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fafneron Arc4random – randomization for all occasions

I don't think that's true. Drepper was against strlcat for specific reasons. And in the meanwhile the C11 standard had adopted an alternative (but imo worse) API for it, based on the Microsoft stuff.

Framing this as a general rejection of APIs because they are from OpenBSD is highly disingenuous.

fafneron Welcome, New Emacs Developers

Especially bread. It's a staple food in many cultures. It's an important item. Why should we not demand high quality? Where I'm from people eat good bread. I grew up with good bread. It is really interesting but also sad, that the anglosphere seems to lack a decent bread culture.

fafneron Welcome, New Emacs Developers

E.g.,

* John Wiegley, author of eshell and other things. * The ada-mode was moved to GNU elpa because the maintainer didn't want to work with bzr.

fafneron The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)

I still remember when I was binding my thesis. The printing shop offered the option to engrave text on the book cover. But they only accepted Word documents as template for it. I gave up as soon as I tried to do smallcaps in Word.

The thesis was nicely typeset in LaTeX and it would have been ridiculous to make the cover look far worse than the actual text.

The engraving was supposed to be something like 3€ per line. But it didn't even support basic typographic features because of Word. That was just ridiculous. That's why my thesis has a plain cover and the shop lost 12€ (- expenses) per copy.

fafneron Welcome, New Emacs Developers

I rarely buy sliced bread. But then again I usually buy real bread and not that "toast"-thing, which seems to be mislabelled as "bread" in the anglosphere.

fafneron Welcome, New Emacs Developers

bzr is a DVCS.

But anyway: bzr has simply become a barrier. Not only to attract new developers but also some long term contributors have ceased contributions because they considered bzr to be too much of a hassle. But it's not only that git has simply become the vcs everybody knows. Bazaar development has stopped and it's in "maintenance mode", which sadly means that some bugs aren't getting fixed. Switching to git therefore made sense from several perspectives.

fafneron Welcome, New Emacs Developers

It's simply a joke about Emacs having a long history. Don't take it too seriously. Just like the "greatest thing since sliced bread" phrase. I mean sliced bread is not great at all.

fafneron Uselessd

GNU tools are rather well documented and well usable. I really don't understand the claims you are making.

fafneron Apple: We have decided to no longer release Libm source (2013)

And the danger of things like that is increasing with clang/llvm. That's why I think RMS is right to be sceptical of it. Right now a lot of development around it might be open source. But for how long? Especially if GCC is moved out of the way.

fafneron Emacs 24.4 released

Well it is limited by Emacs' display engine. It is obviously not supposed to replace your default browser. But it is usually good enough to view html documentation. Which is really something you want inside your editor.

fafneron Emacs 24.4 released

http://larsmagne23.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/eww.png

It's from an early version though (over a year old)

fafneron Emacs 24.4 released

Rectangular mark mode is really awesome. It makes working with rectangles a lot easier. It is now so well integrated into my workflow that I'm really annoyed when I have to use an older Emacs version.

fafneron Emacs 24.4 released

It can display images. It seems to even support HTML5 SVG.

The HTML rendering engine (shr) was originally written as part of the Gnus project for exactly that task: To render HTML in RSS and email. The browser (eww) just adds http support via url.el and a user front end.

fafneron Emacs 24.4 released

The web browser (named eww) is of course limited by the display engine of Emacs. So don't expect too much. But for reading documentation in html format it works well for me so far and I guess that's the biggest use-case for it.

fafneron Clarifying some things about Guile-Emacs

Once rms stepped down as a maintainer development around GNU Emacs seemed to have significantly improved. It is amazing to see the progress. Although the 24.4 release keeps waiting.

fafneron The C++14 Standard: What You Need to Know

GCC 4.9 added __auto_type as an extension in C.

fafneron Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft

> Everything I've read seems like Minecraft totally failed to learn from id software and valve when it comes to modding. And still Minecraft mods are massive.

I have played it but I'm not really a Minecraft person myself. However as far as I know the modding situation isn't that bad because the Minecraft jar can be easily decompiled. The problem is only the lack of a stable API (which seems to be in development though) which means updates can break mods and other mods can break mods. There also doesn't seem to be an official loader or mod list. Thus people are forced to deal with obscure websites and obscure mod makers.

