Posts by GrumpenKraut

Chinese state media describes gaming as 'spiritual opium' that stunts education and destroys families

Re: The cattle

In capitalism people exploit people. In communism it's the other way round.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

> It seems the current crop of new computing graduates are being taught nothing more than...

At least where I live (and teach) this is not entirely true. However, students tend to switch off when it comes big-O and some finer points of computing/programming. Telling them stat stuff *is* important turned out to be fruitless. Nowadays I say something along then lines off "If you ignore this you will not get a good job, and you will totally deserve it.". Funny enough this seems to work.

But yeah, I have seen the content of courses that are not even a joke.

> “What is systemd?”

> ...someone who holds such strong opinions...

Well, that is me not getting the job then.

Somewhat more seriously, I have had excellent colleagues (programmers) who had *very* strong opinions on certain things. Which was a plus because I knew exactly how to rile them.

Malaysian Police crush crypto-mining kit to punish electricity thieves

Re: Payback time!

Back of the envelope calculation: one person at 200 Watts, cycling 16 hours every day, would need about 6000 years.

Re: Why not...

These are ASIC rigs, they can do nothing but mining.

But, yeah, hitting just the ASIC chips with a hammer would have done the job without making recycling extra hard. You get no press coverage that way, however.

Not sure that is correct. Other news sites reported that the operators of those rigs created fires (yes, plural) courtesy of interesting wiring used way over what was reasonable. They apparently stole electricity worth 1.7 million dollars, that is quite a lot of energy!

Re: Looks good but probably ineffective

Very unlikely any data will be recoverable. While it is quite difficult to flatten a hard disk, a steam roller(*) will have no problems. Just note how flat the rigs are afterwards. A hard disk may still be one piece, but the platters will be very much non-flat. For SSDs, a single chip (of several) might survive if it is very lucky, not sure what one would get out of that.

(*) weight up to 30 tons for not really huge ones.

JavaScript, GitHub, AWS crowned winners in massive survey of 32,000 developers

Re: Questionable methodology

No down-vote from me, but wasn't Objective C (at least at its time) a decent language?

Or are you just ... ? ------------>

Re: Questionable methodology

And comparing C++ directly to HTML/css is as useful as comparing a car to an umbrella.

Microsoft struggles to wake from PrintNightmare: Latest print spooler patch can be bypassed, researchers say

Re: Is this the year

more like paperless toilet, I am afraid.

Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

Re: Wonder if the redactors ever learn

Almost like the person making the redactions was very young.

Audacity is a poster child for what can be achieved with open-source software

Re: Telemetry

> For one i don't beleive that this pauses a threat at all to privacy. What's the problem ? I don't see any.

One reason for and usage of telemetry they list goes like this: "Why we collect: For legal enforcement; Personal Data we collect: Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any); Legal grounds for processing: Legitimate interests of WSM Group to defend its legal rights and interests."

Not a problem, really?

Vendors of commercial software used to fight against FOSS because they did fear what you seem to fear. The last three decades showed that they did worry with no good reason. Commercial software will never go away and even more money will be made selling or renting it.

You can give software away for free and still make good money, by selling support contracts. See Suse, Redhat, and probably a lot of other firms.

In https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ I find the following.

"Why we collect: For legal enforcement; Personal Data we collect: Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any); Legal grounds for processing: Legitimate interests of WSM Group to defend its legal rights and interests."

This is not acceptable at all. Funny I had to type the text above, it is an image on the web site.

What's that hurtling down the Bifröst? Node-based network fun with Yggdrasil 0.4

Re: What's with the Ös?

Upvote for mentioning Amon Düül

Boffins show sleight-of-hand tricks to Corvids, find they are smarter than people

Re: Optional sensible title here

You had me right until the end. Yes, I did miss the icon.

VB for you ------->

> I suspect if corvids could communicate with humans they would be better conversationalists than most reality TV show stars.

I find that pot plants are better conversationalists than reality TV show stars, without even talking.

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

Re: Let's unhook the stirrups

Book reader transmitting audio via vibrating underpants in 3 2 1 ...

Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images

Re: Thinks I like about systemd @Def

Randomly killed processes sounds an awful lot like overcommit is on (files /proc/sys/vm/*overcommit* ).

ALWAYS turn that shit OFF. Should be one line in /etc/sysctl.conf

I completely fail to understand why some distros have this activated by default.

Re: WTF?

Because before systemd nothing and nobody could handle passwords, no one every managed to log into any machine. Systemd fixed this problem once and for all.

In other news Poettering once had a problem logging into his laptop and thought "We could just gently stroke this subsystem with a big fucking chainsaw. Hmmm... MOAR CODE. BRILLIANT!"

> no error handling whatsoever.

Erm, WOT?

Simply not true.

Re: Thinks I like about systemd

This is indeed a joke, YET.

Re: Thinks I like about systemd

The systemd-vimrc-distribution deamon will take care of that for you.

Just don't change the systemd generated .vimrc, OK?

Re: Thinks I like about systemd

> And quite frankly, it's my machine.

Oh please, that is so old fashioned. You should go with the flow and let Clippy on steroids and crack, running with root permissions, do everything for you.

