I definitely think if you want to use `cat` then just go ahead, it's fine. Sometimes these things are a power play, a way to distinguish between people who know the social codes and those who don't. In this case, it probably had a reasonable origin even if it's now more of a way to beat on newcomers. On old systems, memory was limited, disk was slow and forking was expensive. Saving a process in a script or one liner was a noticeable improvement performance-wise.
I learned some bash from an old-timer who would write an infinite-loop like this:
while :; do
# loop body here
done
This works because the `:` is a way to set a label, and it implicitly returns 0. It's just a weird wrinkle of the language. So, why not do `while true`? On old systems, `true` was not a builtin and would call `/usr/bin/true`. Writing the loop this way saves a process fork on each iteration.
On a modern system, you'd be hard pushed to measure the difference, so it really doesn't matter which style you prefer.
No need to ask for a source. The word "label" in the POSIX shell documentation only occurs in the description of `case`, and it doesn't happen in the manual page for bash, dash, zsh, etc.
I had a couple of Sirius (AKA Victor) machines that were cast offs from my father's office given to me to play with. The first one was twin floppy, and the second had a 5MB hard drive. When I got the second one I think the first one got binned. When the second one broke, I bust it up to use the PSU and HDD on another computer. Of course, I really wish now that I'd kept at least one of them, but you never know at the time what would have value in the future and what is just junk.
My first exposure to "real" computers was with Victor machines. I may well have one in a pile somewhere still. I worked for a shop that was a Victor dealer, they had the fabled "PC compatible floppy drive" in a machine there. Later I was one of the few people with a PC that could read Victor disks; Copy2PC card For Tha Win there.
They did "high memory" and iirc had slightly higher resolution text modes, which made them wonderful for spreadsheets.
> All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes.
I was at Google Cloud Next London yesterday and I hate to disappoint you but _everything_ seemed to be about AI. The keynote was about AI. The decor was all AI generated. Each breakout had to mention AI, to the point where a couple of speakers joked that they _weren't_ going to talk about AI. It was a bit depressing.
I was at Google's recent Generative AI conference and their latest and greatest LLM can't even answer the "Sally has 3 brothers" question, embarrassing.
I was at school in the 80s and 90s in the UK and this brings back very fond memories of a highly eccentric Latin teacher I had, who mastered this technique and used it frequently. The other memorable thing about him was how he'd tell us he was going to do some photocopying and head off with no paperwork, only to return 5 minutes later still with no paperwork but smelling of pipe smoke.
Some more modern classrooms had the greenish boards that were a continuous loop that you could roll, but the older ones had black ones that were extremely heavy (maybe slate?). Some of them had a counterbalanced pair on ropes and pulleys in wooden runners, so that when you slid one up the other would come down. I remember in one lesson the ropes snapped and the front-most board came whistling down like a guillotine past the face of the maths teacher and landed with a bang like a gunshot. He was unhurt luckily but was extremely pale and shaken - understandably!
I too was at school in the UK during the 80s and 90s and don't have any fond memories. Maybe because it wasn't a school with Latin in the curriculum. I had two science teachers: a young one and one nearing retirement.
The young science teacher spent the whole lesson writing from his notes onto the blackboard, while the whole class just copied it verbatim. His only interaction was asking whether everyone had finished, before wiping one-half of the board clean to continue.
The other science teacher had us read from our textbooks all lesson, and his only interaction was to get annoyed when we made so much racket he couldn't read the newspaper. He always seemed the smarter of the two teachers to me.
I went to one of the best schools in England allegedly. We had a new English teacher who spent a whole year doing the silent notes on the blackboard thing. He would come in early so he could get a head start. We also had a PE/French teacher who couldn't speak French. Shit teachers are everywhere.
I was in a school in the UK during the 00s and I have OK memories. It had Latin in the curriculum, so I think we can conclude Latin does not correlate with fondness of memories.
The teachers used annoying 'SMART' boards and if they ever got board marker ink on them they would freak out.
I considered one of those rollerboards from Wilson and Garden, Ltd, in Glasgow, UK, for my home office. Somehow working with ipad+pencil is just not the same.
