Posts by rcxb 1020 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
Republican party is a Russian asset. They are set to destroy America from within and enrich themselves in the process.
"No" to the first, "Yes" to the second.
Republicans (other than Trump) don't like Putin. Putin likes the Republicans because they're trying to destroy America. Republicans are right on the edge of being a non-viable national party, so they'll quietly accept Putin's help in any form that helps them win elections they might otherwise have lost.
So what's the problem
Laws are all about dotting your "t's" and crossing your "i's".
It doesn't matter how reasonable and common-sense something might be, if the law doesn't specifically say you're allowed to breathe, then you're going to get slapped by the court for breathing...
The one that always bothered me is the term "broadband" in the US Fed is legally defined as bandwidth of 25Mbps download speeds. So your baseband ethernet network at home is legally broadband, while slower 5Mbps DSL service (which is a broadband signal/service) is legally not "broadband." It's like they updated the definition of a "horse" to include cars, and exclude horses...
the sort of hardware that went into a Windows 3.11 PC is getting rarer, and much is not manufactured any more.
For the most part you shouldn't need era-appropriate hardware. The OS doesn't need details on what type of RAM is in-use. Many/most modern PCs maintain DOS backwards compatibility. You might run into an issue if you still need an old ISA card (adapters exist that work for some), but PCI can still be easily found in specialty motherboards. UEFI firmware options in most systems allow USB keyboards/mice to be seen as PS/2, and SATA SSDs to appear as old IDE/ATA drives. Many video cards retain VGA/SVGA/VESA interfaces.
And if that's not good enough, there are emulators out there. You could run DOS and Windows 3.11 under a web browser with reasonable performance these days.
There's even active development in this space: "high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1"
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-retro-development/
And the flip side of that coin is not fearing fossil fuels enough.
Don't they? Have you seen the popular opposition that appears when the construction of a new power plant is announced in an area? Maybe people are just bad at appreciating far-away threats?
a few people died from radioactivity that one time, so we can't have that!
Nuclear power plants are a different type of risk, entirely. Unless you're directly downhill or downstream of a massive fly ash tailings pond, no form of disaster at a coal power plant is going to render your property completely worthless and uninhabitable for several generations to come.
On a country-wide scale, nuclear power is a better proposition than coal. But on an individual scale, nobody wants to be the one to take the risk to their own safety and assets.
The low outside temperatures make cooling far easier than (for example) a datacenter located in Arizona.
Iceland has experienced temperatures high enough to require active chillers: https://www.plantmaps.com/en/is/climate/extremes/c/iceland-record-high-low-temperatures
So you'll still need to pay for that capacity, and maintenance of the units, which is much more difficult to do where the condenser coils frequently get iced-up, snowed over, etc. Unless you're Google, and can just shut off entire data centers.
There's a lot to be said for building data centers in deserts. Lots of unoccupied open land, efficient cooling with evaporation, ideal for on-site solar panels, few or no blizzards or ice storms (which have a habit of taking down electrical grids and make it difficult for personnel to come and go), etc.
More on-topic, nuclear power generation hasn't proven to be price-competitive with wind and solar, and data centers are a terribly competitive business where even slightly higher electrical rates raising their costs is very likely to cause customers to go elsewhere.
A lot of datacenter activities (eg AI training) can easily tolerate the additional few milliseconds latency for the data transfer from Iceland to mainland Europe or the US.
It's a logistical issue, though... How long does it take to ship parts? How difficult is it to get people on-site for occasional major moves/reconfiguration/etc. The added expense of trans-Atlantic rush shipping and costs for remote-hands could easily eliminate any savings from the lower electrical prices. Of course huge companies can make the logistics work, but most cannot.
The Unix shell is a famously rich environment: hardcore shell users find little reason to leave it, except for web browsing.
Only because links/elinks hasn't been updated to handle CSS and modern JS nicely. Which is a real shame because I loved being able to browse the web (even huge complex pages) lightning fast with a tiny fraction of 1GB of RAM. Not to mention vision-impaired users who need to use a screen reader or other assistive device.
e.g.: https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y223/mypapit/elinks.png
Story is incomprehensible.... Something, something, EVs don't work.... ?
Huh? What is the problem with EVs that's being reported?
"Still on zero percent, and this is like three hours"
Well sir, perhaps you should try plugging the charger into the EV...
The mention of pre-conditioning the batteries has nothing to do with the above.
Seems someone is trying to give the impression EVs can't operate in cold weather, when they obviously can and do. And to convey that impression, they have to made this story utterly devoid of information to ensure we can't figure out what the actual incident being reported is all about.
power & cooling for servers is not a trivial expense
Depends where you are.
