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Comment Re: Systemd, for or against? (Score 2, Funny) 234

As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.

Three days ago the Systemd-UpdateAgainstYourWillD automatically installed SystemD-AiD, which is a requirement to even boot the kernel because it was deemed no human being ever has or ever could be capable of the overwhelming task of "run some programs", which of course includes programs written by humans.

Two days ago there were promises SystemD-AiD would also gain enough intelligence to read corrupted syslogs, while insulting your petty human intelligence via way of SystemD-FortuneD, and injecting them into all outbound emails sent from your username via SystemD-SpammerD.
It was also rumored to soon be capable of washing your dishes, since no init system wants to start dirty programs or use plastic fork()'s.

Yesterday they canceled the dish washing patch based mainly on a usenet poll where "fuck systemd!!!" was interpreted by a similar AI as voting against the feature, thus canceling the patch due to overwhelming demand.

Comment Re:Better definition of planet (Score 0) 196

*Puts on grumpy old old old man voice*

When I grew up, there were only THREE planets in our solar system: Earth, Mars, and Mercury.
Both Jupiter and Venus are stars not planets.

Nothing beyond the thing you call the asteroid belt exists, and of course the asteroid belt is really just the outer shell of our universe with the other stars painted on it.

No mystical Pluto object could possibly exists beyond the edge of the universe!

Now get off my lawn with that talking about how things used to be :P

Comment Re: I should think so! (Score 4, Interesting) 107

but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.

Do some traffic analysis on your target's porn habits at the ISP, leave a compromised disc about his favorite kink in a bag on the ground near where he parks his car, and use his "connected" player to zero-day the other equipment on his LAN, installing the APT without even needing to pretend about premesis warrants or anything.

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 1) 102

I will preface this by saying "this is really true" because you probably would otherwise read it as a nonsense, sarcastic, or glib comment.

I heard a conversation the other day about some of the terrible new buildings at the nearby university. A very senior administrator said (paraphrased), "you need to hire a hot architect and pay him 20% of the project price to come up with some really shocking architecture, to prove to prospective students that the school is still relevant."

I think he was talking mostly about the atrocity that they added to the Medical School, which looks suspiciously like the post-accident Chernobyl reactor. The "architecture" part of the project probably added $20M over making it look like a classical higher-ed building. I believe this administrator had final sign-off on such an expense.

Comment Re:Should come with its own football team (Score 2) 102

It is not like an educated population is some kind of public good.

It's not, if you're speaking about the economic term. A 'public good', to an economist, is something that cannot be provided by the private market (a "market failure") and therefore must fall to a government to provide. Education is one where the private market excels in comparison to the public provision, which would be a counter-example.

Comment Re:Should come with its own football team (Score 2) 102

And how should the government do that? With the tax income that these companies managed to avoid paying? Cool story bro.

The government should take money from the poor and funnel it into the coffers of these corporations. Did you miss the part where government is for the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses?

Comment Re:Single point of failure (Score 2) 133

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy.

I can just about guarantee you that several buyers of bandwidth in Phoenix had contracts with the people who owned this fiber and those contracts specified multiple redundant paths out of the city.

Odds are we're looking at backup system failure or contract fraud. Probably the former.

Comment Re: file transfer (Score 4, Informative) 466

you forgot to order the right Compaq IDE laptop header adapter. Whichever one it is for this model...

Suddenly a Laplink cable and a VirtualBox running DOS with a detachable D: doesn't seem so awful bad. Move the image from the XP box via flash drive or network, mount it loopback and profit before lunch.

http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-...

Comment Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI (Score 4, Informative) 516

3. Delete a file
4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list

Err, wut?

I manage around 150 Win7 machines at work, and have 4 of them at home, and never once seen the behavior you are describing.

Are you sure there isn't more involved with recreating that? Have you seen this on more than one Win7 computer?

When I use explorer to delete a file, it is removed from the file list and placed in the recycle bin folder for that drive, just as has been the case for some time now.

If explorer is open to a remote file server it still removes the file from the list when deleted, just skipping the recycle bin part of things.
(Not to mention my complaint about a confirmation prompt being there when the recycle bin is used and so recovery is possible, and NO confirmation when deleting on a file share despite no recovery of the file being possible by default, which always seemed bas-ackward to me)
But you didn't mention browsing to a remote file share, the default explorer will open to your homedir or drive root typically on your system drive.

Comment Re:If users complain about Windows X icons... (Score 3, Informative) 516

Well to be completely fair, there are a TON of very nice features being put in Win10, on top of a ton of things fixed that they broke in Win8.

No GUI requirement similar to the choice of installing xorg (I believe introduced in server 2012?), a powershell version of apt-get using the windows tailored chocolatey package format, fixed the stupidest of GUI changes from Win8 such as no desktop by default and whatever they call the app tiles thing, improved filesystem and network file sharing (the latter bringing a HUGE speed boost, both being more parallelized), etc.

They are trying out a different (and IMHO better) upgrade path, and hopefully all that is claimed about the new IE will come true which will finally begin closing the huge gap between it and pretty much any other browser.

Sure there is still plenty of time between now and release day to drop the ball on for anything above, but I dare say direction under their new CEO has been pretty damn positive so far, and leaps and bounds better than when under Balmer (though I admit that is a pretty low bar anyway)

As someone who hates Windows mainly due to being forced to support it and its bullshit for the past 20 years, even I am quite impressed with the changes between Win7 and Win10, and don't have much to complain about. We will see if that still holds true after release of course.

But I can't help but agree, a lot of the serious problems are being or have been addressed.

We only complain about the icons and lack of theme support to fix them because Microsoft asked us, petty as that may seem.

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