Posts by Graham Dawson

Privacy Sandbox, Google's answer to third-party cookies, promised within months

The maintenance of state is necessary for interactive websites to be in any way useful.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Re: Nope

Oho, new thing to try!

Re: Nope

X11 is awful and needs to die. It's a networked GUI that's terrible at being a networked GUI.

This is true.

Wayland isn't the solution.

When you try to hire a freelancer to write SQL and all you get is incorrect AI garbage

Especially the ones that claim to have read your CV, but then call when it asks for initial connect by email, don't give any details of the position until you call back, and then turn out to be offering permie jobs when the first line on your CV makes very clear that you're after short-term contract roles.

Yes, I am bitter.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Company with license to print money decides it wants even more.

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

Re: A good start, but ...

And the spare parts should be parts, not assemblies that cost a fortune and contain parts that aren't available to anyone but the manufacturer.

Alarming: Tesla lawsuit claims collision monitoring system is faulty

Re: New car?

Nearly all new cars have all these driver "assistance" features as standard, which I find immensely frustrating. They're distracting at the best of times, but at worst they generate a false sense of security, by conning the driver into believing that the computer will warn them - or even save them - if bad things are going to happen. Lane-keeping assist means they don't have to pay attention to the wheel, proximity and blind-spot sensors mean they don't have to pay attention to what's around them, collision-avoidance sensors mean they don't have to pay attention to what's in front of them. You end up with a driver who spends more time staring at the enormous touchscreen than paying attention to the road ahead. It's not something that can be easily resolved with education, either, because the features are still there. It's inevitable that drivers will lapse into relying on them.

You might be limited to the Dacia Sandero in future.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

No, I did not support Farage at any point. He didn't form UKIP. He took it over. Before he came along, the party's goal was to transform our relationship with the EU into something more akin to Norway, retaining membership of the EEA and cooperating on issues that facilitate free trade, but without the unnecessary trappings of statehood that the EU was assigning to itself. After his takeover, it was a Farage Is Amazing party.

Your assumptions are wildly off the mark, and yes they are prejudiced, because you're assigning beliefs to me that are simply not evident from anything I've said.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

You're not exactly disproving my point. Without knowing anything about my voting habits, you've already begun to assume a great deal about me, based on your own prejudices and a few keywords.

But to answer your question: My views on Farage were formed when he transformed UKIP from a narrowly-focused, non-partisan, single-issue party, into his personal publicity vehicle, and have not changed since. I would vote for the devil himself before voting for any political party he endorses or is part of.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

At worst, I might call you a hopeless optimist.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

Almost all the other parties are just minor versions of the big two, so not worth voting for as they'd only implement the same policies, which all stem from a consensus position on so many topics that they might as well all be the same party anyway. Anyone who admits voting for any other parties, the ones that actually differ from the consensus position enough to matter, is pilloried as a transcendental crackpot, possibly racist, and whatever other epithets fit the party's core platform.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

ID cards were "european thinking". The overarching justification for them was to harmonise with EU requirements for a single identity document, which the Home Office gleefully ran with, because it would give them the opportunity to impose a bureaucratic and authoritarian yoke on the populace. There are no "innocents" at any level of this, only degrees of evil, with the EU being relatively benign in this instance - they are, after all, simply attempting to harmonise the existing state of play in most EU member states, where ID cards are not seen as an intrusion by the state in the same way as they are here.

The implementation of ID cards hadn't become an EU competence (and I believe it still isn't) and remained something that member states had prime legislative power over, so we weren't required to implement them at the time. The home office wanted them anyway and simply ran ahead of the slow moves toward harmonisation.

It is worth noting that the original topic of the article - breaking encryption so we can all think of the children - is also something the EU is also pursuing, so even that isn't a "tory" policy, or some unique policy of this country's government in opposition to "european thinking". If we were still in the EU, the government would support it at the supranational level, while playing the "nothing we can do guv" game at home. The situation now, as with the ID card debacle, is that the government has to actually argue in support of the policy, rather than pretending it's simply a passive receiver of EU diktats. We, at least now, have the opportunity to oppose it directly, rather than trying to somehow organise a pan-eu opposition.

