WTF Bites
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which I've seen happen in a coworker's Solaris workstation over 20 years ago
I always wondered if anyone ever actually used Solaris.
My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance. And extremely loud fans.
That just sounds like you didn't get an expensive enough one. Pretty sure the last Solaris I worked on was on x64
I'm pretty sure it was expensive as fuck. Like two month salaries worth expensive per workstation. A proper SPARC thingy.
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My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance.
My only experience with a Sun Solaris machine is being unimpressed by CDE, and impressed by how cheap and nasty the keyboard and mouse were.
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@error_bot said in WTF Bites:
Does either of these work?
tar --versiontar --help
@error_bot tar czvf your.mom.tar.gz ./your.mom
I haven't used tar in a loooong time, but I still remembered
zxvf.
cdidn't immediately pop to mind but I probably could have remember had you asked me.
That's the extent of my knowledge oftaroptions and it's good enough for 99% of my needs.
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My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance. And extremely loud fans.
Not sure if you mean cooling devices or annoying people.
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Firefox suddenly crashes and then keeps crashing immediately on startup. On a hunch I run
debsums -c firefox-esr, and get an answer: two of its*.sos are damaged. Nothingapt --reinstallcan't fix, right? Except the crappy university Wi-Fi has just crapped itself again, and I need to run a JavaScript-capable browser to log in. And I need Internet access before I'll be able to run that browser. What would Yossarian do?Run one of the half-dozen other browsers you have installed?
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
the stereotypical bearded Unix nerds had to explain to me how to use this fvwm2 shit and why its usability was 15 years behind Windows.
If they used a window manager instead of the console in text mode, they were No True Bearded Unix Nerds.
No True Bearded Unix Nerd would use the console*, they'd use
screenin a tty.twmis where it's at—as old as screen and none of that new-fangled glitzy fvwm2 shite. Material Design before it was cool.
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which I've seen happen in a coworker's Solaris workstation over 20 years ago
I always wondered if anyone ever actually used Solaris.
My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance. And extremely loud fans.
That just sounds like you didn't get an expensive enough one. Pretty sure the last Solaris I worked on was on x64
I'm pretty sure it was expensive as fuck. Like two month salaries worth expensive per workstation. A proper SPARC thingy.
Sun never sold anything that wasn't expensive as fuck. Yes, performance sucked, but uptimes measured in years even with dozens of users on the whole spectrum between nooby, demanding and malicious on it 24/7 were pretty cool.
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Last Wikipedia binge led me to the newly opensourced Inferno. I was interested in playing with it until I read this, unironically published (or at least updated) in March 2021:
High level security is an important part of the Inferno system. [...] using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:
- IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms
- MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
My only experience with a Sun Solaris machine is being unimpressed by CDE
It felt better when compared against Windows 3.1.
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That's the extent of my knowledge of tar options
There's also a
t, and that's pretty much it unless you're some kind of crazy person.Stultifyingly-dull-fact,
jarso far has supported this syntax in each version I've tried it with. I think it needs a-preceding per cowardice, tho.
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@Gribnit Yes.
There's the command options:c— Create a tar filex— Extract a tar filet— List a tar file's contents
The mandatory option:
f— Use a tar file (yes, really) or a pipe (if the filename is-); omit this and it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those in use?
The common option:
v— Verbose
And a few things to control integrating with compression directly (which are common extensions to basic
tar):z— Use gzip; this is the one I remember properly.j— I think this one is for bzip?- …
Oh, and a bunch more that nobody remembers.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device
Noice.
Wonder if I should figure out how to link the tape device to stdout in the environment, just to fuck with people.
Foregone conclusion, it turns out.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device
Noice.
Wonder if I should figure out how to link the tape device to stdout in the environment, just to fuck with people.
TAPE=/dev/stdinI accept bugchecks or segmentation faults for payment.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device
Noice.
Wonder if I should figure out how to link the tape device to stdout in the environment, just to fuck with people.
TAPE=/dev/stdinI accept bugchecks or segmentation faults for payment.
Handy. If you want to make sure your profile is loaded, extra sure, try adding
$0 | $0at the end.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device
Noice.
Wonder if I should figure out how to link the tape device to stdout in the environment, just to fuck with people.
TAPE=/dev/stdinI accept bugchecks or segmentation faults for payment.
You'd probably do better using
/dev/mouse…
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device
Noice.
Wonder if I should figure out how to link the tape device to stdout in the environment, just to fuck with people.
TAPE=/dev/stdinI accept bugchecks or segmentation faults for payment.
You'd probably do better using
/dev/mouse…Page 666 of this topic is coming along nice, well done.
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which I've seen happen in a coworker's Solaris workstation over 20 years ago
I always wondered if anyone ever actually used Solaris.
My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance. And extremely loud fans.
That just sounds like you didn't get an expensive enough one. Pretty sure the last Solaris I worked on was on x64
I'm pretty sure it was expensive as fuck. Like two month salaries worth expensive per workstation. A proper SPARC thingy.