Some areas have cheap electric rates.
Some areas are cold year-round, and remote so there are no city gas lines, only electric. Before heat-pumps became cheap, resistive heating was the thing, so a few servers would just mean a bit less work for your heater, no change to your electric bill.
Where was that point, because I didn't notice it...?
Here:
"developed ZFS for Solaris. They didn’t want it in a competing OS. They chose the license that achieves that." "How is that Linux’s fault?"
The AC implies it was Sun's/Oracle's responsibility to chose a license for ZFS that would be Linux compatible, and doing otherwise indicates they are intentionally trying to hobble other OSes.
Fairly sure SunOS predates Linux by a decade or so.
ZFS does not predate Linux. I don't see how SunOS enters into it.
How is that Linux’s fault?
It's slightly more true that the GPL has "licensing restrictions".
It might be more fair to just say the the two bits of software just use mutually incompatible licenses, rather than pinning one of them as being the more "encumbered" preventing integration with the other.
Your point that Linux was around first is neither here nor there.
They didn’t want it in a competing OS.
As said before, it was adopted by FreeBSD quite rapidly.
One can even argue the ZFS license is actually compatible with Linux and the GPL, but Oracle has stayed silent and never offered their opinion on those legal intricacies, and nobody wants to be the first to try it and risk getting sued.
restrict which machines can talk to other machines (but only if they're on different subnets which are routed via the firewall),
"Private VLANs" which is an option on most smart/managed switches, can put EVERY system on their own virtual subnet.
Certainly security on the host side is valuable, but "the network" could do a lot more for security. That it doesn't is because a culture of laziness, permissiveness, and insufficient security concideration permeates most companies.
That seemed to work reasonably well for you.
What is your better GUI alternative?
Will searching for "convert PDF to text" in Windows quickly find a solution?
Is there a "convert PDF to text" icon on everyone's desktop, or in everyone's applications menu?
Is there a "convert to text" option in the context menu if you right-click (or ctrl-click) on a PDF?
Does Acrobat Reader show a prominent "Convert to text" icon, when you open up a PDF?
I don't see this being a failing of the command-line. If you need to do something new, you're going to have to spend a little time figuring out how to do it, whatever UI you are using.
but if you're asking a question like "What do I need to perform [action]", you don't have any way of finding that out quickly from the interface.
If you learned "man -k" first, you do.
And the GUI isn't any better in many cases. Sure, there's a list of programs, and a menu, and obvious close button, but more than that and you just need to start guessing, looking around EVERYWHERE, and just hope you get lucky and find the exact context menu you need.
How about formatting drives, or the famous example of ejecting a disk on a Mac?
In fact the Windows UI has gotten so completely unusable that a search function had to be implemented, just like you're at the command-line or something...
Going further afield, I'd also point to the IBM HMC web UI as a counter-example... There are so many different contexts, so many options in each, and many of those options go a dozen steps deep with sub-options that if you don't have any idea at all where to look it would literally take you YEARS to search through possibility. A situation that can be resolved by just having one page of common CLI commands... Compare to needing several pages of explanation for just ONE thing in the web UI, describing where to navigate to in the GUI to find the same info.
vi and emacs are obviously the power-tool editors. Beginners should start with pico / nano / joe / etc.
It is possible to have one that can suit both, with a little effort. "lynx" is a good example, with its two lines at the bottom of help by default... something you can quickly go shut off in the settings. Helpful for beginners, and only slightly annoying to the advanced user.
The added cost of running several very high speed dedicated fibre internet circuits to your office building (on whatever edge of the city it may be) is likely to be more than you'd pay to rent space in a proper data center. This is not consumer level shared internet services we're talking about, but multiple dedicated 10Gbps links, preferably from more than one ISP... and each is going to make YOU pay for the last few miles of build-out cost to reach you. Compare to a proper data center where a dozen providers are already on-prem, and competing with each other to get their service that last 100m to your equipment.
And electricity? Even with just 1 or 2U, DCscharge less, all-in, than I'd have to pay just for electricity. Maybe your office building gets great low electric rates, having installed solar panels and batteries for shaving off peak electric usage charges to the point they can compete with a DC, but that's not been my usual experience. That's not even getting into the cost of battery and generator backup for power outages.
Not to mention that your building is simply now a 24/7 operation... needing on-call staff woken up in the middle of the night for every hiccup in power or cooling systems, with no down-time to schedule the occasional maintenance, either.
modern linux has become, since systemd and cloud init and network manager and such.
