But ZFS also comes with an uncomfortable truth that doesn't get talked about enough: the filesystem is only as good as the operating system wrapping it. And if you're running ZFS on a generic Linux distribution, you're often signing up for more risk, maintenance, and subtle breakage than you expect. ZFS works on Linux, and many use it daily, but it's not a seamless, built-in part of the kernel. Instead, it's an add-on with caveats, and setting it up can feel frustratingly difficult. //
The problem with ZFS is Oracle
Licensing is a major issue
the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license is legally incompatible with ZFS's CDDL license, meaning that it can't be combined with the Linux kernel. Oracle's licensing is the major bottleneck.
Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works
Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.
UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.
https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw //
The very first version of Unix, later known as the "Zeroth edition", was hand-coded in assembly language by Thompson in 1969. He wrote it for a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs, a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer from 1965. The PDP-7 was an 18-bit machine: it handled memory in 18-bit words. This was so long ago that things like the eight-bit byte had not yet been standardized. PDP-7 UNIX was reconstructed from printouts between 2016 and 2019.
It did well enough that a few years later, Thompson got his hands on a PDP-11. Thompson rewrote his OS for this 16-bit machine – still in assembly language – to create UNIX First Edition. At first, the machine had a single RS11 hard disk, for a grand total of half a megabyte of storage, although the rebuilt source code is from a later machine with a second hard disk.
Joplin
A handy OneNote alternative
OpenCloud
Say goodbye to OneDrive
OnlyOffice
An excellent office suite
Syncthing
To sync your local folders
Czkawka is more than just a dupe finder
It has a comprehensive tool set with a wide range of applications
Czkawka's main purpose is to find duplicate files, but it offers a variety of methods for doing so. The Duplicate File Finder feature allows you to check files not only by hash, but also by size, name, or both. And if you search by hash, you can choose between Blake3, CRC32, and XXH3. When I put the app to the test, it turned up a slew of duplicates in my downloads folder (of course) and quite a few in my documents.
But that's not all it can do. I can search specifically for big files, empty folders (which I found a surprising number of), similar images and videos, and even duplicates of music. Each search is customizable, too, allowing more granular control over the results.
OpenCloud
Immich
Vaultwarden
Docmost
HomeBox
Four new portraits have gone up at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, showcasing this year’s recipients of the Portrait of a Nation award for their transformative contributions to American history and culture. One of them is Temple Grandin, who has transformed animal welfare around the world and affected public perception of autism. John Yang speaks with Grandin for our Weekend Spotlight. //
Right now one of the big things I've been working on is recognizing the importance of object visualizers. And I'm worried about them getting screened out. Okay. I went up to community college and they're doing a two year factory maintenance degree and requiring calculus and algebra. Well, you're going to screen out the very best mechanic for keeping a factory running. //
I just talked to a science teacher and her dad was cooking. Airplane mechanic couldn't do any, any higher math. He fixed some hydraulic problem on a Boeing airplane and Boeing put it in every one of their airplanes because he could just see how the hydraulics works. We need these thinkers.
Now where we need our mathematical engineers. Let's take something like a spaceship. The mathematician tells the thruster when to thrust, but the visual thinker has to make sure it's put together properly.
You see, there's two parts of engineering here, the mathematical part and what I call the clever engineers that often don't get enough credit.
While 300 TB comprising roughly 86 million music files, which the group claims represent about 99.6 percent of Spotify’s listens, is a vast amount of audio, it falls well short of the platform’s full catalog. Anna’s Archive says Spotify contains around 256 million tracks in total, meaning the audio files it archived cover only about a third of the catalog, with the remaining tracks represented only in metadata rather than preserved as music files.
By not bothering with all the musical chaff in Spotify's catalog, the Anna's Archive team is apparently content to let those less popular songs languish despite their claim to want to avoid focusing on just the most popular artists.
A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.
As explained in a mailing list post by Jeffrey Sherman, a NIST supervisory physicist who maintains the institute’s atomic clocks, “The atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage.”
