I’m not familiar with Kiwi, but I noticed a comment thread about them on travel.stackexchange.com recently, discussing whether to describe them as “fraud” or just “using booking practices that subject the client to extreme risks”. Be sure to read the fine print on that booking!
I’d say a lot of the complexity comes from the fact that there are at least four things — Jack, PulseAudio, Pipewire and the ALSA userland stuff, which the article fails to mention — that try to solve more or less the same problems (probably less, in the case of the ALSA userland). Add to this the fact that everything can be, and often is, run as a compatibility layer on top of (or below) everything else, and the naïve user who just wants to get some music though the speakers can be excused for feeling a bit dizzy.
I’m not sure I understand the bit about time-ordered values being a better fit for B-trees. Actually, I’m sure that I don’t understand it... If anything, I’d naively assume that inserting already-sorted values would be a worst case, always going down the same branch of the tree and triggering re-balancing operations left and right (figuratively — literally mostly left!). The Wikipedia article on B-trees notices that there are some shortcuts that can be taken if one knows one is going to do a batch insert of sorted values. Is that what happens? But then how does Postgres know this?
One thing that always bothers me with both matplotlib and gnuplot, is that they literally seem to have a command (or function call) for everything. To set the tick size for the third-level ticks on the Y axis, you call set_third_level_y_ticks() or something like that. This is not necessarily bad (and maybe it has to be this way — I haven’t even tried to analyse the problem) but it feels very un-orthogonal, like everything is special-cased.
Why so many packages? Does it mean that all of them have some critical flaw, and are so hard to fix (for some reason) that everyone just starts from scratch instead of fixing an existing one?
Hang on, doesn’t numpy use C (row major) array ordering by default? checks docs Seems like it does. However, numpy array indexing also follows the maths convention where 2D arrays are indexed by row, column (as does C, by the way), so to access pixel x, y you need to say im[y, x]. And the image libraries where I have toyed with with numpy integration (only Pillow, to be honest) seem to work just fine like this — a row of pixels is stored contiguously in memory. So I don’t quite see why the author claims that numpy stores a column of pixels contiguously, but I have only glanced at the article, so quite probably I have missed something.
"Won’t we lose platforms that aren’t Linux or BSD?" Well, as a mostly-mac user these days, a sane Makefile that I can understand and fix is much preferrable to some automake-generated monstrosity that does not work...
Which leads us to my next point: The article talks about autotools, but only seems to address autoconf. As long as projects used a hand-made Makefile.in, it was, in my experience, usually possible to skip running autoconf and edit the Makefile and config.h manually, if the autoconf script turned out to be completely inadequate. It was the introduction of automake that turned makefiles into an inscrutable mess, where everything happened through four levels of variable expansion.
There are many legends about fissile material, or even “bomb kits” hidden away in some of Sweden’s many hollow mountains.
According to Wilhelm Agrell’s book “Svenska förintelsevapen”, the foundation for one such legend is as follows: There was a chunk of plutonium in a lab somewhere, acquired from the UK, I think. When the nuke program was ramped down, it was decided that this chunk should be transferred to a certain laboratory in Norway. However, getting the bureaucratic stars aligned to do this “by the book” turned out to be a major headache, to the point that some exasperated manager eventually packed the stuff in his briefcase, drove to Norway in his own car and handed it over personally, thus breaking every rule in the book and a few not yet written, but at least getting rid of the cumbersome thing from his lab!
I don’t know about Denmark, but on the north side of the Sound, all construction contracts seem to go to chains of subcontractors fourteen levels deep, where minor details like workplace safety get lost around level five or so, and the fellows who get to do the actual work in the end are all from Elbonia and speak no Swedish.
Let me put in a word for The National Museum of Computing, www.tnmoc.org in Bletchley Park, where you can see the real thing (I can’t remember which state of refurbished/rebuilt/replica it is), along with a replica bombe, EDSAC (being built), the marvellously blinkenlicht-y WITCH, and (literal!) tons of other old computers. It’s an easy excursion by train from London, and you can combine it with a visit to bletchleypark.org.uk (it’s the same site).
I seem to remember that at least some TELNET clients would default to "dumb byte pipe" mode if run on some other port than 23. However, I can't find anything supporting this memory, so quite possibly I'm wrong...
Is there a good introduction to CMake for those of us on the receiving end, i.e., we’re trying to build a package, maintained by someone else, which uses CMake? Things like how to tell it where to find this other package that I just built (and which is not in /usr/local!), how to get proper @rpath:s installed in my .dylibs on macOS, etc?
I’m not sure anybody really wants them to exist (except themselves, obviously). Current law, more or less by accident, allows them to exist, and since this touches on the principle of openness in public administration, which is a bit of a holy cow here, any changes are unthinkable. My guess is that this situation will persist until slightly after it becomes completely unsustainable, at which point everyone will suddenly have been advocating for a change for the last decade.
