* Posts by DemeterLast

54 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2018

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Whoa-o BlackBerry, bam-ba-lam: QWERTY phone had a child. 5G thing's newly styled

DemeterLast

Re: The sliders never had decent keyboards

My last Blackberry was the Bold, and it's still my favorite phone, even with the jacked up Java OS and terrible browser. I used it as my main email device, the keyboard was that good. I switched mobile providers after that, and the new one never adopted the new BBs, so just missed the QNX devices.

When you have a really good device, you end up using it for 80-90% of your communications stuff (email, SMS). I never clocked my typing speed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 20-25 WPM, which I will never reach with my iPhone. But most people want a phone that's part camera, part movie theater, so the development dollars go that way.

Man, I miss the old Blackberry. They were similar to Nextel in that they were really, crazy good in one area, but never quite got the consumer side well enough to survive.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

DemeterLast

LTSC FTW

I put Windows 10 LTSC on a couple of ancient Thinkpads (Core2 Duos from 2005 I think, with something like 6GB of Ram) after upgrading the drives to SSDs.

They were just used for VNC over Wireguard during the 'Rona Crisis , but they boot fast and work remarkably well. YouTube even works decently well. Windows 10 isn't too bad once you de-Microsoft it.

Reply-All storm flares as email announcing privacy policy puts 500 addresses in the 'To' field, not 'BCC'

DemeterLast

Re: Reply All

me too

Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome

DemeterLast

Re: I maybe stuck in my ways but...

I'm just waiting for whatever new version of ActiveX MS comes up with so they can integrate it with Edge and relive the salad days of Internet Explorer again.

Web devs are already exhausted trying to keep up with the treadmill of random GoogBook crap, they may actually fall for it if it means never having to deal with React and node.js again.

Mind the airgap: Why nothing focuses the mind like a bit of tech antiquing

DemeterLast

Re: At a loss

It makes 100% sense to me. Years ago I refurbed an SE/30 (actually an SE with a motherboard swap) to use strictly for writing and some programming. Paired with an old Apple Extended Keyboard II (easily one of the best keyboards ever made), it was a very good dedicated machine.

Of course, WiFi is not possible on that machine... or was it? Adding a PDS Ethernet card, and plugging a cable into a disused WiFi router to act as an extender, I could move this to the quietest corner of the garage and work. The only Web browser available was an ancient version of iCab, so any distractions were limited, but I was able to send and receive files without having to resort to chasing down a floppy (ye gods!) or dealing with an external SCSI drive.

Man, I miss that upright form factor.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

DemeterLast

Re: Oxymoron alert

Oracle DBAs know that, if a problem occurs, the SOP is to explain to the money people that a check must be cut to your Oracle sales rep. I'm pretty sure that's Chapter 1, page 1 of the How to Be an Unleashed Dummy Oracle DBA in 24 Hours handbook.

On the other hand, the first thing SQL Server does on installation is hurl a rock at your face and insult your mother. It will then proceed to convert all system DLLs to kiddy porn and notify the FBI.

Details of Beijing's new Hong Kong security law signal end to more than two decades of autonomy

DemeterLast

Re: Nothing is more subversive than...

Those sound pretty good. Can't wait for the US to adopt some of those!

Apple said to be removing charger, headphones from upcoming iPhone 12 series

DemeterLast

Re: To be fair...

I do. The wired Apple headphones are pretty good for hands-free, and acceptable for music. I don't mind having a couple of them hanging around as I inevitably ruin them by snagging the cable on something. I just use the pair I have until I break it, then head to the Drawer of Holding to grab another pair.

I hate wireless mice, keyboards and headphones. I'm not replacing batteries in my computer peripherals, and I don't want what is, technically, a tiny potential bomb crammed into my ear.

If the supply of Apple headphones dries up, I'll go shopping for an aftermarket pair. I won't be paying Apple prices for them.

When one open-source package riddled with vulns pulls in dozens of others, what's a dev to do?

DemeterLast
Mushroom

Re: The problem is easy to express

It doesn't help that all of these frameworks, libraries, toolkits, etc. all put a gigantic Smiley Face all over their web site and documentation. "FooLib makes YOUR_PROBLEM_HERE so easy! And it's better than BarLib!"

Then they demonstrate how easy it is to do something that's stupidly easy already.

Unremarked upon is the 12.75GB of third-party libraries their framework, library, toolkit, etc. pull in as dependencies, which you barely even see scroll past when you run their recommended Yarn/npm/Composer/pip/etc. one liner to grab all that stuff. Or, they just tell you to download and use their stupid freaking Docker recipe.

