If you hear a scream across the internet right now, it is the sound I am making while reading the Internet Archive v. Hachette Books appeal, which IA has lost: wired.com/story/internet-archiโฆ
"in the best public interest" say the publishers association ... remind me of my activism against software patent in europe where we where subjected to such nonsense ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ
@JohannessNilsson I think there is a lot of misinformation around what IA's Controlled Digital Lending program is and how it works. I recommend this page as a good place to start: eff.org/press/releases/interneโฆ
SAN FRANCISCOโA cartel of major publishing companies must not be allowed to criminalize fair-use library lending, the Internet Archive argued in an appellate brief filed today.
@JohannessNilsson And what galls me is that the court adopted the word "distribute" (which came from the publishers) rather than "lend". It also says that the books can be copied - another tell that the court does not understand the technology it is decrying.
I expected it, to be honest. But I won't stop donating. And they have (don't they) the option to appeal this further. They've said that CDL was built in consultation with top copyright experts, so I think they can make the case that both courts applied the law incorrectly.
I'm OK with IA shifting to a .ru domain, or even just continuing to preserve their collection, even if prevented from loaning it out.
I think that it is in everyone's individual interest to call out the profiteering companies (Hachette et al) that filed the case and do what we can to 1. avoid their products. 2. Only access then through libraries.
In the UK, libraries which are part of the public lending right (PLR) scheme share book loan data with the PLR registrar that's used to calculate payments to eligible book contributors (authors).
!retrocomputing Came across an old USB floppy drive. I plugged it into my machine and it shows up, but I can't tell it it's actually working or not. When plugged in, it sounds like it's continuously reading, so I kind of want to test it. Can you even buy floppy disks any more?
That said, if I don't have any disks, I guess the question of whether or not it works is moot anyways.
floppydisk.com/ this is a real website with an actual reputable dealer behind it, or at least it was ten years ago when I bought some 5.25" disks from them, and the website looks exactly the same.
I occasionally find 3.5" floppy disks at the local thrift stores. There are usually new old stock disks on ebay too.
The USB floppy drives usually only support IBM formatted disks and are useless for data recovery. For any other formats, a Greaseweazle will come in very handy.
Yes, was about to post Greaseweazle. That and whatever scavenged drive sounds like the way to go in general. I don't have one yet just because it costs the right amount to go on my gift wishlist, lol.
A reminder from someone whoโs been around the block more than a couple times: when you see a PDF or ePub on the Internet that you think you might want to read eventually, go ahead and download it, and squirrel it away for the future. The Internet is not, in fact, forever, and Capitalism will eventually take away anything it canโt rent out to you.
it used to be quite common for people to write up, say, videogame walkthroughs, or gender transition how-tos, or any sort of information somebody had personally put together, in a single long text file. a quarter of a meg was on the larger end of what you'd see, size-wise (when it's just text, that is a LOT), but not uncommon.
Data sheets for parts you play with. Manuals for everything you buy. Pirated magazines. I donโt care what it is, if it interests you, save it. Donโt rely on centralized, lawsuit prone services to survive the onslaught of rent seekers.
Mass data storage is fairly cheap these days, even if backup methods are lagging behind. Go ahead and file away that datasheet under โDocuments/Datasheets/Company Name/TGS17362.pdfโ or however you want to organize your shit.
I recommend people to investigate used enterprise storage.
If it passes badblocks & SMART checking (don't rely on that too much, manufacturers do silly things), it is likely to work just fine, and depending on one's location it is possible to acquire triple-redundant 10TB for less than buying a single 10TB drive new would cost.
@lispi314 Yeah. I have considered one of those external USB3-to-SATA cradles you drop a hard drive into, to use regular old SATA hard drives as "backup cartridges" of a sort -- divide the space in each drive 70/30 between "data" and "parity" (.par2 files) partitions, and use good old tar right to the raw partition block device.
If you ever get to the point of thinking about multi-drive enclosures/cradles though, don't go for USB.
