Posts by MacroRodent

Re: REstart?

Uh, the top of the tower is bright enough even in the picture to cause headache. I suspect you cannot look at that with unprotected eyes when the sun is shining!

Re: Reminds one

> In my day we had 7-bit ASCII and maybe EBCDIC

At least you had brackets and backslashes, you rich bastards!. When I started, most Finnish terminals used a hacked ASCII where [\]{|} was replaced by ÄÖÅäöå. Have fun writing C in it.

if (strcmp(line, "fooÖn") == 0) ä

arrÄiÅÄjÅ ö= 1;

å

Some ADM3A terminals in the Helsinki University of Technology had a little retrofitted switch that flipped between ASCIi and the Finnish character set ROMs. If you used it, the text on the screen would change instantly between brackets and letters.

Re: I don't get it

> having been bitten by the RPM-hell back in the days,

That must have been before RPM-based distros also got dependency-aware package managers, like Red Hat's dnf (previously yum), and SUSE's zypper.

Yandex

Yandex, yes. But I believe DuckDuckGo is American.

Re: Bootnote

CP/M was originally written for the 8080 (no Z80 back then), and even after Z80 became available and popular, the OS and utilities, and all older programs written for it ran on 8080 (and the 8085, which was practically identical from the programmer's point of view). Later many applications started requiring the Z80 with its extensions.

Even as late as 1981 Nokia introduced a CP/M computer, the Nokia MikroMikko 1, that was built around the 8085, and CP/M most applications still worked on it.

Re: FrankenDebian shootout

(ideally their KDE/Plasma variants, as that's what real programmers use)

Nah, Real Programmers use the text mode console. GUIs are for wimps.

Re: Not the only one...

Isn't OS/2 also still around, now named eComstation? Although that is based on the OS/2 Warp version that is very different from the original 16-bit OS/2 that was released in the eighties.

Arguably all the various BSD versions also date from that era, being derivatives of Berkeley Unix.

Re: RE: Simple question: if knowledge is so completely lost...

Data meant to be accessed by some unknown people (or other beings) in the future surely should not be encrypted, and It should be encoded in as straightforward way as possible.

As for explaining coding etc, I think such really-long-term storage must be accompanied by material that bootstraps the deciphering from the basics. Like explaining binary coding at elementary level (01 = o, 10 = oo, 11 = ooo), then ASCII A = 0100 0001 B = 0100 0010 ...

Of course there is the risk whoever finds your carefully prepared optical disks will use them for jewellery... But less likely if they are on the Moon, because stone-age level people will not get there.

Re: Military implications?

Not much. These weapons applications do not need ultimate CPU speed. Power consumption and robustness against adverse environment are probably more important.

Re: "Voyager 1 is now 45 years old"

The first modem I had at home ran at 300 baud in both directions. With patience, I could edit with Emacs through it, after I had thoroughly optimised the termcap for my adm42 terminal. Emacs wad really smart in reusing bits of text already on the screen.

Not a problem, and inherent in Linux (or Open source in general)

Linux (as a desktop or server) is for people who like to have a choice. Not some BigCorp telling them what the next OS version is like. Don't like the direction Fedora is going? Use some other distro. Actually even this is not usually necessary, because you can customise Fedora to you liking. I mostly use Fedora, but hate the Gnome desktop, so I use XFCE (conveniently, there is a ready Fedora "spin" with this, but even if there were not, I could install XFCE myself).

Contrast this with the moaning one heard from Windows users whenever MS makes some change existing users do not like. Sometimes the moaning causes MS to change its mind, but usually not, and you just have to swallow the new version. (And there is no alternate Windows "spin").

As to the huge number of distros, most of them do not matter for a beginner. They tend to be derivatives of the three or four big ones. (Usually born of someones dislike of how the original distro evolved! Or a pet customization of it). I would tell a beginner to pick well-known one with a good user community, learn to use it, and then, after maybe a year, perhaps sample others, if interested in alternatives.

Re: NTFS-3G

I have used it largely for handling NTFS-formatted removable media, which i often find has to be readable on Windows as well. Also for accessing a Windows partition years ago when I dual-booted (no longer doing so, as VM:s are a more flexible solution, so I now give the whole machine to Linux). Never problems with these tasks, but I agree more extensive usage might expose problems.

Not blessed by MS is not so relevant. The popular Samba file server software isn't either, it was created by a combination of reverse-engineering and reading incomplete MS documentation. MS is not in the business of helping open source interoperate, I don't expect them to ever help any NTFS project, at least not on terms that would be acceptable to the Linux kernel guys.

Re: Who'd write logs in a binary format?

Haha, sure. Anyway the systemd log format is openly documented here: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-files/

Don't worry.

