* Posts by jake

26589 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

jake Silver badge

Rather childish troll attempt, or just unclear on the concept? Hard to say.

jake Silver badge

Call it Modesty.

The collective noun of Modesty users could be an annoyance.

As for the 4chan lusers, clean up their mess without commenting or otherwise acknowledging that they are shitting all over the place. All they are looking for is a reaction, don't give them one and they will go away. Or, in the word of the Profit "If you feed the trolls, you get to keep them."

Disco classic Rasputin and pop anthem revealed as reasons Twitter suspended Indian politicians

jake Silver badge

Re: I have a button/badge from the '70s ...

Yeah. Black groups, like Abba and the Bee Gees no doubt.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: To all the haters...

We're not haters, Ma'am. We're musicians.

jake Silver badge

Re: I have a button/badge from the '70s ...

No, I'm fairly certain it was a god damn rock & roll thing. The kind of stuff that don't save souls.

jake Silver badge

I have a button/badge from the '70s ...

... that states "Disco sucks!".

I have another one from the '80s that says "Disco STILL sucks!".

Perhaps it's time for a revival.

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

jake Silver badge

No, thank you.

Adjusting to my Linotype keybr0ad is bad enough.

Mine's the one with etaoin shrdlu embroidered on the back.

Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service to grow almost 1000 per cent in five years

jake Silver badge

OMG!

They've invented the server!

What geniuses!

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

jake Silver badge

Re: Surely you can set up a mail sever using Red Hat ...

Nah. Not RedHat. Sendmail on one of the BSDs. Absolutely rock-solid, scales to any size, been around for yonks, etc. etc., what's not to like?

If you're more into the Linuxy side of things, put it on Slackware instead. Similar solidness, scalability, longevity, and etc.

Bit of a learning curve, yes, but once you've learned it you're pretty much done for life ... unlike pretty much every other mailserver out there, which all seem to regularly change things around at the whims of marketing for no logical reason whatsoever.

jake Silver badge

Re: not an IT company any more

"I can remember them writing the letters IBM out in individual atoms (Silicon I think) back in the 1980's."

It was 35 xenon atoms individually placed on a nickel substrate. Very late '80s. Done by Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

jake Silver badge

Re: "IBM has one chance of salvation"

"get back to having competent people on board - especially if they're more than 40 years old."

FTFY

Devilish plans for your next app update ensure they never happen – unless you start praying

jake Silver badge

Re: Just a couple of quotes to get things kick started

"Trolls are for the discouraged, not for the EMPowering."

And the man from Mars promptly disappears in a puff of logic?

jake Silver badge

Re: Just a couple of quotes to get things kick started

amfM, you know the rule about feeding trolls.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

jake Silver badge

"there's a Ctrl key where Shift is supposed to be"

That's why the fine art of keybr0ad re-mapping was in high demand back in the '80s. Some of us still do it, rather than settle for the crap key placement that marketing seems to think works best for computers. Not that today's point & drool users would care about that one way or the other.

My two favorite typewriters are an ancient Royal and a modern Smith Corona Portable from the '50s (with enhancements that helped my Father get his engineering degrees, and me my first one)..

jake Silver badge

Re: Font recommendations

Always is a long time, pardner.

-.. --- / -.-- --- ..- / ... .--. . .- -.- / -- --- .-. ... . ..--..

jake Silver badge

Re: Calling upon a higher power

As an agnostic Yank going to a CofE school in Yorkshire in the 1970s, I was excused from the morning assembly. I used the time to go over my homework, improving my mind instead of being brainwashed.

Still had to wear the school Uniform, though. My girlfriend, who went to the local Catholic school, and I were once seen sitting on a bench outside the public library together, each in Uniform. Both of us were threatened with expulsion if we were seen together again ... Seems that fraternization between the schools was heavily frowned upon, based purely on the xtian cults the schools espoused. The mind absolutely boggles.

jake Silver badge

Re: Calling upon a higher power

Nah. It's Shamanism.

jake Silver badge

Re: "In latex they are identical"

"my kink doesn't include latex covered letters."

Not even French ones, as, when and where applicable?

jake Silver badge

So in other words ...

... the Priest had been told by his typing teacher to go to 'ell?

Another JEDI saga that doesn't need a sequel: Oracle petitions Supreme Court over Microsoft Pentagon contract

jake Silver badge

Re: To boldly go ...

