My new Verizon 4G iPad came in today. Of course I took it out for a speed test almost ASAP. On the Compost via WiFi, download speed was 15.66Mbps, upload speed was 4.93Mbps, and the ping to their server was 18ms. Over Verizon's LTE wireless network... Download 32.34Mbps, upload 12.48Mbps, ping time 39ms.
To say that this thing is *fast* is like saying the ocean is big... sorta an understatement. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Easily Impressed Penguin
I will not buy the latest iDevice. I will not buy the latest iDevice. I will not...
-- Badtux the Impulse Control Penguin
Okay, so I found the source code to a Windows program that I wanted to make some slight modifications to in order to enhance it. Not a problem, I just download Microsoft Visual C++ Express, their free "for home and educational use" C++ compiler, and compile it. Except... it wouldn't compile, because Microsoft *DOES NOT INCLUDE THE MICROSOFT FOUNDATION CLASSES IN THEIR FREE PRODUCT!*
Now I hear the majority of you sayin', "what does that mean?" Well, basically what it means is that *basically no existing Windows code on the planet can be compiled by Microsoft Visual C++ Express*. I.e., it is utterly *USELESS* if your intent is to make slight tweaks to existing Windows code as part of the process of learning how to write Windows code.
What's Microsoft's excuse? "Visual C++ Express is for people who are just learning C++, and people just learning C++ shouldn't be using MFC." Excuse me. I learned C++ years ago. I learned C++ years ago for *free* by simply installing Slackware 95 Linux and wiping out the Windows 95 on my desktop computer, which was an Intel Pentium 233 with 16 megabytes of memory and a low-end video card, this was about five months after Microsoft released Windows 95 and I wanted to learn C++ but I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars for a C++ compiler when Slackware was *FREE*. I don't need to learn C++, I know C++ just fine, thank you very much, I've been programming in it for over 15 years now. What I was curious about was learning Windows programming, not because I need to learn Windows programming -- I make a very, very, VERY good living writing Linux software for embedded applications, thank you very much -- but because I like learning new things. And hey, maybe I'd write a program or two to release as free software for Windows, there's a few things I'd like to see that don't exist because there's no market for them but for which existing code could be modified fairly easily -- if I had some way to compile it.
But apparently Microsoft is intent upon death. Because look. What I did 15 years ago? It's what *every* kid is doing today. *No* entry-level programmers learn how to program using Microsoft's API's. They all learn Java -- which runs everywhere without modification, without even a re-compile, on Java's own virtual machine which completely disguises the underlying operating system from view. Meaning that all the new software coming out runs on Linux and Mac as well as on Windows. And Linux is *free*.
The only way Microsoft can "win" this war is by getting people to use their API, and then they don't provide any way for people to *learn* their API, instead saying "you can't learn our API unless you pay us a buncha dollars"? What the fuck? Do they really expect the majority of people interesting in learning how to write programs that run under Windows to *pay* to learn their API?! Talk about a company with a death wish!
So anyhow, I'm back to writing Java code. Which runs just fine on my Linux box, my Windows box, and my Macs. Way to go down the road to irrelevancy, Microsoft! What next, you put a time bomb into Windows 8 that destroys everybody's data after six months? It's about the only worse thing you could do to destroy your future...
-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
What Google thinks about me (click the link to see what Google thinks about *you*):
Your categories
Below you can review the interests and inferred demographics that Google has associated with your cookie. You can remove or edit these at any time.
We infer your age and gender based on the websites you've visited. You can remove or edit these at any time.
Age: 35-44
Gender: Male
Okay, they got my gender right, but: I detest hip-hop music, I've never even *visited* Colorado, and that is *not* my age bracket.
Sorry, Google, but You Suck.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Compost, my Internet provider, did their usual Comcraptastic job and raised my Internet bill by $3 this month. I had looked at the rate hike sheet and had not seen a rate hike for Internet-only service, but apparently I was looking at it wrong, because Comcast certainly raised my rate.
