Posts by jelabarre59

Re: Schmoo?

I was wondering if anyone would have noticed the (un)Official DEC Auxiliary Output Delivery System we had installed.

You'd think the programming "geniuses" at Microsoft should be able to figure out a containerization function for MSWindows too, right? Split out userspace functions into their own little boxes; after all MSWindows has such a rock-solid kernel, and distinct separation of kernel-space and user-space...

Wait... what? Oh, nevermind.

Re: protect what you value

For example, if you joined, or were forced to join, a website or forum because you ONE TIME wanted some information that was only available to members, it is quite reasonable to use abc123 as a universal password.

For those one-time usages I'm forced into, my chosen password is a bit "coarser"...

Amazon have some weird suggestions; I recently bought a new cordless drill and under their heading "Customers who bought that item also bought" and suggested a salacious novel. The mind boggles.

I expect there was plenty of "drilling" going on in that novel, if you catch my meaning. (wink wink, nudge nudge}

Thunderbird is suffering a lot of breakage these days, severe memory leaks that necessitate closing the application at least once a day (sometimes twice). I suspect the massive boatload of code-breakage coming from Mozilla/Firefox is having it's way with Thunderbird, and with the Mozilla Project so intent on abandoning/not-abandoning it (really the first, they just loudly protest it isn't so) and not enough staff/support, I'm concerned it may not last. And seeing as the alternatives are the bloated and clumsy Evolution, or a multitude of email clients who believe that columnar-only UIs are in ANY way usable, not much available to replace it.

And to state it quite clearly; a web browser is *NOT* an email client.

Re: heh

Beat me to it you did...

Re: An Almighty Trojan Acquisition ........

Not so much a reverse takeover (in the way that Time-Warner took over AOL, even though AOL were the ones doing the buying). It could be possible (I cannot say how likely though) that some of the Directors realized IBM needs to start adopting some of RedHat's culture, or else die an agonizingly slow death.

Re: Am I the only one using Google Meet?

We're using that for our Friday mixer at work. Partially since it's included with the rest of our Google services package.

Re: And google/android will get the flack

Yes, Google needs to be held responsible for not making access controls more granular, and for taking too long to give us the level of granular control we have now. And I'm sure they grudgingly did that, as giving us better control might mean we'd find ways to avoid the Google-kaiju.

But a lot of blame also has to go to the lazy app developers, the ones who configured their apps to "request everything" for permissions, rather than actually THINKING about what they actually needed, and restricting the controls to just those.

Re: CFO Planning

And, six months ago, how many CFO's had a major worldwide pandemic virus and government orders for everyone to stay at home in their plans?

Wouldn't have much mattered if you DID plan for it. Consider the restaurant/theatre chain that actually had "pandemic insurance". Fecking insurance company (and their backers over your way, some place called "Lloyds") tried REAL hard to back out of paying, saying the contract didn't actually name "COVID-19" as a covered pandemic (but it did mention SARS *and* any mutations of it, and guess what COVID-19 is?)

Re: Not on my phone

How long do you think before the back-end data is processed to determine who's phone is seeing the most bluetooth signals regularly and the cops sent to 'remind' them about social distancing? I give it a month, perhaps two and of course it'll all be for our own good.

And how do they differentiate your Phone bluetooth from every other sort of bluetooth? So in your household you each have a phone, a tablet, a laptop (and even newer desktops), and in the house are two or three gaming consoles, a couple of media streaming devices, etc. All these have their bluetooth signatures, and perhaps the corresponding controllers, bluetooth headsets etc get counted here too. Suddenly there's a crowd of 25-30 "people" reported in your house.

About the one thing that was handy with my visiting a partner site every one or two weeks was I could stop by Lowes/Home Crappo/Harbor Freight on the way home and pick up supplies/parts/tools that the local home improvement center doesn't stock. Or some other thing that isn't worth an online order for (where shipping ends up about the same as the item itself).

But then again I have a proper workspace that I've used the past 6 years as a remote employee on multiple jobs.

Re: I'm middle class.

I'd quite like to go to a Volvo theme park.

As opposed to a SAAB theme park, where you just lie by the side of the parking lot, and pieces fall off of you.

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

The thing is, TV's licence tracking is such crap, the machine in question might actually *be* licensed, but that TeamViewer forgot it was licensed.

I doubt WD is worried. They've got no effective competition in the spinning hard drive market (60% market share),

Which is what makes it such a pain in the ass to buy spinning disk these days, especially at your fiendly local WorstBuy store. Staples sells other brands, and on extremely rare occasions you might find some ion their stores (probably somebody slipped up and decided to actually send product to the store).

Re: Saturated Market

You utter b'stard.... I now have Icke Icke Baby - to the tune of Vanilla Ice's ICe Ice Baby - stuck in my head. So thanks for that......

Ah, fortunate then that Clean Tears' "Desperate" has been playing through my head all morning (which is interesting as I've been listening to a lot of Alstroemeria Records product as of late).

Would appreciate it if people would stop conflating "right-wing" with "libertarian".

Re: The Modern UI/UX

In all honesty I am quite convinced that it's the designers who insist that GUIs must be regularly changed because it's the only way they can justify their jobs.

I think it's the only reason ANY products, product packaging, etc get changed. And the stupider, the better. I know I've complained MULTIPLE times to companies that decide they'd rather put some big dopey picture of their product on BACK of the packing, while the microwave directions are in miniature type, and they tell you "see our website for conventional oven directions". NO, dickwits, get rid of the fecking picture and put all the text there, in READABLE type.

Re: lol

Because backtracks compatibility is one of the reasons Windows is such a mess?

Windows is the biggest example of how backtracks compatibility can go wrong and I saying that as someone who uses a virtual version of Windows XP to run some games that I love and some programs I am so used to that I don't want to look for replacements.

There's where I've thought MSWindows should just contribute all their old legacy code to Wine, and then just use Wine as a compatibility layer on top of a pared-down MSWin kernel/API. Old code is still supported, and the core gets cleaned up.

Re: Cables with labels on

so label them with what color they are?

Re: LineageOS

Seeing as I wouldn't be doing banking on my phone anyway (big hands, small screen) it wouldn't matter. Besides, I *despise* store-specific (or business-specific) apps. Generalized, multi-usage apps only allowed.

Slack *might* be OK if it weren't for it's crap UI, their abomination known as "Threads", and their insistence on making it impossible to develop an alternative client (which would be your only hope of making the service at all usable). Unfortunately at work everybody is moving away from IRC and over to Slack.

JR "Bob" Dobbs should be insulted that Slack have managed to tarnish the good name of a central tenet of The Church of the Subgenius.

Re: Background

Other libertarians than he --- even in the highest reaches of government --- also believe in absolute freedom of speech,

Just to clarify that point; libertarians believe strongly in free speech, but also that you are then responsible for that speech. People like to forget that second bit. It's like the big companies who push laissez-faire when it suits them, ignoring the second half that they are also perfectly free to fail unhindered.

I have my two shelving units of records (yes, 12" vinyl) in the background. Oh, and a red hat hanging on the wall.