Posts by Gunnar Wolf

Re: Pulling up the drawbridge

MS actually runs quite well on ARM hardware.

I am writing this from a Snapdragon laptop — a Lenovo Yoga C630. I am running Linux, of course, but it is a very nice, modest ARM laptop. It was originally sold two years ago, and I bought it a couple of months ago. Speedwise, it's completely OK, comparable in most tasks with my same-generation i5 laptop, but is fanless — and the battery lasts like forever.

Of course, the machine was sold running Windows, and it runs quite happily. It does have some sort of x86 emulation for programs not available for ARM; I never tested the emulation's quality.

But anyway, I don't think MS will let this one go as they did with the Windows Phone.

What's your really valuable data then?

James: You might fill in lots of little white lies. But you also fill in distilled truth: Who your real friends are? Not those on your list, but those you hold correspondence with. Where did you grow up? Not where you told your profile you did, but the place you uploaded all those childhood pictures from — And the place you have in common with a third of your friends. Where do you work? Not where you told your profile, but where you connect from during daytime. There's too much real data you are not hiding from them.

Re: Doubly unusable if he moved the document

Charlie,

I have gone (twice!) through the process of publishing a book.The first one was basically prose, in a scholarly setting (published by a university), the second one is a technical one. I chose to use LaTeX, the first one written straight in LaTeX, and the second one via Emacs in org-mode. And yes, the correction/edition process was painful. They want to use Word, I certainly don't. It was quite an issue to get them to accept to use red-ink over paper, and I had to incorporate it all... Painful, but OTOH way better than finding out the changes in Word and going back to my Sacred Originals.

Of course, teaching LaTeX to the editor is just out of the question!

Re: Linus don't need no gun

Best protection she can get at him trying to write a new filesystem.

(Or what was the thing that Mr. Reiser did?)

Re: Because the flaws were very different

If I recall correctly, Debian used dash because they are still using System V init, and dash started up quicker than bash and Debian were looking for faster boot up times

It is one of many reasons. But if we were to find one single reason, I'm sure we'd end up finding my friend Raphael Geissert sitting on it: He was quite active for some time finding and explaining bashisms, different constructs which are handy but break strict-POSIX shell programming. Allowing the system to properly run with a strict POSIX shell benefits low-disk-space systems (i.e. the embedded world), allows for faster start-up times, and leads to less head-scratching due to hard to identify bugs.

If I recall correctly, the drive to migrate the default shell from bash to dash was in 2009, somewhat before the migration to Upstart/SystemD/OpenRC/AnyOtherInitStyle.

- Just One More Debian Developer ;-)

Re: OpenSSL is open source, most financial institutions don't use open source encryption.

You say¸ «It might mean revoking your SSL certificates and getting new ones. Pricey if you have a lot, and time consuming.»

If you have a remote code execution or a privilege escalation bug, and your server gets owned... it's game over. The attacker might have already grabbed your certificates, as well as any information in your server. Get owned, and you will anyway have to revoke every certificate — and user credentials.

Re: I'd be more worried

Hey now, are you a racist pig? Eating beans is *in no way* related to drugdealing-induced violence here in Mexico!

Re: Tell you what I would like...

Then go look at Org-mode. It's really a breeze to use, a very intuitive and rich markup language, with all kinds of export filters for different formats — I most often use LaTeX for PDF generation and HTML, but you can export Org documents to Docbook, even to ODF.

Besides, for fine-controlling the layout exports' presentation details, you can include little snippets. As an example, if you want a figure to be placed spanning two thirds of the text width when outputting to TeX, or 500px when outputting to HTML, just do:

#+caption: This caption will hang below the figure

#+latex_attr: width=0.66\textwidth

#+html_attr: width="500"

[[img/foo.img]]

And yes, that's as heavy as the markup goes. It's often almost indistnguishible from straight text. Oh, and for WYSIWYGers: Emacs *will* render in different faces italic, bold or other kinds of text, headers, etc. Of course, they will not be rendered as they appear on the final document (as Emacs does not even attempt to know which will that final document's export format be), but the structure will be clearly shown.

Many professions can complain...

You say, «It most certainly is insulting to actual engineers». Well, engineering is a word often appropriated by other fields, as others have already answered. And we also take titles from other fields — My wife is an architect. She laughs at my peers who are "information architects", "software architects", "infrastructure architects". And very probably, you can find similar nonsense applied to several other fields!

Re: Fork, fork. My kingdom for a fork

Ugh. I have basically the opposite experience from what Gene Cash here mentions. I just *loved* the simplicity and non-verboseness of X clipboard hanging ever since I first successfully installed a RedHat 4 (1996), and through my progression via different distros (even *BSDs) until I settled in Debian. And, after many years, I don't only know there are different clipboards, but use them for different things. Of course, I'm quite a well-trained user by now — But the system does what I want. (Or I think the way the system wants me to? Hmmm...)

Now, as for the "stupidity with which X11 handles multiple monitors"... Most of the time, at my office, I work in a dual-monitor setup. My right monitor is rotated 90° (portrait, 1440x900), my left monitor is at "regular" 1280x1024. I hated multi-monitor setup back in the XFree days, but today, with a single xrandr command, I get everything I need — And I get it always reliably. In my laptop, switching between a regular, dual-screen and mirrored-screen monitor is also straightforward; when I see my colleagues fiddle with Fn+F5 until they get the right projector+screen layout, I cannot but laugh.

So, yes, X11 gave me quite a bit of headaches back in the day. Nowadays, it's one of the most unobtrusive, reliable pieces of software I use. And, yes, I'm one of those obsessed with no-binary-blobs software.

No, you stop being working class...

Andrew says: «Do you stop being working class if you earn £65k a year between yourself and your partner then?»

Nope. You stop being working class when you stop working.

Cell triangulation is more precise than what you think

Take a look at this experiment published about a month ago by German Green Party member Malte Spitz:

http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

It is amazing, incredible, scary... And fun :)

Do you mean...

It will take you less than a week to code the driver for the plastic injection machine? Sweet!