Posts by jake

Re: Just wish I'd done my SAR request a lot sooner

Indeed. Back in my 9-5 career, I very much enjoyed thwacking manglement over the heads with large piles of paper-trail.

Re: You want Equality? You get Equality.

Oh, fuck you. The percentage of child care and household domestic work that I do (or do not do) is between my partner and I, not you or society. It's up to US to make that decision, in our own little microcosm. To suggest that somehow society as a whole should be able to judge an individual family based on that family's agreed upon division of workload is incredibly offensive.

Re: Good for Davidson

"And besides, work calls actually scheduled for Saturday mornings ? What the blazes is that ?"

Sadly it's the norm these days. You have a so-called "smart" phone with you at all times, therefore the corporation is allowed to contact you about work matters whenever they like.

Back in the day, those of us with expensive pagers got a stipend for each and every minute we were required to be at the Corporate beck and call off work hours. Cell phones upped the anti ... and the amount of the stipend. The folks issued with electronic leashes were smart and didn't allow the company to walk all over us.

Nowadays, with so-called "smart" phones being cheap as chips, any idiot can have one. And so they do. And corporations world-wide are taking advantage of the sheeple. Sad, isn't it?

Re: £22K? Is that all?

Contrary to popular belief, one bad apple don't spoil the bunch, girl. (Works for the cops, too, all you Jackson 5 fans ... ).

Re: £22K? Is that all?

"Why speculate on irrelevant conditions that you have no means of verifying?"

Because that seems to be the topic of this entire comments section?

Or were all these anti-IBM commentards actually there, and so they have first-hand knowledge of the situation?

(Note: I am NOT pro-IBM, far from it ... Just calling a spade a spade (which will probably get me hung, drawn and quartered these days ... ))

Re: We've been there before

The difference is that in the one case, a tool that probably never should have been relied on in the first place was jerked out from under the Linux developers. In the other case, someone is suggesting that configuring an email client is entirely too difficult for (some) prospective Linux developers, and so we need to come up with an entirely new way to collaborate on the kernel to bring these non-technically inclined people on board. No child left behind, dontchaknow.

We'll be serving KoolAid and singing Kumbaya in the atrium after service.

Re: Whatever

That's Phabricator. Poor things.

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

ASCII was developed alongside, and in cooperation with, ISO/IEC 646 in the early 1960s. That's the International Standards Organization.

Seems fairly Universal to me. (amfM, any comment?)

I agree that at least it's not EBCDIC ...

Re: Welcome back, amanfrommars

This was NOT amfM ... amfM sticks to whatever point he[0] is making.

[0] Are Men from Mars properly referred to as "he", as it would appear at first blush? I'd hate to start an interplanetary incident over improper use of pronouns ...

Re: As always, it's easy to sneer

"If you wanted to do Linux kernel stuff and equipped yourself accordingly would you really need to use a Mac mail client?"

Considering that Mac userland is (to all intents and purposes) BSD, and BSD & Linux share most (all?) email clients, I rather suspect the question is moot.

Assuming the "you" in question had any competence, of course. And if they didn't have that competence, I'm not all that certain that working on the kernel is the best use of whatever talents they may have ...

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

I think Norman Nescio's reply here more than adequately addressed Linus' native tongue.

Re: Where's the IT content?

So add a base64 decoder to the pipeline. Simples.

Re: So not just about plain text email

"The XeroxSTAR Office automation software package[0] was slow because the hardware it was designed for was under powered for that kind of system. The developers didn't use STAR because it was an office automation system, not a development environment. The DE that they used was called Tajo[1], an early IDE. As with most intelligently designed IDEs, Tajo used few system resources and ran OK on the slow hardware of the day."

FTFY

[0] The thingie known as STAR was just the software tools for office automation. The hardware, OS and networking were completely separate, if linked, projects.

[1] Outside Xerox, Tejo was called Xerox Development Environment, or XDE.

Re: Is setting up a non-shitty email client really that hard?

Bing still exists? Who knew?

