Posts by jake

"Why do you feel the urge to be distracted or to distract your colleagues?"

How to tell us you've never actually held a job without saying "I've never had a job".

Re: downvoted but no rebuttal

"You know you've hit the nail on the head."

Not this time, sabroni. More like hit the nail squarely on the thumb.

The sports car was never an expense, the childcare and transportation costs were.

Last time I looked it up, here in Sonoma County California the median cost of infant day-care is about $20,000/yr, and pre-school kids about $15,000/yr. That is a very real savings if one or both parents are working out of the house and the kid(s) can stay home.

I'll leave the cost of transportation for two adults going to work, five days per week, as an exercise for the reader.

All of this adds up to significant out-of-pocket expense for a working couple. Unless one or both are working from home.

Bluntly, elsergiovolador is dead wrong.

Re: Problems in the future?

"We don't long for the days of using beads for calculations"

I use an abacus to calculate livestock feed & supplement needs down in the feed barn. Electronic calculators tend to die quite quickly in that environment.

I also still use a sliderule about the place. It's more accurate than guestimating for fencing, fertilizer, seed, roofing, paint, roadbase, DG, working loads on beams and the like.

Re: Problems in the future?

Offices have been around a lot longer than even (electro)mechanical computers. Ask Lloyd's, just as one example.

Also, almost as soon as computers became more than somewhat useful to business, they were accessible from home. The Teletype Model 33 came out in 1963, and was in common(ish) use by top-tier remote mainframe support staff by the late 1960s. Dad had one installed in '67 or thereabouts ... the company even brought a second POTS line into our house for it, their dime. I soon used the same system to access ORVYL, the Stanford timeshare system, with the blessing of Dad's company. (I also later used it to access a new-fangled thingie that DARPA had Stanford and Berkeley et al working on ... but that's another story for another day.)

Re: manually dragged a PDP system

Not just dropped off the flatbed, but bounced up a flight of stairs, only to discover it is to be installed in the basement, and so bounced back down two flights. The heavy goods lift was out of order at the time. After re-setting all the cards (just in case), it was with great trepidation that I tried booting it for the first time. I shouldn't have bothered worrying.

Happened at SLAC in about 1985. Last time I checked, the equipment was still functional and used fairly regularly.

Re: manually dragged a PDP system

"If this was the 1980s, it was very likely it was obsolete and decommissioned anyway."

I could show you PDP kit still in active duty. I have contracts for a couple bits & bobs that supervise, monitor and/or record some rather large and expensive equipment that isn't going to be upgraded any time soon, if ever.

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

"As Linus said: BSD was not available on 386."

386BSD was first publicly available in early 1992 ... but if you knew who to ask (info easily found on Usenet), you could have had access to it's roots in 1990. Earlier, if you knew people at Berkeley.

I don't know if I'm happy that Linus didn't know this, or not ... one thing is very clear, though. If he had, the world would probably be a very different place.

"No-one likes doing free work for other companies to take."

I strongly disagree. See my reply to Doctor Syntax, elsewhere in this thread.

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

"So no-one developed BSD? Or did somebody develop it and then have an "Oh shit!" moment when they got round to reading the licence? Or is it possible that those developing BSD knew exactly what the licence implied and were not only OK with the implications but welcomed them?"

I have been contributing to what we now call FOSS since before BSD was BSD.

Over the years, I wrote code, tested it, chased down bugs, created patches, wrote documentation, and all the other bits & bobs that go into FOSS because I am extremely selfish. I wanted it to work for ME, my way, in my time. Once it worked the way I wanted it to work, it solved a problem that I had, which more than paid for the time and effort that I put into it.

Then I released it to the wild, without caring if anyone else needed it. It's MINE, it scratched my itch ... now, if you have the same itch feel free to make use of my scratching post. No point in you re-inventing the wheel to do the same job ... and better, it frees you up to work on something to scratch another itch.

Thankfully, over the years many other people have has many other itches. In aggregate, we have created something useful.

Without money bags getting under foot.

"Should they have gone to some random A/C on the internet for instruction on what licence they should have used?"

::snort::

Re: Just AI?

"they only care now that the vapid princess is involved"

FTFY

Re: tracefs?

NOT in the kernel itself, however.

The systemd-cancer is not the kernel, is not required by the kernel, and has no hooks in the kernel, and according to the kernel devs (including Linus), it never will.

Thus, building a Linux Distribution without the systemd-cancer is actually pretty easy. I prefer Slackware, YMMV.

Thus proving ...

... developers are human, too. Even Linus.

Linus is paid to keep the Linux Kernel going in a sane direction by the Linux Foundation, a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

Canonically, that's "hit by a bus". It was all figured out over a decade ago.

I'll leave searching for the interview as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Bring back the old Linus

I've never seen an actual "enraged" Linus.

I *have* seen him yell at a very few people who refuse to catch clues when first passed them in a more polite manner.

