Category Archives: Technology and Society

Starship to Mars

Amazing CGI.

[Update a while later]

And then there’s this:

Read the thread. Most people think (correctly) that this is nuts.

I’m willing to agree that it’s a religion, but rocks don’t have rights. The moon is just a very large rock.

Fedora Upgrade Issue

When doing an upgrade with dnf (going from 34 to 35), I’m getting a slew of transaction test errors like these:

file /usr/bin/qemu-alpha-static from install of qemu-user-static-2:6.1.0-16.fc35.x86_64 conflicts with file from package qemu-user-static-alpha-2:6.2.0-17.fc36.x86_64
file /usr/share/systemtap/tapset/qemu-alpha-static.stp from install of qemu-user-static-2:6.1.0-16.fc35.x86_64 conflicts with file from package qemu-user-static-alpha-2:6.2.0-17.fc36.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/pycrypto-2.6.1-py3.10.egg-info from install of python3-crypto-2.6.1-36.fc35.x86_64 conflicts with file from package python3-crypto-2.6.1-39.fc36.x86_64
file /usr/lib/udev/rename_device from install of initscripts-10.15-1.fc35.x86_64 conflicts with file from package initscripts-rename-device-10.16-3.fc36.x86_64

Anyone know what’s going on, and how to fix it?

[Update Monday morning]

OK, the problem is that I’m trying to upgrade to 35 when in fact I’m running 36. And the weird thing is that ‘uname -r’ says it’s 34, while /etc/fedora-release says it’s 36. And when I boot it, it’s using a 34 kernel. So, I decided to upgrade to 37 instead, since in actuality, other than the kernel, all my packages are 36. That upgrade went well, but I don’t know what will happen if I actually do a reboot into the new version. I’m asking people on the Fedora forum. The mystery is why it’s running on a 34 kernel.

[Bumped]

The Death Of Downtowns

An essay by Lileks.

I remember when this happened to Flint. When I was a kid, downtown had two movie theaters, a Walgreens (I think, or maybe it was a Ben Franklin) and Smith Bridgman’s and JC Penny were the major department stores. In the late sixties, the Eastland Mall opened on the eastern border of town, with a movie complex, and downtown started to die. Later, another was built on the west side, called Genessee Valley Mall (Genessee was the county) anchored by a Hudsons, the major Detroit department store that sponsored Detroit’s Thanksgiving parades. That finished the job.

Personally sadder to me, though, was the north end of town, where my grandparents liked. It was two blocks from Flint Park, an amusement park with a roller coaster, Ferris wheel and other rides, a dance hall and concert venue, as well as carnival games. I went to it as a very young child, but it closed in the early sixties. The neighborhood started to go downhill, and it became increasingly black as the prices declined. My grandmother stayed until she was put in a nursing home in the eighties, but the house that my mother had grown up in was demolished. You can now see where the amusement park was, and it would probably be an interesting archaeological dig, but if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never know it had been. It’s a woods, now, gone completely back to nature.

I should note that, like Lileks’ Fargo, the downtown was somewhat revitalized in the 80s, when when a new Flint campus of the University of Michigan was built there, but it’s nothing like the glory days.