zdnet.com/article/…

All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack: Don't expect a quick fix

@terdon Hey, with the pacience I have I am the perfect candidate. Count me in for the 1st of April ;)

@RuiFRibeiro :)

Well, you have been showing an impressive amount of patience with new users lately, actually!

@terdon Even the latest one bad episode, I just engaged because it was "I am a super pro, just need you to tell me how to setup a base installation" ;) There is a pattern there.... But thanks for keeping it up with me.

@terdon Well, if you want a moderator editor count me in...almost 9k edits fixing trivial stuff. (kidding, do not want diamonds next to old threads dissing users)

I know, your edits stats are indeed impressive!

It is ideal to find someone democratic, or liberal to be a mod

It will be hard to live with conservative mods

@Tim You have got to be kidding me...

What in the world do you think mods do? Rule a country?

Can I post it as a reply there?

@Tim Where?

If you mean the meta post, then yes. If you can formulate what you want to say as a question that you would like candidates to answer, then yes, please do.

@terdon Going to Asia most of the month!

@RuiFRibeiro Nice!

@terdon I am tired of the cold....not that young anymore.

@RuiFRibeiro Hang on, aren't you in Portugal?

@terdon yep, tired of colds and rheumatism in one leg....

@terdon anyway, reportedly with one of the hotest summers of the decade, lets see how we manage there lol

Yeah, @Tim I deleted your comment. First because it was making claims that were unsubstantiated and irrelevant about other sites' mods, and second because it wasn't relevant to the post. If you have a question you would like mod candidates to answer, then post that.

@RuiFRibeiro Good one.

@Tim your entire premise is completely false. Mods are not in charge of how the site works. Your objections are objections to the entire SE model, not to particular mods. And throwing accusations around like "long histories of abusing mod power" and "extreme conservatives" is really not cool.

@RuiFRibeiro Vacation or work?

/me desperately racks brain trying to think of an intelligent question to ask a hypothetical mod candidate.

@Tim please stop reposting the comment I deleted. That meta discussion is for suggesting questions you would like the candidates to answer.

It is not for you to air your grievances with the moderators of other sites.

Ok, I've got one...

Well, intelligent or not, who knows...

@Tim stop. posting. that. comment.

@FaheemMitha Vacation!

@RuiFRibeiro Ah. Well, have a nice vacation. Whereabouts are you going?

@terdon I have a question....blackjack, whiskey....?

@FaheemMitha Several islands in Phillipines. We will be also in the island Magalhães was killed.

@RuiFRibeiro Ah. Warm weather.

@FaheemMitha Maybe too warm, but hey, nothing is entirely perfect :)

@RuiFRibeiro True.

Honestly I think Tim is not the best person to complain much about censorship considering the quality and number of question we see here. But he is free to continue posting them as we are. But hey, Nobody is perfect, me included.

Ok, posted.

@FaheemMitha Nice.

@terdon Thank you.

By the way, just so you know, both slm and Michael are still active. They've just moved more behind the scenes.

@terdon I did not even realized Michael was still a mod. slm appears to be more visible

Michael is very much still with us. He just doesn't post questions or answers very often any more.

Btw, talking about Magalhães there has been stress in diplomatic relationships with Spain in Portugal over Magalhães vs Elcano....(commemorations of x years I think)

Those are the flag stats for each mod in the past month ^^

This sort of thing is particularly a problem with Debian, which definitely does not have a policy. Though I think they should.

As you can see, we're all active.

@terdon Though when someone intervenes, it's always you.

@FaheemMitha Visibly, yes. Mostly.

But with Debian, it's just extremely hard to find maintainers, let alone competent maintainers. So I suppose the project thinks it's better not to rock the boat.

And I haven't been paying much attention in recent years, but I've never seen much discussion about it. But it's generally a sore point in a lot of cases.

@terdon Yes, visibly.

@FaheemMitha Tell me about it. I tried to migrate to FreeRadius in my former job

But both of them have posted in Meta in the past 30 days, for example.

@FaheemMitha and ended up creating a local repository and creating deb packages to not have a FreeRadius version with 6/7 years old....

@RuiFRibeiro Were you using Debian or something else?

@FaheemMitha We are talking about Debian :) deb file et al

Though, really, being a Debian maintainer is a thankless job. Rather like being a SE mod.

@RuiFRibeiro Debian has derivatives.

Some of them are better known to the public at large than Debian itself.

