* Posts by jake

26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

jake Silver badge

Re: Just one question

The Soviets already placed at least one Nudelman-Rikhter NR-23 on orbit and reportedly test-fired at least 20 rounds ... the 23x115mm shells could do a lot of damage to a moon outpost if in low-moon orbit & trained down. Remember, with no atmosphere to speak of, orbits can be very, very low indeed.

jake Silver badge

Re: There is a word missing

Assumes facts not in evidence. Post proof or retract.

"Me mate told me" and "I heard it down the pub" isn't proof. Neither is "everybody knows ... ".

jake Silver badge

Re: There is a word missing

"And what it really means is "Hey, Congress, we want more money"."

Of course. In England, it would be "Hey, Parliament, we want more money".

It's Universal, innit.

jake Silver badge

Re: There is a word missing

I believe what the Yanks actually said was "all mankind".

That would include you lot.

Funny how the Imperialist Yankee Dogs are far, far more magnanimous than the PRC, which is (according to their Constitution, at least) 'led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants".

jake Silver badge

Re: I've seen this before

What's Apple TV? Do I have to get cable?

jake Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

I can't help it, I'm an axe victim.

Where's Flugennock when I need him ...

jake Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

::whoosh::

jake Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

Muskrat? That was Willis Alan Ramsey, wasn't it? Wrong genre entirely.

"Starship"

Nope. Wrong genre again ...

"flying edgelord spacelines"

Now you're talking ... They did a cover of "Silver Machine", right?

jake Silver badge

So reading between the lines ...

... Bill Nelson doesn't want to have to listen to any Red Noise from China?

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

jake Silver badge

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

"My point is that presenting someone raised only on Windows with a Linux desktop often results in WTF is this give me back my Windows. While presenting a Linux desktop to someone who has experience using multiple different interfaces will get them to poke around* here and there until they work out how to operate it."

How many times has Microsoft changed the Windows interface in the last 25 years? Switching Windows users to Slackware+KDE (for example) is not hard.

jake Silver badge

Re: I still think...

"If you've nothing to hide etc."

Here's a handy conversation starter for your government officials:

"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? Are you a paedophile?"

jake Silver badge

Re: functionality

What a clusterfuck you have built for yourself.

If you just want to use it to do work, Libre Office is fine for probably well over 95% of use cases.

If you go looking for problems, you will most assuredly find them.

jake Silver badge

Re: functionality

"You _do_ know that Office 97 will work in Win 10, don't you?"

No, as a matter of fact I did not.

But I do know that Libre Office runs perfectly on Slackware 15.0, and reads/writes Office 97 files quite nicely ... unlike Office 362 (or whatever Redmond's marketing department has decided to call it this week).

jake Silver badge

Re: From Earl Grey to Soggy Sponges!

Proof that ChatGPT isn't really all that the marketards claim it is.

No, it wasn't me. I don't use sockpuppets.

jake Silver badge

"Too much effort for most people and the rest don't even know what you're talking about."

And yet large external drives sell by the metric butt load. Methinks the people are figuring it out.

jake Silver badge

Re: re: ""This computer is broken"

"Correct. It demands an internet connection, and if there is none, it just sits there and continues to wait until you format the drive and install a non-privacy invading OS."

FTFY

jake Silver badge

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

Fondling an Android phone or iPhone does NOT teach one how to properly use *nix, regardless of the underlying OS on the phone.

jake Silver badge

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

"Linux LTS is not a distribution, it is the kernel."

You said Linux, you did not specify a complete distribution. I am not a mind reader.

"I cannot download and install Linux."

I do it all the time :-)

"It is simply not possible as it does not exist as a unique OS"

Just because YOU don't do it doesn't mean it can't be done.

"I suppose with enough knowledge one could roll your own"

Yep. Which is what I would do if I were selling a hardware thingie that required a full-blown OS. Select an SLTS kernel, tweak it for my specific hardware, and then bring in all the bits & bobs that I need to make Jake'sHardwareThingie fully functional.

