palordrolap

The real punishment ought to be an atomic wedgie. For everyone who was a C-level for more than a month at that company in the last 10 years.

This ought to be the punishment for a lot of unethical business practices. You can’t delegate that to a customer’s wallet.

If we tried this in the UK with someone like, say, the late David Coleman, I’m not entirely sure anyone who remembers him would be able to distinguish - other than, as I said, the knowledge that he’s been gone for quite some time now.

Coleman, was considered a go-to commentator for decades despite being gaffe-prone even at the best of times. He was occasionally oblivious and apparently lacking any self-awareness too. (He did kind of learn to laugh at himself though and was a good, well, sport, about it all.)

Sounds very AI to me. Come to think of it, he may even have been kept around precisely because of the entertainment value.

I assume that Al Michaels is not of this bizarre calibre and it wouldn’t take long for people to notice.

If they’ve heard of Lemmy then it’s probably the Tankie connection that’s putting them off. If.

Guessing Kbin/Mbin is also either unheard of or tainted by association.

Or it could just be: “But why male models not Reddit?”

In other news, Fred Bloggs from Bournemouth has been on the phone to the White House telling Joe Biden to stop using toilet paper.

You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at the back of some people’s minds.

There’s also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.

These things aren’t necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they’re reasons nonetheless.

An analogy:

My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.

It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.

I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.

xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.

I always figured that Ksh / POSIX / Bash shell arrays are kept as they are because anyone with a serious need of arrays ought to be using something better than a scripting language.

That’s called “time to get a new job.”

Before I came in here, I assumed that’s what “or else” meant, and I’m still not sure it doesn’t mean that.

Asking him to auto-cannibalise? I like it.

You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.

This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.

It’s the same handful of obnoxious individuals over and over making it look like it’s a majority.

That said, this thread started about Tories, and about half the population lean that way even if they don’t vote for 'em…

One downside to this is that $10 is worth more to one person than it is to another, and I can’t see how that can be fixed.

Feeling daring? If you have to buy the software anyway, invoice the government department the price of the software.

Nope. This episode of The Outer Limits has lived rent free in my head since the 90s and I want no part of it. Neither should anyone else.

(In fairness, quite a lot of those stories live rent free in my head because they’re all horror. If you really want to know, this one was called “The New Breed”. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

They did. See “netflitwitter”.

There are probably pre-written awk scripts out there that already do what you want, not that I know where they’d be.

That said, you might be better off using one of the bigger but still fairly commonly installed languages. There’s bound to be things on PyPI (for Python) or CPAN (for Perl) that could be bolted together for example.

If you’re really lucky there might even be something that covers your whole use-case, but I haven’t checked.

Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, there are supposed “bare metal” installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don’t like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.

And there’s that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.

I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn’t mean I like it.

I’d say “first one, then the other” but then we’d argue about the order. Apparently heads are still conscious for a while, you see.