Posts by jake

Re: Snap is a single compressed file,

These things are built to waste system resources. It is expected, and seemingly celebrated.

Re: Snap is a single compressed file,

"Even embedded SBCs can afford to burn through a few extra gigs if it makes them more reliable and robust."

But do they actually need that many 9s of reliability?

Sure, bespoke systems (spacecraft & etc.) might need this. But your average linux desktop/set-top-box/telephone/SBC? Total overkill.

Shirley at this point we are well past the point of diminishing returns in what is a general purpose operating system.

This 19ish year old HP laptop has never crashed, never lost a byte of data, never been compromised, with no issues updating and installing new software. Slackware 10.0 -stable on ext3 when new, moved to ext4 with slack13.1 in 2010, still on ext4 today running slack15.0 (flirted with reiserfs briefly around slack12.1) ... all without any OS or program related issues.[0][1]

From my perspective, not a single one of these new ideas seems to have a compelling case for inclusion FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF USE CASES. And yet, here we are. Wasting system resources for no good reason. (Other than the pervasive "it's there, we must fill it!" of the Lost Redmond Generations.)

Unless the companies pushing this kind of thing have ulterior motives, of course. My guess is that it's a control issue... and not the user's control of his own hardware, either.

[0] I have replaced/upgraded the HDD, battery and RAM over the years. She was built just before the second round of bad caps at HP.

[1] I fully expect this old laptop to dissolve into a lump of slag after typing that for all the world to read ... but I have known good backups, multiple fall-over boxen, and the ol' gal doesn't owe me a dime. I'll shed a tear, raise a glass and give her a decent burial when the inevitable happens.

Re: Hmmm

Relax. Many of us Yanks use the term, too.

Note that Linus says he's an an egotistical bastard and names all his projects after himself ... although that claim was made long after the fact. Those of us in the trenches at the time know who it was really named after.

Re: It's all about making it easier...

There is always EMACS ...

::ducks::

There will be no "singularity". A machine, and the running thereof, is entropy poor. They break. Constantly. And are not self-healing. They cannot, and will not, "take over" until they are capable of running their entire supply chain, and the care and feeding of all THAT ... without Human help. The very concept is laughable. When was the last time you tried to make a simple steam powered traction engine, from scratch, starting with raw ore? Now try it with a simple late '70s era pocket calculator. You really think an intelligent machine could somehow marshal the necessary forces to reproduce, even one random part at a time?

As long as there is one Human in the chain, the plug can be pulled ... thus no Singularity.

Re: not american

That early British "pie" recipe was not an apple pie as we know it. It was mixed fruit and assorted spices cooked in a type of shell called a cofyn ("coffin"), which was an inedible container made of flour and water, no salt or shortening. The fruit mixture contained no sugar.

The British Isles ... where good ingredients go to die. Since at least 1381, apparently. Perhaps now we know where the groans of the Britons came from?

"If I could only find a suit like that"

What is this thing you call a "suit"?

Re: Easier method.

You're not running fast enough.

"Throw in all the dishcloths at the start, so it kills off all the bacteria in the very hot water"

Not unless your water is extremely hot.

Chances are that most of the "stinky" bugs are killed off by desiccation, so allow your dish clothes (sponges, whatever) to dry completely between uses.

"They can."

Not the frying pans and dutch ovens and etc. They are all cast iron, as gawd/ess intended.

Re: Steves Failure

At the end of a production line at a company where I once worked was a burn-in station where a QA tech would wire up the new equipment and run a comprehensive set of tests. One of our upper-middle managers was "touring the manufacturing facility" one afternoon and asked the tech "is this where the Quality is installed?". The tech, knowing the manager was pretty much clueless, answered with a simple "yes" to avoid an explanation.

For years afterward, we all cringed when this manager gave tours of our production floor to visiting big-wigs ... He always concluded his tour with a stop at the burn-in area, and with a big flourish would proclaim "this is where the Quality is installed!" ... You could hear the capital Q in the word. A senior IBM field service engineer/rep once took me aside and asked if the guy was for real.

"Dishwashers waste a lot of energy 'blow-drying' the dishes.'

Yours might.

"Much more efficient (not to mention better results) rinsing with cold water and letting drip / air-dry"

Mine does just that, if I tell it to. But I usually use the heat option so they are done before the next meal. The water is heated with a GSHP, the heater & fan are solar powered.

_{I'm not doing dishes for a dozen adults (plus or minus), three times per day, by hand!}

toxic for dogs

Include chives, shallots and leeks with your onions and garlic.

Also, grapes (and raisins) and chocolate. Anything containing xylitol (including some toothpastes and mouthwashes). Avocados, persimmons, and macadamia nuts. Anything with caffeine in it, and anything with marijuana in it. Tobacco of all kinds. Peach/plum pits. Apple seeds. Alcohol (duh!), and hops.

For a more extensive list, consult your local veterinarian.

Re: Rate your skill level

"so make sure you ask the right questions."

Learning to ask proper questions is an art in and of itself.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Easier method.

Neither the Wife nor I enjoy ironing. So neither of us owns anything that requires it.