Mojang is not putting any artificial hurdles in the way of modding. Something which I highly doubt would have ever been possible if it had been a Microsoft company.

fafneron Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft

Microsoft will absolutely screw this up. We shouldn't forget why Minecraft became popular: It was run by one (and later a few) guys who were close to the community. They cared about input and made stuff to be fun. They avoided all kinds of big business/management decisions to taint that or get in the way.

There is no way Microsoft will let it run like that. They bought it because they have plans for it and those plans will likely collide with the interests of the community. Microsoft is big in the gaming console business and struggling in the mobile market. It seems likely that they'll try to use Minecraft to push those markets.

Even if they won't do it immediately I suspect that they'll eventually make Minecraft exclusive to Xbox and mobile. Meanwhile they'll drop or decrease support for systems they don't like, like GNU/Linux, Playstations, etc. Maybe this will be part of a rewrite or a new huge upgrade (which I guess we can call "Downloadable Content" or whatever it is called in the XBox universe from now on).

And Microsoft will put their game guys in charge of it. And those guys speak a different language than Mojang. They don't care about indie and close community. They care about downloadable content and making new sellable releases every 12-24 month.

fafneron Link-time optimization in GCC, part 3 – LibreOffice

For people who don't trust outside companies (known to work with governments) with their confidential and/or expensive data.

fafneron Summary of ZFS on Linux for Debian

They are currently using a trick trying to circumvent the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL issue. But it is highly dubious whether this is legally sound:

ktime_t dtrace_gethrtime(void) { return ktime_get(); } EXPORT_SYMBOL(dtrace_gethrtime);

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/31357.html

In the end I assume this is intentional to keep the license issue of dtrace and ZFS in a dubious state. Thus preventing other distributions from shipping it. Meanwhile Oracle can ship it because they aren't going to sue themselves and the kernel folks seem rather uninterested in lawsuits as well (and even if they did then Oracle could drag it out forever considering that the company seems to have more lawyers than developers).

fafneron Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

Well if Microsoft gets the rights to it we all know what will likely happen: It will be made exclusive for the XBox. Maybe not immediately but eventually.

fafneron Summary of ZFS on Linux for Debian

or Oracle Linux. I don't know if they are shipping ZFS support with it yet. But they are already shipping dtrace with it which suffers from the same license issues.

fafneron The GNU C Library version 2.20

The C11 safe string functions suffer from the fact that the error handling depends on a global state. The default states can either abort the application or make the functions return an error indicator. But IIRC the user can provide anything else for error handling as well. Therefore using them in a library comes with the risk of those functions handling errors different than you expected. Using them in the application comes with the risk of some library messing with it.

That's why many people are opposed to them.

fafneron How to zero a buffer

GCC also has an `optimize' function attribute which might make sense to use here. This can set optimizations for the function to -O0. But I haven't tried it.

fafneron Ask HN: Why did JavaScript win the browser?

What would you have changed/used if management hadn't insisted on something that "looks like Java"?

I guess one can't thank you enough for saving the web from VBScript!

fafneron How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking (2012)

Enable 2FA everywhere is good advice.

The big issue for me though is Twitter. It does not support 2FA with FreeOTP (or the proprietary Google Authenticator). I don't want to install the Twitter App or hand over my phone number for privacy reasons.

fafneron HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

Nice work researching this. Yes, I'd say that always enabling it as soon as some parental control features are enabled is a bad decision. Maybe this should be a bug report. But we should also note that Mozilla follows Microsoft's implementation here.

fafneron Mozilla Unveils $33 Intex Cloud FX Smartphone

It's already sold out.

fafneron HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

You are just assuming things here. I don't know the parental control features of Windows. And I don't know when this will be enabled. But I don't see a reason why this should be always enabled as soon as parental features are used. In the end Mozilla is implementing a Microsoft proposal here. I would assume that the parental controls have a setting to enable it. So it kinda seems to me that you are building a strawman to attack.

If you want to block specific websites or specific content then you obviously need to use a different tool as well.

fafneron HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

You can't identify minors because this isn't just a feature for minors but, e.g., for companies or public terminals as well. Of course it depends on the websites to deal with it. But, e.g., most popular porn sites actually do care about stuff like this.

There is no UI in Firefox because Firefox uses the operating systems parental control features to enable/disable it. And those features should have a UI within the system. That's why it is only implemented for OS X and Windows at the moment.