We fucked up. No sorry.

The kernel 6.2.8-100.fc36 is so fucked up that upon its update DNF removes it. Of course! It causes systems to hang after half an hour of inactivity. Embarrassed? They should be. I do not often see kernels being removed by the update process. Usually they keep piling up in grub2 menu, but not this one.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

Adobe lies: we can render

Adobe pretends it can render video effects. They have two options in Adobe Media Encoder: software and GPU. Sounds encouraging? Ha-ha! You've been fooled! In reality software means 1 core of however many cores your CPUs have, and GPU means 40% of it at best. To add insult to injury, the 40% GPU utilization rendering is about as slow as 1 CPU core. Are you kidding me, dumb f__s?

I have no idea to which shithole Adobe outsources its development, but their, quote, developers, unquote, can't write code, and their QA can't test. Google for "adobe media encoder uses one core" and you get whole reddit threads and stack exchange Q&A dedicated in finding workarounds to the painfully slow rendering process.

Bottom line is, this problem has a configuration solution. Yes, as simple as that: create an INI file, write a few lines into it, and save it under Adobe product install folders. The dumb f___s at Adobe did not bother making all-core rendering a default. They prefer the world waste megawatts of energy and pay electric bills for essentially idling our PCs. Now, you scumbag elites, shut up about green shit!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 202 words, total size 1 kb.

Who's next?

I never write about politics because I do not give two shits about things I do not get paid for, but now I humorously want to ask a political question: who's next?

The reason being that Russian and Ukrainian sellers on Ebay had flaked on me, and now they fight a war. It could have been nothing, but a Chinese and a Taiwanese companies had flaked me on as well, and in a most bizarre and cruel manner possible. So...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 84 words, total size 1 kb.

CentOS follows Fedora into the trashcan

Having raised issues about Fedora to its "support forum" and been told that Fedora is likely not for me because I am not fond of its machine-gun release and end-of-lifing schedules, I was told to look at CentOS with its supposedly more conservative releases. Ha-ha!

No sound. Yes, you read it right: no sound from a modern laptop with the latest CentOS Stream 9. The sound device is not detected (it is a very common Realtek). Bizarre? Yes. Any solutions? None. Only some attempts by users to solve it, here and there. And now I learn that even pulsaudio monstrocity was not bad enough: CentOS now uses some piece of trash called PipeWire. WTF is it? Another malware layer above ALSA? Hell knows, but it just does not work no matter what. When will this madness end?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 149 words, total size 1 kb.

Microsoft developers are indeed certifiable cretins

VPN: Sometimes, I drop my connection, due to unforeseeable circumstances beyond my control.

Outlook: Your password is wrong. I will wait for you to double-click that status bar area, to re-try the same password.

Seriously, Microsoft? This is the best you can do? Any college student can come up with a method of detecting a VPN connection, but not a trillion-dollar-worth trans-national corporation.

But wait! MS sells mice... A-ha, we are onto something here!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Lowlife duchebags in Mozilla foundation ensure no downgrade is possible

Upgrades of Firefox used to be pretty painless: download the next version, uncompress it to a directory, and run the browser. Not anymore!

Now each next version of Firefox upgrades the profile directory, files, databases etc, so that it is not possible to revert to using the previous version. The upgrade process has become destructive.

Since you destroy our infrastructure, how about we destroy you, Mozilla Foundation? Ever thought of payback by the users whom you royally screw up every day?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 101 words, total size 1 kb.

The humankind should be gravely concerned about the declining intelligence of IT industry

I am warning you: we are on the brink of destruction of our civilization. It will not be due to external threats like retarded dictatorships, fanatic terrorists, space aliens, asteroids, or other BS. It will be due to two things: stupid software developers and complacent public.

Software developers are becoming dumber and dumber, by the day. We the public remain oblivious and forgiving of that.

