Posts by Doctor Syntax

The curious case of a Tesla smash, Autopilot blamed, and the driver's next-day U-turn

"So it's possible motorists don't understand how the software is actually supposed to work."

s/motorists/users/ and it's a fairly generic statement.

2017: The FBI alerts parents to dangers of Internet of Sh*t toys

Re: Self-Regulate basically... Thanks FBI!

"who else is going to ensure people the children are safe?"

TLAs & FLAs.

Re: Ga goo gaa!

"the entire house hold"

If the rest of the household is over 13 COPPA seems to consider them fair game.

Linus Torvalds may have damned systemd with faint praise

Re: no systemd here

"The modern answer would be unit tests, which are easier to do on modularized programs."

Another is long experience observing the thing to work correctly (also easier if it only does one thing) coupled with if-it-isn't-broke-don't-fix-it. And throw in if-you-fixed-it-and-it-broke-everything-around-it-you-fixed-it-wrong-so-go-back-and-try-again-instead-of-trying-to-fix-everything-else.

Re: Not surprising. At all.

"Now, a CentOS fork without systemd... Centuan?"

Centaur? Or has someone already used that?

Re: It's a phase young programmers go through

"Second system effect."

Second system folks are likely to still be youngish. Old programmers have more of a "whatever works" attitude. We also have an intolerance of what doesn't - life's too short to put up with junk.

"It isn't written in nodejs, for instance.

If it were, at least it wouldn't have buffer overflows."

Faint praise for Node.js.

Re: US Portions

"in the UK where you don't own the food you just paid for."

Please explain. After paying for food here over rather more decades than I care to think about it comes as something of a surprise to find I never owned it.

Re: full Linus on Poettering

"I hit Reply planning to link to the rant in question"

I think there was a complaint when Fedora went systemd but I can't remember the terms it was written in and CBA to find it.

Re: Faint Praise

"most of us have been damning systemd WITH ALL CAPS FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW"

Well, maybe you and Bob. But he had a right go at one of Poettering's people (linked in a comment further up the thread).

"a small demonstration of the design"

Design? That's excessive praise.

Re: It's a phase young programmers go through

"Once one beats the other to death"

No chance, they'd merge. And we'd definitely need to shoot what staggered out.

"My tongue was so far in my cheek when I made that post that I looked like a hamster. I quite enjoy the times he tells like it is."

OK, cheers, mate.

"Plus, from the sound of things, the systemd guy probably wouldn't take criticism well."

I'm not sure he sees it. I think he has a program to handle bug reports. It's called wontfixd.

Re: Not surprising. At all.

b) Gnome gets replaced in its leading position and distributions no longer include it.

I don't think "Gnome (another fine RH project)" in an earlier comment was intended to be a compliment.

Also, lets not forget udev which will have to be replaced with eudev through

OK by me.

Re: It's a phase young programmers go through

"I had sort of assumed it should be possible"

X forwarded over ssh.

"Would those applications not work on a non-systemd installation?"

I run KDE on Debian LTS which is sysv. I have GTK2 and a number of GTX-based applications - gimp being one, of course. I see a few GTK3 libraries are also installed - gedit (3.4.2) needs at least one of them so they're quite happy without systemd. Would more recent GTK3 packages will work? Don't know.

Consistently broken (with each new release upstream, in other words, not "broken at all times") is kind of the norm in the Linux world. While MS goes to great lengths to keep Windows backwards compatible every which way, the various Linux projects regularly break APIs and backwards compatibility.

I don't think things are as bad as you say and certainly not as bad as they were; and I think it was libc6 that was responsible for a lot of problems about 2.x > 4.x times. There's also an issue with config files specifying a far newer version of library than is necessary - you can find a situation where config will throw out a number of complaints but the program's author has a downloadable binary that runs perfectly well on the same system that won't compile it from source.

What you miss is that a huge amount of stuff is packaged with the distro. You don't have to worry about applicationx from vendorx will fail because dependencyy has changed and vendorx, if they're at all bothered, will want ££s for an update - applicationx and dependancyy both come from the distro and if a dependency gets changed then the maintainers, at least for stable distros, recompile against it and fix breakages. If, however, you insist on running on the bleeding edge...

None of my comments apply to systemd-land, of course. That's just an attempt to bring the ?joys of Windows to Linux.

Re: Last time

"Last time Linus sounded a faint praise (of BitKeeper), git was born."

