Planet Debian – Colin Watson: Reproducible man-db databases

Oct 162022
 

I’ve released man-db 2.11.0
(announcement,
NEWS), and
uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing
issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name,
man-db’s database is much less important than it used to be: most uses of
man(1) haven’t required it in a long time, and both hardware and
software
improvements
mean that even some searches can be done by brute force without needing
prior indexing. However, the database is still needed for the whatis(1)
and apropos(1) commands.
The database has a simple format – no relational structure here, it’s just a
simple key-value database using old-fashioned DBM-like interfaces and
composing a few fields to form values – but there are a number of subtleties
involved. The issues tend to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/reproducible-man-db-databases.html

 2022-10-16  Comments Off on Planet Debian – Colin Watson: Reproducible man-db databases

Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Inventing “holidays” to get people to spend

Oct 162022
 

US businesses have been inventing “holidays” as excuses to get people
to spend money for more than a century.
About 10 of the many examples.

I decided long ago to disregard all the holidays that pressure people
to give gifts.
I would not “celebrate” Record Store Day, but I do wish there were a
good record store in Boston, with a big selection of classical and
world records — I would visit it from time to time to look for
interesting CDs to buy. The CD is the last media substrate that was
invented without malfeatures to restrict people or impose nonfree
technology, and I am happy to use it.
Meanwhile: Out, out, damned Spotify! It has the same injustices as Amazon…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#14_October_2022_(Inventing_holidays_to_get_people_to_spend)

 2022-10-16  Comments Off on Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Inventing “holidays” to get people to spend

Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Digital payments for parking

Oct 162022
 

People who use a digital method to pay for parking are contributing
to a system of tracking which endangers human rights and democracy.
Occasionally, some of them also get scammed and then screwed.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#14_October_2022_(Digital_payments_for_parking)

 2022-10-16  Comments Off on Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Digital payments for parking

Hackaday – Reverse-Engineering a Display Protocol to Repair a Roland Synthesizer

Oct 162022
 

Repairing electronic devices isn’t as hard as it used to be. Thanks to the internet, it’s easy to find datasheets and application notes for any standard component inside your gadget, and once you’ve found the faulty one, you simply buy a replacement from one of a million web shops — assuming you don’t end up with a fake, of course. When it comes to non-standard components, however, things get more difficult, as [dpeddi] found out when a friend asked him for help in repairing a Roland Juno-G synthesizer with a broken display.
The main issue here was the fact that the display in question was a custom design, with no replacement or documentation available. The only thing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/15/reverse-engineering-a-display-protocol-to-repair-a-roland-synthesizer/

 2022-10-16  Comments Off on Hackaday – Reverse-Engineering a Display Protocol to Repair a Roland Synthesizer

Planet Python – Will McGugan: A new way of drawing boxes in the terminal (possibly)

Oct 152022
 

Not all CEOs of tech startups have the time to write code. Fortunately while Textualize is still in its development phase I have plenty of opportunity to get my hands dirty.
I get a kick out of being creative within the limitation of the terminal. I may even have come up with with an entirely new way of drawing boxes in the terminal. As bizarre as that sounds
Boxes in the terminal are not new. Rich is full of them, but they predate Rich by a long time.
CLI apps will typically use box drawing characters to build boxes out of unicode characters. There are characters for vertical lines, horizontal lines, corners, and cross pieces. With a mixture of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/ceo-just-wants-to-draw-boxes/

 2022-10-15  Comments Off on Planet Python – Will McGugan: A new way of drawing boxes in the terminal (possibly)

Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.

Oct 152022
 

by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

 2022-10-15  Comments Off on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.

Hackaday – Why Learn Ancient Tech?

