Posts by jake

"does anyone have one to test it on?"

I've got a couple buried somewhere in my piling system ... They worked when I stashed them, but I'm rather loath to dig them out and pull them out of the plastic wrap until I have a trifle more info.

Re: The bug is in the support library code (libc?) of a 1982 C compiler?

32-bit code? The 11/73 is a 16-bit machine.

I wonder what OS the machine in question is running, and who built the compiler and libraries ...

"How were you supposed to secure the ladder at the top without climbing it?"

Hooks built into the top. It's hardly rocket surgery.

Re: How did you get in here?

I know of several that are three or four stories high, others that are no more than cable-chases that are large enough for a man to crawl through that open into larger rooms dotted about a couple of floors.

Take a look at a picture of 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue ) you can clearly see these spaces every dozen floors or so.

Note that there is nothing nefarious[0] about any of this; it's all just mechanical stuff that keeps the building running smoothly. Or not, as is apparently the case of 432 Park.

_{[0] Although I sometimes wonder about the sanity of the architectural firms involved ...}

Re: How did you get in here?

"There was rumoured to be an entire hidden floor floor that the lift bypassed."

There probably was. Most tall buildings have one (or more). They are mechanical rooms, HVAC, water, sewer, Pneumatic tube stuff, telco stuff, etc. Usually they are serviced only by the freight elevator(s), often with key access only to those floors. Quite often it is only a portion of a floor that is partitioned off from the general population.

Oh noes!

They've found you, Liam! Quick, run! Hide!

_{Kids these days ...}

Re: So when did...

Cheap joke,

Re: Another thing to think about ...

If you are moving ones and zeros around in a machine, you are programming it. Anthropomorphizing it by calling it "training" doesn't alter the underlying facts.

This is angels on the head of a pin territory, and in the eyes of the Great Unwashed is rapidly approaching religion.

Re: Another thing to think about ...

You've never truly been hungry, and think food comes from the backroom at your local grocer, am I right?

Penguin tastes like a cross between seagull//rat and old, oily fish. And it's really, really stringy. Quite narsty, actually.

The scene: Accident with a cage door at the San Diego Zoo in 1983ish ... A two year old tried to poke his head back at us just as the door was closing. The otherwise healthy bird died instantly (broken neck) and we decided "waste not, want not", and fired up the hibachi.

Re: Another thing to think about ...

Note that all examples that ol' Bill came up with are, in fact, food.

I rest my case.

More to the point ...

Whose morals, Kemosabe?

Re: In the early 2000s...

"it really wasn't called "in the wild" over 20 years ago"

Joe Wells established The WildList in 1993. We had been talking about miscellaneous malware being in the wild (as opposed to being lab only) for at least two decades at that point. (Some dipshit managed to unleash a variation of Creeper on the PDP10 kit at Berkeley and Stanford in early 1973. It was only "in the wild" for a couple hours late Saturday night into Sunday morning. My report on cleaning it up contained the words "in the wild".)

Can I take a complete large format edition of Audubon "Birds of America", carefully separate out each print, frame them individually, and sell them to the highest bidder?

_{Aside from the fact that it would be a heinous sin, of course ...}

Re: What if the ads fell into a hole before they got to my computer?

Back in the day, when I still read the trade press printed on dead trees, I would flip through a new magazine and find all the pages that were adverts on both sides and rip them out. The ones on coated stock went into the recycle bin (Palo Alto recycled coated stock a lot earlier than most cities), and the ones on newsprint went into the fire-starter pile. The fly-in postcards got dumped into the fire starter pile. I didn't actually register what the ads were all about. Only took a couple minutes per magazine, and was definitely worth it.

Today we're in the computer age, so I let the computer handle it for me. Seems like the sensible thing to do.

Re: Look at this the other way for a moment.

Of course it's theft, at least here in the US. Specifically, it is theft by conversion. Look it up.

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

I've used ext4 on Linux desktops since it first appeared on Slackware 13.0 in 2009 (earlier on text boxen) with absolutely zero filesystem problems. At the current moment in time, I see no reason to change despite trying all of the alternatives, on various machines, for various reasons.

Admittedly, the servers often have alternates, also for various reasons.

I don't currently have any disks formatted for either bcachefs -or- btrfs. I see no need.