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

Let's see, it's been what, 32 years and counting that the Linux Kernel has been overseen by Linus with his BDFL hat. It has continued growing, and making inroads into virtually every aspect of day-to-day life.

Sounds to me like he's been doing something right, despite all those poor, downtrodden, unpaid volunteers that you invoke.

Maybe, just maybe, you aren't really as clued into the situation as you think you are.

I'm on the mailing list. Have been since the year dot. I've never been yelled at. Even though I've made mistakes.

Linus is a nice guy. Unless you are the type that is too boneheaded to admit you are wrong, fix your mistake, and move on. Frankly I'm surprised that Linus has been as tolerant as he has all those years ... If it was my name attached to the project, I'd have really lit into a few of the fucking idiotic prima donna drama queens.

Re: A wasted trip

"and also because the "turn it off an on" is a rarely not worth trying"

Reminds me of an early '80s AI koan ...

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Re: Yep.

"For some time now parents have delegated responsibility for the upbringing of their kids to other people."

But where is it written that this is a good thing, or even legal? Last time I checked, the law says in no uncertain terms that the parent/guardian is responsible for their sprog's actions. The fact that nobody is doing anything about it has nothing to do with the actual law.

Is laziness on the part of the parent a good legal defense? Should it be?

Will another law or laws actually fix the problem, when it's quite clear that the existing laws covering the problem aren't doing any good?

Will a hastily prepared and passed into law cause more problems than expected? (They seemingly always do ... )

Yep.

If parents would parent, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Consider that in this country (USA), a minor is not legally allowed to enter into a contract. Their parent or guardian has to sign it for them. Thus kids having access to Internet pr0n and etc. is squarely on the backs of the parents, who have tacitly allowed it by giving their sprog the tools to easily access it.

And of course the kids WILL access it if they can. Remember when you were that age? Does anyone reading this truly believe kids have changed appreciably in the last couple decades?

No, even though I think it is a parental problem, it doesn't follow that I think that BigMedia should be off the hook ... There is still such a thing as maintaining an attractive nuisance.

"That's not what people were saying when newspapers published comics"

Political cartoons, satire and caricatures of people in the public eye are protected works in civilized countries.

It remains to be seen if a computer generated "porn" image of somebody who may (or may not) be a pop singer is similarly protected. What would happen if the porn industry produced a real, live gal that was close enough in looks to the person in question that it'd fool the casual onlooker? Would this double not be allowed to participate in porn? Would computer generated images of her be allowed?

_{As a side question, has anybody ever actually made a real ruling on the definition of "porn"?}

Re: More laws that will be ignored

"The easiest thing to do is add "moral rights" to copyright"

Whose morals, Kemosabe?

Re: Efficient interface

You mean cut buffers?

Re: There was nothing wrong with ..., so why fix it with ...?

"There is not a single such obvious advantage to any newfangled GUI convention."

The ability to run many x-terms on one screen, alongside whatever bespoke GUI software your job required.

Then Mosaic Communications Corporation released Mosaic Netscape (called "Mosaic Killer" internally; you know it better as Mozilla), and the world changed. Suddenly it was hip to release open source GUI code.

Re: Not all Americans

"trying to get a cup of TEA, not iced sugar water"

Oh, gawd/ess ... don't bring up "sweet tea" in here, the British are listening.

Horrid, horrid stuff. All the sugar of a softdrink, with none of the flavo(u)r or carbonation.

_{Disclaimer: I hate softdrinks, too. Sugar is only palatable after appropriate application of yeast.}

Name checks out ...

"Would we now perhaps have "British North America"?"

Ask the Canadians.

Kale belongs, well chopped, in soup. Especially at this time of year. Any fule know that.

"As to sprouts, plant breeding has made great strides over the years. They're not like they used to be when I hated them."

Same for broccoli. If you think you hate it, and haven't tried it in 30 years or more, try it again.

"it rests on the assumption that the bitter receptors need to be blocked. Why?"

Not sure, but I've heard it all my life. Not that I subscribe to the theory.

For example, when I make ice cream with sugar, vanilla, eggs and cream/milk there is no bitter flavo(u)r at all. When I include a pinch of salt, the flavo(u)r is enhanced. You can try this for yourself at home, even without an ice cream maker (look up "tin can ice cream"). Fun game for a kid's party ... have 'em guess which batch has the salt. Likewise, cookies/biscuits, cakes and etc. (mostly) have no bitter flavo(u)rs, but are essentially inedible without salt. Some bitter foods, on the other hand, seem to get quite a bit more bitter with the addition of salt.

I tried the salt-in-tea/coffee thing many, many years ago. As salt is a flavo(u)r enhancer, it seemed to make sense. Played with the amount, dropping it down past the point of tasting it over about a week. It didn't seem to do anything at all once the salt couldn't be tasted, so I dropped to project as useless.

Re: Barbarians …

That's not tea, that's gravy.

_{There is a special place in hell for people who waste sausage drippings.}