Posts by MacroRodent 1979 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
The sample makes it look like it mainly made different word choices, something even age-old joke programs could do (like the classic "jive filter"). Changing style meaningfully requires more. For example, one author could use shorter sentences, another one longer, present things in different order, use more or less similes, and so on.
The God bits don't bother me, but why should there be for example
54. Speak no useless words or words that move to laughter.
Also the
17. Bury the dead.
is not so relevant in today's society, where bodies are handled by specialists. I guess this was not the case in St Benedict's day, so he exhorted monks to take care of stray bodies in the gutter.
So it was NT 3.51 to Windows 95? That was a downgrade in terms of security and stability. I used NT 3.51 for a while. Possibly the least crashing Windows I ever had. Unlike later versions, it still followed Cutler's original architecture that tried to minimize kernel mode code. Of course it had the bit clumsy Windows 3.x ui.
Last night wached on YouTube techmoan channel (recommended!) how the guy made an old police interview recorder work. This is a specialized c-cassette recorder that makes two copies of an recorded interview and adds audible time marks on the second track (of what would normally be the stereo pair). Also makes it harder to tamper with the tape. Apparently such recorders are one reason you still can buy new c-cassettes. Reassuring.
I think the idea here is that there are lots and lots of separately owned servers (everyone could run one, Pleroma claims to be lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi), and the servers agree to exchange messages, or not. So there is no central service to abuse, and each server can have its own policies (about blocking obnoxious users and servers, for example). Reminds me of how USENET used to work. It just might fly, at least among technically knowledgeable users. Like the kernel devs...
One group of users (with more than 2 members) appears to be Linux kernel developers, some of whom are quite active on Google+. Now that it is going down, they are discussing alternatives, and one strong possibility appears to be Pleroma (a federated social network - no, I had not heard of it either before today).
Also, these would not necessarily have been placed where a filter would have been, but somewhere with a +5v line nearby, for example. Who says the motherboard design was not slightly altered to accomodate them? Only an expert familiar with the non-tampered layout would notice it.
At least I always presumed that the "exploding nukes to generate thrust" part only occurred in space, and that conventional rockets would loft it into space first
The original idea was indeed to go with the nukes all the way. The spaceship would have been huge, on the scale of a battleship, not aeroplane.
what the hell are you going to build the back out of for the nuke to push against that won't be destroyed in the process?
The Orion project scientist had this and a lot of other details worked out. Remember they had access to data and experience about nuclear bombs. The blast is powerful but not infinitely so, and with the data available to them, making a pusher plate that can survive multiple explosions is just a matter of engineering. The bombs would also have been precisely designed for the purpose.
There is a fascinating documentary on Youtube about the project.
a big Orion (say, something big enough to put an entire self-sustainable colony on Mars in a single voyage, supplies and all, maybe a 25,000-tonne ship) could be launched for the statistical "price" of one or two extra cancer cases worldwide.
But before you launch your colony ship, you certainly have to make numerous test launches, some of which will fail (quite spectacularly!)
For probaly the only situation where Orion might be feasible to push through (for desperate reasons), see "Footfall" by Niven and Pournelle.
which is controversial for any Linux distro.
Back before fast internet, it was common for distributions to sell distribution CD:s. Some distros (like Mandrake) even provided nice shrinkwrapped carton packages like other software vendors. I bought some CD sets like that, still have most of them, in the hope they become collectibles...
At my first IT job as the operator trainee tending a Honeywell mainframe in early 1980's, we were told to be quick about adding paper to the console printer (which collected status messages, rather like syslog or journald), as the system would supposedly crash if the printer was offline for more than a minute or so. Luckily I never found out if this is true.
> "One famous example are biological membranes in living cells. We've actually studied how the nuclear pasta lasagna exhibits the same structure and structural defects as the endoplasmic reticulum.
Maybe the premise of Robert L. Forward's "Dragon's Egg" is not so fanciful after all. It involves life on a neutron star, based on nucleonic processes, which are way faster than chemical ones. So entire civilizations rise and fall during the few days humans observe the star from orbit.