At that point, anything less than SAS (an expander card & breakout cables in an old computer case can do the job quite well) will inevitably prove frustrating through all sorts of annoying issues.
@lispi314 I have a two-drive RAID-1 box into which I had planned to stick a couple of ~10TB drives when I could afford them, but that's not really "backup" as much as "hold this stuff that doesn't need to be on my main NVME SSD RAID right now".
Conventional Hardware & Software RAID has also been exclusively for stuff where you don't care about integrity ever since 520B sectors have stopped being used. (Those 8 additional bytes were for integrity-checking features.)
Now, such features are implemented instead in modern filesystems since awareness of the data structuring is necessary for sane & reliable recovery (conventional RAID assumes that the drive firmware will both detect *and* notify of errors, which is incredibly optimistic in a setting where general pessimism is the sane attitude).
1. TIL about 520/528B drives. According to one forum post they might even go back to the 70s ("someone on the Internet said it, it must be true!")
2. Integrity checking features? You mean extra space for higher-level checks besides the (40 or so) extra error correction bits used to protect the 512 bytes of data?
I.e. the wrong data could be correctly written to disk. ECC won't catch that during a read, but the extra 8 bytes could.
Yes, there were several sector sizes beyonda 512, in increments of four bytes. This is, from the driver's point of view, extra user data, unrelated to the driver's own internal error control. The amount of ECC the drive adds is unspecified, but even before drives switched to 4K sectors with "512 emulation", the size of ECC was typically much higher than in early 5ยผ ESDI/SCSI/ATA drives. 1/
@cr1901 @lispi314 The extra "tag bytes" were mostly intended for file systems that wanted additional metadata associated with the sector, as done e.g. on the Xerox Alto, Apple Lisa and early Macintosh, and IBM AS/400. This could include an identifier for the containing file and offset, but could also be used for filesystem-level error detection. 2/
@cr1901 @lispi314 It is not unknown for drives to erroneously write to the wrong sector, and when the victim sector is read later, the drive will return that _wrong_ content with no error indication. Using the tag in such a way as to detect this kind of error is obviously useful for the filesystem or RAID layer. In the case of RAID redundancy it may be correctable, but otherwise it's still desirable to report an error rather than blindly proceed with invalid data. 3/
As someone already pointed out, some modern filesystems provide this level of checking without requiring oversize sectors. Back in the ancient days when multiprecosion integer division was extremely slow, it was important for the actual file data to be stored in power of two units, but today there is negligible performance penalty if a filesystem only stores 496 bytes of a file in every 512 byte sector, or even lowrr percentage overhead for a 4K sector. 4/
@cr1901 @lispi314 To this day, enterprise-grade HDDs (SAS) and even some enterprise SSDs (SAS, NVMe) support reformatting to those slightly larger sector sizes. I'm not aware of any substantial current usage other than IBM System/I, formerly AS/400. 5/
Mass data storage is fairly cheap these days, even if backup methods are lagging behind. Go ahead and file away that datasheet under โDocuments/Datasheets/Company Name/TGS17362.pdfโ or however you want to organize your shit.
@Justin To #ะะตัะะพะนะฝะต Fortunately, most of the time it takes is just waiting on it to proof, so it doesn't prevent me from doing other things in the meantime.
@justinto This one is essentially what I do, but I also add in grated cheese both into the batter and on top of the batter once itโs in the loaf pan. But the cheese isnโt needed.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Auรerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Auรerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
There's a family member that Katy and I had cut ties with about a year ago because he's toxic. Today Katy extended an olive branch and we were immediately reminded why we made that decision in the first place.
Iโm sorry to hear that. Iโve been there and done that โ and itโs more difficult than many people realize. But cutting that kind of toxicity out of your life is necessary sometimes.
Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its...
As I like to say, hatred is a precious part of us. Those who control your hatred control you. Don't let them take control. Protect your hatred, cultivate it, hate carefully and deliberately. They'll never see it coming.