Because I'm now paying more for Internet service without receiving any better service, I guess it's time for me to switch to the competitor, uhm... err... what competitor? Comcast has a monopoly on Internet service in my area! Not a government-enforced monopoly, mind you -- our local government has encouraged AT&T to expand DSL availability, for example, and has been very helpful to ClearWire in getting towers up and encouraged a WiFi startup too -- but none of these have "taken" for the reasons that I discussed earlier in this blog -- i.e., that the primary cost of providing Internet service is infrastructure, infrastructure is a fixed cost regardless of how many people use it, and there just aren't enough customers to pay for twice the infrastructure given that the current rates are already less than that. A competitor simply wouldn't be able to recoup their investment in duplicating Compost's infrastructure, so they won't do it.
So I will take my bitter pill of an unregulated monopoly up the ass without lube, just like a good American, because what choice do I have? No Internet? Yah, this Libertarian "no regulations" thingy is workin' out *real* good...
-- Badtux the Sore-bum Penguin
I never met Steve, or actually saw him in person. But his philosophy of what computers should do, how they should work, has irreparably affected my own opinions of how computers should work. Some things Steve taught me: 1) A beautiful design is one that is simple, straightforward, and solves the customer's problem without bothering the customers with details he doesn't care about. 2) The point is to solve the problem of the majority of customers, not to appeal to the 1% of customers who need just this one more feature that would make the problem less usable by the other 99% of customers. 3) Focus on quality, not quantity. If you put out garbage at the low end to appeal to the bottom 25% of your customers, you will get a reputation for garbage and be forever condemned to producing low-margin garbage. In the end, quality builds its own quantity. 4) The customer is NOT always right -- indeed, the customer usually doesn't even know what he wants, he just knows the problem he wants to solve and *thinks* he knows what he wants. Solve his problem in the best way possible while ignoring his suggestions of how to solve the problem, and you will win the world.
Steve by all accounts was not an easy person to work for or to know in his personal life -- various people say he was arrogant, opinionated, and difficult to sway. Supposedly Apple engineers worked for SIX YEARS, producing one prototype after another that Steve rejected, before he finally signed off on the first iPhone. But that seems to be what's needed sometimes to change the world, for better or for worse. And that's what Steve did, in the end, even though he never wrote a line of code or designed a single computer card in his entire life, by simply knowing what he wanted computers and devices to be -- and brow-beating his engineers until they produced it.
-- Badtux the Computer Penguin
The sad reality of life is that not all good ideas end up easily implemented, and sometimes ideas you thought were good turn out to be not so good once they reach the light of day. The sad reality is that over 90% of companies started to produce something innovative here in the Silicon Valley fail. That's just how it works, not every idea works out. Even when ideas do work out, it may not be possible to sell the result for enough money to keep you in business -- I have, alas, worked for several companies that had great products but couldn't figure out how to make enough money from them to cover costs thus went out of business.
In the case of Solyndra, they thought they had an innovative way to increase the amount of energy obtained from solar panels. They found a bunch of backers, created product, and sold thousands of their solar modules. Unfortunately two things happened that utterly destroyed their business model: 1) New silicon wafer foundries came online, making flat solar panels ridiculously cheap even when built in America (and most solar panels sold here in America *are* built here in America, for the same reason that most cars sold here in America are built here -- because they're bulky and fragile and breakage on the long overseas voyage would kill you thus it's not cost-effective to ship them from overseas), and 2) scientists figured out ways to make silicon solar panels produce almost as much power as Solyndra's more expensive copper-gallium panels, thus eliminating most of their power advantage. Solyndra tried making their product cheaper and couldn't, the technology they used is inherently labor intensive to produce (unlike silicon wafers, the production of which is largely automated). So in the end, they had a good idea, but it didn't work out in practice, like so many other ideas, and they went out of business.
Just a normal business failure, in other words. Well, except for the fact that the loans they used to build their factory and buy their equipment were government-guaranteed loans, just like the mortgages of many millions of Americans. Solyndra applied for these "green energy" loans during the Bush Administration, and they were awarded early in the Obama administration, long before Obama had any of his appointees in place at the Department of Energy. Which means, of course, that it's all Obama's fault, and the government shouldn't be in the business of encouraging renewable energy anyhow, even though the vast majority of these "green energy" loans have performed well and Obama didn't have anything to do with the "green energy" program, that was a Bush-era program.