Re: So not just about plain text email

"I'm sure I'm a tiny minority here when I say i host my own email"

Probably not all that tiny. Hands up all you ex- Demon users ...

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

"It's following discussions, submitting formatted code, following feedback and revising parts, and resubmitting it, and accepting it."

Which we are doing. And it's not exactly difficult. For proof, I submit the fact that Linux has been ported to damn near everything, and it runs better on all those things than any closed-source option that I can think of.

"Mailing lists have been a place for that. But they're not the only way to do it."

So she should actually design herself a system that works the way she wants to see it work, and make the source available to all and sundry. If people like it, it will get used. Thats how FOSS works. Kicking open the door and yelling "The way you are doing it is wrong! Microsoft is going to fix it!" is guaranteed to get her laughed at. Because that is also how FOSS works.

Re: But for accurate communication between geeks at long distances, plain text wins every time.

"Today we have tremendous tooling that enables easier communication between people."

Yes, we do. USENET, IRC and email built TehIntraWebTubes, with a little help from telnet and FTP. All plain old 7-bit ASCII (until FTP bollixed it up with 8-bit clean binaries, of course!). Ain't it grand?

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

"Yes, occasionally some /italics/ or *boldface* might be handy but the advantage of universality trumps all."

FTFY

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

Who is having these issues with tracking, submitting, revising, reviewing, and accepting patches? Is it really an issue? Or does somebody have a bee in her bonnet because her partner doesn't know how to configure his "easy to use" Mac?

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

"it's hard to keep maintainers as it stands now due to barriers of entry."

If they are already maintainers and in need of keeping, they have already entered by definition. So it seems to me that these so-called "barriers" are obviously bogus.

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

"That assumes you live in the West and communicate using Latin letters and so on."

There is no such assumption, rather it is a fact. We are talking about the Linux Kernel and the LKML. We have an agreed upon common language to use for this, a lingua franca if you will. That language, like it or not, is American English. Which can effectively use 7-bit ASCII.

BSD is worse. Its lingua franca is Californian English. This applies to Apple's bastardization of BSD, too. Scary, eh?

Re: Where's the IT content?

Note that I wasn't commenting on the article, rather I was commenting on what the article was reporting.

Yes, I contribute to FOSS projects regularly. Have been doing since before BSD was BSD. I generally use an email client. It is quite up to date and modern, with the latest stable release dated June 19th of this year. It's called Alpine. You may have heard of it. I don't find it to be a ritual at all ... unless you consider dotting the ts and crossing the is to be ritualistic.

Seriously, how can anyone with a clue say with a straight face that plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications? It's the LCD for a human readable version of the lingua franca of Kernel development. The barrier doesn't get much lower than that, at least not without losing signal ... and in the kernel, losing even a tiny piece of signal leads to crashes, or worse.

Perhaps our friendly neighborhood commentard, Shadow Systems, would like to comment on Teletubby Toolkits and Fischer Price development systems compared to ASCII when it comes to barriers to communications ...

Re: No, no no no .... not a chance ... or at least not before the 'Heat death of the universe'. !!!

What if yo' momma turns out to be The Most Excellent Grand High PooBah In Charge of The Lizard People?

We save the HE for important things. Like blasting eucalyptus weed stumps so they can't grow back.

Re: How do you hit them?

That's why mosquito coils and the like seem to get rid of mosquitoes ... it's not the smoke they are driven away by, rather it's the excess CO₂ that they become confused by. They sell propane burning mosquito traps that use this principle ... and they are very, very effective without the smoke.

Re: How do you hit them?

You don't hit mosquitoes, silly. You swat them. Several at a time, preferably.

I don't put blood on the barrel any more than I put a little bit of Purina Duck Chow on the end of the barrel when I'm hunting duck.

Re: It was nice while it lasted

"Question: Where do you go for coinage"

I just called a friend who owns a small, tourist-oriented, mostly cash business to ask just that. (I'm curious. So shoot me.) She says she called a vending machine business, and they were more than happy to deliver several hundred dollars worth of rolled coins in return for paper money. With no markup or delivery costs.