I've been working through some #soroban exercises try to actually become reasonably proficient in its use. Interestingly enough, I'm doing much better with multiplicaiton/divison than I am with the addition/subtraction questions, but that's because the latter involve summing a column of values rather than just multiplying two numbers. There are more places to screw up.
Still, these questions seem designed to deliberately screw me up with things like multiple carries, changing the value on a rod just to immediately revert that change, etc.
I don't want this place to be a "Twitter replacement". I came here (in the pre-Musk era) because I wanted something better* than Twitter. The fedi certainly has its shortcomings, and we need to work to improve it (especially regarding the treatment of marginalized people), but Twitter should not be the yardstick we measure ourselves by.
Dear everyone on the Fediverse who posts anything political...
If you're not going to put your post behind a "political" content warning, then please at the very least use FULL NAMES instead of nick names like "Orange man" or "Kama" or "Vice Daddy" or whatever.
It makes it hard for those who are trying to filter out political content from their feed.
@falcennial I never asked anyone to change the topic. I only asked that people not use alternative names so that filters can work. Use โTrumpโ not โOrange manโ and so on.
If someone chooses not to, thatโs fine. Thatโs their right. I can just mute or block them.
People are free to do what they want. Iโm just letting them know that there are people who wished they would make a different choice.
@DeadTOm :d20: Sometimes that's just what you have to do. Friendica (what I use) has an option to automatically collapse all of a given users' posts, essentially CWing them all. I don't know if Mastodon has this feature, but I've found it useful in cases where I don't want to completely unfollow.
I am neither for nor against AI, mostly because it's essentially a meaningless word. What does bother me is the number of people who are shoehorning it into their products because investors lose their minds and shovel boatloads of money at them.
It's not that I have a problem with fools taking other fools' money; I'm just really sick of them trying to sell me their magic beans.
Your SSH honeypot fakes a Linux system and logs the threat actor's commands.
My SSH honeypot hijacks the threat actor's terminal to play the music video of Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" while ignoring Ctrl-C.
I fear that people have become desensitized to seeing teachers asking for help with wishlists.
Each year we are inundated with teachers essentially begging for help. I see it & feel it too.
I am one of those teachers who would not be able to run a classroom without the kindness of strangers.
I apologize & thank you in a single message, because I know many are struggling too. A boost is equally appreciated.The students are back & I didnโt lose anyone over the summer!
@EdCates You have zero (read zero) reason to apologise. The folks in charge of implementing a system that leaves teachers in such a predicament should be the ones hanging their heads in shame (I wonโt hold my breath).
You exemplify everything thatโs good in the system despite the system. I hope your students know how lucky they are to have you.
@aral thank you for your kind words. The support youโve shown to me has meant a lot. I do love being a teacher and I hope that real change comes soon.
Sometimes I think being a teacher in Norway is hard and unappreciated by the masses. (Hah, I first misspelled masses as "asses", and found it quite fitting)
Then I think of the working conditions of teachers in the US and realize things could be a lot worse..
I really hope the US finds a new way forward soon, a way where teachers don't need to beg strangers for help to get basic equipment to do their jobs, and get decent wages..
In my day we had buttons. We had switches! Sliders! And what do we have now? Glass rounded rectangles of various sizes.
"We can make it do haptic feedback."
No just put me out of my misery. Send me to the farm upstate. Your haptic feedback is a mockery of the elegance of the latching switches and potentiometers I have known.
Robotics is hard. Mechanical engineering is hard. The glass rounded rectangles are magical, yes, and lovely, but they also prisons for the imagination.
after posting this brain.worm.pink/notice/AlVXRJZโฆ it occurred to me how aliens/successors looking through our layers of e-waste (somehow in chronological order? maybe they're deep chthonians digging their way up) would find all these buttons and gizmos of dazzling variety of aesthetics and ergonomics
then a flood of nothing but little black rectangles
i can't imagine them *not* panicking and sealing off the cave entrance thinking that our civilization had been wiped out by some kind of grey goo disaster
imagining the rats or bedbugs or whatever gains sapience after us digging up our stuff and staring in bafflement at just what happened a few decades after 9/11 like
> We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Onesโ sculpture at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanationโa difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.