All of which is just utter nonsense. This nation's government has been involved in fostering critical industries since its beginning, when the Federalist government of George Washington imposed tariffs on British cloth in order to encourage the development of an American textile industry. And given that we have reached peak oil and will be transitioning to a mostly-electric infrastructure in the future, we need all the energy sources we can get -- and solar is one of the more cost-effective ones in the southern half of the country where solar panel output corresponds with daytime peak usage of electricity. So not every potential technology we look at turns out to be viable. So what. Thomas Edison made dozens of tries at a viable light bulb before he got one that worked, and the "green energy" program has a much better track record than that, indeed, has a much better track record than any private venture fund in the Silicon Valley. Using it as a political football is just playing chicken with the future of the nation, and regardless of your political affiliation should be viewed as utter nonsense.
-- Badtux the Technology Penguin
So the Free Market Fairy solves all problems, it seems. Including, apparently, the problem of firemen getting old and retiring and drawing their pensions, since the new digital trunking systems foisted onto firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11/2001 often reject mayday calls due to overcrowding, resulting in dead firemen. A problem which doesn't occur with non-trunked analog systems, where you know before you press the mike whether the air is busy or not.
But according to the free market advocates, this can't be, because the magic free market fairy would just wave her magic wand and sprinkle magic free market fairy dust all over and presto, everything would be fine. Err... yeah right. That free market fairy? S/he is a grumpy tranny who'd sooner kneecap you if there's more profit in it. Which is the case here, I know the technology that Motorola and ICOM are selling firefighters (similar radios are sold to ham radio operators, e.g. ICOM's D-STAR system), and I'll tell you this, I wouldn't want to rely on it in an emergency -- there's just too much that can go wrong. Analog may be old-school tin can and strings technology, but it's also bullet-proof.
So what's behind the push for digital? 1) Police departments that want to keep their crime calls secret so that crooks can't listen in and be warned that the coppers are coming (hmm, y'now, there's this thing nowadays called CELL PHONES, why not just give your guy a call on the phone?), and 2) profit, profit, PROFIT. I have to admit that digital gives better use of the bandwidth and generally sounds better *if* you're not in a noisy environment, but if I'm a firefighter down in a basement with a radio and I need to yell for help? I don't want a cell phone. I don't want a digital radio. I want a good old fashioned waterproofed shockproofed analog radio, the kind that's pretty much bullet-proof as long as it's got battery power left.
- Badtux the Radio Penguin
Comcast is composting again tonight. Says Comcast via their web site, "There is a known technical issue in your area. Technicians are working toward a resolution. " So I'm on my backup dialup. Siiiigh!
Comcast sucks. What else is new.
- Badtux the Slow Penguin
One of the things about network servers is that you don't really think about where they are. Okay, so I have a source control server that I use at work that keeps our source code. Where is it physically located? I know what subnet it's connected to, but that subnet serves two whole labs plus a storage area. Where is the machine physically located?
Sometimes this is hilarious, like when a university discovered their most reliable server drywalled into a wall four years after it had been last seen. But one thing I'll note is that virtualization has given us an even better way of doing things. Now we can lose virtual machines in a whole cloud of hosts! Which host is a virtual machine on? Only the Shadow knows :).
-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Okay, I've been playing with Fedora 15 Linux and their brand new ultra-cool Gnome Shell, which re-imagines how you interact with windows and virtual screens. It's really neat. It's got lots of cool ideas that Apple and Microsoft are ripping off for their next releases. Too bad I can't read my email on Linux.