I look forward to Linux, the director's cut.

Re: Cannonlake, kabylake, coffeelake, skylake

"Butty" isn't a geological feature. But "Butte" is.

I thought US portions rendered them a much the same size.

"Too late, I notice what autocorrrupt has done."

I thought it was just wishful thinking.

Re: Cannonlake, kabylake, coffeelake, skylake

"Baconlake, there is a great demand."

You might have something there, Jake, but it would need to become Baconbutty. That opens the door to a whole new series: Jambutty, Marmaladebutty, Marmitebutty (that really divides opinion).

"Odd. Usually it's quite easy to tell if he's pissed off about something."

I take it you mean that usually he swears. Have you considered the possibility that it's normally the ones where that happens that get widely reported and that you're falling victim to sampling bias?

"In the end, the Ubuntu folks gave up and went with initd."

Debian falling over the cliff might have had something to do with it as well.

Re: Cannonlake, kabylake, coffeelake, skylake

And is there going to be a Tealake? Or Beerlake? Or Ciderlake?

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Re: Having had Dengue Fever,

"The niche occupied by the mosquito larvae is not unique, it will be filled by other mosquito larvae species."

I wouldn't think that's the concern. What could be an issue is the Wolbachia and whether it could infect wild life, both other mosquitoes and organisms further up the food chain.

Juicy fine for Bradford firm after it blurts one million spam texts

Just make them credit every account they spammed with £1 compensation

IETF moves meeting from USA to Canada to dodge Trump travel ban

Re: stupid politics

"In these days of the Cloud, who carries sensitive data on them anyway?"

Who'd put sensitive information in the Cloud?

Re: Trump is a Troll.

"The IETF should reflect that the Internet and the RFC process worked without any government involvement other than the original research grant"

Very true. So the problem now is that government involvement has become an impediment to allowing the IETF to meet in one place, that one place being the US.

Re: stupid politics

"to reliably ensure"

Dammit. Tautomerism and a split infinitive. Your downvote was merited.

Re: stupid politics

"Trump Travel ban. Not only is it great alliteration"

No it isn't. Two out of three might not be bad but it's not alliteration either.

And it's vilified not because "it's warped into* Islamophobia" but because it has already shown itself to be capricious which makes it impossible to reliably ensure that the it makes it impossible to guarantee that those who need to attend the meeting will be able to do so.

* Is "into" the right word here? I'd thought "from" might have been more appropriate but I admit to not understanding what passes for Trump's thought processes.

User left unable to type passwords after 'tropical island stress therapy'

Re: Da job Bag

@ Ugotta B. Kiddingme

You forgot the cattle prod. Must have a cattle prod.

"Hello, the blinds in my office aren't closing properly."

That raises a whole lot of possibilities for dealing with Microsoft support calling about problems with your windows:

"It keeps sticking and I can't open it properly"

"The double glazing's all misted up inside"

The only problem is they never seem to call me.

US border cops search cloud accounts? Ha ha, nope, negative, no way, siree – Homeland Sec

That's more than weasel words. More like a polecat. And not semi house-trained either.

Eggheads identify the last animal that will survive on Earth until the Sun dies

Woodlice (pill-bugs to you over there) also stand a good chance.

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

So you can lose money by underestimating the taste of the public.

Now here's a novel idea: Digitising Victorian-era stamp duty machines

Re: Reminds me ..

"74 series TTL logic"

I've just been watching the series on restoring a Xerox Alto at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YupOC_6bfMI&list=PL-_93BVApb58I3ZV67LW3S_JEMFnDrQDj

It turns out that the Alto was largely built from 74 TTL and, I thought, surprisingly few of them.

What can you do with adult VR, some bronze gears and a robotic thumb? On a Friday?

With one of these robotic thumbs on each hand you'd be able to count to 4095.

Luxembourg passes first EU space mining law. One can possess the Spice

Re: We're living in the future

Obligatory Far Side

http://68.media.tumblr.com/670e5aac545e22de4e185a5bcc9e2605/tumblr_n8iwsveFAH1sjxvs8o8_500.jpg

Is this limited to asteroids no larger than Luxembourg? Luxembourg could be the Reg unit of asteroid size.

BTW did anyone see the article about a new berg breaking away from Antarctica? The Beeb gave it's size as half a Wales, /. as a whole Delaware.

