revamping the user interface.
Am I the only one who thought "oh Fuck no, what have they broken this time, and how long will it take me to redo all my configuration"?
5860 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
just today the tories appear yet again to have not gon through with adding information about calories to drink bottles
Which serves no useful purpose:
- the people who have problems don't read or pay attention to those labels anyway.
- it encourages the manufacturers to stuff their products full of artificial chemicals (sweetners instead of sugar, start instead of fat, etc.) to keep the magic number down, and as a result the product is far less healthy in every other way.
I know from my own experience how much less admin time is spent in keeping Linux up to date
Basic out-of-the-box Linux alone, perhaps. As soon as you add complex applications with different dependencies on libraries and other packages it's very easy for a "simple" update to drop you into dependency hell, where package A needs Vn of package B, but updated package C now needs Vn+1, and you can't install both, etc. I'm no MS fanboi, but although both Windows and Linux updates can be straightforward, when they do go wrong it can be much harder to fix the Linux mess. There's a reason why these sorts of systems used to specify commercial systems, like Solaris.
In fairness to Beeching he didn't actually cut anything. His remit was to report on the costs of running the lines compared to their passenger numbers, assuming steam-hauled trains. It was the Ministry of Transport of the day, and a Transport minister allegedly in bed with the road transport industry, who decided on the cuts without any attempt to look at efficiency improvements that could come from, say, replacing steam trains with diesel railcars. That's one of the reasons that lines are being reopened, they are actually viable with the right equipment.
What guarantee would you have that the open source code you've seen was the code running (and the only thing running) on the machine?
You need a secure development chain from source to binary installation, and provided the source has been properly audited as part of that, being open or closed is irrelevant.
And, of course, the UK government approved the change from trade & economic union to political pseudo-empire without a referendum. Supposedly because it wasn't the way we did things in Britain (according to John Major), more likely because all the polls showed 60+% opposition to the idea. That's when we should have had a referendum with a supermajority requirement.
I'd guess that a lot of bloat comes from developers who need a function to perform a 'wibble' operation, so turn to Google. Someone on stack exchange says "I used fwibble() from libstuff.o, they try it, job done.
Meanwhile they're oblivious to the fact that they've just linked 150MB of other crap from libstuff.o, just to get a 2kB generic version of fwibble(), which they could have written in < 1kB themselves if they'd actually bothered to try.
Repeat that a few times and you soon get GB bloat.
Curiosity only has 2GB of flash, according to Wikipedia.
The idea that 21GB of software could be "realistic" in any content is ludicrous even today, especially for an embedded system without graphics. 21MB is plenty for almost anything, if it's properly written. We used to regularly design complex telecomms software that fitted in 256kB.
At uni I remember discovering that VMS HELP understood wildcards, including VMS's unique "and so on" (...) operator.
$ HELP xxxx
would give top level help for the xxxx command, and
$ HELP xxxx ...
would list all the help, including options, for it.
$ HELP * ...
would list all the help for all commands.
That was also when we discovered that dumping a 2" think wad of HELP printout to the lab's dot-matrix printer in one go would burn out the print head ...
Oops.
it eventually took 4 of use a half day going through numerous manuals to eventually find the syscall he wanted.
I used to know that documentation, and the preceding blue wall, so well that I could have told you what book, and probably roughly what page, from memory.
Fun times, I must dig out an old box to load that hobbyist version. Does it come with any compilers?
I'll take it from the front with a date that fits with when I'll eat it.
If I want something for tomorrow's dinner, and the front item is within date, I'll take it. If I'm shopping for the week and need something for next Sunday then of course I'll look back through the shelf for something still within date by then. Why would you not?
This is his second and last 5-year term.
AFAIK the rules prevent more than two consecutive terms, he could probably try again later.
I doubt if he wants to, though. He'd much rather change things so that the EU president has more executive power, like a US president, and then aim for that role. He seems more like Tony Blair every day.
Not by decree, the French President doesn't have that power.
After the opposition tabled thousands of amendments to try and make the debate time out, the prime minister used a constitutional clause to adopt the law without a vote. The inevitable consequence was two votes of confidence. Macron gambled on the opposition parties hating each other more than they hate him, which worked, this time.