@FaheemMitha I comtemplated trying to pick up FreeRadius maintainer as I had time to spare

@RuiFRibeiro And then thought better of it? :-)

@FaheemMitha By the time I comtemplated it, still was a bit green on FR, and did not want to bother too

@RuiFRibeiro It's easier these days if you just want to maintain a package. Though not that easy, as I discovered.

@FaheemMitha I also feel more at ease nowadays with certain aspects of Debian or Linux

@FaheemMitha Well, I maintained a FreeRadius "cluster" for 2.5K daily users, 20K tops, and kept the manual/book/training for all faculties here in PT. So it would be easier, I think.

@RuiFRibeiro Impressive. But you never applied?

Debian does require even would-be maintainers to pass a bunch of requirements, so it's not that easy.

@FaheemMitha As I said, was lacking in Debian knowledge, and did not want to bother...and also become disenchanted with Debian and systemD ;)

@RuiFRibeiro Ah

@FaheemMitha I feel more at ease with some aspects of system maintainance nowadays....

I think people are overly emotional about systemd. Good or bad, it's not the end of the world.

@FaheemMitha I also had a nasty episode where I lost my DNS service because of systemd politics.

@RuiFRibeiro Sorry to hear that.

@FaheemMitha A 99.999999 service or whatever out for a few hours. There goes the statistics :(

@RuiFRibeiro Bummer.

Wait a moment

@FaheemMitha Systemd is not bad in itself it's however a terrible way of handeling community change and communication

@Kiwy I don't know whether it is bad or good. It seems to get very mixed reviews.

@FaheemMitha unix.stackexchange.com/questions/331664/…

But people seem to get extremely emotional about the subject.

It's possible they are over-reacting.

@RuiFRibeiro Is that what happened to you?

@FaheemMitha Well they decided without consulting anyone of change that could have major impact and they have put in production a piece of software that is in itself almost a OS over linux kernel and IMO it's not stable yet

@FaheemMitha yes!

@RuiFRibeiro And was this on stable?

@FaheemMitha That what I am saying in the question, I hope.

@Kiwy So you don't think people are over-reacting?

Kiwy I my former job I was not using systemd.... and had everything in Debian 9

@RuiFRibeiro If that was Debian stable, then that's pretty terrible.

@FaheemMitha well death threat seems like a huge over reacting

@Kiwy death threat?

@FaheemMitha It was Debian stable

@RuiFRibeiro Wow, then the maintainers really screwed up.

@FaheemMitha I think some people on linux/systemd email forum theaten Leonard of death or wish his death which is obviously over reaction

@Kiwy I think you mean Lennert. But ok.

@FaheemMitha read all the comments.....

that's my opinion systemd is considered stable but as they still change major thing between two non major release I consider that unstable

@Kiwy Well, ask them, if you could go back in Time, would you prefer to pay a visit to Hitler or Poetering? ;-P

@Kiwy I think you are missing the point of open source

@RuiFRibeiro that's a tuff one :D

@RuiFRibeiro Well if you change major release version you shouldn't have regression, while it happen like a lot if I remind at the beginning it was almost all systemd update on ubuntu or debian screw something

Major changes in a Debian package in stable are a serious no-no.

(I might be a bit overeacting though)

@Kiwy I will write an example

I don't know what this guy was thinking.

@Kiwy From today on, we declare Apache and NGinx too old and complex to maintain. We will all be using netcat for serving HTTP files. We will add features over time ;-P

He couldn't have just left the existing sysvinit scripts in place? They're buggy, so he pulls them in a middle of a release with no replacement? Am I getting this right?

@FaheemMitha We are having the same conversation. The power of open source is CHOICE. Not telling me which init system I will be using.

@RuiFRibeiro So I am understanding this right?

@FaheemMitha Yes, me with my extreme Apache example, and you, we are saying the same thing.

@RuiFRibeiro Ok

@FaheemMitha The choice was taking due to politic games from RH, and having a LOAD of betatesters for free

@RuiFRibeiro In the middle of a stable release?

@RuiFRibeiro I get the point but they did not replace init, they replace a shit ton loads of stuff all over the place. And I reasonnably do not understand why or how create such a huge piece of software to replace what was a simple system

and politics and RH indeed had some game to play there

@Kiwy Do you want to convice me all the code and support written in the last 30 years disappeared overnight?

