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Woof !

For people who are as confused as I was, there is also a lesser known "i3" which is a form of window manger. I presume sway is compatible with the i3 window manager (in addition to Intel i3).

Linux has a general purpose kernel memory allocator. This is a power-of-2-freelist allocator sitting atop the page allocator (more precisely it's implemented as set of object caches for objects whose sizes are powers-of-two). As detailed in the paper, the e1000 driver allocates skbs via kmalloc. This means its network buffers will usually occupy some part of a page. An access control mechanism with page granularity thus cannot prevent malicious devices from accessing the remaining part of the page. As that's just one of the pages currently allocated to one of the kmalloc caches, any other part of the kernel which uses kmalloc could end up using this "remaining part of the page".

The gist of this is that a (page-based) IOMMU can only prevent malicious devices from accessing data they're aren't supposed to access if the devices drivers used for such devices do their own memory management based getting complete pages from the page allocator.

It's a much *larger* ad-hoc informally specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. :) C++11, in particular, adds lambdas to the language, for extra bonus lispiness. :)

(I was actually about ready to give up on C++ until C++11, which returned to the list of languages I don't mind *too* terribly.)

There are no "data structures" in C standards, there's just a convention for representing strings.

There are, but C++ without exceptions is not what I call "sane use of."

We aren't at that point yet, but it's getting closer every month.

Now I do expect some kind of commercialization, which could mean: pay for IPFS storage.

Some are developing blockchain coin/IPFS storage solutions.

Or maybe I should say: an other chance to do it right or fail again.

mom-and-pop hosting provider in the same city or regional large city of which you know where the datacenter is compared to storing your stuff with Microsoft or Google.

One thing that makes life a lot easier in that case is: same jurisdiction.

Also, SJLJ exceptions are actually quite reasonable even for small environments (something a bit larger than 16 bit Arduino).

And then there's this nice proposal: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p... - it won't make into the coming revision of the standard, but it's on the table for the next one.

OTOH, I'd wish the ISO C committee would simply standardize the stuff in <sys/queue.h>. This should do the job in nearly all cases. POSIX provides insque() and remque(), which are so laughable that one wonders why they bothered standardizing it at all.

Too bad I don't have a spare billion $ to get it past plausible promise.

It's a brand new Remote Procedure Call technology; did you read the article? :-)

Remember: code is data and data is code https://lwn.net/Articles/778550/

Sounds like you've never served on a jury ...

Neither have I but everyone I've talked to has said it leaves you rather badly out-of-pocket, as you're paid a miserly daily allowance, plus expenses, which is usually worth far less than the (usually) unpaid leave you're forced to take.

Oh - and over here, getting out of jury service is doable but not easy. Unlike the American system where you just get yourself challenged and thrown off, here it's more like "who's the next twelve? In you go ..." and it's *HARD* for either defence or prosecution to get you thrown off - they need good grounds. If you're lucky, you get a trial that lasts a few days. If you're unlucky, it lasts a few months!

Cheers,
Wol

Firoz Khan did great job with moving system calls lists from header files into plain text. Looks like all architectures got recent syscall updates at same time.

A good RJ-45 jack is rated for 2,500 cycles. So wireless is a much better fit for high-traffic areas such as cafes and libraries. Patch leads are a small but ongoing expense, and staff and students don't like "BYO patch lead".

A wired port costs around $200 per wallport to cable. But this can blow out when a custom solution is required. Wiring a cafe table will cost more than than table.

Wireless networks work without any further action by the user. Once set up (which is far too hard) Eduroam connects your laptop or phone to the campus network the moment you go to use the device. No searching for a jack and patch lead. Wireless is so convenient that it's common to see a person sitting next to a wall port but using wireless.

Wired from modern devices is difficult. Using wired ethernet from a phone or tablet requires special cabling (a OTG cable) to the ethernet dongle. The dongle itself is a optional purchase. Cheaper dongles meant for laptops might not have driver support in a phone. Using wired ethernet from a recent laptop requires a USB-C/ethernet dongle, which means the laptop can't be powered whilst using the wired network. To have both power and wired networking requires a bulky and expensive "docking station".

We should be telling people who need network performance to use wired. But that may not end up being the bulk of the connections on a campus network.

* What /usr/bin/python invokes (which is commonly in older #! lines); and

* What gets run when a user types "python" at the command line

For backwards compatibility, "#! /usr/bin/python" pretty much has to invoke a Python 2 compatible interpreter, or fail very obviously ("interpreter not found") for the foreseeable future (5+ years, maybe 10). Because (a) all the older not updated programs have "#! /usr/bin/python" in them, and (b) all the newer, updated, programs have "#! /usr/bin/python3" in them. So by definition anything invoking /usr/bin/python explicitly as its interpreter has not been updated for Some Time (tm).