You can also get magnet paint, so you can put up magnet thingies. I don't think blackboard paint is as durable as real blackboards, but then, different use cases.
I've noticed that the offline experience on Spotify is utterly broken and has been for a while. I remember it being quite good when I first started using it, but it just seems to have got worse to the point of being unusable. I figured it was maybe just Android but my kids who are iPhone users said the same.
We live in a rural area and use Spotify on the move a lot (on buses, car journeys, bike rides) and are often without signal so offline is essential. Maybe Spotify devs assume everyone has good 5G/Wifi and never actually test it out?
Whatever the reason, having the option to make my own offline library to work around deficiencies in the service I'm paying £16.99 a month for seems like fair use to me (yeah, I know UK law has no such concept but I can sell the idea to myself at least).
I might even dig out my old MP3 player as mentioned in other comments.
Offline? Try listening to a podcast. It has to be one of the worst pieces of software I have to interact with regularly. The second last podcast would skip back to the same timestamp every time I switched audio or exited the app. If they are going to charge money and still push adds at least give me the option to use an alternate client.
You didn't really specify how it's "utterly broken". As an anecdote, I've been listening to Spotify a lot whenever I drive or go jogging, all offline since I don't have data and it's been working well for me.
The "why" here ... or at least the reason for me to flash my Chromebook BIOS and install Gallium ... was because my Chromebook went EoL by Google and I wanted to see if I can keep it going for a while.
Gallium is an amazing piece of work, and the documentation is superb, but it's starting to show that it's on a very out of date base and there's no sign of a new version for some time. The efforts seem to have slowed down, which is a shame.
It leaves me wondering if the main patches and drivers in the kernel fork could ever be merged upstream. Maybe there's some technical or legal reason why not, or maybe it's just the work required and nobody has the time.
Either way, I hope it remains possible to run old Chromebooks for a while yet! They are often decent, cheap hardware if a little slow.
Yes , there are a lot of quirks in the chrome book platform . I have a 2015 hp 11e and nothing works on it but chromeos, win7 and gallium. No Ubuntu , FreeBSD , NetBSD or red hat .
Much more detail here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60864283
The BBC claims that the 16yo was doxxed by others in his group after falling out with them. They also say that security researchers have been tracking him for at least a year.
Honestly, that little kid is gonna be in for a hard time. I can't see a way they don't give him a prison sentence for this. Being 16 means he would be 17-18 when convicted and therefore going to a Young Offenders Institute - which are basically gladiator schools and with them saying in the news he has millions, the kids in the YOIs will harass him to try and get some of the money even if it was seized since they'll think there is still some lying around.
But nice to see the old homage of "You can spend millions on security but some teenager in a bedroom is still going to hack you." is still true.
So in the UK there are different things that happen depending on your age for the majority of crimes.
In Scotland:
0-6 - Nothing, not criminally liable.
6-16 - Gets sent to the children's panel and they'll normally waive it off.
16+ - Adult court.
In Scotland they're an adult at 16.
In England:
0-10 Nothign, notcriminally liable.
10-18 - Youth Court for minor stuff, crown court for major stuff.
In England they're an adult at 18 but they still end up in the normal system when they're above 16 as far as I understand. (I'm Scottish, so most people I knew who went through that system did it in Scotland)
And in the UK there are time bars, so if you get arrested and charged they have to have you in court in a certain amount of time. Unlike in the US system, the game of delaying going to court doesn't work or even really allowed. The court date is set and that is when it goes to court. And if you were arrested for something at a certain age then you would be convicted based on that as far as I know. However, if you get arrested at 20 and convicted once you're 21 you go from a YOI to a HMP. There is no real difference other than the HMP is more relaxed as older convicts don't feel the need to prove themselves daily.
I am not sure what you're referring to but the strategy of delaying going to court is a may strategy used in US Courts. The state may have to be able to go to court within a speedy time but it doesn't stop the defendant delaying it.