Sherman, whose LinkedIn bio proclaims he is “One of the few federal employee actually paid to watch the clocks all day,” says one impact of the incident “is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference.”
That’s bad because one of the things NIST uses its atomic clocks for is to provide a Network Time Protocol service, the authoritative source of timing information that the computing world relies on so that diverse systems can synchronize events. If NTP isn’t working, outcomes can include difficulties authenticating between systems, meaning applications can become unstable.
At this point, readers might wonder why NIST can’t just turn off the inaccurate service. Sherman said a backup generator kicked in and kept the servers running.
“I will attempt to disable them [the generators] to avoid disseminating incorrect time,” he wrote.
thatanonymouscoward Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
901
I'm gonna have to prepare more crow for people to eat.
I saw a shark once upon a time long ago... of course I'm an untrusted source by design.
As I often pointed out, courts don't let you create events to profit from.
See they could have owned the films, even openly filed cases on behalf of themselves but then there would have been questions, depositions, etc. So they invented shells to hide the client from view and convince the world it was some poor copyright holder getting screwed by evil pirates.
If your playing the home game -
They forged a name on a copyright assignment & submitted a knowingly forged document to courts.
They placed the content on TPB, knowing it would be downloaded.
They lied about their involvement/control/ownership of various firms & shells.
They lied under oath... a lot.
They funneled money out of Prenda from the main accounts, not a client account where actual lawyers place client funds to keep everything above board.
They shifted the money around rapidly trying to hide the trail.
They hired the best of the best lawyers off of craingslist.
They used another lawyers ECF login to file court documents in his name.
They ghostwrote & submitted documents to courts the lawyer of record on the case had never seen.
They tried to sue the person whos identity they stole to forge the copyright assignment. (Not to mention a bunch of us nice people who called them extortionists online.)
They lost that case before it even began because they lied to amend the filing, lied about what another Federal Judge said about a concurrent case they had filed, and pretty much pissed all over the bench.
When this all went sideways they applied the same pay us or else strategy filing bogus Americans with Disability Act lawsuits, and managed to force several small businesses to go under.
@StanFL - there might be a chance that Hans thinks his father can work miracles one more time to save him. He's bailed him out several times but I think he's burned most of goodwill.
@yasth - Thats the fun thing about copyright you can demand actual damages OR statutory damages. The statutory damages are $150,000. Its a very scary number to threaten people with and makes a few thousand sound reasonable. Of course settlement amounts don't get subtracted from the $150K so they can keep scaring people with that number.
Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.
Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele’s favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele’s “vile scheme” but agreed that given Steele’s extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney’s recommendation of five years was “eminently fair.”
Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years. //
Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.
The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers “stealing” certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.
Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.
But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies’ content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys’ pockets. //
Disorders and Diseases of Hamsters
Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier. Appearing at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so noticeable because it was backlit by the setting Sun.
Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
Lois McMaster Bujold, "Barrayar", 1991
Analemma image taken between 2021 and 2022, with images taken at 4 p.m. on a weekly basis, clouds permitting. The analemma was calibrated and overlaid with an image taken over Lake Varese in the late afternoon of the winter solstice in 2021, featuring one of the many swans that flock to the shores of Lake Varese in the foreground. Canon 400D + Sigma zoom lens 10 mm. Happy solstice!
Can you tell that today is a solstice by the tilt of the Earth? Yes. At a solstice, the Earth's terminator -- the dividing line between night and day -- is tilted the most. The featured time-lapse video demonstrates this by displaying an entire year on planet Earth in twelve seconds. From geosynchronous orbit, the Meteosat 9 satellite recorded infrared images of the Earth every day at the same local time. The video started at the September 2010 equinox with the terminator line being vertical: an equinox. As the Earth revolved around the Sun, the terminator was seen to tilt in a way that provides less daily sunlight to the northern hemisphere, causing winter in the north. At the most tilt, winter solstice occurred in the north, and summer solstice in the south. As the year progressed, the March 2011 equinox arrived halfway through the video, followed by the terminator tilting the other way, causing winter in the southern hemisphere -- and summer in the north. The captured year ends again with the September equinox, concluding another of the billions of trips the Earth has taken -- and will take -- around the Sun.