@FaheemMitha Oui. I was very happy avoiding it from Debian 6? to 9....

I also have heard in the newer releases of RH network manager cannot be disabled easily. Why is that, because too many people is disabling it in servers? ;-P

Well if it's true it suck ass but systemd is so intricated in the system that I'm not even surprise

@Kiwy I have not said I do not believe in change, I believe in keeping my choices. If I want to drive a Volvo Or BMW, it is up to me. Not being decreed I have to drive a Lugo.

because you now need middleware to use it

@Kiwy I have a already three FreeBSD at house ;)

@Kiwy Talking about FreeBSD, forgot to turn off the casting of the movie to my wife, she already ended seeing it.

@Tim Here is a tool I made to do regex->NFA/DFA conversions & diagrams

Thanks. Does the diagrams help users of regex, or only implementors of regex?

@MichaelHomer Do you have thoughts about how to learn and use Scala without or with less being affected by its artificial complexity?

It was intended for people learning them/learning formal language theory, so I guess users

Depends on whether you think the automata translation is implementation I guess

@Tim Well you don't have to use all the features even though they're there

When you solve a string matching problem, do you visualize a FA to help you write regex

You can write the same programs you might write in, say, Java, in pretty much the same way, and it'll work just fine

I just write the regular expression

So how can visualizing a FA help using regex?

But I've had a lot of practice by now

@MichaelHomer Nice tool

@Tim I don't know, maybe it doesn't for you

kiwy, how does visualizing FA help you write regex to solve a string matching problem?

@MichaelHomer do you mean it can help? I will try to do that if I figure out how to.

It's not a requirement that you treat them that way and plenty of people use them - probably most - without ever learning the theoretical basis

Well I really understood regexp the day I learn to build the matching diagram on a piece of paper,

Formal language theory is usually tucked away in some obscure computer science course, or glossed over

implementation differ from software to software

so you only have to know how it work conceptually

after that you adapt to the regex engine you're using

for example sometime to match any letter you can use \w sometime you have to do [a-zA-Z]

My first encounter with them was probably in Perl, where they're not even actually regular

[] being a subset a-z inside [] mean a range from a to z

sometime have option to ignore case directly and you don't bother doing a-zA-Z

so most important is to understand the concept of regex

I'm a visual kind of guy so having a graphical representation helped me understood

Why Dbus wiki mention "in Linux and Unix-like operating systems libdbus typically uses Unix domain sockets"? Is the underlying IPC mechanism used in D-Bus depends on OS?

@Biswapriyo Unix domain sockets is a very new thing on Windows. blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/12/19/…

@Kiwy It was self-inflicted: he didn't know that a Linux system has a localhost and that the client connects to the server on the same machine on 127.0.0.1...

Sad story though...

@Kiwy YW

@Kusalananda I didn't mean Windows. I mean to say any Unix or Unix-like OS.

@Biswapriyo As the wiki mentions, on Unix systems, Unix domain sockets are used. What was the question?

The IPC mechanism is the same across all Unix systems. Look at DBus implementations on other OSes and you'll possibly find other IPC mechanisms.

So, yes, the IPC mechanism may well be dependent on whether the underlying OS is a Unix or not.

And by "Unix", I mean "Linux or Unix-like system".

@JeffSchaller Hilarious!

@Fabby is it the true story ?

Honestly? I dunno...

Could have been a simple panic attack,

A real attack

ok you may have taken him to a private chat room to do some terrible stuff

a virtual attack

@Kiwy Nah...

Not my style: i'm an equal opportunity public offender.

Well panic attack do not last for several weeks. it was a clear paranoia. I mean saying that your ex step father was hacking him and hire a team to harrass him all day long

I mean it's not impossible, but A it would be just one the worst human on planet earth that ever existed, B it would have cost sooooo much money

Like I said in my question: calm the man down, listen to what he says, remove the noise, give him some good tips.

You handle it well btw

Sometimes I do, most of the times I'm an idiot.

>:-)

I bet you're not , though ..I though for some time you were a clever dog, now I don't really know are you some kind of alien ?

Depends on your point of view:

well a dog that could type a keyboard properly could be some kind of alien

To some French, the Germans are alien, to some Germans, the French are alien, to the people of the Alsace, everyone is s brother / sister!

face it @Fabby I read right through you perfectly

@Kiwy :D :D :D

You remind me of one of the people I work with...

to me everybody is an alien :D

kidding of course