* Posts by JEDIDIAH

2525 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009

H-1B visa applications from India plummet (and Trump can't claim credit)

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: Thanks, Trump

Jobs like mine were already being outsourced to India long before this. Long before Obama even. My first personal experience with it was right before 9/11.

Media players wide open to malware fired from booby-trapped subtitles

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: There are legitimate uses for movie downloads

I have my own copy of old Trek episodes because Netflix mutilates them much like those cut rate independent broadcast channels we have over here that just show re-runs.

Providers and publishers can't seem to avoid screwing around with the aspect ratio of old content. Wide screen stuff gets panned and scanned and 4/3 stuff gets mangled into wide screen.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: "Freetard" is an incorrect name for a user of open-source software

That's utter bullshit. You can be more than a mindless bootlicking sheep without being a thief or criminal.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: "Freetard" is an incorrect name for a user of open-source software

I still have some divx files laying around from back before transcoding into h264 was a practical thing to do with the available hardware.

Early adopters curse.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Will they ever learn?

Only very basic subtitles are plain text. Anything you are likely to see on a UK DVD is going to be an image based subtitle.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: didn't read it

I recently got some old UK TV reruns because they have a classic Doctor in them. They were a cheap crap product that didn't include any subtitles. You would accuse me, A PAYING CUSTOMER, of being a "freetard" for using 3rd party subs to deal with a shoddy product.

This is why the use of "freetard" is a pretty good "douche detector".

SSD price premium over disk faaaalling

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Tech marches on...

A couple of years ago I bought a huge monstrosity of a laptop so that I could have 2.5TB storage space. That included standard "large" form factor drives both SSD & HDD.

Now a mere 2 years later for the same price I can buy from the same vendor a similarly equipped machine that looks more like a MacBook than an 80s luggable. It's all smaller form factor SSD.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: 160 GB is probably more than enough for 99% of people

The actual footprint on real consumer desktops is considerably larger with 10 than 7. Even rube consumer users manage to notice this themselves.

Corporate systems that are curated by professionals really are quite irrelevant here.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Unused capacity

Storage capacity on consumer desktops goes underused in general. I would not expect a switch to SSD to alter this.

The bigger drive will always be chosen by the consumer PC vendor. They want to sell a bigger number. The cheapest way to achieve that will be chosen. Because the consumer market is all about pushing the cheapest piece of crap they can manage.

The only people that would care to pick the smaller SSD are also those more likely to need more capacity than SSD can handle.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Most/many of us

> Your needs are not everyone else's needs.

Except you are just the pedestrian consumer. You don't drive any of this.

EU ministers approve anti-hate speech video rules

JEDIDIAH
Holmes

Re: My child ...

Not only would they come under the heading of "anti-bullying" law but they have squat to do with the kind of attempts at censorship that characterize any attempt to address "hate crimes".

Things like assault, battery, sexual assault are all real crimes that have their roots in ancient common law. You don't need a special new class of laws to address those things.

You don't need to define something new like "double plus murder".

Huawei missed memo that PC's dead – so here are three new notebooks

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Why the 15in screen cop out? @Steve Davies 3

My main Linux machines are not cheap. They're overpowered monsters. I actually do stuff with my computers.

I have a number of Linux based appliances that use cheap kit because the task allows it. I wouldn't put much power in a device that's a glorified terminal either.

Something should be no more or less expensive than the task requires. Quality should win out over cheapness. Many of us dumped other options not because Linux is cheap but because the other options were crap.

Project Gollum: Because NHS Caring means NHS Sharing

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: Am I the only one appalled that an attack like WannaCry can happen to the NHS?

>> and yes, the backup media is stored off site.

> Yes; In the boot of a car, parked on a <shady> street. I have seen this done :(

Yeah. On the other hand I've seen Iron Mountain destroy backups before. All you can really do is ensure that you've got more than one backup. Even the most robust DR plan using "reputable vendors" can run into problems.

8 out of 10 cats fear statistics – AI doesn't have this problem

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: The purpose of statistics

My favorite bit of statistical nonsense is a study that went out of it's way to obscure any relevant information that might be meaningful to a normal person seeking information on the topic in question. They basically cooked the numbers in order to make any useful distinctions disappear.

US healthcare under siege: Got good insurance?

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Disraeli and Clemens walk into a bar again.

