Posts by wolfetone

Re: Alternative

As a Linux user of 18 years...

The only thing I can't do on my Linux laptop is have it display a screen of "Installing Updates" and take an hour to do it, blocking me from doing any real work.

So in that respect, yeah. Windoze has us licked for an excuse to not do any work.

Re: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

It's such a narrow band that he's looking in to, it's both right and fundamentally wrong. He is looking down at the problem, not upwards.

I grew up in the 1990's. I didn't get a Nintendo until I was 9 years old, I didn't get a PC until I was 10 years old. I became an "adult" in the late 2000's and went in to the big bad world looking for a job just as the arse fell out of the world. I'm even older now, with a 2 year old child, in a world that continues to throw it's guts downwards and where life has been on a steady decline ever since. I too have suffered with depression and sought medication for it, to the point where on this medication I came incredibly close to ending it all in 2019. Let me tell you, every day I look at my child I think back to that day in 2019 and simultaneously thank myself for not ending, and hating myself for wanting to end it.

What caused my issues? Well I will tell you right now that it wasn't the Nintendo, it wasn't the PC, it wasn't the mobile phone I got as a 13 year old, nor access to dial up internet at the age of 14. My issues stem from the world around me, the way the world working, and how in reality the adult life I was "prepared" for as a child was nothing like what it was meant to be. The generation before my parents and I, whether you want to read this or not, believed the next generation should at a minimum have the same chances as their parents. My generation, and subsequent others, do not have that chance. We cannot walk in to any job, we cannot save a third of our pay for bills, a third for fun, and a third for housing. The playing field, while not level in generations before, was not the Everest it is now.

You come in to the adult world thinking you may at least have the same chances and opportunities as your parents. But you end up working for people who tell you that their workplace is "fast paced" but it's OK because we have a football table and a bean bag. Be happy with the pizza every month. Do not fucking dare consult a union. Be happy you have a job here. Be happy you have a medical plan that will bump you back to the NHS once they work out your cancer is too expensive to treat.

My generation involved in the timeframe here, our childhoods were fucking wonderful compared to the shit show as what adult life has turned out to be. Most of the meditations you're told to do, colouring in for example, aren't all of them really adult versions of what we wanted to do as children but told to stop because we needed to "grow up"?

Look up from these problems to see what transcends in to them. The need, not choice, of both parents having to work resulting in less time in the family unit. The need, not choice, to cut back on spending time in the family unit. The constant need to be seen to be doing the same as everyone else or to be seen as being a "good parent" which results in you throwing your phone in front of your child's face when they're going through a fairly normal tantrum - just because some old twat of a couple are looking at you staring at you thinking "will you shut that child up? I'm trying to eat".

Top to bottom, this adult life is the cause of many problems in life. Not the technology as a child.

We've seen enough of On Call to realise no one has protection from the hurt ego of a manager.

I hope they weren't sacked, but I would imagine an embarrassed manager would have gleefully signed the kid's P45.

It'd be better than Carling.

Then again my own warm piss is better than Carling.

This is interesting, I didn't know this.

Does the work OpenBSD do then filter back in to the other *BSD projects?

Either there are a lot of Boeing engineers here, or my sarcasm has been far too subtle.

Re: Recoup costs?

They have already asked this question to the chap who was hired as an Oracle advisor. They said the Oracle system could be made to work.This advisor, along with the other "experts", are costing us all real money here.

And to call for a public inquiry, costing more money, will do nothing to sort it out.

The current system does not work. It has been demonstrated to perform as such. Kill it, sack the people involved in it's implementation and specification planning, and start again. That has to be the cheaper way of getting it done.

But of course, it's public money, so either way it's going to cost us money.

Re: Surely you meant…

Personally I thought it was

Japanese! government! rejects! Yahoo! infosec! improvement! plan!

*sigh* I miss the days when El Reg could afford to be funny without the accountants and managers ruining things.

I have a YouTube channel for me doing stuff on my cars. I have a mind blowing (to me) subscriber count of 280. I don't allow adverts to run on my videos because I'm not going to make money from it. YouTube are clamping down on this to the point where they will stick an advert on a video even if the creator doesn't want one on there.

