Posts by cream wobbly 127 posts • joined 26 May 2015
I work with people like you, and from bitter experience, I hate you.
Yes. (From bitter experience) I'm completely the opposite to our commending friend. I'd go so far as to say that documentation, communication, is vastly more important than the config change itself. If you can't reverse it or replicate it, it's a guess, it's a hack, it's broken and there's the door.
A problem with automation scripts written by sysadmins is that they generally do not have a development background...
A problem with automation scripts written by developers is that they generally do not have a sysadmin background.
It's true both ways around, which is why the top role was originally called Unix Programmer. It's rare for a company to knowingly employ such a deity these days. They'll make do with mere Systems Administrators who know a bit of scripting; or even System Operators who sometimes know how to change a config without manpages.
I shall always admire the Swiss and Walloons for their septante and huitante. It's funny to tease French nationals with and watch them pretend they can't understand, bunch of soixante-dix têtes. They're obvious words, and they make daily life so much simpler.
Yeah, I'm wavering between her being incompetent, and her being bullied.
Then there's the other old saying, "why not both?" Maybe she's incompetent and someone took it upon themselves to "constructively dismiss" her. With that model applied to the back-and-forth above, she might not be able to effectively support her accusation, but have sufficient knowledge to make the accusation in the first place.
The typical "jokey" English work environment? Modern equivalent of striped paint, long stand, etc.? Honestly wouldn't be surprised. Bullies are rife.
"it's very difficult to write technical documentation that essentially boils down to a sequence of steps in a manner that does not sound robotic"
You're using a GUI. Get used to robotic-sounding instructions. If you don't like them, explain to the manufacturer that you prefer proper grown-up scripts because you don't like your instructions to sound robotic.
You ring the doorbell. You click the mouse. You boil the kettle.
Oh, didn't you realize "boil" is onomatopoeic? Ah well. Carry on pretending to be an authority on English.
"There's still a lot that Adobe Flash can do which HTML 5 can't"
Such as entirely hand over your computing resources to Russian-occupied Ukraine, North Korea, and China? Sure. That's what they're trying to fix. Do keep up.
Huh. Interesting. When it's Blighty, or the Yanks, or them upsidedown cobbers, when a list of "possible suspects" for cyberwarfare attacks are characterized as "naughty colonialist types" and it's the attackers' faults. When it's Pakistan with a massive list of suspects, it's their own fault?
Says more about you than it does them, mate.
Yeah, I never could get the ZX81 ROM to work on my Commodore 64.
If you don't want a Mac, don't buy a Mac. You're very welcome.
...which since these are relatively low-skilled, relatively low-paid contractor positions, explains that kind of voter [Steven, Brian, and Christopher] in a nutshell.
If you're a low-paid contractor, you're either desperate or you're in the way.
lol - nothing wrong?
Abusive and disrespectful behavior is a clear sign of weakness, not strength. Authoritarianism doesn't belong outside Rome (the empire, or the church -- your choice). It does not work in business, and certainly doesn't belong in any place of education.
"political liberalism"
You mean respectful behaviour. People (I use the word lightly) like Bannon aren't reacting to "political liberalism"; they're reacting to being told to be respectful, if they want to participate in society. Society is a big mix of differences, not just in what people think and prefer, but who they essentially are, as people. It's not "political liberalism" to say that people who are essentially different from the majority should be extended equal treatment and equal opportunity; and that those who think different(ly) should be leashed when they try to prevent equality, equivalence, and equity.
Funnily enough, I use the googly calendar because my family does. They can see events I create.
I can't see events I create. On my own calendar. On the same app I created them in.
Google Maps is fine for the rare occasions I use it.
Gmail is just where the spam arrives.
Chrome plays spam movies, because the control for not autoplaying videos doesn't work. It's generally crap, but so is the web now, so it's the best tool for the job and the backend is already installed by default anyway.
Everything that's broken has been broken for as long as I've been using Android. It basically reduces my phone to... well, a phone. And a camera. A crap, grainy, non-focusing one that doesn't even come with a lens cap so it gets all smudgy! Can you believe it? A camera. Without a lens cap. And people actually buy this crap for it having a camera!
The chances are that those replacements wouldn't get security patches pushed to them and the multitude of "stores" that supported them would be fragmented and not policed for security issues. It's not a good scenario.
Let's all play Fantasy FUD!
The chances are that those replacements would only run on the Commodore Plus/4 and you'd have to run Mastertronic games on them and they didn't even have security in the 80s so it's not a good scenario.
If you go "network stop; network start" over ssh it'll execute the complete command line. The real story is that they typed "network stop" [Enter] "n....oooooooo!"
Goblin lies about 80 AU from the Sun, making it 80 times more distant than the Earth is from the Sun.
Thank you for restating the very definition of the astronomical unit. Where would we be without you?
One time I made the mistake of attempting to use apps instead of paper for a vacation.