Oct 152022
 

The inner orbits of the Hackaday solar system have been vibrating with the announcement of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge. The short version of the story is that it’s a “retrocomputer”. But I think that’s somehow selling it short a little bit. The badge really is an introduction to machine language or maybe a programming puzzle, a ton of sweet blinky lights and clicky buttons, and what I think of as a full-stack hacking invitation.
Voja Antonic designed the virtual 4-bit machine that lives inside. What separates this machine from actual old computers is that everything that you might want to learn about its state is broken out to an LED on the front face, from the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/15/why-learn-ancient-tech/

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Ars Technica – A dish of neurons may have taught itself to play Pong (badly)

Oct 142022
 

Enlarge / In culture, nerve cells spontaneously form the structures needed to communicate with each other. (credit: JUAN GAERTNER / Getty Images)
One of the more exciting developments in AI has been the development of algorithms that can teach themselves the rules of a system. Early versions of things like game-playing algorithms had to be given the basics of a game. But newer versions don’t need that—they simply need a system that keeps track of some reward like a score, and they can figure out which actions maximize that without needing a formal description of the game’s rules.
A paper released by the journal Neuron takes this a step further by using actual neurons…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889781

 2022-10-14  Comments Off on Ars Technica – A dish of neurons may have taught itself to play Pong (badly)

LWN.net – Patent clouds for the Opus codec

Oct 122022
 

The Opus codec is an audio codec that
was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and
be royalty-free for all users. It was standardized by the IETF in 2012 as
RFC 6716.
Now a company called Vectis (“a premier
full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique“) is collecting
patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding
royalties on its use. “The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be
directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or
content“. (Thanks to Paul Wise).

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/910848/

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on LWN.net – Patent clouds for the Opus codec

Ballot Access News – U.S. Supreme Court Erases Third Circuit Decision on “Materiality” in Determining Whether a Ballot is Valid

Oct 122022
 

Federal voting rights laws have long held that voters cannot be disenfranchised for making a mistake that is not “material”. In other words, if the error made by the voter is merely technical and does not truly pertain to that voter’s ability to cast a vote, the error should not be used to discard the ballot.
On May 27, 2022, the Third Circuit had used that provision of federal law to allow some ballots to be counted in a Pennsylvania local race held in 2021. Even though certain mail-in ballots did not have the “date” blank filled in by the voter, the Court ruled that the ballots should count. All the arriving ballots had been date-stamped by…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/10/11/u-s-supreme-court-erases-third-circuit-decisions-on-materiality-in-determining-whether-a-ballot-is-valid/

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – U.S. Supreme Court Erases Third Circuit Decision on “Materiality” in Determining Whether a Ballot is Valid

Techdirt. – French Parliament Wants To Make People Pay A License Fee To Use Public Domain Works

Oct 122022
 

The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, including commercial ones. That’s the bargain, but it seems that the copyright maximalists in the French Parliament want to renege on it. Here’s an amendment to a finance bill that was proposed by 75 politicians in the National Assembly a few days ago (translation by DeepL):

The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/12/french-parliament-wants-to-make-people-pay-a-license-fee-to-use-public-domain-works/

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Techdirt. – French Parliament Wants To Make People Pay A License Fee To Use Public Domain Works

Ars Technica – Webb captures truly strange set of rings built by massive stars

Oct 122022
 

Enlarge (credit: Image courtesy of University of Sydney)
Today, Nature Astronomy released a paper that shows off the sorts of science the Webb Telescope was designed to produce. Early on, the new telescope was pointed at a system of two massive stars that orbit each other closely. Ground-based observations had detected a ring or two produced by the interactions of these giants; the Webb was able to determine that there are at least 17 concentric rings of material that have been put in place over the previous 130 years.
And just to show off, astronomers were able to obtain a spectrum of the material that forms the rings.
It’s difficult to express just how bizarre…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889489

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Ars Technica – Webb captures truly strange set of rings built by massive stars

Planet PostgreSQL – Paul Ramsey: Be Ready! Public schema changes in Postgres 15

Oct 122022
 

The end is nigh! PostgreSQL has
substantially tightened
restrictions on the use of the “public” schema.
Here, a standard login user (not superuser) tries to make a table, as one does:
user=> CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer); ERROR: permission denied for schema public
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer);

NoooO! Why can I not write a table into public?
For developers and experimenters, one of the long-time joys of PostgreSQL has
been the free-and-easy security policy that PostgreSQL has shipped with for the “public” schema.

