Posts by bombastic bob 10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
Python seems to be the new duct tape of the world.
good analogy.
Python seems as if it is often used (or insisted upon) where it is really NOT fit for purpose but can be shoehorned in with extra time and tenacity.
Reminds me of how a DJango server that I took over was doing many things in Python that it should not have. I re-write the worst offenders in C, then passed files and piped stdio to/from them (called them as external utlities) and sped up the process at LEAST ten fold, so that uploads from smart phones took WAY less than a minute to crunch the data (instead of over 3 minutes - imagine waiting 3 minutes to upload files because of Python data inefficiency - YUCK!)
that is just ONE example. ALSO not a fan of all of those external dependiencies. If you must have pip and a special environment to run your Python program, you're doing it wrong...
I'm rather more concerned that they are able to brick them remotely
For me this justifies two things:
* do not connect TVs to the internet (use a box of your own choosing with HDMI or component output)
* do not purchase TVs from companies that CAN actually do this
Last thing _I_ want is for my legit purchased hardware to "accidentally" be BRICKED like this. So you companies who TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS LIKE POTENTIAL THIEVES, TAKE NOTICE.
At least ONE potential customer WILL NOT BUY YOUR SCHTUFF UNTIL YOU STOP IT!!!
how about using CODING STYLE GUIDES that are comprehensive enough, ONLY allow trusted devs to push their changes without peer approval, and basic project management control over things that are important enough to warrant it.
that, and the occasional code review.
Seriously NOT that hard. Spend time on fixing bugs, hardening security, and *NOT* *IMPLEMENTING* "New Shiny" and MOST bugs and security problems will disappear quickly.
Yeah it's boring, and less interesting than implementing your "wish list", but the rest of us WILL appreciate the lack of moving targets and force-down-the-throat "features".
Faster. stronger, a bit better, and NOTHING ELSE CHANGES (except hardware support). Isn't that the BEST thing that could happen to the Linux kernel?
Only if we LET them.
Only if their way of thinking takes over the project.
Only if Linus retires and hands over the torch to someone else who's on Google's payroll.
They are *WAY* *TOO* *QUICK* to blame the C programming language.
They are *WAY* *TOO* *EAGER* to change the management environment.
They OBVIOUSLY have an agenda here.
It is NOT going to be a GOOD thing, if they get their way.
'Nuff said, I think...
I switched a female relative's computer from Windows Vista to Devuan Linux a couple of years ago. Not only did it fix the thing so it worked well again, it did nearly everything it had done before (but better) and did not need replacing with a "New, Shiny" Win-10-nic machine. She knew very little about anything computer-related except using mail, web browsers, managing music files on an iPod nano, playing videos, and playing games. Well, some of the games she played as a kid were no longer available (but I offered to set up the games in a VM if she needed it, so far no).
Her successful OS paradigm transition took less than a day. Mate desktop helped. Everything just worked. It was an older Sony Vaio laptop, and I set it all up on a new hard drive. No problems since.
I would say that, for her, Linux is kinda like using a Mac. Switching from PC to Mac is generally painless (except for the bank account). Switching from Windows to Devuan+Mate, also pretty painless (and the hard drive needed replacing anyway, so no harm to bank account).
More people need to understand this.
That is just more shit to learn
I'm sure there are many 'SMUG's (Small Minded Useless Gits) who would twist this into a "you REFUSE to learn":comment of some kind, and then go on praising the glories of Gnome 3/4 and (the cult of) SystemD. (or Win-10-nic for that matter)
(Even though the rest of us understand that Gnome 3/4 and SystemD are NOT Linux)
The software houses claim there is no demand, so they do not create a Linux version
True, and yet there are still many Linux applications that are commercial.
Ohe of my observations is the way runtme and package linkage are too connected to the distro. You mention Flatpak which would attempt to rectify this. My preference: static linking. Then make updates (to THAT version) free if there are any important fixes later.
Probably the biggest obstacle to cross-platform is the use of "Micros~1 Shiny' as a framework. Old MFC applications could be adapted (using something similar to wxWidgets which is very MFC-like) as long as they're not using the latest 'Shiny". The 'Shiny' always has a lock-in effect to ONLY supporting Windows. And nobody who is SANE would want to use ''.Not" to start a new project (or to support an OLD one for that matter). LOTS of attempts to port games, etc. but Micros~1 still provides their "Shiny" to keep as many devs SOLELY on THEIR platform as possible...