I file this under "fake news". Numbers meant to create a result and further an agenda.

The funny thing here is that you're citing numbers that also put the UK on the bottom.

You shouldn't be snickering. According to that propaganda, you're in the basement with us Yanks.

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Disraeli and Clemens walk into a bar.

Those same metrics put the NHS just above the US. Those metrics also don't correlate between the "quality" and "outcome" metrics.

There are also more than 11 industrialized countries.

JEDIDIAH
Holmes

No, not really.

> So why does healthcare in the US cost so much? Could it be that someone is being ripped off?

It doesn't really. The media just have a certain narrative they like to push.

My "big procedure" cost the same as it would have in London. The number that the news media would give you for that procedure is a fiction.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Stiff the most well trained professionals.

You can't add a bunch of under served sick people to the rolls without it costing money. Insurance companies aren't going to do that for free. Do you work for free? Why do you expect anyone else to?

As far as our public options go... those suck. They don't pay well enough to keep hospitals in business.

Americans in general think they can get something for nothing. Democrats are just right of Tories when it comes to this stuff. Don't be taken in by their rhetoric. They would run the NHS on one third of it's current budget.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Liberal nonsense.

Obamacare is set to implode on it's own. Trump doesn't have to touch it. Saddling people who can't get employer based insurance with the highest risk patients was never a bright idea. It's the ultimate regressive tax but liberals everywhere insist on pretending that it's a good thing.

Donald Trump running insecure email servers

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: So...

Powell can approve of something without being in office. Dems like to excuse Hillary's behavior because Powell thought it was OK. That goes both ways.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Thar she blows!

He actually has public policy positions. Some of them are funny in subtle and not so subtle ways, but he does have them. He's not quite the caricature the media has portrayed him to be.

Actually the American media reminds me a lot of Internet trolls. Take something, distort it, then pretend that distortion is the truth.

He's much more of a mundane Republican than he's made out to be.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Thar she blows!

OK then... where are those nice juicy leaks?

Why aren't there any embarrassing emails being passed around already?

Microsoft tries, fails to crush 'gender bias' lawsuit brought by its own women engineers

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: Suddenly everyone is a Microsoft legal expert

I can rubbish their products just fine. I can examine them myself. Stuff like this is nonsense, rumours, and hearsay. I'm as willing as the next guy (or 10) to bash Microsoft, but I am going to make any assumptions here or put stock in anyone that does.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Flawed assumptions

Guys like champions. We respond well to them. We raise them on our shoulders. We are socialized to admire those that achieve greatness. This works well with genuine egalitarian female professionals. They get treated like another professional and actually get less grief from men than from other women.

In practice, it's often lower ranked females that would seek to sabotage a female professional.

FCC death vote looms for the Golden Age of American TV

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Golden age my foot

What you see is being filtered. It's like the classics of any genre. The crap falls away and isn't visible any more so you forget about it. You don't see the other 90% of the dreck. So you end up with a false impression of some bygone era or some other country.

Microsoft warns Windows security fix may break network shares

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: I suspect there's nothing broken to fix.

Even a beta release should have proper release notes. Those should have been available to internal QA when testing was done against these changes.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Nothing to see it will be sorted

Back when I still had Macs, they were terribly unreliable when it came to network shares. They would tend to stop working for no reason. It was avoidable but you had to mount things with command line tools. This included all manner of connections including Mac <-> Mac.

Mark Zuckerberg and the $3bn cash fling: He's not your father's tech kingpin

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: PR spin

Zuckerberg is young. He might directly benefit from any new breakthroughs that happen. He might end up saving his own life. It's not a completely altruistic gesture.

Everybody gets sick.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Been there, done that.

I am here to contradict your dimwitted nonsense because of one of those drugs you're trying to scoff at.

Cancer is a tough nut to crack. It's our own bodies betraying us. It's not something that will be sorted with some quackery you found in a chain letter. It's something that we've put a lot of effort into for a long time now (probably since before you were born).

NHS health apps project plan: Powered by your medical records

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: There is no security issue

Well, if you have Tories (or Republicans) then you have to account for this fact. You can't just ignore reality and assume that all will be well.

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: There is no security issue

Spot on. Everyone loves a handout but no one likes to pay.

Americas public healthcare options suffer from the same problem. Everyone is stingy and everyone has a different excuse for not properly funding things. The problem with the government being in charge of things is not the inherent problems with large systems or civil servants. It's the fact that someone will always want to cut the budget.

