* Posts by MacroRodent

1975 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

MacroRodent

Re: Nope

> no-one has talked raw X protocol for years,

Probably almost never, because that is what XLib is for. Applications and toolkits run on top of it. I believe it by default tries to combine consecutive X11 protocol commands.

It is true newer X11 programs do the drawing and font rendering themselves and push pixels, and that really breaks the original idea. I first encountered it with some bloated Java program, that was totally impossible to remote the plain X11 way. The GUI library redrew the entire window for every change (not sure if Java still does this, it was 20 years ago). Using it with VNC server worked. It looks like a X11 server to the application, but sends only the changed pixels (or rather changed blocks) to the remote client.

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: Nope

Yes, X11 remoting does not really work smoothly unless you are on the same LAN. Which was its original use case anyway. On the other hand, an X11-based desktop over TigerVNC works just fine over a VPN tunneled through residential DSL (sans any sound, but for my uses I don't even need it).

I have so far steered clear of Wayland, but one of these days I will have to bite the bullet. Hope by that time it has some working remote feature.

EU's Cyber Resilience Act contains a poison pill for open source developers

MacroRodent
Mushroom

Re: A car analogy

> Would be interesting since tesla runs on Linux

What doesn't, these days? (except Windows and Apple laptops/PC:s, and iPhones). Practically every "smart" home appliance has a Linux kernel inside.

The Linux devs should add a clause to the license that forbids using it in any jurisdiction where individual contributors are liable. The end result would be interesting. No Android phones in EU...

(Icon, because this is the thermonuclear option).

Biden proposes 30% tax on cryptominers' power bills

MacroRodent

How?

Wonder how they plan to distinguish cryptominers from normal datacenters.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

MacroRodent

Re: Chrome

> And the money dries up. Money which drives development.

Money does not have to dry up before it stagnates. The problem with a product that has a monopoly or near-monopoly status is the vendor does not have to invest in development beyond the bare minimum. Customers use it anyway, for lack of choice. It is also likely MS will find ways to tie Edge to its other products in a way that makes switching to the competition harder, just like they did with IE.

MacroRodent

Re: Chrome

Edge actually isn't too bad as a browser - currently. Give it a monopoly position for a few years, and it will become as degraded as IE...

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

MacroRodent

Re: I thought I was safe

That was one of the reasons I started using Emacs back in 1980's. I encountered various keyboard layouts on smart and dumb terminals and PC:s, and Emacs does not depend on any arrow or function keys. So the same muscle memory works, no matter what the layout. Same is of course true of vi.

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

MacroRodent
Thumb Up

Re: A good start, but ...

I recall back in the times when PC/XT and PC/AT were currrent, you could buy a technical manual from IBM that contained the schematics and the full BIOS listing...

I used to have access to these books in one of my first jobs.

NASA wants a telescope on the far side of the Moon

MacroRodent
Boffin

Past 50 years

Re "There's a reason only one robotic rover has landed on the Moon in the last 50 years". Oh really?

- The Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover landed in January 15th, 1973. OK, that is just one month over "last 50 years", but the rover operated until May of the year.

- The Chinese Chang'e 3 landed on December 14th, 2013. It included a rover.

- Chang'e 4, also equipped with rover, landed in 3 January 3th 2019, becoming the first probe to land on the far side of the Moon.

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

MacroRodent

Re: Timey wimey

You are right, a crude error on my part.

MacroRodent

Timey wimey

The time dilatation effect is actually surprisingly large. If a clock on the Moon gains 5.6e-5 seconds per day, it takes only around 49 years to gain a whole day.

This will mess up birthday celebrations...

Sure looks like Beijing stole blueprints from chip fab world's ASML

MacroRodent

Re: Creative naming

I think the next step would be X-rays.

Google's Go may add telemetry that's on by default

MacroRodent

Re: Classic techbro

There is already a Go front-end for the GCC. I'm pretty sure Hell freezes over before the GCC adds telemetry...

https://github.com/golang/gofrontend

System76 teases features coming in homegrown Rust-based desktop COSMIC

MacroRodent

uwm

Also used to use uwm on my first X11 desktops on a VAXstation. At one time, it was the only bundled window manager in vanilla X11.

