Posts by Eric 9001

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

I don't mean ulimits - Unix data structures had arbitrary limits that were very low;

- Filenames lengths were arbitrary limited to 8 bytes and then 14 bytes; https://web.archive.org/web/20250529020934if_/https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/UnixEarlyFilenameLenghts

- Lines more than ~80 bytes long were silently truncated with a newline; http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/truncate_line.html (for example in Unix ps, tar and tsch).

- From large files, sometimes only n number of bytes, or n number of bytes at a time would be read into memory - which would prevent software like grep from working properly.

- Non-ASCII characters were silently dropped, meaning character sets like UTF-8 couldn't work - sometimes even NULL characters were dropped, corrupting even ASCII data.

- Unix socket parts are limited to ~100 bytes (this limitation still exists in Unix's); https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/367008/why-is-socket-path-length-limited-to-a-hundred-chars

GNU's Not Unix made it a policy to not have such arbitrary limitations; https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Semantics.html which made it a lot more robust and reliable than Unix's; https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.en.html

Most Unix's have now finally reduced or eliminated such arbitrary limitations in order to compare to GNU - but all are still functionally lacking.

One of the few similarities of the kernel, Linux to proprietary Unix kernels is how it has an arbitrary limit of 255 bytes for file names and 4096 bytes for PATH_MAX; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems?useskin=monobook#Limits which is high enough for most cases, but occasionally you can end up with a path that GNU software has no problem handling, but Linux cannot.

ulimit is intended to share resources between many users of a system or to prevent buggy software from overloading or hanging the system, but due to Linux's bad habit of by default telling glibc that 1TB of memory is available in response to a mmap() call and then proceeding to lock up when the software tries to use 16GB of memory, ulimit fails to achieve that.

While ulimit has an option of limiting the amount of memory per user, such function is mostly useless, as buggy memory hungry software like monerod, that for example allocates ~2TB of memory, but only generally uses 8GB of RAM, but will happily slowly exhaust system memory when hit by a DoS (with the OOM reaper nowhere to be found, as apparently recovery from that state was deemed possible, despite 24+ hours of total lockup), cannot be limited to 10GB of RAM via ulimit, as it will fail to start if malloc() fails.

>Linux was the alternative to running a Unix-like environment of PC H/W

The replacement to Unix was GNU with Linux added - but even back then of course even back then, many people referred to LiGNUx as "Linux" and considered themselves "Linux users" and refused to work with GNU (which was shocking at the time, as even BSD developers would work with GNU).

GNU doesn't do any work on systemd (GNU's init is GNU shepherd), but systemd does utilize GNU a lot.

Re: The problem isn't Windows, it's Microsoft

There is in fact a lot that can be done on LiGNUx that cannot be done on windows or macos without at least installing a port of GNU.

windows' design has severe deficiencies that results in it being nowhere near as capable as GNU.

The evil in microsoft manifested from the very start.

The whole idea of microsoft is that it is believed that maximum profits can be achieved if microsoft controls the user, via the software controlling the user.

From an early stage, Bill Gates showed how evil he was by publishing the "open letter to hobbyists", complaining that hobbyists had dared made microsoft BASIC popular via distribution of copies without making a payment for every single copy.

Most of the money microsoft made from MBASIC was because businesses that sold computers determined that MBASIC was the most popular BASIC and therefore went and purchased copies from microsoft to include it with the computers.

That letter even claims that writing MBASIC "cost $40,000 of computer time" but Billy boy didn't pay for that - rather the US taxpayer paid for the PDP-10 computer time at Harvard and of course Gates insisted that he deserved money for copies of software already paid for by the taxpayer.

The only money paid was for time on a commercial time share computer to finalize the software - which was needed as Harvard eventually found out about the development of such software that would negatively impact humanity and said no.

All microsoft software was controlled by microsoft from the very start - although in recent years microsoft has stopped pretending that the user has any control and is steadily adding more and more malicious features.

