Posts by graemep 35 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2024
"Some people just don't get maths."
True, a single machine like that could replace several Pi 5s (more RAM, faster processor, faster storage and more built in) so you need to multiply the cost of the Pi 5's by a factor that is likely to be more than five to compare prices, so they would be more expensive.
OP has currently replaced them with a one to three ratio at the moment (so PIs would still be cheaper) but could increase the load a lot from there.
> Mind you, it was hilarious watching Farage suck up to him so abjectly, only to be thrown under the bus later the same day for daring to voice disagreement with one of the drug addled fool's holy pronouncements.
it was a particularly stupid pronouncement though. I do not blame Farage for not anticipating that even Musk would be stupid or extreme enough to back Tommy Robinson.
" I guess he could set up a UK company to donate for him"
He already has one and was going to donate through it.
I do not know whether he is a troll or just an idiot. He (along with a few other Americans) seems to genuinely believe that Tommy Robinson is a "political prisoner" - it appears he has been claiming he was imprisoned for talking about the grooming gangs and people believed him. it takes about three minutes to find out the truth, but why bother?
When you see what Americans (not just Elon and people who share his politics, but quite a few others including the other side) often believe about the UK you can see how easy it is to be mislead about what is happening in other countries. One person got angry (and unfriended me) because I objected to her posting stuff from the jewish division of the EDL (they have separate Jewish and gay divisions because of the obvious issues you get if they mix with fascists) on FB - she is British but had been living abroad and was out of touch. A few friends abroad have done similar things too (although most people understand when you explain).
I have seen the same with British media coverage of Sri Lanka (which I know well) often complete and utter nonsense. The media are rubbish and get away with it because of Gell-Mann amnesia. Individuals on social media are even worse and just believe anything that fits their prejudices.
>We've been using object-oriented programming for decades now, but dates are still stored as a fucking string
Where exactly are they stored as strings? If I use Python they are stored as datetime.date (or datetime.datetime objects), if they are stored in Postgres they are stored as a date time type. SQLite does store them as strings but in a very limited range of formats so you do not have that problem.
I doubt it. owners get profits, not bonuses.
As for directors, this is a closely held, so it might not be as easy as if it was a listed company. If it was still controlled by the Issa brothers I doubt they would reward failure (its their money, after all) but its now controlled by TDR capital who manage other people's money so I do not know. Probably still worse for the directors than being listed with a mix of small shareholders and fund managers vs a private equity fund - it has a lot more at stake in good management as it cannot just sell the shares on the market.
I do not think you can "block" from authenticating. On the server side you can just not implement authentication forms, trying to block forms by purpose in the client seems a bad idea to me.
There are separate protocols within browsers, and there has been for decades in things like HTTP auth. They are just not a popular option. I do not really know why apart from ease of implementation.
"PCs were in businesses for (call it) 20 years before they became prevalent in the homeW
Home computers became fairly common in the mid 80s. 20 years would imply business PCs were common in the 60s. I am pretty sure they were not. Mainframe terminals were pretty common, I believe, but that is an entirely different technology.
Maybe not you, but maybe your MP: especially of they find something that enables blackmail. Maybe people in the armed forces and their supporting businesses to track force movements and the like.
" I'd be more worried about what Amazon is up to with my data than China"
You should be worried about both. That is why I do not have any Amazon gadgets.
Its difficult because its hard to deny kids something that all their friends use. They feel left out, and even cut off socially.
Its not just children either. lots of adults have a some level of social media addiction.
Yes, personal responsibility matters, but its not as simple as saying "stop doom scrolling" (its like telling a drug addict to "just stop" taking heir heroin) or "actual parenting" (better parental supervision helps, but its difficult to go against social norms).
I have been navigating this with teenage kids (older one now an adult, younger one 16) over the years and it is hard to get the balance right, and it has got harder over the years, especially post lockdown.