Take for example carrier tracking web sites such as USPS.com or FedEx.com. When I as a consumer call their support and inquire of the reasons for the tracking number not showing on their web sites they tell me that it works on their end. Their support is not intelligent enough to understand that this does not help. Their IT is not intelligent enough to understand that they have to test their software before it is released to the general public.

Take for example MS Windows 10 and 11. They went out of their way to create a deep, multi-layer system of screens that used to be in one, simple to understand and easy to use tabbed UI. Whereas previously all of the OS settings used to be grouped together in one place, they now have multiple nested screens. This change requires coding and all associated costs. Humongous memory and CPU utilization by these 2x OSs has become notorious but no one cares. This cannot be justified by a reasonable person; therefore, MS is not reasonable.

Take for example MS Office 365 that added several layers of screens for such a simple task as saving a file. Yes, Nadella is the greediest individual in the world, and he wants all money to be his, by forcing everyone into MS cloud, but come on! We will still save files on our local drives, even if he makes it hard. So, why do it?

Take for example Amazon AWS, which never sends an account # to the business customer via email, once the account is opened. So, after the account is closed, but charges keep coming in, the customer is not able to communicate the problem with their customer service because they do not have an account # to reference. Amazon sends tons of advertising emails as soon as account setup is complete, but never a confirmation of the account #. Are they stupid? They very well might be because not everything should be attributed to malice.

Take for example the revamped Google, Amazon, and other search engines that suddenly decided to return results they want instead of the results that the user wants. Amazon is acting borderline criminal by providing products that do not have anything in common with the search term (ex: alkaline batteries when searching for rechargeable). Google, which used to be highly intelligent, suddenly became dumb and returns all sorts of irrelevant garbage.

Take for example Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, which insulates report developers from the database, being in the cloud, and only exposes a bugged, slow, horrendously designed UI that is inconsistent, dumb, hard to use, and overall inconsiderate (no progress bars, no syntax highlighting, no timeout timers, and no auto-save, so every 15 min the developer is kicked out of the session w/o work being saved. Did I say it is poorly documented as well?

Take for example the global addiction of developers to Python and other interpreted languages: it looks like all "green" initiatives do not apply to IT, and it is perfectly fine to develop slow code that requires higher CPU utilization, as high as possible. Are developers too dumb to understand it? They could be dumb or simply inconsiderate.

And the above tiny handful of examples of blatantly obvious issues not being obvious to supposedly highly professional and filthy rich transnational corporations' IT departments is only a tip of the iceberg. I face terminal stupidity in IT daily, hourly, minutely.

If the supposedly best of us are so terrible, imagine the not-so-best! These things all occur over the last 3 years. Is COVID to blame for our civilization getting dumb and dumber? Could be.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 701 words, total size 4 kb.

The first commandment of all UI/UX developers

Thou shalt never do anything in the background while the user is operating the controls.

The above applies to both computer software and devices (cameras, monitors, HT, cellphones, detonators, phasers, etc.)

How to tell a dumb scumbag developer? Their software/firmware will do its own thing as the user presses buttons/touches the screen, etc. How to tell a great developer? Their software prioritizes user input and menu choices over any background processing because the user owns the device and is supposed to be respected for having paid to acquire the device. Amen. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 161 words, total size 1 kb.

Are they mocking us?

Visited Fedora project and saw this:

Welcome to Freedom.
Fedora creates an innovative, free, and open source platform for
hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and
community members to build tailored solutions for their users.

Freedom. Right. Yeah.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

MS Teams compact view: malice or severe mental retardation?

I've always perceived MS Teams as necessary evil and never been inclined to dig deep into its settings, but today someone has pointed out to me that Compact mode exists, in which messages display like in a "normal" IM software: in one column. This has huge advantage over Teams' staggered display, but.

