jtotheh

I got into Linux because it gave me things I couldn't get with Windows/Mac (in 1994). There are less things that is true for now, by far. I am drawn to the ideals of Free Software (maybe BSD style, maybe GNU style) like a moth to the flame. Nonetheless, I have a smartphone, which since 2016 has been an iPhone.

Now there are things I can't get with Linux that I value with macOS. The integration with the phone is just not possible if am running Linux. The power management and convenient things like Apple Music, too.

I was disgusted to see Tim Cook abase himself before Trump and spent a while researching alternative phones. I did not find anything that looked like a serious option. There are things I need that are only available for iPhone or Android, it's become table stakes for life nowadays. My E-car charger required an app to function, for instance.

I admire people who "vote with their wallet" and/or suffer inconvenience for their ideals. But I am not going to install Linux (or OpenBSD) on my M1 Macbook pro. It's too essential for me the way it is.

For the record, I pour a lot of time into my 2014 macbook running arch and a thinkpad running OpenBSD, and keep an arch server/desktop running pretty much 24/7. I spend tons of time trying to find/devise things on Linux to match things I use that are closed-source/apple only.

Hats off to people who can program at the level required to make this happen. It's beyond me. And also to those trying to make Pine Phone etc a realistic option. I think that's the most important free software battleground now.

One of many creative people whose work I love and who have some questionable aspects. I'm sorry he's suffering and dying young (IMO). The Dilbert strip was genius.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160503170006/http://www.paters... this may be a later-in-life snapshot of Tim Paterson's work as of 2016 which is very impressive. He has/had a blog you can see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180711012545/http://dosmandriv... (entry is from 2011). I would put a lot of credence into his account of the days of 86-DOS, the IBM PC and so on.

It's interesting...M$ is very sleazy in this, especially the way it turned out. Tim Paterson was clearly a great programmer. The really interesting person to me is Gary Kildall though, who I think invented a lot of the underpinnings of doing things with "microcomputers" and seems to have been a really great guy. Unfortunately, "business" is not about being nice (or having the best product). Gates has been a minor obsession of mine over the years.....I'd like to see him make good on all the promises he's made to give away his wealth. There's a book on him I think is interesting called "The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire". I mean he's smart, smarter than me, but I don't think he's as smart as he thinks he is, or necessarily even doing that much good in the world. Some good, but a lot of trying to micromanage things he doesn't know much about.

There is a clear view of the sky, no obstructions. The phone app showed that the satellite receiver had a good connection, ping percentages, etc. It was just "restricted" because the software had decided this was not a valid location for this account. Even though we changed the account to a "ROAM" account. A day later, they still haven't even responded on the chat, except an automatic "we're sorry we haven't called yet" text.

I do this (use a mini for hosting time machine backups). I have them on external drives, I have two and switch between them weekly, keeping the other one at a friend's house.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-bill-gates-problem-reckonin...

14 years of age seems like a pretty low cutoff, also......

IANAL. I am very concerned about this matter. from the document you so helpfully provided: "the President proclaimed that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

So I think on its face they are claiming they are apprehending NON-"lawful permanent residents" - i.e. NON green card holders. I think the reality, though, is that even if you ARE a green card holder, the way this is being carried out - based on the video of Mahmoud Khalil's "arrest" - you may find yourself having your head shaved in a prison in El Salvador, with no way to make your case.

Re Mahmoud Khalil- he IS a "lawful permanent resident" and I thought "habeas corpus" was thought to be an issue within 24 hours, much more time has now elapsed. ????

re uber and taxis: I don't use uber, but I just had occasion to price a ride to the airport (Dulles) from home (Bethesda MD) for Lyft and a taxi, and the taxi was a lot cheaper. We got there just fine.

use the reader mode of your browser.

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org https://www.unrwa.org https://wck.org https://www.wearebgc.org

I did, a little while ago. It's sort of an exercise in Luddism. Been posting things that are personal, political, etc. It's just very simple HMTL, not even any dynamic HTML, so no comments, etc. I just started doing it and have kept it up for a bit. It's at https://www.vin-dit.org/

remember, before there was recorded music all music that could be heard was performed live. The technology has evolved over time. Once people were buying and using recorded music, there was a tendency for less creative participation. Some things have emerged in the face of this. For instance, karaoke, where people can participate live with the music. Also, things that DJs did. Scratching literally turns a record, the embodiment of mass media music, into a musical instrument being wielded by someone, often in a small group setting. When the raw material is traditional instruments, people can express themselves in certain ways. DJs remix, add breaks to, scratch over, rap over, and otherwise express themselves with the records and turntables as the raw material.

This may be a really dumb question, but is that much of the behavior of an x86_64 CPU variable and undefined? Until recently I thought the chipmakers provided full information (recently I found an article about people investigating the undocumented innards of the 286, IIRC). This seems like a pretty shaky foundation for software.