Beware, sheep rustlers of the South West of England! Police drone spy unit gets to work

We could do with a few here. For a start they could maybe do something about the fly-tipping that's the inevitable consequence of the council's restrictions on use of the recycling centres dumps. And I'd like them to have caught whoever opened the farm gate down the road the other day - I am not happy about having the bull wandering loose on the lane.

Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

"2 out of 10 trains per week were late or cancelled."

You were lucky. I used to commute from High Wycombe back when the Chiltern line used DMUs. As far as I could make out the outbound trains ran on no schedule, but depended on them finding enough working units to make a train. For fun they also tended to despatch a stopping service before an alleged non-stopping service. The tracks where the latter might pass a stopped train in stations such as Wembley had been taken up so no chance there. Mentioning Wembley reminds me that there were no extra trains for the extra crowds when there was an evening match.

Then there was the occasion when for some reason, one train came up behind another, somewhere like Penn and the two trains were coupled together to make one which was too long for the platforms. After a long while stationary at Wycombe those of us in the rear coaches eventually opened the doors and jumped out.

Being relocated to a location where commuting by car was a big relief.

Re: "How about we abolish cities, people live in human scale communities where they want, and

And you can have that all, provided you're prepared to carpet bomb every city in a country flat to implement it. that's the dirty little secret of most "utopias," they start with a destructive event on an epic scale.

Not necessarily although we've gone a long way to making that the only option. But let's stop the idea of building houses on "brownfield sites". Brownfield sites are sites where people used to be employed and often within walking distance of simple public transport distance of home. Step one would be to stop change of use of such sites as remain; developers would have to redevelop them as places of employment. Crafty use of business rates could encourage employers to move out of city centres to occupy them. This leaves some vacant space in buildings in the cities. Those spaces then get planning permission for change of use to residential for those who want to work in the remaining in-city businesses.

Draconian? Overblown? No more so than the decades of planning policy that brought about the present mess. Make no mistake about it, the situation we have now has been planned. Not intended but planned.

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"Parking only works because many households don't own any sort of road vehicle at all; something that has been a basic planning assumption for centuries."

Going back centuries... We'll count horses as vehicles. Some houses had garages stables. No change there. The rest walked to work and were able to do so because work places and homes were close together. In medieval and early modern urban settlements they were often the same thing.

The transport problem arises because urban growth, exacerbated by post-war planning, has steadily increased the distance between home and workplaces. That's the underlying issue. Searching for better transport is solving the wrong problem.

Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13

Re: "Electric vehicles are the obvious solution to that particular problem"

"kerbside or under-road induction."

Frying eggs on the pavement...

Re: Moving sidewalks

"You had a dozen walkways running in parallel where each successive 'track' ran faster than the previous, so you just walk across the tracks to one travelling at a reasonable speed for your length of journey, and then back down again when your stop was coming up."

How did they handle intersections?

Re: For inner cities/battery charge

There'll need to be some smart logic a lot of investment in cars lying idle most of the day in the system so that maximum numbers of vehicles are available and charged at times of peak demand, but this is scarcely conceptually difficult.

That's assuming "maximum numbers" means "enough to meet demand". A private motorist might be prepared to invest in a car that lies idle most of the time because the journeys they make in it are important enough to them to justify that. An investor is going to want RoI over a short enough period to make it worth while.

Re: For inner cities

"it's going to (in practice) be run 24x7"

In order to do this you're either going to have to even out demand or leave a lot of dissatisfied would-be punters at rush hour.

Re: Bollocks...

"No such thing as an overnight return on scotrail, fork out for two singles even though it's literally the same as a dayshift worker's "go into work and back" just with AM and PM reversed."

That's the easy one One way for the first night, day returns work-home-work for the rest of the period, single the other way for the last night.

Re: Bollocks...

"For travelling in en-masse with a few hundred other people who are all going from Specific Place A to Specific Place B, mass transit is perfect."

Unfortunately going from Specific Place A to Specific Place C by mass transit is unmitigated hell when mass transit only leaves A towards B which is diametrically opposite the direction to C. The journey from Specific Place B then goes by separate service to Specific Place D after a 40 minute wait and arrives there, assuming it's on time, with a 2 minute window to catch the next service, which runs at 15 minute intervals, to Specific Place C.

Re: Trolley problem.

"Good grief, how many people actually die on London's roads?"

It's about 3k for the whole country so, yes, if you think the OP might have been exaggerating you may be right. OTOH he may have been counting algorithmically induced near misses as lives saved.