* Posts by JohnFen

5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

JohnFen

I wish I were that optimistic

This looks very bad to me. Sure, there are benefits, but it's far from clear to me that they outweigh the drawbacks. (And nobody has even started talking about the amount of pollution all those launches are going to cause).

Extremely well-funded astronomers will be fine, because they can afford to use telescopes lobbed into orbit. All the other astronomers (who are collectively even more important) will be sucking sand. And, as the article notes, radio astronomy will be hurt the worst.

And for what? So that a small group of largely misbehaving corporations get to increase their ability to control access to the internet?

> We are sharing in one of the greatest revolutions in scientific knowledge in history.

I hope that's right. But it doesn't look like it to me. At best, we aren't sharing in this, we are making sacrifices so that large corporations will get to benefit.

Oi! You got a loicence for that Java, mate? More devs turn to OpenJDK to swerve Oracle fee

JohnFen

Re: "The declining popularity of Eclipse is notable"

I use Eclipse heavily for C/C++ development. It works well for me. But I'm not doing anything remote.

JohnFen

Where I work, we've already jettisoned over 90% of the Java code that we were using. That effort was completed a month ago.

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

JohnFen

Re: Is GitLab trying to give me an excuse to stay on GitHub?

There are other options. The option I took was to self-host.

Internet Society gets tetchy over .org sale delay, half-threatens ICANN over deadlines and jurisdiction

JohnFen

Re: Not schizoid at all

> PIR has nothing to hide and all of ICANN's questions have been answered in public already.

Oh, that's hilarious right there!

JohnFen

Re: Poor little PIR

I agree with everything you said. I was not excusing or minimizing the problems with ICANN. They are numerous and well-known. I was only pointing out that we already knew that ICANN was unacceptably terrible. Now we know that the Internet Society is as well.

JohnFen

Poor little PIR

Not that they're wrong for being a bit irritated (as the article points out), but I have zero sympathy for them on this point. They're doing something awful to the internet here, so screw them.

ICANN is just being ICANN. That's terrible, too, but is in line with what we've all come to expect.

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

JohnFen

Re: Ad flinger makes browser, ad flinger needs to track you

> It's amazing that anyone is surprised

I don't think that anyone is surprised, or at least not anyone here.

JohnFen

Re: Randomly change what's sent back ?

I'll just continue to not use Chrome and evangelize to others against it.

JohnFen

Re: WHY anyone uses Chrome is completely beyond my comprehension

Regardless of any of its other characteristics, the fact that it spies makes it a terrible browser.

Google, YouTube, Twitter tell face-rec upstart Clearview to stop harvesting people's content – that's their job

JohnFen

Well, that settles that

> the startup’s founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That believed his New-York-City-based biz has a “First Amendment right to public information."

It's rare that we get such a strong and overt indication that a company is just straight-up evil.

Boss planning to tear you a new one? Google Glass is back: Weird workwear aimed at devs, but on sale to all

JohnFen

Re: I have a use case

Oh well, it was a nice thought. Thanks!

JohnFen

I have a use case

I have a use case that Google Glass would be perfect for. I haven't yet found another product that can do the same thing as well. However, my main question is -- can this new iteration of the thing be used without involving Google servers? If so, then this is something I would be willing to pay largish money for. If not, then this is a nonstarter.

Microsoft Teams starts February with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*

JohnFen

Re: Sucks

> It's been nearly six months, and many people seem to be using it grudgingly and as little as possible, while many others seem to be successfully ignoring it entirely.

That's been the pattern where I work -- Teams is ignored by most people when possible, because it does more harm than good. The big exception is the suit who demanded that we get rid of the old system in favor of O365, and particularly teams. He is constantly putting stuff on the company-wide Teams team (channel?) and then complains that nobody ever responds.

JohnFen

Re: Sucks

I hate Teams, because Teams simply blows chunks.

In the larger picture, though, I strongly prefer email over IM. IM demands immediate attention. Email can wait until I have a few moments.

JohnFen

Re: Executive Hubris

> A series of non-IT execs shoved us into the O365 cloud so they could "collaborate better" without considering the down sides.

This was exactly how I got ensnared in the O365 nonsense as well.

JohnFen

Damn, I missed it

I wish I could have enjoyed the absence of Teams at work today.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

JohnFen

> Sadly, it's the only option unless you want to scroll through the start menu looking for something

If you use a start menu replacement, then this isn't so painful. Personally, I find it faster and easier to use the (classic) start menu rather than typing in the program because unless the program is something I use a lot -- in which case I have it pinned on the start menu -- then I don't usually know the name of the program when I want to use it.

JohnFen

I don't. I could never make it work well enough to be useful.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

JohnFen

Re: The way forward

> You couldn't escape it on slashdot about 20 years ago.

I was very active on Slashdot around then.

> Everytime someone commented on some great new software (that was on Windows only) there would be a huge bunch of replies bitching that "the software should be portable".

Well, that may explain it, then. I never bothered to read about Windows-only software. I will suggest, though, that the Linux people who did this are a serious minority and not at all representative of the attitude of the Linux community in general. We are talking about /. after all.

JohnFen

Re: The way forward

> Linux users regularly moaned that software should be portable.

I've been in the Linux world for decades, and I don't remember any such moaning at all. I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but it didn't happen enough that it's something that I noticed.

JohnFen

Re: My pet theory for this shites existance is that...

> the lead developer is seeking to make his mark on history

Oh, he's already done that. Probably not in the way he wanted, though.