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

Android phones are arguably based on GNU (as GNU/Linux is what Android is developed on, same as Android software) - although no GNU software is included by default in the produced images (although there's places left in want of GNU - for example Android supports bash as a system shell).

Mach was never a Unix kernel and is not similar at all to BSD kernel's - it was a microkernel design that has only some parts that are Unix-like.

While Apple did copy Mach, they made extensive modifications to it.

It seems Apple did not fork any "Free"BSD user applications - rather they copied the runtime libraries and made extensive modifications; https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html

In the past, Apple did include some GNU software for use in OSX, but not anymore.

GNU predates Linux - Linux is rather in GNU and there really is only one release of GNU packages - the only real differences is which packages a GNU/Linux distro includes and which versions are installed.

The only similarity GNU has to BSDs and OSX is that it uses a Unix-like design.

Writing about "using Linux" is like talking about riding metal objects, instead of stating what vehicle is being driven - for example riding a restricted bicycle (using Android), or driving a car (using LiGNUx).

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

Linux isn't even an OS.

In most cases, system wide configuration files are in /etc/ and per user config files are in $HOME/.config (although some programs cannot help but to use different parts - but that really doesn't matter).

GNU made substantial improvements over 40+ year old Unix, which was full of arbitrary size limitations and crashes - just because the concept of a modular design is ancient doesn't mean that it is outdated.

While Linux doesn't implement that proprietary windows protocol, Samba does implement Active Directory functionally better than windows.

windows 3.1 was a joke and due to DOS limitations, no DOS software is any good when compared to TUI programs implemented with GNU ncurses.

GNU made it possible for IT to go back to freedom despite all the complaining.

Linux isn't even free - it's proprietary software.

Who's watching the watchers? This Mozilla fellow, and her Surveillance Watch map

Simplicity?

Everything that allows for spying is always extremely complicated and hard to use - although the users are always told that "it's simple".

If you want security, things much be simple.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

It will never be that year, as that kernel doesn't operate on its own.

The year of the GNU/Linux desktop was around 1995, as finally you could use a recent computer in freedom again.

Too bad that was destroyed with the first proprietary program (of many) added to Linux in 1996.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Migrate Windows to Linux

microsoft isn't going to break semi-compatibility with old windows software by replacing the NT kernel with Linux - as the result would be an OS that has worse software comparability than WINE on LiGNUx.

systemd and Bash are GNU, not Linux and microsoft already offered access to Bash with GNU/kWindows ("WSL1") and systemd and bash on GNU/Linux VMs ("WSL2").

What robustness of Windows NT?

After experiencing windows 95 and earlier, I guess "no longer crashing every day" would seem to be very robust, but windows has never been the slightest bit robust or reliable.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

Re: This timeline

Sure heroin was non-addictive when a small dose as a cough suppressant was administered once or twice despite the harm.

But boy it was addictive when it was used to mask the symptoms of tuberculosis (I guess some would keep going back for a bigger and bigger dose as the cough from the untreated tuberculosis would keep coming back).

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

>Behave. That includes not telling lies.

It's quite sad that people accuse me of telling lies when do I extensive research and check before making any claim and try to tell the truth to the best of my ability.

Let us compare Android and Windows;

- Windows doesn't really restrict your ability to install and run software on windows (if it doesn't have a signature, it will pop up a nasty warning, but the software will still run (windows tablet did, but that is discontinued)), while Android refuses to install software unless it has a signature (it's a unreasonable task to re-sign an apk - for example after merely editing the apk config flag to add the external storage flag - you need to work out how to sign it and of course the official signing program is proprietary software) and it is scheduled for future Android versions to disallow the installation of software without google's signature (it is unclear as to how long workarounds like `adb install` will work).

- Windows is fractionally source-available to approved people via the "shared source initiative", while Android is partially source-available to approved parties are not forbidden from receiving the source code (there are far more proprietary things than google play services and google apps) - with google providing non-corresponding source code for many parts under a free license.