I mean, c'mon. This is just ridiculous. You got this ultra-cool user interface and then you can't even read your fucking EMAIL?! Talk about pathetic! I mean, the three things that *everybody* does on a computer are... browse the Web (okay, Google Chrome does pretty well there), write documents (OpenOffice/LibreOffice does okay there), and read email. So what does Linux have for reading email? It has Thunderbird -- a re-implementation of the Netscape circa 1998 mail reader (as in, today's college graduates were in THIRD GRADE when it was created!), and Evolution, a clone of Microsoft Outlook 2003 -- gosh, *only* eight years obsolete. Evolution, as befits its creaky vintage, won't connect properly to any version of Microsoft Exchange email server later than Exchange 2003 (and our corporate email is Exchange 2007 -- too bad for me, huh?), while Thunderbird says "Exchange? What's that?" because, doh, Microsoft hadn't even invented Exchange at the the time Thunderbird was invented, back in the days when Larry and Serg were geeky college students at Stanford University rather than filthy rich multi-billionaires, there was no such thing as Amazon.com, and Yahoo was the way you searched the web.
So what's the response of the Linux types when I ask, "dudes! Where's my email?" Well, it's, like, "why would anybody want to read corporate email from Linux?" Just complete and utter bafflement that anybody would want to do such a thing. And if you say "but Linux is useless on the corporate desktop if you can't read your corporate emaiL!", then they pull out their ultimate trump card: "If you want a great email program for Linux, write one yourself!" Uhm, yeah. Right. Look. You give me a budget of $2,000,000, four of the most gifted engineers that I know, one of the most gifted QA types that I know, and one of the most gifted IT types that I know, and I will have you a world-class email reading program in 18 months. Guaranteed. But the days of one single person writing a world-class GUI-based program in his back room are over. You do the math. That's 90 man-months of work. That's 7.5 *YEARS* of work for one person. Err... yeah. Not happening. If I could interest other Linux geeks in the problem that'd be one thing. But Linux geeks appear more interested in making sure that Linux runs fast on 1024-core processors. Apparently they're fine with using gmail.google.com to read their email, because they're sure not reading it on their Linux systems.
- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Once upon a time, ladies and gentlemen, the Internet did not exist. I know, hard to believe, but true, there was at one point in time no such thing as the Internet!
Indeed, until 1993 it was actually illegal for private individuals to hook up to the ARPANET/NFSNET. The notion was that this would be unfair competition to the private networks, folks like Tymshare, Telenet, Compuserv, AOL, and so forth.
At which point you say, "Who?!" Exactly. See, the deal is that private industry didn't see any profit in connecting individuals together. All of the technology we use today for the Internet existed back then, and these networks had that technology -- the long haul T1 / T3 lines, the modem pools, and so forth. But they wouldn't connect to each other. If you had a Tymshare account, you couldn't talk to someone who had a Telenet account. Someone who had a Telenet account couldn't talk to someone who had a Compuserve account. Someone who had a Compuserve account couldn't talk to someone who had an AOL account. And so on and so forth. After all, they could lose customers to Compuserv if Compuserv customers could still send email to all their friends on AOL. Where was the profit in that?
The reality is that if Al Gore had not opened up the NFSNET to interconnection so that private ISP's could connect their own networks to the NFSNET backbone, there would be no Internet today. The problem that kept the private networks from interconnecting was the deadbeat problem. Smaller ISP's would benefit more from interconnecting to larger ISP's than vice-versa, so why would larger ISP's do so? But by providing a means for the smaller ISP's to communicate with each other, the Clinton Administration created a large enough "pseudo-ISP" that the larger ISP's *had* to interconnect with the nascent Internet. The magical Free Market Fairy simply would have never done it -- remember, the technology of the modern Internet was TEN YEARS OLD by the time the Clinton Administration opened up the NFSNET interconnection exchanges. The Free Market Fairy had ten years to create the Internet out of all those independent networks -- and failed. Because, see, fairies are IMAGINARY. Duh! And there simply was no PROFIT in connecting these independent networks -- until the Clinton Administration let all the smaller networks hook together via the NFS interchange points and created such a large mass that the big ISP's had to join too or be rendered irrelevant.