The airline app worked fine the night before our trip, but next afternoon at the checkin counter, it wanted me to change my password. Luckily we had our bags there and the paper versions of the paperless tickets were easily extracted and we got our flights.
The app for a well-known theme park worked fine at the hotel the night before, but next morning when we got to the entrance whaddya know? It wanted me to change my password. Unluckily, the paper versions of the paperless tickets were back at the hotel, and to fetch them the fittest parent (not me) took 25 minutes round trip, also known as "the time it takes for the line at a well-known theme park to grow from a few hundred people to a few thousand" so we missed the first hour or so of the "early bird" stuff.
Next time we went, we just used the paper versions of the paperless tickets. Which are all bigger and use about four times as much paper compared to the old paper tickets that the paperless tickets were supposed to replace.
perhaps Tesla should have checked what they were buying more carefully.
praps, aye. "disruptive" and all that, see above
"I really feel like doing further research is redundant at this point, since my 2005 papers are apparently still good enough to pwn Tesla," Green noted this week.
Wait, so he noted it this week, but I thought it was patched... I know Musk is a complete but is Green moreso?
"Google Translate typically uses English as a lingua franca to translate between other languages."
Clearly not designed by linguists, who would use etymons and flags for case, number, and gender. Really, the tool should be called "Google Transliterate", because that's all it's doing.
Never have so many known so little about their own country.
I wouldn't say that. It's certainly true that the English are pretty ignorant, and always have been; but Yanks are giving them a run for their ... lack of self awareness. Other nationalities susceptible to similar behaviour include the Iberians, Russians, probably Italians, and very much the Danish. I'll wait for you to make the connection between those nations attitudes to foreigners and their recent history of politics. (Here's a hint: the Germans have climbed down in the last century, so don't feature on the list.)
Security by obscurity. How well does that work? In war, which is what the Wild, Wild West of the Internet most resembles these days, you must always incorporate "The Enemy" being able to see everything you have and do if you want to win, if not to survive. The same logic applies to every other bit of code and data you are relying on. This is as true about competitors as about hackers/crackers, too.
Sure, just make it easy for them.
Another principle of "war" is knowing who your enemies are. You don't just leave everything open to everyone without having them clear some obstacle.
Clearly that's Soviet Russia Clippy. Клипливо?
If fax is "dinosaur" technology, what the math are ballpoint pens? or pencils? Or heck, (electronic versions of) the slates my grandma used to write on at school?
Now if only they'd make 3G phones last almost a full working day before they run out of battery. That'd be nice.
The C64 also benefited from the SID audio synth-on-a-chip. Unlike "chip music" from other 8-bit micros which typically waggled a DAC around to make PWM noise, the C64 was actually playing music on a viable musical instrument via simple digital registers. The most notable technical thing about it is that once you started playing a note, you didn't have to tie up the CPU to keep on playing it; ... like you did on the Speccy. Another reason why Spectrum games tended not to have in-game music but C64 games did.
Another aside: the SID was used in a couple of real synths; although their makers were always desperate for supply.
The "my CPU is better than your CPU" debate is really irrelevant when your CPU is doing everything and mine is just asking other parts of the architecture to do stuff. The same applies to Firewire vs USB.
"The last time one person could know all science and technology was centuries ago."
Oh go on with you. The article is about something called WireGuard. If you don't know what it is, don't comment about it, or Google it and then comment. The person you're responding to is specifically calling out others on their inability to comprehend bloat, external modules, and precompiled modules; particular the difference between using dkms and not.
"The developer of WireGuard..."
Checks image.
I think that's not him. Is that him? He's pretty.
Fuck, to think that all these years I've been running that Stallman's GNU shite on my Linux kernel.
Do keep up. It's only been quarter of a century.
I quite often advise other sysadmins to reboot the box instead of clicking about trying to "find root cause", much to their horror. In my eyes, a 30 day uptime is a prime contributor to root cause, and because of failure to patch, an increasing security risk. (Or if it's Windows, 7 days.)
You can do your analysis after you've rebooted. But I know they won't.
If you think that's too harsh, have a word with yourself.
' "I call BS, there's not a developer alive who doesn't think he can do a sysadmin's job better." '
' In my opinion that would depend more on the sysadmin than the developer(s). '
Nah, in my experience, it doesn't matter how genius the sysadmin is, developers are always complaining that they could do a better job with their eyes shut...
...which is generally how the buggers code, anyway.
In the US, there's a concept called the 'Castle Doctrine'
-----------
Uh, since there are no actual real castles in the US, where do you suppose they got the idea?
I'll wait for you to catch up. You get an extra day off next week to think about it, and there's even a helpful clue in the name of the holiday!
"My own impression of Dutch is that it is one third English, one third German, and one third that I cannot make out."
All three are common descendants of Proto-Germanic. English is built on the same structure as Dutch, but has a ton of Scandinavian influence in spelling, and a lorry load of Romance vocabulary and idioms added. Dutch has Gothic and Spanish to thank for its whack pronunciation. German grammar was reformed multiple times so it would be taken seriously like Latin.
