huh, wha???

> make no mistake - paper lobby is still strong. They had enough influence to outlaw cannabis cultivation worldwide

Ehhh... The paper lobby did that? I could understand you blaming the tobacco or alcohol lobbies, but paper?!?

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Name will have been given to you

Right there in the question / answer / comment you're replying to, without any need to go to some profile page to investigate whether the user has any idiosyncratic wishes for how they wish to be addressed. (Quite possibly the site will even paste the user name into your reply for you, as part of a quote of what you're replying to if nothing else.)

I regret that I have only a single upvote to give

Otherwise I would have given many, mainly for the utterly well-deserved bashing of Quora.

Not really all that confusing.

The second person marker -t is there: On the end of "shalt".

If you want to talk oldie-style, please at least do it right.

Thou shalt not make. Maketh is the present tense, not the imperative.

That's just bad grammar.

The difference between "thee" and "thou" has fuck-all to do with respect, and if that dialectal adage is something older people actually believe around where you come from, they just don't get how English works (i.e. used to work).

"Thou" corresponds to "he"; "thee" to "him": He is an asshole, I'll punch him in the nose = Thou art an arse-hole, I shall thwack thee on the snout.

Prick up one's ears?

A classic!

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

Re: I Am Not A Number!

Makes sense: An integ-er must be something that has integ-rity.

Persecute the heretic, kill the unbeliever...

...because they said "Jehovah"!

Oops!

Flak overflow: Barrage of criticism prompts very public Stack Overflow apology

No, the point passed YOU by.

The point was that you didn't have a point.

You get over yourself, you fucking moron.

> I just pointed out that just because a day is arbitrarily important to some people doesn't make it important to everybody. Get over yourselves.

Which was a fucking unnecessary statement to begin with, because NOBODY EVER SAID it was supposed to be "important to everybody".