If I take it to market, my toy will be a trifle less sophisticated ... in all likelihood, I'll be using an ATMega328 processor.

jake Silver badge

Re: From empowering PC to Orwell's Telescreen.

The real privacy speed bump occurred in the late '70s when Vint Cerf put a stop to us attempting to build privacy and security into TCP/IP. Seems that the .mil of the day told him that was a no-no for civilians.

PEE CEEs are not today, and never have been, what I consider "secure".

jake Silver badge

Re: Does it run Photos*** though ?

Contrary to popular belief, Adobe products are not necessary to run any business.

The kiddies sure love using 'em to put captions on cute cat pics, though.

jake Silver badge

Re: functionality

You can say bullshit all you like, it doesn't alter reality.

jake Silver badge

Re: Making a list...

"what on earth are 'spillable' functions in Excel?"

It's this year's pivot tables. One of the things that was never necessary until Microsoft decided to put it into Excel to make it incompatible with LibreOffice.

"Office ain't done until LibraOffice won't open Excel files." ... doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run", but it's the same old Microsoft. Refuses to play well with others, and resorts to dirty tricks because they are running scared.

jake Silver badge

Re: DAW Not!

"Now what?"

Have fun with your toy? I hope it brings you thousands of dollars worth of entertainment.

jake Silver badge

Re: functionality

And yet, I've spent the last 20 years convincing people to switch to Linux. Once they make the switch, they are quite happy when they discover how it blissfully fades into the background, and they never have to think about it. Unlike Windows, which is constantly in their face, wasting their time with shit they are not interested in.

You can make all the claims in the world about how this is impossible, and I'll just quietly keep on converting people. Eventually, Microsoft will be gone (all corporations are ephemeral), but FOSS by it's very nature will continue on. Do you want to go with the eventual guaranteed winner, or stick with the eventual guaranteed loser and then have to play a very fast game of catch-up when Redmond goes TITSUP, as it must?

[0]This Is The Sad Universal Pathology

jake Silver badge

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

"But it needs a single consistent, working release. Linux does not have that......."

Yes, actually, Linux does have that. It's called a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel.

"Let's just say that a major retailer persuaded one of the brands to bundle a device with Linux?"

Like your set-top box or telephone, for example?

"Which version?"

The latest LTS kernel, obviously[0]. That's what it is for.

"Then we have the minor issue that the majority of consumers would not be able the install the Applications they want."

Like with Windows, you mean?

[0] Actually, being me, I'd probably go with the latest SLTS kernel.

jake Silver badge

Re: Personal Computers were aways only a niche product

Microsoft can't even properly steer themselves, they are on a rail of their own making. Paraphrasing Gene Spafford's 1992 comment on Usenet, Microsoft is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

jake Silver badge

McNealy's Sun tried to sell us "Graphical Terminals", "Diskless Workstations", "X terminals", "Thin Clients" and "The network is the computer" ... I'm sure I missed a couple in there, but the idea is pretty much the same across the board. It didn't sell, at least not in any numbers in the real world ... The basic bottom line is that this kind of computing doesn't have legs now that CPU, RAM and disk are as inexpensive as they are.

Those of us who have been around for a while recognize it as it really is ... Basically, it's centralized computing, with modern bandwidth allowing a GUI instead of text terminals. Mainframe technology with a glittery interface ... but mainframe technology nonetheless. They are trying to sucker people back into the pay-it-monthly service bureau days It's an all-singing, all-dancing, brightly colo(u)red, dinosaur.

Barney, in other words. And targeting the same mental age group, computing-wise.

jake Silver badge

Re: No way

For my last 9-5, my laptop dual booted pre-Solaris SunOS and BSD ... but I digress.

My first new post-9-5 career laptop triple booted, adding Solaris ... anyone but me remember the early '90s SPARCbook from Tadpole?

jake Silver badge

I've been wary of Mr. Dotcom's claims since the year dot.

