natermer

If GNU decided tomorrow that all utilities need to have a --json output argument then that would make me a very happy person.

When perl came along it killed the 'Unix one tool philosophy' dead as a doornail. And since then and people have just kinda ignored the smell coming off the rotting corpse.

I don't write complex scripts in shell anymore because it's insanity. But ad-hoc loops and crap like that... hell yeah. At least a few a day. Sometimes dozens.

People need to be reminded, I think, that shell isn't a programming language first. It's a user interface. And when I look at Powershell scripts and other things of that nature and think about living in Powershell day in and day out I don't see the big pay-off over something like fish.

'Is this going to make it so I can get my work done faster?'

'Is this going to be more pleasant to use as a primary interface for a OS?'

When I go into fish or zsh and use curl to grab json and 'jq' to get a idea of how to use the API in python or node...

versus running 'curl' in powershell against some random API I have never used before..

I get the distinct impression that 'This is fucking garbage' in that It would take me a lot longer to figure out how to use powershell in a useful way then the time I would save by doing so in the long run.

There is no need for laws for this stupidity. Unless you want to consider the laws of economics.

Namely: Create a shitty business model that depends on treating your customers like shit and you can expect to out of business as soon as your venture funds dry up.

This is the sort of problem that solves itself.

Either that or people can keep giving these jokers money, wait for some lawsuit to happen and then in 7 or 8 years after the lawyers take their cut you can expect a check in the mail for 4 or 5 dollars.

Check out endless-sphere.com. There are people there doin home-built motors and designing controllers. 99% of the content is just people messing around with their bicycles or arguing over silly things, but there are a few very highly technical people.

Also there is a open source motor controller called VESC from Vedder Electronics.

http://vedder.se/2015/01/vesc-open-source-esc/

It's a modern controller with FOC modes and such things.

Originally designed for electric skateboards it has gone through many revisions and is a viable commercial product. The developer has a official vendor for buying the design, but there are many clones and variations of different prices and quality.

There are people on endless-sphere working on variations to scale it up for larger EVs.

I'm a lay person somewhat familiar with the terminology. I am going to be wrong on several details.

What they were talking about is phase weakening.

Think of voltage as 'electrical pressure'. Like PSI or Bar.

Think of amperage as 'volume per second' or 'amount of electrons (equivalent charge) per second'... like liters per minute.

Combine the volume per second by pressure and you get total energy per second; watts. Hence 'voltage * amps = watts'

Electric motors are also generators. When they spin they create their own 'reverse voltage', sometimes called 'Back EMF', that creates resistance in the windings of the motor.

The faster the motor spins the greater this 'back emf'. It'll increase until the 'back emf' creates enough resistance that it effectively negates the voltage coming from the power source. At that point the motor has reached it's top speed. This is why DC motors don't try to spin infinitely fast.

The strength of the motor, the torque, is directly related to the amount of amperage flowing. When the motor is at it's top speed it's generating only enough torque to overcome the resistance of the bearings and other parasitic drag. So very little actual current is flowing, especially in a very efficient motor.

Field weakening is a technique that you can use to overcome some of this limitation.

What it does is change the shape of the voltage wave. Most of the time on a oscilloscope it would show up as a sine wave or trapezoid... But if you can change the timing and peak of the wave then you can effectively weaken the magnetic field at the right time that the 'back emf' isn't as strong. Sort of flatten out the peak and make the pulse wider then it normally would be.

So you end up flowing less peak amperage, but overall more amperage. Depending on the type of motor and speed the amount of extra torque/amperage you can generate can be very significant. The trade off is reduced efficiency.

A simple motor surface mount magnet may only see a 20-30% increase in top speed and decrease in torque at the low end. A more modern interior mounted magnet (were magnets are embedded inside of steel laminates) that combines the strength of the rare earth magnets with reluctance of the magnetic field flowing through the steel.. (think of the magnets providing their own force at low end and then providing a guiding path for magnetic flux as the motor speeds up) Can see many multiples boost in top speed while still maintaining significant torque at low end. Field weakening on some motors can produce increased torque across the entire RPM range.

