Posts by GBE 662 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2010
Controlled demolitions use explosives to cut through the center supports of a structure so that the structure collapses inward.
Right. It's gravitationally powered collapse in a (hopefully) predictable manner. Nothing is imploding. Imploding means that there's large pressure differential with high pressure outside and low pressure inside.
OceanGate's Titan submersible imploded.
Buildings being demolished just collapse when you cut their structural supports.
IMO, Microsoft peaked with version 4.0 of the their DOS C compiler/debugger back in 1986. That was a fine product, with good documentation. The OS it ran on was crap.
The first couple generations of wired optical mice (with wheels) from the mid 90's were also fine products.
Pretty much everything else from MS has been varying levels of awful with an overall downward trend over the decades.
Customers who must have calendar and shared address book support still have other options, including existing Thunderbird Exchange add-ons such as ExQuilla and Beonex's Owl.
Good on you for mentioning Beonix's Owl for Exchange. I've been using it with TB for a few years now, and it is fantastic. Not only does the e-mail support work flawlessly, the calendar and contact support also "just works". For Exchange servers that don't have EWS enabled, Owl also works with OWA. Support from Beonex has been first-class.
Regarding https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/argonforty/upton-one-the-true-raspberry-pi-compute-module-5-laptop/
* Screen is too small.
* No Ethernet (AFAICT)
* Bad keyboard layout: my fingers only work with inverted T arrow keys (they seem to be too old to change).
I've wanted an ARM laptop for many years, but it would have to run Linux. I've no interest in running Windows on it. I've looked at various options including "laptop" case/kits for Raspberry PI boards and some other options, but nothing has ever seemed all that practical or cost effective compared to my trusty old Thinkpad T series models. The closest thing I can find would probably a high-end Chromebook, but they're all a bit small/cramped and lack essentials like an RJ45 Ethernet jack.
Scammers are posing as lawyers and offering to recover funds stolen from victims of cryptocurrency scams.
You've got to admit that those particular scammers sure know how to pick a chump. From the self-select group of crypto "investors" you then skim off the cream by targeting those who've already been scammed.
I am sure that the developers of Asmi are quaking in their boots about your refusal to consider it. [...] Asmi will succeed if it can find, and be known to, a target audience. I wish them luck
I'm sure both statements are true, but I don't see how they have anything to do with the question I asked. I wasn't attempting to threaten the Asmi devs with failure, ignomy, or a rain of frogs. I simply wanted to know if Asmi 13 required systemd. I looked at the Asmi 13 web site, and couldn't tell. My rather vague understanding is that you have to use the Devuan fork instead of "plain" Debian if you want to use another init system, so my guess is that Asmi can only use systemd.
[Sheesh. Ask a simple yes/no question and people act like you're kicking their puppy.]
Americans do not call that a "trailer". It's an RV, van, or bus (depending on size and internal furnishing and purpose).
A trailer is non-powered and is pulled by another vehicle. Usually with some of the towed weight supported by the tongue/hitch. If no weight is supported by the tongue, it's often called a "wagon" instead of a "trialer". At least here in the mid-west USA...
That's why the BBC is cracking down on access to the BBC sounds app.
Argh. Don't remind me. I've tried using the bbc app instead, but it's completely crap compared the the sounds app (which was somewhere between bad and mediocre). The bbc app provides a small fraction of the offerings — but it doesn't really matter because it's impossible to find anything even if it is there. When the 21st rolls around and they shut down the bbc sounds app, I'll probably just give up on listening to BBC radio shows that aren't available via RSS as "podcasts".
I need to run a graphical program remotely and see it locally on a low bandwidth secure connection.
That used to work with X11 — back in the Xt, Motif, and Athena days.
All of the modern GUI toolkit/frameworks are apparently based on widgets that require elventy-thousand client/server round-trips for even the most trivial action.
So now it takes several minutes for a remote X11 application to start/render on a 5MB link when the equivalent app 25 years ago started/rendered in a few seconds at 56K baud.
Many years ago, I configured a LInuxX11 machine so that it played an audio clip of a selectric golfball strike any time a "graphical" key was pressed. I'm not sure what the people in the surrounding cubes found more annoying: the selectric sounds or my giggling. I couldn't find a carriage-return or linefeed sound.
"I'm struggling to understand [...], and how abjectly ineffective the Senate appears to be."
What's to struggle with? The Senate is controlled by Republicans who are (with one or two exceptions) completely amoral toadying yes-men, with absolutely no respect for decency, the Constitution, law in general, or Democracy. They are pretty much exclusively occupied with lining their own pockets and a frantic competition to see how far up Trump's butt they can crawl. There's a pretty sever limit on what can be accomplished by minority members.
I'm always glad to hear of non-systemd options.
My personal machines all run Gentoo with openrc, but a couple servers I maintain for work run Ubuntu — and I must say that systemd is, um, "reliable": it never fails to annoy, obstruct, and just generally act snotty.
I had to recycle two perfectly good NVidia cards just because NVidia stopped supporting them. There were, in theory, "Legacy" drivers that would work, but they required LInux kernels that were too old to run on my machine. I tried the open-source nv driver, but could never get it to stop causing random crashes or to work with multiple displays.
Why would switching to a more permissive license be an issue?
Because Ubuntu's plan is presumably to add features and fix bugs and then refuse to make the source code for those fixes/additions available. It's a strategy to make compatibility between distros more difficult to maintain and to lock users into Ubuntu so they can't move to RH because RH won't have the fixes/features in coreutils that customers depend on. It's a pretty standard business practice.
they are not " lemon-soaked paper napkins" they are telephone handset sanitation wipes
Back in the 90's I flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a couple weeks at my employer's site in Bognor Regis helping get a new production process started up. As a USAian, I had read Adams and laughed about telephone sanitizers but didn't realize that was actually "a thing" [I should have known it was real]. One morning I picked up the phone, and it had a very distinctive scent. I apparently got a funny look on my face that was noticed by one of the local guys I was working with. He smiled and said "Yep, the phone sanitizers where in last night." The phone sanitizers were apparently not the same people as the normal cleaners.
node package manager (NPM) packages typically used by crypto devs
I don't get it. NPM packages are JavaScript, right?
What/why are "crypto devs" writing in JavaScript?
Are wallets/blockchains/whatever implemented in JavaScript?!?!
JavaScript is for Stupid Browser Tricks™ people!
... not for actual applications and infrastructure that matters.
Sheesh, next you'll be telling me that JPL is writing code for spacecraft in PHP.
Outlook: in one, I just tolerated Outlook. In another, I ran Thunderbird and pointed it at the MS OMAP server, with a free plugin. Worked perfectly, diaries and contacts and all, and was _much_ more pleasant to use.
Thunderbird is far easier to use than Outlook.
If you don't have OMAP but OWA is enabled you can use the Owl plugin for Thunderbird. You do have to pay a trivial amount for it, but it's definitely worth it. It just works (including contacts and calendar), and the support is fantastic.
The puzzling thing is: Sixty years ago, while NASA was learning how to do it, there were two or three launches a year for a decade - four in 1969 alone. Now, we _know_ how to do it and yet simultaneously we seem to have forgotten how... what happened?
What happened? Budget cuts. NASA in the 60s was getting huge amounts of money. Back then NASAs spending peaked at 55B 2023 dollars — 4.4% of the federal budget. Now it's less than half that in 2023 dollars and 1/10 that as a percentage of the federal budget.
Oh, and Boing was taken over by accountants from McDonnell Douglas and lost the ability to do engineering and manufacturing.
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