But Compact display hides timestamps. I really want to post a bounty on the head of either the monster or the demented psychopath who makes such idiotic decisions as to hide message timestamps and to group them into 'today' and 'yesterday', etc. Do you, moron, seriously believe that we are interested in knowing that the message has come today but not when exactly? You should take yourself out of gene pool and stop polluting it with your defective DNA.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 149 words, total size 1 kb.

Contagious mental retardation is spreading fast across the IT circles

Jira used to be an island of sanity in the cesspool of "modern" web software. Not anymore! Some demented psychopath has thought that joining the list of issues found by search filter into the same DIV as the currently selected issue screwed us all over.

How to reproduce: go to advanced filter, apply any combination thereof, and you end up on a page with a list of found issues in the left column and the currently selected issue in the right column. Bootstrap splits the space between them about 1/8 and 7/8th, the rest being used by the leftmost column Filters.

So, you scroll down the list of found issues, select one down below, and then... TADA! You have to scroll all the way up, to see the particulars of the selected issue. Genius! NOT.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 155 words, total size 1 kb.

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:

Our services aren't available right now

We're working to restore all services as soon as possible. Please check back soon.
0vjyFYwAFAFDDEdC+i+d4R786TOtr6c2TQk4xQUEyMDUxAEE6MDH5AEVkZ2U=

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
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.

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
Post contains 395 words, total size 2 kb.

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
Post contains 644 words, total size 4 kb.

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
Post contains 190 words, total size 1 kb.

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
Post contains 479 words, total size 3 kb.

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
Post contains 207 words, total size 1 kb.

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
Post contains 367 words, total size 2 kb.

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
Post contains 437 words, total size 3 kb.

The more genius - the more dangerous

The temptation to steal personal information is, of course, irresistible for crooks like Staya Nadella, since his software runs everywhere, and of course he has to maintain benevolent facade. So, Microsoft benevolently puts out this article on how to allow Visual Studio through the firewall because some might want to try to retain some shreds of privacy. Ha-ha!

So, let's read through Install and use Visual Studio and Azure Services behind a firewall or proxy server and see how well MS fares in this respect.

The very first thing one spots is that the article provides URLs whereas Windows firewall supports IP addresses only. Well, thanks for nothing, Satya. But let us carry on!

What is the 2nd thing you spot? Right! They provide no EXE names, except for PerfWatson.exe spyware. But even then the real McCoy is PerfWatson2.exe which does the actual spying and uploading of data.

The article was apparently written by someone genius who does not trouble themselves with pesky details necessary to set the actual firewall rules up. Or... do they know that VS can circumvent Windows firewall, so they provide instructions for real hardware firewalls that do support DNS names? Who knows...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 211 words, total size 1 kb.

The latest Visual Studio 2022: a horrendous, scary piece of stinking garbage

And I thought that VS 2019 was bad! Enter VS 2022:

1. Frightening, unpredictable multi-undo in the designer causing lost work.
2. Intermittently, designer files are not saved, causing lost work.
3. Intermittently, build never switches to error list. This happens more frequently after refactoring.
4. Unpredictably working or non-working intellisence.
5. Obtuse intellisence substitution.
6. Editor, designer, toolbox, and property windows intermittently fail to initialize.

Massive, fundamental changes in the editor and intellisence that MS has undertaken for this new version have apparently not been tested enough. Probably not tested at all. Had they only tested all of the above would have been noticed prior to the release.

Total, utter disrespect that MS is showing for its customer base is typical for Chinese society: rudeness is considered a virtue, politeness being an attribute of Capitalist decadence. We are SOL.

The only solution is a nuke but where do we drop it? On Redmond or elsewhere?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 174 words, total size 1 kb.

Microsoft: Much ado about nothing

Back in the day of advent of Internet, software had been robust. All of infrequent bug reports could have been submitted over the official 1-800 line. This changed rapidly after about 2010 when Internet became omnipresent and mature. Companies like MS created bug trackers. This was the beginning of the end.

