* Posts by anonymous boring coward

3229 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2015

Twitter breaks bad news to 677,775 twits: You were duped by Russia

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Presumably, out of the 677,775 tweets, 677,774 were about Hillary Clinton, and the rest about Obama.

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

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Re: Sarcasm...

Most likely "erstwhile" is confused with "worthwhile".

I have to admit that I only vaguely recognise "erstwhile", and had no idea what it meant.

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Re: "Religion gave way to pragmatism"?

Although I have used OSX, I'm far from an expert on its inner workings.

But regarding things like plist, at least you can delete them individually. Far preferable to the registry, I'd thought?

Even if launchd is comparable to systemd (I don't know), I'd say that having some monolithic thing like that that is owned by and maintained by a large corporation like Apple, whose existence depends on it working correctly, is not comparable to having systemd in Linux. I just don't like large monolithic and hard to grasp systems in the FOSS world. They tend to ossify and eventually need to be completely replaced.

They sure don't adhere to the original Unix idea.

Have an upvote for your thorough response!

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: "Religion gave way to pragmatism"?

Odd that OSX is user friendly and works just fine with configuration files. No systemd, and no registry.

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Re: "something that isn't backed by anything of value can have value?"

Crytocurrency can be legitimized. In fact, it could be the replacement for plastic and paper sooner or later. It is very likely a good solution in the long term.

Something that requires you to burn large amounts of good energy just to pop out an electronic token at the end can't possibly be a good solution in the long term. It sounds more like the beginning of the end to me.

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Re: Crypto

Riiight.. Didn't even see that. I usually skip most of the article, as the comments tend to be much more interesting and insightful.

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Well, if 95% of the computers have turned into bots, we might have a problem.

So for the ignorant, I'd suggest protecting them from themselves is desirable. It should just be optional.

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Re: Um....

You got home computers to play with, and actually complain?

The alternative of having nothing is quite a bit worse. Trust me.

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Re: Thus spake Matt Asay

A soon as you start seeing suited up "top people" representing organisations you know the end is near.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Luckily we have Intel fanboys that hate anyone saying AMDs are not bad.

And Apple haters that hate anyone paying good money for iThings or Macs. Even when an Android phone hits $1000.

And the habitual MS defender, for whom no amount of privacy invasion is enough, and no amount of Windows telling them what to do, and when, will annoy them. They don't care when the previously bundled applications are dumbed down and/or removed and turned into rent-ware either. Bricking is but a minor annoyance.

And the Linux hater, for whom a command line represents witchcraft that needs to be stamped out forever.

F-35 'incomparable' to Harrier jump jet, top test pilot tells El Reg

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F-35 'incomparable' to Harrier jump jet, top test pilot tells El Reg

The price is pretty incomparable too.

And when will it be delivered? My guess is that it will be delivered soon after the carrier must be scrapped.

Nice toy, until you look at the price tag.

If anyone wanted to cripple us, right now would be a good time to sink the carrier.

P.S: Please try not to use double quoting in the Joey from Friends way...

.UK overseer Nominet abandons its own charitable foundation – and why this matters

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Re: Not unusual, unfortunately

Play with?

More like enriching themselves!

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I'm surprised it took this long!

I expected a grab on all the valuable Internet stuff, payed for by others in money, sweat and tears. Human nature. We need to let drift any institutions that get too big and full of themselves. Just get rid of them.

Same principle as not paying AGAIN to that puppy eyes wikipedia megalomaniac. Get rid of 'em.

Riding on the back of others' hard work.

Destroying the city to save the robocar

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Unless we all want to be obese and/or weaklings, we better keep using our muscles.

You GNOME it: Windows and Apple devs get a compelling reason to turn to Linux

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Re: "there are much more suitable options for that"

I remember that well!

Pragmatism vs purity.

I might still have my Minix somewhere. Nice learning tool. It predated Linux, I believe. (I used Minix on an 8086 back in ca '87.)

