Re: Forget bringing a towel when hitch hiking the galaxy
Some of us have a few ...
26591 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
... put your favorite secretary in the chair while you've got it hooked up to the 'scope.
Once when testing for this kind of thing, I discovered that the average female office worker can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking along the same path 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.
It might not be very politically correct to discuss such things these days, but then I don't get paid to be PC, I get paid to fix problems.
The beach is surrounded by cliffs . There is only one access. That's the problem.
Actually, you can also come in by water. I know a few people who make a point to putt over from Half Moon Bay to picnic once in a while, just to irritate the asshole.
Because they could. Human nature, innit.
Hands up everybody who didn't see this coming.
Remind me again why, exactly, the manufacturer of my home so-called "security" equipment needs to have a feed from that equipment?
Sheeple are stupid. Dyed in the wool idiots. And the marketards know it ...
And of those 100 people who were shown the add for the new PC, 80 bought one 6 months ago when the ad-shyster-agency slirped their info. The rest bought one in the prior 6 months. None of the supposedly "targeted" people really need a PC at the moment. The one purchase would have bought the exact same PC without the advert because his kid spilled a coke on the first one.
My wife had to temporarily drop the blocks in order to view a client's facebook page (or instagram, or whatever it was), along with associated youtube stuff. After viewing it, she forgot to turn the blocks back on, and went looking for who had her favorite "work" bras on sale.
She remembered to turn the blocks back on after a couple minutes, maybe five, probably after looking at eight or ten pages. But the rot had already set in. For MONTHS after simply going to the store and making her purchase, the bright sparks at advertising agencies across the planet decided she needed to see bra adverts whenever possible. It was surreal, she'd look up horse blankets or forklift parts or muck forks and get bra adverts ...
I wonder how much longer the ad-pushers are going to be able to carry on their con? P.T. Barnum lived a century or so too early ...
Bad analogy. Sugar doesn't dissolve in gasoline/petrol, so if you have a working fuel filter it will never reach the engine. The sugar simply drops to the bottom of the tank and stays there (barring sloshing about). Getting it out is simply a matter of draining the tank, dropping it, and flushing it out. The petrol is still usable, so don't dispose of it.
I came here to say much the same thing.
Fucking gookids ... they think they've invented everything, but in reality all they've done is recycle the unsavory bits. Kinda like rabbits and coprophagia, but at least the rabbits produce their own shit before consuming it.
I have one. It was a presentation piece for a job well done, in a place long ago and far away. I use it occasionally ... it actually works very well, but I'm always afraid of losing it.
Before you ask, yes, the glass was made by Corning ...
(I hate the game, but it's occasionally good for making contacts.)
Whatever.
To the general public, if it starts with a 2 its the twenties and the second decade of the century. If it starts with a 3 it's the thirties and the third decade of the century. Etc. You can make any claim to the contrary that you like, but you're not going to change the minds of the GreatUnwashed. It's called "the vernacular". Might as well get used to it. Unless all y'all actually enjoy the angst that comes with counting angels on pins, of course. In which case who am I to question? Carry on.
Back in the days right after Redmond laid the turd known as MS-DOS on us, I had been hacking BSD for six or seven years (longer than it had been called BSD). I had to support both when Bigger Blue agreed to take on half a dozen 5150s for test purposes ... it took me all of about two days to put together a bootable DOS toolkit so I could get out of jams caused by my muscle memory telling DOS to break itself. I wasn't sure if I should be happy that it was so simple to fix, or if I should be terrified that it might take off. I probably would have bitched about it more when asked by IBM, but the silly thing didn't do networking, so how much trouble could it cause?
The rest, as they say, is history ...
1) It solves the authors ego problems, to answer the first part of your question. The answer to the second part is "apparently".
2) There is no real need for them to speak up. The Kernel and the init are two different things with a clear demarcation between them. In essence, the kernel doesn't give a shit which init is used, never has, never will. This is as it should be.
3) There is no need to fork anything. systemd isn't in the kernel tree (see above). In fact, systemd isn't a part of Linux at all. It is, however, a bit of bloated code that some Linux Distributions use as their init code.
systemd and other inits are (loosely) the bit of code that handles the passing of control from the booting kernel to the fully working computer environment. It is the first process run on the system (imaginatively named "PID1"), and it basically keeps an eye on the rest of the processes as they start, stop, sleep, close, etc. It's kind of an important piece of code. Traditionally, it was a little, tiny thing that did it's job, and did it very well, with little to go wrong.
Along comes systemd. It is designed to handle far more than just the init function. And as more and more bits of the running system are incorporated into systemd (unnecessarily, for the most part), leading to dependancies upon systemd in that code, systemd will become MANDATORY to run Linux. This is already starting to happen.
To me, this sounds foolhardy, at best, and an attempt to take over the entire Linux ecosystem at worst (if the paranoid among us are correct). A power grab, if you will. Probably brought about because the two primary developers were kicked out of kernel development because they don't play well with others, and so are throwing a tantrum.
And that's without going into any of the technical arguments against it.
Clear as mud?
"Everybody who has ever worked at that level in the operating system has agreed that systemd is the proper solution."
Total, complete and utter bullshit.
I know plenty of people who have been developing un*x kernels since before BSD was called BSD. Very, very few of them consider the clusterfuck known as systemd to be a good idea. For anything.