Re: Ultimately it's all BS

1975 already had email and faxes.

I got one of my first 9-5 jobs by sending an email in 1972.

Faxes are way earlier than that, by about a century, before even the telephone.

For the record, if I'm wearing my Hiring Manager hat[0] and some kid cold-calls the company about a job in IT, I want to hear about it immediately. The concept of "gumption" seems to be missing from most of today's yoof ... in fact, in the last five years I've seen more kids bring their mummy along to a scheduled interview than I've had kids show up on my doorstep out of the blue looking for work.

All of the out of the blue kids got hired, none of the mummy's boys did.

_{[0] After I (re)build a new datacenter, I'm sometimes asked to populate it. Occasionally a local kid will note the activity and inquire within (as we used to put it).}

Re: Rust

Yes, COBOL coders can make good money. It's a supply and demand thing. Remember, almost all of the money in the world is handled by COBOL in one way or another. Over the decades, when asked by students, I have always suggested COBOL and/or Fortran as extra languages to learn.

As for the "unpaid" volunteers ... I have been contributing to the FOSS world since before BSD was BSD (and indeed, before Microsoft met an IBM PC). Quite frankly, I have never thought about getting paid for it for one simple reason: It doesn't matter.

Read that again, it's important: It doesn't matter.

I wrote code, created patches, chased down bugs, wrote documentation, and all the other bits & bobs that go into FOSS because I am extremely selfish. I wanted it to work for ME, my way, in my time. Once it worked the way I wanted it to work, it solved a problem that I had, which more than paid for the time and effort that I put into it.

Then I released it to the wild, without caring if anyone else needed it. It's MINE, it scratched my itch ... now, if you have the same itch feel free to make use of my scratching post. No point in you re-inventing the wheel to do the same job ... and better, it frees you up to work on something to fix another itch.

Thankfully, other people have many other itches. In aggregate, over time, and over the generations, we have created something useful. This will continue indefinitely.

Re: So much speculation

"Why does everyone seem to think this hasn't already been given considerable thought and preparation."

It has. See my first post.

"There already is Rust in the kernel (with Linus' blessing), so that isn't a discussion anymore."

Kinda. In reality, what little rust is in the kernel is, at most, a statistical aberration, and even that is aggrandizing it. And the "blessing", as full of "we might" and "maybe we will" and "perhaps" and "eventually", and "drivers, probably" etc. etc. as it is sounds more like throwing the braying fanbois a bone just to shut them up. Note that nowhere does Linus say "Let's do it" or "We are going to" or "It will be soon".

As for the init ... THINK about it. During boot, the kernel sets up for the hardware it has available to it ... and then, and only then, does it pass control to the init. There is no need now, and never will be a need for the kernel to rely on any one specific init. Linux (the kernel) is NOT split on this. Some ill-conceived Linux (+GNU) Distributions might be, however.

"For several hours."

Possibly days, or even weeks, depending on how many times you get it wrong doing it manually.

It's a computer, use it as one. First edit the necessary file(s), THEN run make.

_{And even then you'll probably get it wrong ... but at least the logs will point you in the direction of what to fix ...}

There is no RedHat anymore. It's IBM.

And IBM already releases proprietary IBM Linux kernels branded RedHat. This doesn't affect the mainline kernel in any real way.

Was. Got kicked out for not playing well with others.

Re: May I suggest ...

Except that everybody who might even be close to a leadership roll post Linus is already fully aware that they want nothing to do with the P-thing.

And they especially know they don't want him dabbling in the kernel.

Been there, done that. Never again.

Of course it's click-baity.

ElReg is a red-top, and it's the silly season. They are required to post such articles or they will get thrown out of the guild.

_TING

They are paid to work on it by $CORPORATE_ENTITY, yes. But that doesn't mean they are not volunteers.

I've been on the LKML since the year dot, and I do not remember anyone griping that they were only there because their Boss forced them into it.

Re: Tulips from AI Jam

For those who don't understand the reference, there was a tulip boom in the mid-1630s. Try to find a copy of the 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay ... Here it is at Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

The book is well worth a read. Learn history, or be doomed to repeat it.

Re: People Do Love Bullshit

""AI" LLMs are the best bullshit generators that mankind has yet built."

Oh, I dunno ... The scammers and fraudsters pumping the BS sure seem to be on at least the same level.