Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Yes. Very much so. Personally I think their "entire season release" model is innovative and allows the viewer much better ways to experience a show while fitting it to their personal schedule.
I find myself asking if there would be shows like "Game of Thrones" if not for the emergence of Netflix and Amazon.
"I think that you need to say why you don't regard AIX as UNIX."
Then I will.
Lets start with the logs. If you really know about AIX I need say no more other than to cough "binary format".
Then there are the processes (like volume management) that are much easier if you use smitty, which will show you the scripts it generates that look only superficially what my clever young things want to code because real Unixmen don't do menus. Or something.
I should point out that I work in an environment with Solaris, AIX and Red Hat Linux and am often confronted by naive coding stupids:
a) scripts that assume Linux versions of utilities that have been wildly expanded in capability and are therefore "broken" good and proper when they propagate out into the enterprise
2) scripts that fail to take into account differences in default behavior of said utilities on different *nixes and are therefore "broken" a bit more creatively - df scripts will sometimes feed back a number after being stroked by awk or cut, but since df has different columns under AIX than solaris the numbers aren't what the script-laddie thinks they are and comedy ensues. The sort of comedy that wakes people up at night a few weeks after script deployment.
@) more of the same.
One can approach (most of) AIX like it was BSD or SVR4, but life is a lot easier if one comprehends that IBM wants their "Unix" to look like a mainframe O/S and the jobs are quicker and safer to complete if one does it their way instead of the generic Unix way. One also has to understand that even if AIX has a "This Is A Real Unix" sticker on it, the utilities don't always behave the same way they would on the spark computer running an O/S directly derived from SVR4.
Given the differences between BSD family and SVR3 family Unixes, one might be on safe ground to say "Unix isn't Unix". It certainly would make for better preconceptions of engagement in the Bright Young Things hereabouts, who use the "Unix is Unix" mindset and send all output to /dev/null by default so figuring out what went wrong with their brilliant script and when the wheels fell off is a crapshoot.
A bit too close to home?
I wish you'd use the same argument with some of the clever young things hereabouts who think AIX is Unix, and get very bent out of shape when it isn't so much.
And my child was working with Windows before she could write. Learned basic arithmetic by playing with it on a windows machine.
Finally, anyone claiming a child could understand the man pages is pushing it, a bit. The one I like to cite as being willfully dense is the one on ln butbthere are many othrs.
Oh bob, what about the population that would rather have stud-muffin eye-candy strutting around, oiled and shirtless?
Or that which believes (foolishly in my opinion) that the ony way to dress a woman in public is in a tent wit an eyeslit? They buy computers too you know.
Please try and get solidly into the twenty first century before it is over and the rules change again.
I think the memory of your "favorite" Dr Who is colored in no small amount by the ensemble cast chemistry, the situations (as opposed to scripts) that they find themselves mired in and the general tone of the show.
I loved most of the early doctors *when I first saw them* but they don't often wear well when viewed today (for me). I found Ian Chesterton to be violent to the point of sociopathy - and him a teacher too! - when some of the first shows were recently rebroadcast. I had remembered him much more fondly.
Troughton was fun for the most part, though I found his obsession with the recorder to be "too much".
Pertwee had the advantage (for me) of being an actor I loved in other roles - The Navy Lark springs to mind - but was saddled with the at the time infuriating lack of a working time machine and a surfeit of what I call "70s Stupids" - special effects and script "bits" that were supposed to be cool but were cringe-inducing in their naffness. Venusian Karate was one I hated, as was the Whomobile. Just awful.
Baker was, of course, almost born for the role and his concept of a time-travelling Harpo Marx was inspired. But this was also the era when more and more of the situations were huge story arcs that were wound up with technoblither on the last page of the script a-la Star Trek.
Davidson's doctor cured me of the show, mostly because I hated his companions, his tooth-achingly bad obsession with cricket and that damned celery stalk. The scripts were all gothic doom and gloom too (with the occasional brilliant one like Castrovalva).
McCoy's Doctor was a breath of fresh air, but again, the situations were dull and the companions were intolerable to me. By then I wasn't watching the show much, not making time for it, but I caught a few episodes.
