Comments for Rants and Revelations

Comment on So what exactly did you verify? by Totty

Totty — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:02:36 +0000

Combining Phone and Internet access and Television is common around here, too, but I haven’t signed a television contract in the last 20 years – I have no use for that, since I don’t have a wife or children. I didn’t even own television capable equipment for 10+ years.
The television companies do have a “nice” pricing scheme, you pay 40$ for the first 12 months and 60$ afterwards (says so in the fine print) – you can only get 24 month contracts. I do not remember any 50% price increases except oil and gas.

Comment on Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more. by Totty

Totty — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:46:13 +0000

> I can live without Gnome/KDE
Yes, and that way you can keep some useful servers on an usb stick in your pocket – servers meaning standby servers of for training purposes. Just try to fit 8 servers from Microsoft and Apple on one usb stick.

> upgrade meeeeeee
… and than telling you “i can only be upgraded by an administrator”, so you have to do fast-user-switching (which XP can not do in a domain). I really need to lookup how long “su” has been around on unix.

Comment on Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more. by Jen

Jen — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:14:08 +0000

Anyone who spreads around the image you linked to needs to be sent this article:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/ballmer-and-microsoft-still-doesnt-get-the-ipad.ars

Comment on Same shit, different job… by Totty

Totty — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:41:20 +0000

Don’t tell me that your employer is using testdriven development, too, that is a *** of ***.

Comment on Same shit, different job… by Kris Johnson

Kris Johnson — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:25:13 +0000

That’s familiar. I once worked on the client-terminal software for a big system, and of course, every bug or missing feature got written up as a client-terminal issue. 90% of my time was spent proving that it was the central system that had the bug or didn’t support the desired functionality. The central system programmers were incredible assholes, and wouldn’t look into any issues until they had been officially re-assigned to them.

And, sometimes, they wouldn’t have time to fix a bug or implement a new piece of functionality, so we’d have to implement it in the terminal, even though it was clearly something that belonged in the server. We ended up with about half of the central system’s functionality in the terminal, as well as many hacks to fix-up missing/bad system functionality, and it really sucked when it came time to implement a new terminal.

Comment on More Mailman idiocy by Andre van Eyssen

Andre van Eyssen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:48:16 +0000

Aah, perfect timing, just deployed Mailman yet again today. You should post the text of the pissy emails for posterity.

Comment on More Mailman idiocy by rone

rone — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:19:48 +0000

Maybe you could make the reply-to for each reminder go to an address that unsubscribes that address from all lists.

Comment on Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more. by Kris Johnson

Kris Johnson — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 12:09:26 +0000

Another peeve about the Apple haters: When you point out how much nicer the Mac or iPhone experience is than the competitors, many will claim that the comparison isn’t “fair”, because Apple makes both the software and the hardware.

Other hardware manufacturers are stuck with the limiations of Android or Windows Mobile, so you have to cut them some slack. OS vendors can’t dictate how well the hardware manufacturers will take advantage of OS features, so you have to cut them some slack too. So I’m supposed to buy an Evo or a Galaxy and be thrilled with the big conglomeration of openness and choices-by-many-committees, even if the software is slow and glitchy, and the buttons are in stupid places.

I’ll be happy when someone makes something better than the iPhone and iPad. However, I think it is most likely that the someone will be Apple.

Comment on Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more. by &rw

&rw — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:20:38 +0000

Well, the “I have things to get done” thing is why I don’t use Windows or MacOS on my workstations.
On my Linux boxen, I settled on a window manager that I could tweak to my personal liking 10 years ago, it’s not going to change much and which, and this is the most important part, is not getting in my way constantly. I can live without Gnome/KDE, and with issuing the occasional “mount” myself or reading through the transcode-manpage when I want to convert a video, it actually takes me less time than wading through the noise on Google searches when I want to, say, turn off the “unused items on your desktop” nagscreen with Windows.

Every time I use Windows, I’m feeling drowned in little nag-popups (there are unused items on your desktop, I don’t recognize your A/V, upgrade meeeeeee, …), which tell me nothing of any interest whatsoever, but are breaking my concentration, and make me want to kick the designer in the private parts. And then there’s the lack of a central update mechanism, which means I have to deal with every vendors slightly different idea on how to keep software up to date – when I turn on my Windows laptop every 3 months, I get to spend 1-2 hours updating, when on Debian it’d take an “aptitude update/upgrade” and grabbing a coffee.
With MacOS, the couple times I tried, I got the feeling that I could do everything The Mac Way, or I could fuck off and go sulk in a corner – I mean, integrated-everything’s fine, but only as long as you don’t want to, f’rex, actually working PGP-integration in the mail client, a way to extract an https-client-cert for use elsewhere or, *gasp*, need to share calendar and contact data with non-Macs or a non-Mac mobile phone. Plus, the constant assault with senseless visual effects makes me want to vomit (this goes for Windowses from Vista, and MacOS both).

On mobile phones, I have to confess that I don’t fucking care – from a phone I expect to be able to make&receive calls, and to send&receive text messages. Be it SonyEricsson, Nokia, Apple or whatever, I hate all their UIs (though I’ve just settled on a Nokia 3720 for a new company phone, because it has a standby time of nearly 2 weeks).

For PDAs, the UI on my Palm Vx was excellent, and everything else I’ve seen since has only made me give back the PDA to the company with a sincere “no thanks, I got WORK to do”.

(I still fondly remember the ads for Toshiba Roughbooks – “it has a design that makes Apple fanboys cry” – so I guess I’m that kind of person.)

Comment on Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more. by Totty

Totty — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:51:51 +0000

For me, the difference between Vista and Win7 is that Win7 is less annoying because they tweaked some settings, for example they white-listed some user actions so that the user is not prompted to the UAC/LUA-confirmation multiple times for one user action. And, by the way, Win7 is not less ressource-hungry, meaning you won’t get the aero-look on an intel915-graphics chip (just like vista), these are just less common today than 2007. And yes, my employer still runs them, and two generations beforce that (intel 865 and intel 845 chips equipped with pentium4). Okay, and the business editions of Win7 includes virtual xp mode – Vista users who had their applications updated (for money, I suppose) sure feel cheated, because: no virtual xp mode for them, not than, not now.
Linux is just more than an operating system (or a kernel). The general idea goes back to the days of BSD, where the SD stands for source distribution. It’s just more flexible, for example someone requested a source code versioning server, more of a favor than for money. The requester wanted to show some options to people who can easily buy our whole company (three digit people) out of pocket money. I just copied a fedora installation image (using vmware) i had sitting around on a dvd, started it, created 5 users and done. The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 simply does not run on linux and that is what that company has chosen to use (they provide rail signaling solutions as a part of a two-digit-billion-revenue company doing defense/aerospace/security). So, they surely can afford to feed microsoft some money?