Posts by jake

Re: Is that picture real

I think you calling it a kiddie killer says more about how you have been brainwashed than it does about the cop car.

"Perhaps only in highway pursuit does the Tesla have an advantage"

Probably not, given the traffic in and around Fremont. Also, the Explorer is a taller seat, allowing you to see traffic ahead of you over the top of other cars. For another thing, it has a higher ground clearance, allowing you to go around stopped traffic in the verge/brush/tules and generally go over curbs and other hazards that would trip up a Tesla. To say nothing of the emergency equipment that an SUV can carry with easy accessibility.

"the Ford Explorer has an 18 (US) gallon fuel tank"

Because of the distances involved here Out West[0], many (most?) jurisdictions equip their patrol vehicles with extended range tanks. I don't know if Fremont does or not (it's only 75 square miles or so), but given the gridlock they experience twice a day, 5 days a week (+occasional weekends), it wouldn't surprise me.

[0] Wherever that is ...

Your local cops have enough money to run two cars per driver?

Personally ...

... I find the convenience of cordless fools makes spending money on several batteries and matching chargers worth it. It helps if you standardize on one of the major vendors, so all batteries fit every tool. Some of the tools are actually more powerful than their corded counterparts, which doesn't hurt any. (Example: The Makita 36V 7 1/4" worm-drive saw is much faster ripping plywood than my Skilsaw model 77 ... I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't prove it to myself. The Mag77 is pretty much retired now).

That said, somehow I seriously doubt anybody is going to have a Tesla and a couple of spare batteries for long distance trips any time soon. What are they going to do, carry them around on a trailer?

Re: Meanwhile, in California...

Must be that other California that they[0] report on occasionally but has never actually been seen by anybody who lives here.

[0] Whoever "they" are, of course.

Hookers, Jack Daniel's and cocaine is canonical.

Re: The Windows comparison

Again, that is the path that YOU chose.

Myself, I have no clients who "force" Windows on me. In fact, I haven't worked on a Redmond based system in anger in almost ten years. Try it, you might like it. Or not. But it's your choice. ::shrugs::

Re: The Windows comparison

"W10 forces untried and untested updates down my throat"

Actually, Redmond does no such thing. In fact, you CHOOSE to use their crapware. There are plenty of alternatives out there. Vote with your wallet.

Re: A singularity enters an event horizon

Orthogonal spacetime.

Re: Smash???

OK, smart guy. Care to place your finger on this anvil? I promise not to hit you with my hammer at a velocity of over 0.001 C ...

_{(There's one in every crowd, isn't there.)}

Re: A singularity enters an event horizon

Ah, yes. Forbes. That great bastion of cutting edge astrophysical thought.

Re: @Jake That's going to make one hell of a racket.

Quiet? Really? I rather suspect that finding any kind of signal in such an event will be well nigh impossible, what with all the noise masking it.

I know I'll probably be long gone by the time it gets here, that's why I'm glad it's there, not here. Of course, what with the inverse square law and all that, in this particular case it probably won't be an issue to whoever is here ... not even if it decides to toss a relativistic jet our way.

(If I'm not here in 1 billion years, it's only because I died trying.)

Re: Smash???

Well, I dunno about you, but I wouldn't want to get a finger stuck between a couple thingies that have a combined mass several billion times that of our Sun, and moving at a fair percentage of the speed of light. Smashed wouldn't even begin to cover it. Perhaps ElReg actually under-reported the impact.

Perspective. It's fun to play with.

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

And four and a quarter billion flies say that shit makes for good chow. Doesn't mean I'm going to emulate them, now does it?

"how would someone who doesn't know they are incompetent do that?'

Are you seriously suggesting that the usability of everything should be dropped down to the user level of the lowest common denominator?

It's going to be awfully difficult to cook your pizza without heat.

Re: re: Once desktop processing power became sufficient to crack the encryption

I owned all 67 megs and 2 megs of RAM in my 3B1 ... Still do, in fact, but it boots 4.3BSD instead of the shitware that AT&T shipped with it.

Yes, I know, the 3B1 was unrelated to the rest of the 3B series. A couple years ago, I was offered a complete, working 3B15 (with tape drive), free for the hauling away. I declined. Historic, yes. Useful, not so much. I think it's in storage at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

"How do you know, you've never met my great aunt Martha?"

