Posts by jake

Nah. It was clearly the NorKs.

That, and most people are SO easily influenced and lead astray ...

Remember those triangular UFOs that were all the rage a few years ago, from the early '80s thru' the early 2000s?

I created one of those triangles in a campground in the Sierra by stringing three little dim lights about 40 feet up, in an open space between some pine trees. Come later in the evening, we were all telling tall tales around the camp fire, as is typical in such situations. I told a story about my supposed encounter, on Priest's Grade/Coulterville Road (one of the many back doors into Yosemite), and at the opportune moment had my Wife turn on the lights and point up with a "Just like that one?".

The lights were just bright enough to fool the eye into thinking that there were no stars showing between them .... Presto, huge dark triangular shaped "craft" over our camp fire. When the wife shut them off after about 5 seconds, I yelled "Shit! Did you see how FAST that thing was?". One of the guys not in on the trick commented that it made it over the next ridge (about four miles away) in under a second. Strangely enough, almost everybody agreed with him. At this point, some people were claiming they thought it was redish. They got quite inventive about what they thought they had seen.

The oddest thing is that when I collected my wire and lights the next morning, several people asked what I was doing. I told them. They did not believe me! So I told everybody the truth about the hoax over breakfast. Most of them refused to listen, and today many of them still tell the story of the huge triangle craft hovering over our camp that disappeared like a bat out of hell when we all looked up at it.

I never messed with that kind of mass illusion again. Too much room for error.

Re: Let Mulder and Scully check this out!

Sadly, I know people who think that badly scripted and worse acted show was a documentary.

Re: What kind of urgency is that?

"There was not a single day that I have not head about transgender online"

PICS OR IT NEVER HAPPENED!

It's probably Schumer and Co. giving the frothing loons in the House and Senate a distraction. The increasingly shrill babble from the "Trump won!" Q-anon whackjobs is starting to give the general public a headache.

Re: relying on the explodey hydrocarbon rockets

Since when could passing billionaires keep secrets like that? You've read their tweets, haven't you?

"release of the info would increase the paranoia and conspiracy theories"

Of course. Because the .gov will be so stupid as to admit that some stuff has been left out of the release "for security reasons", which is obviously where they are hiding the stuff about the aliens.

It couldn't possibly be because releasing the info would give China and Russia information on capabilities of hardware that is currently undergoing test and labeled "top secret" and/or our own capability of seeing what the bad guys are doing ... Nope, it must be aliens, innit.

Re: Give aliens some credit

More likely, they'd fatten us up for dinner. Quality protein is probably quite hard to find in the Universe.

Re: Oh really

There is a theory which states that if ever there is a thread in the ElReg forums about Space and/or UFOs where one or more commentards do not regurgitate the same old boring quotes from Douglas Adams' works of fiction there will be great rejoicing.

Re: Carrot vs Stick

"And for the folks behind Budgie to declare MATE as dead... That's just bollocks."

Indeed. In my travels in and around Silicon Valley (including the Unis in the area), I have never seen anybody using a Budgie desktop in the wild. Not once. MATE is almost common, although Cinnamon seems to have taken over that part of the desktop in recent years.

Don't listen to Marketing, folks! It's their JOB to cajole, nudge, bully and obfuscate you into listening to them, regardless of the suitability of their product for your needs.

Re: Really?

"There are quite a few distros that don't but they are quite niche. It's over; systemd won. Sorry, but it did."

Only two major distros adopted it (RedHat and Debian). RedHat did it because they are trying to be Windows (were trying? gawd/ess only knows IBM's intent at this point). In Debian's case, it was an accident of history, in essence fall-out from a large internal power struggle. In other words, it was a political choice. It certainly wasn't for technical reasons. Thus Devuan.

The rest of the distros to implement it, being mostly clones of those two, blindly followed due to ignorance and/or apathy, with a pinch of sheer laziness on the part of the devs. They certainly didn't spend any time thinking about the ramifications, beyond "I use that software repository, so I must comply".

y

The systemd-cancer didn't "win", rather the community at large is losing. This can still be turned around.

