Re: Thoughts and prayers
"What does it mean?"
It means that the speaker (typer) is pretending to be an intellectual.
26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"This 73 year old wanker (not fact checked) has managed to lie and cheat through his life to get himself rich"
Actually, his initial wealth was his daddy's money. Which he lost. Trump is living proof of that old adage "The fastest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one". Hell, the idiot even managed to lose money owning a casino!
Lines one, two and three for Sanguma ... Line one are lawyers claiming to represent the fine citizens of Nebraska asking for a retraction. Line two is similar from the Piltdown area of East Sussex. Line three is a preemptive call from the Order of Florida Man who make absolutely no claim on the genetics of the idiot in chief, despite the fact that he shoots himself in the foot on a daily basis.
systemd is not a virus. For one thing, it doesn't reproduce itself. Yet.
What it is is a cancer. It takes root in its host, eats massive quantities of resources as it grows, spreads unchecked into areas unrelated to the initial infection, and refuses to die unless physically removed from the system, all the while doing absolutely nothing of benefit to the host.
1) Xenix was just AT&T UNIX source rebranded by Microsoft and offered to other companies "as is" to port to their hardware of choice. Microsoft was essentially a reseller of AT&T source code licenses ... I seriously doubt AT&T would have allowed Redmond to ship it embedded in NT.
2) Cutler has hated UNIX since the year dot. Xenix was never going to get into NT as long as he had anything to do with it.
"Certainly typing ls or rm used to get me precisely nowhere on a VAX."
My vaxen always ran BSD ....even when I was at DEC. They still do (although I'll admit to having one that runs VMS ...)
"There's so many people who think "shell-script" and "bash-script" are the same..."
That's a wetware problem, not a UI problem.
The difference between the various versions of vi are not all that great when it comes to day-to-day light editing tasks ... which is probably all that you are going to use it for if you are at the keys of an unfamiliar terminal.
The choice of GUI is not all that important when about all you use it for is launching GUI applications, and popping up multiple terminal emulators. I've been pretty happy with the bone-stock KDE, as shipped with Slackware, these last 20 years or so. Try it, you might like it.
"The problem is where people in cat A think they are fine in cat B."
Since when was it the Corporate World's job to make that decision for me? Or MeDearOldMum? Or for you, for that matter? I'm an adult, kindly hold my beer and get out of the way. If I fuck up, let Darwin greet me on the other side.
Inside corporations it's a whole 'nuther kettle o' worms. Corporate computers, corporate rules.
While technically I am on standby for MeDearOldMum, she has very, very rarely needed that support since I moved her to Slackware over ten years ago. My Windows using sibling, on the other hand, is constantly bitching about her computer. Which would you prefer? Choose wisely, Grasshopper.
"Why do we always end up with a Sandbox?"
Because the telephones carried by TheGreatUnwashed each have more power than all the Super Computers in the world combined back in the 1970s. Sandboxing MeDearOldMum in her desktop protects her from herself. HOWEVER, she has the root password, just in case something happens to me. It's her choice to stay in the user account that I set up for her. See that word "choice"? It's kind of important ...
The real question is why have we allowed corporations to sell us computers that we don't actually have full control of. Why are we allowing ourselves to live in sandboxes? A walled garden might look pretty, and be nice to visit occasionally ... but there is a great big world outside those walls, and I want to be able to access the entire planet, without restrictions.
Who made the Corporate world the arbiter of what I can and can't do with hardware that I have purchased with my hard-won cash?
I stuck a fork in Redmond over ten years ago. It CAN be done, and it's pretty painless ... especially when you balance the extreme lack of unnecessary maintenance of FOSS solutions versus the near constant headaches of admining Windows based kit (as reported here on ElReg on a weekly, sometimes daily basis).
Even MeDearOldMum runs a cut-down version of Slackware that I built for her. Support calls over the last ten years from her are not even 5% of the calls from her back when she was running Windows. The silence in that department is blissful, and worth the price of admission all by itself.
Can't get you the TPS reports until we have the results of the Perk Test.