Just means some day Fedora will not work on old machines. But I'm pretty sure there will be other Linux distros that will. Probably even a Fedora fork or respin will, as some Fedora users will decide they will not give up BIOS and x.org, unless you pry it from their cold, dead hands (I myself might be in that group, x.org still has the advantage over Wayland that it works with all desktops envs, not only the most bloated ones).

Re: Don't contaminate Ganymede either

I wonder why they worry about that at all. Jupiter has famously fierce radiation belts. After wandering in the vicinity for years, the spacecraft is surely totally sterile.

boom

I recently heard Ukraine received antiship missiles from the UK. The Russian Black Sea fleet may soon not be fit for use as a payment.

Re: Software with western components

That is also my take on what probably will happen. Open source is effectively sufficiently Russian, if it can be supported locally. The point is ensuring you don't become dependent on a foreign company and its servers for updates (and there is no practical way to prevent Russia from obtaining updates for open source), and to ensure the source can be audited.

Re: IT Airbus

Not completely true, there are some semiconductor fabricators in Europe, although sadly very few compared to China, USA, or Japan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants

A major lithography equipment maker, ASML, is Dutch (www.asml.com). Stuck to my mind because a fund I invest in has shares in it.

Re: Interfacing to OS has to work at low level for maximum flexibility

C is low-level, in the sense you can twiddle bits without resorting to libraries or non-standard features, and with good efficiency. And it does not require a complex run-time system to work. None of which is true of languages like Lisp, Java or JavaScript.

There aren't many C standards, except for successive versions of the standard, like with any other standardised language (C89, C11, ...). C leaves some things implementation-defined, which is in line with its low-level nature.

It is "lowest common denominator", because it is implemented for almost any CPU architecture anyone cares for. Not true of any other langauge (Assembler does not count, because it is by its nature totally different for each architecture).

ASN.1 is not a good comparison because it explicitly is designed for defining data for interchange between systems, and for nothing else. You cannot program in ASN.1. You also cannot use it to define an arbitrary data structure at bit level, because the data defined in ASN.1 is BER or DER encoded in the implementation, which uses particular rules and metadata to ensure the receiving end can reconstruct the high-level data. By contrast, in standard C you can use data types with fixed sizes from the stdint.h header to lay out your struct very precisely and portably. Really the only things you cannot define is endianness and padding, but the last can be avoided by ordering the fields of different sizes suitably.

JavaScript is not Lisp by any stretch. It lacks the key innovation in Lisp: using the same simple and elegant representation for both data and code.

(Hmm, looks like I disagree with almost all your statements).

Re: Nobody is ever *that* neutral

RISC-V International does not manufacture chips, nor even design them. It is just a custodian of the RISC-V architecture specs. So, a physical RISC-V chip is in no sense their product.

Re: Everything must lock, ask for the key.

A cost issue, of course. Allows the system to be made cheaper if a separate TPM chip is not needed. Now that Windows 11 requires it, it is an easy prediction that within a year or two, all x86 CPU:s will have built-in TPM.

Re: Crytome.org

Wonder if the site just has not been updated to modern tech? These days browsers disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1

Re: Atari ST ?

I am sure. The 16k and 64k versions were released at the same time. I bought my 64k version (which as noted, actually had only 48k available to the user) from a Finnish importer in 1983. The Oric Atmos was released a year later, and I was pretty pissed because it was clearly superior: Had a proper keyboard and a bug-fixed ROM. What the Oric 1 should have been originally.

NATO response (lack of)

> An attack on them would thus not necessarily invoke a NATO response unless specifically requested bij either nation.

As things currently stand, there would be no NATO response, period. That is why the idea of an actual NATO membership has recently gained popularity at amazing speed in both countries.

Re: Puzzled

The only problem is that if removed, newer kernels cannot access old partitions with ReiserFS. But with enough notification about the deprecation, those with important data on ReiserFS hopefully remember to migrate it.

Re: Sorry, what was the problem again?

From a legal standpoint all this is completely irrelevant, unless Patterson etc own enforceable patents in the RISC-V technology. (I don't know if this is the case). I doubt it. Instruction sets like RISC-V are old hat now, largely thanks to Patterson's work. He wrote a seminal text book on the subject, which I read decades ago and almost understood.

Re: use of fusion

The older predictions do match pretty well:

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/

quote: "The team compared 17 increasingly sophisticated model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007, including some originally developed by NASA, with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017. The observational temperature data came from multiple sources, including NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) time series, an estimate of global surface temperature change.

The results: 10 of the model projections closely matched observations. Moreover, after accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors that drive climate, the number increased to 14. The authors found no evidence that the climate models evaluated either systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over the period of their projections."

Sorry, no relief there. I would not bet against modern climate models.