This is going to be very strongly taken advantage of in EVs like the Tesla Model 3.

Although in the case of most motors this field weakening is done electronically, by changing the shape of the waves sent to the motor.

This design does the same thing, but by moving the drum's magnets out of phase with the magnets on either side. So it's mechanical field weakening.

It's not a super-new concept or anything. I expect their patents have to do with the 'H' shape of the spindle and the math behind how it is supposed to work.

I don't know if mechanical field weakening really provides any real benefit over electronically controlled one.

The penicillin moment happened because penicillin actually came into existence and became widely available pretty rapidly.

Research and speculation is awesome stuff, but the hard part isn't discovering new concepts. It is actually making those concepts into a marketable and affordable good.

The evidence for this is that even though there is essentially a new 'breakthrough' discovery every other week for solar panels, or electric motors, or batteries.. We are still using what amounts to cutting-edge tech from the late 90's.

In the modern era this means we generally have to wait till the patents expire and market competition kicks in in order to get the price low enough and the product perfected enough to see widespread usage. If it goes anywhere at all.

It's also worth noting that Florey, the man who is largely responsible in making penicillin practical drug, refused to patent his early innovations to make it widespread as possible.

No. Not a F-22 or F-35 are unlikely to actually be invisible. A B-2 bomber has a better chance.

The talking heads from the military may talk about 'invisibility', but they are full of shit. Just propaganda for the tax payer.

The problem is the physical size of the jet. In order to absorb the radar the material needs to be the proper size in relation to the wavelength. A B-2 bomber is large enough to absorb useful radar frequencies, but F-35 or F-22 isn't.

What the F-35/F-22 stealth does get, however, is invisibility in the XHF and higher frequency ranges, which is what is used for radar guided missiles. So they will have a major advantage against ground and air launched long range missiles.

The F-22 also has good infrared suppression, which protects it against infrared guided missiles. F-35s have a large IR signature, so they are probably not much better then other US jets. Traditionally speaking it's IR weapons that have caused losses for USA airplanes in modern times.

At VHF and lower frequencies the F-22 and F-35 can be detected, but those radars don't offer enough resolution to make them particularly useful for missiles. People suspect that with multiple angles and computer algorithms it may be possible to target a jet that way, but who knows.

So if you were Russia and you detected something with VHF long range radar and then you pointed a shorter range XHF radard at it... and nothing shows up then you can be reasonably certain that it's a American stealth fighter jet. That doesn't mean they can do much about it, though.

To combat this it is suspected that Americans use a technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner traffic to mask the signatures of their jets against the lower frequency, longer range, radar.

I really don't think that this is a accurate statement at all.

There are a few dangers to vaping.

The biggest one is having a vaporizer that is malfunctioning and is burning things instead of heating them up. The complex chemical reactions are difficult to predict. But it has the side effect of tasting like shit.

The second biggest danger is the flavorings. However the community has been very good at self-policing and eliminating flavors that are found to pose a risk.

The last danger is a sort of being a idiot and using way too much nicotine.

On the flip side you can have zero nicotine. So peer pressure isn't really even a problem as you can get zero nicotine juices.

Sure. If you are willing to torpedo the economy you could accomplish a lot.

At least until people start showing up with pitchforks and torches.

And by 'torpedo the economy' I mean raise energy costs up to the point were all this energy pipe dreams becomes viable.

Of course if people were interested in actually solving the problem then we would be building nuclear power plants left and right and wouldn't have to worry about insanely long transmission lines.

Scale and time matters. How many of those cities have lost over 60% of their population since their peak?

The general decay in France is going to be at a much slower rate then some place like Detroit. This means that the increasing tax burden, crumbling infrastructure, and financial crisis not only are much less noticeable, but governments have more time to react and mitigate the issue.

