chunkyks

Ten years, yep, sounds about right. We're finally getting rid of our last few RHEL6 boxes. It got pretty long in the tooth at the end there, but it never gave me any hassle.

As someone who does both sysadmin work, and programming/modeling&simulation work, at a significant research nonprofit in the US...

RedHat is stable: Which has the benefit that it's stable, and the cost that it's always behind the times.

Security is deadly serious, and RedHat make it easy. STIGs are available for RHEL; they're also available for SuSE [very recently] and Ubuntu LTS releases, but we're heavily invested in RHEL infrastructure, training, etc, so switching to Canonical would be expensive and hard. A few years ago I earnestly looked at us coming up to speed on Ubuntu, but with Canonical's recent behaviour around packaging I'm kind of glad we didn't.

We rolled with CentOS in a few places for a while [all the benefits of the training and experience], but the recent changes in that make it useless for our needs.

I've been around for long enough that I remember when Linux sucked; I started using it around 1997. Nowadays, I find that all modern distros are in the same ballpark of "pretty much work pretty much all the time"; so while I don't love RHEL, it's been a safe stable choice and doesn't bite me in the ass.

I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/

I mean, it's right there in the license, that this is an option:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html , section 6b [similar sections exist in previous versions]

-----

6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.

You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:

b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

-----

Presuming you are correct:

* Some number of people are sensitive to latency

* Some people are unable to read my website

You're gambling that there are more people who would walk away due to latency, than there are who would walk away due to being unable to interact with your site at all.

Personally I suspect that to be a poor tradeoff.

But then the website might not look like the designer's glistening perfect vision, that only ever worked properly in their browser on their desktop in the first place.

I worked on postscript drivers for a few years. Escaping the sandbox was a feature!

You could usually exitserver with a default password, then set global state to do annoying things. Imagine every print job being rotated five degrees, or having a weird dead spot somewhere on the page.

I really enjoyed writing postscript. Fun language

"IANAL but GPL does state that you can relicense under any other later version of the license"

No. GPL encourages people to say "GPLv2 or later" or "GPLv3 or later", but being under one version of the GPL does not automatically afford "or later" unless the copyright holder says so.

It feels like a cliche now. Read the article and of course, they're sunsetting something else.

Here's looking forward to the acronym becoming "AANG" so we can make Airbender references and quote the show.

For today I think I'll just go with the pithy "If I try, I fail".

Edit: More charitably and optimistically, I just googled Avatar quotes, and found Aang also said: "When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change".

I recall taking a stab at audit2allow a few years ago, and finding that it was incredibly opaque and felt like practising dark arts.

At this point, it's probably true that I should get onboard the SELinux train and learn it properly, but it's just... ain't nobody got time for that.

Things may have changed, but the last few times I looked, it was breathtakingly hard to a) identify if /when selinux is what's screwing you, then b) get selinux to stop it.

I really wanted an audit mode that could also say "this command will unlock the specific thing I just blocked".

That was a few years ago. Since then, I've turned off selinux whenever I'm getting screwed by some opaque process, stuff starts working, and closing it back down while leaving what I need open remains impossible black magic.

All the tooling, manufacturing, everything for the b2 is gone. They made twenty something, then converted the factories to other things. So whatever the sticker associated with one b2 is, the replacement cost is much higher because you have to include redevelopment, new tooling, everything.

I hate writing resumes. So I found a job I like and haven't felt the need to apply to anything for thirteen years and counting

Every time I see some glorious "this explains git in a single image", it's usually an interesting image for someone who already understands git, yet is entirely, 100%, opaque to someone who doesn't yet know git.

[This comment brought to you by a thread [1] from earlier today]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713

This is awesome. A bit of self-promotion: I, too, wrote a deliberately obtuse raytracer: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer

There are increasing numbers of days where I think google has hit the "live long enough to become the villain" stage of the story.

Fine. Coughed up the $200. I really like the idea of a new microgame every week.

I had never heard of playdate, and frankly was unlikely to buy one even after I had heard of it, except ...

