Notices by Poul-Henning Kamp (bsdphk@fosstodon.org)

@graydon @cstross

I am increasingly convinced we need a tax on stored data.

Even a little as 1$/MB/year would seriously change decisions about what is stored and how long it is stored.

It would also bring into light who holds how much data.

It's weird to find out that there are no traces left of a deci-famous CPU you spent a lot of time debugging at assembler level.

And really ?

Has nobody saved /any/ manuals for the CCI Power6/32 Tahoe computer which gave name to the 4.3BSD UNIX release ?

(Aka Unisys 7000/40, Harris HCX-9 etc.)

@karinjiri @fuzzykb

I've always felt it was a mistake that init(8) couldn't take care of this.

It should read a /etc/programs file and do pretty much exactly what it already does for /etc/ttys

This website asks what happened in 1971, showing a lot of graphs:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The answer is: Rich people started treating other people as things and focused only on money.

Your periodic reminder that #microsoft is not a competent or serious company:

https://blog.orange.tw/posts/2025-01-worstfit-unveiling-hidden-transformers-in-windows-ansi/

(@bagder is remarkably restrained in the quoted responses. I would have gone off the rails, but do not need to, because we decided on day one that #varnishcache would not run on Windows).

If you think that is not bad enough, read the Cyber Safety Review Board's report about the Microsoft Exchange clowncar:

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review_of_the_Summer_2023_MEO_Intrusion_Final_508c.pdf

@theregister

FreeBSD boots on the Lenovo T14s with a Snapdragon CPU as of yesterday :-)

@Ruth_Mottram

We probably had a narrow window, no more than three decades, to try to transform our western democracies into something ecologically sustainable.

But there were no short term profits in it, so we didn't.

As Brecht let Jenny sing in the finale:

"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."

Today US voters condemned any land less than 8 meters above sea level, world-wide, because they think junk-food has become too expensive.

2/2

@Ruth_Mottram

Personally I have no contingency plan in front of me, because this is not a deviation from the trajectory I expected.

Democracy only flourished X the costs of broad increases in standard of living could be externalized (ie: conquests, colonies, slaves, overfishing, pollution etc).

(I'm not sure if 'X' is "because" or "while" and that is only of academic interest anyway.)

In other words: Democracy seems to be a luxury item.

1/2

I wonder how many Europeans are staring at some document with "contingency plan" in the title right now...

I'm amazed that there has been zero coverage of this:

EU's new Product Liability Directive got voted through last thursday.

No later than two years from now, software, stand-alone, cloud or embedded are subject to "no-fault liability" (ie: doesn't matter how or why, only that it is defective.)

Here's the directive:

https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/PE-7-2024-INIT/en/pdf

Gentlemen, start your panic…

PS: Yes, there is a FOSS exemption, but only "outside commercial activity". (Ie: The guy in Nebraska but not RedHat)

Lots of common sense here...

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/kelsey_hightower_civo/?td=rt-3a

@lina @thephd

Yes, I've seen lots of quality code written by people who tried to do so over the last 40 years.

But as I said: I have never seen a silver bullet hit.

Rust is absolutely a step forward, but it is not a silver bullet either.

And as I already said, I have nothing against it's use in FreeBSD.

The only thing I resist is wasting time and effort on importing it into the FreeBSD tree, just because we as a project have this "src or forget it" attitude.

1/2

@lina @thephd

As far as The C Language Standard:

I think that is one of the worst failures of stewardship I in IT history.

It's 20 bloody 24 and we still cannot tell the C-compiler that we want this struct packed&padded a specific way and that the fields should be explicitly little- or big-endian, so that it matches the hardware specification or protocol format ?

But nooo, can't have that in C.

I guess nobody uses C-programs to exchange data outside their program ?

Ass-hats!

If you are a web-dev, you need to read this, so should your boss (and then he should put you on a 56K modem)

https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet

BTW, am I the only one who sees the connection between trojaning the autocrap process for generating tar-balls and "Reflections on Trusting Trust" ?

It bugs me to no end, that media describe the evacuation of everybody from the burning passenger plane as "miraculous"

Passenger planes are designed to be evacuated in less than 90 seconds.

The crew is taught and trained how to do that, and they will do that.

Guess why they demand you stow all your crap during take-off and landing ?

90 seconds, that's why.

And if a drunk idiot slows things down, he will be pushed or thrown down the slide, head-first.

Dont be the drunk idiot on a plane.

@mjg59

The worst part of ACPI is that they invented at stupid crappy unique language for it.

The world would be a better place if they had just picked an already existing scripting language like Tcl, Lua or even Python...