'Build them and they will come'. So, they built bug trackers. Now that they have bug trackers they have to produce some results. Results are measured in bug reports. So, they need more bug reports. But many bug reports are bad, so what do we do with bad bug reports? We close them as invalid. Bingo!

Notice that 100% of names of responders to bug reports in MS bug trackers are Chinese. Chinese are communists. Communists prefer to pretend to work rather than work. So, we have pretend-work:

• Investigating and fixing bugs is hard, and the success or failure criteria is immediately obvious to the user.
• Pretending to work on vulnerabilities is easy because no one will ever be able to tell whether it was fixed or not.

And so we have perpetual work on vulnerabilities but no bugs ever fixed. Congratualtions, Western civilization: you are feeding a monster!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 210 words, total size 1 kb.

Can a knight in shiny armor lie?

Enter Eric Lippert(R)(TM):

We can either spend time debugging the compiler and
adding features, or we can spend time cleaning up thousands
of pages of design notes mostly about features that were
cut a decade ago. The vast majority of our customers would
prefer that we spend our budget doing the former activities.
– 
Eric Lippert
Sep 2, 2010 at 19:03 

But you never do! Your Chinese bouncers at Visual Studio bug tracker close our bug reports as either of "unable to reproduce" or "unable to prioritize". Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 106 words, total size 1 kb.

The slow and painful death

As someone whose daily job is to slap together software systems that run world's economy I am intimately aware of many tendencies on the global software market, both commercial and FOS. There is a tendency that I do not yet know how to feel about.

The cloud consolidation efforts of The Big 5 (i.e. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Amazon) lead to many smaller projects dying off. I can feel it in the water... Shit! Not LOTR again. I can see it on Nuget, Github, Sourceforge, and other portals. I can see previously vivid projects becoming stagnant. Is this good or bad?

I still maintain that the shift from the North American university graduates doing software development to Asia is terrifying. Asians are afraid of losing their faces. They are genetically incapable of admitting fault. This makes them terrible candidates to development jobs. This and their pathological hatred of all things European and American. Big-5 consolidation shifts development further off-shore, predominantly to Asia. We are SOL.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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PHP: by idiots, for idiots!

Recently, I have figured out PHP's motto. It is in the title. When a project's goal is to write all possible boilerplate code so that idiots will not have to, it is clearly an idiotic project. Take for example the following function:

substr_replace(
    array|string $string,
    array|string $replace,
    array|int $offset,
    array|int|null $length = null
): string|array

Instead of allowing users of fringe cases to write a simple foreach() loop they created a mess. They are terminal cases of retardation.

Their other motto is: We have a function for that! Indeed, they have intdiv(int $num1, int $num2). Facepalm.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 106 words, total size 1 kb.

Programming languages that have to be wiped off the face of the Earth

• PHP
• Python
• Erlang
• Go
• Ruby
• Haskell
• Kotlyn
• Lua
• F#

These languages have to be forbidden and erased from Internet and all media. Teaching and using them has to be made a punishable offense. The 1-2-out principle has to be used on offenders. Otherwise, people of Earth are doomed.

The remaining languages have to be standardized and standard changes have to be legally allowed to be made once every 5 years. Violators of this last rule have to be executed.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Open letter to all American global monopolies

You have accumulated enormous wealth over the past few decades. Your wealth originates in our pockets: in the pockets of North American middle class. It has been us and our employers who bought your products and services. You are that which you are, thanks to us. Without us you would have not existed.

So why do you believe it is Okay to outsource all customer service and technical support to our enemies who hate our guts? Indeed, you have all but outsourced those two critically important functions to Communist China and backwards India. Populations of both countries hate and despise us. They consider us rich, spoiled capitalists, slave drivers, and condescending snobs. They look forward to avenging their perceived grievances with us. And now, you give them this opportunity, by handing customer service and technical support over to them. And they avenge!

