Posts by MichaelGordon 29 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2013
Given that "make" was created in 1976 and had to run on the machines of the day, I'll forgive it for not having a particularly flexible parser. There's an argument that modern versions shouldn't care what white space is used to indent recipes as long as something is, but that might break existing input; I haven't thought about this enough to be sure.
> Let's make the scroll bars disappear
This is one of the many things that ensure I'll never use GNOME as my desktop. A scrollbar is a visual cue that there's more to a window than is currently visible; removing it just makes the interface more confusing and difficult to use for no good reason.
There's a balance to be struck between restricting access and not delaying medically-necessary access to records. For example, if I'm in hospital and transferred from one ward to another I want the staff in the new ward to have access to my records immediately, not after some random delay while they wait for IT to set the permissions properly. I'd be happy with fairly open access and a periodic audit to check that everyone who's accessed the records is someone that I was in the care of. Obviously there are people and circumstances for which much tighter controls on access are needed.
Presumably there's going to be some sort of X compatibility layer so that all the commercial and other software that knows nothing about Wayland will be runnable? How will that layer work with this software's use of GLX for hardware acceleration? What about network transparency? We've got several pieces of software that are run remotely on CPU servers because they need more power than an average desktop machine can provide to do their thing but display their GUI on the user's local desktop.
A big reason why OSI never really got anywhere was that it was just far too big and complicated. Cut-down versions of some of its ideas, such as SNMP and LDAP, have seen widespread use, but the majority of the OSI stack died a well-deserved death, serving only as an example of what happens when you turn technical matters over to massive committees and their associated bureaucracy.
Exactly. Monitoring, for example, lines of code produced will just result in a lot of incredibly verbose code. Fixing code to run twice as fast or be half the size of existing code will show up as zero or negative productivity and therefore never happen.
The damages Christopher Jeffries got for this were nowhere near heavy enough to dissuade the newspapers from doing something like this again - only six figures in total apparently. The cost to the newspapers involved needed to be enough to hurt - 10% of annual turnover say.
I know someone who keeps documents in GMail drafts. Occasionally they send one of the documents to someone, then copy it from Sent back into Drafts. I sometimes provide some unofficial IT support for them, but after having tried to explain why this is such a dreadful idea and suggesting several more reasonable ways of doing things to no avail I've simply had to refuse to provide any support for such a fundamentally misguided setup.
Entirely possible that they'll miss something. 2023 NT1, for example, passed at 1/4 of the Moon's distance on July 13th, but wasn't spotted until July 15th. It wasn't that big - around 30 metres - but compared to, say, the Chelyabinsk meteor, which was around 18 metres, it was big enough to cause a very bad day locally if it had hit. Hopefully the new systems coming online soon will be better at spotting asteroids coming in from near the Sun's direction.
I like LILO as well - it's much simpler than GRUB and can load the kernel/initrd from any filesystem as it uses disk blocks to find them, compared to GRUB requirement for them to be on a filesystem type it understands.The only drawback of using disk blocks is that you have to remember to rerun it after a kernel update as the new kernel is almost certainly not going to be on the same blocks as the old one.
Exactly. I've tried many other Linux distributions through work and other sources, but all my personal machines are Slackware and have been since Slackware's early days. Slackware just gives me far, far fewer "What the hell were they thinking?" moments than any other distro I've used, and avoids the layer and layers of crap between me and what's actually going on that other distros seem so keen on. Take networking for example: on Slackware I edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and either fill in the IP addrfess, gateway, etc. or set USE_DHCP. That's it; no netplan configuration that gets handed to NetworkManager or systemd-networkd, no multiple layers of scripts, etc. The fact that Slackware hasn't been infected with systemd is a very nice feature as well.
Layout still needs some major work. For example, if I view the page with the web browser window at my preferred width I only get one story per line when more would clearly fit. This is demonstrated by the fact that if I make the browser window roughly 1/3 wider than my preferred size I get 4 stories per row. Other than that I don't think there's anything major that can't be fixed with a few CSS overrides to move/resize/hide a few things.
It's really odd, that kind of remark often comes up. Can one point me to some specific date for that mythical Golden Age when people did in fact respect journalists more than now?
True - the phrase "yellow journalism" was coined in the 1890s to describe the sensationalisation of news.
The killer problem for me, as was the case in the version I tried a while back, is that there's still no way to get the tabs to behave the way I want. When I close a tab it should select the tab to the right if there is one, or the tab to the left if there isn't one to the right. The reason for this is that my heaviest use of tabs is when reading The Register, BBC News etc. - control-click on everything on the home page that sounds interesting to open them in a new tab, then move to the first tab to start reading. Closing a tab/story should then take me to the next story, not back to the home page.
Other things such as the lack of a proper menu bar, putting basic items such as "New Tab" into a sub-menu rather than being at the top level, and overriding my preferred window manager with its own title bar that provides substantially less functionality, are annoying but can at least be switched off. Having said that, I've had Vivaldi pop itself to the front of the stacking order for no readily apparent reason a few times, so it looks like switching to a native window doesn't quite turn off all the stupid.
All in all, not even close to tempting me away from Palemoon.
For me, the Australis mess was the final straw that pushed me to use Palemoon exclusively. Fortunately the Palemoon developers haven't gone insane and have stated that they'll continue to support NPAPI no matter what Firefox does.
While it would be nice if everyone switched to HTML5 video, there are going to be sites with <embed src="foo.avi"> for many years to come. On Linux the MPlayer plugin (or VLC) is the only reasonable way of handling these pages, making a browser in which it doesn't work a complete non-starter.
I looked at this a couple of days ago at the request of one of our users and gave up in disgust. What claims to be "build from source" isn't - it downloads shared objects that seem to have been compiled on a reasonably recent Ubuntu and won't work on our SL6 boxes; the binary distributions have the same shared objects in and are therefore just as useless to us. It's also impossible to run the build as any user other than root; if you try it fails because it can't chown files it's created in a .atom directory in the home directory of the user that's running the build. No idea why it thinks it needs to chown files it's just created. The build process is some insanely complicate javascript nightmare that I wouldn't know where to start with fixing the problems.
Update: I've managed to build it on an SL7 test box. Maybe it's because I'm running it on a remote machine with the display on my local X server, but it's very slow. XEmacs does similar syntax highlighting/indentation/etc. and it isn't anywhere near as slow with a remote display though.
Is there any way to click on a link and have it open in the background? One of the main things I use tabs for is on sites like The Register, BBC News etc. where I Control-click on headlines I want to read, then look through the resulting tabs; being taken to the new tab immediately and having to go back to the main page to select another story is irritating enough to ensure I won't use their browser. Another feature that's important for the way I work is that the browser shows the tab next to the one I was reading if I close a tab, either to the right if there is one or to the left otherwise; going back to the first tab on tab-close is another annoyance big enough to drive me away.
Your "shoe" example is a hidden variable theory. Unfortunately it's been proven that no local hidden variable theory can reproduce all the observed features of quantum mechanics. To make hidden variable theories work you need to accept either FTL communication between the particles or communication which travels back in time along the past light cone of the particle.
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