Posts by MacroRodent 1979 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
The Helsinki Metro isn't that old. The eldest M100 model train is from 1977, the latest from 1984 (https://www.hel.fi/hkl/en/by-metro/fleet/m100/). It opened for passengers only in August 1982, with a rump of a line (did not even to to the center of the city yet). Test trains had been rolling for years before that.
Well, in my are (Helsinki) they tend to stay put for years. Not local landmarks, but not particularly ephemeral either.
Not that the disappearance of a shady mobile repair shop would matter much for law-enforcement point of view. They guy could still be tracked down.
I don't see why there would be any more fraud in this than in any other existing technical service businesses. Alo, unlike with online fraud, if caught, the shady mobile repair shop owner is easy to find, and bring to the table with no bread on it, as we say round here.
Your elderly relative would probably not repair his/her car engine either, but would let a professional do it.
Same thing with re-flashing the old phone. The existence of open-source updates would enable commercial maintenance business. This how opening the software could reduce e-waste.
I'm pretty sure the existing mobile phone repair shops that now do things like replacing broken displays could easily expand into installing aftermarket software updates.
> An abandoned OSS project isn't any more secure than an abandoned close source system.
True, but with open source there at least is a non-zero possibility that some people will keep the device useful, instead of being destined for the landfill. This is more likely to happen with devices that are popular. As others have noted, the information (keys and such) for uploading a new version to the device must also be made available, source alone is not enough.
... of running Windows just to launch Linux applications. The experience is far better if you use Linux to run Linux code, without Windows talking its share of the CPU and memory.
A couple of years ago I still used (at work) a Windows 7 laptop with Linux in a VM, and spent most time in the VM. Then I manned up and ditched the Windows side (it helped that the corporate IT said that 8 years old machine cannot be upgraded to Windows 10). After that, it felt like I had got a brand-new laptop. Unshackled from Windows, the hardware could concentrate on running Linux, making everything noticeably faster.
The Starfish Prime test generated temporary radiation belts, with charged particles racing along magnetic field lines. So all the energy is not radiated uniformly. I would speculate that with a suitable placed nuke, you could take out most satellites within a given "orange slice" of orbital space.
> Three-five nuclear explosions in space, and whole constellations of satellites are dead.
That would probably destroy half the satellites out there, including your own, and blow up electric and communications networks on the ground as well. Google the "Starfish Prime" nuclear test from 1962. At that time there were few satellites up, and people did not yet rely on them as much as now. Just imagine the mayhem it would cause today.
Western media says nothing about Zelensky's degree 117/2021 because it either does not exist, or is nothing like described by the rt.com quote above. All online search results of it appear on shady pseudo-news sites, often parroting precisely the same text. Looks like a propaganda operation.
> Finnish law is based on old Swedish law
The funny thing is, there used to be laws in Finland that came from old Swedish legislation that was no longer in force in Sweden.
(Should finally get around to planting hops in my garden, else I violate Rakennuskaari 5§1 and am liable for a fine of one taalari per year...)
> Finns aren't Scandinavian.
Ah, one of the classic issues debated online since forever. Depends on how you look at it. A good discussion can be found in Ye Olde soc.culture.nordic (a USENET newsgroup) FAQ. Relevant section here: http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/scn/faq21.html
A long quote:
2.1.3 What is "Scandinavia"?
The word "Scandinavia" presents a bit more difficulty. In Nordic languages, the meaning is quite clear:
Skandinavien:
Sweden, Denmark, Norway (and sometimes Iceland)
-- the ancient lands of the Norsemen.
The Scandinavian peninsula, on the other hand, is usually simply understood as comprising Norway and Sweden, despite the unclear border to the Kola peninsula. The northernmost part of Finland is of course also situated on the Scandinavian peninsula.
But in English, alas, there seems to be no standard usage. This is mainly due to the fact that English lacks a simple and clear term for the five countries, and the word "Scandinavia" tends to be used for that purpose instead. The term "Nordic countries", in its current definition, is a rather recent invention, its meaning is still a bit obscure especially to non-Europeans, it's awkward to use and to some people it carries unpleasant connotations of the Aryan "Nordic race". Therefore, you will find that it's quite common to define the word "Scandinavia" in English like this:
[Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English]
SCANDINAVIAN
1. of the countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland
in northern Europe, or their people or languages.
On the other hand, it is not uncommon to use the word "Scandinavia" in its more limited definition. An example:
[The Concise Oxford Dictionary]
SCANDINAVIAN
1. a native or inhabitant of Scandinavia
(Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland).
And some encyclopaedias put it like this:
[The Random House Encyclopaedia]
SCANDINAVIA
1. region of northern Europe consisting of
the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark;
culturally and historically Finland and Iceland
are often considered part of this area.
Despite the term being rather clear for the Scandinavians themselves, disputes remain about how the term would be understood and derived in English. If the word is understood as a geographic term, how can then Denmark be included - as most do. If instead it's deduced from the area where the languages are quite similar North-Germanians, should Iceland logically be excluded?
At the risk of disturbing some people's sleep, we will use "Nordic" and "Scandinavian" interchangeably throughout this FAQ, for practical reasons. You have been warned. :->
> told the local crew they could load the plane up with X pounds of ore samples
Doesn't Australia use the metric system these days? At least for measuring anything where accuracy matters. (Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia says metric became the only official system in 1988).
It is possible the local crew had balances only marked in Kg.
Back when Microsoft started, it wasn't even clear yet if software was covered by copyright, never mind APIs.