They pretend to be dumb. They waste time. They deny fault. They pass the blame. They stonewall. They pretend to be powerless to assist. And when all of that fails they start all over. Does this make you happy? Probably it does. But it makes us, North American people, miserable. It also makes us hate you: filthy-rich owners of a handful of world's monopolies who have betrayed us.

I am not a communist. I am not a socialist. I am a healthy centrist. But it is you who make me hate and despise your insatiable and blind greed. Beware because sooner or later North-American people will come for you, and you will have nowhere to hide.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 05:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Microsoft's PowerTrip. Oops, sorry: PowerShell

Why do we disable weak TLS cyphers? We are told that they pose risk of intrusion/eavesdropping. A-ha! They pose a risk.

But here comes a genius degenerate from Microsoft and... Guess what they do? They write the code behind PowerShell commands. One such command is Get-TlsCipherSuite. It was devised to display information about the existing cypher suites. When you run it it spits out a bunch of information. So, what is the problem?

The problem is that genius degenerates in Microsoft did not bother to include Enabled/Disabled flag! What is the implication of this? The implication is that there are only 2 ways to find out whether a particular cypher suit is enabled or disabled. One is to try to disable it, and to get an error if it already is disabled. The other is to try to enable and re-disable it.

Let us pause to think, for a second. So, if a cypher suite is disabled, and we want to find out its status, then we can only enable it temporarily. Does this not create a vulnerability, which could be exploited?

And if we try to disable an already disabled cypher and receive an error do we know what causes the error? Is it the fact that it is disabled or is it some other reason? Here is the error, for you to judge:

Disable-TlsCipherSuite : Exception from HRESULT: 0xD0000225
At line:1 char:1
+ Disable-TlsCipherSuite -Name "TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (: ) [Disable-TlsCipherSuite], COMException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Exception from HRESULT: 0xD0000225,Microsoft.WindowsAuthenticationProtocols.Commands.Rem
   oveTlsCipherSuiteCommand

The same error is thrown if PowerTrip, oops, sorry, PowerShell does not run under Administrator. There may be other cases of which I am not aware. How do you tell one reason from another?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Wordpress: a bomb waiting to explode into your face

Architecturally, Wordpress is a landmine waiting to explode.

It looks like Wordpress core developers and plugin developers never read this page: https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_exception.asp Otherwise they would have known that errors have to be handled instead of being thrown into the site owner's and their users' faces.

But no, genius developers do not have to handle errors! Let exceptions rain! And we have WP's signature white screen of death and PHP errors all over the place. And when they occur there will be no support whatsoever. PHP developers and their hired representatives on wordpress.org are trained bouncers, and they are skilled in throwing you, pesky users, out of the door.

Do not repeat the costly mistake made by many: never bet your success on a PHP CMS!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:03 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Gnome developers need a "Bounty"

It is not possible to remove wallpaper in Gnome 4.

Now they have officially gone nuts.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Why we should expect more bugs in open source software

There are so many free, open source software projects out there that their developers and maintainers have little hope of being able to monetize their products. But there is always the other side of it: AD revenue. To create AD revenue it is enough to create traffic to a web site. How do we create traffic? We set up a forum or bug tracker and introduce bugs to our code. Bingo! Now, we have frustrated users coming to our web site, creating traffic, and generating AD revenue.

So, expect more and more unscrupulous crooks to piggy-back on this genius scheme, and more buggy FOS software. We are SOL.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Stupidity knows no limits: VirtualBox power button handling

It is reasonable to expect many users to standby their PCs by pressing the power buttons. It is trivial to configure both Linux and Windows that way. But in VirtualBox there is no setting to prevent the shutdown of the OS by pressing the power button! So, when one presses it, the guest OS shuts down.

Give your head a shake, Oracle!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Evidence that Google passes search and client information to spammers

One of the web sites that my company hosts has a somewhat vulnerable captcha. It can be bypassed by some spammers, and their emails reach the admins. They approached me for hardening their captcha, and I became aware of the kind of spam that they receive. They also authorized me to mention it in this post.

