Posts by Arthur the cat 3382 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
don't want to admit that your "correct" English is...French.
Ah bless.
The Yanks have such simplistic notions of this country and its language. Completely forgot German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Old Norse, Brythonic, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Cantonese, Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, Mandarin, …
A lot of sites absolutely lose their shit when they see a non-Windows/non-Apple UA
<voice mode="bewildered">Umm, err, but it's 2023!</voice>
Would I be right in thinking you're talking about US institutions? They've always seemed to me to be so far behind the curve that they're still in Flatland. About a decade or two ago I had a Bank of America investment account. They gave me online access to my (not insignificant) portfolio, protected by what they considered to be the highest password security. My password had to have all of a lower case letter, an upper case letter and a digit. It couldn't contain control characters or punctuation marks. It could be a whole six (count them) characters long.
And the last time I looked the typical GNU/Linux system had more lines of code from FreeBSD than from GNU. But whatever.
[I had real problems deciding whether I wanted the troll, fire or nuclear explosion icon for this. Readers should imagine all three apply. Yes, I'm a bit bored.]
I would say the core BSDs (Free/Net/Open) aren't rival sects, they're more different emphases. Free concentrates on running efficiently on mainstream hardware with lots of packages, Open focuses on security, Net wants to run on everything including toasters, bionic artificial limbs and engine management systems. Dragonfly is/was schismatic from Free.
minix & xv6 were pedagogic (as was/is Xinu which didn't get mentioned), so a different game.
Differently different, HURD and L4 are about microkernels, which arguably Are Not Unix Anyway.
Plan9 and Inferno are by definition Not Unix, being intended as research into what comes after Unix.
x7/86 seems to be an exercise in pure nostalgia.
So the only real division is between those Unices with Bell Labs ancestral DNA, and Unix-alikes. Even then, there's been so much cross fertilization that the distinction is very blurred.
On my SOHO network all the servers are FreeBSD (as is the OPNsense firewall/router) , the desktops are 1 each FreeBSD, macOS(*) & Linux, the laptops are 1 FreeBSD, 2 Linux & 1 ChromeOS, and the phones and tablets are all various Androids. No burning at the stake in this house.
(*) Or however it's capiTALisED this month.
Do the BSD folks include MacOS/iOS? It's a lot closer to a traditional BSD than Chrome OS is to linux.
Depends which level you're talking about. The kernel never was BSD, the user space was but has mutated. Trying to be an admin running a macOS system in a mostly Unix network triggers murderous rage(*).
(*) Well, it does for me.
Ads on Twitter that I've seen recently vary widely (browser on PC).
Use uBlock Origin. I don't see any ads via the browser interface, only via the app on my phone.
What is also unique to Twitter is that I can hit "block @xxxxx" on every ad. If this feature actually works, I have no idea why Elon would keep it in "Twitter 2.0".
It's exceedingly useful, so I'm sure Space Karen will get round to deleting it soon because it costs Twitter to maintain and process the block lists.
Imagine if this was on TV, "Fuck Ford, I never want to see a Ford ad again!".
Just give me uBlock Origin for TV. I don't want any ads.
Since when has targeted advertising actually been relevant to anyone?
Dislike or block enough ads on Twitter and the remaining ads you get vary between ridiculous and hilarious. Lately I've been getting ads for small pet shops across the southern US states and engineering industries in India. I live in the UK.
If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity 538,711 times since he launched in one ear, and to Is there Life On Mars? 725,891 times in his other ear.
Surely it's been long enough for spontaneous transmogrification to occur and he's listening to Queen's Greatest Hits?
I have seen users where every email is in the inbox in one case over 25000 of them
I run a mail server for the extended family + friends and get disk occupancy reports every month. My niece currently has 37k mails in her inbox. A friend has only 600 in his inbox, but has >26k in Junk plus 1k in Trash. Users usering as only users can.
Recycling is for things you want to reprocess later, not for stuff you want to discard
Yes, we break down your email so all the ones go over here and all the zeroes go over there. If you want your email back we can give you the requisite number of zeroes and ones but you'll have to knit them back into the email yourself.
High DPI
High DPI wouldn't have been a problem if a) application programmers had asked the X server about pixel density like they were supposed to and b) X.org hadn't subsequently wired the server to 96 dpi even if it was running on a 200+ dpi display. The number of times I've had to fight bloody Firefox & Thunderbird to get properly sized controls because they've changed the scaling mechanism yet again for no good reason. Rant, fume!
The real solution for a high-energy Britain is nuclear power,
Given the speed at which nukes get approved and built, a new nuke being proposed today wouldn't get built until long after I'm dead and millennials get their pensions.
and an adequate distribution grid.
This might be a little bit faster, but the howling from NIMBYs would be deafening. "But the pylons will spoil my view/house price!!!"
Warning: more unnecessary realism!
If you look at history any new technology destroys old jobs, but it also creates new ones, usually far more. 90%+ of the population used to be needed just to feed us (modulo occasional famines), now it's ~1%. We don't have 89% of the population desperately wishing they could pull mangelwurzles to earn money.
For a 2-hour discussion, video is unbeatable, but for 1+ days of intense negotiations you can't beat being there in person
I completely agree, but if you're having meetings for a day or more then the extra couple of hours needed for subsonic flight are irrelevant and we're back to no need for an SST.
New York to London or vice versa in 3 hours made some sense for business meetings before widespread networking, but a video call set up takes only a few minutes (allowing for "I can't hear/see you") as opposed to six hours total flying time. About the only uses I can think of for quiet SST are spy planes for cloudy regions or upgrading the squadron watching the Sleeper in the Pyramid.
Instead of a cage fight, can we please just dig a very deep hole, dump them all in there, fill it nicely again
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
There is a good possibility that "this lot" will be out on their ears and we get some grown-ups in instead.
Old 60s saying: it doesn't matter who you vote for, it's always the government in power.
Mass surveillance, like ID cards, is an obsession of the Home Office and both crop up regularly no matter what party is nominally in control. Home Secretaries go native in about 12 months, due to a Civil Service brain washing regime of "this will reduce the crime figures, it would be a brave decision refusing to take the opportunity to catch criminals/drug dealers/terrorists/paedophiles". The only way to stop it would be to disband the existing Home Office hierarchy and move the top mandarins to posts dealing with areas like Northern Ireland community relations or hands on DEFRA inspection of fish gutting operations as punishment for being the enemy within.
This is never going to happen so expect proposed legislation for mass surveillance and/or ID cards to crop up again and again. Democracy needs to win every time, the bastards only need to win once.
one of my colleagues commented "I am learning a lot here!" when I described the outline of this story.
Ouch. I think this says a lot about how El Reg has changed from when I first started reading it (back in the late paleolithic IIRC).
The French and Israeli regularly steal technologies as well
Fifty years ago when I worked for the scientific side of the MoD, our security briefings on espionage boiled down to "The USSR are the worst threat, they want military secrets. The Israelis are the second worst threat, they are interested in military secrets plus anything that will give them a commercial advantage. Russian spies are usually obvious, Israelis less so."
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