My biggest bug bear with YouTube are the adverts and their quality. I see videos about God botherers, swamp coolers that were created by 4 British engineers, a neat trick that British estate agents don't want you to hear, and grossly offensive and misleading claims regarding muslims in Palestine since October. Most, if not all, of these adverts you would not see on TV for a multitude of reasons but Google/YT see fit to show you them.

What is worse are channel owners allowing YouTube to place adverts for them. One channel I watched is called Aging Wheels and in a 15 minute video I had 10 x 30/60 second adverts. What's worse is that he spent 2 minutes including his own advert for some awful processed meal bullshit at the beginning too. This laziness/greed on the creator part compounds the problem. So if I see a video like this I will downvote them, and I will comment as to why, and if I'm subscribed I'll unsubscribe.

Hey man, the cost of living crisis affects us all!

Re: Those damned reboots

She really, absolutely, unavoidably has to use Windows.

Re: Maybe a ninth...

I'm sure I can find an aubergine in my fridge that's been in there longer than him in that case.

Re: Little Larry Tables

We've all been Little Larry Tables at some point.

The "digital electricity" might have been affected by the "digital light" coming from the "digital posted lamp".

Re: Coincidence...

"Linux will never be seen as a replacement."

Of all the reasons why Linux isn't considered a replacement, this is right down the bottom of the list. The way you install an application on the Mac is a piece of piss even compared to Windows itself. Yet both the Mac and Linux don't have the marketshare of Windows at a desktop/laptop level.

The reason Linux isn't "seen as a replacement" is down to legacy applications and long standing stubbornness of the only application in the world that can do a job must be a Windows application. Look at the recent article regarding Outlook and how many people are so entrenched in Outlook's way of doing things they have no idea how well other non-Microsoft applications work with Exchange/O365 for email.

It isn't a case of Linux being a replacement for Windows any more, in my opinion. People who know there is a different, better way of doing things have long since left Windows. Whether they've gone to Linux or Mac is irrelevant really. People who can't see an alternative to Windows will never see the alternative because of a myriad of different reasons, and that will be down to old habits and a fear (or even refusal) to modify their way of working to try something new.

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

Some little dickhead at Microsoft has dreamed this up to keep themselves in a job. That's all this does.

Re: Bias that matches society?

"The fix isn't to change the LLMs, but to fix the deep seated bias in the US society."

It's cute you think the issue rests in just US society.

Only today, on the Sky Snooze Twitter feeds, there are two stories. Headline one: "More than £117m taxpayer's money to be spent on protecting UK Muslims".

The next story, right after that one, has the headline: "Rishi Sunak pledges extra £54m for security of Jewish communities amid record levels of antisemitism".

The whole of the west have a problem, regardless of whether the language spoken is English French or German. We're kidding ourselves if we think the problem is located to just one area.

Re: I doubt he would get paid today

From a few of his videos I get the impression that he got employed by Microsoft on the back of personal work.

I'm guessing he wasn't fond of waking up at 5am on a December morning to go and pour concrete.

It can definitely bring life to an old laptop. But from my own testing the small footprint doesn't remain small for long depending what you want to do.

My own testing involved setting up a server to run and execute PHP scripts which would read/write data to a remote database. The small footprint of the OS didn't remain that way, not so much the fault of the OS but it's the associated packages the software you want to run requires. It's incredible that you can have a working OS run at idle at such low requirements but it just highlights how heavy and bloated software has become.

It's been 6 months since I tried it for my own use case, and I think what let it down was a piece of automation I wanted to happen that I could get working on a standard Linux device but not so on TCL. It's not put me off using it, but you do have to consider what you'll be using on it and whether the software itself can work within the confines of the resources provided.

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

Only if you definitely have a girlfriend but no one would ever know who she is because she goes to a different school.

Please accept my apologies for that, I wasn't aware of it.

Re: Being polite is great

"...added the "asshole boss" premium to your rates."

I always thought it was called the "Wanker Tax".

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

"I so wish users would stop confusing email with instand messaging."

Every day I wish for the sweet release of death to come and cover me whenever I have to deal with some dickhead user who can't understand why the person next to them hasn't had the email they sent 2 minutes ago.

Every. Fucking. Day. Except Saturday and Sunday because thats the only point in the week where I don't deal with them.