Posts by bombastic bob

both parties copied it from FreeBSD, which is legal

I wish this had gotten more attention.

Re: Errr but...

but if applications begin to *RELY* *TOO* *HEAVILY* on obscure and ridiculous "features" supplied by systemd, it will only encumber the BSDs and Devuan and other "non-systemd" Linux flavors with having to WORK AROUND IT.

I hope devs will not rely on such features, and will NOT assume systemd is "there". I fear they just might jump into the lemming herd and do exactly THAT...

(it's bad enough when they assume /proc or /sys exist as they do in Linux, or WORSE, Pulse Audio - even as a PORT on FreeBSD, Pulse Audio tends to interfere with OSS whenever the server is running)

Re: Cloud Costs

I've been looking at another ISP for my company domain again. The accounts are being migrated and I would lose a couple of features I want to keep. Fortunately, a comparable service [to the existing capabilities] exists.

In the mean time I've had to look at a lot of hosting options and pricing.

In short, AWS, Azure, and Google are *NOT* the only game in town. Many lesser expensive alternatives exist. And it may benefit them to combine their cloudy services with a hybrid shared/dedicated hosting platform for admin things. Based on what I saw in the article it may be the "adinistrative" crunching that's doing them in.

(you know how managers are, "what's the average man hour for XXX type of YYY and can I get that in my e-mail every monday morning, summarized and totaled?" - multiply that by a dozen or so, and CLOUD SERVICE STICKER SHOCK ensues)

Not quite sure what the point of an inflatable habitat is.

I would guess it's all about cost. Structural supports are heavy and cost money to launch into orbit.

Rocket fuel tanks are pressurized to make them nice and stiff, and probably to improve fuel pump performance at the same time. As an example, take a couple of empty paper towel rolls and try this experiment:

* Stack weights on a paper towel tube that's pure vertical. Most likely you'll squish it after a small amount of weight.

* Now, inflate a balloon inside the tube [make sure it fills the tube] and observe what the balloon air pressure does to the paper towel tube.

(this is why rocket fuel tanks are pressurized)

So: the air pressure in this case is providing the structural strength. you need air pressure anyway inside the people tank, so you might as well work WITH it. Win-Win

I would assume that, like a car tire, there are re-enforcement bands that keep the pressure from over-inflating the container. With a pre-stress OUTwards, you can actually withstand even MORE stress INWARDS, and depending, it might withstand a collision with a space rock (or space junk) better than a solid structure.

"Steel Belted Radial" space enclosures. Works for me.

it's the same arguments regarding street lights. San Diego metro area is near Mt. Palomar Observatory. Over the years the observatory's night sky requirements have influenced the color and placement of street lights in the metro area. It's a compromise between dark and dangerous night time streets vs an unusable observatory.

Orange and yellow lights that direct their light downwards seem to work pretty well. But comments earlier about LED lights, and considering the high level of blue [which is VERY bad for your eyes, I might add] and their effect on light pollution relates to this.

OK we paint the satellites orange. Helps to find them if they "splash down" too I bet... [ok they'd burn up but still, the color of an orange life vest might be filterable by telescopes]

Re: Not racists but futurists!

I was thinking "gangs" and "bullying" and "chaos" but your description is adequate for arguing against it.

"Get Woke" - "Go Broke". It'll happen, as people 'wake up' and see "the woke" for who they REALLY are... and even more than RH abandoning FSF, it'll be 'the rest of us' abandoning "the woke".

As for Stallman [back on topic] I would normally consider him to become 'one of the woke' but I assume it's too late for that.

Re: Laptop fires

there's a chance of it powering up for updates

You would ACTUALLY ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN???

From the article:

C2D2, or Continuous Capability Development and Delivery. This has been less than stellar

I guess this is 'similar in principle to Agile'. And apparently, JUST as *FRAGILE*. Yeah it was supposed to rhyme...

I'll just say it: Developing software to a moving target is NEVER going to get things done. Neither is meeting mania nor analysis paralysis nor changing directions so fast you could generate electricity with the circular motion.

Re: "founded in 2013"

remember the "dot bomb" companies?

They're probably a straw and/or a single card away from collapse...

Sell to the investors! Sell the INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY! Make THAT our Business, and use famous people as employees to help promote it!!!

Without doing any research on this company I'll say that, pretty confidently, believing that I'm right.

(Those VCs should invest in MY company instead. i'll hire people and make stuff. Hopefully, would make a profit, too. I'm envious...)

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

I think your description is the more accurate one, in my bombastic opinion at least. I won't say why exactly, other than "it sounds typical" of the kind of person that i believe Stallman to be, especially politically.

His original vision, I think, was to increase freedom with software, and NOBODY can really argue with that. Where it's gone from there, is ALSO typical, and a LOT less "free" In My Bombastic Opinion. It reminds me a bit of George Orwell's "Animal Farm". Implications obvious.

Re: Why is Wireguard in the kernel?