- The windows "sdk" is under a proprietary license, while the Android "sdk" is under a proprietary license.

- Windows uses a proprietary kernel (the NT kernel), while Android uses a proprietary kernel (Linux).

- There are unauthorized custom modified versions of windows, while there are also unauthorized custom builds of Android ("AOSP" lacks everything needed to actually get a device working - the developer needs to include the missing proprietary software in an unauthorized manner).

As you can see, Windows and Android are uniquely proprietary in different ways - which makes Android just as proprietary as Windows in practice, even though far more non-corresponding source code of Android is available.

The explanation below is only partially sourced (I didn't want to build a wall of text too big) - if anyone needs any further details, just ask.

>The runtimes are FOSS.

To develop anything for the "runtimes" of Android, you'll need at least the Android SDK, NDK and platform-tools, which are proprietary software under a proprietary license (the same license applies whether bundled with studio or not); https://developer.android.com/studio/terms https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads https://developer.android.com/tools/releases/platform-tools

That license contains many proprietary restrictions, but restrictions of exceptionable notability are;

"You may not use this SDK to develop applications for other platforms (including non-compatible implementations of Android) or to develop another SDK."

"You may not use the SDK for any purpose not expressly permitted by the License Agreement. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK." (applicable third party licenses is software not from google).

google claims to provide source code of the SDK separately (I have not checked if that is in fact complete source code - I have read a claim that it contains binaries not in source form) and there is a rebuild project; https://codeberg.org/Starfish/SDK-Rebuilds - but what google provides is not corresponding source code, as a lot of Android software that is developed with google's SDK (that does not use google play services) will not compile against the rebuild SDK.

fdroid for that reason does not use the rebuild SDK to build software - instead they use the proprietary google SDK; https://f-droid.org/docs/Installing_the_Server_and_Repo_Tools/#proprietary-non-free-libraries

>AOSP is FOSS.

"AOSP" completely lacks the most important software required to get any device working.

In most cases, or most devices, to get a working device, proprietary software like (but not limited to) proprietary drivers need to be extracted out of vendors proprietary versions of Android and then unauthorizely distributed as part of the distribution.

Google in the past provided downloads of the recent required proprietary software for their devices (starting from Android 16 they don't), but in fact distribution of such software was and is forbidden; "These files are for use only on your personal devices and may not be redistributed"; https://developers.google.com/android/drivers).

>FOSS: Free and Open Source Software.

Most people who read that assume it means gratis, source-available software.

The only way to resolve that confusion would be to describe what free software is (takes <30 seconds - "By free I mean freedom, not gratis - free software is software that respects the users freedom to run, study, modify and/or share unmodified or modified versions of the software. Everyone has these freedoms with food recipes and should have them with software too. Free software can be either gratis, or cost money".) and then describe what is "open source" (10+ minutes - as you need to go over the 10 requirements of the osd, the development model and open source intelligence - 90% of people are going to stop listening and all they'll remember is "open source" == source-available) and then you need to come up with something as to why free software and "open source" should be grouped together - which is a disaster.

>Which requires Unicode support and appropriate fonts for a start. Then it additional requires a way to _type_ 適用.

To edit a .po file, all you need is Emacs and unifont (although you may want to install mozc or anthy, rather than having to type C-x 8 RET 9069 C-x 8 RET 7528).

>Android is Linux. >It has a different libc

Android is far more than just the kernel, Linux and binonic and an OS is far more than a kernel and a libc.

Linux isn't fully source-available, despite being the poster child for "open source".

It contains completely undocumented init sequences without a single comment, object code without source code disguised as arrays of numbers and the project also develops against and maintains proprietary software without source code (it's stored in another git repo for convenience reasons (massive binary blobs mess up the git history), but the name is "linux-firmware.git" - not "firmware.git" (i.e. for any kernel) for some reason - which means despite the "open source" development model, Linux is proprietary software

Android does not clean up the proprietary software out of Linux when it uses it and proprietary Linux drivers are extremely common for Android.

