Posts by jake

Re: How much legit traffic is there from US military/government computers to .ml?

Perhaps go back and read the article, this time for content?

Here's a relevant paragraph: "The Pentagon said it has technical controls in place that prevent its users from sending emails to the wrong place – such as going from a .mil to a .ml – by blocking those messages before they leave Dept of Defense systems. Senders are told to check the recipient and try again; the DoD didn't mention when it added such controls."

Here's another: "As to why the issue is ongoing if the DoD has already taken some action, there's only so much it can do, the department's officials said. For one thing, someone trying to email a .mil address from a personal or external account, and typoing it as .ml, can't be stopped by the Dept of Defense due to the way today's internet works."

Re: Save the Champagne

"Can you actually mount a gooseneck/5th wheel in the bed?"

Of course. Might take several hundred pounds of added steel to make it structurally sound, though. What range were you expecting when towing?

"And can you fit towing mirrors?"

Sure. I have a drill and plenty of nuts and bolts. I'll even use stainless fasteners.

Re: Save the Champagne

"How many people are buying this as a work truck ?"

Exactly none, would be my guess.

This thing isn't a pickup truck, it's a personal "look at me" luxury vehicle, useless for much more than getting groceries and posing.

Re: Save the Champagne

It's electric. When towing, the range plummets to the point of making it unfit for purpose.

The toobs of ewe purportedly contain all kinds of examples of the failure of e-vehicles to be adequate tow vehicles.

This aspect alone makes the tesla truck a failure before it even goes into production.

Seriously, if I can't put a medium sized Kubota tractor on a flatbed and tow it from Sonoma, CA to Fort Bragg, CA, and back, on one fill-up, it is all but useless as a pickup truck.

Re: Open and Shut

"Are we heading for another SCO Linux type feud ?"

No.

Re: Decisions, decisions

"so perhaps I should leave it at that and tell any RHEL users that there's nothing I can do if they have any problems."

I've been doing that for all of the commercially licensed Linus distros for over a quarter century. Doesn't seem to have negatively affected my bottom line.

_{Probably doesn't hurt that I target the BSDs and Slackware ... if it runs on them, it should run anywhere.}

Re: Eric S. Raymond wrote...

While ESR has managed to string an awful lot of words together over the years, that quote was from Fred Brooks, Shirley?

Re: X11 was pushed to prevent Sun becoming dominant in the desktop space

"stability is worse, a few features don't work."

Lovely. Just what I want in a serious GUI for my business.

I know people have been conditioned by Microsoft to think that computers are supposed to fail on a regular basis, but I'm sure you'll pardon me if I choose not to jump on that particular exasperating bandwagon. Life's far to short to deal with computers that don't work... especially when there are computers that DO work within easy reach of all and sundry.

Re: Really?

Over the last dozen years or so, I've noticed the SUSEs quietly disappearing from my friends and neighbors desktops. Nor sure what that means in the great scheme of things, perhaps I should conduct a short poll asking why (if I can be arsed, I might). It's probably because it has drifted too far from "mainstream", whatever that means.

I like Arch. If Slackware didn't exist, I'd probably fork it into a variation sans the systemd-cancer (which works quite nicely, BTW, try it!).

Ubuntu is just a corporate rebranding of Debian, NOW WITH ADDED KITCHENSINKWARE!!!! I don't consider it and sub-distros to be serious Linux contenders.

If you honestly think the systemd-cancer has won, how do you explain MX Linux being at the top of Distrowatch's PHRs this last year, and by a wide margin?

Re: Wayland is the future, but only with a lot of boring work and a redesign

"At some point it's a good idea to try moving to it,"

I have kept an eye on it since the initial release.

"so its future direction can be influenced"

From what I have seen, only the anointed few are allowed to make acceptable suggestions.

"and the rough edges minimised."

Yeah, good luck with that. I'll stick to X, which works for all my use cases, and has done for nearly 40 years.

Yes, X has problems. It needs an upgrade or replacement. But Wayland is not that replacement no matter what the fanbois tell you.

And probably not 'orribly xenophobic, either.

Re: Carrot vs Stick

"And for the folks behind Budgie to declare MATE as dead... That's just bollocks."