Re: Fingerprinting

There is absolutely no need to jump ship when you own the ship.

The only barrier is in your mind ... but fear of the unknown is formidable, indeed.

Re: It was nice while it lasted

It'll take more than one person bitching about it to pull it off.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's crazy, and they won't pay any attention to him.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both idiots and they won't pay attention to either of them.

And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people actually getting off their ass/arse and demanding a new local branch? They may think it's an organization.

Can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day, walkin' in, singin' a bar ... Oh, wait, that was a different protest entirely. But it just might work ... Squeeky wheel & all that.

(With apologies & a heartfelt thanks to Arlo, who would undoubtedly approve.)

Re: The elevator did it

"Turns out there was a process sitting waiting on that RS-232 port. For what I do not know.. but as soon as it received any data the machine reboots."

Probably looking for an APC UPS comms link ... and I'm only half joking.

They actually used a 10 before they got the 11 ...

The "spare, laying around" computer was a 7, which they used for the initial simple sketches of what they wanted[0], but the machine was too old, slow, and small to do what they needed ... so they begged/stole/borrowed time on another department's 10 to develop the file system, shell, editor and various low-level tools. This is roughly when the UNIX name was coined.

That dried up, but yet another department bought an 11 and allowed them to borrow it to continue development on what they (the other dept.) thought was going to be a text processing machine. Along the way, the programming language "B" was invented, which (with the move to the 11) morphed into "C" and the entire project became portable.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[0] They were working towards a better clone of the working environment they had experienced on Multics ... not just the computer environment, but also the human collaboration environment. The sense of community that permeates un*x culture today was there right from the start, built in as one of the design tenets.

Re: The elevator did it

Here in the States, $TELCO ring tone is 90V@20Hz ... it's well worth avoiding, but will definitely wake you up in the morning.

Re: They =/= BT

"You have to wait until everyone else involved had died."

Not necessarily ...

Re: The elevator did it

The "What if ... ?" aspect of destructive testing was one of my favorite games for several years. I've measured 115,000V after running a standard vacuum cleaner over the floor of a SillyConValley shipping & receiving department. Lots of very small particles moving quickly through a plastic tube caused the static buildup. The next stop on the cleaner's schedule was the stockroom, with shelves & shelves full of static sensitive parts. Much hilarity ensued.

I once measured 61,750ish volts on an empty, unused Styrofoam coffee cup set down on an isolated table after a colleague walked across a nylon carpet wearing Nikes ... Was an example, just to prove the point.

In other news, the average secretary can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking alongside her came up static free. Seems my unmentionables were made of cotton, hers were made of silk and petrochemicals. Her heels were leather, my soles were high-carbon rubber.

Along the same lines as the above, most gas(petrol) station pump fires seem to be caused by females with man-made fiber underwear getting back into their cars after starting the fuel flow ... and then not grounding themselves before getting close to the fumes surrounding the fuel-flap when completing the scenario. (Yes, in the enlightened state of California we're actually allowed to fuel our own cars.)

"I was a filed service engineer"

Worked to the bone? Felt needled? Sounds like a raspy job. They must have run you through the mill. Bastards.

Re: Woking

"Showing that you had a fire hazard and inadequately setup wiring...."

As we all did, when computers were becoming ubiquitous in the office. Took a couple decades for the wiring to catch up ... and many offices aren't there even today.

Re: Woking

From what I remember, a lot of the stuff I viewed in Mosaic was indecipherable.

Re: Woking

The only reason there is still a telly in the house is because I can't be arsed to move the thing out of here ... it's a 1988 32" Trinitron (Stereo! WOW!). She still works quite nicely as a monitor (with help from Myth TV), the internal tuner died a couple dozen years ago.

Re: Performance Upgrade

Swapping the badges on the cabinets is a time hono(u)red method of hazing the Brass/Boss and/or testing the newbies.

Re: Thanks For The Mental Image\Flashback

So did the RAF allow stringvestites in the ranks, or was it an Officers only thing? Inquiring minds & all that.