Yes, before systemd appeared everybody sitting in front of a Linux machine was asking "I want a working OS not just a kernel please", "how could that possibly be done?". People were also annoyed with having the same device names all the time and being able to read logs using less.

Re: Thinks I like about systemd

> I use /tmp and only want to delete things when I AM READY. Not after a reboot. Cunts.

That's more diplomatic than I possibly could have put it.

Your "don't be sorry" pint --------->

Thinks I like about systemd

(nil)

Mensa data spillage was due to 'unauthorised internal download'

Re: Wow

> Don't worry, you will know after 10 minutes

I know quite a few vegan people, none would tell you unless the conversation was specifically about vegetarians/vegans. None would start a conversation about it either.

Re: People in glass houses

> No-one would question being a member of the "I can run fast" club but as soon as any cognitive ability is mentioned hugely defensive behaviour ensues.

I feel being addressed. My unpleasant experiences were/are with people rubbing the MENSA thing in my face, unquestioned. Imagine reading a CV for some IT job containing half a page with each and every achievement in some running fast hobby.

My experiences along those lines are actually not job related but with a project I volunteer for.

Anyway, have an up-vote and a virtual pint.

Re: Wow

Indeed.

Re: Wow

> You have to look at the individual.

While I in general agree with this, I have yet to meet a single person announcing being in MENSA (or one of the other "God, we are SO clever!" associations) and not being a giant pain in the ass.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

> CONFIGURABLE BY ME

Nope. Yours, Microsoft.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Stand: yes. Alternative: don't know.

Re: Just call it

My bad, should not have made fun of dear Mr. Trouser Snake (PhD).

Just call it

the one-eyed purple-veined theorem prover. Sorted.

Do you come from a land Down Under? Where diesel's low and techies blunder

looking at the DNS log

back when dial up was a thing. Some URLs where telling, others not so much. Content was invariably "OMFG!". Never did it again.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: The echo chamber at work...

> echo chamber full of Guardianistas

Ah..., have a downvote. You are welcome.

Re: Man makes idiotic statement on a mailing list...

> Vaccinating the young has absolutely no medical or scientific justification.

Just in case you are really just uninformed: vaccinating also people to whom the disease is not life threatening (say, kids) does stop transmission to those to whom the disease is life threatening (say, old folks). Some people *cannot* be vaccinated, among them some old folks.

Still with me? The justification you demand is: saving lives.

Is that so fucking hard to understand? Hint: no, it is fucking not.

Re: Man makes idiotic statement on a mailing list...

> Vaccinating the young has absolutely no medical or scientific justification.

Are you really that fucking daft?

Google, Facebook, Chaos Computer Club join forces to oppose German state spyware

Re: Stasi

> They normally take that kind of things very seriously.

The population in general, yes. But we do have a few politicians that are in favor of all the insane crap like forbidding (or at least back-dooring) encryption. Those, without exception, don't have the slightest idea about how cryptography works, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

Wanting to put spyware on computers is a bit low even for those arsewipes.

Linux 5.13 hits rc5, isn’t yet calm, Linus Torvalds is only mildly perturbed

Re: Still brickin'...

> most installers fell back to a text installer or generic VGA driver.

Not if an *undetected* problem occurs. Source: yesterday, latest Debian with an old-ish AMD graphics card on the machine of SWMBO.

Ubuntu was installed. However that ^%&^* distro seems to have no text consoles at all (at last none reachable with ctrl-alt-F1).

Re: Still brickin'...

I suggest to always boot a "live system" to check that thing can work at all. Because if the live system doesn't work, it may be wise to give up. When it does work, looking at the output of lsmod can be instructive regarding what divers are used, especially for graphics.

When you get a black screen without *anything* on it, hit ctrl-alt-F1. This should give you a text console, showing the "login:" prompt. If not, it may again be wise give up.

Re: "How dead was it, on a scale from 1 to 10"

May I offer How to fix any computer by the oatmeal?

Oracle hits UK reseller with lawsuit for allegedly reselling grey market Sun hardware

Re: Did I read that right?

Just one? Bloody optimistic I'd say.

Re: Did I read that right?

Seems like Oracle sprung to action only when stuff was sold in the US, well knowing they'd get laughed out of court when trying to pull that shit in Europe.

I am waiting for an article reporting on something Oracle is doing that is not complete and utter asshattery. Not holding my breath.

Taiwan’s top chip tester, King Yuan, shuts down production and quarantines workers

Re: Complacent

Sometimes many posts in a row get down-voted with no explanation. In some occasions all comments for an article. Best to ignore.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

Re: The gap year

My two-month brake was mid year. Having month-year is expected hereabouts, and I stick to that.

Btw. if one applies for a state-job (civil servant), they want that *exact* date when you started and ended school, every one of them. Turns out there is no way for me to find out. I did select a plausible date just making sure it was neither Saturday nor Sunday. How could *they* ever verify?

Where this would not work, you absolutely positively do not want to work.

Re: Older applicants

Word by word it is "terror regime of the wanking frogs", the last two words for the MBA type of, well, wanker. Not sure this parses well in tze English, though.

Anyways, beer o'clock!