bodyfour

The "if !" syntax isn't available on old enough shells.

Probably not an issue for most people in 2026 -- you have to back pretty far for it to be missing. Technically, though, "if x; then :; else" is more portable.

Waterloo&City seems to be missing too

The issue is that "const" didn't exist in the earliest forms of C... and even when it became available not everybody started using it.

So you might have a function that doesn't have proper "const" qualifications in its prototype like:

  void my_log(char *message);

and then call-sites like:

  my_log("Hello, World!");

...and that needed to stay compiling.

A few months ago I happened to install Debian/unstable on a G4 mini. ppc32 is no longer a supported architecture -- purely "what you get is what you get".

Still, the process was mostly painless. Everything I needed worked out of the box.

What is annoying to me is that in this internet-connected age, the storage units I see still don't have better per-unit security.

Just a phone alert to say "door to unit #xyz has been opened" would be a huge improvement. Wire up a cheap webcam for extra credit.

Surely you mean Ultrix, not OSF/1? Unless you're misremembering the hardware model...

After seeing how term limits work in the California state legislature, I stopped being a fan of them.

The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effective assembly members would end up forced to seek a "promotion" into the state senate if they wanted to stay in politics. This often meant challenging members of the same party. This ends with people constantly fighting their "allies" to scramble up the greased pole, rather than doing more useful work.

Of course, that can happen even without term limits (politicians are the ambitious sort) but they definitely accelerate the effect.

The worse problem is that all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists! Since they're now the only ones around with deep experience, they invariably get even more involved with crafting laws.

This actually dove-tails into the other problem with the lobbying industry: the revolving door from legislator to the lobbying firm. Even without term limits this happens all of the time. It's very common for a retiring US House member to immediately get a lucrative job lobbying their former colleagues. However in a term-limited legislative body this only gets worse. Not only do lobbyists become more powerful, but term limits provide a guaranteed flow of politicians needing a new job.

So, if you find yourself as a newly-elected politician in such a system and you actually want to make a difference, probably your best bet is to immediately find some lobbyists to get sweet with. They are the only ones with the experience to make the political machinery work, and they're probably your future employer as well.

So at least in my observation, the ultimate effect of term-limits is to transfer power from democratically elected representatives to well-funded special interests. By un-entrenching the politicians you're accidentally making another group even more entrenched.

By contrast, I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest. Imagine somebody who has been working on, say, education policy for decades. They know every policy detail, all of the stakeholders, all of the experts. In a world of term limits, how will such a person ever emerge?

All of the above is specifically about legislative term limits. I believe the case for executive term limits is much stronger.

IFUNC is supported on several architectures, including ARM64.

The malicious code that the xz backdoor inserts into the library is a compiled x86_64 object file so it only is targeting one platform.