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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I remember being forced to learn this in university.

    I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

    And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

    If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

    At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.




  • If the disks are of the same type, check their serial numbers.

    Once I set up a RAID with four 120GB disks. Back then, they were basically close to cutting edge technology as a 16TB drive would be today, and expensive as f-ck. Within a week, two disks failed, bringing the raid down. One failed in the evening, the other in the morning. When I called about warranty, I noticed that all four disks were within ±20 in their serial numbers, and got suspicious. I got the two drives replaced (with different, wide spread serial numbers), set up the RAID again, only to have a fail within less than ten days again - another one of the original set dead. This time I asked not only for a replacement of the next dead one, but also of the fourth, which was declined. I cut my losses and set up a way smaller RAID with only three disks. The fourth is in a drawer somewhere, wit a big red warning sticker.


  • Treczoks@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlDid we kill Linux's killer feature?
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    10 months ago

    Snaps and Flatpaks auto updates automatically

    Nope. Firefox does not, because either Firefox is running, or the PC is down or sleeping. So I have to close Firefox, open a shell, update that snap shit, and restart Firefox. Which pisses me off to no end, apart from the point that snaps are a waste of resources and a bad idea in general.


  • Treczoks@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux on a Commodore C64
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    10 months ago

    What a joke:

    go to Preferences | Settings | Cartridges | RAM Expansion Module, enable it and select the file reufile.linux, and make sure to select the correct size (16MiB)

    So this only works if one adds a f-ing 16MB RAM cartridge to the system?

    This is not “Linux running on a C64”. This is Linux running on a platform that marginally includes some C64.




  • “This incident demonstrates the evolving challenges of cybersecurity in the face of sophisticated attacks. We continue to work directly with government agencies on this issue, and maintain our commitment to continue sharing information at Microsoft Threat Intelligence blog."

    Translation: Fixing bugs cost way to much more money than just leaving them in, so in order to save the profits, we just wait them out. If the shit hits the fan, we can still start looking into the issue and maybe get some PR coverage to distract the public.

    But we still happily support government agencies to exploit the barndoor-sized holes in our software for whatever nefarious reasons they have because they pay us for that.



  • For many it is simply frustrating because it is not Windows. Just think about how many people have a hard time already to get the most simple things done on Windows. Can you imagine those people to switch to another platform? Those people who cannot find their banking app anymore when something moved the icon on the desktop to another position?