Network Manager works great. If you've got a number of different interfaces that come and go (whether Wi-Fi or wired, whether automatically or something you just want to toggle off/on), the old method doesn't handle that well. nmtui makes it easy to set them up and manage. My only big problem with NMTUI is that it doesn't have a simple check-mark to send response to incoming packets on the same interface they arrived on. Gotta do a couple long "nmcli connection modify" commands to get that.
Systemd is a nice improvement too. Simple service file syntax, single line change for different types of processes (daemon/foreground/etc.), and a one-line config change to restart services when they quit... no need for some other service manager/monitor in parallel. It also has several features I find anti-useful, but still a plus.
educational concept should be wrapped around gendered stereotypes
Not that they *should*, no... only that there's nothing wrong with trying it out and seeing if it increases interest.
Those who are doing good work, at least trying something, should not be berated for doing so.
Political correctness is not a suicide pact.
cost, reliability and serviceability were more important
Years back, a friend bought an old used Taurus, and asked me to check it out.
It had a plastic (likely ABS) splitter on the coolant system/hose next to the battery, with a very small takeoff going to a smaller hose. This looks like it: https://images.carid.com/gates/products/22337.jpg
I bumped said smaller hose, which promptly broke the small plastic bell-end and sprayed me with antifreeze. That's not what I call reliable or even particularly serviceable.
This came on the heels of having owned 3 Fords over the prior decade or so, which were all maintenance burdens. That Taurus nonsense convinced me to thereafter switch to buying GM vehicles, where I've never seen any such stupid and fragile powertrain components. Have had an extremely good tract record with GM vehicles since. (Better than Toyota and Honda vehicles owners I know, though of course it's quite a small sample size.)
Dealerships are parasites, adding no value while taking a big cut of car sales. They have lobbied many state governments successfully to make independent dealerships a legal requirement, enshrining in law their rent-seeking position in the new car market, otherwise they would have gone extinct long ago.
They're overplaying their hand, here. If they don't quickly adapt to selling more EVs, they'll find automotive companies bypassing them, as they enter a death-spiral, just linger around for a time and fighting each other for the last few scraps of an ever shrinking ICE vehicle market.
In fact, I'd say they are a threat to national security... Inhibiting the uptake of EVs causes greater reliance on imported foreign oil supplies, much of which is supplied by sometimes-hostile nations.
If Trump or any other Republican gets elected next year, they'll very likely get their way, and EV adoption will be delayed by years.
multiple fully underground 260,000 Gallon Swimming Pools at 10 metres by 10 Metres by 10 Metres each!) and a way to radiate the waste heat to the outer environment without it AFFECTING said outer environment (i.e. for stealth hiding purposes and for keeping negative local environmental thermal affects to a minimum!)
So you built a data center under Yellowstone, and that is the real source of the Old Faithful geyser?
One reason that I give credit to congestion control algorithms in explaining the success of the internet is that the path to failure of the internet was clearly on display in 1986. Jacobson describes some of the early congestion collapse episodes, which saw throughput fall by three orders of magnitude.
The reason the internet didn't collapse is that the backbones were able to continue to get drastically faster. More than just keeping up with traffic growth. That has ensured that the vast majority of the distance of your data travels, is entirely free of congestion, with congestion only an issue at the last mile. This reality is very different than the old 1980s assumptions of telcom networks, that we needed protocols that would handle heavy congestion all the time.
Intel has been supplying components to the defense industry since its inception.
The joke was that they would stick a logo on a missile to advertise.
The only thing that has changed is that they've realized the risks, and they're getting serious about preventing infiltration and sabotage.
there is little incentive for the investment company to provide class-leading service or fees.
There is incentive. People can opt out of the 401k entirely, and perhaps privately invest in an IRA instead. Company executives are in the same 401k plan as low-level employees. Individuals may opt to keep their money in the same 401k plan after leaving the company if the terms are reasonable.
It's not unusual for bad employers to offer 401k services with long term yields of -10% annually.
"For 2011, the average total administrative and management fees on a 401(k) plan was 0.78 percent" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/401(k)#Fees
401k plans typically have 50+ investment options to choose from, and I have yet to see one that doesn't have an S&P 500 option with low fees. They certainly offer options that have higher fees, but only people so lazy as to not read a couple pages and select a good investment option will get steered into those.
If you don't like your company's plans, the moment you leave the company, you can transfer the entire cash value of your 401k into any brokerage firm's "Rollover IRA" account and invest it without restrictions, even day-trading with your balance. Or more realistically, sticking it in a lower-fee S&P500 fund. And of course you can just opt-out of the company 401k plan entirely if you choose.