>There are multiple rebuilds of it.

CyanogenMod, GrapheneOS and LineageOS are all proprietary software.

There is Replicant - but questionably it refuses to install an apk without a signature and you cannot permanently disable system services (if you extract the boot partition, disable an unwanted service that will not break the device and repack it with the exact settings the device will fail to boot).

Re: Linux first

It takes some skill compile things cross platform between windows and GNU if the used IDE doesn't have a button that automatically does it - which most game devs seem to lack.

Considering that such games are almost always proprietary software, it's arguably a feature for the games not to run.

Re: SSD Issues

The issue seems to be lack of interest in delivering a non-defective product on Samsung's part, as Linux does implement SATA and NCQ and TRIM to the specification; https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203475

I wonder what Debian's doing, as looking at GNU Linux-libre 5.4.260 as far back as November 2023, the issue is fixed by disabling NCQ TRIM in drivers/ata/libata-core.c (NCQ itself is not disabled unless you have an old ATI SATA controller which requires disabling NCQ entirely).

With no NCQ TRIM, but NCQ enabled, as long as you schedule a periodic trim with cron or whatever (usually already done via a systemd service on systemd distros), there will be no meaningful performance decrease.

Window's kernel seems to handle defective SSD's far worse; https://wccftech.com/windows-11-latest-update-is-reportedly-causing-widespread-ssd-failures/

I've had no issues with SSDs on LiGNUx - even when I forget to setup TRIM, there isn't a slowdown until months later and you just run fstrim.

When it comes to translations, that is generally enabled by a library called GNU gettext, which is free software - not "FOSS".

If the programmer goes and includes the gettext init and header and does _("string to translate") for every string that is beneficial to translate, that does indeed allow even non-programmers to translate the software.

The .po format is pretty good in that all you need is a text editor to finish off a translation - you can see; msgid "Apply" msgstr "Apply" and go translate it by changing msgstr to;

msgstr "適用"

For many programs - all that needs to be translated is the help output and the manual, as that allows the user to understand what say cp and --dereference does and use it, despite not knowing any English.

There is nothing wrong with commercial software - what is wrong and what does the enslaving is proprietary software.

Several years ago, microsoft got the Chinese by making many of such unauthorized copies of windows cease to function (Billy let the unauthorized copies happen, as he wanted the Chinese to use and become dependent on his - rather than having factories use say LiGNUx instead), but as far as I can tell, there hasn't really been that much action taken to fix the problem permanently.

Android is just as proprietary as windows, but I guess how you can make custom Android builds that partially does what you want, despite the extreme difficulty, is practically much better than windows (which does not allow custom builds at all).

Re: Oh how I wish...

LibreOffice can render, edit and save .docx and .xlsx files (unlike office, to spec, but you'll want MOX mode rather than to spec) and I suspect the output files would render more reliably than the output of office 2010 in later versions of office.

For all the times I've edited .xlsx files - nobody has ever noticed that I'm not using office.

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Perhaps the Rust Foundation should have thought of this earlier

SPARK seems dedicated to being proprietary (with the free software release being an afterthought) - if that's the case, it should be avoided.

GNU Ada is a fine language to program things in, as it is now a in tree frontend in GCC after all.

Rewriting well developed free software is almost never a good idea, as if you have a program that had the logic errors worked out of it for 20 years and an extensive testsuite (with only a few memory errors remaining to work out) and decide to rewrite it in another language (that magically has no memory errors somehow), the rewritten version will be full of logic errors (and thus have far more security holes) and is almost guaranteed to lack functionality the original had.

Re: Perhaps the Rust Foundation should have thought of this earlier

Rust stuff can easily stop working even if all used crates are maintained, as the language is a moving target.

UK judge delivers a 'damp squib' in Getty AI training case, no clear precedent set

Re: Stored or not stored?

Always relying on the law to determine right or wrong is trite logic that fails hard - as there's a lot of laws that are immoral - but magically those laws are moral because the law says so.