"It's so easy!" No it isn't. It never is. And your shiny happy people attitude is giving impressionable young developers hope and optimism, when what they should be feeling is despair and cynicism. This modern drive towards acceptance and unity and inclusiveness is killing development. Developers should be angry, bitter, hateful towards users, and above all deeply skeptical of anything new. Security becomes super easy when nobody is allowed to do anything.

GitHub redesign goes mobile-friendly – to chagrin of devs who shockingly do a lot of work on proper computers

DemeterLast

Re: Qui bono?

I'm not a big user of GitHub outside of perusing repositories and docs, though I am a happy user of git itself. So I'm not sure how important the UI is to developers who use it a lot.

But, I do know that I and the developers I know want interface stability. Pretty is less important than predictable.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

DemeterLast

Often forgotten is the freedom that Apple has, as a near permanent also-ran in the PC world, to run around and break from tradition. People lost their damn minds when the iMac came without a floppy drive and was all USB. "Madness!" they cried from behind their Windows PC. "Apple is going to destroy itself!"

In the meantime, Apple the company has put together a string of very public and very successful fundamental processor changes with very little disruption, using very clever software hacks to move from instruction set to instruction set. If it wasn't smug, cash-rich, hipster-adored Apple doing it, tech people would be in awe.

This move is a good one for Apple, if they learn something from the success of their iPhone SE line. An ARM Macbook Air with decent RAM/disk specs priced around $800 would utterly own the education market. They will be able to run the educational iOS apps already on the market with the provisioning by Jamf or whatever, and Apple will brainwas... I mean build a new customer base for the next 20 years.

DemeterLast

Re: Probably not a big deal, if you already have reasonably solid code.

You may rethink that. ARM has been making some pretty impressive in-roads into the server market for what is basically a roll-your-own processor. This move by Apple may shake MS from its stupor and get them really trying with their ARM Windows project.

The near future won't be all ARM all the time, but it's going to be a significant player.

I'm not sure why you're down on the Apple hardware either. They've made some real stinkers, but the 2015 MBP isn't one of them. I'm looking to upgrade my 2011 MBP to one. In the Year of Our God 2020 no less. Hell, I keep a $99/year Apple Developer account even though I don't use it just in case I want to. I pay more than that for a stupid Dropbox account because stupid Dropbox double-dips on shared folders and the people I work with love their stupid Dropbox. At least Apple actually provides something meaningful for your yearly Ben Franklin tithe.

I mean, it's no skin off my nose if you want to ignore a significant market out of pique, but I think it's shortsighted.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

DemeterLast

Re: L-1

Nobody other than South Park is saying "forener are steelin are jobs". What newly minted American STEM graduates are finding is that they are competing against H1-B workers who are willing to work at reduced wages and under strict contract requirements for many years in trade for a green card so that very wealthy corporations don't have to pay Americans competitive wages.

I don't know why America is supposed to prefer hiring people from all over the world over its own citizens for the benefit of Wall Street and corporations. Why do you think they should?

Ex-director cops community service after 5,000-file deletion spree on company Dropbox

DemeterLast

Re: Backups? We've heard of them...

Are you a moron or something? Everybody knows that once your data is in The Cloud it is bathed daily with warm glacial spring water and groomed by a handsome centaur with a unicorn tail brush.

The Cloud is perfect. The Cloud is reliable. The Cloud is redundant. The Cloud cured my aunt's gout.

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

DemeterLast
Trollface

Re: Trump. A master baiter

Don't you mean a "main baiter"? Or are you, like git, a crypto-racist?

NASA scientists mull sending a spacecraft on a 13-year mission to visit Neptune's 'bizarre' moon, Triton

DemeterLast

Re: Quibble:- Trident...Triton... Neptune

If NASA uses Saturn for a gravity boost, and sends Trident past Titan on its way to Triton, every news scribbler in the world will shoot themselves in the face rather than try to keep all that straight.

For years, the internet giants have held on dear to their get-out-of-jail-free card. Here are those trying to take that away

DemeterLast

Re: Censorship is bad mmkay

Section 230 was largely meant to be protections for carriers. In the same way AT&T couldn't be held responsible for a phone call arranging a hit on your ex-wife, AOL can't be held responsible if BigEarl82 sends an email to Bill Clinton threatening to bone his dog. 1996 was a weird time.

