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Comment Propaganda much? (Score 1) 313

by Arker (#46743783) Attached to: Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base
""Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula"

Like this was recent.

Crimea has been Russian since 1783.

For my fellow Murricans, that was 7 years after our Declaration of Independence, 4 years before our Constitutional Convention, and 17 years before we moved the Federal Capital from Philadelphia to Washington.

Just so you know.

Comment Re:I'm disapointed in people (Score 1) 693

by Arker (#46743761) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
While I have seen a bit of press on the systemd issue, I do not feel like I understand it well enough to comment without an 'I may not have a clue here' caveat.

But yeah, if you are replacing a simple robust and proven system with a complex new system, you damn well better have a MUCH better case than 'it boots faster' or your reception is going to be my boot up your arse.

Boots faster? How often do you boot? FFS.

You could reduce my boot time to nothing and if you introduce a minor regression in the process it's not worth it.

Comment Re:gnome 3 sucks on many levels! (Score 1) 693

by Arker (#46741493) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
"That is why I use a window manager as GUI (fvwm2 in my case), not something that thinks it is an essential part of the OS and has any business doing a lot of things that have no place in a GUI."

I quit using GNOME when it quit being willing to work with my choice of window manager (and they broke a few other things at the same time.)

"Same, incidentally, with systemd: Its job (should it ever be able to do it properly) is to start services that configure themselves in whatever way they see fit. Instead it takes over everything it can get its hands on and tries to be some kind of "meta-kernel"."

I dont pretend to be conversant with all the relevant issues but that is my impression of systemd too. An overly large and complicated replacement for a simple system that has always worked perfectly in my experience.

Well, actually, a replacement for a replacement for the system I am perfectly happy with. I never adopted SysV init either (except via the futzing that Patrick did to accommodate packages that think they require it.)

Comment Re:I'm disapointed in people (Score 3, Insightful) 693

by Arker (#46740959) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
Yeah that's just not accurate.

It's not change=good versus change=bad. Everyone is ok with change. The question is what type of changes and why?

Gnome has a history of changing for the worst, and for the worst reasons.

Not just Gnome, they are a leading case but the affliction they suffer from appears to be very widespread in the computing industry. We have a glut of 'designer' prima donnas that all want to 'change' and 'innovate' for no reason other than so they can feel trendy, and this is a predictable result.

Change comes in so many different forms. "I changed this line to fix this bug" is one kind of change. "I changed the master control loop slightly to add a hook for new functions I wrote" is another. "I broke everything completely so we can all have a lot of fun rewriting everything from scratch, and let's make it totally different just to be fresh!" Is a third.

It's not that there is something inherently evil about the third type of change, even. No, it's perfectly acceptable, fine, good, laudable - in the right situation.

But gnome has earned a reputation for excessive and inappropriate changes.

Comment I liked GNOME 1. (Score 1) 693

by Arker (#46740357) Attached to: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
The basic mental malfunction that leads from Gnome3 from Gnome2 is the same as the one that lead from Gnome1 to 2. I guess not as many people used unix key-bindings and window manager choice as some of the things they have broken more recently, but I did and the project has been dead to me ever since they made it clear they broke those things on purpose and would stick by that decision.

Comment Re:And the attempt to duplicate their efforts resu (Score 2) 448

by Arker (#46737623) Attached to: Commenters To Dropbox CEO: Houston, We Have a Problem
"should her life be ruined over the fact that she made some mistakes while in government?"

A question that could be asked of any war-criminal.

Most of her colleagues have received promotions and honors for their failures, so I can see how this might seem unfair from her point of view.

But let's quit thinking about fair for her for just a moment and think about fair to her victims. US soldiers and foreign civilians, dead, maimed brutalized, thousands and thousands of them. Think about it from their point of view for a moment instead of hers. Think about it from the point of view of the relatives of her victims.

And then think about DB customers. Paying customers, mind you, not eyeballs at facebook or google but real live paying customers. They deserve a little respect too. Not a huge amount, perhaps, but at bare minimum keeping the likes of Condy Rice outside the walls is called for. Hiring her, and saying they were proud of it?

No one with two working brain cells could possibly trust them after that. DB is dead.

Eich is a rather different situation. Eich's 'crime' was political speech protected by the first amendment - not a crime at all, however wrong-headed, and with no connection to his work. Condy's situation is different on every count.

Comment Re:more pseudo science (Score 1) 869

"They are showing that according to the type of random fluctations that happen on a short timescale, the warming apparently observed recently is not consistent with being simply random short term fluctuations."

Excellent. A much more sophisticated attempt than the summary would lead one to believe, you must have read TFA.

But tell me this, how do you know the last 500 years is an accurate proxy for the last 500m years? Oh, you dont. In fact if you would go ask a paleoclimatologist dont be surprised if he actually laughs at the suggestion immediately. Every reconstruction I have seen indicated that the last 10k years have been an unusually placid and temperate time and Earths climate has often been much more chaotic in the past.

Comment Re:more pseudo science (Score 1) 869

"Oops."

Indeed, your oops.

The linked article is great. Too bad you dont understand it.

It explicitly debunks the thesis that "A large population size must require a larger sample size." Great. Not an argument I made.

If there was an actual *sample* involved then there are specific tests that can be applied. There does need to be a minimum size but IF the sample is truly random and IF other factors are properly constrained it can be shockingly small. All of which is beside the point here. Because it is not a sample, anymore than lining up a group from shortest to tallest (or sorting them in a database by last name, or street address, or what have you) and picking the 5 at one end is a sample.

Comment Re:Colbert (Score 1) 24

by Arker (#46734559) Attached to: Interested in seeing Colbert in a !Report mode
"Nope, sorry to disappoint. It wasn't the spelling."

Well that was a fairly short quote, 13 words? And that was the one you chose to highlight and draw attention to, so it was a natural reading.

If that wasnt it then what? I am genuinely curious. Something in that quote apparently screams 'crackpot' to you and being that we have spoken here a few times in the past and I believe you have already gotten a basic idea of my politics, I am completely at a loss as to what it was.

"And you really need to take a pill."

Not a pill-popper, sorry.

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