Posts by DropBear

Re: Doofuses!

...even simply "concluded" would do...

Re: The article says the key is in the hash part of the URL

Right up until a confused party pastes the received "URL" as-is straight into a browser instead of using the appropriate microsite / app / text box / whatever it is you are supposed to actually do with the link (bonus points if they paste it straight into the Google search box instead of the address bar)...?

Re: Lunar Gateway Questions

...is that some kind of "set someone on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life" thing?

Re: No internet in the Amazon?

Those interpreting the "no internet" thing as "in not any place close to the Amazon river" would be of course right to point out that's not true - particularly in the larger cities; but I'd still wager the vast majority of the jungle the Amazon goes through has a serious deficit in not only internet-capable hardware but indeed human presence altogether - and wherever else spears and bows are still mostly the norm of local weapons technology, internet cafes are likely still spread awfully thin on the ground.

Re: There's a bunch of these on FlightAware...

My first reaction was "the real reason this exists is because there's a commonly used aviation tool somewhere that facilitates creation of waypoints in a drawing-like fashion - people are simply using it because it's there!". If this is a common thing, I'm even more convinced that I'm not wrong...

Re: Could do better but not much better

Must have been a different summary table than the one I've seen.

Re: Astounding, indeed

Unfortunately "only" having to properly implement anything is exactly one bridge too far in 99.99999999% of cases. USB2 bandwidth may be more than adequate in theory, but it doesn't matter that I get 30FPS on average in a game when I get all of them in one half of a second - and precisely nothing in the other (or, you know, for the next five seconds - hello there SC...). I remember quite vividly having any audio that was playing glitch on my desktop every time any network traffic occurred whatsoever - and that was hardware bolted onto the motherboard southbridge not even attached via USB, and it was not a single-version bug but the state of affairs with the official mobo drivers from a reasonably reputable supplier! I can't even remember exactly what workaround or update solved it, but to this day my drivers are frozen to the version that finally worked reasonably, any further updates be damned*.

Properly prioritised and enforced resource access is simply NOT something anyone pays any attention to in the twenty-first century - everyone just assumes they are either alone on their bus, or the bus is "fast enough anyway" to let them get away with bloody murder. Except it never actually is, and sometimes to the point where you end up like this - getting to hear it quite clearly.

* let me tell you about that one time when the mouse cursor kept randomly turning into corrupted garbage for an infinity number of further versions of the graphic driver for their then-flagship card long after AMD swore they fixed that - guess when I updated THAT driver the last time...

Re: WTA*

"I don't even understand the need for a bendy phone."

It's not hard to understand though. 1) I'm not willing to carry a tablet-sized device, ie. one larger than a normal phone. 2) I absolutely need a screen larger than a normal phone has - I do all my book reading on my phone, and the current screen size absolutely makes it suck. Also, any browsing I do on it almost sucks worse than seeing my dentist, because I happen to not give a crap about vertically scrolling cards like Facebook timelines or Twitter tweets or Messenger messages, and anything else* is just miserable to read on a screen that size, both in portrait and landscape mode.

* I have yet to see a website with a "mobile" (or worse: "adaptive") version that isn't definitely worse than seeing my dentist...

Re: Windows 8/10 Control panel

Dunno about that. I learned to swear worse than a sailor* when they started to arbitrarily group various bits of the control panel under text links (each of which I had to read and mentally process to navigate them) under equally arbitrary categories in windows 7, compared to the simple grid of named icons I could navigate at a glance** or even mostly just muscle memory** in Windows XP after a bare minimum of familiarity.

* I kid, I kid. That actually happens to all of us once we start driving...

** Which is what makes "recent" or "most used" collections of apps useless - because they're inherently dynamic, there is no muscle memory developing on where to reach stuff so you need to actively identify everything on them all the time, whereas I only needed visual clues on my old XP start menu to fine-correct my cursor movement; which region to reach for was pure memory.

I'm almost certain it just vaguely realised on some level that "what is" tends to be associated with looking for the "definition" of a thing, and "a dog" means the thing is "dog", so just yanked the closest thing it had to a Wikipedia article and quoted it nearly verbatim - mixing it up with some other words just enough to make sure we realize it has no idea what it is doing...

Re: Yee Gods

Also, if your target accepts your friend request, one would assume that's because there is at least _some_ amount of real-world connection between him and whoever you're spoofing - but if that's so, how do you expect that real-world link to not uncover fairly quickly that your "spofee" never actually friended him...?

Re: Hmmm

Don't be silly. How can learning what might put him in the slammer NOT be useful to a terrorist...?

Naaah. My Spirit Animal is still Spanky Ham...

You easily can. But you probably do need a rooted phone. AdAway works nicely for me.

Re: I generate the licenses..

Well, that's why I refuse to (personally) use any software that comes with any kind of "fuel"* that needs to be "topped up" periodically even if it insists it's free and will always be available. It's just voluntarily putting on a collar with a leash somebody else is free to tug on** any time.

* actual real-world example.

** you better be a latex-clad dominatrix if you want to try that with me

Re: Happily

While I'm not the OP, I fully endorse the sentiment. Linux desktop is absolutely fine for a non-Linux person - assuming they never want to touch anything other than Firefox and LibreOffice and whatever the photo viewer is called these days; one needs zero learning curve for that. For absolutely anything else though, as a non-kernel-developer, you hit a brick wall. And I'm not talking about having to use the CLI, as bas as that already makes things - I could live with that. No. It's just a matter of time until you stumble into something that most definitely doesn't work as it should, it cannot be configured to make it work, and the bug report(s) concerning the problem sit either unanswered for half a decade or straight-up wontfixed. That's assuming there is anyone still in charge of that piece of software at all of course.

Yeah, Mate is nice - so how does one go about having a "systray" indicator of received mails that isn't either Thunderbird running all the time or a Gmail-only thing? Because "Mail Notification" is deader than dead, broken, and nothing else works. I never had that problem under Windows. Or - how does one enable direct feedback from mic in back to the headphones, a thing that used to be trivial in the Windows XP mixer, still fairly easily doable under Win7 if you know what checkbox to tick, and flat-out impossible under any GUI mixer in any version of Linux I've seen (and just barely doable in alsamixer text-mode, in a sort of semi-accidental glitchy way)...? The official stance seems to be "just listen to the sampled input played straight back into the output" conveniently glossing over the horrible line delay that doesn't exist with the hardware-based mixer loopback.

And there are hundreds of these paper cuts - I _am_ trying to use Linux and I'm fighting them far, far more than I am actually getting on with what I came to _do_. Invariably, it turns out that the only way to get them to work would be to learn the ins and outs of the software package in question (and all the frameworks it relies on) and code a fix yourself. If you can't do that for whatever reason from "C++ is incompatible with my brain" to "my entire lifespan wouldn't be enough to get all of this working", tough shit. It just won't work. And these are all problems I never had under Windows,,,

Re: Oh well

Fine, make it 7 months then...

No idea what you're talking about. My desktop is a lot older than that, and was bought as a "best value for money, not the best there is" proposition at the time, yet to this day the only piece of software I have ever seen it drag its feet with was Star Citizen - and it even plays that one at a usable if not decent level. There was definitely CPU performance increase in the last ten years, but you seem to heavily overestimate how much, especially compared to typical software needs. See also PC OEMs incessant complaints about people showing no inclination to replace their existing PCs - there's a reason for that...