Re: Really?

"No one has a philosophical problem with it"

From my perspective, the arguments against Wayland are about equally split between technical and philosophical.

"just concerns about whether it is mature enough"

Which it isn't, not by a long-shot, and after 15 years of development (15!), I'm pretty sure it never will.

"and worries it may cut out the BSDs."

Frankly, the BSDs can handle themselves. They'll either make it available to their users, or not. Regardless, Wayland will not "take over" anything in the BSD world because the very idea of "taking over" is anathema to the BSDs. Something the kitchen-sinkware corporate Linux distros would do well to emulate.

Re: "if it does its job correctly, the user [..] might never know they were using it"

Indeed. The ultimate OS is the one that blissfully gets out of the way and allows me to do my job with no histrionics. For my needs, the systemd-cancer free Slackware (sans Wayland) does exactly that. Try it, you might like it.

The only time I actually think about which OS I am running is when I'm responding in threads like this one.

Re: How to do this with Wayland? Don't know!!

Wayland overall is a huge step backward. That's why it's still an also-ran after 15 years. Nobody really wants it outside the Corporate world.

Remember, X is still available. And will remain available until roughly the heat death of the universe. That's one of the beauties of FOSS.

Yes, X has problems. It needs an upgrade or replacement. But Wayland is not that replacement no matter what the fanbois tell you.

"When, say, a calculator app (i.e. something non-resizable)"

Calculator "apps" and the like are not resizable these days? How the mighty have fallen ...

_{Have you tried 1994's xcalc? It's easily customized to suit your needs.}

Re: At least systemd worked…

"Reinstall the old driver and pin it so that it doesn't get upgraded, or switch to the open drivers."

Try both. Pin the one that works best for your needs. It's your computer, it doesn't belong to your video card manufacturer.

Note that one or more of the current LTS kernels might be your best option for older hardware. For example, LTS kernel 4.4 (released in very early 2016) will be maintained until at least 2026, and probably until 2036 ... and possibly beyond, if there is a need. If your hardware runs nicely on that, it might be an option for you.

"an indication that Linux is moving further and further away from being a UNIX-like OS to being something distinct from it."

And yet here I am, happily using a non-systemd-cancer distro, and not running Wayland. And I see absolutely no reason why this will change in my lifetime.

Linux is the kernel. It is not X or Wayland or the systemd-cancer or any other init. Linux is just the kernel. Shall I repeat that? Linux is just the kernel. You are allowed, nay ENCOURAGED, to graft the bits and bytes onto it that make an OS that suits you, the way you use a computer. There is no "one size fits all", and never will be, despite all the corporate interests trying to make it so.

"The people doing the the most promising Linux port to Apple M1 and M2 hardware have said that they do not have enough resource to both re-write the X.org backend display driver for the new silicon, and also do a Wayland compositor. So they've opted to just do Wayland."

Possibly smart. When Apple change their mind and do another radical switch in hardware (as is their wont), they'll have to re-write it all from scratch. Again.

I hate treadmill programming. Still, I guess it's a living.

I think there is a subset of commentards who think that their "thumb" somehow will help make differing opinions go away. It's their ineffectual attempt at censorship.

For the Yanks in the audience who don't do Wiki, the Wagon Wheel (from 1947) is essentially a British copy of the Moon Pie (1917) (in some states the Scooter Pie is more common, but is essentially the same thing). If you prefer ice cream to marshmallow, here in the US you'll want an It's-it ... which is a whole 'nuther kettle of worms.

No, they are not identical, but they all share a common esthetic. Kids love 'em, adults maybe not so much.

All are easy enough for kids to make ... When we host birthday parties, we have 'em make their own.

RC cola optional (personally, I prefer coffee ... strong, black, no sugar. No kid's confection, either, come to think of it ... ).