The lack of decorations in uwm was a feature. You just could not have decorations, the code was that simple.

Focus on mouse entering a window (with no click needed) is available in most other window managers as well, although usually not the default.

MacroRodent

One Window to rule them all

Re GNOME still strikes us as a desktop for people who don't want to do manual window management, and who live in one maximized window most of the time

I just don't get why some desktop developers think this kind of an UI is a good idea. Like going back to MS-DOS! There is a reason why GUI's with multiple possibly overlapping windows were invented.

Thankfully, there is still XFCE...

Space dust reveals Earth-killer asteroids tough to destroy

MacroRodent

Re: Ignoring the other issues with this plan

The ideal solution would be to nudge it so that it will slam into the Moon. Won't come back after that.

MacroRodent

Dig a hole

If it is a rubble pile, it should be easy to first bury the warhead a meter or so below the surface. Then the explosion will kick vaporized rock and dust as reaction mass.

Massive outage grounded US flights because someone accidentally deleted a file

MacroRodent

NOTAM

I recall learning that was short for Notice to AirMen. Stuck to my mind because of that quant "airmen", bringing up associations of gallant gentlemen wearing goggles flying in open cockpits.

Has it been retconned to be gender-neutral?

Fancy a quick tour of DragonFly BSD 6.4?

MacroRodent

csh/tcsh

I also used to use csh and tcsh a lot on proprietary unices and Linux, but eventually switched to Bash, because (A) almost all scripts one encounters use sh-style syntax, so better get familiar with it, and (C) Bash is the default what you get in Linux installations.

But in some ways the csh-style syntax is more user-friendly. Initially the rules where sh (or bash or ksh) expects a newline or semicolon in control structures were clear as mud to me. Csh is more like a normal programming language.

What's in Santa's sack? New Linux Mint, EndeavourOS and postmarketOS updates

MacroRodent

Re: Mint 21.1

Browsing the "New Features" page of the XFCE edition, there was talk of getting the old colours back with the "Mint-Y-Legacy" theme. (Not tried yet, downloaded it last night).

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

MacroRodent

Re: Had M2 become popular...

Pascal took off, went mainstream, didn't adopt any of the improvements of later descendants, and so became unable to compete and died off.

One big problem with Pascal was that it was not really portable. The "pure" language part mostly was, but every implementation had its own idea about how to interact with the OS, so a program that wanted to open a named file had to do it differently, not to mention reading any command-line parameters. Wirth's original design clearly assumed the program would be run from "cards" (or batch script), where a control card would define what input, output and any additional file parameters of "program" refer to. Also there was no standard way to split your program into separate modules.

Later many implementations added modules and OO features, but all in a different way. C by contrast always came with the file handling basics and crude modularity included, and any differences could be papered over with #if and macros (both also feature that Pascal did not have). So it is no wonder practical programmers quickly switched to C.

China reportedly bars export of homebrew Loongson chips to Russia – and everywhere else

MacroRodent
Pirate

Blockade runners...

Chips are easy to smuggle. A suitcase-worth of Western CPU:s will equip quite a number of cruise missiles. A middleman buys chips from California and then happens to go on a cruise of the Pacific in his yacht, which somehow loses its dinghy out at the sea ("I guess I did not tie it properly"), which happens to be picked up by a passing Russian ship a day later. The ship later arrives at Vladivostok, together with the suitcase full of CPU:s.

So I fear China's ban does not have any real effect on Russian arms manufacturing.

