AnyOldName3 @ AnyOldName3 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The plan at the time was what the film explicitly said. They were devastatingly effective at taking the Tantive IV. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the sandcrawler (to the point that they couldn't disguise it as having been attacked by sand people). They were devastatingly effective at nearly hitting the protagonists enough times that they believed they were being shot at for real, when actually they were just being herded onto a ship with a tracker on it so they'd reveal the location of the rebel base they'd spend the first half the film failing to threaten or torture out of Leia. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the rebel's attack force against the Death Star, and were seconds away from destroying Yavin IV and the rebel base on it when someone used supposedly-extinct space magic to make what the film had previously described as an impossible shot against a tiny target.

The only time they miss is when the film says they did so on purpose.

In A New Hope, the only time stormtroopers miss is when they do so intentionally, when they're chasing the protagonists off the Death Star, and onto the Millenium Falcon, which has been fitted with a tracking device which they know will be taken straight to the rebel base. They easily overwhelm the guards on the Tantive IV at the beginning of the film even when only a few of them have made it through the breached airlock. The myth that stormtroopers miss comes from people not noticing the scene where Tarkin discusses intentionally letting the rebels escape so they can follow the tracking device back to their base.

WSL2 is, but WSL1 implemented the Linux kernel API in NT, so ran things directly.

You dun goofed here. You don't need to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, so the Next button shouldn't be greyed out when the checkbox is unchecked. You also only need to show the user the GPL when you give them a copy of the software, so there's no need to show it during the installation process.

I never said I preferred Outlook to Thunderbird, but both are generally horrible.

It affects Windows 10, too.

The mail server for the accounts I've noticed it struggling with is GMail, and it manages to push mail to other clients on my non-Windows devices just fine.

Having the tinkerer options should come after making the software work. From my perspective, Thunderbird is a passable clone of a bad mail client. None of its tweakable options turn it into a good mail client, and so it would be a better mail client than it is had the effort spent on implementing the tweakable options instead been invested into making it generally better.

Desktop mail clients all seem to be dire, but Mail for Windows 10 seemed to suck a lot less than anything else. I, too, am a victim of it not noticing new mail for a couple of hours after it's sent unless I explicitly refresh it, despite it being set to get new mail on push, but I'd still rather use it over Thunderbird, which I tried years ago, and tried again when they started warning about forcing Outlook onto people. Unfortunately, it looks like Mozilla decided that there were a non-zero number of good things about Outlook, and made a clone of it, as it's got basically all the things I hate about Outlook.

It's not a good tool if one party is likely, but not guaranteed, to win without your vote, but is much worse than the other. You should only spoil your ballot if your constituency is has a large enough majority that your vote won't matter at all, or none of the parties are less bad than the others.

If you're voting on the single issue of Palestine in the US presidential elections (not the primaries), then no state has a large enough majority to justify as spoiled ballots, and one party wants to support a genocide while the other wants to discourage it (even if they're doing a crap job of it), so there is a least bad option to vote for.

Part of it depends on how you define things. They're not a monopoly in terms of having eliminated all their competitors, but they're a defacto monopoly in terms of being able to do the things a monopoly can. As an example, they can dictate pricing for the whole market as their margins are better than AMD's, so if AMD undercut them, they can retaliate by dropping their prices to the point AMD would have to sell at cost, so AMD can only sell things in the narrow price window where Nvidia doesn't feel threatened. On the other hand, AMD does exist and does sell things.

There's a good argument that Nvidia only had the money to do the work because of anticompetitive practices, and so shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it unless everyone's allowed to benefit from it, otherwise it's just cementing their dominant position further.

I've swiped to upvote on occasion, but I've accidentally triggered both it and replying while trying to scroll fast more often. I think it's really just a matter of being fat too keen to activate off motions that mostly go up or down, and until it's not in the way of scrolling, there's not any way to reliably judge how good it'd be if it wasn't.

If the AI had any actual I, it might point out that the most recent Halloween Document was from twenty years ago, and Microsoft's attitudes have changed in that time. After all, they make a lot of money from renting out Linux VMs through Azure, so it'd be silly for them to hate their revenue stream.

I'd be unsurprised if it's just set up to abandon the conversation if accused of lying, rather than defending its position.

There are two things in conflict that apply to Dolphin, and in general to post-DRM console emulators:

• It's illegal to create or distribute a device which circumvents DRM.
• It's legal to ignore DMCA restrictions for the sole purpose of making things interoperable, like running software on machines it wasn't originally created for when you'd be able to run it on the machine it was created for.

The wording in the legislation is sufficiently vague that it's not obvious whether it's illegal to create or distribute a device that circumvents DRM for the sole purpose of interoperability. If a case goes to court, it could set a precedent that has to be applied in the future, or it could be settled out of court to avoid setting a precedent, and so far, there's no case law setting a precedent.

