Posts by DarkwavePunk 156 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2014
Argh! I worked for a small ISP back when that horrible web push content became all the rage. Given the Internet industry pricing for peering in Australia at the time the bills went wild for a bit. We pinned down the problem and stomped on it fairly quickly. Ashen-faced bean-counters was mildly amusing though.
Too true. I remember back in the early/mid-nineties a shark taking out pretty much the only direct (commercial) Internet cable to the US from Australia. Routing had to be done through SE Asia in a very convoluted manner. Watching BGP go batshit was mildly amusing at the ISP I worked for at the time.
Used Perl4 as an awk/sed substitute for silly nested/piped shell scripts. Worked okay and still looked horrible. Perl5 still fits that role as well. If version 7 doesn't break the horrible 1-line data munge crap - go for it. Stick with sed/awk/shell, if only to piss off the Ops team. </sysadmin>
Back in the day when I first used the Internet at university I had the chance to use the early WWW. It was a rubbish experience (especially with the network connections in Australia then). I went back to Gopher, Archie, Veronica. When the web took off I still tended to use Lynx which is sadly no longer really possible for most sites these days. Glad to see there's various projects kicking back against bloat and prioritising information again - as it should be.
I have no idea what that <Ctrl>-<Left Cursor> etc thing means either. In most KSH derivatives beginning of line and end of line are <ctrl>-a or <ctrl>-e, or word at a time forward/backward <esc>-f or <esc-b>.
*edit (before I've even posted* - looks like the latter. Never knew. Then again I'm the type that uses <ctrl>-p instinctively instead of the up arrow.
As I age it seems I spend more time answering questions than doing stuff in the IT sphere. I swear like a fucking trooper but not at people directly. Vent my anger over some fucking shitty wankstain system that some poor sod has to support not them. If something is an utter cockbadger pile of fartmunch swine shlongs I can say it and they can get a bit of confidence about their (muted) thoughts. Old and cocking foulmouthed rants can elevate the youth into a proper state of nihilistic ennui.
I'd generally be careful there. "You're a right fucking knob and talking steaming piles of bollocks you utter pillock" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to many things. I understand where you're coming from. I'm not targeting you personally in this response. If only "Social Media" was as civilised as USENET was... (AFK Mind Bleach).
You'd be surprised. Early 2000s I had a short contract job at a financial institution that had 700+ NT4 desktops on a flat network alongside the servers. With stacked hubs no less. After pointing this out as a "bad idea" many times I was basically told "We know, shut up!". Not exactly sure what they wanted me to do and why I was hired.
I managed to get windows 10 to install on an ancient ExoPC demo unit I got from some Intel conference nearly a decade ago. It was meant to run Meego as the OS which dates it somewhat. Sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet taking off, and could probably be used as a very loud impromptu version of Air Hockey. It did fucking work though. Now my old-ish i7 laptop with 16G of RAM with a discrete graphics card can't even run Win 11. Not that I particularly want to anyway.
Given the price of the top end Studio Ultra I doubt we'll see "upgradable, and reasonably priced Mac Pro.". The Studio is weird. Being completely locked in (okay the SSD might be upgradable with a software tweak) to the configuration you bought seems stupid. Soldered RAM on a chassis that big is outright retarded. They get points for useful ports though I guess. It's a shame as I really like the Ultra CPU architecture on paper for thread heavy tasks. Oh well.
Given the benefits to humanity (if nuclear fusion actually fucking works as a viable energy source) I'm surprised at how little money is - in relative terms - assigned to it. Obviously it's not a problem you can just solve by spaffing cash at. It's nice to see so many different design concepts. I don't see that as a bad thing as nobody has got it right yet, but it does rather dilute the funding. Public/private is a good idea, although as with anything it can stray into the "pork" territory...
Being in a pub and getting a panicked technical support call as their team had run out of ideas. Trying to visualise the screen they're on and the system involved from memory whilst slightly sloshed (I wasn't technically on call, honest). Too many times to count. As an aside - why do all these calls seem to start with "Sorry to bother you, but..."?
I agree entirely. Business park outside of Amsterdam, business park somewhere in Copenhagen, where the fuck is Luxembourg?, that sort of thing. Rack up the bar tab and get them to invoice it as "dining", watch the "interesting" things on European TV, and hope you're still drunk for the journey home.
I kinda like some of the ideas. Feel like adding even more stuff to the "Exposé" style thing dilutes it actually. Having had to deal with OL(V)WM and CDE in the past and various other shitshows of so-called Desktop Environments they still fall flat. Obviously not the target audience for such things as FVWM would probably still be fine for my needs. Guess it comes down to choice which is nice. Remember - set your virtual desktops in a 3x3 grid, bind a function key and cursor keys to move between them, make sure the background is different on each VD. Or don't.
You and your fancy modern Postfix! Back in my day we wrote sendmail.cf files by hand and sent email crafted in telnet sessions. If anyone complained we'd beat them around the head with the complete Sendmail reference manual. I can't even see a way to download Slackware via Kermit - what is wrong with the world?!
Back before dinosaurs learnt to fly I was using Sun (maybe SGI) workstations with a 4 button mouse. Proper mouse - balls and all. I must admit getting used to 2 copy buffers in *nix style takes a while, but now I constantly bugger up cut'n'paste when I need to use Windows. Can't win.
One of my mentors at a Telco in Oz used to write CGI scripts in shell and C. I expanded on this to use sed and awk (mainly because I knew it, but also because Perl 4 was utter shite). It stuck with me as an ethos. I'm so sorry to every company I've worked for in the last 25 years. Sort of. Maybe. Lot's of love - The Eternal Bodge.
1) I never completely understand the question (I'm a moron). 2) Even if I do vaguely glean the problem I'll try and solve it with some mutant hybrid of bash/sed/awk/bc (I'm a moron). Once tried that Project Euler thing. Got a little way through it mostly because there's a Unix util called "primes". Attempted to use Python but that added more misery and woe. They all seem to descend into "Your late uncle's half brother's sister married a fridge stolen from your great aunt. How many magnets do you need?". Have I mentioned I'm a moron?
Yeah, at some point you've just got to throw your hands in the the air and go "Sod it. Done as much as we can.". Still, must be nice for the boffins to have almost real time comms with the kit briefly. May Eris, Goddess of Chaos smile upon the journey.
I'd guess that there are good helicopter pilots and dead ones with a small overlap on the Venn diagram. I heard a tale from someone who saw a pilot put a teabag in in a mug from a helicopter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Probably just bollocks, but a nice story.
Remember that the Electron is rather small, will have lost all its fuel and be descending via parachute. Still don't think I'd want to be on that particular ride when they actually try it.
...it was only the early 90s and rendering a refractive ball with multiple light sources on a chequerboard in 320x200 resolution using an Atari ST could take a day or more of work in PovRay. To think that real-time raytracing (even with some cheats) is possible blows my (albeit tiny) mind.
X11 might be a bit of a mess as a protocol but I have fond memories of being able to use a web browser that my feeble hardware couldn't possibly have run at the time. Run off the mighty SunOS server at my university and projected to my screen at home in glorious 14.4 modem speeds I was truly enlightened.
Okay, all 1000 websites there were at the time, but still.
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