Posts by MacroRodent 2029 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
When Windows 10 came out, it was promised to be the last major version, later versions would be incremental, no big steps. Hah, that did not age well. Now the company I work for is rolling out Windows 11 on corporate laptops, causing loads of wasted time: in the update itself, and in the various hickups it causes. All for the joy of everyone continuing to use Windows more or less in the same way they have used for years.
> Not what but who: Linus Torvalds.
The license of Linux permits anyone to start an own fork and make releases. However, good luck getting anyone to contribute only to it, unless it server some specialty that the Torvalds Linux does not. For example, the Android kernel was that way for a long time, but it has gradually merged most (all? not sure) of its special sauce to the master, to simplify maintenance.
In a way, splintering is prevented by network effects, not Linus.
> If I have understood this correctly it is a compromise of ssh login authentication.
PAM is a spec for modules that are used for all authentication, not just SSH. But installing a PAM module requires privileges. I guess the most plausible route is an infected 3.party package that the user is somehow convinced to install from a deb or rpm file. The nice front-ends for package installer tools in typical desktop linuxes run with temporarily elevated privileges, typically just asking the user's login password.
> The company called Nokia was assimilated: What was left emerged as Nokia Networks. But no more Nokia until a lot later.
Getting back late, but this cannot stand. "Nokia Mobile Phones" and "Nokia Networks" were both subsidiaries under "Nokia" the parent corporation, along with some others. Nokia selling the mobile phone business to Microsoft was analogous to IBM selling their laptop business to Lenovo.
> Not even that: They were originally making wellies and other rubber products, like tyres. In a town called Nokia.
No, the pulp factory came first, in the sense it used the name "Nokia" as the company name. But the rubber products came soon. The original Nokia was acquired by another company, "Suomen Gummitehdas", making rubber products, the combination then started using the "Nokia" name. Pretty forward-looking, I mean "Suomen Gummitehdas" would have been a clumsy mobile phone brand...
> (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous
My last Symbian phone was the N97mini, which I got second-hand, and really liked. Used until it developed a hardware problem partly disconnecting the display and keyboard halves (could no longer make or answer calls). I have got the impression it was a better product than the original N97 "not mini".
> it wouldn't have returned a real key but would have "hallucinated" one.
I think the reason it returned a real token because the entire key was a single "token" from the point of view of the LLM. Just like words are tokens, stored as-is. This is also why LLM:s have trouble with tasks that involve properties of words. Words are indivisible "atoms" for them.
The OS is actually only a minor part of the Microsoft problem. Working in a Big Corp that is fully into Office365 and Microsoft cloud services, it is easy to see Microsoft has the whole shop by the balls. Office365 can be used via Mac and even Linux (the web interface is pretty good these days as long as you run Edge). Never mind MS just cutting service. If MS simply one day decided it needs more money and raises prices, the company has essentially no other option than to pay up, up to some eye-watering percentage. Moving the data and the intertwined processes elsewhere is infeasible. The ultimate lock-in.
Frequent travelers should have a separate cheap laptop to take along anyway. Even for other countries than USA, Russia, or China, because of the possibility of the laptop getting stolen. Copy only the needed documents to it before traveling, reformat and reinstall after the trip.
Never seen a failure in 5 years. I guess I have managed to avoid the bad ones, then. What I have are mostly Fujis, Maxels, TDKs, Sonys and Verbatims, but when one looks at the packaging, most actually came from some company named Ritek. I once did a small "accelerated aging" test, where I hung a sample of DVD-R:s on an outer wall, exposed to varying temperatures and sunlight. The winner? "Octron", which at the time was a house label sold in Lidl stores (havent seen it for a long time). But that too was really a Ritek.
> Everything else used either a lot of devices (like USB and SD cards) or wraps the media with a lot of hardware, IE hard drives.
Optical media (eg DVD-R) is also entirely passive. With good blanks and decent storage it also has good longevity. At least 20 years is no problem for in my experience (that is going by the oldest DVD-R's I have).
> This is one of those many cases where hacking the device you own should be legal,
Yes. A law that says something like if the vendor stops supplying software updates, it must either open-source the code and any keys needed to update the firmware, or offer to buy back the devices for 50% of the original price.
The Linux developers have no commitment towards keeping the internal C interfaces stable. They see such commitments as an impediment to improving the kernel. They don't change them unnecessarily, but they will change without hesitation when there is a good reason.
By contrast, the interface towards user-level applications (system calls) is kept stable.
> Every one of the dozens of proprietary UNIXes in the 1980s and 1990s had its own independent implementation, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Apple, Commodore, Atari and Acorn, as well as dozens of implementations on DOS, Windows 3
I don't think the Unix versions were independent, just MIT X11 + whatever "value-added" the vendor wanted to add (often some proprietary desktop environment). DEC by the way added X11 to VAX/VMS and called it DECWindows, but it was still MIT X11 underneath.(DEC was also one of the major contributors to early X11). I actually at one time ran a remote DECWindows terminal window from a Unix workstation when I needed a session at the VAX, but that was a bit rude way of doing it, because of larger resource usage compared to a telnet session. So being a terminally nice guy I stopped doing it when I realised this.
