Posts by jake 26682 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Meaningful filename extensions, however, not so much.
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will learn what magic numbers are. Eventually. You folks running un*x-ish systems, try "man magic" ... you can poke around in /etc/file/magic for more. The concept is older than UNIX[tm] itself ... Meaningful file name extensions should have died with Digital Research's CP/M.
Rest in peace, Gary, my friend ... you are still missed by many, you cantankerous old goat.
They are probably using LESS fossil fuel per unit of electricity by generating their own on-site than if they purchased it off the grid ... fewer transmission losses. And a modern half-megawatt natural-gas powered gen-set is quite likely more efficient than the aging unit run by the local power company ... and is required by law to be less polluting, as well.
Note that I agree that the whole bitcoin concept is fucking stupid ... but as long as what they are doing is legal, Shirley choosing the lesser of the two evils is preferred?
You won't get them.
Interesting fact: Free-range hens are much, much more likely to die from being dismembered alive by predators than battery hens. Here in Sonoma, California I typically lose about 50% of my layers per year to predators because I allow them the freedom to come and go as they please from dawn to dusk ... my neighbor, who keeps his in a covered run, only loses a few if one of his children leaves the door to the hen-house open.
Free-range for domestic foul ain't what the PETA set would have you believe ... Chickens just aren't built to survive in the wild.
"Such a calculation would require quantifying human stupidity, which seems like a difficult exercise at best."
Some of our greatest minds have worked on this problem. A selection of results follow:
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. —Albert Einstein (supposedly)
Apart from hydrogen, the most common thing in the universe is stupidity. —Harlan Ellison
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. —Frank Zappa
The point is that they fired up a natural gas generator, they didn't re-commission and fire up a disused coal burning power plant plant, as commentard iron disingenuously suggested.
One can make an awful lot of electricity with little pollution on a standard, common or garden commercial-grade low pressure natural gas connection.
"Surely old people die for new ideas to be born."
From my bookmarks: an interesting paper on the subject ... which suggests otherwise.
A quote: For example, Nobel Prize winning research is performed at an average age that is 6 years older at the end of the 20thcentury than it was at the beginning(Jones,2010). Figure 2 reconsiders the data from Figure 1 in three different periods and shows this effect, where the tendency for great scientific or technological contributions has been shifting toward later ages."
So don't listen to the lazy (and becoming lazier!) kids, my fellow aging commentards. There is still life in us yet ... have a beer and a cogitate, you just might figure out how to save the world.
Here's the link in plaintext, for those who quite sensibly like to know where they are going:
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Age%20and%20Scientific%20Genius.pdf
"Then you're chasing unicorns"
Says the guy on record as trying to fix stupid ...
As a side note, a combination of find and grep, perhaps with the addition of a filter or two (to dig into archives), will easily do exactly what TOA wants. This has been possible for well over three decades.
"And that's what the one-size-fits-all preordained enterprise or distributor build fails on."
As I've been saying for at least a decade ...
You seem to be missing the distinction between "The Linux Kernel" and "a KitchenSinkware Distribution".
The kernel, in essence, manages the hardware it is running on. That's pretty much it. It is quite boring, and the average end-user never even knows it exists.
A KitchenSinkware distribution adds all the software bells & whistles for your every pointy-clicky delight.
Thus, your router and KitchenSinkware are two completely different distributions, serving two completely different needs. So of course they are different ... even though they both can run the same, exact Linux kernel. (Although the kernel in your router will be compiled for that specific hardware, and the one in KitchensSinkware for as many hardware types as possible, thus the size difference.)
That's why Ubuntu (and clones) have all the issues that Cupertino & Redmond based OSes have, and for all the same reasons. Trying to make one desktop OS that works for all users, everywhere, inevitably makes for a bloated, buggy code-base. You'll have better luck with a more targeted distribution ... or better, learn to build your own custom version.
It's not really a problem, more of an irritation. The filesystem is a major part of the operating system as a whole. It is fairly consistent across unicies, and has been for a long time. Making changes like that break who knows how many scripts that would otherwise function perfectly well after merely copying them from system to system. And this change on Apple's part is for what reason? Near as I can tell, it's nothing more than an affectation. There is absolutely no reason for it at all. Gets on my craw, it does.
Note that Apple isn't the only company to do this kind of thing, I just used them as an example that would be familiar to most ElReg readers.
Before anyone asks, yes, the naming of the X11 directories also get on my craw ... but I've learned to live with it over the years.
Depending on who and where you are, and who is paying the bills, one answer is "But this IS the way it is done!" ... if they are so computer illiterate as to believe you, you're on the first step of the ladder to their education.
