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OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

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Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#171
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A kibibyte is a fictional unit invented to make computer scientists sound like their lips were still asleep after a dentist visit.

I have tried to convince people to change the metric system to binary, i.e. have a kilogram be 1024 grams, and a kilometer be 1024 meters. Which would finally force hard drive manufacturers to be honest about their devices' capacities. So far, I have not been very successful, though. :(

I still wonder if you could convince a Congressperson to slip a line in a bill to make the base 2 definition the US Standard.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#172

As a French-speaking person, I cannot tell you how much the announcement[0] that after 5.8, basic utilities, including mg(1), will be UTF-8 ready pleases me. I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I like to use mg(1) for quick edits and this is very exciting news for me! [0] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150722182236

Funny thing about Emacs and OpenBSD... ...Emacs is the only package in the entire ports tree that can't use ASLR.

That can't possibly be true, the Go port also doesn't use ASLR.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#173
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he lost interest in living I get what you're trying to accomplish with the parallel construction, but that's a pretty callous way to describe it :/

I'm sorry I upset you. I didn't mean to.

I wasn't upset, and I certainly wasn't trying to imply I was. But that doesn't change that it makes me a little sad to see people refer to suicide with such a lack of empathy.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thank you. Just store times on computers as $epoch+$offset and then convert to UTC when displayed to the user. That way, only the display routine has to care about leap seconds and it won't break anything.

If you mean "UNIX time", you'll be disappointed -- UNIX time is not the number of seconds since the epoch, it is also leap-second adjusted. It stops when a leap second happens to make sure there are exactly 86400 UNIX seconds between every midnight (so you can do divmod calculations on timestamps.) Maybe you were suggesting an improvement to UNIX time, though, in which case I think the grandparent and I would get beh…

Yeah I know about unix time and that isn't what I meant. It never made sense to me. Just have a monotonic timer and an epoch, and worry about UTC and leap seconds in the view.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the fascination with powers of two in storage. RAM I understand, because you're counting address lines. But storage? What sense does that make? I have an SD card with 16.0 GB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (16.0e3 MB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = 1.42e4 s, or 3.95 hours. Now do the computation with binary units. I have an SD card with 14.9 GiB…

If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

[deleted]

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the fascination with powers of two in storage. RAM I understand, because you're counting address lines. But storage? What sense does that make? I have an SD card with 16.0 GB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (16.0e3 MB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = 1.42e4 s, or 3.95 hours. Now do the computation with binary units. I have an SD card with 14.9 GiB…

If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

> Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse.

Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. So using sector as a label is just bad practice.

And... how does it make the math worse? My hard drive partition has a size of 250140434432 bytes (actual value)... how much is that in GB? Easy, 250.1 GB. For some reason, I was able to do that calculation without the aid of a computer or a calculator.

Humans don't count sectors. We like to shift decimal points around. Computers are good at calculation, so we give them the task of multiplying by 512 for us, and displaying measurements in units suitable for human society.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

> Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse. Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. So using sector as a label is just bad practice. And... how does it make the math worse? My hard drive partition has a size of 250140434432 bytes (actual value)... how much is that in GB? Easy, 250.1 GB. For some reason, I was able to do that calculation withou…

> Sector sizes are different between drives anyway.

Yeah, 512 bytes or, now, 4096 bytes - neither is a power of 10

The math is worse because the computer (address space) and hard drive are actually base 2 and vendors are selling in base 10.

This worship of base 10 in every aspect of our lives, even when it doesn't make sense and cheats us out of money, is sad. Computers are base 2, memory is base 2, and storage should be base 2 or else its just a batch of lies. I guess I should be glad the humanity didn't have 11 fingers.

The computer is showing you a number, calculating using base 2 will not be any stress on a human since it doesn't show every byte anyway.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#178
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing about Emacs and OpenBSD... ...Emacs is the only package in the entire ports tree that can't use ASLR.

That can't possibly be true, the Go port also doesn't use ASLR.

I'm just quoting what an OpenBSD dev mentioned to me. I guess there could be more.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#179
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed I'm paid the same amount every month. Yet I'm paid on the same day of every 28/29/30/31-day month, i.e., with slightly varying intervals. The differences between the months are currently small enough that it doesn't really matter much, and it always evens out the next month. But if suddenly a wild week appears, I will want to get paid for that week. Either that, or everyone will need to keep to a parallel trad…

Why would you want to get paid for that week? You don’t get paid for January 31st, March 31st, May 31st, July 31st, August 31st, October 31st or December 31st either. (Actually, you get paid for 2 of them. Still leaves 5 days a year without pay, 6 days in leap years). So, why should you get more? Just because you feel like you deserve it?

As far as I know, I am paid for those 31st days, but the pay is evened out over the year. You may live in a different country than me. It is actually pretty presumptuous of you to claim that you know on what basis my salary is calculated, unless you have comprehensive information about the entire Western world.

I have expenses during that week. I happen to earn enough to be able to save a bit during the rest of the year, so it won't be a problem for me, but not everyone has that luxury. There is no reason to make life harder for hard-working poor people. Also, entrepreneurs/employers are earning money that week, so it won't be a problem for them to pay.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#180
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry I upset you. I didn't mean to.

I wasn't upset, and I certainly wasn't trying to imply I was. But that doesn't change that it makes me a little sad to see people refer to suicide with such a lack of empathy.

I am surprised that you read my remark as lacking empathy, but I have deleted the remarks I had written here about my actual feelings about the event, because this doesn't seem like a very promising conversation.
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