It's probably contributed code

You _could_ write a kernel module as a port. I've done it (more than once). Then someone who wants the kernel module can install it from FreeBSD ports, or maybe just copy the port files onto the target machine and build it. All you need is kernel headers and the ports collection to do that.

But inclusion as part of the base system requires that it meet some specific standards, from coding style and naming of variables to reliability and security.

Usually it gets a lot of peer review. At least, that's been my experience in the small number of contributions I've made.

(if you have something good to contribute, it's worth going through the process, spend some IRC time with the core devs, submit it to Phabricator for review, have specific people review it, and so on)

Re: I'm Back...

Actually, that particular statement I agree with. Not so sure about having Stallman back...

(not looking forward to the possibility of something like, let's say, a GPL 4 ...)

Re: Sounds like ...

after listening to portions of both the raw and filtered, it seems to me that the 'scratches' were, in fact, the sounds of the powdered regolith-like material being pressed into the cracks of the wheels. Some kinds of powdery stuff will 'squeek' when you compress it. That's what it sounds like to me. And filtering it out loses that aspect of it, so the raw version is the better one.

If you listen to it carefully with this in mind, it makes sense. The rover is going over rocks and powdery regolith-like material [as apparent from the photo anyway] and leaving some nice patterns in the dirt, showing how it's being pressed between the cracks of the wheels.

I suppose without that sound-sync video it's only possible to guess. But it also helps to be a musician who does amateur recording and equalization and noise removal and things like that.

Re: Paperless

I mentioned this to a similar response for a related article...

RIght now it's "tax season" in the USA. To electronically file them, you usually have to print something, then sign it, then scan it, then attached the scanned document to your electronically filed tax stuff.

Can't do that if the printer is broken. And it's due on or before April 15.

The only OTHER alternative seems to be PRINTING EVERYTHING and mailing it. Printer required, yeah.

Re: "users should not expect much whizzbangery"

not to be bothered by an OS that wants the spotlight

_SO_ many thumbs up you deserve for this

(it's like a program that significantly altered your autoexec.bat and config.sys files without your permission, back in the DOS days - the 'arrogance of the developer', as if HIS software is THE most important thing YOU have on YOUR computer...)

Re: not excited about the 'wayland' thing

not downvoting you. You have expressed a discussion-worthy common misconception about Xorg and whether or not it is being maintained or has a future. If necessary, it would be forked like Mate.

My actual *FEAR* here is that (for some reason) Fedora is now RH-beta, and RH seems to carry actual WEIGHT whenever their engineers foist something upon the POSIX OS GUI desktop world.

For normal workstation I use FreeBSD. For Linux I use Devuan, and Raspbian/RaspberryOS when I have to. I reject as much of Poettering's contributions as possible.

Also, keep in mind, that change is NOT always a GOOD thing. Sometimes it's called "going bad" or "rotting". When your primary focus is GETTING WORK DONE, you do NOT need your tools to change shape and/or appearance and/or functionality, requiring you to RE-LEARN for an extended period of time INSTEAD OF DOING PRODUCTIVE THINGS. And the use of DISPLAY is one of those productivity things that means _I_ will _NEVER_ use Wayland until they implement it!!!

For size you need to consider that the modules included with Xorg support many obsolete displays, and drawing code that supports them [example, VGA 4-bit planes] whereas a "modern" display is probably 24-bit or 32-bi RGB or RGBA and the code to manipulate individual color pixels is MUCH simpler than it was for 16-color VGA. That doesn't even mention the myriad of display drivers...

In any case, this Fedora release is probably an indicator of where RH wants to take us. I may not want to go along for the ride... at ALL.

Re: Now that's more like it...

every currency unit spent on space exploration indirectly benefits EVERYONE, and you're getting something for that money, as opposed to tossing it into a black hole of gummint waste, fraud, and abuse.

History has shown that the invention of the integrated circuit, microprocessors, and even [to some extent] cell phone technology has been driven by the need to miniaturize and run on limited power.

Large scale integration was VERY expensive at first. ONLY NASA had a budget and a need for it.

I recommend a study on the Apollo nav computer, how it worked, why it was built entirely with 'nor' gates, what kind of read-only and read-write memory tech they used, how THAT stuff was actually made [that's right - hire women who are good at sewing to string the beads, so to say] and so on. I read about it on wikipedia and other places, found it to be pretty interesting, even intriguing, just what it was they did to make those things work "back then" and how far weve come in our technology since then, MUCH OF WHICH was driven first by space exploration...

also http://www.righto.com/2019/09/a-computer-built-from-nor-gates-inside.html for a fun read about early computers used by NASA.

(they would have not built it "that way" were it not for the limited capability of ICs at the time they designed it, but once working, did the job for which it was tasked, and did it well enough.

"Mad Science" (to the tune of 'Weird Science')

Re: pwned by default

I've never tried torch.save or torch.load and so I didn't even know about this...

I can understand how a binary data format would be better. But NOT one with executable CODE in it, which is where LOTS of back doors have creeped in... Word doc... Excel spreadsheet... enhanced metafiles... flash... the list goes on.