I only saw one episode of Colin Baker's Doctor. I thought it showed promise in a completely over-the-top way, but as I say, by then I wasn't really paying attention and wasn't crushed when the show was dropped.
Besides, the Baker episodes were in constant rotation on PBS here in NY every Saturday afternoon. I was astounded at the show's popularity and the fans' efforts to keep it on screens all around the country. Tom Baker did a fund-raiser "bit" when our local PBS station was having a beggathon, in which he berated those who watched without subscribing at length and with great creativity. It was hysterical right up to the time they cut to someone else, anyone else for God's sake.
Paul McGann was excellent in the challenging role of trying to make Dr Who a prime time US TV product. A difficult act to bring off and pretty thankless, many daft UK viewers seeing his role as some sort of betrayal. His was the doctor that first showed us a Steampunky Tardis.
Eccleston was nothing short of brilliant. I don't kid myself that he was the only actor capable of giving the franchise a new lease of life, but he bit off huge chunks of it and made it his from the first few seconds of the opening. He also had some of the finest scripts I think have been attempted for the show. His is the doctor I wish we could have seen more of.
Tennant was fun, but began to get too shouty. He was also saddled with Donna which was the point at which I stopped watching again for a season or so. Did love Broody Tennant Doctor though.
Never really cottoned to Smith in the role. The show had some very clever plots and he was particularly clever in what he did with the role in places, but I found much of his reign to be "meh". I'm re-viewing his first season on disc so maybe I'll learn to like him better. Also: not fond of the River Song plot thingy.
And so to Capaldi's doctor. A bit of a puzzler this one for me. Half the time I love his characterization, half the time I hate it with a vengeance. A bit too much "today" in the set dressing I think. Some of the scripts have been stinkers, but some have had moments of inspired brilliance - the long way round springs to mind, as does the breaking of the fourth wall to ask "who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?". But the last season was saddled with too many problems for me. I wish they could have spread the encounters with old enemies over the four Capaldi seasons instead of mashing them into one horrendous crescendo.
Still iconic though, no matter who plays him. Especially if it's John Hurt.
systemd with faint praise
Only a problem if you are served them in the UK (I'll wait while the laughter subsides) where you don't own the food you just paid for.
In the US it is expected that if you are served a gigantic portion of food you will have the common sense to ask for a take-out box after eating half of ithe meal.
No more gourmand criticism from the land of the see-through luncheon meat slice and the deep-fried Mars bar.
I had a friend who, back in 1987, decided to collect an entire chapter of "beaky" Space Marines for the Goons Wonkshop game Wonkhammer 401K Rogue Trader.
He accordingly set about buying up all the $22, 30 minis per box sets he could find until he had the requisite 1000. He gave up at around 500, deciding half a chapter would do for now. He washed the sprues and left them to dry so that he could paint them. While he was at it he acquired a few hundred Space Hulk Genestealers for another Wonkhammer 401K project.
Some of these Marine sprues were the ultra-rare blue styrene ones from the very first production runs.
Whereupon dear old Mom decided to clean out the basement and tossed them all in the garbage.
Months of effort. almost $600 of investment, chewed up in hydraulic masher in the back of a dustcart.
He was pissed-off for weeks.
I no longer smoke, haven't since before some of you were born, but when I did I went throuogh a period of heavier than normal at-desk smoking.
We had hired a new bloke who had the habit of watching over one's shoulder, then running to the boss's desk as soon as the problem was found and remedial action underway to claim the credit for "figuring out the problem".
Everyone hated this "work" habit and my way of dealing with it was twofold.
He claimed to be allergic to cigarette smoke so when I was problem solving, if I heard his voice in-theater I would light up.
Whenever I left my desk I would run a macro that printed a line every few seconds like:
UCURBNGAD nnnnnnnn nnnnnnn nnnnnnn nnnnnnn
Where the "n"s were the values from three counters under the macro. He eventually asked me what it was and I told him it was a diagnostic I ran to "test the mainframe's registers".
He never did wise up, but he spent a good few lunch hours wasting his time trying to analyze the numerics.