Building apps from source ain't exactly rocket surgery. Any idiot can do it.
On the other hand, MeDearOldMum and GreatAunt have been happy Linux users for many years now. Since moving them from the world of Windows to Slackware, their support calls to me have fallen from several times per month for the bastard child of Redmond, to none (zero, zilch, nada, 0) for well over two years now on Slack.
Linux works perfectly well on user desktops, as long as the wetware of the installer understands the needs of the user.
If you are a cog, you have no say in what the machine does. You have two options: Suck it up and accept it like the rest of the sheeple ... or you can move on to greener pastures (starting with attempting to change the culture where you are now, if you like).
Your mythical Captain Peachfuzz (usually the Nephew of The Founder, or the like) can be treated as the speed-bump that he is. Rule one: Get it in writing, with a wet signature.
I'm a man, not a number. Yourself?
So you're an advocate of stupiding the world down to the lowest common denominator?
When I was younger I thought I could change the world. Now that I've been teaching on and off for about 45 years, I've come to the realization that probably nine out of ten humans are ineducable beyond "eat here, sleep there, bathe occasionally & don't poop in the living room".
I can live with that. Just don't ask me to join them in their mire in the name of you separating them from their money. That's between you and them, kindly keep me out of it.
... and it irritates the pig.
"With traditional Linux distribution tools and approaches if you want to downgrade your version of Libreoffice or get compatibility with a different version of Blender3d the only way to end up with a supported configuration is to re-install your operating system."
Horseshit. Total, utter and complete horseshit.
Nah. I admin my own computers. The only person who can take me down is me[0]. And if I do, so be it ... at least I'll have learned something. Having proper backups and automatic fallover hardware redundancy in key systems helps with piece of mind.
[0] To be perfectly honest, the Wife has access to the safety deposit box with the BigBookO'Passwords[tm], just in case I step in front of a bus. She's *nix literate (finally!) and knows how to access everything, but she's never seen reason to use root, even on her own computers (Slackware and BSD), so she doesn't.
It all started going downhill when people changed /u back to /usr ... Us lazy bastards at Berkeley had changed AT&T's /usr to /u in the name of brevity, but apparently it made things hard to understand for newbies.
/u (or /usr) always had non-home directories & other stuff in it ... Source code, documentation, the man pages, user installed binaries available to everybody, and other useful tat like vi, EMACS, UUCP and the BSD games pack.
It was both useful and logical to split it into /usr and /user when the system grew large enough, and had many users. Then some bright spark decided that /usr and /user was too complicated due to their similarity, and thus /user became /home ... except in the appleverse, where they "simplified" it to /Users (Caps in a system directory name? WTF‽‽‽).
From many years of observation, if you keep the ad hominum to a bare minimum in these here parts, chances are your post will be allowed.
We (TINW) know you meant fuck, so fucking type fuck. If some fucker can't fucking handle it, they can fucking leave.
Or we can let the fuckheads who pretend to be easily shocked take over.
You're talking about the so-called "first thanksgiving" of the Puritans in 1621, right? It might surprise you to learn that those folks had absolutely nothing to do with the Founding of America.
It cracks me up every time you Brits claim the US was founded by the Puritans. In reality, the Puritans were a fairly unimportant sub-culture by 1776. If you look at facts, not a single one of our Founding Fathers was a Puritan. In fact, many of them spoke out against organized religion partially because of the Puritans ... If anything, the American Revolution happened in part to rid ourselves of such bullshit (sadly, we're not done yet).
On the other hand, and apropos of ElReg's science oriented crowd, seven of the ten initial core group that became The Royal Society were Puritans. The Puritans never ran the United States, but they DID run England for many years. The effects are still visible.
Not a lot of lawyers call themselves Barristers in California. Basically, any lawyer who has passed the state bar and has been admitted to practice may prosecute or defend in California. We use the term Attorney for both prosecution and defense.
Like the above terminology, don't assume "the Law" (whatever that means!) is the same here as it is in your jurisdiction. It frequently isn't, and assuming otherwise just makes you look silly.
For some reason certain people seem to think that adding asterisks somehow mutes the badness of the word(s) that they self censor, despite the fact that their actual meaning is blatantly obvious to anyone with native intelligence greater than that of a flatworm. It's almost as if they think that the words themselves are somehow more meaningful than the intent behind the words.
People are weird.
... go ogle had already dropped "don't be evil" as a motto as of October of 2015, when Alphabet decided "Do the right thing" was more appropriate. Following that "don't be evil" was vestigial, at best, an afterthought in the CoC before eventually being removed completely.
Methinks Willie Sutton might have had something to say about the lawsuit(s).
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