Isn't cloud grand?

When Microsoft cloud crashes during update and leaves your Visual Studio broken for the rest of the day (I am assuming it is not going to be down for longer than one day, but anything is possible in this best of the worlds) what do you do? What recourse do you have? Who is going to recover lost revenues? No one will. So, enjoy this:

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Microsoft's update URL https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr looks like this for a few hours now. And I am dead in the water because the update has left VS 2022 in a broken state. Genius degenerates run this world.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Panic fear is a bad guide

How can Intel sell more CPUs? It can't if software runs well. It can if software slows down. How can software slow down? If underlying libraries slow it down, it can. Let's see how they achieve this.

What OS is installed on most of computers? Windows. Who makes Windows? Microsoft. Every new OS of theirs is slower than the previous. A-ha! We are onto something.

What else does MS make? Right! .NET framework/core. This is what the bulk of software uses for its library layer. WPF is slower than WinForms. GDI+ is slower than its predecessor GDI. Yada-yada-yada. We found Intel's accomplice!

Let's see where MS makes the greatest push against performance. A-ha, it is in async/await. They managed to scare most of developers into panic fear of threads. Their emissaries on Stack Exchange, Github, SourceForge, and thousands other online resources kept hammering developers with their mantra: Do not use threads! Threads are evil! They will screw you over and byte you in the ass! Fear threads! Use async/await that runs on the same thread but magically asynchronously. What is wrong with this?

Such paradigm improves performance if and only if the application spends most of its time idling. Then splitting work into before and after await can free up resources of the main thread during spikes of activity. But turn your effin' brains on! If you strive to do 100% of the work on the same thread, then why the hell do you have multi-core CPUs? For the OS to do its own payload on the rest of cores? Why? Is MS mining crypto-currencies on them and lying to us about CPU load (which it actually does, but later about that)?

In George Carlin's voice: 'Are you fucking stupid?' You are being corralled into a pen with this doctrine! Your's truly runs threads, and his apps' performance is mind-blowing compared with crawl speed of async software. Reason is simple and straightforward: when 1 CPU is busy, another can pick up the load. It is as simple as 1-2-3. Nothing in software development is magical, nothing comes free, and there is always technical explanation to technical constraints. The expectation that async can magically accelerate software w/o dividing load among CPUs by way of threads comes from the domain of fiction. Live with this!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The lack of vision, guidance, and respect in North American IT is frightening

Anyone who has experience running even a small business, making payroll, and paying for goods, service, and taxes knows this simple truth: everything has its price, everything comes with a cost, and resources wasted cannot be recovered, unless one is a global monopoly that can simply resort to twisting customer's hands into obedience. So, let us take a look at waste.

Microsoft is indisputably a global monopoly on the OS, DB server, Office, collaboration, and now cloud. MS regularly scraps the technology that it has, revamps it totally top to bottom, and comes up with a completely new way to do things. So happened with its .NET that has been revamped several times already. Reasonable developers curse the learning curve of WPF that replaced WinForms. They also curse shortcomings of Entity Framework that replaced ADO.NET. I can go on and on about this.

Some believe that our society is going through recession. I do not know. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. I think that it is economical to go up and down, but what do I know? But if it truly is in a recession, then it lasts since at least 2000. Since then I have not seen a day when people did not lament difficult situation in the economy.

So, why, I want to ask, why do you waste billions on revamping? Why do you make millions of developers around the globe go back to school, figuratively speaking, every few years? Why do you scrap and build from scratch instead of evolving your products?

Everyone who has been around computers knows that in the OS domain MS mostly redesigns the icons. Seriously, every next version of their products is the same old crap but with icons that no one recognizes and has to re-learn from scratch. I want to slaughter their graphic artist and their boss for that when I am forced to use new Office, Teams, Windows 7/8/9/10/11/12 whatever (they promised no more numbers after 10, by the way. Where is their promise now?).

Consistency, anyone? When one submits a bug report into MS tracker, their Chinese support closes it with 'unable to prioritize'. It means too busy to fix it. We know what they are busy with: redesigning icons.

The velocity of them machine-gunning new C# standards is terrifying. They come up with a language that is totally revamped, for all practical purposes, almost once a year. When we look at changes we can see that they are totally unnecessary. Yes, now developers can save a few keystrokes but they have to go back to school and learn what the hell MS changed the syntax to. Multiple return values save everyone the declaration of a Touple(). Big effin deal! await async saves us from typing Task.WhenAny(). Whole lotta easier! => saves us from {}. A huge saving! Nullable types are more of an annoyance then benefit. null! is going to make our lives so much simpler. All while complete showstopper bugs and intentionally introduced bottlenecks and shortcomings exist for decades. Only recently they introduced .Shared, to simplify multi-threading. About effin time! Like, 2 decades too late, if you ask me.