Sometimes you get a button, but it's a 1-in-all deal. Press and hold to turn on, press and hold longer to pair bluetooth, press once for play/pause, press long to turn off... Oh, you pressed it too long and now it's gone from on straight into BT pairing, or maybe off, I'm not sure. Just press and hold till something happens again.
I haven't read him but your toot made me think about him because here in Italy he's the example of a writer who "travelled" without leaving home (and made readers "travel" through his own books)
I eat peaches with the skin on, but usually rinsing them and rubbing them with a paper towel gets most of the fuzz texture off, since I'm also not a big fan of that
yeah lol i'd absolutely eat nectarines before i'd peel a peach
Unless I'm going to a farmers market where they have the good shit I end up buying nectarines more than peaches anyway just because supermarkets tend to have dogshit peaches but okay nectarines.
my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded ๐ฅ
โMicrosoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.
โ Local Cranky IT Guyโ [shared with permission]
@BassRck5000 Your meme, exactly! Itโs evidence of a breakdown in our standards and belief in a Democratic Republic. Itโs a crisis, that has been heading in the wrong direction for 30 years, and approaching a breaking point, a point I believe will be arrived at if MAGA/Drumph succeed in Nov. If theyโre trounced and The Head Liar is prosecuted after, then there is hope. Otherwise stand by for our National calamity to grow exponentially. ๐ค
@BassRck5000 I think weโre on the same page, but itโs Trumpโs creation. MAGA would be more accurately called Trumpets and Fascists, get rid of the word โgreatโ. ๐
@BassRck5000 Agreed heโs a traitor. Iโd call him a focusing lense, a powerful magnet for STUPID, and a useful tool for hardcore capitalists , monopolists , billionaires, and fascists.
@Huntn00 @BassRck5000 The Republican Party has been a personality cult in search of a leader since Reagan's day. Trump was just the first person to successfully step into the role.
@BassRck5000 @Huntn00 They really mean "Make America White Again", or maybe "The Confederacy Will Rise Again". I keep waiting for one to run on a platform of repealing the 13th Amendment.
@cavyherd @VATVSLPR @BassRck5000 Thereโs no way anyone can observe DJ and proclaim the man is a patriot or a rule follower. Constitutional rules are out. Donnie rules are in, one rule, โwhatever benefits me and my powerโ. The most upsetting thing about this is his base. Millions functioning like a cult and have abandoned democracy because there are people who disagree with them in a democracy. They are a direct threat to our Democratic Republic. ๐ฅ
I have long believed we humans are operating at the edge of the complexity envelope (the very limit of our mental capacity), and any vendor (Microsoft) promising a simple solution that requires no thought automatically has an advantage.
I wrote the help documents for Teams. Frequent directive was โThereโs no way around this problem, so write it as if itโs a known issue being addressed.โ
And, time to turn my phone off again to enjoy the trip instead of scrolling social media (which I can do at home). Also, I only have so much battery. ๐
Fun fact, the cat can slip out of his harness when spooked by a passing car. We're hanging out in the tent with him until we can sort out this logistical wrinkle.
So I think that when I took off after Benny when he got loose I got into some poison ivy/oak. I'm normally careful about such things, but I had to be quick to catch him.
I washed my arms immediately after and slathered them with afterbite (which I figured was the most useful thing we had on hand) but there was some itchiness/rash shortly thereafter. Fortunately Benny seems to have been unaffected.
Well, we forgot to bring bug spray. Rookie mistake, but it's been a while. Ran off to the nearby pharmacy to pick some up, then we'll finish setting up camp.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban's Minister of Education has announced that girls' schools are likely to remain closed permanently.
