Posts by jake

Re: (Slackware, just to date this scene)

Every day, for nearly 30 years.

Slackware is the oldest continuously developed distro, and for more than one reason.

If you haven't tried it recently, try it again. I'll bet you'll be surprised.

Window AC

"The half-in half-out, window mounted units are presumably better"

Modern ones actually work quite nicely (if properly sized!), and use less power than you might think.

"most houses have the wrong sort of windows for them."

As long as you can bolt a bracket or two to the outside wall to support them, they will work with any window that they physically fit into. True, you might need to install some sort of blocking material to fill open spaces within the frame, but not taken up by the AC unit, which can get ugly, but what price to pay for cheap comfort? Note that they are usually only good for cooling, they don't work both ways.

At the house in town, we use cheap metal shelf brackets as supports, and 1" closed cell foam insulation cut to size and painted to block the open space. Works nicely.

Re: Once upon a time, long ago..

"Windows 95 has IP stack in the system"

Not unless you sprung for the "Plus!" pack. Microsoft still didn't "get" the Internet at that point. Some can make a pretty good argument that they still don't.

"Windows NT always had IP stack since it first 3.1 version."

For extremely small values of IP stack. Quite frankly, it was the worst approximation of a TCP/IP stack that ever shipped commercially. A small portent of things to come.

Re: air CON

"If you've got snowflakes, your aircon is set too cold..."

It might be the right temperature, but the humidity needs adjusting.

Re: Cooling

That's why we don't allow untreated outside air and inside air to mix in situations like that.

Properly engineered modern air handler systems are truly marvelous to behold.

Re: air CON

Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there has been a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist ... One side always says it's too hot, the other side always says it's too cold. Facilities says "set it all to 72F, that's what the HVAC is optimized for" ... and so we listen to pretty much everyone bitch about the temperature.

Until one place I worked at upgraded the AC, and all the controls that go along with it (had to do with a couple of new clean rooms). Naturally, the folks installing all the new gear left all the old thermostats in place. They were no longer connected, so why worry about them. A friend of mine noticed one of the secretaries would inevitably turn one of these controls up, and then keep an eye on it from her desk. Within an hour, one of the engineers would stroll by & turn it down again. Then she'd turn it back up, and so on ... This dance went on all day.

So we hatched up a Plan ... with the Boss's permission, we installed unconnected thermostats quite near both the secretary and the engineer ... and removed the one they were "fighting" over. Now both could happily set "their" temperature to whatever they wanted. It worked. Both were happy, and both commented how comfy the office was with the "new, improved" controls. People in their circle of friends made similar comments. The complaining about the temperature stopped, virtually overnight.

That would have been the end of it, except ever since then I've installed faux thermostats for 'special" people. It has never failed to shut them up about the office temperature. However, be warned ... that type can always find something else to bitch about. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Re: Refrigerant or refrigerating fluid?

Could be a slow leak at a service valve. These Schrader valves are similar to the valves on your car or bike tires.

There are typically two valves ... one on the hot high pressure side, and one on the cold low pressure side. If the itty-bitty o-ring that seals one or the other somehow gets damaged during service, it can appear to the tech that all is operating just fine ... but after the system has been running for a while, cycling on and off and generally vibrating, a valve can fail. An old AC tech once told me to always have the Schrader valves replaced when the system is serviced. Cheap insurance.

Re: Easier method.

There's a reason that ties were fair game for anyone with a pair of scissors at most early Silly Con Valley companies ... hand-built one-off prototypes often had voracious cooling fans. The theory was that if we starved 'em of ties they'd be too weak to do much other damage. Not even IBM Field Circus folks were safe from the shears ... HP, somewhat wisely, decided ties were pretty useless fairly early on, as did DEC's Palo Alto contingent. Most of the other big names followed. Some of the Military Brass working out of Ford Aerospace, Varian & etc. had special dispensation to do without neck-ware "so they'd fit in with the locals" ... We had high hopes that it'd become a world-wide movement and we'd be done with the useless things for good.

_{The only real use for a tie is as a handle when trying to shake sense into the wearer.}

Re: This is perfect for a Friday story

Those of us old enough to know better aren't the frogs in the pot, young feller me lad.

Indeed.

Software that is not housebroken and leaves little bits of itself scattered all over the file system should be avoided at all costs. (Are you listening yet, GNOME, systemd and Wayland? No? I thought not ... )

Re: This is why we can’t have nice things

"It’s exactly this kind of thinking that makes multi gigahertz modern systems run like arthritic slugs and means they need gigabytes of memory just to wake up."

It's also the reason that after nearly 30 years of Linux, I still run Slackware.

Re: Snap is a single compressed file,

I've almost never run into a problem with Slackware packages.

The "almost" is because I screwed up when creating a couple of packages early on ... but a quick modification with vi sorted 'em.

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::

Re: Quality of life?

I intend to be fit and healthy and live forever, or die in the attempt.

Re: The flaw with crypto...

"in fact one of the items that's suggested for our earthquake kits** is cash in smaller bills."

I know of one Palo Alto neighborhood where a well-meaning housewife organized all the households into preparing earthquake kits one Saturday afternoon (they blocked off a couple streets and made a party out of it). Included in each was about five hundred bucks in smallish bills.

Local teenagers noted this with interest. To make a long story short, by the following weekend, all kits were relieved of their cash.

Moral: Stash your emergency cash somewhere other than in your emergency kit. An Altoids box (or similar small metal box) with the money in a ziplock makes for waterproof and rodent/insect proof.

Epilog: The kids were caught red-handed counting their loot. They did all the gardening in the neighborhood for the following year.

Re: Quality of life?

Jogging's bad for the joints, especially as you get older. Walking is just as effective, and easier on the system. Better, get into swimming.

I'm well past 50. I feel better than I did in my late 20s.

I rather suspect that salt will be the major commodity after societal collapse. It's the one necessity of life that I can't easily produce here post apocalypse, and I'm less than a day's walk from San Francisco Bay! Ever try to move enough ocean water to keep yourself in salt, with just horses for transportation? Try to remember that in this scenario, salt is a preservative for most foodstuffs ...

Various dilutions of Ethanol will also be somewhat valuable, but anybody can make that, pretty much anywhere.

"Fourteen years after the invention of the internet, we still didn't have TCP/IP"

Actually, it was almost exactly 14 years between the first ARPANET connections in 1969 and TCP/IP's "Flag Day" on January 1, 1983.

Note that we had been working on (and testing over the network) TCP/IP for some years prior to it going live.

Re: Not a very good exchange token

"Wembley Stadium apparently serves 40 pints per second at halftime."

They clearly need more taps!

Re: Gold vs electricity

"It's a mystery to me why gold has always been "valuable""

Get thee to a place where you can learn to pan. I recommend anywhere on the Fraser River in BC (you'll always find gold anywhere on the Fraser ... small bits, but gold nonetheless).

I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't panned a little gold for themselves that hasn't immediately understood. There is something about the look and feel of the stuff, especially right out of a cold river, that can not be matched by anything else.

Be careful. It's addictive ... but there are worse hobbies. At least this ones out in the fresh air.

Re: Pay REAL close attention, now...

And it has made money since 1839, which is a trifle longer than the modern high-tech world been around.

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: 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.