There is a reason that an init, traditionally, is a small bit of code that does one thing very well. Like most of the rest of the *nix core utilities. All an init should do is start PID1, set run level, spawn a tty (or several), handle a graceful shutdown, and log all the above in plaintext to make troubleshooting as simplistic as possible. Anything else is a vanity project that is best placed elsewhere, in it's own stand-alone code base.
Inventing a clusterfuck init variation that's so big and bulky that it needs to be called a "suite" is just asking for trouble. systemd is b0rken by design and implementation.
At the end of one year it was discovered that I had been upgraded more than any of my colleagues, and by a fairly wide margin. When asked what my secret was, I told 'em the truth. Airline staff are in the same business that we are in in the IT world. It's called "customer service". I simply treat them the way I would like to be treated if our positions were reversed.
Works for hotel, restaurant, and bar staff too. Etc. PleaseAndThankYou and a smile go a long way, ESPECIALLY when the party you're speaking with has been dealing with assholes all day.
And get this ... it works even if you are having a bad day! If you pass your bad mood on to another person who is capable of making your life miserable, you deserve what you get. On the other hand, if you are nice to them for fifteen seconds, they'll probably help make a fifteen+ hour flight somewhat bearable.
And on the gripping hand, if you're really, really lucky you'll find a friend for life. A buddy married the stewardess he met on an SFO to Heathrow flight... both had been having a shitty day, but he put on the cheerful mask before boarding. During the flight they comiserated on the idiocy of the general public, which lead to dinner in London. Two years later they tied the knot ... that was over twenty years ago, they are still happily married.
I left out a couple of words: "tens of thousands of". Insert between "of" and "marketards". Sorry for the confusion. The camera just can't do the ... what's the word I'm looking for ... "bulk!", that's it! ... The camera just can't do the bulk of it all justice. Kind of like trying to photograph the Grand Canyon, only not quite as pretty.
This explanation brought to you by the number 4 and the letter U. You may now put your seat trays up and return to your usual bickering. Carry on, all.
But reductio ad absurdum can be so much fun!
For example, if all the Global Warming alarmists were to immediately stop all personal local production of CO2 and other pollutants (in the best of the "think globally, act locally" tradition/mantra), don't you think the world would become a vastly better place, practically overnight?
What do you mean they won't do that‽ Shirley saving an entire planet is worthy of SOME individual sacrifice, right‽‽‽
... of these idiots actually expected an upgrade. Did they honestly think they were the only cattle-class warriors eligible? Or that suit-and-tie salesdroids didn't have business-class booked three years in advance? Or maybe they thought that they were the only people on the flight actually stopping in Vegas, and business class would be empty?
Regardless, the mind boggles ...
It's not a third of CO2 emissions. It's a third of exported CO2 emissions.
Note that China, which buys most of Australia's coal, doesn't even make the top 30 on that list, yet they are the largest producer of CO2 emissions ... and will stay that way thanks to internal mining capability, even if Australia shuts down all coal production completely.
As a result, Australia doesn't have the capability to even dent total global CO2 emissions, so they might as well profit from some nice Chinesium dollars while they still can.
Actually, they ganged up on her and kicked her out of their clique because of a CoC that hadn't even officially been put into place yet. In some communities, this would be considered bullying. What does their precious CoC have to say about bullies?
Now that Stack Overflow admits to being built on argumentum ad passiones[0], and is thus to all intents and purposes useless, who do we send the wannabe programmers to in order to plagiarize b0rken versions of standard code snippets?
[0] Clearly, the most easily offended is in charge.
"Except when it is the cleaner unplugging the server so they can use the hoover"
It's their job to clean the place, floor to ceiling, board room to bog, watering plants, replacing dead light bulbs & emptying the trash in their wake. The modern world wouldn't run without janitorial staff. Extending this to include the labs that evolved into computer centers in the 1950s wasn't even thought about, it just happened.
Janitorial staff having the keys to the entire kingdom (as it were) was the norm until we in the glass room started putting our collective foot down in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It wasn't until the late 1980s that it became uncommon. By the late 1990s it was as rare as hen's teeth. The last time I witnessed a janitor coming unannounced into a data center "in the wee hours" at a place I was consulting for was 2005 ...
"why does the AM/PM notation not switch exactly at midnight and exactly at noon?"
It's in the name, and from the Latin. AM is ante meridiem (before midday), and PM is post meridiem (after midday). Noon and midnight aren't considered AM or PM, they are just named markers of zero duration between the two.
Try to remember, when this notation was first being developed the concept of minutes didn't exist yet, much less seconds.
Many moons ago, I bid on a contract at a un*x shop. I won the contract without a face-to-face interview. When I walked in on the first morning, the guy in charge of the data center looked startled & exclaimed "Where's your beard‽‽‽" ... Despite over forty years of un*x experience, I do not now and never have had a beard. Still makes me chuckle :-)
Now git orf me lawn! (Beers all around.)
... my Satellite Pro (a 400CDT, if I remember correctly) triple booted. 4.4BSD, Minix 1.5 and this new-fangled thing called Slackware Linux. Slack had in the last year and a half taken over from BSD as my go-to OS. I wouldn't have been caught dead troubleshooting network issues with a Redmond based program loader pseudo-OS.
"Do you want to bet it is definitely not such an improbable plot?"
Yes. I am willing to bet the farm that is it not such an improbable plot. In fact, I am so absolutely certain, that I have done that very thing ... The alternative, assuming your scenario is anything close to reality, is to curl up and quit living due to the futility of it all. I'm not a quitter. Are you?