>For an example, wage theft is a crime where I do work for someone who agreed to pay me but criminally withholds owed money.

In that particular case, the work has been done and money has been earned, but the contractually agreed percentage isn't given to the person who assisted with making that money.

Such act would be immoral whether it is criminal or not.

>As law stands, someone owning the copyright has the right to place terms on the distribution and use of their work

If you actually read the copyright laws - those state that copyright is of a limited time and eventually expires - while something that is owned never expires (too bad both the term lengths and the legal texts have been corrupted immorally).

It's often the case that the copyright holder is not the author of the work and is it moral that some business who didn't author the work has the ability to restrict the work (especially so against the author(s) wants)?

>you commit a crime if you violate those unless you and your use comply with explicitly written exceptions.

If you actually read the UK law; https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107 receiving unauthorized copies for private use is not an offense.

Distribution is only considered a offense if it is part of a business, or is for financial gain, or it is imagined that the copyright holder would make a financial gain if the distribution had not occurred (such claims are ludicrous).

>Others, for example violating an open source license with specific terms, are less financial but are still criminal and can result in financial penalties.

In the UK, violating an "open source" license would likely only be regarded as an offense if done commercially (reviewing section 107 - there is no offense for deemed losses that are not financial).

The typical case of copyright infringement of a strong free software license is to take the free software and to make it proprietary (usually commercially, but sometimes noncommercially) - which is immoral no matter what the law say (immorally it seems that individuals making software proprietary noncommercially in the UK would get away with such disgraceful act).

>As long as you continue to use flawed logic like this to either claim that these aren't crimes

Receiving an unauthorized copy is not an offense in the UK, nor is distribution that isn't imagined to cause a financial loss.

>You can argue that they should not be crimes and thus that we should consider changing laws.

Noncommercial sharing of generally useful public information should not be an offense not matter how, or how often it is done - after all, computers are the ultimate copying machine and never using them to copy is serious brain damage

In the UK, that could be achieved via removing remove the parts about imagined losses and also the parts forbidding breaking digital handcuffs from the copyright acts - but that will never happen.

Re: Nonsense

Every creative work automatically falls under copyright whether its author wants it to or not - thus it's well known that it must be assumed that all images downloaded from the internet are under copyright, unless such images were marked as a scan of an ancient image or have been validly placed into the public domain on the page the image was downloaded from.

Exact copies do happen, but in the general case it's a bit like slamming parts of a bunch of CD's together and re-encoding into mp3 - the only difference is that buzzwords are plastered everywhere and it's magic as it's "AI".

Re: Stored or not stored?

It is an error to equate unauthorized copies to theft - as making a copy of digital data doesn't change the original by one bit, while robbing someone takes something physical from them.

It shouldn't be a crime to share generally useful public information with your neighbors just to be nice.

In the case of proprietary programs, maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to make distributing them a crime - as the distribution of proprietary software does harm those who receive the software.

Re: Hmmm

If Joe in the UK uses a boat as part of an operation where he steals a storage medium with software on it (unless the act includes a boat, it is not piracy), generally there would no grounds for a claim of copyright infringement (as he didn't copy the storage medium - he stole it) - but there would be grounds for a claim of theft of the storage medium and of piracy - which has severe charges available on the books.

As far as I can tell, it has always been the case that if Joe in the UK downloads an unauthorized copy some software without distributing it, there aren't any grounds for a claim of copyright infringement, but a company will still be able to send a threatening letter demanding thousands of dollars.

As far as I can tell, it has never been illegal to download a movie via bittorrent in the UK provided the client is configured to be a leech that doesn't seed - after all, you wouldn't be distributing the movie (although an extortive letter demanding x dollars, or that you'll be sued may still be received).

But I guess there's now some new precedent that you can share generally useful public information with your neighbors by seeding the movie, as long as the movie is re-encoded (as the bytes on disk and pixels are indeed different after after re-encoding H.264 to H.265 or better VP9).

Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate

Going from github to gitlab is going out of the frying pan into the fire.

What's his email so I can email him and tell him all about it?

Copilot can replace Search in latest Windows 11 test builds, but it's not a good idea

`find -name '*file*'` or `locate file` does work great on my machine.

That would be the windows GUI on top of DOS (November 20, 1985) - as despite how GUI's existed before, that was clearly exciting for those who previously suffered with the command line interface of MS-Dirty Operating System (almost the worst one ever implemented).

Re: Ask CoPilot anything

Boiling the water until it turns into superheated steam is exactly what they are doing.

They've now realized that, no matter how far they go, people who still use windows, aren't going to stop using it and are ready to take all of any new abuse that can be dreamed up.

Re: Productivity

Nobody needs to - if you run LiGNUx, most things really haven't changed for no good reason in 30 years - Emacs, grep, sed, awk, find, nano, ed's, tar and everything else have the same interface and thus the user only needs to learn once.

Even for unhelpful breakages like wayland, you can just not install wayland and keep using Xorg.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Re: Time to move on

I really shouldn't reply, but it's really amazing the libel against Richard Stallman that people come up with - but I guess the whole idea is that if you carry out a character assassination, with accusations of anything related to "paedophilia", people let emotions cloud their judgement and don't check the facts.

He was defending his late friend Minsky (after all, dead people can't defend themselves) from what turned out to be false allegations; https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-against-richard-stallman.html

Despite the harm resulting and inability to discuss things in a logical manner, emotions clouding judgement can result in these irrational conclusions;

"Laws decide morality" (when in fact many laws are extremely immoral in certain cases).

"A {17,17.5,17.75,17.99,18,19} year old is a child".

"<Harmful act> was not rape or harmful if the victim was 18".

"<Commenting anything at all> in relation to individuals under age {18,19,20,21} years is 'paedophilia'" (Of course people don't even bother to check what that word means; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophilia?useskin=monobook)

I'll move on, as logic is lost on the irrational.

>The GPL is way more restrictive than the BSD license

There are many BSD licenses, but let us compare the BSD 3-clause and the GPLv3+.

The 3-clause BSD "restricts" you from distributing the software;

a) If redistributing source code, you must keep intact the copyright notices, the list of conditions and a disclaimer.

b) If redistributing binaries, you must keep intact the copyright notices, a list of conditions and a disclaimer in the documentation etc.

c) You may not endorse or promote products with the name of the copyright holder or contributors.

d) There is no patent license.

The GPLv3+ "restricts" you from distributing the software;

a) If redistributing source code, you must keep intact the copyright notices and license text.

b) If redistributing binaries, you must keep intact the copyright notices and license text.

c) You may not restrict the software by making it proprietary - for any object code distributed, you must include or make available via a written offer, the complete corresponding source code and installation information (just like how that was provided to you), to those provided the object code (or in the case of a written offer, anyone with the written offer).

d) You have a patent license, which remains in force unless patent aggression is undergone.

As can be seen - neither license contain any restrictions (the government is the one restricting the software - a free license rather undoes such restrictions) - but both do have several requirements.

Businesses may complain about the requirements of the BSD 3-clause (after all, it's inconvenient to include the license notice in all needed places) and may complain about the requirements of the GPLv3+ (after all, it's inconvenient to tarball up the source code and compilation+installation scripts), but when given the option to take it under the terms or leave it - most accept either set of terms in the end.

>So the GPL according to your logic is also a crime against humanity.

It could be argued that releasing software under a weak license, knowing with certainty that it would be restricted to become proprietary software would be a minor crime against humanity - but that is not certain and BSD 3-clause software with source code, that is not rendered proprietary by a patent, is free software after all.

>There is nothing inherently wrong with proprietary software.

Proprietary software is inherently wrong as it infringes on at least one of the four freedoms (most infringes on all 4).

In any case where the users are restricted from running the software when they wish, and/or restricted from studying how the program works and changing it as they wish and/or restricted from sharing unmodified or modified versions is a case when something wrong has happened.