But the discussion on this thread, and the discussion about PEP 394 updates in general, suggest that a lot of people would understandably like it if the user typing "python" at their command line invoked a recent version of Python, eg, Python 3.6 or Python 3.7 (or even Python 3.8 soon). At this point I'd like that too.

There is solution that achieves both of these problems:

1. /usr/bin/python points at /usr/bin/python2 if it is installed and is missing otherwise; *and*

2. There is a "python" program in *another directory on the default PATH* which points at /usr/bin/python3.

So running /usr/bin/python gets Python 2, and running "python" gets a modern Python 3+.

All this needs is another directory on the PATH earlier (even /usr/local/bin), and a "python" link in there which points at /usr/bin/python3. So, eg:

ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

installed as part of a "modern-python" type package would be sufficient to flip over what happens when you run "python".

There's a remaining surprise that "python" and "/usr/bin/python" are different, but it seems to me that's the *least* surprise possible in this situation, created over 10 years ago, of releasing a very incompatible successor to Python 2, ie Python 3. For better or worse, that degree of incompatibility permanently forked the language into Python 2 and Python 3; it's just that finally, 10 years later, the Python 3 fork is winning out.

Ewen

USB-C power negotiation however… makes the Linux x86 early-boot code sound simple and reasonable in comparison. Cables have their own CPUs, voltages aren't fixed, the hardware has to be prepared to put up to 100 watts into a tiny, fully bidirectional connector (and it's already infamous for doing it in the wrong direction too often - your phone will probably make a futile attempt to charge your laptop at some point). The technology's a disaster at every level.

Filesystems don't need specific hardware either. Wouldn't it be nice if Btrfs had RAID5/6 regression tests?

Some of the recent fixes will help, though.

> They are kind of apps that you run once, say "ok pretty", but never run for the
> second time.

I do use Weather occasionally., however I quite often fire up Maps to just lookup some place.

> GNOME Clocks is borderline usable

I do find this very useful (and have used similar tools in the past) and have a number of timezones set up in it.

Of course there are reasons why I'd rather use the apps than some website.

I wonder how well Qt Creator would parse this new output of GCC. It didn't do it well previously, especially for long messages about templates. Perhaps on the new format it will break even more. :-( On the other hand in future perhaps Qt Creator can use this cool new json-based machine-readable format.

I'd be careful there ... I've had my differences with Cyberax, but I see *you* as closer to a troll than him...

Remember my "cheap, fast, good" comment? Free speech is no use when you're dying from an easily-cured illness because you're too poor to afford the treatment. Value systems differ, and yours seems badly out-of-kilter with mine, and probably Cyberax's. Free Speech is worthless, if you lack the resources to make yourself heard.

Cheers,
Wol

Cobol is alive too, so python2 should be safe. I guess now's as good a time as any to set up your job security :p

I guess your python2 code never had an issue with text encoding ? Perhaps you were very careful to do all the correct calls where needed, or perhaps you were lucky with your input data. It's much harder to get things wrong with python3. To me that was py3's biggest selling point, but other people will have different favorite features (including some making code more concise or performant).

Also, it's unfair to complain that removal of deprecated stuff doesn't yield improvements on day 1. It takes time to take advantage of the cleaned up code. For example removing support for classic classes doesn't bring anything by itself, but it opens the door to improvements down the road.

Also, the dichotomy between "us-based" and "offshore" is tiring, for the vast majority of internet users who don't live in the US. I know Slate targets an american audience, but the US isn't the only country capable of producing large reputable companies with clear ownership. And the US doesn't top my list of privacy-protecting countries. I'm tired of things like us-based information sources using farenheit and miles despite the fact most of their audience is outside the US and using SI units.

> I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.
In the US right now the "free speech advocates" almost invariably turn out to be Nazis/racists or crazies.

> I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.
Nope. I saw that the value of self-controlled communication services is pretty much zero. GMail or Facebook turned out to be more helpful.

And if you want to compete about who lived through more civil disturbance then you'll probably lose.

To be complete, that leaves the case where one does not care about the result (type T in your example), and simply ignores it.

Of course the Rust compiler has a warning for that.

This thread started with

> A server in the hand is better than a flock of them in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit instead of yours.

I.e., this is about not running servers *in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit*.

