mackwinston

@mackwinston@feddit.uk

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mackwinston,

Such a shameless and brazen attempt to bribe the older electorate.

mackwinston,

Presumably it has taken over a year because:

Cdr Dominic Murphy, head of the Counter Terrorism Command, said it had been an “extremely complex investigation”

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....

mackwinston,

An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)


<span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sh: ls: command not found
</span>

So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:


<span style="color:#323232;"># rm -rf / tmp/*.log
</span><span style="color:#323232;">^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># ls -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sh: ls: command not found
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># stat /bin/ls
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sh: stat: command not found
</span>

A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

mackwinston,

The chances of an accident while flying on an airline are probably a lot lower than the chances of having an accident going to and from the pub.

mackwinston,

That’s nothing new, that’s the very basis of how a firm works out how to price an item or service, at the maximum price the market will bear. It has been this way since the year dot.

Collaborating with “competitors” however must be prevented or the market won’t work. (This is the reason we have anti-monopoly laws, and anti-collusion laws). The laws exist already they just have to be enforced.

mackwinston,

It was the kid breaking into the substation to get his frisbee that was stuck in one of the insulators that did it for me. “Jimmmmmyyyy!!!” while smoke was pouring out of his shoes.

mackwinston,

Post-industrial depression landscape in the Cumbrian mountains? Or Yorkshire? The Pennines?

mackwinston,

You can get soft silicone ear pickers with a built in camera now so you can see what you’re scooping.

mackwinston,

Carrier grade NAT. For instance, on our local mobile phone network, thousands of handsets will have the same public IP address.

mackwinston,

As a workaround, you could use OBS and use OBS’s virtual camera so Discord is streaming what it thinks is a camera, and set up whatever you want to share on your desktop through OBS.

mackwinston,

How old is “older?”

I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).

mackwinston,

Sigh. Yet another thing that must be sacrificed on the altar of the almighty motor car.

Opinion: The small but crucial detail that will lead to Feddit.UK's inevitable downfall.

First off, I understand that this isn’t our top priority right now, but I am scared that this can will be kicked far too down the road. I also don’t want to cause a storm of drama here, nor a split. No hard feelings here to Emperor, Tom or Albatross....

mackwinston, (edited )

Why not just rename the instance, instead of creating a completely new one? Rename it, make sure feddit.uk still redirects there, job done. People are lazy and won’t migrate unless they have to - I think you underestimate the difficulty in migration (getting everyone to do it. Just look at migrating off reddit to lemmy - so many people declaring how they hated the changes at reddit but how many actually moved? 1% of them? 0.1% of them? 0.01%? I would expect the number is closer to 0.01% than 1%). Just rename feddit.uk but keep all the users and all the communities so it’s literally zero effort for the users and communities, even their bookmarks will just continue to work with a properly done redirection.

Also - I’m picking nits here - but “Feddit” isn’t infringing a copyright, you cannot copyright a word. It would be a trademark infringement not a copyright infringement. The law around trademarks is quite different to copyrights. Even if Reddit gets wind of feddit.uk, the likely outcome will be a “cease and desist”, and feddit.uk will have to be renamed, not some kind of catastrophe. Reddit’s only going to go to the effort of pursuing a trademark case in the UK courts if the feddit.uk admins are completely intransigent and refuse to take action.

mackwinston,

The UK isn’t going to extradite someone over a civil trademark case. (Does the extradition treaty even cover civil actions?) Reddit would likely have to bring a trademark case in the UK.

Fedxit: Migrating to a new instance

Sooo if you skim the previous posts on here, you’ll know that Feddit.uk’s only Admin (@tom) has been missing for a couple of months and in that time we were defederated by lemmy.world (although we’re back now) and we are one upgrade behind (just a minor fix) with one much bigger one whistling down the pipeline that may...

mackwinston,

Looking forward to wave 3. Too bad but it has to be done.

One of the weaknesses with Lemmy I think is that communities themselves aren’t distributed - a problem solved by both Usenet and FidoNet decades ago (for instance, a FidoNet bulletin board ceasing meant that the community there would have to be moved to another BBS - the FidoNet echoes (“communities”) were themselves distributed so as a user you could just move to a new BBS and whole communities wouldn’t have to be moved. Similarly with Usenet - your usenet server get shut down? Just move to a new one and subscribe to all the same groups.

mackwinston,

The OP is clearly using hyperbole. But only 1% of the welfare bill goes on unemployment benefits, so even if absolutely everyone on unemployment benefits is cheating and you cut them off, you don’t save much. In reality the majority of people on unemployment benefits are not cheating the system - a system that already sanctions the unemployed for not actively seeking work.

mackwinston,

What’s CSAM? (I don’t want to google it, it sounds “risky” from the context).

Common global rules needed ahead of ‘flying taxi’ boom, UK regulator says (archive.ph)

Sir Stephen Hillier, chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, said the travel industry is at an “inflection point” and needs global co-operation ahead of the “widespread” adoption of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) designed to carry passengers on short trips....

mackwinston,

Not only that, but they will make an ungodly racket while doing so. Multi propellers all turning at a slightly different RPM, with all the annoying beat frequencies this will create. They will also likely be almost as expensive as helicopters (only a very small amount of a helicopter’s cost is its fuel, the overwhelming majority is maintenance and insurance).

mackwinston,

Never. We had a work lunch and one of the guys a few days later said “I just tested positive for covid, better test”. About 2 days later I was testing positive, but none of us in the household ever had any symptoms other than testing positive (about 4 days in, the LFT was going bright red as soon as the liquid reached the test line). None of us ever had so much as a sniffle. The guy we got it off was really rough for a few days.

mackwinston,

A road rage conviction should result in a lifetime ban or until a medical professional can certify that the person is mentally fit to drive.

mackwinston,

They both do significant business in the UK. To continue doing business in the UK, they must abide with UK competition laws.

mackwinston,

I’ve never forgiven that arsehole for what he did to Andrew Sachs.

Road casualties have become normal in Britain. But there is another way (www.theguardian.com)

“Poll after poll has shown that the biggest reason for people not wanting to cycle is perceived danger. And anyone who has dared to ride a bike on unprotected roads will soon discover that a large part of this danger comes from pure illegality, not least the vast proportion of drivers who speed, especially on residential...

mackwinston,

I love the arguments about tolerances, how “having to stare at the speedometer will make things less safe”.

The average 17 year old is expected to be able to drive at a steady speed while dividing attention effectively and NOT staring at the speedometer, and demonstrate this skill on their driving test. So basically all the people going on about how they will “have to stare at the speedo” are saying: “Speed limits shouldn’t be enforced because I’m too incompetent to safely drive at the speed limit”. It makes me think that it would be a good idea that driving licenses really expire at their expiration date, requiring a new driving test.

Anyone who thinks driving at the speed limit needs to stare at the speedo seriously needs some remedial training from a driving instructor.

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