I'd argue that being for a micro kernel architecture is being knowledgeable, but being against other more pragmatic solutions as a consequence of that is less so.

Thanks for the link to that nostalgic look back at a flame war! Linus was just as undiplomatic then as now, so no news there!

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Re: So, 2018 will be the year of the Linux desktop because of Gnome?

Most of the time it involves copy-paste, as opposed to typing.

The only typing would be to input your password for "sudo".

I find this much faster than following directions on what menus to open in Windows (version dependent, not to mention language dependent).

Granted, I know the shell well enough to be able to identify if the command line is legit. This is where trusted sources of advice comes in. (Not that different from when using Windows. Don't do whatever someone on YouTube says will be great.)

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Is the full title..

"You break it, you GNOME it: ..."?

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Re: lack of good tools for GUI development

Seems Linux was good enough for Google to use internally for all its development.

And OSX, a Unix derivative, was good enough for Apple for development and end user products.

Guess real programmers can use tools that aren't babysitting them all the time. (Too much babysitting only gets in the way anyway.)

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: "there are much more suitable options for that"

He/she/it just had to say "monolithic kernel architecture" to try to seem knowledgeable.

It failed.

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Re: Oh, dear

At least those "fanboys" have choices, which, incidentally, might be why they are debating the relative merits of them. Cough, cough... Windows 10, cough.

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Re: AC

Are you sure you are not confusing "Linux forum" with Youtube?

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Re: "Read more and try to understand when and where the GPL is an issue"

The GPL doesn't seem to have stopped Google?

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Re: Adobe Creative Suite on Linux...

"How well your $8,995 60" photo printer works with an unsupported driver "

If you have such a printer you have a dedicated PC driving it. You pick whatever OS it needs, and preferably take it off-line if it's Windows so MS can't ruin your day/week/year/life.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

I don't know if you are aware of this, but Android is Linux. The Internet is largely run on Linux. I would be surprised if you didn't have several instances of Linux kernels running in your home already.

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Re: @hititzombisi - single application with single button

That tiny little application called Emacs? I know, it used to be seen as massive and overladen, and look now! Now it looks tiny and spartan compared to the bloat we are used to!

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Re: Example in today's news: Unimpressed by Gnome

"GNOME 3.28 Removes Option to Put Icons on the Desktop"

Read your link and had a laugh!

Just show the limited mindset of some of the people working on these things. No grasp of the wider consequences of their fiddling at all.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Re: So, 2018 will be the year of the Linux desktop because of Gnome?

I think the clue to the purpose of Fuchsia is in the name.

Feds may have to explain knowledge of security holes – if draft law comes into play

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NSA's duty would be to do nothing like this. So I doubt they will.

Anything already known (floating around the internet) or useless will be disclosed. The rest, not so much.

Intel’s Meltdown fix freaked out some Broadwells, Haswells

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Rushing fixes out usually is a cure that's worse than the problem.

Any decent engineer knows this, so I wonder what numpties are in charge at Intel/MS? (That's a rhetorical question, as I think we all know that a having a suit trumps knowing anything.)

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

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Re: athlon

"Though if you choose to defer security updates for 30 days getting your PC bricked could be the last of your worries."

Paranoia. The vast majority of security issues are related to users running things they shouldn't run. I have yet to see a single virus detected (or stopped at any stage) by MS defender (or whatever it's called) on my machine.

Being bricked is sort of bad. Oh, Windows is saying it wants to update right now, as I type this! It doesn't say for how long it will disable my machine whilst updating. Nor any hint of the purpose of this update, or the extent of it. Typical arrogant MS.

As I was planning to actually use the PC right now, I think I'll just tell Windows Update to eff off.

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Re: Who's going to replace my bricked hardware?!

So what did they patch, in case a new boot partition doesn't affect things?

I suspect you are doing something wrong. (Not trying to defend MS and Intel.)

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Yes. That is the correct answer.

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Re: It is true

If it's just a file server I can't see the point of running Windows at all on it.

