Posts by DeathStation 9000

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

IMHO the bit of Solaris that makes it UNIX hasn't changed much over the years. The system calls I was taught on BSD at Poly in the late 80's still work fine on my Mac and even now a socket is still a socket. It's more the things built on top of that POSIX core have changed hugely over the years. And to be fair the Win32 API hasn't changed much over the years in the other camp, but the UI layer in Window keeps changing with the tides.

Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse

Re: Seeking education here...

Oddly enough the only time I’ve tried VR I had to keep my glasses on (I’m short sighted) which was a surprise as I would have thought that the screens being close to your eyes you’d by using near sight. Unless I’m just odd.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: It works until it is blocked

Don't know. While I agree that Apple is a bit precious over replacing hardware they seem less so over software. I doubt that in the Intel days they'd have given us Bootcamp unless they were happy to have Windows running on it. I'll be interested to see if something similar comes on the M1 Macs to install an ARM based OS alongside MacOS.

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Re: Now that is one hell of a tale

There was a episode of CSI were that happened I seem to remember where they were picking up the DNA of a worker in the swab factory. Not that I get all my forensics knowledge from said source :-)

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

Re: Man pages were how I learned unix.

That's brought back happy memories of learning X11 via man pages on the Sun workstations at work. Ah, many a happy hour spent hacking X11.

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

Re: Coding, Sigh

You're close but utterly wrong :-)

In C zero is false and everything else is true.

Darkest Dungeon: Lovecraftian PTSD simulator will cause your own mask to slip

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the Gamecube had losing your sanity effects. Some of them were too realistic for their own good sometimes. 'twas a jolly good game too.

How to remote hijack computers using Intel's insecure chips: Just use an empty login string

strcmp

I'm still trying to work out what security/safety benefit they thought they'd get with strncmp? They know how there internal string is constructed and they must have a null terminated string for the user input as they have its length, so why not just use strcmp?

Juno turns around and heads off to graze Jupiter's clouds

I expect more accuracy from NASA myself...

"On Monday, UK time.."

On the plus side, it's more accurate than using a month as a unit of time.

Rampant robot tries to rip my clothes off

Re: "they will probably kill us off by accident"

... and definitely no smeggin flapjacks.

Microsoft acquires Xamarin: An obvious move not without risks

Re: Fingers crossed...

Thanks, didn't know about that. I can handle C++ without screaming in agony as much as I do in Java ;-)

The only thing that stopped me trying to use the NDK was the big warnings from Google saying something along the lines of 'Don't use this just because you prefer the languages involved', so I assume that can be taken with a pinch of salt :-)

Fingers crossed...

Good lord, I do hope this works out well! I may finally be able to write something for my phone.

This isn't intended as flame-bait (it is just my personal opinion), but by god do I hate Java as a language to code in. I'd rather code in COBOL. C# is one of the few decent things Microsoft invented IMHO and is my language of choice after C.

The Xamarin stuff was always awful to try out -- I grabbed the trail version and I couldn't even compile an Android Wear project before I actually added any code to it! So if it ends up in VS (and it must make the community editions), I for one will be a happy camper.

New Monopoly version features an Automatic Teller Machine

Why was there an iron though, I can't explain.

Never mind the money, what the smeg has happened to the player pieces!

When I was a yoof our Monopoly board had plenty of small furrows where I'd been doughnuting the car while in jail.

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

It's almost certainly not a negative problem, and probably a zero problem. time_t is 64 bits on OSX, and most UNIX and UNIX-like systems are very happy with negative numbers. Or at least they are in the C libraries, unless it is some new-fangled nonsense they're using:

time_t t = -10;

printf("%zu\n", sizeof t);

printf("%s", ctime(&t));

Gives this in UTC land:

8

Wed Dec 31 23:59:50 1969

FTC: Duo bought rights to Android game – then turned it into ad-slinging junkware in an update

Re: "... complaints and fines from the FTC"

Completely agree.

I'm sure if I fiddled in a detrimental way an MOD or government computer I would be looking forward to doing some porridge, so why should it be different for *our* computers and corporations (or governments for that matter)? I'm looking at you Sony* and Leveno for example.

* Yes I realise I'm being two-faced there by owning all the PlayStations. But I like video games, so what can you do when you want something a bit flashier than Manic Miner?

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

So many errors in two lines...

My favourite ever was this beauty in C:

strcpy(dest, src);

strcat(dest, "\0");

To give them credit, at least they commented this bit of lunacy by saying "in case the source is not null terminated" before the strcat.