Posts by JLV

Re: Pint due.

Distinctive...

My take seeing an F-117 Nighthawk up close @ Paris airshow was that it looked like a cheesy low-budget space fighter mockup put together by the FX guys from Sharknado for a Battlestar Galactica 1 ripoff directed by Kim Jung-On, based on a novel by LR Hubbard. Its angles just grate on your optic nerves and feel wrong on a plane. You don't get that impression from afar, but in real life it is one ugly duckling.

By that token, I find the Warthog quietly impressive. Plus, its ability to do low speed & height overflights because of high damage tolerance is pretty relevant nowadays when the idea is to avoid nuking the locals' weddings. Or not doing some blue-on-blue because you are flying by at 600 mph and 20000', just in case you collided one of HMs 24 $150m low-cost/hi-volume plane with a mosquito pushed by an angry tailwind.

Good call on the A10, assuming it's for sound military reasons and not just the local senators looking out for their pork come what may.

>throw your shitty OS

cue for... howls of outrage by the Windows community...

I guess it's only fair though. When your cherished systems incur bugs frequently and gets jeered at (by folks who often think their toys are perfect), you just want to lash out at your tormentors when you get a rare opportunity to do so.

There, there, let it out. Don't hold back. You'll feel all better now.

;-)

Peace on both camps. No one's perfect and Linux users could use the humility to be more vigilant and not think they are automagically immune.

Re: Yuckity yuk

Oh, those. I think I read those and/or the CUA ones ages ago and they were pretty good.

As to have forgotten about them in my snide n snarky post, I can't be blamed too much, can I? MS itself has totally forgotten about their own guidelines about what makes a good UI.

The funny thing is that MS used to be strong on the UI and weak on the backend. Now the backend is arguably getting better (it's no POSIX, but I consider that a plus from the POV of OS diversity, no matter if I prefer 'nix myself).

But the frontend - where the great mass of customers judge from - is losing the plot and getting panned massively for it. Not to mention telemetry/forced upgrades.

Re: Swinsian

which iTune alternatives would allow me to manage mp3s as follows:

- all new MP3s are brought in without a rating.

- then I go into iTunes and give them a 2

- create smart playlists to put on ipad/iphone:

- `mytoprated` will pick say 4gb of 3+ rated songs

- `random` will pick 4gb if rating is >1

- newly added music is also copied (if >1 rating)

When I find a song/artist excessively annoying (The Verve, Bitter Sweet Symphony *&#^~, for example), it gets a 1 rating. That means the various >1 rating smartlist conditions never let it near my devices again.

Now, one bit of annoyance is I still haven't figured out where iOS iTunes has now hidden ratings. But otherwise it works well enough.

Open to suggestions to get off iTunes. But what I don't want to do is to manage 7000+ songs that take 40gb or so manually to fit subsets of them into 6-10 gb free space devices. And I don't ever wanna have Bitter Sweet* on any device. So conditional playlists and ratings seem necessary.

Any recommendations?

* substitute your own abhorred mp3s - Bieber, JLo, etc... - that you don't want to delete but never want to hear again.

p.s. any replacement that easily copies playlists onto my BB10's SD Card (directly, cuz BB Link is the worst ever) gets my eternal thanks.

Re: Twelve =/= teen

Yeah, I kinda only realized it when my daughter neared her own transformation into Ms. Dracula. I had heard "teen" so much that the etymology for it went right past my head. Teen is also a quite colloquial term, hardly the stuff that your lit and grammar classes spend time on.

Jeez, from the downvotes you'd think the poor guy had commented positively on Windows Teen.

storm in a teacup?

I am still using iTunes, mostly out of inertia. Never really shared the deep hatred for it, mostly for lack of trying others. However, I do now notice things that are wearing on my patience:

- frequent changes in good-enough-UI to no great improvement (cf Windows UI)

- disappearance/hiding of previously available functionally on iOS - shuffle by genre/artist, star ratings

- promotion of their dumb music service

- about as update-happy as Adobe Flash

To be clear I buy Apple for the build quality, core OS stability and bash/posix friendliness. As well as for the main desktop windowing system. The rest comes from macports and GitHub. On those terms it works and is stable enough, esp if you sit out new releases for a while.

I find their own apps are stodgy and prone to locking your files in databases. So I mostly avoid Mail, Pages, Safari, iCloud. And iPhoto did its best to lose all my pictures. iBooks/music/movies? Surely you're joking - who wants unportable media? I grudgingly put up with Finder but much prefer navigating the file system in iTerm2.

Bottom line: I essentially try to have as little to do with Apple as possible while running on their platform (my treasured 17" 2011 MBP).

Much better alternative, to my needs, than Windows and enough like Linux at the editor/bash/server-process levels that it's pretty seamless minus much need to configure anything.

Hardly makes me notice these hiccups. But then it hardly makes me their dream customer either.

Re: The UK has it better on this point

trademark != copyright

Re: Fool me twice

This seems promising

https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

Doesn't repair borked programs though.

Re: I tried to use Apple for business

With Windows doing its best to piss off customers, untrusted/unprofitable PC manufacturers and fairly unexciting year-on-year Apple growth rates in its core markets, Apple may yet pursue companies more aggressively in the future. For one thing, many white collar folk will already be using them at home.

Of course, that would require updating the laptop/desktop lineup, fixing a whole bunch of we-dont-this oversights in their OS offerings. And, actually being responsive, rather than bossy.

But for the world's "most valuable company" enterprise-done-right (i.e. in a way that worked for businesses) could be a huge new market.

Just iOS probably won't suffice, but it may be a good way to start throwing out feelers.