I read *in the hand* as *under one's control*, as cited above. Physical location in one's house (a.k.a "at home") doesn't matter. In fact, you're right that running a server at home is usually not desirable in repressive situations.

> Don't move your excuses.

I don't move my excuses. My reaction was to your comment where you wrote

> > fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.
> TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.
> When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.

and equated "moaning about freedom of speech" with "spewing neo-Nazi propaganda". This bold equation was the one that I reacted to.

I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.

> > Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
> No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

You changed context by deleting your snarky comment that this replied to. FTR:

> > And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.

Well, since that's the case: I retract my expressed opinion that you wrote a complacant comment. That is not a fitting term, and here's not the proper place to express what I think about this. It seems that we live in different worlds, and since that is the case, I'll stop participating in this thread.

You cannot make a library fool proof, fools are too ingenious.

You can only tell the fool that he has been foolish.

Returning error codes are for telling the caller that something they couldn't possibly know about, has occurred. eg. Some external process has deleted the file, so open cannot succeed, so return ENOENT.

Precondition asserts are for telling the caller that there is a bug in their program that can only be fixed by a new version of their program.

Of course any part of a process can kill a process, this is a fact of programming life.

Divide by zero, dereference null.... do you want the CPU to ignore those errors and just womble on doing stupider and stupider things.... sometimes working, sometimes doing rubbish, sometimes dying?

Attempting to detect and unwind every possible flavour of stupid on the part of the caller merely creates an untested and untestable spaghetti of error handling code.

I get infuriated by people who write such spaghetti... and then never even check the error code, and just cast it to void. Experience tells me whenever I see that pattern... I will find bugs.

Far far more opportunities for security flaws and leaks to hide in that stuff.

People get horribly confused between "something unexpected came in over the wire from an external system" vs "your program has a bug and will do wrong _every time_ until you get off your butt and fix it".

An assert should _only_ be used for second thing, and should _always_ die as there is no other sane and reliable way of recovering.

Don't move your excuses.

> Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
Don't move the goal posts.

> And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.

> > Setting up a mail server often is time-consuming, ad hoc, and brittle; despite technical literacy and the hours I poured in, I continue to have problems with my e-mail delivery.
> Suddenly, the problem came into focus: Alyssa Rozenzweig is worthless at basic computing.

Proof: "an email server is basic computing".

qed.

It's not really getting any more popular.

Sidenote, in Russia cloud services advertised that they are police-proof. It's very typical for corrupt local government to confiscate physical servers as a "material evidence" in a drummed-up criminal case. Even if there's no crime committed and the company is cleared in the court, its work can be paralyzed for months.

And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

Many years ago, I had acquaintances in China who ended up in prison because they exercised their ideal of "freedom of speech". I think they see it different than you, too.

Please note: Neither the USA nor other 1st world countries are the whole world.

Cheers,
Joachim

PS: I'm from a country where neo-Nazi propaganda is illegal even on your own server, and I think that's OK. We learned the hard way that there are limits to freedom of speech *because* it is so valuable.

I see two main issues.

The first is software. Most MTAs are excessively configurable. Most of us don't need that. A packaged and configure MTA that would let me easily try a new version, or roll-back to the old version would remove a lot of the admin headaches that have been mentioned. This would be given away as a loss-leader. It would probably include IMAP service and a web-mail interface (roundcube??).

The second is connectivity and is primarily about trust, though for people who have obnoxious ISPs, firewall-transition is also important.
Allowing every host to send unauthenticated mail to every other host is one of the reasons that email is a pain. We can go part-way without going to full centralization.
Maybe there is a business opportunity to provide authenticated SMTP services.
My MTA-in-a-box connects to the service that I pay a small sum for, authenticates as me, and delivers email. Then it uses the ETRN STMP command to switch roles and starts receiving email addressed for me.
The provider establishes reciprocal agreements with other providers - they promise to only send authenticated and paid for email, and agree to receive similarly authenticated email.
These providers also to spam tagging, and maybe even filtered when they have 99.9% certainty that it is unwanted.
I pay about $20 a year for a domain name. I could easily pay a similar amount for trouble-free self-hosted email.

Down here in our small corner of Latin America, some of us still value free speech because some of us have seen (as recently as the 1980s and 1990s) our relatives being tortured and killed for investigating government corruption...

Cría cuervos, e te bicarán los ojos...

Human beings do this with politics as much as technology: let those who really groove on communications electronics figure out how to both design and regulate my handset, so I can bother my pretty head* with other matters.

Possibly what's needful is a discussion on how we manage to put "enough" time into limiting the centralization of information management. Promises to be a challenge.

*It's not actually pretty.