Not sacrilege. Tradition, almost local canon.

Look on the bright side, it could have been a B5 image ... late 2019, wasn't it?

jake Silver badge

Re: Which one should fail?

Because Redmond is all sweetness and light and moons & stars and rainbows and my little pony?

Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police

jake Silver badge

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

Whenever I hear the word "prepper" I have visions of idiots prancing around in the woods kitted out by Brooks Brothers, with polo shirts, boat shoes and V-neck sweaters worn as capes (Look! It's SUPER PREPPER!).

jake Silver badge

Re: Hearken to Prophet McNealy

I very, very rarely shout. Takes too much energy and almost never provides any real benefit.

jake Silver badge

Re: Hearken to Prophet McNealy

Take it in context. I was pointing out that we knew well over 35 years ago that privacy concerns would become a major issue. To the point that we tried to make end-to-end encryption the default for TCP/IP back in 1979ish ... but Vint Cerf, complying with the wishes of his bosses in the NSA at DARPA put the kibosh on it. McNealy, hardly a prophet (and a business major, not a techie), was just parroting what he had heard around campus as a grad student at Stanford.

jake Silver badge

Re: observation

Yes, he did. But it doesn't mean what you think it means, because you are taking the line out of context.

For the sensible who prefer to copy & paste:

https://www.hoover.org/research/what-benjamin-franklin-really-said

jake Silver badge

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

"Then people will distrust governments"

People don't trust them now. With reason.

Sheeple, on the other-hand ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Hearken to Prophet McNealy

"I refuse to carry an electronic leash 24X7 unless you PAY me 24X7!"

Me, about the pager & DynaTAC my employer wanted me to carry, roughly 1985.

Today's kids happily pay for and carry their own equipment for their employer's pleasure. Sad, that.

"Don't comment on Usenet or in email what you wouldn't shout from the rooftops!"

Me, addressing a Freshman "using the network" class at Stanford, also around 1985.

Today's kids see nothing wrong with spilling their life's history and other details all over twitter and facebook. Even sadder.

jake Silver badge

Re: observation

ITYM "Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither." —Thomas Jefferson

jake Silver badge

Re: try turning off GPS, bluetooth, WiFi.

"Likewise those, who decide to inconvenience themselves by leaving their mobile at home."

It's not an inconvenience. Far from it ... quite the opposite, in fact. Try it for a month.

"WHY would you want to do that?! VERY suspicious..."

Why do you have a door between your toilet and the rest of the house? Why don't you have a plate-glass window to the street in your shower? Why do you have curtains on your bedroom windows? What are you hiding? VERY suspicious.

jake Silver badge

Re: " its a simple start ..."

The Wife and I haven't routinely carried our cell phones for several years now.

Life is much freer and easier than when electronically leashed.

Try it for a month. You might be pleasantly surprised.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

jake Silver badge

Re: Why tax tech?

I think you'll discover that most places have entertainment taxes, occupancy taxes, and food (in restaurants) is most certainly taxed.

However, this isn't about pop singers. It's about industry executives and other shareholders. If you have never read Janis Ian's rather excellent commentary on the subject, do yourself a favo(u)r and check it out. Read the follow-up, too.

Suggestion: Get a cuppa, and find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted before starting in on it. It's longish (for this sound-bytebit addicted modern world), and quite densely packed with large doses of reality.

jake Silver badge

True enough. It's still tax evasion, though.

Read up on what took down Al Capone.

jake Silver badge

Re: FOSS

Exactly. Free.

I didn't contribute expecting to get paid ... although a nickle for every instance of TCP/IP which contains code that I wrote would certainly be nice, to say nothing of the myriad of patches I've contributed to the Linux kernel, BSD, GNU and FOSS in general over the decades :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: What about the people in the software world?

More likely you'll see a tax on people working from home to pay the owners of all that office space who aren't getting paid anymore, and more tax on fuel to pay all the poor gas(petrol) station operators who have been missing revenue this last year. These have actually been suggested here in the Bay Area.

Bridge tolls are going up, partially because we've had less traffic. I kid you not.