By way of their normal business activity, their employees perform searches for keywords, on Google. They do not use Bing or any other search engine. After running certain searches, they receive spam emails that contain search terms very similar to those that they use. I consider it evidence of a leak from Google, and here is why.

This client of mine is also my VPN client. The IP address of their web site matches the external IP address of their internet connection. Since they use Google over SSL, and its certificate appears in their browser, their SSL connection to Google is not compromised. This means that information about both their searches and their IP address can only be obtained by spammers from Google itself.

If Google is willing to provide any feedback on this matter, I will allow them to comment on this post.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Does anyone understand why Microsoft hates Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins?

Ctrl-Ins key combination for copying objects into clipboard and Shift-Ins key combination for pasting them from it have been around since I started working with DOS programs. Then they became natural habits under Windows 3.1, OS/2, and subsequent versions of Windows. So far, it is a smooth ride.

Fast forward to the emergence of Microsoft Help Viewer, Microsoft SSRS Report Builder, and some other products by that company. Suddenly, the above key combinations do not work anymore, but Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V do work.

Can anyone explain inexplicable hostility and hatred by Microsoft of the former keyboard shortcuts? What is wrong with them (MS) so that they neglect to support or deliberately choose not to support them in some areas of some of their products?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 05:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Listen very carefully: Everyone in the IT industry has gone mad

Microsoft acquired GitHub. Okay, this probably means that it was a lucrative business that MS could make a few hundred bullion $$ from. Sounds like a sweet business transaction.

Fast forward a few months. Now yours faithful tries to go and register a new github account, just to post a bug report for an open-source piece of software that is full of bugs and requires some feedback and a kick in its developer's balls, just to become barely useful. Ha-ha! Not so fast.

To register at GitHub one is now required to solve a captcha challenge. It is a set of 6 pictures, 2 rows of 3 columns, each with a set of 6 of 6-sided dices. Those dices not only have dots: some have numbers on their sides. Are you following? They have numbers too...

Now, try to solve the challenge: pick a picture in which dices total to 14. Here we go... Some dices have 6 on them, and they lay sideways on the desk. Are they 6 or 9? Fine, once I flex my math skills and finally solve this challenge, by guesstimating which digit it might be, the whole thing has the audacity to tell me: "1 challenge done" and present me with a new set of similar pictures. You know, Microsoft: you are brain-fucked, if you believe that adults who need access to some open-source projects enjoy being bullied to such degree. So, go and fuck yourself, lunatics! more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Yawning Heighs of corruption

Type 'golem' into an Open Office or LibreOffice text document. It will be underlined by a red, squiggly line, as a typo. Right-click it. The dictionary will suggest 'google' as the only replacement. "Open" Office is as corrupt as it gets.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Xinsane

Another Linux lie: we can scan.

Truth: you cannot.

Refugees from Windows environments come spoiled by high-quality software that they acquire as bundled with their scanners. It always works fine, it is always intelligent, and it overall helps to be productive. On the contrary, Linux scanning is lame, buggy, counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly, and, ironically, insane, even though the core scanning infrastructure under linux calls itself sane.

Xsane is one of the higher quality products for scanning under Linux. It kind of works: it can scan single-page documents. Congratulations, Oliver Rauch: your programming prowess is truly incredible! But what about automatic document feeders of modern MFUs? He pretends to support them by... having a user create "projects".

Read it again: it is not enough to pick ADF from the drop down. You have to switch your target from Save to Multipage, which opens another window that forces you to browse for another file, different from the file you have already designated as the target on the main window. Then you struggle to understand what to do next because this new window cannot be closed. It has counter-intuitive controls that mean nothing to someone who is used to Windows scanner software.