1996 was also a long time ago. The spirit of the law was to allow the Internet to grow under the auspices of American free speech values, with lots of companies all competing for eyeballs and users. Unless you were doing something obviously illegal or onerously disrupting, BigEarl82 could yammer away on the evils of left-handed gingers on Usenet if he wanted to.

Where it gets dicey now is Section 230 is bumping up against past court decisions that say that public facilities cannot discriminate. You can't put a sign up at your bowling alley that bans left-handed gingers (though they are evil and probably deserve it) because you offer general access to the public; i.e. you're not a private club. Due to the nature of the modern Internet, a handful of very large, very powerful, and very wealthy corporations control large swathes of the Internet. Should these corporations be held to the same standard as the bowling alley?

I'm a bit afraid of any meddling with the existing law. Any attempt to modify it will certainly be rife with unintended consequences, and no doubt the wealthy corporate big players will beaver away at making the new law beneficial to them in some way. For example, including some kind of compliance requirement that a small player would find financially ruinous, but Google can absorb with ease. What we call "regulatory capture" in the States.

A better solution, with a long history of success, is to break up the monopolies. Monopolies are not intrinsically bad, and can in fact be pretty good (Ma Bell's laboratories did a lot of great research and development), but they put too much control in the hands of an largely unaccountable corporation. Whether Trump gets his Tweeters put on the naughty step is a sideshow to the real problem.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

DemeterLast

Re: Let's go through this point by point

"I guess you feel powerless, like you're losing control? Someone else is telling you what to do, and that the old was bad?"

You make it sound like this change is less about righting a wrong and more about retribution.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

DemeterLast

Re: Thanks Rasmus!

It's also a function of how Wordpress maintains compatibility. You should have a look at a well-used Wordpress site's database, one that uses a lot of plugins. Wordpress, if you use it as a blogging platform, is pretty good. But to keep compatibility, the database is used as a really inefficient key-value store, filled with gobs of serialized objects and the like.

Also, Wordpress (and Drupal) work the way they do because they needed to work around PHP's limitations before it had decent OOP mechanics. So you would end up writing Wordpress (or Drupal) code in a PHP-flavored syntax. Wordpress developers must bow to The Loop, for The Loop sees all and The Loop knows all.

PHP is pretty expressive. If you like Java, you can use the Zend Framework (or whatever they call it now) and feel right at home. If you like node, you can mess with Swoole. If you like to get your hands dirty, you can use Phalcon and write your own C extensions using their Zephir language. It's pretty impressive how widely varied PHP has become. Which is partly why it's so hated, as you never know what weird mutation of PHP you have to work with.

DemeterLast

Re: Don't know PHP, but, woudl probably take it over client-side JavaScript hell any day

First there was node.js, and the front-end developers rejoiced.

Then came npm, and the back-end developers sang songs of joy.

Then came the dark winter of left-pad, and all developers gnashed their teeth and rent their garments.

Then came yarn, and bower, and many other gifts, and the developers all battled on the fields of How-To.

Then the god of node.js saw that his children were saddened.

So the god made deno.js to bring his children home.

And the front-end developers rejoiced.

...time passes

...

...

So the god made oden.js to help his children fight the robot uprising.

Video? That's so not what we care about, says Slack, as it signs video deal with AWS

DemeterLast
Joke

As an Uglo-American, I protest this new fascination with video calls.

If it can't be handled over email with 7-bit ASCII, I don't want to be involved.

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

DemeterLast

Re: Amazon is a shady bookstore

Yes, please support your local bookstore.

If you have kids, or know people with kids, gift cards for your local bookstore are fantastic. When you turn a kid loose in there it's sometimes surprising what they come back with.

California emits fine-print of its GDPR-ish digital privacy law, complete with Google and Facebook-sized holes

DemeterLast

Re: "Ideally, it's just a first step."

Don't forget that it's also a hammer that can be used--selectively, on an as-needed basis--to pound down any nails that have the impertinence to stick up.

Legislation in the US, from local to state to federal, is so compromised that it would be preferable to have monkeys at typewriters writing laws.

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

DemeterLast

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

When I'm told about faster startup times with systemd, all I hear is "this is for VMs and embedded/hardware devices".

Faster startup makes a lot of sense if you're spinning up dozens or hundreds or thousands of VMs on a cluster. Clean configs and non-binary log files don't mean as much here because all that is just another service controlled by systemd. And if you want a Linux kernel based handheld device (like a phone, tablet, netbook, or maybe a piece of custom kit), then you want it to blaze through the startup.

