Some countries, e.g. Poland, require you to turn on your left indicator as soon as you enter a roundabout and as long as you stay in the roundabout. If you intend to exit, you have to switch from left indicator light to right indicator light. Switching happens while steering left.
Poland has multi lane roundabouts where you are expected to stay on the innermost lane possible and only move to an outer lane when your exit is close.
> My understanding is that Signal (the app) is private, not anonymous, centralized, and closed.
You are right about that.
There used to be an open source build called LibreSignal
Moxie Marlinspike made clear [1]: You may inspect the code. You are even allowed to compile it. You are not allowed to connect your self compiled client to our message servers. We are not interested in a federated protocol. Make sure your fork creates its own bubble that does not overlap with Open Wisper Systems. Stop using the name Signal.
Big corp introduces a constant uphill battle and people get minted to avoid conflict (Why do you want to spend money on a subject that is not on your bosses boss roadmap? Does this new service obey our IT-compliance-rules? I know a virus scanner on Linux is a bad idea, but compliance demands it. I do not care about your threat model, have you installed one already? Can you spend 30,000 Currency Units, but have it billed in November, accepted in December, and paid out in January next year? Answer me until end-of-business!).
People want to have an impact on their environment and conflict is the wrong way to start with.
If you ever happen to study computer science, you may come across a subject called "coding theory". It introduces you to compression as well as many other topics such as error correction (Reed-Solomon, used in RAID5, RAID6 and ECC-RAM), line coding (sometimes you need to flip bits to keep the clock on both sides in sync, no clock-signal for a long time may cause clock loss) and a lot of wonderful but weird stuff.
Let us go into detail on compression:
There is a representation. US-ASCII uses 8 bits per latin letter, UTF-32 uses 4 bits per latin letter. It is just a temporal representation to the machine -- usually in memory only, it does have the same amount of information, you can save it more efficiently to disk. You would not want to save either format to disk, it is a waste of space.
Information content (I hope my translation is correct, scan Wikipedia for details) cannot be compressed. But it can be calculated. The more seldom a letter, the more information its occurence carries. As soon as each letter is not equally frequent (compare space and "q") the information density drops.
Calculation is quite simple: Count the occurence of each letter, count the caracters used (if there is no "q" in the text, you got to save one letter and its encoding) and apply some math
For some easy examples, think of morse code and Huffman coding -- not every letter needs to be encoded using the same amount of bits.
> How much data can lowercase save? #
Nothing. Either there is (almost) no information to it in the first place, in that case compression will take care of it for you. There could only be information to it if uppercase letters were equally likely as lowercase letters
> How much data can lowercase save? #
Why do you even stop at letters? You could build a dictionary of words and compress references to it. The compression efficiancy would only depend on the amount of words, regardless of case and regardless of character set. That is why entropy depends on "symbols" instead of "letters"
> I must admit, I read this and failed to find any profound, deep way that these coders are different.
I have come to the same conclusion.
> Seems like they just worked hard.
I would like to draw another conclusion. Fitzgerald operated live journal from his bedroom as a teenager - so he was at the brink of new technology. Same effect that gave rise to Bill Gates.
There are probably more effects at play, like working for a company that does not waste your time doing bullshit tasks and having a mentor to get you started. Even a like minded individual will increase your chances to overcome obstacles.
Thank you dang very much for that explanation. It is a good example of social interaction and of second order effects. You are setting a good role model.
I am trying to make sense of the argument of pushing configuration into a library:
* if the library is just a dependency, the Linux loader will set it up. It will have the same environment as the other libraries and as the main program.
* if the library is set up by dlopen(), there is no way to provide an environment pointer
Altering the global environment variable for child processes makes no sense, for
execve()
accepts an
char* envp[]
. So I guess we need to talk about issues with a specific use case of
Maybe the dlopen issue could be hacked around by dlmopen and injecting getenv and setenv symbols that access a different environment variable list than the application's.
You are right, you do not want to lookup documents that old, it is a waste of time...
... unless you are a German and the state asks for your time sheets three years in the past because you've gotten child support and are requested to prove your working hours.
... unless you happen to have an accident and your insurance is fighting with another insurance who's gonna pay and they ask you about the incident two years later
... unless you end up in a contract fight with the postal operator, that can take a year of mailing before being settled.
Some correspondences take years and only add a mailing every few months. You would like to have a thread-like view -- as in an electronic mail. That is the strength of document management systems.