Two months salaries? That's not "expensive as fuck", that's more like "mid-range".
I remember when I started the university, there was a lab with DEC workstations, bought by the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering as CAD workstation. Twice a year, it was full of ME students doing their assignments... and the rest of the time, it was completely empty because ME students generally did not like DUX.
Funny story: the Dean of the ME Faculty did a tour for some bigwigs (Edu ministry maybe?) and as they entered the lab (from behind us), he said... "and here we have the top-of-the-line CAD lab, each of these workstations cost like mid-range Mercedes..." .... and the whole group looked at the half-empty room with me and two other people, all of us having 8 xterms tiled across the 30" monitors.
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j — I think this one is for bzip?
Yep - z and j are the two that I remember as well. Then again, modern tar can figure out the compression itself, which is useful when somebody uses a compression that isn't gzip or bzip.
(One might think that nothing useful ever comes out of Facebook. It's not quite true - their zstd compression is quite good for general purpose stuff.)
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j — I think this one is for bzip?
Yep - z and j are the two that I remember as well. Then again, modern tar can figure out the compression itself, which is useful when somebody uses a compression that isn't gzip or bzip.
(One might think that nothing useful ever comes out of Facebook. It's not quite true - their zstd compression is quite good for general purpose stuff.)
Capital J does
xzcompression.
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One might think that nothing useful ever comes out of Facebook. It's not quite true - their zstd compression is quite good for general purpose stuff.
Meh. If you were to use a special-purpose, lossy compression algorithm that discards useless and redundant information, all of Facebook could be compressed onto a single floppy.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
One might think that nothing useful ever comes out of Facebook. It's not quite true - their zstd compression is quite good for general purpose stuff.
Meh. If you were to use a special-purpose, lossy compression algorithm that discards useless and redundant information, all of Facebook could be compressed onto a single floppy.
Apparently, an 8" floppy could hold 242,944 bytes. Which sounds like more than enough space.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
But what are they thinking with the yearly promo price, compared to the monthly?
I'd guess the $1.99/month rate doesn't last a full year. I'd further guess that it lasts 3 months. 3 months at $1.99 and 9 months at $34.99 would be $320.88, so $290 would still be a discount. 4 months at $1.99 and 8 months at $34.99 would be $287.88, so about the same as the yearly rate, which would no longer be a bargain. If the introductory discount lasts longer than 4 months, you'd have to be seriously innumerate to take the yearly rate.
There's also a marketing psychological trick where if they show you an outlandishly high price first, it makes the real price much more palatable.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
If you were to use a special-purpose, lossy compression algorithm that discards useless and redundant information, all of Facebook could be compressed onto a single floppy.
by Westworld.
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There's also a marketing psychological trick where if they show you an outlandishly high price first, it makes the real price much more palatable.
Something about "anchoring", I think.
I remember seeing a video that recounted an experiment where you ask people two questions: first, whether a given object (say "this car") weighs more, or less, than X, with X being an obviously outlandish value, either too high or too low (i.e. the first question is either "does this car weigh more, or less, than 10 g?" or "does this car weigh more, or less, than 1 million tons?"). The second question is to give an estimate of the weight of the object.
Statistically, people would give a larger answer to the second question if they were asked the first one with the huge number than with the tiny one. They obviously know that the number they hear in the first question is totally wrong (by several orders of magnitude), but the simple fact that it was the last number they heard before the real question is enough to skew their answer upwards (or downwards).
So something similar might happen here. Even if the first price is outlandishly high and you discard it immediately, it still "anchors" you towards a higher number as what you think the "true" price should be -- which makes you more likely to accept a slightly higher actual price than otherwise.
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A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn
Stories on major news sites like ‘The Washington Post,’ and ‘New York Magazine’ currently have porn embedded in them because of an old site called Vidme.
Whoopsie daisy
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@error_bot xkcd historical artifact
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Epic games is having some issues and letting me know in a nice way
JSON, do you speak it?
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it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those
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@Zerosquare Nope. I had one 30+ years ago (my first employer out of college made them, or at least the electronics inside, and I got it either free or at a substantial employee discount), but it disappeared into the mists of time decades ago. If I did still have it, it would be rather less than useful. I don't remember what interface it used (parallel SCSI?), but whatever it was, it's long obsolete. And I don't remember what the capacity of the tape cartridges was, but I'm pretty sure it was measured in MB, not GB, and certainly not TB.
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omit this and it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those in use?
Yeah, a handful of 24x12TB LTO8 changers. But there's no way anyone would let tar figure out the device. Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
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omit this and it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those in use?
Yeah, a handful of 24x12TB LTO8 changers. But there's no way anyone would let tar figure out the device. Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
I mean, can you even just write a stream of random garbage directly to the device? How would that make sense?
(Obviously I have no clue how this works)
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omit this and it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those in use?
Yeah, a handful of 24x12TB LTO8 changers. But there's no way anyone would let tar figure out the device. Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
I mean, can you even just write a stream of random garbage directly to the device? How would that make sense?