And, Tada! To add insult to injury, after switching Xsane into multipage mode, you scan and, WTF? You still end up with a single-page PDF. It simply ignores the rest of the pages, after scanning the 1st one. Xinsane!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Non-Microsoft web sites owned by Microsoft now pin CPU

Using their global monopoly position, Microsoft must be tempted to abuse their customer's processing power by running some obscured payloads in their browsers. I noticed first that it is happening on Github: when its page is loaded, it pins 50% of one core. Then I visited other sites and noticed the same behavior on Linkedin, but with nearly 100% load of one core. Then Office365 and Teams exhibited the same behavior.

This consumes anywhere from 5-10Wt of electric energy to 20-30Wt. Multiply this by the millions of users, and you arrive at megawatts stolen by Microsoft from its user base and the general public, which subsidizes electricity in many countries.

What is the payload? Is Microsoft mining crypto-currencies on user devices? I believe this question is worth looking into. Even if they do not, even if this is just a very bad and inconsiderate design, common these days, this practice must stop. Such ginormous waste on a global scale is unacceptable for the human civilization.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: we have a community, and it is friendly

Nothing could be further from the truth. Linux "community" is the most viscious, cruel, and unforgiving. Linux enthusiasts eagerly and readily team up to bully and harass everyone who questions the swamp and torrent of bugs that Linux pours onto its users.

The UNIX&Linux stack exchange is the standing monument to this kind of behaviour. Its moderators are clearly activists on payroll of RedHat and Canonical, and they use any PR spinning practice invented, such as verbal abuse, character assassination, and cancel culture, to expel anyone and everyone who has audacity to ask questions about problems and bugs in Linux. Any problem-related questions are immediately swarm-downvoted and eventually closed as not fitting high standards of UNIX stack exchange.

So, where does the now-frustrated user go? To the distro-related resource, I guess. Be it Fedora forums or Ask Ubuntu. But there, again, each problem question is met with similar hostility of a few select enthusiasts. To them it does not matter that we have to get our job done. The only thing that matters is that distro maintainer prescriptions, perpetual upgrade and blind following of the dogmas, is obeyed.

Careful reader might ask: but what about the slogan of freedom that Linux had been introduced under? Forget about it! Linux is no longer that which it started off as. You have no freedom to refuse unwanted technologies being shoved down our throats. You either obey and accept, or they see you out of the door.

Linux has morphed into a gigantic clusterfuck of lies by today because there is a ton of money to be had by Linus and Kox. Remember: Android is Linux. This smells $$$

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: Linux is stable and being developed by competent developers

I have already blogged about full-on backdooring of Linux via systemd and hijacking of its security by polkitd. Turns out that the developer of the latter is also an inconsidering troll and disrespectful fascist, like the majority of so-called "open source community" is.

Read this excellent research by Jonathan de Boyne Pollard: The PolicyKit service. It is a damning guilty verdict to Linux gestapo uberschturmgruppenfuhrer David Zeuthen from... tada!.. RedHat (surprise! Who wudda thunk that RedHat employs inept trolls?). In short, PolkitD pins CPUs around the globe because the developer considered it a good idea. Why did I put a period just before this sentence? Because this is it: David Zeuthen thought it was a good idea to keep incessantly polling directories that polkitd has no permissions to, in the assumption that someone might notice that their CPU is pinned and start doing research.

For posterity:

Sometimes /usr/local/share/polkit-1/rules.d/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwx------ permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwx------ permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwxr-x--- permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes the ConsoleKit service is simply not running.

The polkitd program's failure mode in such scenarios is to keep trying,
incessantly, to access these, every few seconds. This is visible as
the dæmon constantly consuming (some) CPU time and continually appearing
in the listings of top -I and suchlike. 

How about a message? But no pip squeak from commandante Zeuthen. He did not bother to publicize his exploits, and millions of Linux users around the globe keep paying inflated electricity bills and suffer degraded performance on their systems because... tada!.. many distro maintainers and software packagers have no idea of polkitd's permission requirements.

Fuck you, David! I hope that you rot in hell soon.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 341 words, total size 2 kb.