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“It’s hard to describe how epic this comeback was after our first Falcon 9 launch failure.”
On Dec. 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the first time. The story behind this remarkable achievement is nowhere more fully told than in the book Reentry, authored by Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. To mark the tenth anniversary, Ars is reprinting a slightly condensed chapter from the book that tells the inside story of this landing. The chapter begins in June 2015 with a tragedy, the disintegration of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the CRS-7 cargo supply mission for NASA. It was the first time a Falcon 9 had been lost in flight.
normally butters Ars Praefectus
18y
5,285
ahsgdbeyb3 said:
I am curious about what role exactly he had here in the control room. Operators freezing up sounds like an understandable response, but also sounds like there was a lack of sims to prepare then for such events. The flight director would be the one who should keep them on focus, not a manager. I would actually keep such 'VIP' people out of the control room, they tend not to be able to offer much of use during an actual flight, so I'm wondering how SpaceX managed their presence here and what kind of access to the loops they were/are given?
SpaceX has a "responsible engineer" culture. The engineers who know the most about a system assume responsibility for that system and may eventually have a management role and/or represent that system on console in mission control. This philosophy extends to higher levels. The manager of the Dragon program is a responsible engineer wearing a manager hat, not an MBA. David Giger was responsible for Dragon as a whole, and that was the role he was playing when he reminded the team that Dragon is still alive and might still be saved.
This isn't how NASA works. This isn't how legacy NASA contractors work. For example, Boeing outsources Starliner mission control to NASA. Boeing trains NASA controllers and managers on how to operate Starliner, and they provide "back room" engineering support for the NASA controllers on console. I'll never forget the video from Mission Control Houston during the Starliner OFT-1 MET clock anomaly when the thrusters were firing like crazy immediately after separating from the launch vehicle. The NASA Flight Dynamics Officer was gesticulating wildly in an animated conversation facing the Flight Director, obviously unprepared for this scenario and probably not giving the Flight Director the answers he wanted to hear. I felt sorry for him.
Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.
“A calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool for when we need a boost in performance.”
If you’re human, you’ve probably hollered a curse word or two (or three) when barking your shin on a table edge or hitting your thumb with a hammer. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this seems to lessen your pain. There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.
As previously reported, co-author Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele, became interested in studying the potential benefits of profanity after noting his wife’s “unsavory language” while giving birth and wondered if profanity really could help alleviate pain. “Swearing is such a common response to pain. There has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” Stephens told Scientific American after publishing a 2009 study that was awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. //
The team followed up with a 2011 study showing that the pain-relief effect works best for subjects who typically don’t swear that often, perhaps because they attach a higher emotional value to swears. They also found that subjects’ heart rates increased when they swore. But it might not be the only underlying mechanism. Other researchers have pointed out that profanity might be distracting, thereby taking one’s mind off the pain rather than serving as an actual analgesic. //
UserIDAlreadyInUse Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
12y
6,810
Subscriptor
<psst> "Hey, buddy."
"Yeah?"
"You got a game coming up, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Need a boost? I got some curse words guaranteed to boost your performance."
"Oh, uh...they check for that now. #!$@, $#!@, and even *&!%!! they test for."
"Yeah, yeah, but I got &!$#!!! and !!^%@$, virtually undetectable. You memorize these, pass the cursing check, and I guarantee you'll have the #!$@ing edge when you need it!" //
etxdm Ars Centurion
5y
315
Subscriptor
They need to study overuse versus occasional use. I've always thought a well placed swear word is far more effective than rampant overuse. I was recently waiting for a drink at a bar and some bro was literally using f*** every other word. It was exhausting trying to filter his speech to understand what he was trying to say.