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

MacroRodent
Happy

Floppies against the passing of time

I last used 5 1/4" floppies in anger in 2017 to rescue the electronic forms of my grandmother's and some of her ancestors' memoirs. She had not entered the texts, one of my uncles had done them in the 90's when preparing a self-published book in WordPerfect. Despite the passing of the time, no problems in reading them, except I had to resuscitate an old PC to do it. LibreOffice then interpreted the WordPerfect files nicely. The 360k floppy appears to be fairly robust against aging, if stored decently. Of course it is not so durable mechanically. This floppy had probably been written and read only a few times, and then left alone for years.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

MacroRodent
Devil

Ob. NetBSD

There are also not one but two Falcon-compatible operating systems that are FOSS.

You forgot NetBSD. I have no idea of how well it runs, but it is supposedly supported as a Tier II architecture. http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/atari/

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

MacroRodent
Happy

Re: twitters dead

And for news try https://www.world-newspapers.com/,

That actually is an interesting suggestion. Wonder how well that site is curated, because there are these days English-language disinformation sites posing as legitimate newspapers. But at least the ones listed for my country (Finland) seemed to be a sane selection.

Twitter refugees seek asylum in an unusual place: The Matt Hancock app

MacroRodent
Windows

Features

Nice demo that Twitter technically is nothing very special, and does not do much more than some 1980's bulletin board that in many cases ran on an 8-bit computer with 64k memory. Except Twitter allows photos and HD videos, The latter taking more disk space than the 80's bulletin board maintainer could even dream of.

FreeBSD comes to Amazon's lightweight hypervisor

MacroRodent

Re: Xen?

Seems to me that an OS that does not have drivers (not even virtio -style) and no file system of its own is not even an OS, but a container. Which we have long had in the FOSS space.

MacroRodent

Xen?

Wasn't the original (and by now ancient) Xen a microVm by this definition? It has a kernel modified to use only the services of the hypervisor. And also did cool things with the 386 architecture protection rings to implement a VM on an architecture that was at the time hostile to virtualization.

Microsoft and Meta promise facehugger PCs piping cloud desktops into VR headsets

MacroRodent

Missed one option

- Discomfort of wearing such hardware. Personally I even hate wearing earphones at the computer, except when needed. When the Teams meeting is over I throw them away, with force.

(Guess I cannot ever switch jobs to become an air traffic controller).

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

MacroRodent
Mushroom

wasting scarce resources

"Windows 11 is the best growth prospect for the PC industry in the next year,"

Translation: Windows 11 is the best tool for the new round of planned obsolescence.

The IT industry is totally criminal from the point of view of environment.

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

MacroRodent
Headmaster

You win the Spelling Bee

Finally a comment that spells the name of the product correctly. "Trådfri" means "wireless".

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

MacroRodent

BTU

The heat out put of the plant is of course measured in British Thermal Units. (Wikipedia: "The British thermal unit (BTU or Btu) is a unit of heat; it is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.").

Astroboffins present fresh evidence of moving liquid water on Mars

MacroRodent

Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

Like on Earth, there most likely are radioactive elements in the crust of Mars that give off heat as they decay.

How CIA betrayed informants with shoddy front websites built for covert comms

MacroRodent

Re: "Investigative research group Bellingcat"

> if they were then they aren't now

Any grounds for that claim?

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

MacroRodent
Mushroom

THERE . IS . NO . SUCH . THING . AS . C/C++

C and C++ are very different things by now. C++ stopped being a C super-set a long time ago.

Stroustrup of course gets this right in his reply, he does not mix the languages.

(IMHO C still has its uses, but C++ should be drawn and quartered, then buried at a cross-roads at midnight)

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

MacroRodent

Nothing new

Charging for open-source programs in app stores is nothing new. It is Good that LibreOffice gets a share directly in this way. you can still get LibreOffice gratis for Windows, Linux and probably also for the Mac if "side-loaded" (? I have no idea if Macs still permit it, for me the Apple universe is alien).

I do occasionally send a donation to Document Foundation, as should anyone who wants to ensure there remains at least one full-featured office suite that works locally, and does not make your documents hostage to the whims of some Corporation.

The next deep magic Linux program to change the world? Io_uring

MacroRodent
Headmaster

Odd subject

io_uring is an API, not a Linux program.