Seriously, would YOU buy a used car from the guy?

jake Silver badge

Re: They'll try

"that Micro$oft would rebase its GUI on the Linux kernel."

ESR's been babbling about this for some years now. IMO it will never happen. Too many differences in architecture to overcome. And no, WSL is NOT Windows running on the Linux kernel.

"I understand that there is such a beast, but it isn't for general consumer use."

That makes zero sense. In general, consumers don't even know the kernel exists, much less what it does. I will be perfectly happy to be shown otherwise, though ... do you have proof of this assertion?

Besides, the licensing suggests they'd use a BSD kernel, not a Linux kernel. See: Apple.

jake Silver badge

"Why would anyone consider cloud storage where the service provider has access to their files is beyond me. I use my local file server, which is similar to Mega or OneDrive but uses no WAN bandwidth and can end-to-end encrypt my files if I like, thus taking responsibility for my own shit."

FTFY

It's not like the price of local storage is at a historical high or anything ... I've seen 8TB of name-brand spinning rust for under $100.

Note: This is NOT a backup! You DO have proper backups, right? RIGHT? RIGHT‽‽‽

jake Silver badge

Re: Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Funny story about my Great Aunt ... I brought her a Slackware box after spending four weekends in a row cleaning up malware on her XP system. She refused to use Slack, because it was "too hard to make a change at my age". Several weeks later, I realized that I hadn't had any support calls from her. I called to see what was up. It turned out that her sister in Finland had sent her some pictures right about the time that the XP box crapped out again. Out of desperation, she booted up the Slack box ... and hasn't looked back.

Several months later, she asked me to "get rid of that old thing", pointing at the now working again XP box. I couldn't convince her that I could install the same version of Slackware on it, with it's more modern CPU, more RAM, larger harddrive, etc. To her, the OS+hardware were a lemon that couldn't be fixed. She's a Linux advocate now, in her "over 90" club ... but unfortunately, she calls it "the version of windows that my nephew gave me".

The above events occurred over 15 years ago. Linux is a lot more mature and user friendly now.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

jake Silver badge

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

"chainsaw trousers"

That's pronounced "chaps". Forget them once in my view, and you're gone. They should be as automatic as gloves, bugz, bar oil and checking chain tension. My insurance guy spelled out exactly how much my rates would go up if an employee cut up a leg or legs with a chainsaw. Like the wound itself, it wasn't pretty. Chaps work. Use 'em always.

"and dragged the stump grinder over one of his feet"

Modern stump grinders are designed to not move backwards when the cutting head is engaged for that very reason ... Move it into position, fire up the wheel, turn it side to side and up and down, then declutch, advance and do it again. Some allow you to move forward while the cutting wheel is engaged, some do not. These things are probably the most dangerous tool that is accessable to the home DIYer ... but as long as you never engage the wheel unless you have verified there are no kids/cats/dawgs/postmen/wives in harm's way, you'll be alright. An afternoon's rental price is well worth the work you won't have to do digging out that old stump 'er indoors has been nagging you about. Satisfying, too. Recommended.

jake Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

"not getting at you here, I just got triggered"

No worries. I've got a thicker hide than most.

To be fair, it's your brain that is the tuner, not the computer/phone. That's why I advocate not viewing that side of YouTube, and a lot of other anti-social media ... it rots the brain trying to tune that bilge in. Just go try to get some sense out of a MAGA hat wearer to see what I mean.

Agree on "film at 11" and "footage", but it's a handy handle for what it describes, and everyone knows exactly what is meant in that particular context. English has mutated right in front of us. Personally, other than the odd comment for amusement value, I'm willing to let this one slide.

The floppy icon for "save" works. Do you have a better (and viable) alternative? See: "mutated", above.

Tune in, turn on, drop out ...

jake Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

"Ratings gold."