Forget Khan and Klingons, Star Trek's greatest trick was simply surviving

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: The Future is pretty close to what it used to be...

...a better answer to that question is "I don't know" or "either they don't work, or they do work".

This is how you know these people don't know anything about the actual science involved.

Something about cats would have also been good.

JEDIDIAH
Devil

You can't even relate to the 60s.

Yes, and Dr Martin Luther King himself told her to stay put because even that was an inspiring improvement. People have lost all sense of perspective about these things.

Whoopi Goldberg could probably tell you a thing or two...

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: proof read?

I dunno. I've actually heard the man speak and it seemed he was more about Humanism than science and technology.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: that really gave Star Trek muscle was, in a word: science.

Star Trek is a space western. The "physics" of the show serve the plot and the budget. It's nominally sci-fi because of the "tech getting us new places" angle but it's pretty thin really. Without a few good brawls and space battles Trek would have died a long time ago. If anything, the pretense gets in the way.

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: Embedded systems!

They market devices like this for old Ataris and Amigas.

Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

"nice" lawyers

Lawyers have to deal with nasty shits that think they are above the law and can get away with breaking contracts and crippling people. They exist because people are scum and courts are less harmful than duels and rampaging vigilante mobs. They have to be jackasses because they are dealing with jackasses. If you're nice, people will eat you alive. Clients will take advantage and corporations will walk all over you.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Re: I'm mixed about this..

> From what I read in the thread(s) of the mailing list: Linus does want to enforce them, but without using lawyers.

That's like using nothing more than harsh language against a Dalek.

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: So, to sum up...

"It's my party, and I will swear if I want to..."

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: So, to sum up...

RMS organized the creation of "the rest of it".

His contributions are not trivial.

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: So, to sum up...

Lawyers are a reflection of their clients. They are weapons. They merely implement policy. Those policies are set by the people that hire them.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Let the adults speak...

As an actual, experienced, full time, production DBA, I hate the idea of depending on the database vendor for disk access code. It's a layer of obfuscation and something outside the scope of what ANY of the database vendors are actually good at. It completely breaks the Unix idea of well functioning, limited, highly specialized tools. It also ensures that the host of tools that can be employed against a regular file system are now WORTHLESS.

It's also going to be a terrible bother for the shallow end of the talent pool (which is the vast majority).

I would only deal with an RDBMS disk access layer if I absolutely had no choice.

JEDIDIAH
Linux

Are you kidding?

Are you kidding? EVERYONE hates lawyers. Ragging on lawyers is more like an attempt by Linus to pander to the masses.

California to put all your power-hungry PCs on a low carb(on) diet

JEDIDIAH
Devil

Re: CPUs vs PSUs

Yeah, that's the real solution. Just turn stuff off when you don't use it. Even go so far as to disconnect it from wall power so it doesn't draw power while "idle". Surge strips are great for that. I had to do that with an ION HTPC in the bedroom because it still made noise when it was off. Bothered the spouse.

De-powering everything else that's supposed to be off but really isn't would probably save more than this nonsense.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: I'm cautiously optimistic ...

Yeah... been there, done that. I would rather run an old ION.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

The Peoples Republic of Californa

...yet another reason I am f*cking glad that I didn't move to California.

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: Just another distraction.

It doesn't really matter what kind of slander people come up with. I am NOT left of the Democrats.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: The one thing all the media, and this one too, won't be telling you...

A lot of people are simple in the middle not affiliated with either side. It has been this way since the Continental Congress nearly didn't pass the Declaration of Independence. Both parties are full of themselves and don't acknowledge to what degree people don't drink either flavor of Kool-aid.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Re: Now That Bernie is Out....

Both Bernie and Trump talk nonsense like the Golden Girl with no impulse control. They say whatever stupid shit that comes into their heads or what they think will get them elected.

OTOH, most politicians are like that...

Both represent fringe elements that need to be ejected from their respected parties. Both aren't really members of the parties they are running for. Trump is just an attention whore and Bernie is too afraid to properly label his party affiliation.

JEDIDIAH
Mushroom

Walken/Busey 2016

Quite. The role of the President primarily plays off what's happening in Congress. Both of our parties are nuts and neither one of them should have control of Congress and the White House at the same time.