A court in my local government has been using a document imaging system since the early 2000's. It stored documents as DjVu files until a couple of years ago when the vendor re-encoded all the documents as PDF to comply with mandates for file storage format from my state Supreme Court. It made me really sad.
So, I love DjVu and think it's a superior format to PDF. _Consuming_ DjVu is easy, but when was the last time you interacted with the tools to _create_ them? I can say from direct experience that they are awful.
I mean "lack of knowledge" in so much as most people have never come across a DjVu file in their lives and when they get one they find that their system won't open it, so they will instead go looking for a PDF version of the same document.
The bane of the single line display! It's amazing what constraints like that can do to your imagination and skills, though. You have to be very clever.
I programmed all day at school for years on the Casio version:
I had an MSX machine at home and a casio (not sure anymore which one although I still have it, somewhere, and last time I tried, it still worked but that's > 10 years ago); so in class I could write on the casio then, then copy to paper, delete, write more, copy to paper etc. And when boring af school was over, I would type into my MSX with the necessary changes to the BASIC code. Good times.
Gemini made a lovely TUI for my C# project, but afterwards it said it could just spin up a Kestrel web server inside the app instead which would be a much better solution for managing it, which was fair. (I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution)
> I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution
And that helps? I tried that a while ago and it very often said this is not a good way of doing something even though it was objectively the best way of doing something. I removed it after a while because it was too random.
It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars.
I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.
I’d be interested to hear more about your project. I’ve heard about other DHT related things like search engines and such using it, but I haven’t explored the space much myself.
I help a blind friend order his groceries online from Walmart once a month. He's disabled and on food stamps (EBT/Link). The groceries are all taken care of, but the site always requests a $30 tip for the driver.
I drop it down a bit and pay it on my credit card for him, but what's the right way to deal with this situation?
"Walmart InHome is a premium service that delivers groceries and essentials directly into a customer's home (fridge/kitchen) or garage, using trained, vetted Walmart associates. As an add-on to Walmart+, it costs an additional $40/year (or $7/month) to provide unlimited, tip-free, and free-delivery-fee service."
Wow, thank you, I had no idea about this. Going to look into it. He has Walmart+ which you get for half price if you are on benefits, which also removes the regular $9.95 delivery fee.
When did we all stop using telnet? I can't even remember. Most of my first 10-15 years was using telnet. One day I used telnet to connect to a shell for the last time and didn't know it. I had a ton of servers all with root telnet access Internet facing. Never hacked once, somehow. Those were the days.
In the Linux / BSD world, SSH took off incredibly fast for the time. I'd estimate that maybe 80% of people had moved to it within the first year of its release.
But adoption stalled when the original SSH moved to a commercial license in 1996-ish - many of us stuck with the last free version, but vulnerabilities started to pile up. There were various half-working alternatives, but it wasn't until OpenSSH came out in 1999 that the remaining telnet holdouts started to move across.
I worked for an ISP in the mid-90s and had been on the Internet since 1989 or so. I recall the progression for me was something like this:
We used telnet in college no problem. It was a fairly well-accepted method of remote access. The heterogeneous network had many different modes, but a major dialup point was the Annex box, which supported telnet into the Unix or VMS machines.
Between Unix machines, we would often prefer "rlogin" instead. There were several horrific iterations of other remote-access protocols such as "remsh". rlogin was notorious for its "/etc/hosts.equiv" authorization method which trusted DNS and should've been perceived as Swiss Cheese from the outset. rlogin was, IIRC, directly related to rsh and rcp and used the same frameworks. rlogin was no more secure than telnet, but probably less secure because of its conveniences.
We also used port 23/tcp for remote management, for example Cisco routers. They weren't running telnetd, but it was the port where you connected remotely and logged in with or without credentials.
rlogin persisted alongside telnet, until encryption came into fashion and ssh was distributed. Once ssh was available and working well, everyone knew that telnetd and rlogind were on borrowed time. The services were shut down and disabled in inetd. The ports were sometimes blocked. Security advisories went out.
I suppose it took a long, long time for ssh to finally dominate, and for people to abandon telnetd mostly, but it was fairly thorough. We all recognized the superiority of sshd's authentication and encrypted channels.
There were mitigations for people to extend their legacy use of telnetd and rlogind. For example, tcp wrappers and fail2ban could be implemented. Firewall filters could select only authorized networks. VPNs could tunnel through an Intranet that still used them. So, the services lived on wherever they didn't need to be exposed on the public Internet. But I think most Unix admins got the picture by the end of the dot-com bubble.
All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.
I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.
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