I used to regularly have to explain the facts of life to database programmers who coded "check error return status and plough on regardless" every furging time.
Got to the point that when programmers turned up claiming a database issue I would offer to give them ten dollars if that turned out to be the case, and if they agreed to pay me one dollar for every code logic error I could spot in their blither. Not one taker, usually because I'd glance at page one and say "you should know you are already three bux in the hole" or somesuch.
No, the problem was the dimwit AT&T "technician", and a lack of AT&T gumption when it comes to how to react to individuals' repeated call-bombing the help and support center sans proper credentials.
The PayPal part is the one where the attempt to make them act like a real bank hits their terms and conditions. I've only anecdotal evidence to offer, but there seems to be no dearth of people who are less than impressed by the problem mitigation offered by PayPal. The victim (who is of course being blamed in these comments - big surprise) is expressing a lack of sanguinity vis-a-vis a speedy and angst-free resolution of the breach caused by a dimwit working for AT&T.
Assuming you are right (a big assumption, but I am implying AT&T obfuscation rather than kain preacher misdirection) then the "breach of protocol" is even more bewildering and should result in an immediate firing and outing on the intranet as a warning to others - just like they do in my own enterprise. Shouldn't be necessary, but sadly is. Dimwits infest the world.
Dimwit shaming the "tech" who "broke protocol"?
Of course we all know that while we think of the call center people as working in an office of many, in actual fact they are working from home over a network connection. This week's customer account service technician is last week's full-time facebooker.
glibc maintainer after 30 years
I'll bet you didn't know that Sperry/Unisys were open source (not so much since the "new brooms" post '86).
You paid for the O/S, but Sperry would let you have full access to the source so you could f*ck about with it.
They just said that if you did mess with the code, you did so via a provided mechanism. You could bodge the code directly, but you were on your own if you did and it went TITSUP.
Quite a shock for me to move over to an IBM technology that was black-boxed to Hellenbach.
"Exceptional. Right now I'm trying to remember the last time someone stepped down from something, on their own accord, while declaring that they do so because things will work at least just as well without them."
Carl Kasell, of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
Oh, you meant the prima-donnas infesting the computing world. Yeah. You're right there.
Thanks, Roland McGrath for your efforts. I'm not a 'c' programmer but thanks to people like you digging in, I have a brand new (as in about three hours old) Linux Mint up and running on a reconditioned laptop, ready to become both an evaluation of Mint and a lab for learning about Oracle installation (in the absence of actual training and/or a lab machine being provided for me by the idiots I work for).
Have a nice rest and do something that hasn't gotten old for you.
Biometrics are dumb, dangerous and dumb.
I know I wrote "dumb" twice, but that just reflects the depth of my feelings towards this dumb technology.
The idea is sound enough. It's every phase of the execution that has "fail" writ large upon it.
Passports that can be stolen from feet away without leaving one's pocket, Photo IDs that requires the owner adopt facial poses never worn in nature and to doff pop-bottle spectacles needed to avoid walking into walls and idiot biometrics stations. And fingerprints, which have been demonstrably fakable since about one year after they were first adopted as a means of identification.
Dumb.
Can it tell the difference between a hot dog, a bratwurst on a bun and a proper British sausage sandwich that has been opened up to apply the HP Sauce?
If confronted with a matrix of pics of bread-mounted orange sausages and Scotties in front of blazing fires, could it solve the capcha?
More importantly, who give an act of aerial copulation?
Oh dear.
The problem is that non-techies (and increasing numbers of techies who are "in the zone") are not really thinking about the technology they are using. To paraphrase Mr Jobs, when they are using email "they just want it to work". Hence all the illicit Blackberries in Congress.
The convenience blinds them to the danger. We all do stuff like this. Poke a knife in the toaster while it's plugged in. Drive with the tax disc out. Put off rewiring the house because you can't smell fizzing wire today and there's the roof to fix. Some of us even admit to doing so. Doesn't make you stupid, just distracted. That can kill you, but hey-ho, that's the human condition.
What a shame we don't routinely encrypt everything so there would be no harm, no foul.
Actually, I was thinking of this sorry affair when I linked that, but both are appropriate.
Mere Culpepper.
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