I'm clearly too dumb to understand systemd, so I tend to use the BSDs where I can. I can never remember from one time to the next how to do certain things on systemd servers, so I prefer something that I can leverage my couple of decades worth of muscle memory. I also prefer to use bare metal whenever possible, so startup times are less meaningful than stability.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

DemeterLast

Re: NAT is not a firewall

NAT may not be a firewall, but it looks an awful lot like one in the way it prevents direct access to devices. You might as well say stripping all .EXE attachments from emails is not an anti-virus program. While true it's also a pretty good idea and stops a huge chunk of problems from occurring.

The other one is "RAID is not backup!" Yes, but it's still better than nothing. Perfect is the enemy of good.

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

DemeterLast
Stop

git broke English

"for now I'm unpulling it"

I like git a lot, but if 'unpulling' escapes into regular use I'm going to track down the git developers and huck rocks at their houses.

As anti-brutality protests fill streets of American cities, netizens cram police app with K-Pop, airwaves with NWA

DemeterLast

Re: radio channel

Getting new police radios in a city government is an onerous process. Getting nearly anything that isn't surplus military for your SWAT team is onerous. Aside from the bidding and contract awarding process, which is rife with corruption and influence peddling, you also have to retrofit vehicles and train officers.

If you have two brain cells to rub together you'd think this would be easy, but it isn't, especially in a big city like Chicago. It's so much easier to just keep using what you already have.

DemeterLast

Re: "Yes, Anon activists are back."

"I'm the only person here who has met Antifa"

Pfft, that's nothing. I played ping pong with Anonymous just last week. Anyway, I've been told that "Antifa" is not an organization. I've been told that it's a spontaneous uprising of revolutionaries, so your knowledge may be incomplete at best.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

DemeterLast

Re: Affinity

I jumped on Affinity as well. There are a few things I miss from Illustrator, but all in all I've been happy.

I noticed the outage when I went to set up a new user to Acrobat Pro. While I'm happy to switch to Affinity for design, unfortunately in this industry (AEC) not using Acrobat can lead to some weird issues when contractors use Adobe toolchains to put together PDF submittals. It's really annoying, but the other PDF options aren't workable or are more or less just as expensive.

I'd like to force everybody to use LaTeX, but I don't think I could weather the fury.

Lawsuit klaxon: HP, HPE accused of coordinated plan to oust older staff in favor of cheaper, compliant youngsters

DemeterLast

Re: This Is About As Shocking As The News That Bears Shit In The Woods.

While you're correct, too many companies see their IT department as purely a cost center. That idea is part of the reason why companies love to embrace "the cloud," because it's seen by the PHBs as a way to arbitrage their costs. "Wow, v3.14 was pretty expensive, what if v3.16 was run on OtherCloudCorp instead?"

IT is a thing that runs unseen and unnoticed, until it breaks. It's like the brakes on a car--carelessly trod upon daily, without a thought given to it until the master cylinder fails and the brakes stop working. Never mind that the driver should have been getting everything inspected regularly, and repaired or replaced as required.

The greybeards in the IT department cost a bunch of money, in the eyes of management, but return nothing they can chart on a Powerpoint other than downtime. Besides, the CEO's nephew is "really good with computers," why can't we just hire him to migrate our product to a SaaS platform and save $millions?

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

DemeterLast

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

2011 13" Macbook Pro here. Actually thinking of upgrading to a 2015 15" MBP so I can install the latest OSX without witchcraft, but not because my old workhorse doesn't do what I need it to.

I set up some ancient IBM Thinkpads from 2006 to do remote work over VNC/Wireguard for a couple of guys during the pandemic.

I think my record was a Mac SE/30 that ran NetBSD and used as a test web and mail server for a really long time, decommissioned only a decade ago or so. If you have the time to trawl ebay for SIMMs, the SE/30 will take up to 128MB of the things. Definitely one of the best computers ever made.

Google rolls out pro-privacy DNS-over-HTTPS support in Chrome 83... with a handy kill switch for corporate IT

DemeterLast

Re: Power grab

Exactly. Firefox started using Cloudflare's DoH by default and suddenly people inside my network couldn't see internal Web servers. Oh, and Firefox's "opt-out" dialog is basically "Do you want to be secure, or do you want to douse yourself in kerosene and light off fireworks like a moron?"

No, I am not going to run DoH on my internal network, plain old NSD over UDP is all I want to use. No, I do not want Cloudflare collecting DNS queries from my users.