Do not get me started about glorious entity framework that is the fad of the day! Writing DB contexts must be so much easier and more clear than a few SQL DDL statements that everyone is craving for DB contexts with their decorations: un-debugable, un-testable, write-and-pray piles of C# garbage. Ever thought about expressing your entire database in one C# class? Your dream comes true with EF. Congratulations!

When multi-trillion $ global monopoly all it does is waste, someone should take a sober look at them and realize that something is wrong. Anyone?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Mozilla foundation lies: "we care about users". You do not.

Same old, same old: FOSS Cerberus shuts the gates and shits on users: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531588.

Yours truly had a misfortune of click-dragging a tab in Thunderbird, and fell victim to two windows persistently re-opening. So, ended up searching and finding this obvious, glaring bug. Not surprising is Mozilla guard dog's response: F U, users, GFYS.

By the way, my TB is 52.2.*, so it is 9 years and counting that this bug is not even looked at.

My open letter to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk): With your GFYS attitude, you turn users off. This is why everyone is on Outlook 360 and not on Thunderbird. An odd unfortunate soul who still is looks at this shit, shrugs, spits on the floor, and walks away instead of going through the frustration escalating into infuriation of having to put up with your abuses. I could have said that you are a disgrace to FOSS but your behavior is par for the game in this 'community' as of late. So, I'll reciprocate your snide attitude.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The more genius - the more dangerous

This topic is becoming recurring. This time I'll point my gaze at Google, at their new advertiser verification program aimed "to make Internet a safer place".

Aren't they genius? Of course they are! They have so many neat things: search engine (that became obtuse as of late), Android (a stolen rebranding of Linux), and lotsa more. But at the same time their ingenuity is dangerously stupid.

My point is that their verification requires that a subscriber of their advertising account has to satisfy a requirement that is known impossible to many in the business: that the name of the advertised organization match the organization's registration certificate. Sounds reasonable? Perhaps, if you have never ran a business. Listen up, genius!

First of all, businesses in the free world of North America are not required to register. One can operate a business under their own name but as a different name. Chen Wong may run his "24th and 39th Corner Wok", and Jane Finch may run her "Swift Scissors Barbershop" for several decades, all along having been paying Google for advertising, but now Google cuts all of these small businesses off advertising, in one quick swipe. Or it forces them to register but if there is another business with the same name in the country then they are out of luck: all of "John's Gasoline and Oils" will have to compete for this name now or rename! This move is clearly devised to eliminate competition from small businesses to Amazon and other big-ticket players.

Secondly, even a registered corporation is not required to run web sites under their own name which very often is nothing but a number. Ever heard of numbered corporations that exist in every US state, Canadian province, and federally in both jurisdictions? Hello! Are you awake? Small companies may not be willing to spend a few hundred $$ for a name search and associated expenses of registering it. These small businesses are going to be either forced to spend a total of a few hundred millions or be cut off Google advertising.

This is not the first time giant global monopolies destroy competition. Let's watch how this is going to play out, this time. It will be fun to see, how during recession a global monopolist started by Sergey Brin destroys North American economy even further.

Okay, Okay, forget small business! Even large, multi-billion and famous store chains like "ABC Stores" may in fact be owned by "XYZ Holdings". How are they going to keep running their ads? Ah, they probably have special deals with Google, but even then they will probably be required to chip off some nice dough, to stay afloat. Isn't monopoly grand? It is a nice business you have here. We do not want anything to happen to it...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It is now clinically proven: FOSS instant messenger developers are sick in the head

Every time I use an instant messenger I discover bugs. It is inevitable, and I do not blame anyone! To err is human. But every time I report these bugs it turns into a shit storm.

A while ago some IM did not work, and I asked its developers for its requirements because all that they replied with was blaming my environment. They never told me what their software needed, only that I had to fix my network. And this scenario keeps repeating, almost word to word.

I have great working relationship with some open-source projects. They thank me for bug reports and I thank them profusely for bugfixes. This is how it is supposed to work. But with IM I am always met with hostility.

