Posts by Dazed and Confused

There's going to be vampires in it, right?

That would be the First Age too

Re: Come on lads, do some research

> It got marked as orphan in MAINTAINERS which means no one came forward to maintain it.

And the maintainers gave up a long time before the end of the line for Itanium. After they moved away from the SX2000 chipset (I guess zx2 on the baby boxes) there were never any drivers. So you could run Linux on a rx8640 but nothing newer such as the BL8[679]0c blades, SD2s or rx2800 boxes. I don't think you could even run it in their VMs from version 6 onwards.

Re: Only half the story

> A £1.5k DVM? Seriously? Wow.

I used to work in a semiconductor lab back in the 80s. I used to buy meters that cost more than that back then. If you don't chose the right meter you can find the resistance of your meter is less than that of the circuit you want to test so all those pesky electrons take the easy path and flow through your meter instead.

Re: Static IP addresses

Don't newer versions of Android (and I'm guessing iPhones) default to randomizing MAC addresses? Wouldn't this tend to mean the system ID bit of an IPv6 address varying?

Not that it will help if they have static address allocation to the router and therefore household.

Me, I like the way NAT means that lots of peoples traffic is combined onto single IP addresses so that it is a lot less easy to identify users. Mind, my main Internet connections use static IPv4 addresses and I keep getting accused of being from different places. The other evening Amazon and my credit card company managed to locate me at least 200 miles apart for an IP address that prior to GDPR whois would have given my post code.

Re: It's not just Windows:

systemd what could possibly go wrong with this ubiquitous and IMHO anti-ideological monolith?

At the very least please can Linus and friends just say that PID 1 is ours. Mess it up and you panic the system so only grown ups should be allowed to play here.

If you need the process termination notifications the the orphan catcher gets, come talk to us, we'll give you an API, but just leave PID 1 to those who act responsibly.

Re: Bells and broken whistle

It just underscores the fact that Mircosoft is overloaded with "GUI Designers" who don't actually use Windows to do any real work beyond "GUI Design".

Like they do with their own applications. They obviously have scores of GUI designers working on the likes of Word who sit around giving each other awards for the things but have clearly never had to use it to produce a document. Programmers not be experts in the field they are writing software for is probably understandable, but they also seem to have taken to sticking their fingers in their ears and singing "La La La, I can't hear you" every time an actual user tries to give any feedback.

Re: Great news....until.

You might like to take a look at Neil deGrasse Tyson's Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.

There is quite a bit of discussion about the relationship with the KH11 and its offspring Hubble.

Re: The Wire - without the drama

I think I've got their 1200Mb ones, they certainly don't give 1200Mb between the different ring mains in the house.

Re: My submission...

It could be added to the O'Really series to go along with Snooping Email for Fun and Profit which was once on sale from this very organ.

Re: Custom ribbon?

I really feel for you on this.

As far as I can tell every version of Word since the late 90s has done this is a totally different and inconsistent way.

Building a table of contents for multiple files works a totally different way too (don't try mixing these it breaks everything). For the ToC you use reference documents (I think that's the name) and you can edit them - Yay! but not for master documents. It sticks the full pathname for the files into the master document and then it does something weird with OneDrive so you can't copy the damn things.

ARGH!

It is often easier to just make a new master document and add the component parts again.

Oh did I mention the style gallery? now look at it.

Re: Blank media tax V2.0

The small time players don't make enough money to fund the executives expensive habits through the normal channels, so I guess they have to find another way to gouge money out of them.

ReL Make it a galactic highway and you'll find trash down the side of the road everywhere.

Maybe what SETI need to do is to scan the sky looking for unspooled cassette tapes, then at least we'd know where the highways were.

Re: Restarts

@Brewster's Angle Grinder, you're right this is an accurate description.

It can vary from implementation to implementation. Some of it is beneath the vnode layer in the Unix kernel and so could potentially vary between different filesystems. Not all implantations even managed to be coherent between nmap MAP_SHARED and the traditional read/write system call interface to files.

To get a guaranteed consistent view of a file with MAP_PRIVATE you need to open the file, lock the whole thing, or at least the part you're interested in, then touch all the pages so your processes address space sets up all the data structures down to the page level and then unlock it. But that's really no difference to the behaviour of the read/write interface. If you open a file and start to read it while someone else is writing to the file you can get some old and some new new data. It is only the individual systems calls which are guaranteed to be atomic.

Things like libraries are normally only open read only so you don't need to worry about this sort of issue.

Also, not all systems allow you to unlink an open executable and you can get a text busy error, however you can rename an open executable so that an updated version can be inserted in its place.