Yes. Fleecing the sheeple is what the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world are good at.

jake Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

"So you'd actually be tuning in to watch Musk"

You must have me confused with somebody else. I'm not tuning in to anything of the sort.

Life's far too short to waste any of it on this kind of shit.

jake Silver badge

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

"Last time I looked at defamation law in England"

But Musk isn't in England. He is in California. California (and Federal) law applies. If England doesn't like California (and Federal) Law, they can block Musk's business from entering England. Perhaps take lessons from China's Great Firewall?

On the other hand, if you want him, you can have him.

jake Silver badge

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

"Of course, depending on where in America you live, as I understand it, some employers can just fire people if they feel like it, without any real employee protections."

As an employer in America, sure. I can fire any employee that I want to fire. For any reason. But the reality is that I am running a business. (Several businesses, actually. It's a tax thing.) I only fire people who are bad for my business. The reality is that my core six adults (plus the Wife and I) have been here for a coupe decades. Why on Earth would I want to get rid of them? In fact, I want them to stay so much that I made them a gift of a percentage of the holding company that runs everything else. The employees have become part of the ownership group.

Along the way I have fired many people. For consistent tardiness, drug use, ignoring safety procedures, embezzlement, creating ill-will with customers and co-workers, constantly lying, ignoring job responsibilities, outright sloth, and other things detrimental to the company as a whole. Are you suggesting that I should be forced by the government to keep these people on my staff? Shirley not!

And before anybody says it, yes I try to screen new employees for fitness for the position. But I'm only human ... and so are they. Anybody can be good and play nicely with others for an hour or two, or even a short probationary period. But being a model employee for a month doesn't grandfather you into a lifetime of abusing my resources.

jake Silver badge

Why X?

Because Musk lucked into one of the few single letter domain names in private hands, and now he needs to find a place to use it. That is all.

If any sensible chimp owned it, they'd sell it to somebody in the pR0n industry and make a couple million bucks. But because Musk seemingly isn't a sensible chimp, and doesn't exactly need a couple million bucks, he's hanging onto it. His ego won't let him admit that he bought a pig in a poke, so The Name Must Be Used. It didn't work for his Boring company, so maybe it'll work for the rebrand of one of the most recognizable brand names in Internet history.

Hey, it worked for New Coke and The Shack, right?

jake Silver badge

Re: It's rattle time...

Exactly.

Every time I hear about this, I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling, slapping and biting, or it'll be high-noon in Parump, Nevada, out on East Basin in front of the DMV, with handbags at 15 paces. Either way, it'll all end in tears.

Regardless, I wouldn't pay money to see it. Waste o'time.

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

jake Silver badge

Re: I have zero sympathy for him

"There's a difference between an honest mistake borne of ignorance and rank stupidity."

In my experience there is quite a bit of overlap in that particular Venn diagram.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: "Ever done a little thing that made a big mess"

Congrats! You hace arrived!

Have a beer:-)

jake Silver badge

Re: "Ever done a little thing that made a big mess"

There are apparently commantards who think anything positive about space exploration is a bad thing, and a waste of money.

There are other commentards who have alternative opinions about physics and hate anyone who can debunk them.

There are still other commentards who think that the entire multi-national space effort is a hoax.

There are even a few commentards who hate it when a post makes it clear their favorite SciFi TV show got science wrong.

I'm sure I missed quite a few.

Bottom line: If you are an expert on a given subject, and post about it, there will always be someone here on ElReg who will become outraged and furiously hammer that downvote button. Just ignore it and move on. Or do what I do ... block[0] the upvote/downvote display. It's fairly useless, so no loss.

[0] Do you think that addblockers only block adds?

jake Silver badge

Re: "Ever done a little thing that made a big mess"

One nameless, faceless blob of grey goo[0] recently admitted to downvoting at least one article just because it had too many upvotes, and it hinted that it had done the same in the past. It didn't say how many upvotes were "too many".