The Internet is not only bad — it is now possible to sign up for notifications when somebody registers at your address (it’s on the Skatteverket web, somewhere). However, Sweden being Sweden, I suppose you will still have to prove that they do not in fact live there to get rid of them...
The idea here is that the workings of the public authorities should be open to scrutiny. Hence, all documents (correspondence, working documents, the lot!) are public, except those that are explicitly made secret, and it takes national-security level issues to do that. The authorities are not even allowed to ask who’s asking.
The first problem is that even material on individuals, collected by the authorities, becomes public.
This generally went unnoticed for a couple of hundred years, as you still had to know which documents there were, go around and ask whichever authority held the documents, and probably pay at cost for copies. Now we have the Internet, which has led to the second problem. Several data brokers have started to request all data there is, and then index, repackage, and sell it on the Internet, drastically lowering the threshold to request all the juicy stuff on anyone. Now, that is obviously against the GDPR, but the law allows anyone to become a journalist, who play by different rules, by saying "I am a journalist!" and paying a token fee.
So, to summarize: Openness, intended to keep tabs on those in power, and which has historically been somewhat tamed by practical barriers has, those barriers torn down by the Internet, become uncomfortably open.
"Map showing the triangulation across the Andes, 1744. Bibliothèque nationale de France." Fancy, I didn’t know that Sangis, Torneå and Kemi were in the Andes! :-)
I’m not familiar with modern (or any, for that matter...) car navigation systems. Do they have a big "NO!" button? The ones I have seen seemed very intent on planning one route, and then following that, no matter what. If you could not make a turn because it was blocked by some road works or whatever, the satnav would just keep trying to direct you back to that point. It would have been nice with a big NO/UNABLE button to push to get an alternative route.
It is a purposely malicious take! The question was why the GNU project has put itself in a place where it cannot assign resources to the GIMP project, to make GIMP more like what the average person wants it to be.
The GIMP developers say “we want our layers to work like this, take it or leave it”, and they have every right to do so. They write the code, they pay their own bills, they get to call the shots.
The GNU people say “software should be free-as-in-speech”. That is certainly their right, and to some extent I agree with them. However, that ideological stance means that the GNU project does not have any resources it can assign to the GIMP project (or anyone, for that matter).
Because GNU are on a Mission. They’re not out to make things people want, they’re out to make things people ought to be wanting (according to them). This is not necessarily bad - the world needs some idealists - but it does interfere with fundraising.
Ages ago, when I was in college, a "numerical methods" course was more or less obligatory... has that changed?
Anyway, toying with a slide rule is a fun way of making these things very obvious, because you are essentially working with something like 3-digit floating point. When you find yourself subtracting 1.234 from 1.235, but you know that both the "4" and the "5" are really fuzzy around the edges, it becomes obvious that the resulting 0.001 does not really mean much. Similarly, when you take 1.234e+6 (again with a really fuzzy "4") and add 2, you realize that 1.234002e+6 is not really a sane answer.
This is probably slightly irrational, but it pains me to see how many slide rules go unsold at auction sites, and probably end up being thrown away. Admittedly, most of these are school rules of which there are thirteen in a dozen, but I see a fair number of nice ones as well. The collector in me wants to buy them all, but the rational Pinus says that I already have a few, and unlike the gentleman in the article, I do not wish to fill my home with slide rules...
To put a programming angle on things: Using a slide rule feels a bit like assembly-language programming on something like the Z80. Since operations can only take their input from certain places, and only leave their output at certain places, you need to try to arrange things so that any intermediate results are in a place where they can be used as input for the next step.
In RMS’ message that started that discussion, he stated that the GNU project intended to provide two languages — one Lisp-like (which I assume eventually became Guile), and one with a more algebra-like syntax. Did anything ever come out of the latter?
I remember actual hardware terminals doing this. I also remember keeping it turned off, partially because it was slow (as many others have already said), but also because I felt weird when scrolling one line at a time. As I remember it, there was no ease-in or ease-out to the motion, but instant transitions from standing still to rolling speed to standing still again. Jerky.
Anyway, what I don't remember is: Could typical hardware terminals do this with a scroll region, or only with the whole screen? For a full-screen scroll, I suppose one could quite easily move everything by gradually offsetting the vertical sync a bit, but for a block of lines there would have to be something more complicated, like offsetting the input to the character generators for some scan lines. Is that what they did?
4 November, actually. All Saints’ Day gets a bit confusing in Sweden, because there are two of it — one on 1 November, which is not a public holiday, and one on the Saturday after, which is. The one on Saturday tends to catch people by surprise, because most don’t work on Saturdays anyway, so they don’t expect this Saturday to be special, but then it turns out that shops and services they expected to be open are, in fact, closed.
Considering that this happened last Saturday, and today is Thursday, i.e, it has only been five days (more like four, since it's still early morning, local time, on Thursday) I find it extremely unlikely that all books have been returned by now — surely someone needs a week to get through a book?