racingmars

But MEPs can't even introduce legislation, they have to get all of Parliament to ask the European Commission to initiate legislation, and the Commissioners are pretty far removed from direct election. Nobody elected by the citizens can initiate legislation.

From the news release "What does this mean?" section: "This update to the Covered List does not prohibit the import, sale, or use of any existing device models the FCC previously authorized."

So no, this does not pull all existing routers off the market. Anything that already got FCC approval remains approved and new stock may be imported and sold.

Is there really any correlation between tax revenue and spending at the federal level anymore? It seems the U.S. government is willing to spend at huge deficit levels. If everyone stopped paying federal taxes I suspect nothing would change.

Ha,you beat me to it! That book was my first thought when I saw this post. I have a copy sitting here on my bookshelf.

Just to expand on how bonkers this book is... they assume that everyone has easy access to a Forth implementation. So they teach you how to build a Lisp on top of it. Then they use the Lisp you just built to build a Prolog. Then, finally, they do what the topic of the book actually is: build a simple expert system on top of that Prolog.

I love it!

very common OS feature since 90s

And if you want to go farther back, even if it wasn't called "mmap" or a specific function you had to invoke -- there were operating systems that used a "single-level store" (notably MULTICS and IBM's AS/400..err OS/400... err i5 OS... err today IBM i [seriously, IBM, pick a name and stick with it]) where the interface to disk storage on the platform is that the entire disk storage/filesystem is always mapped into the same address space as the rest of your process's memory. Memory-mapped files were basically the only interface there was, and the operating system "magically" persisted certain areas of your memory to permanent storage.

From everything I've read about aphantasia, I'm certain it described me -- I have absolutely no ability to consciously "visualize" things in my head (I was also surprised to learn that some/most people sometimes experience a smell sensation if they recall smells, or "hear" music when they think about music or have a song stuck in their head, etc.)

Really the only thing in my head is my internal monologue. If I'm thinking about something I've seen, it's my internal monologue "saying," with words, physical attributes I remember about it. If a song is stuck in my head, it's my internal monologue (in my own voice) signing the lyrics or my own voice humming the tune in my head. No sensation of it being the original artist or the actual instruments, it's 100% my own voice in my own head.

I have a friend who says she does not have any inner monologue at all, and thinks entirely visually. I can't imagine! We're on the pretty extreme opposite ends of the spectrum of how we think, apparently.

What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?

I set up a new mailserver a few years ago and have had no delivery problems whatsoever. All messages get through to gmail and outlook/o365 inboxes I've sent to. Didn't even have to register the IP with O365, it's just worked flawlessly from day one. That was from an IP address/netblock not associated with cloud or VPS providers, so initial reputation may have been higher.

A few months ago I set up a mail server on a VM in Digital Ocean, and have had no delivery problems to gmail/Google Apps recipients.

More recently, for new IPs sending mail into O365, they appear to be blocked by default but the rejection message gives you a URL to go to where you can register your IP(s). After doing that, we haven't seen any problems.

If you end up getting an IP that has been associated with previous spam or abuse, I assume your experience will be different. But in my experience, my handful of servers have not had delivery problems. This is all, of course, with proper reverse DNS records that match what the server advertises in its HELO/EHLO, SPF and DKIM all set up, etc.

I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.

I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?

Now all we need is for Apache Guacamole to add support into its RDP client for whatever old version of RDP NT 4 Terminal Server uses. Access all those old NT 4 applications through my web browser!

That was it, yes! Thank you!

I'm looking forward to see how this develops.

There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days.

Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!

Hercules is _not_ used by IBM's own developers. Being found with Hercules on your computer at IBM gets you in trouble. I know people who work on mainframe-related stuff inside IBM and they steer well clear of Hercules. And I've heard that IBM's computer monitoring stuff (antivirus, asset protection, etc.) looks for Hercules and flags it.

But IBM _does_ have their own mainframe emulator, zPDT (z Personal Development Tool), sold to their customers for dev and testing (under the name zD&T -- z Development and Test), and to ISVs under their ISV program. That's what IBM's own developers would be using if they're doing stuff under emulation instead of LPARs on real hardware.

(And IBM's emulator is significantly faster than Hercules, FWIW, but overall less feature-full and lacks all of the support Hercules has for older architectures, more device types, etc.)

Coconut trees are in the palm tree family.

All coconut trees are palm trees, but not all palm trees grow coconuts.

This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. [...] identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world.

Identity is the only purpose that certificates serve. SSL/TLS wouldn't have needed certificates at all if the goal was purely encryption: key exchange algorithms work just fine without either side needing keys (e.g. the key related to the certificate) ahead of time.

But encryption without authentication is a Very Bad Idea, so SSL was wisely implemented from the start to require authentication of the server, hence why it was designed around using X.509 certificates. The certificates are only there to provide server authentication.

I think multibrot here refers to setting the exponent (under "Render Settings") to a value higher than 2.

Value Database

Smalltalk and another esoteric programming environment I used for a while called Frontier had an idea of a persistent data store environment. Basically, you could set global.x = 1, shut your program down, and start it up again, and it would still be there.

Frontier! I played with that way back when on the Mac. Fun times.

