Posts by Orv 2122 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
Calendaring is, for some reason, the single hardest thing to duplicate without Exchange or some kind of cloud-hosted system. I mean, yes, you can sling ICS files around with Thunderbird, but in a business environment you really need the ability to share free/busy info, and most open source solutions fail at that.
With Unicode you also run into the problem of there being different ways to represent the same glyph; for example, ö has its own codepoint, but can also be the letter o plus a combining mark plus an umlaut. So you face the question, do you consider these different characters for filename purposes? If you do, it's confusing, and can have security repercussions. Or do you canonicalize them somehow?
Also after having understood the importance of parametric database queries for decades, with AI we went back to feeding instructions and user-controllable input into the same channel, opening up a whole new world of entirely predictable security holes.
Not to mention that if you're using telnet to get a remote shell you're really behind the times.
But any long-running command should either be run in tmux, or backgrounded with nohup.
And people not experienced enough to know that stuff are probably not experienced enough to be growing/shrinking filesystems anyway. It's super easy to shoot yourself in the foot doing that, even with something simple like ext4.
In general in the US car manufacturers are obligated to provide emissions-related parts for ten years. Anything after that is gravy, and anything not emissions-related is technically not required after the warranty is up. Usually they make parts for ten years and then everyone's just relying on old stock until it runs out. One of my cars is 30 years old and most of the parts are no longer available, unless there are aftermarket copies of them.
This isn't really a DEI thing. You can tell because the anti-DEI party is doing things like issuing lists of words that people aren't allowed to use in government documents. The list includes words like "diversify," "bias," and "systemic," regardless of context; if you submit a grant application with one of these words it's automatically rejected. At least when a guide like this gets issued it's not mandatory.
I tend to agree, and would add that support for these types of lists is almost never widespread. They're usually internal documents for small orgs that get blown out of proportion. The main difference between this stuff and what conservatives do is when conservatives ban words, it tends to have the force of law. (For example, you cannot use the word "trans" in an application for a government grant in the US now, even if it has nothing to do with transgender people; it will be rejected.)
I will give one weak defense of this sort of thing, and that's that I've often seen some of the more luridly creative tech jargon confuse people who aren't native English speakers.
Flying wings have some serious practical problems for passenger craft -- mainly the lack of space for windows. You can see a bit of that in this design -- there are only a handful of window seats, and the people toward the center rear are pretty much out of luck if they want to see out. With a full-on flying wing the only place you can put windows is in the leading edge, and that's usually avoided for bird strike reasons.
My theory: 2003 is the default, and they were using a window system where two-digit dates are interpreted based on an arbitrary cutoff. e.g., if it's >24, it's a 19xx date, otherwise it's a 20xx date. So "25" would be interpreted as "1925", which is probably outside the system's date range, and cause a reversion to default.
Cutoff windows like this were a pretty common way to handle Y2K problems in databases, because they didn't require touching all that much code. But everyone involved in implementing them knew they were just kicking the can down the road and the system would need to be fixed "properly" later.
A large reason for games mostly being written in machine language on the C64 was the BASIC interpreter was slow, and when you're using a chip clocked at 1 MHz you really want to save those cycles.
That said, both the C64 and the Apple II (another machine with Microsoft BASIC) both had some commercial software written in BASIC. Just not usually anything speed-critical.
Some versions of the Apple IIe also had a mini-assembler in ROM, which was handy for putting together short machine language routines. Traditionally the dumping ground for those was the tape buffer starting at 0x300, since no one really used tape on an Apple II system.
Considering Defense, Social Security, and Medicare have all been declared off-limits it's hard to see how they get to $2 trillion. That would require cutting pretty much everything else government does, and a lot of those agencies have substantial constituencies relying on them in red states. Try telling farmers that there won't be any more subsidies and see how it goes.
There's also Transit 5B-5; it can't claim the title of oldest working satellite, because it stopped functioning shortly after launch. But it was launched in 1965 and still transmits garbled telemetry occasionally, making it the oldest satellite to still emit a signal.
The Transit system itself is fairly interesting -- it was an early, pre-GPS satellite navigation system, intended to allow Navy ships and (surfaced) submarines to re-calibrate their inertial navigation systems. It was accurate to around 20 meters if the receiver was stationary.
Before section 230 sites had a choice -- they could do no moderation at all, or they could be held responsible for user-supplied content. Most sites chose just to not have user supplied content; things like message boards and comment sections didn't really become common on a large scale until after section 230 made them less legally risky.
At Starlink's orbit that's not that big a problem; debris would naturally de-orbit pretty quickly. (Small debris particles de-orbit faster than whole satellites due to their greater surface area to mass ratio.)
It's a lot more of a concern at higher orbits, where the debris might not re-enter for decades or longer.
I would not necessarily expect the filibuster to stand -- it's just a Senate rule and can be changed with a majority vote.
However, each of the departments Musk would like to target has a constituency who is sure THEIR favorite department isn't the wasteful one, it's all the other ones that should be cut. Representatives who are not in safe districts, and Senators who are in purple states, can be expected to resist cuts. It's not likely to be a straight party-line vote for most of these proposals. (This is why NASA's SLS keeps staggering forward -- contractors for it are spread across a bunch of congressional districts, making it essentially cancel-proof, because no one wants to be the Representative who voted to take jobs away from their voters.)