SO: The Internet would not exist without government. There simply is no profit motive that would have created the Internet without the government intervention of providing that initial interconnection backbone. So my Libertarian infestation is using a government creation to.... criticize government. That's such a hilarious bit of hypocrisy that it takes the breath away, but not particularly unusual. Libertarians tend to be blind that way.
-- Badtux the Technology Geek Penguin
One of the things that annoys me about my current ultra-zoom camera is that its performance in anything other than perfect outdoors light is abysmal. The basic problem with ultra-zoom point-and-shoots is that the sensor is tiny. This is necessary in order to get sufficient crop factor so you can get a 30x zoom without needing a lens the size of a telescope, but also means that the pixels on the sensor are teeny tiny and don't get many photons hitting them except during broad daylight outdoors. The fact that many of the ultra-zooms use antiquated CCD sensor technology rather than backlighted CMOS technology doesn't help either.
This same issue -- the small size of the sensor -- also means that the sensors are really noisy at fast shutter speeds with low light (i.e., high ISO). Think about it this way. Say there's 100 photons that hit the pixel in a DSLR-sized sensor. That means there's 1% noise -- one more photon may have been coming in but got cut off. But an ultra-zoom's pixel is 1/10th the size. So only 10 photons hit the pixel. So that's 10% noise -- because one more photon is 10% of that pixel now. The results generally look pretty grainy, sometimes with odd colorations in small places. This also means that you can't deal with contrast as easily, since you have fewer photons hitting a pixel and thus less contrast to pull out and enhance if you need to do so.
Add in the relatively poor quality of the lenses typically used with ultrazooms, which are subject to chromatic distortions and fisheying around the edges, and the quality of photos taken by even good ultra-zooms is not anywhere near a DSLR's. There simply is no substitute for sensor size if you're trying to gather sufficient photons to make a good picture.
So I have two possibilities here. I can either step up to a new ultra-zoom with the new more sensitive CMOS sensors rather than my mediocre (by today's standards) POS, or I can just gulp, swallow, and buy a DSLR with the zoom lens that I need for outdoor photography. So here's what I'm looking at for DLSR's:
Oh yeah, why Sony? Basically, the electronics are getting spectacularly better every year. The sensors get more sensitive, the processors that interpret the sensors and turn the raw capacitor levels into colors get better every year, and so the newest camera is most likely to be the best camera (within reason). Sony and Nikon are the most recent to update and have the best sensors of all the DSLR's and ultrazooms in their class. From a viewpoint of raw hardware they're roughly equivalent. But Sony has better processing software for things like, e.g., in-camera panorama processing that actually works and in-camera HDR on their DSLR (if you don't know what HDR is, you've never tried to take a picture of a mineshaft from the outside on a bright day, without HDR it is devilishly hard to get sufficient detail to show up, either part of the photo is washed out or part is just black). Even the HX100V is a lot better than my current ultrazoom in those respects. I just have to decide whether I want to invest over $1K in camera equipment that is bulkier and doesn't have as much ability to zoom in when outdoors (but which takes much better pictures in low-light conditions and focuses much faster)...
-- Badtux the Technology Geek Penguin
Changed my oil, lubed my Jeep, then bought a SSD for my travel laptop and am currently installing Windows on it (yeah, yeah, I know, but I need it for talking to my ham radios and GPS's and such and all that software is Windows-based, not Linux or Mac based). I was going to change the fluid in my front differential too, but I discovered that my tube of black silicone had burst at the bottom of my toolbox (too much slamming heavy hammers around in there I guess), meaning I had a sticky gooey mess but nothing to seal the differential cover with. By the time I got more goo, it was dark outside and I'm not interested in working on my Jeep in the dark. (Excuses, excuses ;).
Talking about which, the TuxJeep is 5 years old now. So I'm in the process of doing the 5 year maintenance. Next up is going to be to change the radiator fluid, I got some of that very pricey Chrysler-certified Zerex HOAT coolant (same stuff that Mercedes Benz cars use, i.e., not your run-of-the-mill green crap from the discount store) to do the job. Then comes the transmission and transfer case fluids. I figure changing them every 5 years is a good policy regardless of what the official service manual says...