As a Muslim let me be explicitly clear. This is apartheid, vile, & inexcusable.
Prophet Muhammad(sa) declared, "It is incumbent upon every Muslim male & every Muslim female to attain education." His wife Ayesha was a leading scholar & jurist. His final words were "women are your committed partners." Not servantsโPARTNERS.
Doing some last minute checking of the #camping gear for our trip tomorrow. We haven't touched any of it in like six years. I was sure the batteries in our lantern would be dead. I tested them and they're fully charged. I'm impressed.
I just pulled some Energizer lithium AAs from an old set of FRS/GMRS handheld radios. The batteries have "expiration" dates of 2010, but they read 1.7 V on my multimeter, 14 years later. These batteries are rated for a 10-year shelf life, so they are 24 years old.
Ugh, I hate that. My current EDC flashlight has a parasitic drain like that, so I have to keep the tailcap partially unscrewed so the battery isn't dead when I actually need it.
Remember, no matter how much neoliberals will try to convince you:
Public services should not be required generate income.
Water, Power, Communications, Healthcare, Education, Public Transport, Mail, Firefighters, Police, Libraries, Swimming Pools, Roads, Generally all infrastructure, Military
None of these things were created with the idea of making big profits with them, they are meant to provide you with a service which is being paid for with your taxes. Privatizing any of them will make them worse, not better.
Though, companies are very good at pretending they are better for a while, by simply deciding to lose money for a few years. The bill always comes due before long, though.
In fact, they were often being done by the government explicitly because capitalism refused to do it well enough for the nation to function properly...ahem.
Okay, finally took the plunge and just booked a #camping trip this upcoming week instead of waiting for everything to just fall in place. We haven't been camping since before COVID.
I've got to go through all our gear to make sure everything's still in working order.
Just for fun, I decided to look into how to use an abacus the other day. I have no practical use for this whatsoever, it was just something I was curious about. Learning this of course made me want to buy an abacus. I know myself well enough to know that while it would probably be an inexpensive purchase, it'd only end up collecting dust on a shelf within a week.
Then I thought about programming a virtual abacus that I could then play around with. I know this to be an absolutely absurd idea, but that absurdity only kinda makes me want to do it even more.
Just started down the rabbit hole that is the Japanese electrical system. At a glance, it actually seems to make the North American system look sane. That's an impressive feat.
Cykonot
in reply to evacide • • •wayne_sloman
in reply to evacide • • •Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Tristan Ridley
in reply to evacide • • •benoit mortier
in reply to evacide • • •diesUndDasMitTassen ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to evacide • • •Sorry. Could not hear you. I was too busy ranting out loud about this crazy message:
central organized cookie banner consent management
heise.de/en/news/Consent-managโฆ
It seems to be another dark day for the free internet.
Consent management: German government wants to combat flood of cookie banners
Stefan Krempl (heise online)Phil Stevens
in reply to evacide • • •Stephan
in reply to evacide • • •evacide
Unknown parent • • •Internet Archive Files Appeal Brief Defending Libraries and Digital Lending From Big Publishersโ Legal Attack
Electronic Frontier Foundationkaren coyle
in reply to evacide • • •slash
in reply to evacide • • •I expected it, to be honest. But I won't stop donating. And they have (don't they) the option to appeal this further. They've said that CDL was built in consultation with top copyright experts, so I think they can make the case that both courts applied the law incorrectly.
I'm OK with IA shifting to a .ru domain, or even just continuing to preserve their collection, even if prevented from loaning it out.
Can't stop the signal.
I stand against genocide
in reply to evacide • • •ัะฒะฐัั ัะฐัะฐัะธะบ
in reply to evacide • • •on n'hachette plus
(eng.: will not buy hachette anymore)
๐
Don Holloway
in reply to evacide • • •|~hamu_sandowicz~|
in reply to evacide • • •