( When I worked for Bigger Blue, back before the days of VisiCalc and Word Star, if middle management wanted to know how long it'd be before any given project would be finished, the stock answer from us techies was "We're still waiting on the results of the Perk Test" ... the manager would mindlessly nod his head, usually slack jawed, and wander off. Many of them actually had open-ended bars on their hand-drawn Gantt charts labeled "Perk Test" ... the mind boggles.
Computing's a hurry-up-and-wait kinda career. Sometimes we need coffee ... but actually, I coined the phrase after a soils engineer came out to my property to evaluate the location I had chosen for my new leach field. Do with that what you will.)
"There is little reason for majority of the medical devices to be on the world wide web."
Then I'm absolutely certain you'll be overjoyed to hear that very, very few medical devices are connected to the world wide web.
Unfortunately, however, many such devices are connected to The Internet, which turns out to be a bit of a problem.
"I have no problem with EBay trying to detect fraudulent software running on people's machines."
In my mind, EBay trying to run a port scanner from inside my firewall without so much as a by-your-leave is just as bad as any other skiddie trying to run code on my machine without asking.
Quite simply, it is NOT benign ... and it's entirely too far over the wrong side of the slippery slope. They should stop the practice immediately and issue a public apology with promises to not do anything of the sort ever again. And even then, I doubt I'd trust them. Once a corporation crosses the line, they always cross it again as soon as they think they can get away with it.
"Maybe they're blindly using an obfuscation tool they don't really understand."
Probably. There is a lot of cargo-cult programming out in the Corporate World. Probably because they are firing old programmers and hiring wet-behind-the-ears new graduates with absolutely zero street smarts.
Or perhaps it's simply because most blokes these days don't want to get into a large bath full of sweaty, muddy rugby players?
It's a sign of the times. Bathing has become a personal activity. The Romans would be appalled, and the Japanese think we're weird.
Pardon me while I fire up the sauna ...
Yeah, you're right. There were so many kids in the proto-SillyConValley in the 1960s sweating over Latin, Aramaic and Koine Greek and other medieval schooling practices (under constant threat of the cane, of course!), that it's a wonder that the computer revolution occurred at all.
Kids nowadays spending hours watching YouTube videos get so much more done. Why, today we have an App that will tell you if you have symptoms of Covid19! All you have to do is answer a couple of questions on your iFad, and there you go! Where would we ever be without such a marvelous invention? Ain't technology grand?
"You falsely posit a golden age when every 10-year-old was educated and motivated to produce innovative feats of engineering."
Oh, horse shit. There was no golden age. However, there was a period of time where kids were actively encouraged to experiment with things that today are completely outlawed in the classroom.
"I suggest that you're just a moaning old codger"
Guilty!
"who looks at the past through rose-tinted specs."
Again, horse shit. I'm only a pseudo neo-luddite. The so-called "good old days" had plenty of bad to go without all of today's mod cons.
"Then, as now, these bright kids represented a fraction of the total kid population, most of whom live unremarkable lives. "
Of course.
"Today, the bright kids have even more access to the knowledge they'd require to do this,"
Access, yes. But actual hands-on school learning? Not so much.
"but they're probably focusing their efforts on coding-based shenanigans."
Drag and drop in a walled garden isn't coding.
"Except that it isn't the only reason to run Windows"
So tell us all, Alan Bourke, why else would you run Windows, if you had no intention of running an(y) application(s)? Inquiring minds and all that ... Are you a manager whose computer only runs the screensaver? Because even that is an application ...
"blinkered fanboy."
::koffkoffkoff::
I tend to drive very defensively on the street. Some might say I'm paranoid, but the idiots really are out to get me. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I understand the math(s) involved.
My 31 and 32 Fords don't have seat belts. I drive them on the street regularly. They haven't killed me yet. But then, I return the favo(u)r and don't put them into harm's way.
1) If you are cycling in such a way that you can't maneuver fast enough to avoid an obstacle, you are cycling over your head. No number of personal safety devices will protect you from your own stupidity. Even if the bike ::koff koff:: was drunk.
2) I was taught to stay out of traffic when on my bicycle. To the proverbial thinking man, Newton's laws of motion quite obviously trump the new-age "share the road" bullshit. Simply put, if you play in traffic, you might die. Helmets don't increase those odds as much as you think they do ... worse, in some it makes them feel invulnerable, which compounds the underlying problem.