I was going with the odds.

Re: Linux is dead

I've been living with and contributing to Slackware for a long time. I've never seen anyone wringing their hands over systemd getting in the way of the Slack init, nor userland. The upcoming 15.0 release will be systemd free ... and if the current 14.X is anything to go by (7 years old, no EOL in sight), 15.X will be with us for a lot of years. Note that Slack's init is a hybrid of SysV and BSD ... It is very resilient in the face of cancers like systemd. I rather suspect that other distros will be looking into the Slack way of doing things before too much longer.

For the record, I haven't had a single system crash or failure to boot that wasn't my own damn fault since the release of Slack 14.0 in September of 2012. This includes the Slack installations that I maintain for friends and family (this timeframe and these results work for BSD, too).

Seriously, try it alongside BSD. I not only advocate it, I employ the pair as my solution.

Re: For Real?

There are bad trolls, and then there are very bad trolls.

And then there is this.

D-, must try harder.

Re: This may solve my procrastination

"I've already decided to move to either Slackware or BSD"

Change that or to an and ... Slack on the desktops, BSD on the servers. Has been working for me for two and a half decades or thereabouts.

Re: Devuan?

Minix is a viable alternative. MeDearOldMum would probably be running it, if I hadn't moved her to Slackware years ago.

Re: Linux is dead

"WHEN (not IF, because 99% of the linux distributors are sheep and can't think for themselves) this abhorrence makes it into mainstream linux, then ...well ...it's game over!"

Hardly. The kernel itself is immune to his machinations, and so is Slackware.

Most of my Linux boxen are desktops. The servers are mostly BSD.

Some of us ...

... have been running Linux on laptops since before the turn of the century. My primary desktop machine has been a laptop running linux since '96 or thereabouts.

"BSD init? It has worked for many many years. And it's far simpler than anything ever used on linux"

Not quite. I can easily setup Slackware to boot with a pure BSD init. And I do occasionally, when it's required.

And BSDinit (4.3 and on) will handle all of the edge cases that sysVinit has issues with.

Slackware has a happy amalgam of both, best of all worlds. Yes, it has a learning curve ... but nobody ever said everything worth knowing should come easy, now did they? (The default will work for almost any desktop user, install it & use it, no need to even look at the init system if you don't want to.)

I use BSD on the servers. Horses for courses & all that.

That said, Slackware makes for a rather good server OS, when setup by a competent admin.

(Before anybody says "But how many of us are competent admins? What about my Great Aunt Martha??? Frankly, if you're not competent, you have no business setting up servers. And besides, your Great Aunt Martha has never installed an OS of any description, and isn't going to start anytime soon, regardless of the machinations and mewlings of poettering and his ilk.)

"You can't run gnome3 without it"

You say that like it's a bad thing ...

I use Slackware on a laptop and never have to think about systemd.

(Actually, I do have to think about it, alas. Can't explain to a table full of C*s why their distro of choice is not a good idea without understanding that distro at a fundamental level ... The more I know about systemd, the less I like it.)

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

"it might become impossible to do a simple systemd-less fork."

So don't use such a fork. Instead, use a distro that never implemented systemd in the first place. Simples.

I use and recommend Slackware. Try it. You might like it. There are other options; most won't cost you anything but a little time and bandwidth to try. Don't forget the BSDs and Minix (surprise!), they have viable options for most folk's desktops.

Re: Ignorantia juris non excusat

His solo stuff is fairly dreadful, but I'm rather partial to the early stuff with The Damned.

Re: Regardless of which side of the fence you are on.

"ignorance is, well, pretty much a common state of affairs for the huge majority in each and every population."

Worse, it's willful, stubborn and very, very vocal ignorance. And the .gov of your choice likes it that way. Why do you think one of the first places that they make cuts is in education?

Re: It was the first time the duo had been caught in the same frame.

And Ansel Adam's "Moon over Half Dome" is also a pretty shot, from late December 1960. Other photographers took landscape[0] shots with the moon included prior to that, back almost to the invention of photography. Arguably, all could be considered "the duo caught in the same frame".

But really, we both know what was meant, right?

[0] Yes, I know, it's in portrait orientation ... again, you know what I mean.