> GNOME-based Workstation is the most visible, and it supports x86-64, Arm64 and 64-bit little-endian PowerPC
Now I got curious. What kind of workstation runs on a little-endian PowerPC? Or any PowerPC( excluding old Macs, which I believe were big-endian like the previously used Motorola processor).
That is a kind of "Your mileage may vary" situation. Someone at my workplace tried various filesystems for very large build jobs in a local cloud server, and BTRFS came surprisingly on top. Still, I myself prefer XFS, as a mature fs with long track record and good performance in most cases. The file system is the one component one does not want to play games with.
Might be a practical problem it the physics of turning a sonic boom into a sonic thump require the tapered nose to be half the plane even when scaling up. MIght work, but the passenger capacity in relation to the dead weight of the hardware would be ridiculously low. The seats would be super expensive. Of course they were on the Concorde, too, and it wasn't terribly succesful commercially.
> Depends on the time period and location. Modern-ish PCs will tend to use around 50W, add about 25W for a monitor so 75W per setup, for 1875W in total.
However, at startup these PC:s are, for a brief moment, almost short-circuits. If a lot of them are behind one fuse, and started simultaneously (such as after a power outage), the fuse blows even if during normal operation the current is reasonable.
Learned this when in a previous job we had a room full of various PCs and servers for testing purposes (not a production server room, fortunately). They had been placed there and started over time. Then a power outage occurred and the fuse blew when power came back up. Happened a couple of times before we understood why.
If the Chinese can build a smartphone with the usual goodies using only domestically made chips, even if it is two generations behind the latest Western tech, it means they have no trouble building modern missiles and drones with similar electronics. The latest process is not required for them, the one from 10 years ago is good enough.
Yes, but you should not execute an interactive editor to create the scripts. Tcl can write them directly. It can also easily do itself whatever any shell script needs to do, because it can execute external programs easily (exec "program" "args" ...). The second solution is usually better, as it has less moving parts. Creating a script from Tcl makes sense only if there is some other component that needs a script as input.
The way Tcl syntax works has always reminded me of shell with commands followed by space separated options and arguments. The main difference is of course Tcl does not start a new process for each command, and the code for each command is already in the interpreter instead of loaded from disk, which makes it much faster.
I don't really write Tck now, but there is one tool written it it that I always use and carry around: the graphical diffing tool tkdiff. It is amazing the whole thing is only about 16 000 lines of code, and can process quite large files in reasonable time, despite being written in an interpretive language. Of course much of the grunt work is done by the "diff" tool of the host computer, but making a nice display of the results is still nontrivial.
Outlook's Web version, which (being a Linux user) is the only one I use, does have a simple way to show headers when the mail message is being viewed: Three-dot menu -> View -> View message details. This shows the headers, but not the raw message data. Useful for checking suspicious mails.
> So dBase had two blocks of memory: a core block in memory, and an overlay block
Overlays is how many large programs worked, also on MS-DOS. The Microsoft linker had support for specifying which object files were part of the fixed block, which could be swapped in when functions in them were called. I never did CP/M development, but I suspect it had tool kits that did the same. After 32-bit 386 and its successors became common, large MS-DOS programs started using DOS extenders instead of overlays. Much easier for the programmer, and more efficient.
Those were the days when even well-known netizens did not yet get avalanches of mail, and spam was still almost non-existent. So they were more disposed to answer interesting mails.
I once mailed a minor bug in an early version of GCC to Stallman, and he quickly replied with a patch. That was probably around 1990.
Remember copying the original Minix floppies among some friends. Each had bought the Tanenbaum book, then we pooled money for getting one copy of the OS. As I recall ast wrote he and the publisher were OK with some copies of the software being made for study. The version of the kernel on the floppies was not quite the same as printed in the book, but slightly updated one. Managed to run in on a PC/XT clone. It did not even require a hard disk.
VirtualBox also checks for updates from the mothership. I would not be surprised if the check includes information about the possibly installed extension pack. So you could be in trouble if you load it at home but use it at business.
Pro tip: most ordinary usage of VirtualBox does not actually require the extension pack.
Anyone who has been doing real software projects knows that getting complete specs and implementing them in a predetermined timetable is a total fantasy.
You need flexibility, and Agile recognises that. But swinging too far in the other direction does not work either, except for very small projects.
Any project that produces working results is in reality a mix of "waterfall" and "agile", no matter how it is officially presented.
Many a science fiction story gets around this with the "Buzzard ramjet" that runs on interstellar hydrogen. If it worked, it would be able to accelerate forever. See "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson, where this idea is taken to infinity, and beyond...
> What is needed is a server which, when asked, gathers up the WIMP stuff and squirts it down a pipe
That is essentially what VNC does, and with surprisingly good performance, if you use a modern VNC client-sever pair like TigerVNC. You can get servers and clients for various OS'es.
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