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

MacroRodent

Ted Re: Linux: Abiword??

Have to issue a correction about Ted: It uses the more modern gtk2 GUI toolkit, not Motif. Just for fun tried to build it from source on a Fedora Linux system, and it went smoothly following the build instructions, and without having to modify anything, which is NOT typical of large Linux programs last updated in 2013. The build did print out lots of deprecation warnings about some gtk2 API features, but these did not prevent compilation.

Here at least is a word processor that starts instantly.

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: Linux: Abiword??

Sadly, Abiword seems to be be an almost abandoned project. The source is at https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/AbiWord but the last change was 9 months ago. I think LibreOffice ate its lunch. I used Abiword on Windows ar one time, but there were some deficiencies that caused me to drop it (mainly poor Finnish support and no document encryption option). But it is the only relatively modern FOSS word processor that is not too bloated and starts quickly.

Another, although not as featureful was Ted. There are many editing programs with that name, but this one was a word processor that used RTF as the native format and was based on the Motif toolkit. Think FOSS reimplementation of old-school Wordpad. Homepage https://nllgg.nl/Ted/ (but this is even more abandoned less than Abiword).

Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect on open source software

MacroRodent

Yes, they disclaim

Yes. For example, the old and widely used MIT License says in big friendly letters:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

That should do it.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

MacroRodent
Linux

Linux desktops

Sure, major desktop projects like Gnome like to change things, but you also have the choice of using stable alternatives. XFCE still has much the same UI it had originally, in fact it largely follows the original CDE. That is it's niche: a desktop for people who don't want to waste too many resources on frippery, and have better things to do than learn a new desktop every few years.

Deepin prepares to leave Debian base and move to fully independent distro

MacroRodent

Re: Welcome disruption

> For example, I use Ubuntu and that has moved some browsers (chromium? and firefox since 22.04?)

Have you checked if Linux Mint fills your needs? It does not use snap for browsers, even though it is based on Ubuntu.

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: Welcome disruption

No one is forcing you to use Flatpack, Snap or similar on Linux. I never use them myself, despite having had Linux as my only desktop OS at work since 2019. I too heavily dislike the concept of bundling all libraries in a package.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

MacroRodent

Still work in progress

Doesn't look like the Unicode support is yet merged in the master branch, but there is a working branch unicode-support with notes like "more to do".

Will be interesting to see how the old Master has managed to retrofit Unicode. I once looked at the problem in the context of another very old piece of code, and thought it too much work. If a program does anything except copy the strings, it has to parse the UFT-8 encoding, and on top of that many old programs assume characters have only 7 bit of data, and use the MSBs for something, or get negative array index errors if it is set (often crashing the program).

W3C's planned transition to HTTPS stymied by legacy laggards

MacroRodent

Whats's the point?

Wonder why would the force HTTPS? Just for foolish consistency? In the case of XML schemas etc. published by W3C, there are no secrets, they are maximally open data by definition.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

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!

MacroRodent

REstart?

Always wondered how you restart a molten salt reactor that has cooled down. The salt obviously has become a solid. Actually, how do you even start it in the first place? you need some way to pre-heat the whole thing to a high temperature (hundreds of degrees C).

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

MacroRodent

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.

MacroRodent
Devil

Reminds one

If you want to get a feel of what installing Linux was like with the very earliest Linux distros, such as SLS, installing NetBSD is a very similar experience. I have occasionally done it for nostalgic reasons, but never used it for long before leaving it to the shelf (many of my machines have some NetBSD VirtualBox VM sitting around for this reason).

One problem with NetBSD (and an itch I should scratch some time) is installing non-English keyboards and UTF-8. You can ask for a Finnish keyboard in the installer, but affects only the bare console and has no effect in the X11 session. This needs a separate setting (I think it involved XDM setup files).

(Icon? There wasn't the nice BSD daemon in sneakers available, so I had to use that)

Rocky Linux 9 and its new build service enter the ring

MacroRodent

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.