ParrotyError

Indeed. But the fact that the kernel does it at all is mysterious, and that on most systems the misfeature is enabled by default...

I can't remember but I did sit in on a presentation about 15 years ago where they explained it. I lent the notes to a senior developer and never got them back.

The OOM killer was a misfeature when it was designed. Why is it still in the kernel? Solaris solved this problem 20 years ago.

The tape recorders still work.

I suppose you can run it in bochs or quemu or one of those things if you want to use it on non-x86 hardware.

I've never been on the offshore survival course where they teach you how to jump off an oil platform into the sea and survive, but allegedly they tell you to cover your mouth firmly with the palm of your hand and pinch your nostrils closed tight between your thumb and fingers. Apparently when you hit the cold water your natural reaction is to breath in. Also, you must prevent water being forced up your nostrils and damaging your brain etc.

No, let's attack the unemployed, the sick, the old, the disabled, the mentally ill, the foreign, the Muslims instead, right? Done up like a kipper!

"We already had control" is, however.

No, but it's how the Kippers won the vote.

Are you nuts? We already had control. Now the future of the UK is in jeopardy because of you tinfoil hat brigade.

All kinds of things. Large organisations (supermarket chains like Tesco) holding onto vast "land banks," new property being bought up and left vacant by foreign investors as fast as it can been build (a big problem in London and Cambridge), construction companies and their investors who want to restrict the supply to keep prices high, a lack of suitable places to build new housing (lack of infrastructure, protected countryside...). Everywhere I look I keep seeing new flats (apartments) being built where offices used to be but they are empty, so it's a bit of a mystery. Maybe these are of the wrong type or these are examples of the ones the foreign investors are buying?

"In the example of home rental, making homes available for rent enables families to live in accommodations that they would not be able to purchase. These accommodations are not without cost to the owner: Taxes, utilities, maintenance, security and administration are all associated costs that rent payments offset. What the rentier provides in most cases, is a better quality of life than the family could have if they were forced to own the property they lived in."

In many parts of the UK this just isn't the case any more. There is a serious lack of housing due to many factors (the bigots will tell you it's all the fault of immigration) but the short story is that the competition for rental property is so fierce now that in many places, monthly rent to the private landlord is higher than a monthly mortgage payment would be to buy a similar property.

So why don't people just buy? Well, there is a shortage of houses to buy, and you can't usually get a 100% mortgage. You need to put down a substantial cash deposit towards the purchase price of the house, for example 15, 20 and even 25% in some cases.

So why don't people just save up for a deposit? Well, if you need to spend £250k on a very modest 3-bedroom house, you are looking at anything from £37.5k plus fees.

Housing is so expensive now in relation to average income, that people are effectively priced out of the market forever, unless they win or inherit a lot of money. It is not possible to save that amount in any reasonable time scale.

So why not get a second or third job? Maybe they'll work themselves to death before they need that house? Only joking, people have to work long hours at their main jobs nowadays. The contract may say 37.5 hours per week, and that's what you get paid for, but "You're all professionals..."

A containment vessel at Chernobyl would have been useless. The Chernobyl disaster was a combination of poor reactor design leading to dangerous reactor physics, poor safety systems, poorly-trained staff, and an dangerous and unnecessary "experiment" being performed on the reactor (i.e. operating it in a dangerous regime). No containment building could have been strong enough to contain the explosion. The RBMK is a particularly bad design of reactor.

"I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." -- Jerome K. Jerome. Especially when it's the high priests of the C++ orthodoxy reinventing the wheel 30 years late.

Back in the 90s (IIRC) someone wrote a kernel module for linux that provided the equivalent of a GUI "trash can/recycling bin" but at the filesystem level, where a specific directory (folder for you young 'uns) was set aside for the deleted files. Because it was a kernel module (filesystem driver) it was transparent to applications, including the shell.

It's unreadable on desktop too. What's with this new fashion?

Back in the days of the 8-bit micros there were some games that were absolutely incredible for what they could pack into a tiny machine. Elite on the BBC micro (32k) was one, but being poor I had a Spectrum 128. There was a helicopter simulator by Digital Integration for the 48k Spectrum called Tomahawk which was particularly good, and another 3D game called Starglider, which was originally for the Atari ST but there were ports to the Spectrum 128 and 48k Spectrum! I seem to remember an article in Sinclair User where they interviewed the developers who explained how they got it all to fit into such a small machine. Self-modifying code and using parts of the frame buffer to store code and data IIRC...

When I was in my teens I bough a book called "Advanced Spectrum Machine Language" by David Webb (IIRC) and it had examples of a rainbow processor (high-res colour by repeatedly writing to the attributes file quickly) and a full-screen horizon (by flipping the border colour bit at the right time). I've often wondered what other tricks were possible. For example, would it be possible to mix colours by changing the attributes on successive frames? So you could, for example, make orange by mixing red and yellow?