Posts by jake

Re: functionality

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

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.

Re: DAW Not!

"Now what?"

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

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}

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.}

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.

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.

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?}

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

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

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.}

"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‽‽‽}}

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.

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.

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.

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.}

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.

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?}

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.

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".

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.

"I think this contraption needs a lot more work, but eventually musicans will become obsolete."

Not until the contraption gains a self/id/soul/ego. Which is never going to happen.

Re: So what's stopping all that energy ...

I've seen a ground-strike take out all the plugged in electronics in three properly wired houses[0] surrounding the strike point ... strangely enough, an identically wired fourth house was closest to the strike by about 20 feet, and yet remained untouched.

Lightning is funny stuff.

[0] Post-Korea tract housing in Santa Rosa, California.

"How do "properly set up systems" get properly set up in the first place?"

Competent administrators ... or, in the world of Linux, competent distro maintainers.

"Do they come like that out of the box?"

Honestly? I haven't checked recently.

So I just downloaded the latest Slackware installation DVD ISO, burned it to appropriate media, and installed it on a completely blank computer, accepting all defaults.

Everything works out of the box. I would not hesitate to use this system as a loaner for MeDearOldMum, should her computer HaltAndCatchFire. All I would need to add is her printer, near as I can tell, and thanks to CUPS that's handeable via GUI. (Note that I'd have to add her printer regardless of OS; she's afraid of plugging in hardware.)

"No, they need tweaking."

Slackware 15.0 doesn't seem to. Perhaps your distro maintainer is incompetent?

"why leave your desktop powered up if it's not doing anything."

Convenience. With the monitors off, the thing doesn't draw enough power to matter.

init can be restarted at your choice of runlevel, at least on any sane version of *nix ... look up telinit.

Re: That WSL comment...

"Ironically WSL doesn't use... systemd."

Yes, it does.

That link, for the non-pointy-clicky inclined:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-is-now-available-in-wsl/

Re: And Pottering continues to screw up Linux for its primary purpose....

"Seriously none of SystemD's supposed improvements have much relevance to the hordes of headless VMs or cloud instances that are the overwhelming majority of the installed base...."

It also does absolutely nothing for the hoards of Debian and RedHat derivative desktop users who will never even touch the init system because they probably don't know it exists, but even if they did they'd be afraid to go near it. All the while massively increasing the initialization system in size and complexity, thus dragging in many bugs that should have been unnecessary ... to say nothing of increasing the size, scope and number of potential attack vectors. FOR NO GOOD REASON,

Re: Once again

"most of all because it constantly and inexorably grows like a particularly aggressive cancer whilst becoming harder and harder to avoid."

Yep. As I said here, over 6 years ago.

That's why I call it the systemd-cancer ... Consider: 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.

Re: Once again

"frankly it's garbage."

IMO, it's worse than garbage. It creates more problems than it pretends to fix, all while fixing things that weren't broken in the first place.

Re: Usecase?

"But then I'm not saying it is actually good."

It's a solution looking for a problem.

"I do wonder if the increased speed is truly worth the extra complexity, though."

And if there is any reason at all for this kind of thing on MeDearOldMum's computer. Maybe 1 person in 100,000 might, possibly, make use of this kind of thing very occasionally and perhaps 1 in 10,000,000 on a daily/weekly basis?

So why inflict it on the vast majority of users? Implement it as a kernel module, and allow those that need it to load it.

"I have two desktop machines running Linux and I only ever reboot them when I do a kernel upgrade."

Exactly. The whole "faster reboots" thing was a red-herring right from the git-go. Everything surrounding the systemd-cancer has been bullshit and bluster from the beginning.

Re: Hmmm

"Who is this change helping?"

Marketing. "LOOK! WE HAVE SOMETHING NEW!!!!! YOU MUST BUY (into) IT!!!"

And lo, the sheeple flocked for their masters ...

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

"Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well."

Not a lot of liquid water[0] or free oxygen[1] on the smaller moons & asteroids. Nor salt[2].

[0] Melting ice for transport is prohibitively expensive. As is cutting it into blocks and physically placing them in the hold. Water is used in almost every industrial plant in existence here on Earth, I see no reason why aliens would not find it as useful as we do. And ours is free for the pumping, thanks to the fluke of our location with respect to the Sun.

[1] Oxygen is a fairly dangerous chemical in it's free state, binding explosively with many other chemicals. For that reason, it's a very important industrial chemical. Our atmosphere is probably a rarity in the Universe, making it a treasure trove for visiting aliens. Probably.

[2] You don't need to be told how important a chemical salt is ... Again, I'm sure aliens will find it equally useful, even if it's not required for their metabolism.

Re: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Absinthe makes the heartburn stronger?

Re: reverse engineered tech

Nah. Us humans came up with all that.

The incremental steps learning what we now call solid-state physics, starting in the early 1800s, are easy for anyone to research for themselves. There are absolutely zero huge jumps in knowledge, it's all micro-steps at a time. Yes, things have become smaller/faster quite quickly, but that's just scaling ... a transistor is still a transistor, regardless of size.