I'm all for secure by default, but I am not for making a handful of corporations the de facto backbone of the Internet.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

DemeterLast

Re: In my experience

What's annoying is any spreadsheet of sufficient complexity is just as difficult to get right as spending the time to normalize your business logic into a database. The spreadsheet offers the deceptive simplicity of "changing this one thing here," but carries the risk of borking the rest of it. If your data is important, it's important to get somebody competent to build it for you.

Graphic designers have the same issue with Word and Powerpoint. It's easy for amateurs to put something together, which makes the amateurs feel empowered. But amateurs think clip art and a half-dozen different fonts makes something "creative and fun!"

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

DemeterLast

Re: Mices...Aahhrg

"general crud off of the rollers"

The term for that is "hand salsa."

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

DemeterLast

I like "Monopolist Formally Known as Evil" as it neatly sums up Microsoft from its founding to today, and also because the initialism MFKE sounds like a Microsoft technology. "Microsoft Foundation Kernel Extensions" or something similar.

Node.js creator delivers Deno 1.0, a new runtime that fixes 'design mistakes in Node'

DemeterLast

Re: Wonder how long it will take…

That's a pretty good argument to stick with the older, tested things and not pivot to new things simply because they're new.

Node solved a certain class of problem, and in doing so introduced whole new classes of problems. So much so that Node's inventor said, "let's start over." I'm not sure that's a great plan.

DemeterLast

Re: Wonder how long it will take…

Or just being competent.

The nice thing about using stuff built in C is that the bar is set that much higher and therefore attracts a certain level of programmer. JS was designed to be, and is, very easy for beginners to get something complex going. The Node ecosystem is a redundant array of individually dumb programmers that manages to work in the same way termites can build a mound despite having no brain to speak of. It's actually pretty impressive what gets built on Node, but I wouldn't want to depend on it. As evidenced by its inventor already building the Next Big Thing.

Developing via ADHD is a bad idea.

Nine in ten biz applications harbor out-of-date, unsupported, insecure open-source code, study shows

DemeterLast

Re: Research, document, and periodically audit

I recently got back into front-end development for some personal projects. The glut of package managers and automation tools is astounding. Also confusing, and hard to audit. npm alone hoovers up 4/5ths of the Internet to install a library to convert a timestamp to local time.

Just trying to deal with CSS preprocessors turned me into a lunatic. I gave up and installed sassc and went back to Makefiles for everything.

The speed at which developers are expected to turn around projects has gotten ridiculously short. Hell, even expecting there to be IT staffers is dated. Everything is contracted, and whatever random developer built your thingummy has already moved on new employment (twice) by the time the CVE is published. The next guy down the line can't even dissect what's wrong because the fancy CI/CD workflow the original developer used exists only on his laptop, which has by now had 6 new Linux distros installed on it.

I should have just gone into growing weed.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

DemeterLast

Re: Einstein vs Newton? Where the hell did that come from?

Where did it come from? It's Twitter. Somebody asked and Elon answered. Including it in the story is strange, but if you want to make Elon look like a nut it works. But if we're going to persecute people for random divergence, all of Twitter will be sent to the gulags, and what a great idea that is.

I have to say, I'm kinda with him on this. Einstein did a great thing, but Newton did a half dozen great things when all he had to work with was a feather dipped in ink and his brain. And he did it in Latin.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

DemeterLast

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

Somebody should find the date where Outlook became Microsoft's premier product instead of their OS or Office. It really has been their stalking horse for a long time. People just love their Outlook.

Author of infamous Google diversity manifesto drops lawsuit against web giant

DemeterLast

Re: Yonatan Zunger's response is still worthwhile reading

From the first paragraph of Zunger's opinion piece: "...about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it"

Having read the memo, I did not infer that conclusion at all. Starting from an inaccurate (or, more charitably, a questionable) position is not a great way to build a solid argument.

The top-rated highlight is: "Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers."

That sounds great, except that if you're an engineer and your project doesn't work, no amount of cooperation, collaboration or empathy will salvage it. Whether it's a bridge or a search engine, if the structure is faulty, the end result is a disaster of varying degrees. Sometimes it takes an engineer to stand up and obstinately refuse to cooperate or collaborate because your non-engineer colleagues and customers want to implement something that is wrong (pervasive privacy-infringing tracking) or dangerous (sub-standard steel girders from a cheaper supplier), and empathy be damned.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

DemeterLast

Re: OK, sp which password manager to plump for?

I like pass,(passwordstore.org). May take some effort to set up for multiple users, but very flexible. Great if you spend a lot of time on the command line.

DemeterLast

Re: In other news....