(Seriously this should make Java even MORE popular, I would think)
What would be the reason of GNU/Linux being so popular ?
Probably marketing and hardware support. The BSDs really didn';t have RH and other commercial support/distributions. And so Linux grew in popularity because you could buy it at the local computer outlet, and it (mostly) supported YOUR hardware. That kind of thing.
Sometimes that's all it takes.
Oooohh, look, a NIT to pick! pick, pick, pick, ...
That's kinda how I read that. [most nits aren't worth picking]
As for the article, I didn't realize Linux was already 30! I guess I've been using it since it was 12...
and a "well done" for the use of [L]GPLv2.* (I think many of us would be unhappy if it ever went to 3.*)
I see money from governments going to WAY LESS BENEFICIAL things all of the time. Might as well do something FUN with the money, other than empowering politicians and paying off political debts...
Sure. Let's build a Sci Fi world based on Elon Musk's (sometimes crazy) ideas. Why not? MUCH better than "clown world", I bet. [and it could be a jobs bonanza]
optimism sometimes has interesting positive effects on EVERYONE. I mean if YOU saw someone in a jet pack flying by, wouldn't YOU be inspired? OK I stole that line but seriously...
there is some evidence that the appearance of the skin of a golf ball not only reduces the air drag during the ball's flight, but the noise it would generate as well.
I have to wonder what effect this would have on airplane parts...
(parts of the article already allude to existing features that might behave similarly, like lots of small holes in a control surface, which could also reduce weight)
we really don't need predatory and/or burdensome and/or malicious (or even VEXATIOUS) lawsuits getting in the way.
Bezos, exactly HOW many successful spacecraft has your company designed and flown in ACTUAL missions, other than that sub-orbital publicity stunt you did a month ago?
*cricket* *cricket* *cricket* *cricket* *cricket* *cricket*
Ya think maybe SpaceX might have a good track record of price and performance? And contracts should NEVER be based on ANYTHING ELSE.
(stupid predatory, burdensome, malicious, and vexatious lawsuits)
Bezos: GET A TRACK RECORD. COMPETE. Your "Legal Tricks" are for CHILDREN!
do kids still say that?
never try to be "Lame Dad" and speak like a teenager, because it will always come out wrong [at least it did when OUR Dads did it].
I still like using hippy jargon on occasion... but mostly 80's. Totally!
[so if you use YOUR generation's jargon, they'll get it and may actually use it themselves when you aren't looking]
But what happens if Fa[e]ceBAN decides to... BAN your company from their service, because you make rifles, or let certain kinds of speech go uncensored on your service, or gave money to politicians and causes they do not like... (etc.) ?
Yes, this NEVER happens to ANYONE, right? I'm sure people in the board rooms of defense contractors and certain news organizations are just WAITING for this kind of heavy-handed EULA/TOS *LAND* *MINE* which can (potentially) have a negative impact on your JOB.
As for me, I remember a room with a speaker phone only a decade and a half ago, and our meetings went just fine. No cameras, no distractions, just actual discussions between international participants.
I do not trust Fa[e]ceBAN for a GREAT MANY reasons, not just those already mentioned by others.
(aside from the Matrix-like imagining or WoW-like avatars being a major anti-work distraction)
If your industrial solution can use either the 3b+ _OR_ the 4, there seem to be enough units available in the short term, or so I've been told by the guy doing the procurement at the moment...
If it's getting better over time (not worse) this is actually good news.
[mostly I just need the Pi touch screen, USB 2 ports, ethernet, and wireless, and CPU is fast enough on 3b+, and then you get flexible with the power supply so it can feed either unit and voila!]
I have to wonder how much paralleliism there is in the robots' learning algorithm.
With a lot of parallel operations, you could power it with a server farm and something a bit better than wifi networking. That'd speed the learning process up, right?
(eventually >256 core CPUs but who knows when THAT will happen... at least one that STILL fits in a robot)
it was an articulation of the rule of law as priority to the whim of the King.
Correct, and in many ways it was one of the first very important political reforms ever made.
In the USA our Constitution says that we have the right to PEACEABLY assemble and address our greivences etc.. So rioting is COMPLETELY out of the question as far as the law is concerned. I'm sure in the UK it's pretty much the same. Using bad interpretations of the Magna Charta to justify lawlessness is pretty stupid.