Larsson explained that a lack of support for seccomp or network namespaces limits things somewhat. ... [and so and on for more missing bits]
If you want all Linux features, the only way still is to run the real thing. But of course this was a cool hack, just to see if it can be done. Don't show this to pointy-haired bosses, who might then imagine the developers have no more need of real Linux to get work done, and ban it.
That's more useful than one might think as keyfobs tend to fail when the battery gets tired
The quality of the buttons in the keyfobs also seems to be low. I have had two failed ones, turning them into plain old physical keys. Not bothered to replace. At this point, a new keyfob apparenly would cost about the same as the resale value of the old car...
But without laws and lawyers, that would be an arbitrary State with no control over its power. A dictatorship, in fact.
Certainly true, and I am not advocating getting rid of laws and lawyers. However, setting industry regulations and sanctioning their violations is properly a function of the state (of course with inputs from citizens and the industry).
As you said, it is a hobby. There are just a handful of major Linux distributions that can be considered for real work, or even for home use for "ordinary" users (meaning those wishing to mainly use applications as opposed to those enjoying developing the platform itself). All the rest are really hobby distributions, or very specialized ones filling some small niche.
Making a Linux distribution that fits into a "small" machine is perhaps akin to building a ship in a bottle. I sometimes myself wonder if a modern kernel could ever run in the oldest machine in my house, a Pentium MMX with 128 MB RAM. Now it has an old Mandrake Linux in one partition (with KDE GUI) and Windows 95 on the other.
This is something I often encounter as a native speaker of Finnish, another language with gender-neutral pronouns. The solution depends on the context, so it requires some understanding of what is being said, which is why current machine translators perform badly. The problem often has no ideal solution, because choosing "he" or "she" may require information that the source text simply does not contain. Usually one defaults to "he", as "he/she" is too clumsy.
Going the other way also sometimes requires rephrasing the text. "He said, she said" does not translate directly into Finnish.The closest one can get is the use the nouns for "man" and "woman", but it is not quite the same.
I think this method was already in Andrew Tanenbaum's operating systems text book (the one that introduced Minix) in the security chapter: Something like "Read the documentation looking for passages that say Don't do X. Try as many variations of X as possible".
A minimal RISC should be easy to verify
Done already in the 1980's for the VIPER architecture, a simple 32-bit CPU. Read about it back then. It was supposedly intended for avionics and such where failure is not an option. (Some info can still be found by googling "verified risc cpu viper").
Yes, this kind of thing is nothing new. By using special drivers when running in the VM, the kernel just avoids some of the silly inefficiencies that communicating via simulated i/o devices causes. There is no downside. Similar techniques are used when you run Linux in a Linux KVM virtual machine, or VMWare.
> You need to test each supported combination, to ensure nothing weird happens. And yes, it means also you need to test NTFS on each supported Windows platform, in 32 and 64 bit flavours.
So should one do this for *every* program that reads or writes files? Same thing. Normal open, close etc are also part of an API specification that abstracts away the underlying file system implementation.
Building large software systems is impossible without relying on such abstractions.
If the feature Dropbox needs is xattrs, it is a fair requirement. It is just like requiring some other property of file systems, like a certain minimum file name length. But then it it should run just fine on any Linux file system that supports the xattrs API, not just ext4fs. Most non-ancient native Linux file systems do so.
Too many options it not an issue here. Only the API matters, in other respects a user level component like Dropbox must be ignorant of the particular underlying implementation.
You would have to modernise the video output also. If I recall correctly, the Spectrum, like most early home computers, produced only RF-modulated PAL which you connected to the antenna input of your TV (were there any NTSC versions?). I'm not sure all TVs even have a PAL tuner any more.
the identifiers FOO_BAR and fooBar are equivalent...
Sounds like PL/M, which is also case-insensitive, and where you can insert extra $-characters anywhere in identifiers and numeric literals without affecting meaning (FOO$BAR == fooBar). I have never understood why. $ is not a terribly good noise character for making identifiers more readable, because it looks so much like a letter.
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