And that makes sense because FOSS IM developers are defective individuals who are unable to communicate with normal people around them. This is the only reason why they develop instant messengers: to insulate themselves from peers. This is mental sickness. Is it curable? No idea. At least we now know the root cause.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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If America was Internet

This is a post that I have contemplated for a long, LONG time. Now, I finally blew my lid, after another Internet incident that is too boring for you to write about. But I digress. So, if America was Internet, then you would have had to:

• install cameras and microphones in each of your rooms, including bedrooms and washrooms.
• allow total strangers including foreign nationals access to those cameras and microphones.
• wear a tracker bracelet at all times and allow total strangers including foreign nationals access to tracking data.
• sign into log books in each of the buildings you visit.
• they would also stamp your body, upon entry and exit from each building and check previous stamps.
• prove your innocence to cops. There would have been no lawyers because law enforcement would have operated on the premise of presumption of guilt.
• sign contracts before being allowed to speak. The punishment for saying wrong words would have been immediate termination. If you said them from a crowd, then the whole crowd would have been terminated.
• allow random strangers to tattoo or brand their likes or dislikes of your person, on your skin.
• never question authority because the power of anyone in position of power over you would have been absolute and unappealable.
• buy a new car, appliances, furniture, and house, several times a year, because of security vulnerabilities allegedly found in them by total strangers.
• beg vendors of the above for fixes to obvious, glaring defects that should have been found had only the vendor bothered to turn an appliance on or to start the car's engine and drive a few miles.

How did we get there? Initially, Internet tried to mimic American society. Internet providers even went to courts to protect the privacy of their subscribers. But these heroic efforts have soon been broken by twisting ISP's hands into compliance, and now each Internet-related entity puts convenience and profit above all. This doctrine could not have been constrained within the bounds of the Internet, and it has inevitably spilled back into our society, having all but replaced the values that American society had been founded upon. We are SOL.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A FreeBSD lie: we have package management

My love-hate story with FreeBSD has begun about 10 years ago or so. On one hand, FreeBSD is not as bleeding-edge-obsessed as Linux is. On the other, it is retarded, which is not too bad, considering that being bleeding-edge-obsessed is much worse. Long story short: I became interested. Fast forward 2022: FreeBSD 13.0 is released. And it immediately grinds to a halt, and here's why.

Try to do something with a freshly installed FreeBSD, and you immediately need pkg. Of course, you can use ports as long as you are prepared to spend hours in front of the terminal, answering popping up configuration screens. Of course, genius degenerates in FreeBSD development team have not given a thought to the idea that someone might have better things to do than waiting for each dependency of a ports package to be configured, compiled, lather, rinse, and repeat (needless to say, wait for Raspberry Pi 3 to compile something - good luck with that!). So, they have not allowed all configuration screens to be shown in the beginning, followed with however-long-it-takes compilation. This is why I prefer to install packages from repositories rather than roll my own from ports. Are you still following? Good!

So, run pkg install whatever in FreeBSD 13.0, and it will soon give you this POS:

# pkg install -y apg
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 1 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        apg: 0.4.1_4,1

Number of packages to be installed: 1

The process will require 5 MiB more space.
2 MiB to be downloaded.
[1/1] Fetching apg-0.4.1_4,1.pkg: 100%    2 MiB 557.3kB/s    00:03
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
[1/1] Installing apg-0.4.1_4,1...
Child process pid=84483 terminated abnormally: Bus error

This bus error has become so famous that SirDice, FreeBSD forums admin and moderator, immediately responds with this recipe whenever someone asks WTF:

pkg bootstrap -f

An unsuspecting victim bows and thanks him, but happiness is a passing feeling: pkg in 13.0 is biodegradable. A few commands later, it self-destructs again:

# pkg list | less
/usr/local/bin/7z
/usr/local/bin/7zz
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/7zC.txt
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/7zFormat.txt
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/Methods.txt
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/lzma.txt
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/readme.txt
/usr/local/share/doc/7-zip/src-history.txt
/usr/local/share/licenses/7-zip-21.07_2/BSD3CLAUSE
/usr/local/share/licenses/7-zip-21.07_2/LGPL21+
/usr/local/share/licenses/7-zip-21.07_2/LICENSE
/usr/local/share/licenses/7-zip-21.07_2/UNRAR
/usr/local/share/licenses/7-zip-21.07_2/catalog.mk
/usr/local/share/man/man1/7zz.1.gz
/usr/local/libexec/apache24/mod_fastcgi.so
Child process pid=96220 terminated abnormally: Bus error

I've learned about this issue more than 6 months ago and inquired as to WTF, only to be told, TADA, to do:

pkg bootstrap -f

6 months later, still no fix to this. GFYS, user! FreeBSD team has better things to do than to fix a bugged package manager.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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