Asimov
Better program Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into it before that happens.
1954 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
> "As part of the contract's design, work with the RCCTO to transition Leonidas into a future program of record after successful demonstration of the prototypes," Epirus said.
Just ship some units to Ukraine, they will field-test them for free under real battle conditions, and return quick feedback...
Back when IBM-compatible monochrome monitors were a thing (remember those? green and very slow phosphorus, well at least it did not flicker), I encountered a warning on a 3.party extended graphics card (one that could drive both monochrome and CGA monitors with more colours and resolution than IBM's offering- this was before VGA and even EGA) that one should never use out-of-spec modes with a monochrome monitor, else it may break. So I did not. I have ever since wondered if this actually happened to anyone.
> Windows 3 and previous had Write so Windows 95 needed something like it.
When Windows 95 with WordPad came, I recall it actually had even less features than Write. For example, Write supported headers with page numbers. I actually wrote some report in a university course with Write on Windows 2 (yes, really) to see what these new-fangled GUI programs were about. Went back to LaTeX...
Once coded shellsort in 8088 assembler in one of my first computer jobs. It is not much more code than bubblesort and performs a bit better when the number of items increases. But in that particular application (crude 3d computer graphics) it probably did not make much difference, we did not have very complex scenes. But made me feel a guru...
Exactly. This is why a successful businessman is likely to be disastrous in a leading political position in a democracy. I wouldn't go as far as disqualifying them, but before someone can be elected to be a president, he should have succesfully served a term in some elected position, even if it is just a local councilman.
> My shop's dev infra is Rocky (previously Cent, natch) and prod infra is RHEL.
Out of interest, have you (or others here) looked at CentOS Stream? One would assume it would be good at least for dev infra. RHEL bug-for-bug compatibility is really an issue only if you depend heavily on 3.party closed-source packages, which I feel is an anti-pattern anyway for Linux users.
If it is a consumer router, the users likely are no aware of the problem, and will not become aware of the problem, as long as the router works for them. TP-Link and other similar consumer gear makers have no idea who their customers are, and cannot reach them. Probably they would have to be either forcibly remotely updated by some white-hat hackers, or remotely bricked, so that the oblivious user is forced to get a new one.
I don't see the sky falling here for friends of local LibreOffice (like me).
Recall this was about RHEL, which ships pre-obsoleted versions of everything. If you want an up-to-date LibreOffice, installing it from RPMs is no big deal (or from Flatpacks I guess, a technology I have so far never tried). I used to run CentOS and always had to do this upgrade to get a sensible version. (Now I run more up-to-date to date distros on desktop).
Yes. I swapped the 8088 for V20 in my PC/XT clone. It was a good and cheap upgrade, because the NEC V20 executed some instruction faster than a 8088. Multiplication in particular was quite a bit faster, which made the chip appear better than it really was in some benchmarks. I think the extended x86 instructions were the same as in 80186, like ENTER/LEAVE. One could use the 80186 target option in Microsoft C compiler, and get a bit smaller executable.
The 8086 was never binary compatible with the 8080/8085, but you could map 8080 instructions and registers more or less 1-1 to 8086. There were translators that would take 8080 assembler and produce the corresponding 8086 assembler. Of course such programs were limited to using only a single 64k segment, and you had to convert the OS interface. However, for the most common porting case, the original MS-DOS API was so close to CP/M that porting was easy.
If I for some weird reason were forced to use Windows ME as other that a curiosity cabinet item, I would probably try to find the last Firefox (or other browser) version that still worked on it. Of course that might still not be enough to get https working, we would probably be talking at least 10 year old browsers.
I have a Windows ME installed in a VirtualBox (why? masochism maybe). Took some doing because first one had to install MS-DOS 6.2 and the CD-ROM driver hassle into the VM before the distribution CD would work. Jogged bad memories...
One fun thing to check with it is what web sites still work with the bundled IE: Almost none. The main killer for most sites is the ancient ssl in ME, and the fact most sites insist on using https and modern protocols.
