Posts by coconuthead

Re: What is the definition of "social media"?

The Australian PM initially said – and apparently took as policy to the election – that YouTube would not be included. Three weeks before the start date, the public servant in charge announced that it would be.

You are right to be worried. For example, I’ve heard of a case of parents having to replace the music instruction resources they had curated from YouTube. (There is indeed a lot of serious music and music instruction on there.) And now even if parents have paid for a family YouTube subscription to remove ads, the children have to sit through the ads because they can’t log in, and some schools still set YouTube videos for homework.

A charitable explanation might be that Albanese and the rest of them are clueless. A less charitable one is that it’s a deliberate free kick to the Murdoch press, which ran a campaign to bring it in.

Re: C over 50

The quirk was that the struct member names all shared the same namespace. To this day, hacks around this for Unix live on in POSIX. Examples are the st_ prefix in the stat structure and tm_ in the time structure.

Re: Handsets?

The article is conflating an unrelated handset issue with the 000 failures that may have contributed to deaths.

The 000 failure was caused by a botched firewall reconfiguration, compounded by offshore call centre staff not realising the significance of customers calling them to say 000 wasn’t working (because 000 is not the emergency number in their home country).

Separate from that, because Australia has switched off 3G, handsets must be able to roam onto any available *data* network to call 000 over VoLTE, even without a SIM. Old handsets can’t, and telcos were supposed to identify any such handsets using the IMEI and toss them off the network completely, so that their owners would go and buy a new phone.

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

Upvoted for the joke, but my installation of ReiserFS scribbled all over itself due to a bug.

Re: He's right, of course

“self-referencing”

Re: none of your code still running in 2100

Depending on what kind of embedded systems you’re building, that may not be true. Stuff like railways comes to mind. 75 years is old, but not out of the question. I believe parts of the NY subway signalling go back to the 1930s.

"And should any of my code still find itself being used by other engineers by then, and should it then cause them to run into Y2100 issues, more fool them for not paying attention to the clear comments in said code explaining the short-cuts/limitations/optimisations/etc taken..."

I worked on railway software that was still in production 30 years later. By then, they had lost the source code. Undeterred, they built a PDP-11 emulator for it (not that the non-standard pre-ANSI C would have compiled as was). It was finally retired when enough new railway stations had been built that a statically allocated array was now too small and it couldn’t load its data at startup! And yes, that array bound would have been #defined, but without the source code...

Someone trying to restore a car or electronic toy in 2124 also won’t have the source code.

Re: ALGOL 68 Blew My Mind

"do" didn’t end with "od" because "od" was the octal dump utility. Fun fact – it’s still there on macOS Sonoma! (Although I’ve always used "hexdump".)

Re: Manual is optional,

DId she go on to run Apple's developer services?

Re: I should copyright this

They are generally clueless about how these things play outside the US... all those imperial measurements too and saying "fall". (Assuming one knows they mean "autumn", that is some time off down here.)

Re: The only nation that nominated English as an official language of the EU was the UK

There is absolutely nothing "boutique" about Spanish and French. Large parts of the world outside Europe speak them.

meaning of acronym

Page vii of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System" says it is "Berkeley Software Distribution". The second listed author of this book is Marshall Kirk McKusick, who I think was project leader – first author is Sam Leffler.

This tallies with my own recollection from the 1980s.

(It was widely referred to as "berserkly". For the Brits here, Berkeley is pronounced to rhyme with "perk", not like Berkeley Square in London.)

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

SET DIR/VERSION_LIMIT=3 [.mysubdir]

CREATE/DIR/VERSION_LIMIT=3 ...

would ensure that when a new version was created, older versions were removed.

Re: REALTIME, baby.

APL was invented by Ken Iverson (actually as a notation before a programming language) and ran on more than IBM, although the most common implementation was on OS/360. I know it was still staggering along in 1980, being used for turnkey stuff in finance by a Canadian company called I.P. Sharp.

The Lisp-based editor you're thinking of is emacs ("Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping", at a time when 4MB was a largish mainframe memory) and it has little to do with Linux. It arose from the MIT media labs and ran on pre-Unix operating systems like ITS. Then Richard Stallman reimplemented it with a Lisp interpreter written in C, from where it went everywhere. Up until a couple of years ago you could find it installed on every Mac.

Not to mention a reference.

This is called "shadowing" and clang at least can warn about it.

Coming from Pascal, with its nested functions, I have no problem with shadowing and have that warning turned off.

Re: Skateboarding Rhinoceri?????

According to that article, the skateboarding rhino has a Boris Johnson subunit, with 1 rhino = 15 borises. However, as the reference boris is now lighter than when the article was written, this will no longer be correct. That is, Boris Johnson is an unstable unit.

Re: Big credit

It's actually a big intellectual leap from a light pen, where you draw directly on the screen, to a mouse, where you move something around to draw on the desk with it appearing on your screen. It's not even obvious the average person would be able to do that: they would have needed to build one first and try it out to know.