JohnFen

> Cloudless hot-desking? Great.

Not great. Hot-desking is a scourge whether or not the cloud is involved.

JohnFen

Re: I wonder if I'll be able to...

I have a bootable USB stick with Linux installed that accomplishes this (in the absence of disk encryption, anyway).

JohnFen

Re: Finally!

Slackware, my old friend. One of the first distros I used, but then I left for newer, sexier distros in the years since. I need to rekindle that relationship.

JohnFen

I refuse to allow any of my personal machines to interact with my employers machines at any deep level. Doing so poses far too much risk to both myself and my employer. If my employer expects me to use mobile devices or laptops, then they must supply them to me.

JohnFen

A million times no

Portable home directories give me nothing I need or want and brings extra complexity to the operating system. There's zero chance that I'll be enabling this stuff. Particularly after I'm done escaping this Brave New Linux World and go to BSD.

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

JohnFen

Re: Performance? Art?

Excellent. You've pointed me in a possibly great direction, I appreciate it! I don't care about real-time traffic information, just directions. That should make it easier.

JohnFen

Re: Performance? Art?

Thank you! I'm going to look into doing something similar.

JohnFen

Re: Performance? Art?

> (Older Garmin plus OpenStreetMaps plus Afrikaans voice)

I really do want to get a nav system that doesn't need to talk to servers anywhere. Is that working well for you?

JohnFen

Re: Performance? Art?

I'm the same, although I try to avoid using it even for routes I haven't gone before. Instead, I'll plan out the route before I leave. I consider online navigation to be a "last resort" sort of option.

JohnFen

Re: Ingenious

I wonder if maps pays attention to GPS elevation information?

JohnFen

Re: Performance? Art?

> I totally fucked up the city

No, he totally didn't.

JohnFen
Pint

This is brilliant

Buy that man a beer.

Quick, get the popcorn: Amazon Web Services says Microsoft's benchmarks for Azure are a load of stripe

JohnFen

Re: So Amazon paid $5Bn in various taxes

Payroll taxes aren't Amazon paying taxes. It's the people who work for Amazon paying taxes.

JohnFen

Re: 3.4 times faster and up to 87 per cent less expensive

> "up to" == "less than"

Except for those sales which are advertised as "save up to x% OR MORE!" Those drive me nuts.

JohnFen

It'll be fun to watch

It'll be fun to watch, even though there is nothing less interesting or meaningful than fights over benchmarks.

BSOD Burgerwatch latest: Do you want fries with that plaintext password?

JohnFen

Re: Surprised they don't use *NIX

Yes, this is mostly a problem with modern non-OSS software, although there is notable OSS software than has adopted the same madness as well.

JohnFen

Re: Typical PoS system

When I first saw systems being called (with a straight face) POS, I laughed and wondered what marketing genius managed to sneak through naming a class of systems "piece of shit". Because that used to be the only thing it meant.

Then I had to work on them, and learned that I underestimated that person's accomplishment. Those systems are both "points of sale" and "pieces of shit" at the same time!

JohnFen

Re: Surprised they don't use *NIX

> It IS "progress" that we should not let systems run for years on end without getting patched.

But it's the exact opposite of progress that you can't just get and apply security-only patches anymore. That gives a pretty strong disincentive to keep stuff up to date security-wise for a lot of people and companies.

Difficult season: Antivirus-flinger Avast decides to 'wind down' Jumpshot

JohnFen

Re: It's been said many times...

It all went wrong when we allowed marketing companies to effectively take control.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

JohnFen

Re: Polite request

For my use case, they've already buggered TB up.

JohnFen

Re: Oh God No

> this is a potential attack vector since the code is no longer being actively maintained by Mozilla.

TB uses Firefox's engine for HTML, so it's certainly being actively maintained.

That aside, it's true that HTML is a potential attack vector anyway, which is why I don't allow HTML to be rendered. When I said I look at the raw HTML, what I meant was that I actually read the HTML source, not that I allow it to be interpreted.

JohnFen

Re: Thanks for the clarification, Smooth Newt

> It's an age-old technique from before the days when "telemetry" was a gleam in a data-harvester's eye

AKA "the good old days".

JohnFen

Re: I've stopped using it

I use a combination of two plugins: Exchange Calendar and Lightning.

JohnFen

Re: "a fork will come along that does it better"

I'm not planning a fork, but...

I'm sitting still on TB 52.9.1 because more recent releases broke things of value to me. Should using the older version become unsustainable, my backup plan is to write my own email client. Email clients aren't terribly tricky to implement if you don't care about things like HTML, image rendering, and etc. -- which I don't.

JohnFen

Re: Oh God No

> Gecko's important for handling of those awful HTML e-mails that people will insist on sending.

Personally, when I get an HTML email from someone who I shouldn't ignore, I just read the raw HTML. It hasn't failed me yet.

JohnFen

Re: I've stopped using it

> And if you're using Exchange, you basically have to use Outlook.

We are forced to use Exchange at my workplace, but I use TB to interact with it (including for calendaring). It works very well for me, and lets me avoid having to using Outlook.

Facebook coughs up $550m to make AI photo tagging lawsuit vanish. How ever will it survive on that $17.9bn left over?

JohnFen

What community?

> "We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter,"

I understand that this is in the best interest of their shareholders, as losing the lawsuit would be even worse for business. But community? What community are they talking about here? It certainly can't be FB users.