Dave.

Time is a cube, and always will be.

Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn’t work in wine?

Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company’s IT department.

It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you’re standing in front of the printer.

And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

Your IT department won’t give a crap. But they also won’t help if anything doesn’t work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don’t have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some “windows exclusive garbage” isn’t an answer here.

Precisely.

A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you’re outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

But to a drone, it’s 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that’s tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.

“I think there’s something wrong with the door switch on my old microwave oven. I’ve been testing it outside for safety, that’s why it’s out in the back yard pointing upwards with the door open.”

The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user’s data on the system.

Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

If I look at the command line arguments of a program called “systemd-tmpfiles” and one of them is called “purge” I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

Wellllll…

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

(*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.

Pretty much.

Capable employees don’t raise a huge stink.

They quietly put the word out to a few people they know and play along until something interesting appears on the horizon.

Then when they’re good and ready they just “suddenly” fuck off to somewhere nicer for them.

And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

Generally I bash together the one-off programs in Python and if I discover that my “one off” program is actually being run 4 times a week, that’s when I look at switching to a compiled language.

Case in point: I threw together a python program that followed a trajectory in a point cloud and erased a box around the trajectory. Found a python point cloud library, swore at my code (and the library code) for a few hours, tidied up a few point clouds with it, job done.

And then other people in my company also needed to do the same thing and after a few months of occasional use, I rewrote it using C++ and Open3D. A few days of swearing this time (mainly because my C++ is a bit rusty, and Open3D’s C++ interface is a sparsely-documented back end to their main python front end).

End result though is that point clouds that took 3 minutes to process before in python now take 10 seconds, and now there’s a visualisation widget that shows the effects of the processing so you don’t have to open the cloud in another viewer to see that it was ok.

But anyway, like you said, python is good for prototyping, and when you hash out your approach and things are fairly nailed down and now you’d like some speed, jump to a compiled language and reap the benefits.

Eh…Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they’d had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.

Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn’t take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore…

Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare.

To follow from your comment , because Australia has a publicly funded health system, the government actively works to reduce preventable diseases because it reduces the load on the system.

So they have had:

A sunscreen campaign and skin cancer check initiatives since the '80s.

Anti-smoking campaigns (and high tobacco taxes) where resources are available to help quit.

Every citizen gets a free bowel cancer test mailed to them when they turn 50 to help find and treat cancer earlier.

Road safety laws are tight and helmet / seatbelt regulations are strict as it reduces hospital loads.

Vaccinations for a multitude of easily preventable diseases are given for free in childhood, particularly now for the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Those and a myriad of other public health initiatives all help Australians to live longer.

Coupled with the fact that the cost for the whole population is borne by an income tax of approximately 2% , it means that if you are poor or unemployed, you still have access to health services. That also means that small health issues among low income earners don’t snowball until they are life threatening.

It has the knock on effect that people don’t end up trapped in a job because it offers “good benefits and a low deductible” and concerns about pre existing conditions interfering with insurance and etc when changing jobs is generally moot.

Then throw in mandatory government regulated retirement funds that require all employers to put in 12+ percent of an employee’s gross earnings into an employee’s fund of their choosing for their retirement. That coupled with public health generally means the whole US style worker=slave arrangement can’t exist.

Which means the US will get nothing like this as all that screams of nanny state overlords and death panels and moar taxes killing freedom and so on and so forth. Sorry guys.

Yes, I shifted to my own domain after my default ISP of 20 years decided that email was just too hard, you know? They didn’t outright say it, they just started batch processing emails so that I’d get all my daily emails at around 2 am the next day. Super handy for time limited password reset emails!

A few hours reading a guide and setting up a $5/mo linode email server with SPF and dmarc, a few more hours transferring 20 years of IMAP mail from my old account to a folder, and a month or so of changing a few site contact emails over each day when they emailed something to my old account, and now I’ve got an email server on my own domain that is 10 times faster at sending/receiving mail than my old ISP ever was.

And now I can have amazon@mydomain.com and career@mydomain.com and random other disposable addresses so that when they are inevitably sold off for the $$$ I can just dump them and maintain a spam free inbox.

You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from…

That connection only “appears to come from” if I explicitly put a rule in my NAT table directing it to my computer behind the router doing the NAT-ing.

Otherwise all connections through NAT are started from internal->external network requests and the state table in NAT keeps track of which internal IP is talking to which external IP and directs traffic as necessary.

So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.

Compare this to IPV6 where you get a slice of the public address space to place your devices in and they are all directly addressable. In that case your crappy ISP router also is a “proper” firewall. Strangely enough it usually is a “stateful” firewall with default deny-all rules that tracks network connections and looks and performs almost exactly like the NAT version, just without address translation.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

The partition table is just a set of pointers to various places on the physical disk where partitions should be, inside those partitions are filesystems with all your data. It’s like the table of contents in a book. You can mess around with the table of contents and make the page numbers for chapters different, but all the words in the book are still there.

Now you’re lucky that filesystem drivers are fairly smart these days. They sanity check things all the time. When you write the partition table to disk all the active filesystem drivers get notified of the changes, so they can keep track of things. When the driver noticed that the size of your filesystem exceeded the size of your partition, it basically was like “Hold it right there, I’m not touching any of this!”. At that point the filesystem would have been forcibly unmounted and disconnected, which is why none of your commands worked after running cfdisk, they were on that filesystem.

Note that your approach was almost the right way to do it. To make your filesystem bigger you can expand the partition using cfdisk ( as long as there is physical room on the disk!) and then run a program called resize2fs , and it will expand the filesystem to suit.

Similarly, you can shrink the filesystem in the same kind of way, except you run resize2fs first and command it to shrink the filesystem to a particular size. It will do that (assuming there’s enough free space in your filesystem to do so) then you shrink the corresponding partition with cfdisk to match.

Of course, as you’ve learned, resizing partitions is moderately risky so backups are a good idea. Having said that I routinely expand filesystems in VMs like this without backups - I make the VMs disk larger in its settings, then run cfdisk and expand the partition, then run resize2fs.

The filesystem driver knows the size of the filesystem is larger than the physical size of the partition it is on. Because of that it refuses to do anything with it until that discrepancy is sorted.

Boot to a USB/ISO, run cfdisk, extend the partition size back to original or larger, then run fsck on the partition again.

SSH/SCP. Install Winscp or Filezilla on the host.

Or alternatively, Windows version of tar -> netcat -> network -> netcat -> Linux version of tar.

Red Hat 5.0, 1998.

Had to get it on a CD as it would have taken 37.5 years to download according to Internet Explorer.

Kernel 2.0.36 represent 🤘

not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.

That’s not entirely true.

The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.

You might be the only user, but there are processes running on your machine that are not you. Most system processes try to run with the least permissions possible to mitigate security risks.

It feels like it’s this kind of problem, but it could also be something to do with file locking. Eg the transfer process wants to rename the file but it can’t because another process has it open.