Secondly, no the US protections are not stronger than the UK. The UK protections are that strong that if they don't get you to court in a certain amount of time they can't convict you. It's 6 months if you're held in custody and longer if you're on bail. It's quite common from my understand via documentaries of prison/jails that people spend a year in jail waiting for their trial and it's possible for multiple years if bailed.
A crime of this order with the money damages? 6 months jail sentence. That’s what other kids got. If he was 15 it would have been better for him. 16 is where is goes to the normal justice system.
Jup, just like Lauri Love, years of anguish with threats to go to a punitive jail system not aimed at rehabilitation or even simply protection, but designed for punishment and profit.
Of course when US citizens kill people in the UK they just claim diplomatic immunity and flee the country.
The collision became the subject of a diplomatic dispute when Sacoolas left the country shortly after the incident and the US embassy said she had diplomatic immunity as the wife of a US agent working in the UK.[8][16][14][29] According to Sky News someone at the US embassy told Sacoolas to leave the UK.[30] The Washington Examiner reported that Jonathan Sacoolas did not work for the National Security Agency, and that the Sacoolas family lived in Northern Virginia in the area of the Central Intelligence Agency Langley headquarters.[31]
Dunn's parents were advised by two leading specialist lawyers on diplomatic immunity, Mark Stephens and Geoffrey Robertson. They advised that Anne Sacoolas was not entitled to diplomatic immunity, as her husband was not listed as a diplomat. Furthermore, they contended, diplomatic immunity no longer applied upon Sacoolas's return to her home country; therefore, it would be possible to take civil action in the US courts. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, also stated that diplomatic immunity no longer applied.[32][33] Dunn's parents decided to travel to the US to "fight for change" and seek the return of Sacoolas to the UK.[34]
I think that's more of a quirk than anything, they were able to leave the country before getting charged for the act. They were directly related to someone with the US government (CIA) which muddied the water. If it were a normal citizen, they probably wouldn't be afforded the same special treatment.
That's the funny bit, she is a normal citizen. She wasn't working for the CIA, it was her husband. Which is a slap in the face to the family of the boy who was killed.
The comment is also true and is talking about a real fact that America conducts extra judicial killings around the world and generally has no care for civilian life.
It's disturbing to see mentions of this simple fact get attacked.
I was talking to a friend recently about the hours spent playing these games, and how we'd tape or glue pieces of graph paper together to make large hand-drawn maps of the games. I wish I still had those!
I have so much love for those games, and so many good memories of them. Also, I loaded them up in an emulator recently and I'd forgotten how hard they are! No save games, very limited lives, so many ways to die, so much skill needed to get jumps and moves just right, and often no time to think. And when you die, you lose everything.
Yeah, games get more brutal the further we go back.
Never had microtransactions in my day, bah! I say spending a lot of my childhood money in Arcade machines haha. Which are equally brutal in giving you maybe 1 minute of game play for your coin
TIL that in the US you use a different octane rating to the UK (and Europe generally). We use RON, while you use an average of RON and MON (called PON or AKI).
Our baseline fuel here is called "Premium Unleaded", despite it being the standard fuel and is 95 RON, which should equate to about 90-91 AKI meaning it lines up with your Premium gas.
We also have "Super Unleaded" at the pumps, which is 98 RON and should equate to 93 AKI in the US.
I guess that means we have no equivalent of your regular gas.
FWIW I've never managed to detect any benefit of using the 98 octane fuel, either in performance or fuel consumption. I've never owned a really high performance car, beyond a tweaked Saab 9000 Turbo running a higher boost, and that seemed to be happier on the Premium. I always assume that the 98 octane stuff is just a way of extracting extra money from gullible people, but I have no more proof of that than the anecdata from all the people who buy it and swear by it (probably because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias )
I learned some bash from an old-timer who would write an infinite-loop like this:
This works because the `:` is a way to set a label, and it implicitly returns 0. It's just a weird wrinkle of the language. So, why not do `while true`? On old systems, `true` was not a builtin and would call `/usr/bin/true`. Writing the loop this way saves a process fork on each iteration.On a modern system, you'd be hard pushed to measure the difference, so it really doesn't matter which style you prefer.