Its also easier if you have a good relationship with your kids so you can talk about things with them. Not everyone does - especially not with teenagers
You are supposed to use monkeys, which (assuming multiple species) are far more common than chimps (which are apes, not monkeys).
If there are still not enough, the answer is to breed more.
This is how IT works - if you have inefficient systems just throw expensive hardware at it, making it more inefficient so it can be parallelised etc. if necessary.
Can people please get their historical references right?
" His words remind me of those exploitative barons of medieval ages from whom the 8 hours work day rights had to be snatched,” quipped a commenter who claims to be a former Infosys employee."
Its plain wrong. Medieval working hours were short on average (because a lot of the required work was highly seasonal in an agricultural economy, and that set the norms). The correct reference is to the industrial revolution when people could work long hours in factories.
I do not think so.
Most Wordpress installs are for individuals or small businesses. They will not know about this, and will not pay attention. their hosting provider makes Wordpress a one click install, and they are familiar with it, so no reason to change.
In big organisations the decision makes will mostly not care, except those hosted by WP Engine.
A lot of people who do know will side with Wordpress.
"Matt needs to change the terms for the software he produces then. While it remains open source he's not got a leg to stand on"
That is not an option he has, for two reasons:
1. It is GPL licensed and always was so he would need the permission of every copyright holder of code in Wordpress - so every contributor from outside his company and the developer of the project he forked.
2. Even if he could do that, the existing code remains GPL and its like people would fork it. There are already forks like Classic Press so people can just switch to those.
More likely to be narcissistic than sociopathic or psychopathic: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210830-how-narcissists-climb-the-career-ladder-quickly
You will soon probably not have the option.
They ill be cheaper (because the costs can be offset by selling the collected data), so very few people will buy not internet connected versions, so they will become expensive niche products or not available at all.
I recently bought a washing machine and dishwasher (cheap ones too) after moving house and it took a bit of care to be sure I did not end up buying something that had the "convenience" of being operated using an app.
A lot of them do use open source OSes for servers. Even the organisations listed here: the London Stock Exchange was mentioned and its trading systems run on Linux.
IMO an in-house OS is going too far for almost everyone, and a lot of big businesses do use in-house software.
The problem is with end user devices, and the common software that runs on them.
I also think a lot of issues arise from a tick box approach to security and reliability. People aim to meet sufficient requirements so they cannot be blamed if it goes wrong. They are a lot less concerned about whether a system is actually secure and reliable. In many ways Crowdstrike did what it was supposed to - the management (and IT staff) of the businesses affected cannot be blamed because its Crowdstrikes fault.
It also grates when they fly off to a conference to tell the rest of us to reduce our consumption for the sake of the environment.
> especially beef, that brown coal of the food industry
I just bought some local grass fed beef. That has a very different environmental impact to grain fed beef.
"Well, it's the corporations that made those facts public for you to lift."
Does not matter in terms of copyright law. Facts are not covered by copyright.
Can you imagine what news coverage would be like if the first to report something could precent others from reporting on it?
It might also often the case that media corporations disseminate the facts, but they rarely make them public. If you find out about a announcement by your government through News Corp, it is still the government that made the information pubic, not News Corp.
"Mathematics is not the same as arithmetic"
This is why my (home educated) kids did IGCSE Maths (designed for use abroad, but also popular with independent schools) rather than GCSE. There was no no-calculator paper and I thought it a waste of time.
They did learn some times tables and stuff while they were at school, but once I took them out I did not bother with things like long division. It did not stop the older one getting A* in maths A level and an A in further maths.
Regardless of whether it was a repo or not, they were apparently distributing GPL licensed code as a proprietary binary. Otherwise why would the code have been in the zip file or whatever?
Agreed about the complexity of Git and Github. For personal projects I sometimes use Fossil, but Git and Github are what everyone knows. I mostly use local tools as far as possible even when using Github so keeping it (or at least trying to keep it) to being just a place to host a repo.
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