“public” is in the default search_path, so you can always find things in it;
and,
any user can create new objects in “public”; so,
“just throw it in public!” has been an easy collaboration trick.

However, for anyone using a database for more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5qV

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Paul Ramsey: Be Ready! Public schema changes in Postgres 15

Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.

Oct 122022
 

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner? In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/mandatory-reporting-strains-systems-punishes-poor-families

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.

Motherboard – ‘We Don’t Have Much Time Left’: Co-Author of UN Climate Report Detained at Climate Protest

Oct 122022
 

On Tuesday morning, an IPCC report author and climate scientist was taken into police custody while protesting  alongside activists blocking traffic in Bern, Switzerland.  The scientist, Julia Steinberger, is a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and contributed to the 6th Assessment Report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specifically its third chapter on emissions mitigation pathways that are still possible this century.  The protest was organized by Renovate Switzerland group, and advocated for improved energy efficiency in buildings. Activists glued themselves to the road as part of a blockade; it was the fifth action by the group in the last week, according to local news reports. In a video of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ax783/we-dont-have-much-time-left-co-author-of-un-climate-report-detained-at-climate-protest

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Motherboard – ‘We Don’t Have Much Time Left’: Co-Author of UN Climate Report Detained at Climate Protest

INDY Week – Op-Ed: We Need to Ensure We’re Doing Everything Possible to Stop Mass Displacement

Oct 122022
 

Future generations will one day learn about the large-scale removal and replacement of one people with another on a scale not seen since urban renewal. Will we be able to tell them we did everything possible to stop it?

External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/Letters-to-the-Editor/oped-mass-displacement-durham/

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on INDY Week – Op-Ed: We Need to Ensure We’re Doing Everything Possible to Stop Mass Displacement

Phoronix – Zink Lands Async Pipeline Precompiles For Better Performance, Less Game Stuttering

Oct 122022
 

Mesa’s Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Async-Pipeline-Pre

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Phoronix – Zink Lands Async Pipeline Precompiles For Better Performance, Less Game Stuttering

Boing Boing – Do “The Lurch” to this rare vintage TV clip of “Monster Mash” as sung by Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy!

Oct 122022
 

On the October 30, 1965 episode of the musical variety show Shindig!, the special guests were Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy (aka “Lurch” from the Addams Family)! Previously thought lost to the ages, here is an actual clip from that episode featuring a rendition of “Monster Marsh” with Karloff impersonating original “Monster Mash” singer Bobby Pickett who, of course, was impersonating Karloff in the song. — Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2022/10/11/do-the-lurch-to-this-rare-vintage-tv-clip-of-monster-mash-as-sung-by-boris-karloff-and-ted-cassidy.html

 2022-10-12  Comments Off on Boing Boing – Do “The Lurch” to this rare vintage TV clip of “Monster Mash” as sung by Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy!

Hackaday – RotBot Adds a Extra Dimension to 3D Printing, with a Twist

Oct 092022
 

It always seemed to us that the Z-axis on a 3D printer, or pretty much any CNC machine for that matter, is criminally underused. To have the X- and Y-axes working together to make smooth planar motions while the Z-axis just sits there waiting for its big moment, which ends up just moving the print head and the bed another fraction of a millimeter from each other just doesn’t seem fair. Can’t the Z-axis have a little more fun?
Of course it can, and while non-planar 3D printing is nothing new, [Stefan] over at CNC Kitchen shows us a literal twist on the concept, with this four-axis non-planar printer. For obvious reasons, it’s called the “RotBot” and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/09/rotbot-adds-a-extra-dimension-to-3d-printing-with-a-twist/

 2022-10-09  Comments Off on Hackaday – RotBot Adds a Extra Dimension to 3D Printing, with a Twist
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