Posts by Orv 1955 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
FOSS also suffers from the problem of it being more fun to write your own code than to improve someone else's, so Linux has three or four sound systems, none of which work very well. Try changing the output from your headphone jack to an HDMI device and you'll be in for a long journey. (This is a couple clicks in most other OS's.)
When I would take them (around rush hour) the X buses got stuck in traffic like everyone else. It could take an hour to get from the U District to downtown, although half an hour was more typical. And they were standing room only all the time. It was pretty miserable.
I don't really buy the idea that the US is so unique that things that work in other places can't work here. If it's true, it's only because we're uniquely incompetent (American exceptionalism FTW!)
Gotta disagree with you on the Seattle light rail. I used to live there. It halved travel times between downtown and the University District compared to buses, and the trains were packed almost every day when I was there.
It got a reputation for low ridership mostly because the initial segments they completed were not the most popular routes. For political reasons it had to go to the airport first even though not many out-of-towners ride the thing. Once it actually started going places people needed to commute, though, it got more popular in a big hurry.
The Auto Train is mostly there for snowbirds who go to Florida for the winter, want a car to get around when they get there, but are too old and infirm to drive for 12 hours.
Otherwise it shares the same problem as all Amtrak services -- an unappealing combination of being more expensive than flying, slower than driving, and always late.
As late as 2005 I was working on new systems that were programmed via floppy. They were surveillance camera controllers. You used a program to write a config file to the floppy, then used the floppy to upload it to the controller. This kind of stuff used to be common for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" reasons. The config files were only a few KB so there was no reason to use anything more complicated to transfer them.
Nothing really helps in a wildfire -- even a masonry house will usually have a flammable roof structure, and barring that, heat radiation through the windows will set the interior on fire if the fire gets close enough. Wildfire safety focuses on creating safe zones free of flammable materials around houses, and preventing flying embers from lodging against the structure.
As for mudslides, there is no construction that can save you from that.
You can get fire-rated shingles. They're thicker and cost more, but they're designed to survive embers landing on them.
Terra-cotta tile roofs are popular in California and pretty fire-proof, but you have to be careful about maintaining the flashing that fills the hollow ends of the tiles. Otherwise embers can blow inside and set the attic on fire.
Cedar shake roofs were once popular for their look (and even required by HOAs in some places) but are now uninsurable because they're so flammable.
Money is a big issue. A lot of open source is run as hobby projects. Burnout is common. It relies really heavily on people who either feel a sense of obligation to keep going, or who believe they need stuff to point to on their resume. It represents a huge amount of unpaid labor on the part of programmers.
I'm not a huge systemd fan but I actually doubt that's true. We've had other attacks in the past that relied on poisoning shared libraries. (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, in particular, has been the source of a number of problems.) You don't need systemd to do this.
It...doesn't? At least, no macOS machine I've used ever has, and I've used some pretty unconventional desktop setups.
Mind you, if it's a managed machine then your institution's MDM server may be pushing a profile that locks that stuff down.
In Netflix's case, that was absolutely the plan from the start and they weren't quiet about it. Right from the beginning, when they were still a DVD rental service, they said they were planning to have a) online streaming, and b) their own studio.
I also think they'd have been happy to keep streaming other people's stuff as well, if they could, but studios decided they'd rather try launching their own streaming service so they could control the whole stack.
I say this not to defend Netflix -- I wouldn't still be a subscriber if I didn't get it for free with my cell phone service -- but because I think it's interesting that they outlined their plans right from the start.
As far as I know, no, it's just a continual 2 hour loop. This used to be done with an endless loop of magnetic tape.
Keep in mind the main purpose of these things originally is to have some information in the event of an "everyone's dead" kind of accident, where there are no witnesses to interview.
Flight crews would prefer that only conversations related to an incident be available; they don't want every single thing they say in the cockpit to be available to review and dissect later. The 2 hours is a compromise. There's an FAA proposal to extend to 25 hours, but there's some resistance from the pilots' unions.
These days a lot of cars use electric steering assist, so they're already dealing with both hardware and software.
I look a little askance at steer-by-wire too, but there are some real advantages. For example, crash safety is easier if you don't have a metal rod poking up into the cabin. Also, one of the bigger challenges in packaging a car is having to place the steering rack where there's a good angle for a shaft to the steering wheel; even things like engine accessories have to be planned around it.
I sourced the last one from Office Depot, not some random site, so I assumed it'd be legit. It started streaking almost immediately. The problem is they don't replace the imaging drum portion of the cartridge, they just refill it with toner powder, so you're always getting someone else's worn-out drum.
On the one hand, HP should let me use whatever I want in their printers. On the other hand, every refilled toner cartridge I've ever bought turned out to be complete junk -- I was usually lucky to get 1/4 the service life for 2/3 the price of a "genuine" cartridge. So I just can't get too worked up about this, given that refilled cartridges seem to be complete scams.
Technically there's no crime called "insurrection." That's one of the issues that has to be sorted out. It seems likely the ultimate finding will be that the 14th Amendment is not self-executing and Congress dropped the ball by not passing a law spelling out what counts as an insurrection and who decides.
I had to write some Delphi code to print some documents from disk files -- literally dump the files straight to the print queue, since they were pre-rendered HPGL plots. Pressed for time and in too much of a hurry to figure out the complexities of the Windows printing system, I threw in a system call to the DOS PRINT command with a comment along the lines of:
{ This is a hack and will need to be replaced by correct code later. }
I left that job a few years later with the program still working. About a decade after that, the company contracted me to make some changes to my code to fix a couple of issues they'd run into...one of which ended up being due to that line.
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