But as for programming language with integrated database... MUMPS! Basically a whole language and environment (and, in the beginning, operating system) built around a built-in global database. Any variable name prefixed with ^ is global and persistent, with a sparse multi-dimensional array structure to be able to organize and access the variables (e.g. ^PEOPLE(45,"firstname") could be "Matthew" for the first name of person ID 45). Lives on today in a commercial implementation from Intersystems, and a couple Free Software implementations (Reference Standard M, GT.M, and the GT.M fork YottaDB). The seamless global storage is really nice, but the language itself is truly awful.

I would like to note that Linux is the only kernel which will allow you to do this!

I'm pretty sure that MVS syscalls (that is, the numbers you use with the SVC opcode) have remained backward-compatible at least as far back as MVS 3.8 in the 1970s and those binaries making those "raw" syscalls will still work on the latest z/OS releases.

There are a _lot_ more operating systems than Linux, Windows, and the BSDs... making a statement that the Linux kernel is the only kernel to do something a certain way is a risky proposition :-)

The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks.

Chapter 16 is named "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering."

I'll type out the beginning of the abstract at the beginning of the chapter here:

"All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? Unless it is more than 9/10 of all effort, shrinking all the accidental activities to zero time will not give an order of magnitude improvement."

"Documents must be utf-8 and should have a byte order mark."

No. If you're using UTF-8 (which is a good choice), the use of a BOM should be discouraged. Given that the format specification says documents MUST be UTF-8, there is no need to enable detection of UTF-8 content with the UTF-8 BOM. And, of course, the original purpose of the BOM (detecting big- or little-endian encoding) is unnecessary in UTF-8.

The Unicode standard, section 2.6, says, "Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8".

While it is allowed, if you're making a new spec for a new data format, you shouldn't recommend the use of a BOM in UTF-8.

Do they still use 0-terminated strings/char* as the main string type?

Of course, it's still C.

Is the usage of single linked lists still prevalent as the main container type?

As far as I can remember, the C standard library has never had any functions that used linked lists. Nor are there any container types, linked lists or otherwise, provided by C. So I'd say this is a question about how people teach and use C, not related to the language -- or language spec version -- itself.

The article addresses this: what happened with .su is part of what caused ICANN/IANA to update their policies to not have defunct country codes stick around.

It doesn't matter who "owns" it (the country probably outsourced management of it to another entity, I assume); the domain exists because it exists as an ISO country code. When the country is no longer a country, and the IO country code is removed from ISO 3166-1, the justification for the domain existing will be gone. The article is saying that per current IANA policies, that should trigger the domain to be retired over a period of several years.

Personally, I do find it highly unlikely the domain will go away. They'll do something to keep it around. As the article states toward the end, "The IANA may fudge its own rules and allow .io to continue to exist. Money talks, and there is a lot of it tied up in .io domains."

"Microsoft Notepad." "BMP image format."

Seemed like the definition of "programming language" was quite odd (given the title of the submission to HN is "Where are programming languages created?"), but then I noticed the actual title of the page is "Where does software innovation happen?" and is not restricted to programming languages.

Yes, Biblioteca Joanina in Portugal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioteca_Joanina

Wow, this is one of the worst articles I've ever seen. Aside from the obviously false information about Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 mentioned in other comments, the article just drops in this statement at the end:

"This is also precisely why military aircraft, like the Air Force One, still use needles, dials, and gauges—you cannot beat the reliability of older systems that have already been put through the wringer."

Gonna need a citation for that! The two jets used for Air Force One are based on the 747-200, which was one of the very early 747 models, so of course it predates glass cockpits. The reason isn't "precisely" because analogue gauges are more reliable, it's because of the plane's age. Look at all military aircraft development and you'll see they use the technology of the era. The replacement for the current VC-25 (Air Force One) aircraft will be based on the 747-8, and you better believe they'll have the glass cockpits now in use in the latest 747s.

In series they don't add up... doing a quick example, I find that in the worst case (e.g. each resistor out by 5% in the same direction):

22 - 5% = 20.9

47 - 5% = 44.65

Actual resistance in series: 65.55

Nominal resistance in series: 69

69 - 5% = 65.55

So the combination of the components still appears to maintain the 5% tolerance.

I run a multi-user Linux server. It's IBM POWER9 hardware and several of my friends in the open-source community who care about testing on something other than x86, or who are interested in different architectures or playing with its unique capabilities such as quad-precision floating point implemented in the hardware appreciate having shell access to it.

It's a play on the old Uncle Sam "I want YOU" recruiting posters.

If you're maintaining one of the most widely used packages that is directly linked to by libsystemd and is included by pretty much every Linux distro as part of the base system? Then maybe some measure of paranoia is justified.

But whose problem is that? systemd chose to link against liblzma, not the other way around. I doubt the xz maintainer(s) make money off of the project, and I'm assuming it's a spare-time/side-project type thing. Why should the fact that the library is included in every distro and is a dependency of systemd affect the xz maintainers' obligations? The leader of systemd has been variously employed by RedHat and Microsoft... if they're choosing to pull in an external dependency for systemd and then making money off of selling their Linux distros/cloud services, it would seem they're the ones that could afford to take on the burden of reviewing everything with a fine-toothed comb, not the xz maintaners.

This feels like a trademark question, not a copyright question. Seems like an abuse of DMCA; if only it were easier to ensure companies filing fraudulent DMCA claims end up facing real consequences.