Same matchsticks ruin sir at cricket thine theirs. Far hymns naughtilywanky.
If Google's translation AI had a more linguistically informed parser instead of treating them as strings of letters between whitespace, it wouldn't make such fundamental errors.
The problem will come in about a decade, when they *start* solving that: correct dialectal and idiomatic usage will be simplified to the lowest (American) common (Webster) denominator (slang). By the time they fix it to be more advanced, the damage will be done to the language by pushing our little monkeys to use their cloth mummies instead of going and asking a real teacher.
If someone else connects it, then you don't have to worry about it being yours.
I hesitate to point out that if it's a brick, then it's *disabled*.
Yeah, this is a bugbear of mine, too: credit card numbers, dates, and phone numbers without any delimiters. Just let me enter them, and run my input through your implementation's version of "tr -dc [:digit:]".
I always use YYYY-MM-DD format on documents, and yet, I recently had to explain to someone that "Since the other date on the cover sheet is March 20th, it should be pretty clear that the one you're confused about is June 2nd, not February 6th."
I was going to say that ISO date format is idiot-proof, but the others on the call were already laughing at him.
"Frankly, I wish the Linux Foundation would take these issues as seriously and disable cruft like this in the consumer OS kernels by default."
Yes, this would be great. However it would annoy their long-term buddy, Intel.
Not really feeling it, are you?
In computing jargon, erasure is as simple as unlinking. The data's still there, but there's no direct path to its retrieval. It's the electronic version of 'in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”'
In legal jargon, erasure has a very definite meaning, closer to the common sense concept of erasure: the data's gone. This type of erasure in computing jargon means scrubbing; whether that's overwriting with zeroes, or "dd </dev/urandom >/that/guy" in a loop fifteen times with an upside-down chicken on your left elbow.
Of course if you scrub something, you should log it...
Nah, I wanted the new Notepad that handles Unix line ends. It took a while to install Notepad, but it was worth every penny.
"You can guarantee that the owners have not the slightest clue about oils so just pick up 20w50 and go with it (which to paraphrase Robin Williams is "great when you're in a landcrab, but not so great when you've got VVTi") or (and my neighbour actually killed one doing this) top it up to the valve gear."
So, you don't like the Fiat 500 because someone once didn't know how to do an oil change?
Maybe there ought to be warnings. Just saying....
I knew this would come up in some capacity or other...
"you have to warnings on cups that coffee is hot"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants#Burn_incident
That Wikipedia article is well-researched. The elderly lady in question took off the lid to add cream and sugar and ended up with third degree burns. She had an eight day stay at the hospital while she underwent skin grafts. She lost nearly 20% of her body weight: 20 lbs.
You might want to adjust your prejudices so you don't sound like a prat in future.
Worth adding for clarity that the generic name search was the method used to arrive at the list of URLs. But the legal complaint revolves around the URLs on the list; not the search term. The merits or lack thereof for the presence of each URL is what was being debated; and that's where the simplistic methodology came up.
"We have only a sample of one (here) which is statistically meaningless."
Not really. We know roughly when proto-life emerged from spiral molecules, and for roughly how long the conditions conducive to forming those (or similar) molecular spirals were in existence prior to that. We know roughly the astronomical conditions necessary to producing the planetary surface conditions. From there we can deduce some very broad probabilities.
Thing about broad probabilities is when you combine them, they either splounce out to infinities, or they limit themselves. It happens that these are the sort that self-limit.
I mean, it's not like we have anything close to useful that could guide us where to look. Pretty much the best we've got is "I hope that star isn't exploding or collapsing", (but even that makes an unreasonably big assumption that stellar stability is key to life). We don't really know how old their planets are ... yet. We don't know anything at all about their surface conditions. But that's just the probability for evolving life. Life, it can be concluded, given certain pretty common conditions, is pretty much inevitable.
When you start talking about intelligent life though [1], the probabilities start to diverge again. Add in technological intelligent life, and the divergence increases. Add in communicative technological intelligent life, and it's almost as useless trying to make predictions about that as it is to prove the existence of a soul [2].
So it's quite possible that we could eventually make great predictions about where to look for signs of intelligent life [1] but technological and communicative? You're just going to have to keep that screensaver running and brute-force it.
1. Yes I know, not the Whitehouse. Ell Oh Ell.
2. Pronounced "arsehole", natch.
The Series 3 got a month from two AAs. The Series 5 got a week from two AAs. How long does a 4Ah battery last with this thing? How long does it take to charge?
"Perhaps they could double the battery capacity to 8000mAh, as was originally envisaged."
Perhaps. And how long would *that* be expected to last? How long to charge?
This is the *only* obstacle to me adding one to my wishlist, and making room in my budget.
If it helps, Minix, Mach, Hurd, Exec, and Fuchsia (okay, Zircon) won't suffer the 'slowness feature'. Less-than A aitch-ref equals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate greater-than I'll wait for you to catch up less-than oblique a greater than.
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