NFS used to add "interesting" layers of behaviour too as it was never fully SVID compliant.

Re: In-App purchases

Mostly I agree with you, but...

Perhaps the app I use most on my phone is for audio books, I wouldn't be much use if I couldn't load in books and I don't see why authors should give them to be for free. OK, I love to be able to get the app to play MP3 file based books so I could use it rather a general purpose audio app to listen to the myriad of books I had previously bought on CDs. The audio book app is just much better at playing books than any other audio app I've ever tried.

Given that I need to buy the books to listen to, how do you suggest this working without in app purchases? OK, I'd pay for a version of the app that supported loading MP3 files so I could buy the books from other sources, such as directly from their producers/publishers as I used to with CDs. But MP3 doesn't seem to be the most efficient format for the spoken word.

Re: Sounds like it is time for a new standard

I remember when at uni fabs would proudly boast of their 0.18μm processes. And the howls of "you cannae break the laws of physics" at the prospect of going beneath 100nm at around the same time for that matter.

Back in the early 80s the lab I was working in had got their 5um process into production and were well on the way to getting production ready at 3.5um. HP had just come out with their 1um NMOS process for their HP9000 series 500 systems. I went to talk at the RI given by a guy from IBM's labs talking about how their were using X-Ray diffraction gratings to do the focusing as optical wave lengths too long for the line sizes they were researching. Can't remember the line sizes they were quoting but it was orders of magnitude better than we were managing.

Re: Don't forget the users with reading difficulties

I agree fonts that make it hard to distinguish between lower case L, 1 and uppercase i are annoying.

I just want a version of Courier where you can easily see the difference between

lower case L, 1 and uppercase i

Upper case o & Zero

These are the ones which cause the most pain when writing Linux training manuals.

Re: Time for a ====>

Yeah, but if it wasn't for those 1 in 5 you'd only need 20% of your staff, coz the "I'm an expert" brigade cause at least 80% of the problems.

Re: Comments are missing the point

> Tesla supremo Elon Musk

Rushed out a statement...

This is like Boing rushing out a statement about a plane crash. It would be better to wait for the accident investigators' report.

The difference is when the air accident investigators point their finger, all the planes of that type are grounded but this isn't going to happen with cars.

Re: "more of a super-cruise-control"

You can be curious and explore some of it's behaviour while still sitting in the drivers seat ready to take over again if it f****s up.

Re: I take this as evidence ...

Yeah, these days even the bleeding edge distributions are aiming for a stability level that the general public can't expect from W10. It's just so boring :-)

I called a programmers code boring in a code review once, he was offended but I'd meant it as the highest praise, I'd have happily climbed aboard a plane if he'd written the flight control system.

Re: You need to prove who you are to buy a SIM in Aus?

Years back when I used to travel to the US and roaming was beyond extortionate I'd pick up a local SIM, you just used to chuck a few $$$s at a guy on one of those carts in the middle of any mall. Then one day I tried this and was told I need ID and all that crap I didn't have. After a pause of at most 2 seconds the sales guy just filled in the form, put the malls ZIP code down as the address took the dollars and handed over the SIM. No worries.

Re: Why. Won't. Skype. Die?

Once upon a time Skype was really good and really useful.

How they managed to turn this success into

Skype was blown away by Zoom last year as the coronanvirus pandemic took hold.

Must rank as an amazing achievement in negative business strategy.

Of course when I say that Skype used to be good, I'm not talking about Skype for Business which was pants and trying to change the name to hide from people knowing it's pants hasn't made any difference.

Perhaps they could just find a backup tape of the Skype SW from the mid noughties and relaunch that.

Re: 3 hours.

> And no matter how it turns out, I want my old job back!"

Or at least "I want my old gravy train back"

Re: What is it with swap files

OK, it's been decades for the Unix variant's case. Thinking back I think it looked like it was writing "raw" to the device, so I guess someone had screwed up between the file's vnode and the file's device vnode. Having fed all the details of the problem and how to reproduce it back through the appropriate channels I never bothered to follow up the details of the fix, other than to note it was very quick :-)

Re: Good

Or go after their clients...they're the actual scammers.

Or, fine the payment processors but give them a receipt which allows them to reclaim some of the fine when they've handed over the heads of the actual scammers. They then might suddenly remember they've got a few more details of their customers than they'd previously recalled.

Re: My current annoyance is "gift" as a verb

self proclaimed authority that only wishes they had any control of any version of English

I don't think they've ever claimed to control anything, they see their job as documenting how the language is used. The don't want to be an Académie Française of the English language which is a b*****d of many parents and evolves constantly.