Re: Just to add fuel...

You are full of it, P.

Ever since Win 8, any minor/config tweak to Windows to personalize/set it up for my use starts out with a Google or superuser.com search, in order to find out where they've moved things.

There was a bit of that w 7 vs XP, true. But no more than you could expect after about 10 years of OS evolution.

When 8.0 instructions are sometimes inapplicable to 8.1 in weird ways, then yes, you can spend hours reconfiguring your PC. Especially if you are a power user and not just a mail, browser and office "genius" like yourself.

I think I will just bone up using on Powershell for configuration instead. That should be more stable and I am looking forward to compare/contrast w bash. But it's not an option for the average Win user, izzit?

I rarely use the word shill, but you well deserve it.

Re: "Not my fault..."

Think P-39 Airacobra, WW2 aircraft which was pretty advanced, quite innovative and intended for air combat. Instead it had pretty massive problems in that role and was instead shunted to mostly ground attack roles*.

some of it sounds familiar (wiki):

"in the event of heavy rain the pilot's forward view would be completely obliterated; the pilot's notes advised that in this case the door windows would have to be lowered and the speed reduced to 150 mph (241 km/h)"

However in 1940 aircraft design and production cycles were in months, not in decades. You could also still use the P39 to do other things. Most importantly there were plenty of very good planes, designed by evolution rather than committee, waiting in the wings to take over its role. For each P39 you had a Tempest or P51 design.

Or you could also pick the F104 Widowmaker, which required, IIRC an upside roll to eject downwards, at least in the beginning due to its big tail (see recent articles about F35 helmet and pilot necks). That thing was quietly canned some years down the line.

Point is - aircraft designs can and do fail, sometimes. There are tons of fighter designs that either were abandoned or put into different roles while a replacement was procured. It doesn't necessarily mean the original designers were incompetent or corrupt. They just failed, perhaps by being too innovative.

The difference is, we now refuse to acknowledge the problem and are in full Emperor's New Clothes mode. There is no alternative design to fallback on - the whole point of the F35 program was to source all the eggs with one basket to reduce costs. Lobbyists, and the rather clever spreading of the pork all over, means that the F35 is likely to trump a lot of military and budgetary logic before it gets canned.

Anyone wanting to chuck the F35 is a peacenik clueless idiot, runs the official party line.

And we have no plan B.

* even the Typhoon was, IIRC, originally more intended for fighter duty.

** also the wikipedia entry makes the P39 sound quite a bit more successful than I recall reading about it in the past.

Re: bit confused about the technical aspects

On reread - in linked articles, there seems to be an indication that Windows was making the users aware of the kernel access.

If that warning was displayed through normal Windows process vetting mechanisms - and not through some particularly savvy Windows user's configuration and system auditing - that would put the onus on users to run like hell, but perhaps kinda exonerates Windows.

Re: Nothing wrong with the chips.

>All a proper dev needs to do his job is

Think a bit. My domains of competence are Python and SQL, along with some more proprietary stuff.

Any time that I want to write fast Python code, I will often think of using dictionaries, aka hashmaps. Now, they are not applicable 100% of the time, but they are very, very fast. The, slow, Python interpreter mostly gets out of the way and calls highly optimized C that's been tuned for years and years. AFAIK the underlying implementation is a B-Tree type algo. A big part of writing fast Python code is knowing which built-in data structures to use to tap into the fast C stuff underneath.

Now, instead of being a lazy shit dev, I could take out my editor (I dislike IDEs, but disagree with you that that shows skill of some sort) and wrangle some C hashmap code myself. Even if I knew C well enough, would my code be as fast as that evolved over years by folk very much smarter than me? I think not.

You're gonna say "Lazy turd, using a scripting language". News to you, modern system languages are evolving towards having more or less built-in maps - Rust, Go, Swift have them. I don't mind system languages, I loved a quick dip into C a while back. But there is a lot of value in providing building blocks on top of even system languages. Who wants to implement a linked list? Who wants to use code with gratuitously hand-written linked lists, unless there is a very very good reason?

That's the power, and costs, of abstractions. I now how, and when, to use a hashmap, but I have little idea of how it is put together. I do know that Python speeds can go up by orders of magnitude when you know the little tricks.

Let's not even get into the abstractions involved with working on top of relational database. A good SQL coder will write stuff that is infinitely faster than a noob. Both have a limited idea, or interest, in knowing the rdbms internals, though the experienced coder will know about indices, NOT IN slowness, full table scans, etc...

Every so often people bemoan that software engineering (hah!) is nothing like say mechanical engineering. Now, by your metrics, does that mean the automotive engineer needs to design his own subcomponents (bolts, drive belts, brakes), each and every time? That would do wonders for both car costs and car quality, would it not?

No, we expect re-use there as well and don't call car engineers out for "just" assembling car components together.

Well, to be fair, the fake blood tests company was a little closer to having real significance. Rather than whether Gillette overpaid their ads to sell 17-bladed razors to up and coming spotty teens.

Not that I disagree with you otherwise, +1. And I expect the ad buyers won't be amused.

Re: Software development

Good points. Not to mention that most of that, rather impressive, list only makes sense to aggressively patch (and research) in the context of widespread exposure to public networks - ie the Internet. Ditch the Internet* with your time machine and apps have a considerably easier life, security-wise.

Ah, the good old days.

* ditch Flash? Now that's more doable.

Re: I take it this is not the People Eating Tasty Animals group....

Maybe he means the frying bacon smell is what makes him regret being vegetarian?

And... since you've mentioned being Jewish further down, I'll take your bacon, just to avoid your lapsing into sin/temptation ;-).

You're welcome.