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

This isn't the tories; it's the Home Office. They've been banging this drum consistently for the last thirty years, or whenever they realised computers were a thing, regardless of which party was in power. The Home Office civil service is extremely good at assimilating whoever ends up as Secretary of State for the department and turning them into just another statist, authoritarian, ID-carding ban-everything-camers-up-the-toilet-tube nutcase, who thinks it's not only possible, but necessary to monitor every moment of every citizen's life, just in case they think about maybe doing something unapproved.

Financial red tape blamed for London losing Arm IPO

Re: The bind

Brexit wasn't supposed to happen. We were supposed to vote remain, so our government could continue implementing pointless, complicated regulations while blaming it all on the EU. Leaving scuppered them, because now they have no excuse and have to actually justify all their regulatory bullshit rather than passing the blame. That is the Brexit dividend: The real source of our problems has stepped squarely under the lamppost and revealed itself, meaning we can start applying practical solutions, rather than flailing at shadows. A bright light is the cure of many things.

Re: Transparency

"The rules" are incredibly expensive and complicated in just about every other aspect of life (just ask a farmer), so why not in finance as well?

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: RE: most safety rules are written

Sounds like you need a rule about hardhats on your site.

Huge lithium discovery could end world shortages ... Oh, wait, it's in Iran

Re: Terrorism

Biden days a lot if things. Sometimes he even knows what he's saying.

The fact of the matter is, Hersh makes claims that are simply false.

Re: Terrorism

Hersh's claims are easily disproved.

https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe

SpaceX lobs second-gen Starlink satellites into orbit

Re: I'm no fan boi but....

with the way Twitter is blazing through operational costs with an ever decreasing income

So, in that regard, what's actually changed since Musk bought it?

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

I'm sure the solution will be a breath of fresh air and I hope we can all keep abreast of new developments.

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

Re: Lasts 3 years

Three years is better than most. HMD have gone from being just another reference design mill to having some pretty decent offerings, with no bloat outside the stock google spywareapps. Can't currently get a replacement ROM for the X20 (my current phone), but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Re: the perfect phone for my son

I think that's his point.

It's getting crowded on the ISS: SpaceX Crew-6 to launch Monday

This is where one of those inflatable habs would come in handy.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Bring it in

No, you're making a mistake. They can do all these things. They choose not to.

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Snap also has a daemon running all the time, to manage all the garbage required for snaps to work.

Re: Seems that it's not just Google, Apple and Microsoft

It's ridiculously easy to add a new store to android. Usually just a couple of clicks. The problem is removing the stores installed by the manufacturer, or any other bloatware they add on.

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Re: But why is this necessary?

Not personally, no. In aggregate, yes. It's one of the touted "benefits" of the smart meter, that it can be used as part of a more responsive load-shedding regime by managing demand at the meter level. All the power company/government/crazy rich island guy has to do is set upper limits on consumption and have the meter manage demand automatically. This already happens.

Re: But why is this necessary?

Same reason we're all "encouraged" to get smart meters: control. A centralised, digital currency can be locked and blocked, and restricted in where it can be spent, or how much, or by whom. Like a credit card, but with greater granularity, and now the state is cutting out the middle man and taking all the control (and profit) for itself.

The one saving grace of this mad world we inhabit, is that our rulers are so incompetent with any sort it technology that it's unlikely to be implemented in a working state, and may never be finished at all.

Used EV car batteries find new life storing solar power in California

Re: Nonstandard units

Depends on how much power they can put out. If it's 25MW, they can supply a lot of houses for an hour (somewhere in the region of 7000 I think? I may have a decimal in the wrong place. It's late.), but it's unreasonable to assume they'll put out that much power for that length of time, given the huge strain it would place on the batteries.

They don't provide that information, though. They just give theoretical capacities without context.

Re: bit of a contradiction

Generally speaking, valuable things end up in landfill because the cost of recycling is greater than the value of the extracted materials.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Re: Daemons?

What's the point of an account that never posts anything?

WINE Windows translation layer has matured like a fine... you get the picture

Re: Can we use it to run WSL?

Conservative estimate? Probably 90%.

Re: Can we use it to run WSL?

Gaming is a bigger industry than movies and music combined. 176 billion dollars of revenue in 2021.

