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ananonymoususer

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The WSJ editorial was in response to the flood of mainstream coverage about the administration's announcement yesterday. I knew it was an editorial when I linked it and it should be obvious to anyone who reads it. Is there any question about the facts of the administration's policy statement?

X was developed on VAX, 68k, and later SPARC and then x86. VAX and x86 are little-endian, while 68k and SPARC are big-endian. Portability across these platforms was important and this was the inspiration for the RPC (now gRPC) platform-independent external data representation (XDR) standards.

Things were still not perfect with portability even back then. I remember taking a class in OSF Motif where everybody in the class was using SPARC while I was using x86 Linux. The code was somewhat portable between platforms, but many of the arguments to the (Metroworks) Motif library functions needed their endianness swapped in order to work properly on Linux, so the code examples from the course would not run on Linux without modification.

I realize that there may be some performance improvements realized by removing cross-platform compatibility, but I do not believe that the performance gains are worth the loss in platform compatibility. If X.org does this, it will eliminate one of the core reasons for sticking with X vs. Wayland.

I had to click and read the article to see whether CGI in this context was "Computer Generated Imagery" or "Common Gateway Interface". I've always been a fan of simple CGI interfaces. More middle-ware always means more bugs.

In the Stacks 4 years ago

I agree it was a good story, but I became skeptical when I could not find the music (or any reference to it, or the composers) on-line.

It should have somehow been tagged as fiction.

Nothing is 100% secure, but I have opted for a high-quality gun/fire safe that's bolted to the foundation of my home (in a gated community), and protected by multiple monitored alarm systems and cameras. The safe has a lot more room than any bank's box would, it's cheaper in the long-run, and IMHO (especially after reading the fine article) more secure. Also, it's got a S&G spin-dial lock that I trust a lot more than any electronic garbage.

I use this all the time. It's a big time saver on multi-core machines (which is pretty much every desktop made in the past 20 years). It's available in all the repos, but not included by default (at least in Ubuntu/Mint). It is most useful for compressing disk images on-the-fly while backing them up to network storage. It's usually a good idea to zero unused space first:

(unprivileged commands follow)

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zeros bs=1M; sync; rm ~/zeros

Compressing on the fly can be slower than your network bandwidth depending on your network speed, your processor(s) speed, and the compression level, so you typically tune the compression level (because the other two variables are not so easy to change). Example backup:

(privileged commands follow)

pv < /dev/sda | pigz -9 | ssh user@remote.system dd of=compressed.sda.gz bs=1M

(Note that on slower systems the ssh encryption can also slow things down.)

Some sharp people may notice that it's not necessarily a good idea to back up a live system this way because the filesystem is changing while the system runs. It's usually just fine on an unloaded system that uses a journaling filesystem.

MicroVAX 78032 4 years ago

I did some development on uVAX in 1989. Wrote a DECWindows app that did monitor & control of a distributed realtime system. DECWindows was slow, so it would get updated every 250ms, while the realtime stuff communicated to a proxy (via 10Mbps DECNet with a custom driver) every 20ms. All of the code was in 'C', but everything aside from the DECWindows stuff was running from ROM on embedded VAXELN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXELN

Signal TLS Proxy 4 years ago

Governments can easily correlate GV numbers to mobile devices. I personally no longer trust Signal. Moxie's departure stinks like a canary.

Integers in C quiz 4 years ago

I have an issue with this one: Assume x has type int . Is the expression x<<32 ...

Defined for all values of x

Defines for some values of x

Defined for no values of x

(chose second answer) Wrong answer

Shifting (in either direction) by an amount equalling or exceeding the bitwidth of the promoted operand is an error in C99.

So according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

int signed signed int Basic signed integer type. Capable of containing at least the [−32,767, +32,767] range.[3][a]

So a minimum of 16 bits is used for int, but no maximum is specified. Thus, if my C compiler on my 64-bit architecture uses 64 bits for int, this is perfectly allowed by the specification and my answer is correct.

Another example of "we don't know that it's okay, so you can't have it." This flawed logic has been used in various forms to create twisted reasoning for plenty of stupid laws. E.g. We don't know that you're not going to use the cold medicine to make meth, so you can't have it." The presumption of innocence is dead.

Good suggestion. If the school is requiring your child to have the chromebook, then they should pay for the thing. They don't have the right to infect any device that your child happens to log in with. So factory reset, don't log in. Then when the school complains that the child is not completing the assignments, tell them that he/she cannot do them unless the school issues a school-owned device.

A better move would be to get your child out of Chicago public schools altogether.

Perhaps true, but this has already become the typical behavior of YouTube (and most other mainstream social media/media). My comment is focused on this now typical behavior and not the immediate situation. They are indistinguishable anyway.

I will cite a few examples:

Wuhan lab leak theory that was fake news until it wasn't.

Any content that questions the integrity of the 2020 election, but not content that questions the integrity of the 2016 election.

Any mention of possible alternatives to the mRNA vaccines for treating CoViD-19 -- including studies undertaken by reputable organizations.

E.g.: This now removed tweet regarding the now removed YouTube video: https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Im...

Please take note that my remark below has nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine. Do not assume that you know my position on the matter.

YouTube (and most of social media) has lost its way. As with any other business, straying into politics and making it a core part of their decision making process is a sure way to alienate some percentage of customers/users.

I miss the good old days when businesses were focused on their business.

I blew up a few selenium rectifiers when I was a kid, and I distinctly remember the (fart-like) odor. I also played with vaporized mercury, and indiscriminately inhaled lead fumes while soldering. Aside from the chemical contamination, I've also been severely shocked four times (once requiring hospitalization), and received RF burns a few times.

No idea what this did to my IQ/personality, but I somehow managed to survive (60 years so far).