The reason why places like Flint are impressive in their decay is because the rate of change in population is so extreme.

This is just a microcosm of problems governments are going to face with shrinking populations.

Another, related problem, is the issue of maintaining state pensions and other entitlement programs.

Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.

All these sorts of programs have the same problems. They were designed in a era were it was assumed that people died off as a higher rate and people were born at a faster rate. As those trends gradually reverse then all welfare/entitlement programs are becomingly increasingly insolvent.

....

This sort of stuff is why the Soviets had to institute travel restrictions and a sort of passport system in the USSR; you can't have effective long term government planing with a rapidly shifting population.

You would just shift the costs away from maintaining pipes to treating massive amounts of water that would never get used by anybody.

And you will still have to maintain the pipes. Your solution would reduce costs per mile, but you still have a lot of mileage to maintain with a shrinking population.

Most of the problem I have it is with the imperialistic culture that came with it and with the serious security bugs that they keep sweeping under the rug.

The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality.

They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits.

Again, another fairy tail.

They have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.

A) This is par for the course in Linux software. See also: Linux kernel. One side you have is a bunch of security bros running around trying to fluff up their resumes and trying to turn themselves into heros. And on the other side you have devs working hard on various features and bugs and being resentful that most of their work goes unnoticed while stuff they already fixed is thrown back in their face.

B) Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users.

C) This level of scrutiny never existed before for low-level Linux features. The multitude of redundent and terrible shell scripts that made up the majority of functionality that systemd project seeks to replace was always a swampy mess of broken functionality and bad code. Having each and every major linux distribution rewriting 90% of it from scratch in a completely un-portable and estoric way didn't help matters.

Linux advocates actually went so far as to praising the fact that even though half of the scripts in their OS were completely broken and the OS still worked fine was a testament to it's robustness.

The fact that now, finally, after decades of this crap people can now track bugs related to low-level Linux userland 'plumbing' is actually a good thing.

It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but...

On the sysvinit side you had thousands and thousands of lines bunch of procedural code of dubious quality that is endlessly rewritten by hundreds of different teams with vastly differing levels of competency and success using a general purpose language for configuration. It was so unportable that you couldn't even use anything but the most basic and trivial (also broken) init scripts from one distribution to another without herculean levels of effort.

On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine that allows people to describe the state they want the OS to be in via a domain specific configuration language. It has managed to standardize the low level plumbing for Linux operating systems and allows distributions to share improvements with one another in a way that was previously impossible.

If people want a alternative to gain in popularity they need learn what systemd does and understand why Linux distribution makers switched to it. Then produce something of their own that takes those positive features and improves on it further.

All the hand waiving about 'Imperialism via releasing open source software to the public' is infantile.

The upside of all of this is that it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to make systemd unit files portable then it is to make Linux init shell scripts. There isn't any reason why a more capable init system wouldn't be able to parse existing unit files and know then how to start and manage the services and applications that use them... So the effort to move away from systemd should be significantly less then the effort to move to systemd.

Propane makes a good substitute for R12 with very little modifications. I wouldn't use it inside a home or anything like that, but I have used it to make older vehicles blow cold.

It's extremely good refrigerant. The biggest problem people have is that it ends up too cold and icing up the system.

It sounds dangerous, but it's really not. Propane is only flammable with the correct mixture of air. Otherwise you couldn't light it with a blow torch. Even if you have a leaky system it isn't going to leak fast enough to cause a issue. Also propane is significantly heavier then air so anything that leaks out is going to go to ground. And the amount of propane you use is not very significant.

Cars that end up having issues with propane are typically home built propane fuel conversions with no ventilation under the tanks or connections. The propane can then pool in the low places and build up enough to cause a explosion.

You may be wrong or may be right, but all I can say that after looking at the demo the text became significantly more difficult to read after the CSS coloring was applied to it.

Unlike you I do have a lot of experience in graphical stuff, specifically finer art. And I do understand more then the average person on color theory.