The attached strings are that the administration & underlying investment is controlled by the employer and their choosen investment company. The individual cannot (E.G.) use the funds in the account to purchase an S&P 500 ETF, and earn the 10% (or whatever) tax free for their working life.
The employer does choose the plan administrator, but they typically have 50+ investment options to choose from, and I have yet to see one that doesn't have an S&P 500 option, with the low fees.
The moment you leave the company, you can transfer the entire cash value of your 401k into any brokerage firm's "Rollover IRA" account and invest it without restrictions, even day-trading with your balance. Or more realistically, sticking it in a lower-fee S&P500 fund.
Is there an answer to this conundrum? Probably not,
Restructure taxes... make capital gains double or triple its current rate, and restore tax-advantages back to dividend yields.
That way, holding shares for long-term investment would become preferred over juicing short-term profits and selling your shares to a bigger idiot.
Unfortunately there's now an av1 patent pool mudding the waters.
MPEG patent-holders have always been spreading FUD about patent-free codecs. This is to be expected. It's an existential threat to their business.
The MPEG-LA got a pittance settlement out of their court case, and were being investigated by the US Department of Justice for their anti-competitive actions. Nokia's patent claim failed in a German court. VPx has not fallen afoul of a single patent yet, and the huge players implementing AV1 like Cisco and Google without being sued is a pretty strong statement that none of the claimed patent holders actually even believe their own claims will hold up in court now, either.
Theora was a sad chapter. VP3 was made free in 2001 back when it was reasonably competitive with other patented video codecs. But it saw almost no adoption, as the Theora project was in the works that was going to dramatically improve the codec and standardize it. Not until 2008 did Theora get an initial release, long after the world world had moved on to newer formats Theora couldn't hope to compete with. And all the while there were loud-mouthed Theora supporters using cherry-picked demos to insist it was better than everything else, while 99% of the world utterly ignored it as a failed experiment in non-commercial public collaboration and development of video codecs. You can still see echos of this petty advocacy in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Performance
I anxiously await a patent-free video format gaining popularity. It's one thing to use it on your computer, but quite another to have something widely implemented in hardware so you can play your videos on all your multimedia devices.
It is not about programs that can _view_ PDF files. It is about programs that can: [1] Allow you to complete PDF forms. [2] Allow you to annotate non-form PDFs, so you can fill in forms that were meant to be printed.
That's fine. By all means, point me to a platform that doesn't have applications that can handle PDF forms and annotate PDFs, but does get modern versions of Firefox.
Personally, I've always hated the Firefox PDF viewer, as it quite often doesn't print out PDFs as they are formatted, which is the #1 feature PDFs have going for them. Disabled it across my company, to eliminate all the regular complaints that PDFs (that my program generated) were cut-off when printed, as well as terrible performance on very large PDFs. I'm happy to try it again to see if they've improved things, though I don't see any compelling reason to when the native PDF viewer works great (on all platforms).
The *only* Linux one I could find that could do both was Okular, which is ugly and needs hundreds of megs of KDE libraries installed.
Fortunately you found one.
I'm not sure why you need ONE app to be able to do both, when we're talking about lightweight free apps. That sounds like the Windows mindset. In the Linux world, I'd go straight to a fully capable PDF editor, instead of using a tacked-on annotation feature in a crippled "viewer" app.
Personally, I open PDFs in Xournal if I need to edit, erase, draw on, or annotate them. Well known and even more capable PDF editors include Inkscape, Scribus, LibreOffice Draw, and Qoppa.
This eliminated the need for a separate PDF viewer or plugin – especially handy for operating systems that may not have one.
Please name ONE operating system where modern Firefox runs, but which doesn't have one or more PDF viewers...
Because I can name a huge number of the opposite... Lots of platforms can open PDFs but don't or can't have modern web browsers.
For instance, the official Adobe Reader for Linux was discontinued after version 9 and that decade-old version doesn't install smoothly on modern Linux,
Right, no Adobe Acrobat on Linux, but a dozen PDF readers available for sure. Ghostscript (found on practically every Linux system) is great, allowing converting anything to or from PDF, stripping password protection out, quickly lowering image resolution to shrink gigantic PDFs to reasonable sizes, etc., and that's just one common tool, not mentioning all the things you can do utilizing a few others
I have never seen a bit of equipment killed by static electricity.
ESD protection is a feature in chips these days. Not that equipment is invulnerable now, just much more robust than it used to be. Go back to about the 486 or Pentium 1 era, and motherboards would just suddenly die if you touched them before putting on a wrist strap... micro static you don't even feel, and it is just gone, black screen and no activity on power-on. Making it worse, components were quite a lot more expensive back then, so it was a significant loss whenever it happened.
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