Re: Micro-kernel

"Also, I predict the U.S. DoD and NASA will mandate the use of the Rust programming language for their systems and embedded software in a couple of years."

Yep. Just like they did with Ada. With similar results, no doubt.

Re: Chrome OS?

And don't forget

3) All the unremovable snooping baked into it.

Re: Unix was always diverse

"what really did it for the commercial Unices was the huge and extortionate licence and royalty fees that came with them."

Mark Williams Coherent was about a hundred bucks per seat. It worked nicely and was FAST (being written in assembler), had no AT&T code in it, and would have done better if they had added better networking earlier. Lost opportunity ... but most people didn't realize where networking was going in the early '80s.

Re: Unix was always diverse

"As soon as the free and open source upstart Linux cousin came along"

Well, to be fair NET/2 (based on 4.3BSD) was released in June of '91, a couple months before Linux.

Mark Williams Group's Coherent (1980 on PDP-11, '83 on PC clones) had already brought the cost down to where mere mortals could afford to run a good *nix OS.

Throw Minix into the mix (1987), and it becomes clear that a free UNIX was pretty much inevitable.

Interesting times, especially for those of us who were *nix agnostic and wanted to run it at home.

Re: Still Is

No. If Linus goes TITSUP[0] tomorrow, Linux will carry on.

Look up "What if Linus gets hit by a bus?".

_{[0] Torvalds Inconveniently Totally Stops User Processes}

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

Not really. Any sysadmin worth his salt knows that a completely custom, fully targeted installation is the only way to go for a server. It doesn't really matter which distro you start with, what matters is the distro that you actually wind up using. Only an idiot installs Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat or SUSE off a kitchensinkware DVD and calls it a server.

That said, some software distributions are easier to customize than others. I personally prefer BSD on the servers ... but Slackware works nicely, too.

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

At least nobody in their right mind would put esl-erlang on a production server, very awake or otherwise.

Forgot one.

4) When updates are available (cron is your friend), update the computer that runs the same software as [Wife, DearOldMum, GreatAunt, siblings, sprog, etc.]'s boxen. Check that the update(s) work as advertised on the one local box. Then reach across the network and tell their computer(s) to perform said upgrade. Script most of the operation.

Works for me and mine. The version of Slackware that I built specifically for this makes it almost laughably easy.

Re: @AC - Technology & Economics

Except "man" (from the Old English Mann) means all humans, men, women and children.

The word "wer" means the adult male human (as in "werewolf" ... sorry kids, no such thing as werewomen, not in that context anyway!) ... and as a side-note, werguild is not the same thing as a Eunich, the plural of which is not UNIX, just to bring us back on topic.

Re: Men

Have you been told that ELReg is a RedTop, and that the commentardariat is full of trolls of one persuasion or another?

Are you aware that some trolls exist to troll other trolls?

Re: The HURD is lost

There is nothing inherently wrong with HURD, in fact I quite like it and have contributed in the past.

But the BSDs got the jump on it. I like the BSDs, too, and also contribute there (and have been since before it was BSD).

And of course Linux got the jump on the BSDs. Fortunately for me, I also like Linux. And so I contribute.

The Windows part of the equation is more about marketing and sales than technology, alas. Fortunately, one doesn't have to contribute to every project.

Re: Rhythm is a Dancer

"I'd accept snap if it played a few bars"

So write a start-up script and make it so.

::shrugs::

Re: Do what we say, not as we do

One more reason to be thankful that I have never had an itunes account.

Re: From the horse's mouth

"from 20,000ft"

After you get past a certain distance from the ground, if dropped you reach terminal velocity and stop accelerating before reaching the ground. That distance varies with the object dropped, but it's well under the height of all of the objects.

"going to hit the ground hard."

Yeahbut ... That balloon was rather large ... I would imagine the drag caused by the bits still attached to the hardware would have kept the hardware well below its unadorned terminal velocity.

_{And no, the water, being uncompressible, wouldn't have cushioned the impact. Much.}

Re: Does it actually clean edges and corners ?

"I want something that can dust! Carefully! Very carefully!"

If you don't have central HVAC, a simple AC unit (either window mounted or portable) will happily pull dust out of the air for hours on end. Move the temperature control to a point where the AC compressor doesn't need to run, and the things sip power. You can also use a standard 19 inch box fan with a furnace filter duct-taped/bungeed to the intake side. The 20'x20" fit near perfectly. Either way, if the sound annoys you, turn it on whenever you leave. It's amazing how much crap these things will pull out of the air. You can get varying filter capability, depending on your personal needs (pollen is larger than smoke, for example).

Don't forget to clean or replace the dust filter periodically. Remember, when cleaning a dust filter, backflush it!

Note that the finer the filter, the less air it will allow to pass. The answer is to increase the number of square inches of filter. Simply get 5 filters, tape them together in a cube with the intake side of the fan as the 6th side. This worked for an asthmatic friend of mine when this part of California was under a constant cloud of heavy smoke due to wildfires.

Re: I have a perfectly serviceable...

"Girlfriend"

That's what they are trying to make you. A girl robot.

Poor bastard.