Another claimed it regularly did the opposite.

::shrugs::

[0] Most people just call them "AC".

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

jake Silver badge

Personally, I like Slackware. For a lot of reasons, many of which I'm fairly certain you (as an old UNIX hack) can get along with.

If you just want to look, you can find a live CD image here https://download.liveslak.org/ ... but as we all know, live CDs have their own problems.

Suggestion: Beg, steal or borrow a spare computer (people throw away 4 year old machines every day, this should not be much of a problem), and install Slackware on it. Run it alongside whatever distro you use today for a month or two. Report back.

Slackware still boots into the CLI by default. I'm sure this won't bother you, but if you have anyone in the household who prefers a GUI, simply edit /etc/inittab, which is mostly self-documenting in Slackware. (Sound familiar?)

vi is a link to Vim's CLI mode ... but if you prefer a more traditional vi, try stevie. (Both come with.)

You can run as root for convenience during this testing phase, but I don't recommend it. adduser does exactly what it did 45 years ago.

If for whatever reason the install doesn't find your network connection, hardwire it and use dhcpcd eth0 before delving too deep. You can change to a wireless connection later if you feel the need.

A simple startx will do just that. KDE is the default, but XFCE is also an option.

The default sound is pulseaudio for historical reasons, but it's fairly easy to switch back to plain-jane ALSA. For normal people, pulse-on-slack works for normal stuff.

Wayland is available for those interested, but by default Slack still uses a more sane x.org.

Obviously, the systemd-cancer is not there, Slackware uses a kind of hybrid of the best bits of the SysV and BSD inits.

jake Silver badge

Re: something else to shout about

As I said, it's an alternative translation.

Regardless, I reject the term "hater". It is unnecessarily emotionally loaded, and clearly ad hominem in it's intended use. Tactical syntax designed to affect the emotions of the reader.

Regardless of the names you attempt to call me, I do not hate the systemd-cancer. I'm more flabbergasted that hoi paloi has run with it.

Red Hat implemented it to make their Linux Distribution more Windows-like, which should be a red flag to anyone with a clue. Debian did it for internal political reasons, the tech involved had nothing to do with its implementation in that space. Another red flag. Most of the rest followed on blindly through ignorance and/or apathy, with a pinch of sheer laziness, because they use one those two distro's repositories. In no example that I can find did a distribution choose the systemd-cancer because it is demonstrably a technologically better system. Not one. Think about that for a minute, and then ask yourself "Have I been had?".

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 attached to this base 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. The systemd-cancer is b0rken by design and implementation.

jake Silver badge

Re: Usecase?

"Red Hat has a great deal of influence, if not outright control, over Linux directions and decisions."

Influence perhaps. Control, not so much. Remember, it's FOSS ... ANYBODY is free to roll out their own distribution.

"Full marks to Devuan and MX for stepping off Red Hat's path."

How many marks do you give Slackware, then?

jake Silver badge

Re: Usecase?

"The entire Linux world was free to reject it, but choose not to do so."

I don't think that word "entire" means what you think it means.

For a start, Linus himself has stated that the kernel will remain init agnostic in perpetuity.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

jake Silver badge

Re: "On the matter of international keyboards causing chaos"

"compared to the US 101 keys..."

Pardon me while I count ... Hmmm. Looks like this Yank's primary keyboard has 122 keys[0]. There goes that theory.

I also have four (five?) 124 key Gateway "AnyKey" keyboards squirreled away somewhere in my piling system ...

[0] IBM M122 "Battleship" from 1988 ... Not for sale.

jake Silver badge

Re: "On the matter of international keyboards causing chaos"

Keyboards are nationality agnostic inside, in that your OS will allow any key to be programed to be any character. The only reason keycaps have characters printed on them is because most people can't touch-type. In this context there is no such thing as an American keyboard. Nor a British, French or German keyboard. The keycaps are just a superficial representation of what the complete system is setup for.

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