The thing to keep in mind with all of this is that black isn't black. White isn't white. White and black have tints. You can have cool whites, and cool blacks. You can have warm whites and warm blacks. What you will never have is white whites and black blacks.

Lowering color contrast is a trick that is used in art to make things seem far away or behind the more colorful pieces of art. Part of that is because reduced contrast makes details harder to see, which corresponds in people's minds to distance because distance makes details harder to see. (other factors are going to be things like that atmosphere has it's own colors and these begin to compete and wash out colors at a distance).

High contrast makes it easier to read text. But it needs to be the right type of high contrast.

If you try to pick the blackest black you can and the brightest white then that means you are letting the viewer's monitor dictate what the tinting will be. And mixing colors incorrectly results in a shimmering or 'vibrating' effect in the eyes. So depending on the user's settings it may be easy to read or it could be irritating. Which as a designer isn't going to be something you want.

I have a idea that the author of the "Web Design in 4 Minutes" is extremely good at writing CSS and not so hot at web design. Which are two different things.

What everybody needs to learn is the concept of 'derivative works'.

When you combine MIT code with GPL code you are creating a derivative work of involving at least 3 sets of copyrights. Your copyright (since I am assuming you did more then just copy paste), the MIT licensed copyright, and the GPL copyright.

Anybody using that code is subject to those 3 sets of copyrights combined. It's a derivative work of all 3 code bases so it has all 3 copyrights and depend on the original licenses for anybody else to legally copy.

Since the GPL is the most restrictive and disallows any additional restriction then the code base is _effectively_ GPL licensed.

I doubt anybody really writes 'POSIX' anymore, if that helps.

What they do, more typically, is 'Write Linux software'. If they care about POSIX they will try to ignore features they don't think was mentioned in some POSIX manual from 20 years ago. It's all very hand-wavy.

This is why you see the major operating systems advertise Linux software compatibility rather then paying for POSIX certifications. AIX, Solaris, Windows, etc. Sure it's not a official standard, but it's going to be pretty well defined because you can just model your compatibility on WWLD.

If push comes to shove then Fuchsia could just add some variation of 'usermode linux' as one of those userspace kernel services.

Just remember this crap next time anybody spouts bullshit about democracy.

It's hard to convince people that the Federal government in the USA is not really democratic in nature because media companies make billions of dollars in revenue off of every election and it's in their interest to propagandize it as much as possible.

But in the EU it should be easy to convince people it's just smoke and mirrors and that the central government only represents moneyed interests due to just how far removed it is from any and all oversight by individuals living in the EU. It's a lot more obvious in Europe that even if you got 10 million people to agree with you and sign papers and send letters the central EU government is going to be unaffected and won't really care a whole lot.

The only way to cause any change in behavior in government bureaucrats is to impact them directly and individually financially.

But since it's illegal to not pay your taxes there isn't much you can do.

In terms of geologic history the CO2 levels now are lower then they have been. It's not surprising that plants respond very positively to higher rates of CO2.

And it's been proven to be true many times.

I guess what the study is trying to address is the positive aspect of CO2 rising enough to counter the negative aspect of CO2 rising to the plant biomass.

The question really isn't whether or not it's broken. It's more of a question of 'for whom it is broken'.

Or, more accurately; what is the true purpose to the state and how well does it fulfill that purpose?

If you assume that the purpose to the state is to carefully and thoughtfully use the resources and powers granted to it by the public to serve the public then, yes, the system is utterly broken. It's so completely and fundamentally broken that it is not salvageable.

However if the purpose of the state is use the political power granted to it to advance the interests of people who are politically connected to the state... then it works very very very well.

In fact what people call 'corruption' is fundamental to how politics is able to function in the first place!

Get rid of the 'corruption' and get 'money out of politics' then you eliminate the purpose, reason, and forces that caused the state to come into existence.