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: I'm gonna borrow a friend's story here. I wish this wasn't true.

More comfortable than settling on the latter.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: No to cups or spoons

But the salt is just salt. It isn't kashrut, it's just used during the process in preference to other kinds of salt, because of certain properties that are considered more efficient for drawing fluids out of meat. Any salt will do in a pinch.

2.4 isn't really all that exciting.

The reason why more factors are a good thing is because you end up with fewer cases of infinitely repeating decimals. 10/3 is 3.33333... whereas 12/3 is 4. Duodecimal offers a good balance between factors and mathematical simplicity. It only gets weird a bit silly once you're dividing by 7 or 9, but 10 doesn't divide well into those either.

Now I just need to find an article that lets me ramble about replacing Pi with Tau...

Re: No to cups or spoons

Kosher salt is so called because it's used in the preparation of certain kosher meats.

Factors are more useful than you seem to think.

Well. My inability to spell, combined with my inability to edit, has left me in something of a jam. I'm sure a jar of marmalade has a lovely climate, though.

The problem with the jars climate orbiter wasn't that it was using customary units; the moon landings used customary units throughout and went off without a hitch. The problem was that units were being converted between two teams and someone made a mistake in the conversion. It's a perfect demonstration of the need to standardise units across a project, rather than proof that any particular system is superior to any other.

We should all be using duodecimal, anyway. 12 mm to the douximetre, 120 doux to the metre, and so on. More factors.

Space mining startup prepping to launch 'demo' refinery... this April

Re: How does this work?

For things like iron and nickel, yes. To a degree. The real point is that space has a functionally infinite supply, at least in the near term, and few environmental issues to get in the way of harvesting the materials. There are also potential, novel microgravity fabrication techniques to explore, as well as gaining the ability to construct much larger structures in space than we could ever hope to launch from the surface.

Founder of FreeDOS recounts the story so far, and the future

Re: What is dead may never die

"That is not dead which can eternal lie."

Depending on which meaning of lie you use, we might be stuck with a few people forever.

Twitter 2.0 signal boosts Taliban 2.0 through Blue subscriptions

Re: Sponsorship, sponsorship...

Twitter did nothing about daesh and other islamist-terorist accounts for years, some of which were verified under the old system, and even appeared to be tacitly supporting them by rejecting reports of obvious calls to violence and other breaches of the twitter TOS at the time. Really, what's changed now? A representative of the current (oppressive) government of Afghanistan has a verified account, but now the Musky one is in charge while it's happening, so it's all hands to the gun deck I guess.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: This system will work perfectly...

God bless that man.

I've got an article that conveniently contains links to both proposals right here.

I should have linked it before. It's friday. :)

The FAA thinks pilots are spending too much time relying on automation, reducing their manual skill and familiarity with their aircraft and increasing the possibility of unchallenged controlled flight into terrain because they trusted the automation. The EASA has taken the reverse position, calling for more automation and less manual control, in order to reduce the possibility of pilot error. Interesting clash up ahead.

Re: Just one question...

Surely you can't be serious.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Re: "They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

Only if they're black.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: Carbon free electricity

Per wiki, so a pinch of salt is required, the typical efficiency of a grid-scale power station is also around 33%. This is before factoring in conversion losses between the grid and the car. Wind turbines, when they're actually turning (rather than sitting idle because there's no/too much wind), have a maximum efficiency of around 55%, but they will be typically less than that. This is comparable with a diesel engine, but again, this doesn't account for conversion losses at the charging point, which is typically around 20%.

The final and key point with BEVs is energy density. In short, it's terrible, and it's unlikely to improve without a fundamental change in our understanding of physics. That much-touted efficiency of electric cars is absolutely necessary, in order to get even a remotely reasonable range out of the battery. The moment you place any unexpected constraints on the car, be it towing, cold weather, slightly deflated tyres, too-strong a headwind or what have you, that efficiency just about disappears and you go from having just about enough range to make it to your destination, to being stuck between services on a "smart" section of the M6.

Quantum entanglement discovery could enable futuristic comms tech, Nuclear physicists say

Re: Seek and Ye Shall Find, has forever been the case, has it not?

You really want to block the resident AI?