> no-one has talked raw X protocol for years,
Probably almost never, because that is what XLib is for. Applications and toolkits run on top of it. I believe it by default tries to combine consecutive X11 protocol commands.
It is true newer X11 programs do the drawing and font rendering themselves and push pixels, and that really breaks the original idea. I first encountered it with some bloated Java program, that was totally impossible to remote the plain X11 way. The GUI library redrew the entire window for every change (not sure if Java still does this, it was 20 years ago). Using it with VNC server worked. It looks like a X11 server to the application, but sends only the changed pixels (or rather changed blocks) to the remote client.
Yes, X11 remoting does not really work smoothly unless you are on the same LAN. Which was its original use case anyway. On the other hand, an X11-based desktop over TigerVNC works just fine over a VPN tunneled through residential DSL (sans any sound, but for my uses I don't even need it).
I have so far steered clear of Wayland, but one of these days I will have to bite the bullet. Hope by that time it has some working remote feature.
> Would be interesting since tesla runs on Linux
What doesn't, these days? (except Windows and Apple laptops/PC:s, and iPhones). Practically every "smart" home appliance has a Linux kernel inside.
The Linux devs should add a clause to the license that forbids using it in any jurisdiction where individual contributors are liable. The end result would be interesting. No Android phones in EU...
(Icon, because this is the thermonuclear option).
> And the money dries up. Money which drives development.
Money does not have to dry up before it stagnates. The problem with a product that has a monopoly or near-monopoly status is the vendor does not have to invest in development beyond the bare minimum. Customers use it anyway, for lack of choice. It is also likely MS will find ways to tie Edge to its other products in a way that makes switching to the competition harder, just like they did with IE.
That was one of the reasons I started using Emacs back in 1980's. I encountered various keyboard layouts on smart and dumb terminals and PC:s, and Emacs does not depend on any arrow or function keys. So the same muscle memory works, no matter what the layout. Same is of course true of vi.
Re "There's a reason only one robotic rover has landed on the Moon in the last 50 years". Oh really?
- The Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover landed in January 15th, 1973. OK, that is just one month over "last 50 years", but the rover operated until May of the year.
- The Chinese Chang'e 3 landed on December 14th, 2013. It included a rover.
- Chang'e 4, also equipped with rover, landed in 3 January 3th 2019, becoming the first probe to land on the far side of the Moon.
Also used to use uwm on my first X11 desktops on a VAXstation. At one time, it was the only bundled window manager in vanilla X11.
The lack of decorations in uwm was a feature. You just could not have decorations, the code was that simple.
Focus on mouse entering a window (with no click needed) is available in most other window managers as well, although usually not the default.
Re GNOME still strikes us as a desktop for people who don't want to do manual window management, and who live in one maximized window most of the time
I just don't get why some desktop developers think this kind of an UI is a good idea. Like going back to MS-DOS! There is a reason why GUI's with multiple possibly overlapping windows were invented.
Thankfully, there is still XFCE...
I also used to use csh and tcsh a lot on proprietary unices and Linux, but eventually switched to Bash, because (A) almost all scripts one encounters use sh-style syntax, so better get familiar with it, and (C) Bash is the default what you get in Linux installations.
But in some ways the csh-style syntax is more user-friendly. Initially the rules where sh (or bash or ksh) expects a newline or semicolon in control structures were clear as mud to me. Csh is more like a normal programming language.
Pascal took off, went mainstream, didn't adopt any of the improvements of later descendants, and so became unable to compete and died off.
One big problem with Pascal was that it was not really portable. The "pure" language part mostly was, but every implementation had its own idea about how to interact with the OS, so a program that wanted to open a named file had to do it differently, not to mention reading any command-line parameters. Wirth's original design clearly assumed the program would be run from "cards" (or batch script), where a control card would define what input, output and any additional file parameters of "program" refer to. Also there was no standard way to split your program into separate modules.
Later many implementations added modules and OO features, but all in a different way. C by contrast always came with the file handling basics and crude modularity included, and any differences could be papered over with #if and macros (both also feature that Pascal did not have). So it is no wonder practical programmers quickly switched to C.