Gates famously published an open letter to computer enthusiasts, pleading them to not copy his BASIC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
According to the article, one major factor the Supreme Court judges considered was the size of the part borrowed under fair use, in relation to the whole. In this case, it was tiny.
Taking a whole program, making a few changes, and then declaring it proprietary would be a completely different case.
I think the challenge is not the distance, but the speed. A probe mush match the speed of the asteroid, which at that point may be travelling faster than our current rockets are able to accelerate the probe. The asteroid missions performed so far (like Dawn, Osiris-Rex and Hayabusa) have first travelled in space for years before the encounter, picking up speed with ion engines or by gravity assists.
It might be doable, but here we really need an answer from an actual rocket scientist.
Old folks who remember the wartime in Finland say they made ersatz coffee from dandelion roots. At least it is a readily available raw material: dandelion typically grows here wherever you really try to grow something else.
When the first ship from Brazil carrying real coffee arrived after the war, it was a cause for national celebration.
Been using the Edge development version on Fedora for a while, along with other browsers (depending on how I feel on a given day). Works well enough, no odd crashes so far. Pretty much the same experience as Chrome, except the default search engine is of course Bing.
Curiously, it actually feels faster than Chrome, even though it is in principle mostly the same code. Perhaps it still has less telemetry and spying than the older brother?
As I recall it, that is how Adobe foisted the PDF format on the world. Readers were free, but originally only for-pay Adobe software could produce PDF. Nowadays there are of course plenty of programs for writing and reading PDF, including open source ones.
So it is doubly absurd that Hyppönen gets a takedown notice about it.
> 1.2MB floppy disk (5 and a quarter inch variety).
1.2Mb? Luxury! My first PC that had any disks at all had two 360k disks (A: and B:, but no hard disk C:, and I did interesting stuff with that for some years...). Yes, I know many people would call _that_ a luxury. If memory serves, the original Osborne 1 portable that one of my friends owned had two only 90K diskette drives. But that ran CP/M, which is about as barebones an OS as you can get.
> UFS was dog slow the last time I tried it –
With or without "softdeps"? This is a mount option that makes disk updates more intelligent, but at least in old BSD systems it was not on by default, and the difference was very noticeable. UFS really was "dog slow" without softdeps. I don't know if it is enabled by default these days - should be.
I liked this look at the current state of FreeBSD.
At one time I used an earlier version (around 4.x in 2004) in a project at work. Was pleased by its sane resource use, and the way it booted up almost instantly. Occasionally looked at it since, but getting a usable desktop with it is still more work than with Linux distributions (especially if your keyboard and character set is not bare ASCII). The article says they still care about desktops, good, but it clearly is not the focus, and it shows.
Probably I will give v13 a try.
> only supports IEEE-754 32-bit floating point
Really?
$ node
Welcome to Node.js v14.15.4.
Type ".help" for more information.
> var a=1.23456789e300
undefined
> a
1.23456789e+300
>
Also the V8 engine is damn fast, it runs JS way faster than any dynamic language has any right to run...
> grab a brewski or two
Surely you meant a vodka or two. - Many, many years ago I was in a shop in a then-socialist Eastern European country, in front of the booze shelf, and noticed the cheaper Russian vodka bottles did not have screw caps, but caps of the old kind that you used to find in lemonade bottles, where you rip a tab to open it. You were clearly meant to consume the bottle in one sitting...
init option in sixth birthday release
> Pulse Audio still sucks. There I said it. Not sorry.
That's a "your mileage may vary" type statement. For my part, i think I last had trouble with PulseAudio maybe some 8 years ago, but in the Mint and Fedora installations I now mainly use, sound just works for what I need it for (video/audio files, streams and teleconferencing). Probably due to the distro makers doing a lot of grunt work to make it happen.
GraalVM is licensed under "version 2 of the GNU General Public License with the “Classpath” Exception, which are the same terms as for Java" (from the FAQ). Oracle could of course change the license starting from some newer version, but if GraalVM has enough interested users at that point, it will just trigger a fork of the last GPL-licensed version.
This gives it a kind of vaccination against unreasonable licensing.
Out of interest, I checked if NetBSD still supports Itanium, and surprisingly even it has dropped it, or never had (The II Tier table has "none" for the latest release of IA64). Curious, because NetBSD supports many platforms you can find only in a museum, or a fleamarket with a particularly slow turnover...
I stand corrected!
I wonder why Chrome has it? Firefox I can understand, it comes from the Mozilla organization, and is actually a descendant of a browser named Mozilla, obviously named after Godzilla.
A paranoid mind might suspect that by showing something similar to the Firefox mascot whenever Chrome misbehaves, they sublimely deflect blame from Chrome. But of course Google, as a company that is officially Not Evil, would do no such thing.
> This bug was generically fixed at least 25 years ago.
Try 50 years or even 60. Simula 67 (from 1967 as you can guess) included language-supported dynamic strings, classes and managed memory allocation. And certainly was not the first. The implementation had a reputation for slowness (actually one reason Stroustrup developed C++), but there is no reason a competent Simula 67 implementation, using techniques developed after the sixties and seventies would be any slower than C++.
Doesn't that heraldic language have formal rules, so so that it is essentially a declarative description of the graphic (PostScript for shields :-). The graphics themselves also consist of similar formal elements. I am sure that DALL-E or similar would work fine after being trained with hundreds of pairs of coats of arms, and the corresponding formal description.
PUIAS is unlikely to have been there first. I recall installing and using White Box Linux 3.x (compatible with RHEL 3.x) back in the noughties. But its author (I think it was a one-man band) could not keep up, folded his tent, and recommended his users move "sideways" to CentOS, which was easy.
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