When Nintendo asked Valve not to allow Dolphin onto Steam, despite what some people were saying, the decryption key was known to be there, and the Dolphin team had legal advice that it was reasonable to expect that the interoperability exceptions had more power than the DRM circumvention restriction. The decryption key is a so-called illegal number, but these are probably not actually illegal, and you can see several examples on the Wikipedia page about them. Nintendo ended up taking no action against Dolphin, and it wouldn't have been a good case to try and set a precedent with as there weren't obvious damages now it's been so long since the Wii stopped being sold, and because the Dolphin team have historically been so diligent about stamping out discussion of piracy in their official communities, making it hard to argue that it's intended as a DRM circumvention device rather than an interoperability tool. Also, Dolphin's never taken donations, easily covering all their costs with just basic ads on their site.

Yuzu's a bit of an easier target. For a start, it's got a Patreon, and that makes it easier to paint its developers in a bad light as they're getting money (as well as meaning there's actual money to recover). They've also got data to back up the suggestion that lots and lots of Yuzu users are pirating games instead of just playing games they've already got a disk copy of. In a sensible world where laws are applied fairly, there's an easy argument that hoops to jump through like requiring the user to provide Switch firmware show they're not trying to make piracy easy, but it's not like Yuzu will be able to muster up enough money for lawyers to match what Nintendo will be spending.

The worst thing that could come out of this is a decision that interoperability isn't an excuse for circumventing DRM under any circumstances, as that'll have serious consequences for a bunch of other projects, and Nintendo are likely to want to push for this precedent to be set rather than accepting an out-of-court settlement. On the other hand, Nintendo could mess up and get the opposite precedent set, although if it looks like that's going to happen, they're likely to drop the suit.

I'd imagine they're already censoring U+1F595 🖕, and that's already a thing.

Yeah, the Wayback Machine doesn't use Reddit's API, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't automatically archive literally everything that makes it onto Reddit - doing that would require the API to tell you about every new post, as just sorting /r/all by new and collecting every link misses stuff.

People insist it happens in the UK, too, and we don't have school shootings, so wouldn't have that source for the claim.

The archive sites used to use the API, which is another reason they wanted to get rid of it. I always found they were a great moderation tool as users would always edit their posts to no longer break the rules before they claimed a rogue moderator had banned them for no reason, and there was no way within reddit to prove them wrong.

I think you've misunderstood my complaint. I know how you go about composing things in a Unix shell. Within your post, you've mentioned several distinct languages:

• sh (I don't see any Bash-specific extensions here)
• Perl-compatible regular expressions, via grep -P
• printf expressions
• GNU ps's format expressions
• awk

That's quite a lot of languages for such a simple task, and there's nothing forcing any consistency between them. Indeed, awk specifically avoids being like sh because it wants to be good at the things you use awk for. I don't personally consider something to be doing its job well if it's going to be wildly different from the things it's supposed to be used with, though (which is where the disagreement comes from - the people designing Unix thought of it as a benefit). It's important to remember that the people designing Unix were very clever and were designing it for other very clever people, but also under conditions where if they hit a confusing awk script, they could just yell Brian, and have the inventor of awk walk over to their desk and explain it. On the other hand, it's a lot of stuff for a regular person to have in their head at once, and it's not particularly easy to discover or learn about in the first place, especially if you're just reading a script someone else has written that uses utilities you've not encountered before. If a general-purpose programming language had completely different conventions in different parts of its standard library, it'd be rightly criticised for it, and the Unix shell experience isn't a completely un-analogous entity.

So, I wouldn't consider the various tools you used that don't behave like the other tools you used to be doing their job well, as I'd say that's a reasonable requirement for something to be doing its job well.

On the other hand, PowerShell can do all of this without needing to call into any external tools while using a single language designed to be consistent with itself. You've actually managed to land on what I'd consider a pretty bad case for PowerShell as instead of using an obvious command like Get-ComputerInfo, you need:

 powershell

    
(Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem).FreePhysicalMemory / 1024


  

Even so, you can tell at a glance that it's getting the computer system, accessing it's free physical memory, and dividing the number by 1024.

To get the process ID with the largest working set, you'd use something like

 powershell

    
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet | Select-Object -Last 1).Id
# or
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet)[-1].Id


  

I'm assuming either your ps is different to mine, or you've got a typo, as mine gives the parent process ID as the second column, not the process' own ID, which is a good demonstration of the benefits of structured data in a shell - you don't need sed/awk/grep incantations to extract the data you need, and don't need to learn the right output flag for each program to get JSON output and pipe it to jq.

There's not a PowerShell builtin that does the same job as watch, but it's not a standard POSIX tool, so I'm not going to consider it cheating if I don't bother implementing it for this post.

So overall, there's still the same concept of composing something to do a specific task out of parts, and the way you need to think about it isn't wildly different, but:

• PowerShell sees its jurisdiction as being much larger than Bash does, so a lot of ancillary tools are unnecessary as they're part of the one thing it aims to do well.
• Because PowerShell is one thing, it's got a pretty consistent design between different functions, so each one's better at its job as you don't need to know as much about it the first time you see it in order to make it work.
• The verbosity of naming means you can understand what something is at first glace, and can discover it easily if you need it but don't know what it's called - Select-String does what it says on the tin. grep only does what it says on the tin if you already know it's global regular expression print.
• Structured data is easier to move between commands and extract information from.

Specifically regarding the Unix philosophy, it's really just the first two bullet points that are relevant - a different definition of thing is used, and consistency is a part of doing a job well.