-- Badtux the Busy Penguin
So T-Mobile is being bought by AT&T. Well, uhm, not exactly. T-Mobile, the mobile phone branch of Deutsche Telekom, is the largest provider of cellular service on the planet. They have more customers than AT&T knows exists. What AT&T is buying is the much smaller US subsidiary of T-Mobile. Which is *NOT* T-Mobile. It's just a subsidiary, s fairly small one. Sort of a fingernail on the body of the giant Deutsche Telekom.
Look. I know Americans don't realize there's a whole wide world out there outside of the USA. But there is. And there's more people out there, with more cell phones in their hands, than exist in the entire USA. Saying that AT&T is "buying T-Mobile" is as ridiculous as saying that Joe's Autorama is buying Chrysler Corporation -- it just doesn't make sense, it's like saying that a gnat is swatting a hairless ape, rather than vice-versa. Deutsche Telekom is that much bigger than AT&T.
So anyhow, back to T-Mobile USA and why DT is selling it: In a word, the problem is bandwidth and spectrum. T-Mobile USA is basically the remains of provider VoiceStream, which pioneered digital service in the USA, long before 3G. While T-Mobile picked up some spectrum in 2006 to do 3G, they don't have enough to deploy the 4G LTE technology. In desperation they've deployed 3G HSPA+ technology and claimed it's 4G, but it's not -- it's a bag on the side of the existing 3G HSPA technology, and when a node is heavily used it degrades to the speed of existing 3G HSPA technology. AT&T and Verizon, on the other hand, are either deploying real 4G networks right now, or plan to do so shortly. Once that happens, T-Mobile's existing U.S. customer base will be stuck with an obsolete technology that will not be supported by the end of the next decade when the entire world migrates to LTE.
So what to do, what to do? First, T-Mobile tried buying some spectrum from Sprint's Clearwire subsidiary. But despite the fact that they hold a huge amount of spectrum yet are using less than 10% of it for WiMax, neither Sprint nor their other partners in Clearwire were interested in selling, they're hoping that they'll get enough customers in the future to use all that spectrum. Next, T-Mobile thought about just buying Sprint. But Sprint has some pretty bitter poison pills in place against hostile takeovers, and Sprint wasn't interested in selling. Then T-Mobile thought, well, let's sell our US subsidiary to Sprint and bill it as a LTE failsafe in case WiMax fizzles out or Sprint can't get CDMA gear anymore for its network. Sprint *almost* nibbled on that one, but then eventually came to their senses and decided that if they wanted to do LTE, they could do it themselves for far less money than it'd cost to buy T-Mobile USA.
So that's why T-Mobile is trying to sell their US division to AT&T. They would need more spectrum to remain competitive in the future, and there doesn't appear to be enough spectrum coming available for that to happen. If there was government intervention to reallocate spectrum from users who aren't using it (like most of Sprint's Clearwire spectrum) to users who need it (like T-Mobile), then they could likely have stayed in the U.S. market. But there isn't, and won't be, because we have a Republican administration in the White House. A moderate Republican, true, but Republican all the same, with a Republican's native distrust for government intervention...
-- Badtux the Geek Penguin
One of my secret weapons for finding interesting music videos for you guys to watch was using YouTube's "Recommendations" function, which found new videos based on my past video viewing. Except Youtube no longer has that function. Instead, they just deployed a new home page that is entirely different. So anyhow, I tried using it tonight and... errm. It won't show more than eight recommended videos when I hit the 'More' link, and it always shows the *same* eight videos, hitting the "load more videos" button doesn't show any other videos, it just shows that same eight in a different order.
Siiiigh! "Progress". For some definition that reads, "breaking shit that worked in order to justify being employed by Google". Crap like this is one reason I'm glad that I decided to hang up whenever Google recruiters call me. I'm not stupid enough to design a user interface that lousy, which utterly disqualifies me from being a Google employee.
-- Badtux the Grouchy Penguin
Is this thing on?
Have a cat:
Here is The Mighty Fang on the move...
(testing 123...)