Any time you attempt to exercise political power to enact any sort of change to the country you must give the powerful people of your country a reason to go along with you. Whether your goal is to eliminate poverty, save the environment, or make your brother a billionaire... you must first convince the key individuals go along with your program.

And powerful and wealthy don't work for free.

And how this works in a country like the USA is by having the state gain significant control over markets so they can use regulation and policy to benefit people who play along and punish those companies that resist.

Money and power go hand in hand. You can't have big government without big corporations. You can't have big corporations without big governments.

These groups are not opposing forces, the state does not balance out the 'greed' or 'excesses' of market capitalism. Instead it is the nature of the state to feed into these negative effects and exploit them. Big business and Big government are complementary.

So, yes, if the purpose of the state is to exploit the wealth of the country for the purposes of the politically elite within and without the state... then it works extremely well.

Not broken one bit.

Contracts are power stuff that overrides most things. If you agree to something then people, and courts, will hold you to it.

I expect it is in the agreement they require you to use before you join Etsy.

Uhh...

The ENTIRE POINT of Title II is common carrier.

Common carrier means they get to regulate peering costs. They don't regulate the costs ISP charge you personally. They regulate how peering agreements between businesses work.

That's why they call it 'common carrier'. That's the whole point to establishing common carrier in the first place. It gives FCC rights to step into a dispute and regulate. What other disputes are going to happen other then ones over pricing?

Title II was going to solve all of the problems caused by the un-competitive ISP market.

It's not going to solve any of the problems and it never will.

Red herring.

Title II is how the FCC protected the AT&T monopoly.

Due to various regulatory goals (such as controlling telecommunications for cold war purposes) FCC found it much easier to deal with and regulate one corporate entity then a wide variety of different corporations.

Title II gives the FCC authority to regulate pricing in peering agreements and because of this they were able to essentially price AT&T's competitors out of the market and prevent new companies from being created.

There is no reason to believe that Title II common carrier rules would improve competition or prevent companies like Comcast from continuing to own huge government-protected regional monopolies.

More bad regulation is the wrong answer to the problem of bad regulation.

It's a lot easier when you are allowed to make your own money.

Only people that could have anything approaching a opinion about ipv6 worth listening to.

ok, 'search that does not suck' isn't a feature of IMAP.

Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer.

Right, so users are forced to set up this stuff for each and every device they have. This is a big reason why the exodus to webmail and the proprietary internal-only protocols they use.

Seive is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard and is something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients. Unless you are a big email nerd that runs your own servers it's pretty much worthless.

Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop.

The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail.

The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people.

Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones.

Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.

Large scale usability tests are pretty rare for open source software. Gnome is one of the few exceptions having some testing paid for by Sun Microsystems for Gnome 1 and then again by Novell for Gnome 2 around 2005.

From this they developed the Gnome HIG (human interface guidelines), which was used extensively in Gnome 2 and formed the basis for much of what they wanted to accomplish in Gnome 3.

Since the Novell test they had some ad-hoc usability testing, but nothing large or ran by professional usability testers.

Example:

https://renatagegaj.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/gnome-usability...

I think you missed the point of the article completely.

Which is:

Containers are not actually a _thing_. BSD Jail is a _thing_, Zones are a _thing_... Linux containers are just a particular configuration of _multiple things_.

PIDs in containers CAN be like PIDs in BSD Jails... if that is what you want. It's up to you to use what Linux primitives you want in your containers.

For example:

I can run a application in a 'linux container' that shares PID, user, and network namespace with the main OS.. and the only thing that is different is that the file system is namespaced. I can run cgroups without running namespaces. I can run namespaces without cgroups.

Now if you want to talk about _Docker containers_ then, yes, that is a _thing_, but it's just one of many different possible ways to have Linux containers.

RN on the other hand crushed their competitors by its huge popularity, number of articles, documentation and tutorials available.

That's means it's a better product. You can have the best code in the world, but nobody is going to give a damn if they don't know how to use it.