Anyone who has ever cooked from a recipe would likely agree that it would be wrong to infringe on these 4 freedoms when it comes to food recipes (you should be free to cook the recipes, read and understand the recipes and/or share unmodified or modified recipes) - but magically software is something completely different and it's okay to restrict it.

>A lot of software would never get created it people couldn't earn a living coding.

The assumption that software needs to be proprietary for it to be possible to earn a profit is false (and also the assumption that software being proprietary guarantees profit is false too).

It would be better for software to not exist than for it to be proprietary - so as long as proprietary software was eradicated, it wouldn't be a bad thing for less software to be written and for people to not be able to earn a living coding (after all, they can do something else, like programming) - but that's a false dichotomy.

The world doesn't particularly need another calculator, or other word processor, or another kernel etc etc etc, but what it certainly doesn't need is more proprietary software.

Most software is custom software, which is free software as long as the customer has the wit to require that the source code is provided and also to not sign away their copyright for proprietary terms, for the software they paid to have written.

Regardless, generally the money is not in writing the software - the money is in support, warranty, hosting and custom modifications - all of which is working quite well with free software in many cases.

Only a small number of companies and a handful of individuals are able to make a profit from selling copies of proprietary software (or even merely subscriptions to it) - as generally those companies and individuals do their best to prevent competing software from being written, as they do not like even imagining of any interference to their monopolies.

>Not everyone wants to live like a homeless bum sleeping in a computer lab

If anyone wishes to have a life where they hack to their hearts content and then choose any flat surface in the computer lab to collapse exhausted and sleep - they should be free to do so - as such sort do tend to achieve something for humanity, unlike most people.

Richard Stallman last worked in a computer lab 26+ years ago and he in fact did not sleep in the computer lab - he slept in a normal bed and would shower before returning to work.

>with no bath or shower for weeks at a time (how do you think his toe jam accumulated? He has bad personal hygiene).

The most egregious lie in your post is that Richard Stallman has bad hygiene - while people assume he has bad hygiene, he in fact has good hygiene to their shock.

The reason why he was able to take a sample and seconds of his foot skin when taking about the dangers of patents, was because his foot was clean.

I would love to do nothing better than to hold a question and answer session on free software and at a key moment whip my feet out and sample some carefully cultivated foot cheese (too bad I don't have any - maybe it only starts growing when you finish writing the substantial free software package).

>Most of the posters here paid their bills writing software - and most of that was proprietary. Obviously you never worked in the industry.

Most of the posters here appear to be sysadmins - which consists of maintaining computer systems - not writing software.

You've clearly never worked in the industry if you think most of is writing proprietary software (how there is now an equal amount or more free software than currently available proprietary software products disproves such claim).

Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

Re: "free money is free money"

I don't get why people see "free" in marketing and believe it - after all everything that has ever been labeled "free" in marketing is always nonfree (synonym for proprietary) and isn't ever gratis either.

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

Re: It doesn't have to be efficient

There is only one rust compiler and there is no rust specification either - the language is a constantly moving target and the only program that can compile the compiler version N-1.

There is a C++ compiler (mrustc), but that can only compile rustc 1.74.0 at the newest, while the current rust verision is 1.91.0; https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/10/30/Rust-1.91.0/

There is a lot of versions between 1.74.0 and 1.91.0; https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/archive-stable-version-installers.html and bootstrapping rust takes and hundreds of gigabytes of storage.

There is gccrs, which will solve the bootstrapping problem, but after 7+ years of development, issue 49 on the github repository still cannot compile hello world (using github to develop gcc is unacceptable - but even such sinful drag on development doesn't slow down development that much) and even if gccrs ever manages to compile a release of rust, that still wouldn't solve the major functionality and security issue of your typical rust project relying on thousands of statically linked rust crates.