Indeed. In my travels in and around Silicon Valley (including the Unis in the area), I have never seen anybody using a Budgie desktop in the wild. Not once. MATE is almost common, although Cinnamon seems to have taken over that part of the desktop in recent years.

Don't listen to Marketing, folks! It's their JOB to cajole, nudge, bully and obfuscate you into listening to them, regardless of the suitability of their product for your needs.

Re: Really?

"There are quite a few distros that don't but they are quite niche. It's over; systemd won. Sorry, but it did."

Only two major distros adopted it (RedHat and Debian). RedHat did it because they are trying to be Windows (were trying? gawd/ess only knows IBM's intent at this point). In Debian's case, it was an accident of history, in essence fall-out from a large internal power struggle. In other words, it was a political choice. It certainly wasn't for technical reasons. Thus Devuan.

The rest of the distros to implement it, being mostly clones of those two, blindly followed due to ignorance and/or apathy, with a pinch of sheer laziness on the part of the devs. They certainly didn't spend any time thinking about the ramifications, beyond "I use that software repository, so I must comply".

y

The systemd-cancer didn't "win", rather the community at large is losing. This can still be turned around.

Re: Really?

"No one has a philosophical problem with it"

From my perspective, the arguments against Wayland are about equally split between technical and philosophical.

"just concerns about whether it is mature enough"

Which it isn't, not by a long-shot, and after 15 years of development (15!), I'm pretty sure it never will.

"and worries it may cut out the BSDs."

Frankly, the BSDs can handle themselves. They'll either make it available to their users, or not. Regardless, Wayland will not "take over" anything in the BSD world because the very idea of "taking over" is anathema to the BSDs. Something the kitchen-sinkware corporate Linux distros would do well to emulate.

Re: "if it does its job correctly, the user [..] might never know they were using it"

Indeed. The ultimate OS is the one that blissfully gets out of the way and allows me to do my job with no histrionics. For my needs, the systemd-cancer free Slackware (sans Wayland) does exactly that. Try it, you might like it.

The only time I actually think about which OS I am running is when I'm responding in threads like this one.

Re: How to do this with Wayland? Don't know!!

Wayland overall is a huge step backward. That's why it's still an also-ran after 15 years. Nobody really wants it outside the Corporate world.

Remember, X is still available. And will remain available until roughly the heat death of the universe. That's one of the beauties of FOSS.

Yes, X has problems. It needs an upgrade or replacement. But Wayland is not that replacement no matter what the fanbois tell you.

"When, say, a calculator app (i.e. something non-resizable)"

Calculator "apps" and the like are not resizable these days? How the mighty have fallen ...

_{Have you tried 1994's xcalc? It's easily customized to suit your needs.}

Re: At least systemd worked…

"Reinstall the old driver and pin it so that it doesn't get upgraded, or switch to the open drivers."

Try both. Pin the one that works best for your needs. It's your computer, it doesn't belong to your video card manufacturer.

Note that one or more of the current LTS kernels might be your best option for older hardware. For example, LTS kernel 4.4 (released in very early 2016) will be maintained until at least 2026, and probably until 2036 ... and possibly beyond, if there is a need. If your hardware runs nicely on that, it might be an option for you.

"an indication that Linux is moving further and further away from being a UNIX-like OS to being something distinct from it."

And yet here I am, happily using a non-systemd-cancer distro, and not running Wayland. And I see absolutely no reason why this will change in my lifetime.

Linux is the kernel. It is not X or Wayland or the systemd-cancer or any other init. Linux is just the kernel. Shall I repeat that? Linux is just the kernel. You are allowed, nay ENCOURAGED, to graft the bits and bytes onto it that make an OS that suits you, the way you use a computer. There is no "one size fits all", and never will be, despite all the corporate interests trying to make it so.

"The people doing the the most promising Linux port to Apple M1 and M2 hardware have said that they do not have enough resource to both re-write the X.org backend display driver for the new silicon, and also do a Wayland compositor. So they've opted to just do Wayland."

Possibly smart. When Apple change their mind and do another radical switch in hardware (as is their wont), they'll have to re-write it all from scratch. Again.

I hate treadmill programming. Still, I guess it's a living.

I think there is a subset of commentards who think that their "thumb" somehow will help make differing opinions go away. It's their ineffectual attempt at censorship.