I've used DB2, Sybase, Postgres, mysql, Oracle, and a little SQL Server. Long ago I worked in a Sybase shop and management said we must move to Oracle. Sybase had a nice programming language that made things easier and clearer than Oracle, all i remember is that it involved creating temp tables and then querying against them. I think Sybase is no longer very popular but SQL Server was based on it and may have similar stuff. Postgres is pretty ubiquitous and it is pretty good IMHO. The DBAs at a recent job all said SQL Server is better but there is the $/windows server stuff you have to do to use it.

I worked for a while as a contractor for the US Dept. of Education Student Loan system. It was z/OS with DB2 and most new business logic was done in this weird language "Gen" https://www.broadcom.com/products/mainframe/application-deve... . Gen can supposedly "generate" java and other stuff but they used it to generate COBOL for the mainframe. You could debug the Gen code on the 3270 emulator, rather than trying to deal with the generated COBOL. There were a small number of people (like 6) who were handling that code. The data and I guess some of the code went back to like 1980 at least. There was so much legacy code, I doubt they've changed platforms. I was supposed to be more a Java guy but I did a little Gen. Mainframe is very alien to me. The people that knew it well could really crank on it, though. I joined when they were converting an MS ASP front end to a Java one. So we wrote Java that users interacted with via the web and that made calls to Gen (really, to cobol). In retrospect there was a lot wrong with that operation... One interesting problem that came up once was that the mainframe didn't sort things the same as Java. It turned to be caused by EBCDIC vs UTF.

I think APL on System/360 was implemented in assembly. That's pretty wild.

Thanks for all the replies! I'm going to give Arq a try. EASEUS was unable to open a Bitlocker-encrypted external drive from its restore media(USB). I guess I shouldn't have expected it to be able to. I have not lost any data, I was just testing my restore capability. I will see if Arq works for me. (and I am reformatting the external drive, will hopefully have encryption of the backup on the unencrypted drive).

I've done it twice. I dreamed up the line, "I wanted to be able to concentrate on my job search rather than doing it on the down low while working". Maybe that'll be useful. I got jobs both times after quitting. But yes, you need finances to fall back on. It'd be best to keep your health insurance, if you're in the USA.

I have a 2014 MBP Retina running Arch and it's now pretty good. It took some tweaking. It does overheat when I try and run HDMI 4K full screen video though. It's not equal to that. It got so hot it turned off.

Am I a Luddite? I just feel like I don't trust AI because of the hallucinations. It also sort of offends my sensibilities to ask an AI to rewrite something I wrote, and more so the idea that I am receiving things that have gone through that process. I was amazed when I first started checking out AI last year, and it is a great technical achievement. But I don't like the idea that it gets things wrong and so I don't trust it. I've tried asking ChatGPT (admittedly I haven't paid for 4.0) things like summarize a book I know well and it is often wrong.

Copilot in VSCode is really something though. Even if it makes mistakes.

I've been thinking about this myself. It'd be great if some of the essential crates could be somehow sponsored or certified. Go does provide a lot more capability in the standard lib.

If you like Fela's music, you will like this Brazilian orchestra including jams with one of Fela's sons. https://www.funmilayoafrobeat.com/ I didn't realize until reading the above article they are named after his mother.

I have emails going back > 20 years in IMAP folders. They've survived numerous email server migrations and personal email address changes. For a while I was running my own email server. I find Apple's iCloud has hung on to things for me for quite a long time too.

I used to use Linux on the desktop and periodically lost things that were saved to it. A lot of early photos are lost due to that.

I had a web page about my daughter starting when she was born in January 1998 and my employer, who I left, promised it would "always" be preserved. They deleted it about a year or two later and I wish I could somehow get it back.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240810153028/https://www.theat... Algorithms may be allowed to facilitate price-fixing among landlords in ways that would not be allowed if done by humans.

The course is free BTW.

I went through this course, the Yale Course on Happiness, a couple years ago. I think it is really valuable for understanding what will bring us happiness and/or inner peace. I was told I was very smart when I was young and as it has turned out, at least at programming, I'm not that great. (I retired a year and a half ago). I think a lot of people are working as hard as they can, and trying to act like they're not. The people you're comparing yourself to may be working as hard as you are. I think the happiness course is really good though, here's the link: https://online.yale.edu/courses/science-well-being

I worked on an app that was using Java Web Start still, as of January 2023. It was a problem, because JWS was not included in the parts of Java that were open-sourced, and was not available as part of recent OpenJDK versions of Java. Some open source JWS implementations exist, when I left that job though, the situation had still not been resolved in terms of finding a JWS replacement. It was imperative that we get off Oracle Java because of their expensive upcoming licensing changes. I wonder what ever happened..........

Miles Davis "Jazz at the Plaza" is pretty much the band from Kind of Blue, live. It's a good record.

There's another Miles record that is very meditative, "In a Silent Way" but it's quite different. Electric pianos and organ and John McLaughlin on guitar.

Kind of Blue is sort of an its own level, though.