Posts by jake 26667 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
... " What does Twitter's new logo really represent?"
What it represents is the massive, insatiable ego of one sad and lonely man, trying to make his mark on the Universe and failing in his intent quite publicly.
I'd feel sorry for him, if he wasn't such a massive twat.
go ogle dropped their "don't be evil" motto as of October of 2015, when Alphabet decided "Do the right thing" was more appropriate. Following that, "don't be evil" was vestigial, at best, a footnote in the CoC, before eventually being quietly removed entirely.
They don't mention what 'the right thing" is (making a profit?). Nor to whom they are supposed to do it (the shareholders?).
But at least they admit that being evil is OK in pursuit of "the right thing". Nice to know where they stand.
Some of us have been shunning go ogle since the year dot ... not paranoid, pragmatic.
Here's the deal: You worry about the code running on your systems, and I'll worry about the code running on mine.
That's how the Internet works. You worry bout your end and link, and I worry about my end and link, and ElReg worries about their end (and pays somebody else to worry about their link). What ElReg and I choose to do with our ends and links are none of your fucking business, period.
So again, I invite you to fuck off. Nobody wants your vision of a nanny state, especially not where you are the nanny. Have I mentioned you should fuck off? Now would be a good time. Just do it. Put yourself out of our misery. We don't want you. At all. Go away.
"We people on the fringes didn't have the luxury of direct tcp connections"
There was usually a BBS with an FTP gateway somewhere fairly local. Failing that, UUCP over dial-up to a local Uni was a thing.
I helped people all over the UK (and parts of Europe) get connected in the early days ... it was there, if you knew how, and who to talk to.
Didn't Walnut Creek agree to host Debian in the early days, like they did Slackware and FreeBSD (and the simtel collection, Project Gutenberg, X11R5 (and later R6), perl, the complete monstrosity known as ADA ... later, that new-fangled Apache & accessories for people fiddling about with the WorldWideWait thingie, and ... ).
Have a beer for services rendered.
The neophyte user might not have understood that he only needed the one binary installation CD, and had no immediate need for the two source CDs, no need for the binary CDs of the other CPU architectures available, and no need for the several foreign language CDs. I don't think it was quite a full dozen 25 years ago, but it would have been close.
Canonically, that's "Never underestimate the bandwidth capability of a station wagon full of mag tape."
The quote is often attributed to Tanenbaum in 1996, but it was a common expression when I was at DEC long before that ... and I remember a similar comment from a student at Stanford in the early '80s when a professor expressed surprise at one of the vaxen already running the latest BSD build, released just a few hours before. Conversation went "How on earth did you get that code across the network that fast?" answer was "My motorcycle's latency might be sub-par, but it still has a much higher bandwidth capability than your network!".
Monday morning on the local news, we watched the SF police department telling the MuskMinions to cease and desist, because they didn't pull the proper permits to make the logo change. Elon's been fighting with San Francisco over signage for months. Seems he can't handle the City telling him "no". I predict he'll be moving the HQ to Texas, where they love slurping high-tech arse.
"The Bible is not a cookbook, it is a conversation."
It's just a book compiled of many stories, written, transcribed, translated, re-transcribed, re-translated and re-written (lather, rinse, repeat) by many people, over a LONG period of time. It contains errors, and even outright faults (and bad math, sex, gore and violence ... but that's just gravy).
The fundies I've met claim it is the Word Of God (you can hear the CAPS in their voices), is a perfect work, and contains absolutely no errors whatsoever. Why they refuse to use the brains their supposed god gave them to critically look at an obvious work of man is beyond me.
"Have you read them?"
Yes. For comprehension, even, Can you say the same?
"They don't contradict. One simply expands a little on the other."
In the one, god created the animals, and then he created mankind, male and female simultaneously. In the other, god created adam first, then the animals, and then he created adam's helper[0]. Clearly, these two accounts are not the same, at all. Looks like contradiction to me.
[0] And adam's helper, being a clone grown from his rib (allegedly), would have been male. So "eve" was clearly trans, at least at some level. But I digress ...
They cost what, under a buck and a quarter to make, and are clearly throw-away items, like fast-food wrappers. And yet people pay that much money for them. Do they honestly have more money than brains? If I had $50,000 to throw away, I'd find a worthwhile charity to give it to. At least it'd help me with my taxes ... and I'd have one less thing to very carefully store (the box is sometimes more than half the value in such "collectables"), hiding away from daylight so it doesn't fade. If indeed they even came in a box, which is unlikely as a trade-show give away.
"I dislike, purely on aesthetic grounds, the 'z' in -ize words"
Damn your French ise, anyway.