(Obviously I have no clue how this works)Yes, that works fine, it just creates a new "file" on the tape and dump data in there. Tape drives have some primitive notion of a file that is just "shit between markers on the tape" so you can tell it to skip forward or backward to the next marker.
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Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
Okay, I'll bite. What lets these buggers not be amenable, to the notional standard interface?
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare Nope. I had one 30+ years ago (my first employer out of college made them, or at least the electronics inside, and I got it either free or at a substantial employee discount), but it disappeared into the mists of time decades ago. If I did still have it, it would be rather less than useful. I don't remember what interface it used (parallel SCSI?), but whatever it was, it's long obsolete. And I don't remember what the capacity of the tape cartridges was, but I'm pretty sure it was measured in MB, not GB, and certainly not TB.
30 years ago you could put 8G on a VHS tape.
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Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
Okay, I'll bite. What lets these buggers not be amenable, to the notional standard interface?
What's that standard interface that who is not amenable to?
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Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
Okay, I'll bite. What lets these buggers not be amenable, to the notional standard interface?
What's that standard interface that who is not amenable to?
I seriously can't expect
tarto just work withoutffor a tape deck assuming POSIX compliance?
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Apart from the fact that anyone using tar for these things to begin with would be frontpage material.
Okay, I'll bite. What lets these buggers not be amenable, to the notional standard interface?
What's that standard interface that who is not amenable to?
I seriously can't expect
tarto just work withoutffor a tape deck assuming POSIX compliance?You can, and I used to do that when I had a DAT drive at home for my daily backups. But I don't know anyone still using single tape drives—usually if you need a tape these days, you need a changer, and tar is completely out of its depth with these. You'd have to handle inventories and short writes and retries and changer operation and whatnot in some shell script abomination. That's what Bareos, Amanda & Co. are for.
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You'd have to handle inventories and short writes and retries and changer operation and whatnot in some shell script abomination.
That sounds like a wager. I do like me a good shell script abomination.
in verbose mode, when
hexagram.shdisplays "Great Power", it also spawns background processes equal to the number of cores to crank through an obscene wudge of data from/dev/urandomI'm not a monsterand I've no intention of fixing the bug that lets me trigger this at-will, it's useful vs test stability although if there's a hexagram name that inspires me to drain the entropy pool, I absolutely will do so, and am reviewing now. torn between "Innocence", "Great Taming", "Work On The Decayed", and the unreachable* "A Suffusion of Yellow" "Dispersion" it is.
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you need a [tape] changer
I've always wondered. Is the budget version of that an underpaid intern, or do you actually need the serious-level hardware?
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My first job as a programmer was on Solaris. Very expensive hardware with very poor performance. And extremely loud fans.
Not sure if you mean cooling devices or annoying people.I'm pretty sure it's both
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it's supposed to use a goddamn tape device and who the fuck has one of those
I have a Datassette for my Commodore 8-bits, but I don't normally have it hooked up as it won't work if you have a 1581 attached to the computer. (Also I don't have a lot of tapes; they were never big over here.)
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You'd have to handle inventories and short writes and retries and changer operation and whatnot in some shell script abomination.
That sounds like a wager. I do like me a good shell script abomination.
in verbose mode, when
hexagram.shdisplays "Great Power", it also spawns background processes equal to the number of cores to crank through an obscene wudge of data from/dev/urandomI'm not a monsterand I've no intention of fixing the bug that lets me trigger this at-will, it's useful vs test stability although if there's a hexagram name that inspires me to drain the entropy pool, I absolutely will do so, and am reviewing now. torn between "Innocence", "Great Taming", "Work On The Decayed", and the unreachable* "A Suffusion of Yellow" "Dispersion" it is.Drain
/dev/urandom/?
Not even with Enthusiasm.
What Youthful Folly.
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you need a [tape] changer
I've always wondered. Is the budget version of that an underpaid intern, or do you actually need the serious-level hardware?
Not in civilized countries it isn't. I.e. where you have to pay even an intern some semi-serious salary to get them to the office at the time you usually want to run your backups.
Plus you'd need extra logic to check when the tape changer has inevitably fucked up and put the wrong tape in the drive because he's taken acid to make the only job more boring than night watch at a car park a bit more exciting.
BTDTGTT
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BTDTGTT
Was it at least high quality enough to machine wash?
I have way too many that don't survive more than a few usages...
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@Tsaukpaetra How many washing machines have you broken, I wonder?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
BTDTGTT
Was it at least high quality enough to machine wash?
I may have imagined the tshirt, so yes.
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@Tsaukpaetra How many washing machines have you broken, I wonder?
None! However, I have yet to find a solution for the clogged drain...
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/plunger-and-clogged-bath--1199279746-9e2a05ab39f24ebeb6c9326292f8289e.jpg)
Given how the simplest things tend to go haywire when you're involved, it's better to avoid chemicals...
1168: tar - explain xkcd
