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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Sorry, but this is completely wrong.

    Windows has ACLs and they are an important part of Windows administration, and used extensively for managing file permissions.

    Windows has supported ACLs on NTFS since Windows NT & NTFS were released in 1993 (possibly partly influenced by AIX ACLs in the late 80s influenced by VMS ACLs introduced the early 80s).

    ACLs were not introduced to standard POSIX until c.1998, and NFS and Linux filesystems didn’t get them until 2003. In fact, the design of the NFSv4 ACL standard was heavily influenced by the design of NTFS/Windows ACL model – a specific decision by the designers to model it more like NTFS rather than AIX/POSIX.

    Technically, at the filesystem level, exFAT also provides support for ACLs, but I am not sure if any implementation actually makes use of this feature (not even Windows AFAIK, certainly not any desktop version).


  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlCircles do not exist
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    1 year ago

    Damn, so what’s the name of the shape that’s a flat donut with an inner and outer circular perimeters? i.e. a filled circle with another smaller radius circular area subtracted from it. Or 2D cross section of a torus seen perpendicularly to the plane that intersects the widest part of the torus. A squished donut, or chubby circle, if you like.


  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlCircles do not exist
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    1 year ago

    And many “circles” aren’t circles either, but 2D torus approximations. The edge of a true circle is made of infinitesimally small points so would be invisible when drawn. And even if you consider a filled circle, how could you be sure you aren’t looking at a 1-torus with an infinitessimally small hole? Or an approximation of all the set of all points within a circle?

    Clearly, circles are a scam.



  • The modern definition we use today was cemented in 1998, along with the foundation of the Open Source Initiative. The term was used before this, but did not have a single well-defined definition. What we might call Open Source today, was mostly known as “free software” prior to 1998, amongst many other terms (sourceware, freely distributable software, etc.).

    Listen again to your 1985 example. You’re not hearing exactly what you think you’re hearing. Note that in your video example the phrase used is not “Open-Source code” as we would use today, with all its modern connotations (that’s your modern ears attributing modern meaning back into the past), but simply “open source-code” - as in “source code that is open”.

    In 1985 that didn’t necessarily imply anything specific about copyright, licensing, or philosophy. Today it carries with it a more concrete definition and cultural baggage, which it is not necessarily appropriate to apply to past statements.


  • In the latest version of the emergency broadcast specification (WEA 3.0), a smart phone’s GPS capabilities (and other location features) may be used to provide “enhanced geotargeting” so precise boundaries can be set for local alerts. However, the system is backwards compatible – if you do not have GPS, you will still receive an alert, but whether it is displayed depends on the accuracy of the location features that are enabled. If the phone determines it is within the target boundary, the alert will be displayed. If the phone determines it is not within the boundary, it will be stored and may be displayed later if you enter the boundary.

    If the phone is unable to geolocate itself, the emergency message will be displayed regardless. (Better to display the alert unnecessarily than to not display it at all).

    The relevant technical standard is WEA. Only the latest WEA 3.0 standard uses phone-based geolocation. Older versions just broadcast from cell towers within the region, and all phones that are connected to the towers will receive and display the alerts. You can read about it in more detail here.



  • Open source software is also notably lacking from the impact assessment documents, but I suspect this is because it was intended to not impact open source software at all. It seems the legislation intends to exclude open-source software, but doesn’t clearly and unambiguously exclude open source software that is developed or contributed to in a commercial setting (e.g by paid contributors).

    I think the wording seems clear enough to determine the intent, but the ambiguity surrounding the “commercial activity” part might necessitate trial (which nobody wants to risk), or might lead to poor implementation of this directive in the laws of member states. I think we should be campaigning to improve the wording, not reject it outright.


  • Ah, OK. So it seems it’s a case of the spirit of the text not matching the precise technical wording used. IMO, the legislation clearly intends to exclude freely-distributable open-source software, but the issue lies with what constitutes a commercial activity. (I’ve not yet checked the rest of the document to see if it clearly defines “commercial activity” in relation to the legislation.)

    TBH, it seems that what is needed here is a clarification and tightening up of definitions, not wholesale rejection of the legislation.


  • Why is everyone up in arms about this?

    The legislation specifically excludes open source software. Has nobody in this discussion actually read the proposed legislation?

    From the current proposal legislation text:

    In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable.

    There is also a clause that states those using open source software in commercial products must report any vulnerabilities found to the maintainer.


  • Don’t forget pipes: |

    cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3

    …will run all 3 in parallel: cmd3 can be processing cmd’s output while cmd2 is generating new data, and so on.

    How much parallism actually occurs depends on the nature of the processing being done, but it is a powerful technique, which can be combined with the others to great effect.


  • This needs to be fixed, IMO.

    It’s not at all obvious to newcomers. If you signed up on a smaller server (as you’re advised to do), it makes it look like there’s not much going on on Lemmy. It also makes it harder to find active communities and discourages participation.

    So now everyone and their dog is building Lemmy community explorers. This functionality should be baked into Lemmy itself, and available on every instance, so you can just browse and search all communities (seeing the true community sizes) and simply click join and be done. No confusing redirection to other instances, or having to copy and paste weird snippets of text into search boxes in other tabs.



  • Funny how you say it’s not a problem, then go on to describe the problem that needs to be dealt with. Dealing with scaling is a problem, and it’s a problem that costs money.

    Posts like this: https://lemm.ee/post/58472 suggest it is a problem. The rise in traffic seen by Lemmy in the last few days is absolutely tiny compared to a site like reddit, and already instances are struggling to cope. The recent growth in user registrations represents only about 0.007% of reddit’s active user base. (~60K new Lemmy users vs 861,000,000 active monthly reddit users). A site like reddit costs millions to run.

    There are 190+ Lemmy instances last time I checked, yet almost all the brunt of this load has been borne by a handful of servers, which see an inordinate amount of traffic while 100+ other servers sit around idle. Why should a handful of “lucky” servers have to pay all the hosting costs? What if a volunteer-run instance explodes to reddit-like levels of popularity? It will simply fold, unless the volunteer has serious money to throw at the problem.



  • Active has a 48-hour cut-off, and the ranking function it uses seems to encourage the same few posts to stay at the top for 48 hours. It’s basically the same ranking as “Hot”, but using the timestamp of the last comment instead of the time of posting to decay its ranking over time.

    This means any comment activity whatsoever on a popular thread bumps it back up the rankings significantly, and I suspect leads to a kind of snowballing effect that keeps posts higher up. Ideally, it would use some metric based on user interactions over a time period to calculate a score of activity rather than solely the latest comment. In effect, it seems to act more like a “top from last 48 hours”. (Although I would add I’m a newbie to Lemmy, so might not yet have an accurate picture of its behaviour).

    Lemmy seemed to get much livelier for me when I switched my default to Hot, but I wish there was a way to disable the auto-updates (I’d rather see new items only on browser refresh). Active sort feels pretty stale to me.