The actual hardware construction was probably the lesser part of this invention.

Re: Using the default keymap for Australia (same as the US)

The key combinations you mention are all already supported by the Australian keyboard layout without any special configuration. If I go get a new Mac from the Apple Store 10 minutes down the road and turn it on, those will be active as soon as I select "English" in the setup screen.

I'm guessing if you didn't know that, those characters aren't important to you, and that is why you think it's perfectly all right for them to be hard to type.

And no, I don't want to install third party software like Karabiner into something as important and sensitive as the keyboard input processing.

"Where else?" you ask. From where I sit, Melbourne–LA/SF, Melbourne-Buenos Aries (over the Antarctic) and Perth–Jo'burg would be nice.

I imagine, seeing it's the Japanese developing this, they have Tokyo–LA and Tokyo–Sydney in mind.

muppets

I do not think muppets are behind this. If it were muppets, there would be more colour.

Neither Kermit nor Miss Piggy were ever such a tedious grey/blue.

Oh, my.

Did you miss the bit where you could put your iPad down on the desk beside your Mac and then smash the Mac's mouse through a hot edge on the Mac screen so that you can click and drag on the iPad? And then drag a file between them?

Or where people in two separate households could watch Disney's streaming service on their living room TVs attached to Apple's "Apple TV" media box, *synchronised* via chat on their iPhones and chatting in real time?

Or the OCR text recognition on photos in the album?

I've never personally wanted any of those things, but surely you can see the appeal for the average person. And none of them is technically trivial to do, particularly the synching of TVs in separate houses. They must be calculating time-of-flight like NTP to pull that off.

Re: Charm offensive

The judge is female (Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers).

Re: Of course policeman is thinking how to solve the problem

It is true that she travelled to Sydney, but hardly surprising that she might want to wait and think before finally going ahead with a formal report, given who she was accusing. Presumably during her visit to Sydney (I tnought it was one visit, 4 interviews) the detectives briefed her about the likelihood of a successful prosecution. So then she would go home to Adelaide, think about it and discuss it with friends there before making a formal statement.

I'm not sure she'd even completed the 14 days. The NSW police did say they didn't want to do it over Zoom without a psychologist present. What they conspicuously failed to say was "we told her we'd arrange for a psychologist to sit with her when we took her statement over Zoom as soon as the quarantine was over". Presumably she was already seeing one.

I am not saying the historical rape occurred, and whether it did or not isn't really the issue.

It is the way the Prime Minister passed his copy of the dossier on to the wrong police force without even reading it, and his failure to act on the Higgins affair, and his comment that the women demonstrating outside Parliament are lucky they weren't shot that have landed him in hot water.

Re: The quick hack

It's a "good hack" if you can't later clearly state a reason why it should be replaced by something done "the right way".

The ".." in Unix paths (as in, there was originally an actual directory entry with string "..") was a "good hack" because it is hard to argue that anyone would actually want to create a file called "..".

Re: Major apps…

Photoshop 22 beta runs natively on M1 Macs:

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/photoshop/kb/photoshop-and-macos-big-sur.html#native-known-issues

Apple have been purging the APIs of nonportable stuff for several years now. For example, the provided calls for atomic increment and decrement were deprecated in 10.12, five years ago, with developers advised to use C++ std::atomic<> instead. Any use of a deprecated function results in a compilation warning.

The kernel extensions are going away for Intel as well.

The commitment to 5 years' support for Intel Macs is so that owners of existing machines have software to run.

Re: effect on small Pacific countries

It very much does, and IIRC it is the one of the most popular websites in Australia. Currently rubbing its little virtual hands in glee pointing out the ABC also has apps.

The issue is, people in some of these tiny places *do not have* affordable access to that website, or any website. The internet for them is a phone on 4G pointed to Facebook. How that came about, I don't know, but presumably Facebook did the telco a deal.

It's all in the article I linked, on the very website you complain does not exist.

Re: what is linux good for?

The reason was historical, and predates both Linux and Unix.

Long ago, there were computers that had no lower case. Some of them used 6-bit codes. Others used character codes that could accommodate lower case, but their printers could not print lower case. (Back in the day, the better printers didn't use a matrix of pins, but "chains" carrying lines of raised characters in a line that would be struck against the paper.) There were even a couple of years there where ASCII had not yet got its lower case characters. So, while there was usually some way to upper and lower case the content of your files, the last thing you needed was for their names to consist of characters you might not be able to see or type. Hence, the native form of file names was generally UPPER CASE, and the UI would helpfully convert lower case names to upper case so you at least had a fighting chance to get them in the editor or feed them to the case-change utility,

And naturally, if you had a proprietary operating system where file names were case-insensitive, your customers had got used to it, and it would also be a hassle for them to reformat all their volumes, So things carried on long past the point where lower case support was ubiquitous.

If you grew up with it, it does not seem so strange. (Except, I imagine, if your're Turkish, because the lower case of "I" in Turkish is not "i". And that is the real problem with case-insensitive file names – whose case rules?)