But rioting gets attention, especially from the media, making these people "attention whores" and not protesters. [similar criticism applies to riots in MY country as well] When you riot, you draw attention to YOU (like a child having a tantrum). When you protest peacefully, you draw attention to YOUR CAUSE (which becomes part of the solution).
A thousand people marching peacefully with signs and bullhorns makes a very big message for politicians. Or maybe just one guy with a sandwich board marching up and down a street [or wearing a Guy Fawkes mask in protest] is a simple enough message that's also both peaceful and law abiding. And it generally draws attention to the message, not to the messenger.
What these people did (trying to storm the castle) just makes them look like idiots.
your point about human rights failures is "not wrong" of course, but the method should be simpler: build competing factories elsewhere, i.e. no more "all eggs in China's basket".
In 2021 there are 2 additional reasons to do this. One, China has proven themselves to be an unreliable part of the supply chain. Two, the manner in which they (the CCP) just "shut things down" without warning, damn the consequences. The combination of the two suggests they can't be trusted.
(other places in the world exist where tech investment is likely to pay off BETTER)
my recent experience with a chip shortage (in which a Hong Kong chip dealer offered to sell them for over 20 times the normal price in very limited quanitities) on an otherwise popular (yet single-manufacturer) device that had good world wide supply at design time [my solution was to re-do the firmware to accommodate inverted-logic and save tens of thousands of dollars] suggests that China may pick winners and losers until they've completely cashed in on the disaster.
And last I checked, China was STILL a communist country.
seeing the chip making FINALLY recover though is still "good". But I hope the recovery is TOO LATE to stop manufacturers from building chip factories elsewhere.
I think it's simpler: do we REALLY want big tech and social media to be our NEW THOUGHT POLICE? Do we REALLY want to surrender control over communication in our society to *THEM* ???
I say, NO WAY IN HELL!
However, it would be better for them to get the ACTUAL police involved, when crimes or the appearance of things _LIKE_ terrorism are involved.
"Hey look, we have a bunch of people on our social network claiming to be Taliban and it looks like people are using this as if they ARE" - then let the cops or even the military get involved, and if a court or some other REAL authority shuts it down, fine. "Due Process", society run by LAW, and all of that. This might mean some local authority gets to have control over local stuff on social media, and gets worked into the administration of the media services, but that would be MORE like REAL LIFE.
However, letting a techno-oligarchy "just decide for us" to ban (or not) content based on THEIR FEELZ???
NO. Just No.
Hard to tell how the Taliban will rule
not really. They've 'ruled' the same for a VERY, VERY long time. Rewind 20 years and the only real difference between then and now (from their perspective) will be how much better the Taliban now are at manipulating the media and big tech and "the world" with their B.S..
There are apparently NO such sanction laws involved in many of the alleged 'cancel culture' bans done by FB and Twitter and Google (and most likely their 'pwned' companies as well), but there ARE some apparent ideological similarities among many of those allegedly victimized by alleged 'Cancel Culture' bans, allegedly done by these companies. At least, that's the perception.
Yeah no ginormous glowing hypocrisy here, nothing to see, move along...
So when will sanction laws coincide with the whims of Big Tech? Would that become a GOOD thing or a *REALLY* *REALLY* *BAD* thing? (See icon)
Years ago I found some code for a Pi calculator written in C. There was no author attribution that I remember. I ended up publishing my modified version (which included a bug fix and some significant speedups). The thing that makes mine different is that it is MULTI-THREADED. But the speed benefit is only about 2.5 times, due in many ways to the limits of just how much parallel stuff you can do in the basic algorithm.
In any case, my updated modified threaded version can calculate 1 million digits of Pi in about an hour and a half on a typical amd64-based system. Since it's roughly an n-squared relationship, it implies that this algorithm could calculate 63 trillion digits in about 6 billion hours. Not very impressive, yeah.
It might be interesting to see what the actual numbers would be...
(and since the Swiss algorithm is apparently using 64 cores, they must've found a better way to introduce parallel calculations)
why not a single DVD? Traditionally this has been the case. Subsequent DVDs just have other packages on them. I normally do a net install though, so I burn a CD (or just use the IMG for a VM) with the net installer and let it rip for a few hours downloading and installing. Net install is usually pretty small, WAY less than the size of a CD. But the DVDs typically have a live system which sometimes makes fixing things easier.
I should probably verify it but chances are it's still the same as it's traditionally been.
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