If a large development team was to spend 10 years writing a rust-to-C transpiler (it look >40 developers 10+ years to support rust 1.74.0; https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/commits/master?after=da4075f17328474ba90d2b3b56dde6be1954eeea+5770), it'd stop working as soon as the next complexity increase is made to rust.

Regardless - unless there is an implementation of y language in x language (for example lua is implemented in C, which means embedding it in C programs doesn't cause issues), you shouldn't ever mix languages in projects - otherwise you'll always get a program that often ceases to compile and/or run and requires constant changes to make it compile and run again (something likened to cancer).

If a developer wants apt to have rust, that developer should write a pure-rust implementation of apt - but nobody would use that, as well it would break many things and lack much important functionality until after many years of development - thus the intention is to rust the current apt implementation.

(Just think about what happens to a building when its structural steel rusts through - that is exactly what rust intends to achieve - it's even admitted in the selected name).

Re: Linux Is Not Windows

I agree that a kernel is not comparable to an OS.

There are many languages that are memory safe.

Go is memory safe, python is memory safe, ada is memory safe, bash is memory safe, Java is memory safe and lisp is memory safe.

But interesting, the only language being pushed for memory safety despite the unstability and lack of a specification is rust.

Could it be that the reason is to eliminate the OS that must be completely eliminated to the point that it may not be named (using those before mentioned langues wouldn't do that, as that OS has compatible and portable implementations of those languages).

Re: To paraphrase Steve Ballmer...

It's literally right there is the name as to what happens to the big iron.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Moles won't make it very far - as those can only trench through soil, as far as the pneumatic air supply and piping can handle and will stop on encountering a rock layer.

A small boring machine will make it further, but those need to be babysit, with a conveyor belt taking away evacuated material and will get stuck on encountering rock that is too hard, or to soft, or the wrong type of soil or sand.

Most submarine cables already lead directly to places that add optical splices and sell access to people that do far worse things than playful cleverness and also even crackers.

Re: Political instability nixes it

Microwave line-of-site transmitters are commonly in use in the deserts of Africa - as fibre laid in shifting sand promptly breaks.

Repeater stations can only transmit so far and need power at every repeater location, which would be significantly more expensive than a single fibre with optically, or aluminum wire powered repeaters - as power only needs to be supplied at both ends of such cable.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

It's not clear as to what use LLM's would have for writing ransomware.

It's really not that hard - all that is needed;

* id+encryption key generation.

* Sending that data to a remote server.

* Encryption of user files + deletion of originals.

* Popping up the ransom message with instructions how to pay and receive the decryptor (or writing the ransom message to a file on the desktop) and of course the attacker can also just take payment and not supply decryption.

* Or if the encryption and payment checking is too hard, add an .encrypted extension to every file (windows will make the files mostly unusable and also makes it hard to remove the extension) and make the program remove the extension when the "payment has been made (non-payment will result in deletion of all files)" button is pressed.

All of that is mostly a copy-paste job from stackoverflow.

A LLM could be used to write the email demanding that the "pdf.exe" file is viewed immediately and the ransom message, but it's really easier to just type the 1 or 2 needed sentences and copy-paste the cryptocurrency address (using a LLM even risks the cryptocurrency address being modified to the wrong one).

Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge

CISCO has a lot of confidence in managers to think that most could do difficult tasks like replacing the correct PSU out of the failed one.

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: CGNAT is more widely used than you may think

What network are you connecting to?

Internally, LTE network are IPv6-only at the lowest level and therefore IPv6 support is in fact a hard requirement for LTE to work - but the ISP can go out of their way to only offer an internet connection with NAT'd IPv4 - meaning on the end device, the internal IPv6 addressing is hidden and all you see is IPv4 addressing.

Re: IPv6 solution...

The definition of a wide adoption of IPv6 seems to be when all popular website have AAAA records.

theregister.com and github.com are examples of popular sites that are IPv4-only, which means no connection without at least NAT64.

I don't think the price of IPv4 addresses is going to fall off a cliff any time soon, as demand far outstrips supply.