"I would be really happy if the continual use of nouns as verbs would disappear ('architecting a solution'). ::snip:: This seems to be a Californian Tech phenomenon"
My Big Dic[0] says "architect" can, in fact, be used as a verb ... and that architecting is correct English, going as far as citing a letter from Keats (1794-1821), who wrote "This was architected thus By the great Oceanus.", so it clearly pre-dates California (est. 1846ish, depending on who you talk to).
[0] OED, second dead tree edition.
This Yank first heard it on Radio 4 in England in '78. I recorded it on cassette, including the xmas special (gawd/ess knows why), and still have those cassettes (again, gawd/ess knows why). My friends and I heard about it a couple days in advance when John Peel plugged it on his radio show after somehow accidentally managing to be allowed to sit in on a rehearsal.
Over here on the left side of the pond, and a trifle later (1980?), It ran on NPR as part of their Playhouse series. (That's National Public Radio, for you Brits.) I listened to that broadcast, too, turned all my friends onto it. It became a bit of a cult hit on the Stanford and Berkeley campuses. There were actually old-fashioned "listen to the radio show" parties.
The books (1981? '82?) and TV show ('83ish?) crossed the pond later.
"Soon they'll all be."
In your jurisdiction, maybe.
Not here in Sonoma, California. Friends in low places assure me that existing analog POTS lines will not be removed into the foreseeable future. It's difficult, but not impossible, to get a new line installed ... Just tell $TELCO that you need it for an alarm system, analog modem and FAX machine. If the flunky on the line tells you it's impossible, simply hang up and try again. Eventually you'll find a cooperative so-called "customer service" representative. I did this for our house in town about two months ago. Recommended.
AT&T will probably now hunt me down and reprogram me for divulging this info.
Relax, Slackware comes with a GUI. A couple of them, actually.
What we are talking about is the package installer, which doesn't need the GUI running to work (it uses a thing called "ncurses" for selection boxes and etc.), and the fact that by default Slackware boots into a CLI, which is easily changed if you prefer it to boot into a GUI.
There is a "live" version of slackware-current if you want to try before installing. It works on most modern (but not bleeding edge!) computers.
Yes, it's a big "full" install. But with today's laptops having upwards of a TB, is it really?
Once you've been running it for a while, it's easy enough to build your own install script. Probably not what most people are wanting to hear (thinking is hard for most people), but with Slackware customization is part of the point. Once you've learned to make it yours, the entire OS blissfully slips into the background, allowing your to use your computer for whatever you need/want to use your computer for. It's no longer about admining the box for admining's sake.
"Why on Earth - how on Earth - do Windows users put up with this?"
You know the answer, but for anyone who doesn't ... It's because over the years, they have been conditioned by Microsoft to think that this is the way computers are supposed to work. It's been a kind of frog boiling combined with telling the same lies over and over until people believe them.
I'd like to think that eventually some of them will notice, but I'm not holding my breath.
I've been in the industry for about half a century. I have worked on any & all hardware, and any & all operating systems, and any & all applications. I have NEVER, not once, ever, been able to get help from Microsoft. Gawd/ess knows I've tried occasionally, I probably have well over a hundred fifty phone hours with them, but they have NEVER been helpful ... Mind you, my issues have been a trifle more complicated than "how do I print" or "I just downloaded pR0n^Wa picture, how do I view it?" ... By way of reference, I can even still get useful real-time telephone support for DEC gear running TOPS-10, but Microsoft? Faggedaboudit.
Now ask me why I no longer work on anything from Redmond.
"a trailer with a half load of hay only needing to get 10 miles a few times a year could be fine."
I haul a set of joints from the Nevada property (where we grow it) to Sonoma (where it is eaten) at least once per month. Electric trucks don't scale when you have mouths to feed.
"Which may have all sorts of interesting consequences, from brakes to tow attachments to trailer safety."
To recharging ... Imagine, you're at the lake for a long weekend, you put the boat and jetski in the water, take the dirtbikes for a buzz to the top of the ridge and back, just in time for a sunset putt around the lake. Then dinner and bed ... wake up at sunrise and take the boat out to catch breakfast, and return just in time for the kids to get back on the dirtbikes and the wife to return on the ski ... and discover you're all out of juice in all four vehicles. And it's only 10AM on Saturday. What are you going to recharge them with? The Tesla with just enough juice to get you back to the charge station in the next town over? Or did you haul a 37KW genset to annoy your fellow campers with?
This entire "everything must be electric" is daft, from all angles. It just doesn't scale if you look at it critically.
Personally, I'm betting on alcohol burning ICE to be the wave of the future. It's the only thing that makes sense.
"Would there be room for added structure?"
Of course. The vehicle might end up a trifle wider than it was from the factory, and with a little less ground clearance and/or a trifle less cargo capacity ... But I can add steel to any vehicle, if the owner wants to pay me to do so.
Have welding gear, will travel ...
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