I have a an automatic $2/mo donation to Wikipedia set up. Of all of the sites I’m more than willing to support with hard currency, it’s the one.

$2 isn’t much, but if we all do it, it’ll keep the best online resource for general information we have on the planet operating. Very worth it.

Some 25 years ago when the RIAA was going apeshit over online sharing of music they were happily suing people left and right.

At some point they argued that no computer should ever make a copy of music without a license. The opposition proceeded to demonstrate how computers work. They make many copies of data files while processing them in the CPU, RAM, cache, omin temp files, etc. The judge did temporarily order that only one canopy could be made, but after the education, said fine: if the RIAA wants to let it stand, then they can’t distribute via any computer systems anywhere by their own rules.

In the end, the case was dropped and computers got to keep processing data as per normal.

Can they rate GoT as two groups, first few seasons vs last couple of seasons? Then the first few might deserve to be in the top 25.

I try other options now and again. When something is better I use it. Until then, I have things to do with what works.

People continue to innvote, test, and develop new options. Someday one will eventually work out a superior approach that takes off among the general userbase.

I have a small home server that I occasionally push through huge batch processing jobs. During the pushes, I might collide with other projects that use a pretty big chunk of the RAM. So, to make sure it’s never a killer (just a major slow down), I made a 32GB swap file. If I need it, it’s there and disk is hella cheap.

This machine has never had a GUI installed. No browsers to complain about, just plain old data processing, stats models, and old skool computing.

Now, my worst case scenario was building a C++ program on a raspberry pi gen 1. That has 256MB of RAM. g++ ran out building, so I NFS mounted a huge disk from my desktop machine and made the swap file there. The build took a while… but the program ran fine after the week long build, no swap needed.

The problem is that it worked in the US for many decades. It’s the ghost of the capitalist powers fear mongering away to prevent citizens from taking control of their own labor.

Awesome. That’s the Geek Way.

Shadowrun shouldn’t be a documentary, but here we go.

Also: << the nerds aren’t going to do any of this shit, so… let’s look like the good guys by exempting them so we don’t look terrible when the nerds show how obviously this is all security theater >>

Ho boy. It’s been a few weeks since I caught one of these posts.

Classes are on hiatus, so the formal learning is decaying. I’m supposed to start B2.1 this fall. It’ll be quite a ride.

My reading is still improving. The vocabulary for core words is getting smoother so I can keep up with more sentences on things like readerboards.

My listening is actually improving more than I expected. I was listening to a student describe their engineering project and got about 90% of the description from the German. I’m more often able to pick up short sentences now, where a few months ago they were just a series of noises and no distinct words.

I’m up to book 9 of Dragonball. The translation from German continues. Of course, we’re entering the era where it’s mostly just powering up during fights, but there’s still the fun insults to learn. Vegeta is still the best for those.

Speaking. Oh, the speaking. Small stubs of sentences come, but the flow isn’t there yet.

I’m down to about 258 days until I can apply for a permanent residency… assuming I have the requisite language certificate by then.

My latest round is Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Railroad Tycoon II, Plants vs. Zombies, and a bit of TF2.

We still bust out the GameCube to play MarioKart Double Dash.

Exactly the problem: bandwidth and latency.

The radio frequencies these run at and the power they’re allowed to use limits them to very very low bandwidth for data transfer. They can’t even do a low bitrate audio stream.

What they can do is messaging without 3rd party oversight and with adhoc data links. They’re very very cool for offline networks, especially in places without extant infrastructure for transmissions.

That’s with a car, is it’s totally different.

If you had to push a Greek penteconter the whole way down that freeway, with occasional side trips for special requests, it might take you a long time too.

So from this headline I can only deduce:

1. there might have been a meeting of some sort.
2. I’ll wait for an adult to report on what might have happened

Why is a Republican taking photos of people in the bathroom again? Isn’t their ankle tracker for the last sexual assault conviction working?

Someone purposefully drove in a crowd at Pride today in my city. Aside from more rioting, what’s it going to take to get the TERFs and related scumbags to just leave people alone?

Online personalities are all too often broad brushing for likes. Many of them are racist themselves so they’ll seize any opportunity to throw that accusation at another.

My beef was with the way the Argentine team acted on the pitch and after the whistle. They did not play with good sportsmanship. Turning their backs on the winning team during the lift (except that one player who faced the stage with good character) was the last straw for me. Argentina’s team had massive help from the refs in earlier games and acted like spoiled jerks. What this says about Argentina as a whole is nothing, but the team they sent were mostly assholes.

We’ve been using those on Linux for a very long time. They just work.

Shit. I’ve been on Debian for decades now. Maybe I’m just an old soul… Or I’m just lazy. I don’t even configure my DE anymore. The OS install of today will be wiped in no time, so it’s not worth being too attached.

I did a tour with OpenBSD about 2000-2004. It works just fine, with a much reduced ecosystem of pre built packages, just because of the quantity of devs around.

I saw Dragonfly when it started and I’m glad to hear it’s still going. The idea held a lot of promise.

It works fine for the job it’s designed to do. It does it in a significantly more monolithic manner than historic UNIX architectures and approaches (System V, BSD init, etc) did similar jobs.

It doesn’t suck from a “does it work perspective” in my eyes. Whether it’s a good long term approach given the monolithic nature binding more tools and services to a single framework should be a continued debate among the community.

If you don’t want to use it, then pick a distro that doesn’t use it. If you can’t find a distro that doesn’t use it, start one. If your distro gets popular than Systemd will be sidelined over time.

Historical References: X11/Xfree86/Wayland, telnet, MySQL/MariaDB, Linux/BSD kernels, etc.