And don't forget schools ... Schools are funded according to how many students they have had in the classroom recently. Not enrolled, mind, but the language actually states "in the classroom". Guess what happens when a pandemic ensures there are no kids in the classroom?

jake Silver badge

It works the same way you pay taxes on all income ... including income received from doing illegal things, like dealing drugs or selling stolen property.

jake Silver badge

Re: Blank media tax V2.0

Just like your common or garden pyramid scheme.

Cross-discipline boffin dream team issues social media warning: FIX IT NOW!

jake Silver badge

Re: Virtual Community

"That was one of the first phenomena to be documented, even in the very early days of UUCP-based Usenet."

Before that, even. BBSes were known for their idiosyncrasy, and even Community Memory brought like-minded people together from across the Bay Area. (I got a lift to Day On The Green on July 13th, 1974 via a Community Memory message. The people with the car are still friends of mine.)

In the old days, we had the town well and bread oven.

jake Silver badge

Re: looking at pictures of cats and hope it all goes away

Too late. Skogkatts have already inherited the Earth. Some even have a proto;opposable thumb, which allows them to descend from trees head-first (among other interesting things ... operating the can-opener doesn;t seem to be one of them. Yet.).

Jeff Bezos names the fourth person for the first New Shepard flight: Wally Funk

jake Silver badge

Re: Bezos or Branson?

Or here.

I could never tell if George and Co. (especially Bootsy) were playing it straight (as they saw it!), or if they were knowingly parodying the genre. Some really good tunes in there, though.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

jake Silver badge

Give me a fifth of that and I'll happily sell you one of mine (shipping included, next-day and insurance extra). It's complete and fully functional, serial number less than 40 away from the supposed SirTim machine at CERN. WOW! What a deal! How can you pass it up?

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: How much do you think that I would get ...

"I think that this is all a bit silly."

Congratulations! You've just won the Understatement Of The Month Award!

Exoskeleton startup wants to slap robot arms on schoolkids

jake Silver badge

Re: What's the purpose of these things?

Power amplification. Will eventually allow a single slaveworker to do the work of four or more unassisted slavesworkers. The Unions are going to love 'em.

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

"But the last paragraph is a very handwavy argument."

Worthy of a beer, though :-)

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

jake Silver badge

Re: "We were going to take the sharp edges off "

Except Windows break quite often, leaving shards around all over memory.

Don't cut yourself.

jake Silver badge

"Can I please have an operating system that says this"

Linux BSD and Minix are open source (as are others), so there is nothing to stop you from making it so.

Has the systemd-cancer taken over the sound system yet?

Oh, wait ...

jake Silver badge

Re: -9

L1-A does the STOP-A thing on some Sun keyboards ... Note that doesn't actually shutdown the system, it takes you to the OpenBoot prompt.

As long as I'm typing anyway:

sync

sync

halt

is just as fast (no need to reach for L1), and actually halts the system. Note that the second sync isn't necessary, it's an example of cargo-cult programming. The first sync doesn't do anything obvious, so people issue the second sync command just to make sure.

jake Silver badge

Re: Why so long?

My 17ish year old laptop running Slackware-stable takes about 7 seconds to shutdown.

This one, 15 years newer, running the same thing, also takes about 7 seconds.

jake Silver badge

Re: meh

Mine don't even bother to haul them behind the shed. They just get killed where they stand.

When my daughter was learning to program for X11 she managed to create a child window that refused to die. So I introduced her the the xkill program. Naturally, being the rebellious teenager that she was, the primary thing she learned from the exercise was that she could change her mouse pointer to a skull and crossbones. Which she promptly did.

Probably get her kicked out of school and/or jailed these days. Sad, that.

There was a crooked man who bought a crooked M1 iMac, and we presume they lived together in a little crooked house

jake Silver badge

Re: Units error

But ... but ... but ... I thought it was all the unerring word of God! Now you're telling me that it wuz Umans wot rote it?????? I R confuzled.

Whispers? Are you trying to say the Bible is just a transcribed game of what us supposedly racist Yanks call "Telephone", and you more enlightened Brits call "Chinese Whispers"?

I suppose that's not what you mean by "oral tradition" these days ...

Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates

jake Silver badge

Re: Does it Miracast/wireless display out of the box ?

"I guess if they'd have know they could have installed MiracleCast: https://github.com/albfan/miraclecast"

No, thank you. It requires the systemd-cancer ... for no readily apparent reason, as usual.

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