Lucas Pope [1] of "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers, Please" fame is doing his next game, "Mars After Midnight" for it [2]. [actually, browsing his website is how I even heard about the playdate]

The day that both Mars after Midnight, and the playdate itself, are actually out, I shall purchase both.

[1] https://dukope.com/

[2] https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog/261758/mar...

It's not obvious to me that that is a problem for me, or that it makes the internet worse

You haven't convinced me that preventing browser tracking is making the internet "slightly worse overall".

If sites are having trouble converting me, perhaps it's not me that's the problem.

I worked at Lehman for a year around 1999/2000. While I was there, they handed out these plinths, I still have mine: https://imgur.com/a/NKnJh

Every time I see a link to source forge, it makes me wonder about what will kill github.

Is it technical? Will a better code management tool show up? Technically superior, or just less user hostile?

Or is it a business issue? Will Microsoft bollocks it up?

I cannot believe that git and github are the pinnacle. I really hope I see at least what comes next, and hopefully the thing after, in my professional lifetime.

In the past I had a website with hundreds of gigs of data that needed updating regularly, but could be read-only from the web server perspective.

I used sqlite for that, and had a mysql server for the user data and stuff that needed to be written to. Performance was fantastic, users were happy, data updates were instantaneous ; copy the new data to the server then repoint a symlink.

Most of my work is modeling and simulation. Sqlite is almost always my output format ; one case per database is really natural and convenient, both for analysis, and run management.

Anyway. Sqlite is amazing.

It's shorter to write down a list of good actors.

Generally I just assume a good old fashioned "48 hours", like in the olden days, and I have yet to be disappointed.

We moved to o365, I was worried for my good friends the exchange admins, because the entire premise of saving money by moving to the cloud is that you can get rid of people.

Good (?) news is that they're busier than they've ever been, even needing more support from other admins.

Turns out, TANSTAAFL

I do wonder how many times we need to learn this.

Indeed that's what I've experienced in the past. But I'm telling you this, for sure, based on my experience downloading a 200M tensorflow wheel the other day.

Don't forget that you can literally concatenate jpegs and zipfiles [header at start of jpeg, but at end of zipfile], so the valid jpeg can also be a valid zipfile.

Combine that with something like Safari's insistence at automatically exploding zipfiles on download, and you got yourself a party.

We have a security proxy at work that gives you the bits, but then holds the connection open while it does a scan, then resets the connection if it doesn't like something inside. Both Chrome and Firefox [haven't tried IE/Edge, but I assume that they'll do something that the proxy vendor would want] infer [or are told?] that the connection broke and delete the interim file. Unfortunately, with zip files, the header is at the end; so it can't do scanning until the whole file is down.

For me, the easiest way to mitigate it turned out to be to use wget [with an appropriate user-agent... say, the same as my desktop browser]. wget Gets the bits, but doesn't in any way molest the "partial" download when the connection resets. Then it tries to download the rest using the "Range" HTTP header, and the server says "oh, dude, you already got the whole thing"; wget declares success, and all the bits are in my download folder.

I believe that we pay, like, a lot for this proxy, which is annoying on two counts: 1) If I can get past it trivially, then presumably competent attackers can, too, and 2) Sometimes it takes a dislike to legitimate stuff, which is how I was forced to learn how to get around it.

Sure. The problem is that I don't know what I'm getting until I follow the link. Even when I beep the qr code but before following it, 3/4 of the time I get some url shortener.

To be clear, I think your website is a good idea and a good movement forward. I'm just a curmudgeonly old guy.

Maybe I would be happier if you did what I sometimes see others do: abuse the error correction in qr codes to make the one you produce more interesting or unique. So instead of an anonymous url injector, it looks like a menu and has your logo or brand somewhere clear.

Every time I follow a qr code pasted on the wall of a restaurant, I think "this goes against everything that I, a nominal computer professional, knows to be a good idea"

Problem is, it's not a big enough deal for me to turn around and walk out, instead my phones download folder is just cluttered with pdfs of bad scans of paper menus.

On one hand, when there was a chance coronavirus was spread by surfaces, I thought this approach was genius. With the appropriate amount of water being under the bridge... Bring back the old menus.