Re: More funding for low probability things

"I'm far more concerned with how to keep the damn chipmunks from killing off my sunflower starts"

Sunflower starts are tasty, I grow 'em as micro greens, but the varmints like 'em too. Quarter inch galvanized steel mesh "hardware cloth" low tunnel keeps all manor of critters out. No need for supports, just dig six inch trenchs to bury the sides and Bob's yer auntie. Flatten and wrap the ends to seal, minor cutting helps. Use a cutting wheel on an angle grinder for easiest/fastest results. When the plants are big enough to fend for themselves, roll it up and save it for next year. Mine are seven or eight years old now. Might need to stake it every three or four feet if you have a particularly mischievous puppy.

"short of genocide"

My first suggestion was to get a whippet or two ... assuming you're in a jurisdiction where a garden gun[0] isn't an option.

[0] Small smoothbore gun, designed to fire .22 LR shot shells (AKA "rat shot"). Useful to about 10 yards/meters, or a bit more.

Re: PICS OR IT NEVER HAPPENED!

::whoosh::

Nah. It was clearly the NorKs.

That, and most people are SO easily influenced and lead astray ...

Remember those triangular UFOs that were all the rage a few years ago, from the early '80s thru' the early 2000s?

I created one of those triangles in a campground in the Sierra by stringing three little dim lights about 40 feet up, in an open space between some pine trees. Come later in the evening, we were all telling tall tales around the camp fire, as is typical in such situations. I told a story about my supposed encounter, on Priest's Grade/Coulterville Road (one of the many back doors into Yosemite), and at the opportune moment had my Wife turn on the lights and point up with a "Just like that one?".

The lights were just bright enough to fool the eye into thinking that there were no stars showing between them .... Presto, huge dark triangular shaped "craft" over our camp fire. When the wife shut them off after about 5 seconds, I yelled "Shit! Did you see how FAST that thing was?". One of the guys not in on the trick commented that it made it over the next ridge (about four miles away) in under a second. Strangely enough, almost everybody agreed with him. At this point, some people were claiming they thought it was redish. They got quite inventive about what they thought they had seen.

The oddest thing is that when I collected my wire and lights the next morning, several people asked what I was doing. I told them. They did not believe me! So I told everybody the truth about the hoax over breakfast. Most of them refused to listen, and today many of them still tell the story of the huge triangle craft hovering over our camp that disappeared like a bat out of hell when we all looked up at it.

I never messed with that kind of mass illusion again. Too much room for error.

Re: Let Mulder and Scully check this out!

Sadly, I know people who think that badly scripted and worse acted show was a documentary.

Re: What kind of urgency is that?

"There was not a single day that I have not head about transgender online"

PICS OR IT NEVER HAPPENED!

It's probably Schumer and Co. giving the frothing loons in the House and Senate a distraction. The increasingly shrill babble from the "Trump won!" Q-anon whackjobs is starting to give the general public a headache.

Re: relying on the explodey hydrocarbon rockets

Since when could passing billionaires keep secrets like that? You've read their tweets, haven't you?

"release of the info would increase the paranoia and conspiracy theories"

Of course. Because the .gov will be so stupid as to admit that some stuff has been left out of the release "for security reasons", which is obviously where they are hiding the stuff about the aliens.

It couldn't possibly be because releasing the info would give China and Russia information on capabilities of hardware that is currently undergoing test and labeled "top secret" and/or our own capability of seeing what the bad guys are doing ... Nope, it must be aliens, innit.

Re: Give aliens some credit

More likely, they'd fatten us up for dinner. Quality protein is probably quite hard to find in the Universe.

Re: Oh really

There is a theory which states that if ever there is a thread in the ElReg forums about Space and/or UFOs where one or more commentards do not regurgitate the same old boring quotes from Douglas Adams' works of fiction there will be great rejoicing.

Re: spell checker changed it to "Microsoft Encarta"

That's because Encarta wasn't Microsoft's. It was the CD version of the 120+ year old Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia.

Odd ...

... using DDG, the first six options when I search "RDS" are for Respiratory Distress Syndrome ... I would never have guessed this. I guessed Reliable Datagram Sockets would be near the top; it wasn't. I was actually hoping to see Random Dot Stereogram, at least by the second page, but no ...

That would be a relic, not an icon.