Rather than berate the 7 billion people on the planet into conforming to password requirements, how about companies do a little work and spend a little money to clean up their act. The first time I was confronted with a "your password is too long" error message, I assumed I had fallen through a wormhole and arrived in the before times where 80-columns was enough for anybody.

"correcthorsebatterystaple" has been dismissed unfairly I think. Sure, 48 characters of line noise is safer, but for quite a lot of sites 4 or 5 random words is far better and easier to remember than 7 alpha-numerics and a special character (which is almost always "!"). Sure, if a site gets their password hashes breached evildoers can gigahash through it with a couple of NVidia cards, but if the users are able to have a handful of long, yet easy to remember passwords, they're less likely to reuse them.

In any event, if you're a developer, dropping the $3.50/mo for haveibeenpwned API access is cheap at twice the price. Want to stop password reuse? Let your users know that their sooper-sekrit password is already in the hands of the evil hacker 4chan.

That awful Butterfly has finally fluttered off: Apple touts 13-inch MacBook Pro with proper keyboard, Escape key

DemeterLast

Re: specs vs. prices

Since I've been left behind with Mojave and Catalina not supported on my 2011 MBP, I've been watching the 2015 MBP used market. It's the last MB I'm interested in as while the battery is only barely replaceable, at least the SSD is upgradeable.

I wouldn't mind the soldered-on and glued down parts of the current crop if that meant they were cheaper to spec out for future expansion. I got 9 years out of mine because I could upgrade the drive, RAM and replace the aging battery. But I'm not dropping $3000 on a fully loaded 13" MBP. I'd rather give up and go back to using FreeBSD or Linux.

Dell to unleash hybrid server/storage boxen that can run virtual machines

DemeterLast

Re: Boxes

They're called "boxen" because you must treat them as you would any herd animal.

Lars Ulrich threatens to make another Metallica album during web chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

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Re: Most bands are in it for the money

The Napster thing was a tragedy for many reasons. If you were of a certain age, getting Metallica records meant knowing somebody who would dub a tape for you. Maybe you didn't have the cash, or maybe Mom wouldn't let you buy it because it had a bloody hammer on the cover.

How many Metallica fans were made by this samizdat music publishing? Nobody knows. But to hear Lars tell it, those people were thieves.

I haven't listened to Metallica Incorporated(R)(TM) in decades. I won't be introducing my kids to their music either. Good luck with your Salesforce job, Lars.

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

DemeterLast

Re: Florida man...

From what I understand, "Florida man" is a result of Florida's "sunshine law" that gives free public access to all government records--which includes arrest records.

So if you're a professional scribe with a looming deadline and either A) writer's block, or B) a hangover, you rifle through Florida's records until you find something wacky. It works really well year round too, because in Florida it's warm enough to sleep outside in the winter, so there's no weather related downtime to the hijinks and tomfoolery.

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

DemeterLast

Re: Remember serial breakout boxes?

80s Radio Shack also sold serial and parallel switch boxes. In the Dear Old DOS Days of AutoCAD, I had 7 or so computers connected through a byzantine array of serial and parallel switch boxes to allow the CAD operators to print to the dot matrix printer or the pen plotters. There is still 50 meters of DB-9 and DB-25 cable above the ceiling to this day.

Woe betide the operator who failed to check with the others before manipulating the switches to access an output device.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

DemeterLast

Re: Say what?

It probably wasn't "they," it was "that guy." Doesn't matter how big your company, there is always "that guy". That guy goes in to do something, the something gets a little complicated, he fixes it "temporarily, I'll clean it up later," and then gets sent off to do something else and promptly forgets.

I've been "that guy." More often than I like to admit.

You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't

DemeterLast

Always buy the disc, then rip

For one-off movies, we always just rent them. Everything else is streamed. But for those things that we (meaning "the kids") want to watch over and over, I buy the disc and then rip it. The thing about a ripped digital movie is that you can say "I want to watch this" and then watch it. If you use the disc, DVD or BlueRay, you have to suffer through endless unskippable crap, wait for what seems like an interminable amount of time before the snazzy menu comes up so you can hunt around on the DVD remote for the right key that plays the movie. Half the time you're treated to two more unskippable warnings from the FBI about doing the very thing you're thinking about, which is getting rid of this dumb crap you don't need to see every time you watch Wreck-It Ralph.

Compare that to open up Plex on the Roku box, use the world's simplest remote to navigate to what you want to watch, and then play it.

Attention Hollywood! I'm more than willing to pay for entertainment. I do not want to be given a wedgie every time I use your product though. Thanks!

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