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Re: Meh Meh Meh

Perhaps they didn't know. But do you HONESTLY believe they wouldn't ship anyway if they did know? Such extreme naivety! We are talking multiple billions of losses here if a processor line was completely withdrawn, and the top brass is BUSINESS people -not engineers with pride and integrity! Grasp this: Business people and sales people don't have pride in the products! All they ever worry about is money. OK?

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Re: Redmond office hours only

"You're drinking the wrong kool-aid"

Someone's got Intel shares, for sure!

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MS made it so slow and painful to update that people stopped updating.

My experience of Linux on the other hand is the complete opposite. It doesn't tend to unexpectedly force a reboot on you either.

It's pretty simple: MS is fixing a problem of their own making by introducing forced updates.

anonymous boring coward Silver badge

Apathy implies some kind of lack of interest. MS is interested, but don't really give a flying feck about ordinary people. They are just too big for that, and their marketing budget is too big as well.

My question was largely rhetorical.

Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX

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Re: That's what they want you to believe

Most people would deny ever having been for Trump, and be deply embarrassed about having him for president. Guess quite a few Americans are a bit different.

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So how do you know if someone is this special kind of yank, unless they first express some moronic view on gun control, climate change, or being brown skinned (Obaka), or being "liberal"?

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Re: Probably the work of SPECTRE

You are sooo dated! Bond now relies on a Seiko digital watch with built-in laser! As seen on Moonraker, and, incidentally, a watch I used to own.

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I bet a forced Windows 10 update caused it.

Meltdown, Spectre bug patch slowdown gets real – and what you can do about it

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Re: As ever, all fine with Apple...

No song and dance, but some actual information in the OSX change logs.

What a difference to the annoying MS "secret society" bollocks.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't modern X86 (x64) basically RISC architecture nowadays? Deep pipeline, very high frequencies, speculative execution, multiple execution units, and all the other benefits of RISC?

(It's been a few decades, so I may have forgotten a few things.)

I suppose the "reduced" in "RISC" may be somewhat missing, making it harder to verify security...

UK exam chiefs: About the compsci coursework you've been working on. It means diddly-squat

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"You know those kids who have got parents who have written code professionally..... they are getting A* for the programming component. Not really a level playing field for those that have normal parents."

Well, at least it makes up a little bit for having abnormal parents.

"Same applies with coursework in some of the other subjects. Kids that have parents that can speak a language, excel in that MFL exam."

Yes, those with parents that can speak no language are really at a disadvantage. (And I'm not even joking now. Sadly.)

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Re: CompSci without coursework - half the size and faster

And don't forget: The tutor also had the satisfaction of belittling the student that was way more clever than himself. An opportunity never to be missed.

US Senators force vote on Ctrl-Z'ing America's net neutrality death

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Re: Overcompensating?

"Nadella.. Pai? I've seen awful managers like this before: People with self-perceived social inadequacies make the worst tyrants."

Agree. But I'm not sure about the difference between the worst tyrants, and the best tyrants?

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Re: Likely won't pass, but...

"Yes, by not meekly going along with the Socialisation of the Internet."

OK, I don't get it. Was that some kind of satire?

You do know that the Internet is like roads, right? You know, those things you can use to go places. Socialist hell holes of snaking tarmac...

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"The controversial repeal of net neutrality rules in America will go to a formal vote in Congress after sufficient lawmakers backed an effort to scrap it."

Rewrite that.

Scrap what? The repeal? Or net neutrality rules?

What is "sufficient lawmakers"? Do you mean "a sufficient number of lawmakers"? (As opposed to sufficiently fat ones, for example.) Also, clarify what "lawmakers" are.

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Re: The More I read About the US of A....

USA isn't "western culture". It's "western". Hope that cleared it up for you?

RIP John Young: NASA's longest-serving 'naut explores final frontier

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Can we please have a portrait photo of him to go with the story?

I believe he was probably the coolest-under-pressure astronauts there has been. And that's saying a lot, in that group!