-Badtux the Geeky Penguin
I've been fighting that fucking piece of shit Microsoft Office (hereby called "Microsoft Piece of Shit") all day long now. I give up. I am rebooting into MacOS and going into the Windows directory and removing every fucking piece of that goddamned piece of crap pile of reeking feces, and installing OpenOffice and Thunderbird. Life's just too short to deal with crappy software.
Microsoft can just shove their piece of shit where the sun don't shine. Corporate standard? Fuck that shit. They'll take the Office 2003 documents that OpenOffice produces, and if I can't read their document, I'll tell'em to put it out into an older format. I'm too senior and paid WAY too much to be wasting my time on this fucking Microsoft bullshit. I'm supposed to be doing work, not fucking with nonsense.
-- Badtux the Frustrated Penguin
And today's rant is about "security". I'm fucking *PISSED* about all the fucking "security" bull fucking shit that Red Hat Software (in particular, but most other Linux vendors too) have put into their latest Linux. It just fucking REEKS of acne-cheeked cheeto-stained legends in their own mind who, like, have fucking never held a real job (one where they had to actually GET SHIT DONE IN REAL LIFE IT ENVIRONMENTS instead of masturbating bytes into a computer in an edit-compile-test loop) who come up with "well, doing things the way they have to be done in real-life IT environments isn't secure, so we're going to put all this shit into our distribution to make it fucking impossible for you to do your job because that's the only way to secure the system."
Well excuuuuuuse me, Mr. Legend In Your Own Mind. Yes, I administer my systems remotely. What, you think I fucking walk to the motherfucking data center and personally walk into a machine room full of thousands of servers in order to administer my system? And yes, I use VNC to do this. No big deal -- well, until you fucking assholes decided to put this PolicyKit and ConsoleKit bullshit into your software that WON'T AUTHORIZE ME TO DO ADMIN TASKS IF I AM DOING THEM REMOTELY!
Like.... uhm... hellooooo? Clue, you stupid-ass motherfuckers? Like, uhm, this makes all this fancy GUI admin toolkit bullshit you've put together like, fucking USELESS for your biggest customers? Like, uhm, you've had this motherfucking bug in your system for, like, years, and all you motherfuckers will say is that it's a goddamned feature because, well, a VNC session isn't local so it's a security risk so it shouldn't register itself with PolicyKit for doing security dialogues? Well excuuuuuse me for not living in your goddamned ivory tower and needing to, like, get shit done!
Which, of course, this bullshit doesn't keep me from getting shit done. It just means I have to do some *really* insecure shit to get around it while not driving myself motherfucking insane in the process -- like, running VNC as *ROOT*. You think prompting me for a password is insecure? Honey-chile, compared to running Xvnc as root, prompting me for a password is as secure as fucking Fort Knox, yo.
Note that I use the above as just one example of the many, many attempts to "secure" my systems by cheeto-stained geeks who haven't, like, got a clue. In the meantime, every time I look at my motherfucking update log these legends in their own minds have released yet another stream of security update bug fixes because they're such fucking legends they can't even check their own goddamned code for buffer overruns and memory leaks, but what the hey, if my security gets compromised because their motherfucking software is a piece of crap, which is the only time it's *ever* happened (not because of VNC sessions, not because of anything else they're trying to protect me from, but, rather, because they're a bunch of clueless geeks who are legends in their own mind but haven't a clue), it's *MY* fault as the sysadmin?!
And thus ends today's indecipherable rant. If you don't understand anything I said above, just summarize it like this: Linux geeks might know their awk and sed and bash, but they haven't a fucking *clue* as to even the basics of how to make a system usable by mere mortals. What a buncha hopeless geeks... no wonder Apple had to dump every single bit of user interface code ever written for Unix in order to create Mac OS X, the world's one and only Unix system usable by mere mortals... and why why Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth is thinking about the same damned thing. Because these geeks are just fucking hopeless once you get beyond serving up bits and bytes to the Internets... when it comes to UI shit, they're fucking legends without a clue.
-- Badtux the Ranting Geeky Penguin