*IF* the parser is re-written to convert old style files into harmless data [without executing functions] then it could continue, but I expect it will convert slower in the process.

Better still, bite the performance bullet and use XML or tab-delimited columnar text or some OTHER standard data-only interchange format (though I'm not a fan of JSON) to store and load this kind of data. NOT that hard, and if the interpreter is [intelligently] written in C, it might be just as fast on large data sets [ones limited by disk access speed], though I expect data compression might be needed to keep the file sizes small. gzip works pretty well for that on text data.

/me points out that CPU-piggy C++ code that relies on exception handling and uses 'new' a lot would NOT qualify as "intelligently written".

Re: "It is almost as if the company does not test things properly... "

If they took the time to test things then they

would have to PAY PEOPLE to QA updates before they get shipped to end-users.

Re: "the next evolution in the Windows app development platform."

from the article:

WinUI 3.0 is intended to be the primary official framework for Windows desktop applications.

and

Microsoft's problem is that it has changed strategic direction so many times that developers outside a niche of Windows enthusiasts will have little confidence in the future of the current flavour.

If I'm going to switch frameworks, it'll be with something that is

* written in C or C++ _FOR_ C or C++

* easily converted from existing MFC applications

* runs on windows versions as early as XP

* does not require a boatload of monolithic libraries and "indexing" for an hour or so after "yet another upate"

* will NOT break my application in the future when some 3rd party garbage "app" installs its own crap on a computer [and then _I_ get THE MIDNIGHT PHONE CALL from DESPERATE CUSTOMER needing HELP to GET MY APPLICATION WORKING]

* Compiles on Linux or FreeBSD or OS/X as well as Windows.

RIght now I can think of 3 frameworks that work for this:

* QT

* GTK

* wxWidgets [which uses GTK]

wxWidgets is actually POSSIBLE to port from MFC and create Linux (etc.) versions of EXISTING WINDOWS APPLICATIONS. It's not pretty, but MUCH faster than a complete re-write.

OK - Micros~1, _*WHY*_ do we need "yet another toolkit" again??

Re: Prior Art.

YES. This is EXACTLY what I was thinking!

Re: Test before deployment ?

yeah what I was thinking - they need to have a 'cloned' Hubble (simulator at least) upon which they stage EVERY update. And if it did not catch THIS problem, it needs to be fixed...

Re: Error by MS?

there are more than enough people in this country that speak Vietnamese. it would be no trouble at all to get a translation from a native speaker that is also fluent in English. A lot of these native-Vietnamese-speaking people are software gurus and many probably work for Micros~1. One guy I worked with, a PFY at the time, went on to work for Sony, on Playstation development last I heard. i think it was on his Linked-in page. A 'dream job' for a gamer.

more than likely, as stated in the article: they have elected themselves the arbiters of what is 'responsible.'

References to "Cancel Culture" need not be explicitly stated.

Re: It just goes to show ...

I was thinking "it sounds kinda similar to a Ponzi scheme" but who knows... or the Tulip Madness in Amsterdam a few centuries ago.

This kind of thing ALSO sounds like a way to LAUNDER MONEY...

* criminal "sells" something under the table to a buyer

* Buyer THEN purchases NFT at agreed-upon price from "seller"

* Transaction appears legit on the surface, and there's now a precedent for paying huge prices for something that has no actual worth.

Expect more of same. This is kinda obvious, not like they did not already think of this...

generally, within the USA, illegal drug USE is treated much differently than trafficking them.

A typical example, someone addicted to opioids who obtains them illegally is caught, but then is ordered to a rehab rather than a prison. Still convicted of a crime [illegal drug posession], but the end result is a hell of a lot different. Now, breaking the deal can get you that jail time you avoid by going to rehab, but at least the judge is focusing on TREATMENT instead of PUNISHMENT.

Re: Printers are the bain of MS's world

Perhaps MS should just adopt CUPS.

I can't give you ENOUGH THUMBS UP for THAT one!!!

Re: XX is faster than Yy ?

Yes, _I_ would choose a browser that:

* Does not look like Chrome's 2D FLATTY McFLATSO FLATASS interface

* Has colorful 3D looking buttons and icons in the toolbar, NOT flatty-flatty-2D-by-four ones

* Has non-hamburger-menu TRADITIONAL interface BY DEFAULT

* Does not choke on excessive Javascript NOR fail to re-load included (script, css) files when you hit 'refresh' (the last bit being for authoring purposes)

* Includes a built-in "NoScript" like feature, and isolated tabs in different processes if you want

* Has a simple built-in 'regular expression' (or similar) way of filtering DNS requests and returning blank content for a user-config ad-block and DNS-block system, such as a list including ".*ads.*" to block

and so on. that's kinda what my wish list looks like for a browser.

Hey - if FIREFOX ABANDONED AUSTRALIS, and made the interface LOOK LIKE IT WAS BEFORE, I think people would WANT IT!!! Plugins could handle the rest.