Re: spell checker changed it to "Microsoft Encarta"

That's because Encarta wasn't Microsoft's. It was the CD version of the 120+ year old Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia.

Odd ...

... using DDG, the first six options when I search "RDS" are for Respiratory Distress Syndrome ... I would never have guessed this. I guessed Reliable Datagram Sockets would be near the top; it wasn't. I was actually hoping to see Random Dot Stereogram, at least by the second page, but no ...

That would be a relic, not an icon.

"Office is still Office and not Microsoft 365 Apps for Business as well."

When we're not calling it Office 361 ...

It's not for its own sake, it's to enrich those in power.

See early xtians reorganizing and renaming icons of various extant religions and making coin off it.

Re: There’s that term again

"Never trust anyone who uses that."

FTFY

Re: This has been done before...

"Remember the days when corporations sent ships to West Africa and picked up local workers, offering them nice new jobs"

Read your history. The "western" traders BOUGHT the workers from the locals, who had enslaved them[0].

Re-writing history to isolate one "bad guy" when there were many bad guys involved is worse than outright censorship. Tell it like it was, or don't tell it at all.

"These days "slavery" has been eliminated"

No. It has not. It's a huge problem, world-wide.

_{Note that I don't condone any part of this behavior, not by any stretch of the imagination.}

Re: Clickbait journalism

I'm pretty sure the so-called "super powers" (China, the US, Musk and BEZOS) are the ones engaged in the race. The journalists are just reporting on it.

Re: Univac-Flavored Unix??

"When did Univac/Unisys ever run Unix on its systems?"

Officially? Starting in mid 2003ish, with the 2.6 Linux kernel.

Unofficially, a trifle earlier. Probably late 2001 or so.

Re: Sausage Factory

"Kinda hard to force a client to install these at their own site."

Nah. It's all in the presentation. "It would cost you upwards of $BIGNUM per hour if that server were accidentally unplugged. If I install one of these simple devices, at a cost of $smallnum (including labo(u)r), that possibility is removed forever". In fact, they are so cheap and easy to install that I've been known to install them gratis and not even bother mentioning it.

"If you can get them to do that you can usually convince them to put the equipment in a server room off limits to cleaners"

THAT is easy. The hard part is convincing them that the former closet now needs its own AC ...

"(Unfortunately then you still have the problem of "security guards" who make it their life's mission to switch off aircon in unoccupied rooms - including rooms full of noisy equipment and racks)"

So remove the switch from places accessible to "security guards". It's not rocket surgery.

Re: Why isn't Windows Server Windows?

"a cleaner version of Windows without bloat"

That word "without", I don't think it means what you think it means.

Try instead "with a little less bloat".

_{And "cleaner" is very, very subjective ...}

Re: Sausage Factory

"it's becase the cleaners unplugged it"

For future reference, they make locking outlet covers that fit over an inserted plug or plugs, preventing the removal of same. The locks are trash, easier to pick than a file cabinet, but they work for this kind of thing. Under twenty bucks, and usually in stock at your favorite purveyor of sparky stuff. They make more expensive and harder to defeat versions, too. They come in both indoor and outdoor versions. Recommended.

_{And of course sometimes nothing beats hardwiring the machine(s) in question into either a J-box or the breaker panel.}

Re: Mapping Máaz: NASA Uses Navajo Language To Name Features On Mars - NPR

1) The rover's computer runs VxWorks, which speaks UTF-8 like a native.

2) The rover's command and control systems only use 1byte/char. Saves bandwidth between here and there.

3) There is no reason to tell the rover that the rock has a name, much less what that name is.

4) Consider the source of your quote. They are not exactly known for their rocket surgery.

"Can any of the research be used in subsonic jets?"

Judging by the past, very probably. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on it.

But who cares? It'll also be used in SSTO craft ... which are necessary if we truly plan to get off this rock en masse.

Re: "Concorde famously burned an awful lot of it's fuel just getting off the ground "

Arguably, given the expected use profile, the SR-71 did in fact need it.

Horses for courses and all that.