Spyke

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Anyone know what this is?

It's the guts of 3.5" floppies, like these, they usually stored 720kB, then 1.44MB, but the latest versions (double sided) were 2.88MB.

The larger one at the bottom is from a 5 1/4" (orange in this picture, the big daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)

... and now you kids know where the "save" button icon came from.

They were not meant to be removed from their protective envelopes, they're probably damaged now.

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What's some really unpopular opinion you have?

Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look "cute", and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages ("oh, but my child loves his cage") when they don't need hardwired unconditional lopsided "love" to feed their narcissism.

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Brands that don't buy enough Twitter ads will lose verification

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Since he started his act about buying Twitter I saw that as a personal vendetta to harm it - the ultimate tantrum for being mocked at there and not being under his control. He said he'd buy then backed off just to hurt Twitter's value, but then when he was forced to buy it for the first offer value, he got even more butthurt.

It's pretty clear that everything he's done since is to get revenge and destroy it. It's insane that some people keep praising his decisions towards Twitter as anything but ridiculous.

He's the rich brat who doesn't get brown nosed by the waiter in front of his date, then proceed to buy the restaurant just to fire the guy.

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Is it still necessary to use _ while naming files?

Spaces are not the end of the world, but very annoying:

On a bash command line, they make it harder to handle a list of files returned by a command as argument to another.

On the command line (lin or win), they require escaping or quoting when used as arguments or script/executable names.

On many programs, if you cut&paste the complete path to the file (for example in a network drive), you can click on the path and it will access the file, but spaces in filenames or directories breaks that (and it's not bad programming, the program simply can't guess where the link ends).

When you mention the name of the file in a documentation or message, it may lead to misintepretation, and it's just fugly:

"You can find more information in the attached document file.pdf".

What is the name of the file? it can be "the attached document file.pdf", "attached document file.pdf", "document file.pdf" or "file.pdf".

Also when mentioned in a text, the file name may end up split in separated lines or even pages, and will more likely be subject to autocorrect.

When copying the file name in a text, in most environments you can double-click to select the whole name, but it doesn't work if it has spaces.

Now, if you never ever type or copy/paste a file name, and only ever access files through a graphical interface, then it makes no difference.

But then you start getting to comfy and if anything goes, why not non-ascii chars too? And that opens a different can of troubles.

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What's the most legendary thing that's happend to you?

1987, I was 19, invited a girl (from the same tech highschool I had just finished) to watch Crocodile Dundee (not a date). Yes I know, this is a 1986 movie, but in the age when movies travelled in reels, releases took time to arrive in Brazil.

Arrived at her home, she was still showering. Her older sister (25 years old, just out of college, a Pharmacist) invited me in for a coffee.

Had a coffee with her and their mother. I was mesmerized by older sister. I had given up dating girls about my age, because too much immature fantasy romance. This girl was independent, bewitchingly intelligent, and beautiful.

I was too intimidated to invite her to join us. In my mind, she would answer "oh, sorry, my fiancee is about to arrive" or something like that, which would have crushed me.

So the younger sister finally shows up and invites her to join. She (thinking I was interested in younger sister) asks me "is that ok?" "YES YES Please!".

We went out as friends for some months, then dated for 7 years, while I went through college and got a stable job. Married in 1994.

We're still together, two "kids" (23 year old Nurse degree and 25, 1 year to finish med school).

I did a lot of awesome things in life, but so far the most extraordinary, happened by pure chance, life changing, fortunate, unlock secret ultimate quest event was meeting my wife.

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What do you think is the best solution to having the same named communities on different instances?

This feature shouldn't be implemented on the server side or decided by the front end code, as the developers would have to decide which "same names" to merge. It's the end user who should pick that.

It would better be a front end/app feature: The end user would pick communities from multiple servers (even ones with different names), and group them under whatever name/category they want. The front end would then show all posts/comments from that group as they were from a single community.

Additional feature: Automatically merge comments from cross-posts.

linux

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What exactly does systemd do?

What does exactly systemd do?

It mostly causes heated discussions and a feeling of nostalgia for simpler times.

When your computer finishes loading the kernel, you have to tell it what to do next. There are dozens of systems and services that have to run (once or keep running) for everything to work. Mounting your disk partitions, bringing the networking up, starting the GUI, initializing all kinds of services, etc.

Once upon a time most (all?) distros used sysVinit, adapted from Unix's System V to do that. It was simple and very easy to understand and setup: Very basically the init program would call scripts by alphanumerical order (passing "start" to scripts starting with S and "stop" to ones starting with K). You'd place these scripts in /etc/rcX.d, X being a number, the runlevel (and you had just a handful of runlevels, like halt, reboot, single user, gui, etc). Want to run something between starting the network and bringing up sshd? Just create a script in /etc/init.d and link it to /etc/rcX.d naming it SNNmyscript, with NN being a number between the ones in SNNnetwork and SNNsshd. Want to disable a service? Change its script name from S... to K... Change startup sequences? Just change the NN.

Beautiful. But although it worked perfectly for most of us, it did have deficiencies. An obvious one is that it ran these scripts sequentially. Even if your computer was using 0.1% of its power to run each of them, you'd be waiting for each one to run in a single queue.

So a very nice and polite guy came up with systemd. Instead of simple scripts running sequentially, you could now create "unit files", describing each "thing to do", for what "targets" (similar to runlevels) that thing is needed, which scripts to run to make that thing happen, and which previous things should have been done before this thing (dependencies). With this, your computer can fire up multiple startup scripts (and stopping scripts) at the same time, only making sure to queue stuff so dependencies are met. For example, you don't need to wait for sshd to start your database server, but you do need networking before you mount shared disks.

That made boot times much better, but at the cost of complexity and maintainability (and here come heated discussions...).

The problem is that not everyone wanted that tradeoff, but systemd was shoved down everyone's throat as most (all?) distros adopted it.

So init freedom is a reaction to that, offering you the option of multiple init systems (there are more than just sysVinit and systemd).

No offense to all the other init systems, but I'd stick with sysV if you're really after simplicity and backwards compatibility with most older systems (and the old ways), or systemd, because it became the de facto standard, it's faster and more modern.

Should you care? If you have to ask this, then no.

If you had to craft your own init scripts and configurations, and had a ton of legacy scripts, or maybe were building very simple barebones systems, or very complex, always changing startup scenarios and targets or runlevels, or want to exercise your "freedom" just for the heck of it, then you could care.

If you're a distro hopper (i.e. are more dedicated to "use Linux" than to use applications which run on Linux), having tried 5 different init systems may be one more thing to brag about in distro hopper meetings.

If you're getting into Linux to learn Linux administration for career purposes, systemd is what you'll find in commercial systems.

If you're after an OS to just be an OS (i.e. just run your programs), just pick a well supported (community) and mainstream one, it will most likely come with systemd, and you'll probably never need to touch systemd. My wife (not technical) has been using exclusively Linux for 15+ years, and I can assure you with 100% certainty that she doesn't know which init system is there, or what is systemd or sysV.

If you're new to Linux, curious and want to learn all you can about it, I'd say there are many other interesting and useful things in Linux to learn and care about before you go down this rabbit hole, summoning some nice nostalgic but outdated tech from the dead.

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Zoom Changes TOS to Say It Won't Train AI on Your Calls 'Without Your Consent' After Backlash

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Technically they can collect whatever they need, before encrypting to send from E to the other E, and send, with or without encryption, to their servers. The "E"s are the devices on each end, not necessarily the users mouths and ears.

You can send your typed credit card to that site using SSL encryption, but the number can be captured by a keylogger or a screen capture before being encrypted.