Posts by David Haworth 1 47 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
A few minor corrections:
* in the Unix philosophy, each little "app" is a *master* of one trade, not a jack
* all of the little apps are at most an "apt install" or equivalent away - no subscription needed
Conclusion: iOs and Android need a command line and all the usual stuff (sort, uniq, grep, sed etc.)
If that were available, I might even consider investing in a so-called "smart" phone.
No meta key? Well, that's interesting, because the first time I fired up tilde (after reading the article and installing it to take a look) it informed me that I could use Meta+<letter> to access the menus. Or Esc <letter>.
Another interesting thing (referring back to my earlier comment): After Esc F neither Q nor ctrl-Q work. Is that another useful feature of CUA?
It demands that my fingers do interesting gymnastics for even the simplest tasks.
Two features that I use a great deal appear to be missing:
* ability to pipe a range of lines through an arbitrary pipeline of commands
* multiple copy/paste buffers
They might be available, but there's nothing behind the help menu except "About", so I can't find out how to do it. Even modern vi clones have decent help behind the :help command.
Another minor niggle - the hotkeys stop working when a menu is open. So, for example, Quit is CTRL-Q, but if I can't remember it I can use ALT-F to open the File menu, and there I can see that the hotkey is CTRL-Q. But at this point it's no longer CTRL-Q but Q. Unless you press CTRL-Q first :-(
Disclaimer: I recognise that choice of editor is a very personal thing. I've been using vi in various forms for so long that my fingers type the commands without me having to think about it. Elvis for preference; vim is OK (and essential for utf8 support.)
The clue is in the company name: HP Inc.
A US-based global conglomerate. In its world view, the UK is an insignificant dot on an insignificant dot. The HP offices in the UK may thrive or die, but the effect won't be noticed and the company as a whole wouldn't notice either way.
"Water detected in drive A. Starting spin cycle" is an old MS-DOS joke program. I've probably got a copy of it lying around somewhere - if the floppy disk still works, that is.
It was harmless - just made a vaguely washing-machine noise sound using the old one-bit internal speaker driver and then terminated.
One MPFC sketch lampooned Coventry City for never having won the F.A. cup.
But they've even manged that since the sketch was aired, IIRC.
Coventry is also the home of Warwick University, which is well renowned in several subjects. It's also David Davis's alma mater, but we all make mistakes (said the Dalek as it climbed off the dustbin).
Quoth Squander Two:
"And indeed Brexit wasn't an option without the express consent of the EU, as the EU only created the sainted Article 50 quite recently -- until they did, there was no mechanism for leaving."
IIRC Art. 50 was added to the Lisbon Treaty to appease the UK. Without the article there was no agreed mechanism for leaving. But that doesn't say that leaving the EU wasn't possible. In fact, it would probably have been less messy, avoiding the need for two years of blah that won't start until the intent to leave has been formally declared using some unspecified "constitutional" method.
Without Art. 50 you'd just have to repeal the domestic legislation that ratifies the treaty. Then it's "so long and thanks for all the fish." That means in its simplest form a "hard brexit". Art. 50 also allows the remainder of the EU to stonewall until the official invocation. Without it, negotiations could take place under an informal non-binding declaration of intent to leave.
Quoth David Roberts: If you ordered 10,000 USB sticks with a custom tacky logo from a supposedly reputable supplier, would you then employ someone to virus test every single one?
No. I'd probably create and test a single image then write the whole lot over the USB stick. Saves an awful lot of trouble, and may even be faster.
@TeeCee Can you explain why the fresh-ish fruit and veg I buy in Aldi always has the country of origin on the label?
Perhaps it's a case of over-zealous interpretation of EU directives by British politicians and civil servants.
Or maybe it's another case of "the EU made me do it" to divert the blame for unpopular laws.
(I live in Germany, by the way)
All that's really needed is for internet communcations to be afforded the same privacy protection as other forms of communication.
In the good ol' days, the number that I phoned may have been fair game, but any conversation I held once the connection was made was considered to be private. Even if I asked the person at the other end of the line to pass the information on to other people.
In the good ol' days, the address on the envelope may have been fair game, but the content of the envelope was considered to be private. Even if the envelope contained a message and an instruction to send a copy of the message (in a similarly sealed envelope of course) to each of my friends.
So the principle appears to have been: any information that is needed by the communication service provider in order to correctly connect or route the communication is fair game, but the information thus communicated is private. Even if it contained further communication instructions for other service providers such as mail distribution services.
Unfortunately it seems to have become the unchallenged norm that internet communications are not subject to the same privacy principles. If they were, then the only "fair game" part of the protocol would be the TCP/IP headers - IP addresses, port numbers, etc. The contents of the frames (be it IMAP, SMTP, HTTP or whatever) is part of the information content of the communication and (under the good ol' principles) should be considered private. It is not (or at least should not) be used by the communication provider in order to connect or route the communication.
So we don't really need any new definitions of privacy and whatever. All we really need is that the law observes the old principles correctly.
One of the interesting effects of universal encryption of communication is that it enforces the same level of privacy that's applied to other forms of communication. We need to point out to law enforcements and lawmakers that the use of encryption does not conceal anything that would not have been concealed in traditional communication.
> This is the same country wherein one of its states once tried to make Pi=4 by law.
... whereas it's quite easy to make Pi=4 using mathematics.
Consider the metric space where distance between two points is the greater of the x-distance and the y-distance. This is actually quite well-defined.
A circle is the set of all points that are at the same distance from another point known as the centre.
In our metric space the lines x = 1 and x = -1 (-1 <= y <= 1) and the lines y = 1 and y = -1 (-1 <= x <= 1) are all the points at a distance of 1 from the origin. Therefore they form a circle of radius 1. The diameter is 2, the circumference is 8. Pi is defined as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter, i.e. 4
The area of this circle is 2x2 = 4. The area of a circle of unit radius is Pi - also giving a value of 4 for Pi.
And it's just as useless as all the other flight search engines. What I'd really like to see is a search for flights from/to a particular area, country or state.
Example: I live in Germany and want to fly to the UK. I might consider MUC, NUE, FRA or maybe another German airport for departure and one of several UK airports as destination, depending on price, availability, convenience etc. With ALL the current search engines I have to ask for each pair individually, which is very time-consuming. Yeah, I know Germany and UK aren't supported at the mo, but the engine still only accepts specific start and destination airports.
Oddly, there are specific entries for "all airports" for some cities, but no way to select all airports that are "near" a given location.
Why is everyone banging on (only) about the right to privacy and data protection? Whatever happened to presumption of innocence, a fair trial and the right to confront one's accusers?
Give me a trial by a jury of my peers - and don't forget this is a peer-to-peer network (*groan*)
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