Posts by Adair 1556 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2008
A good comparison would be, how did RocketLab do it (down in NZ before US interests got involved, but including that also); while Orbex, with a notionally much bigger local pool to fish from, hasn't even managed to go 'KaBoom!' on the pad (or have they—I'm guessing here)?
there are good reasons why the mantra 'DO ONE THING, AND DO IT WELL' is well worth taking heed of.
As grey-beards retire, then fall off their coding chair, taking with them knowledge and understanding that cannot easily be recovered, and the stack gets ever deeper, and abstracted beyond reason, the chances of any one being able to see the wood for the trees and simply 'get things done' let alone maintain the tottering pile tends ever more heavily towards zero.
If a human being cannot fairly easily parse the requirements for setting up a network without needing to trust an AI to make it happen before everyone loses the will to live, then we are in serious trouble, and have clearly lost the plot.
How trustworthy is your AI? Better go and ask it.
EXAMPLE: try completing the TrustID process on your phone, for a DBS check, without using Chrome.
"You sad loser, you're not using Chrome, so of course our wonderful app won't work with whatever poxy browser you have chosen to use instead. Nothing personal, just business."
Arguably, 'identity' is defined and authenticated by relationships, i.e. a,b,c,and d all agreed that x is x. They could be wrong, but the bigger the pool, and closer the degree, the greater the probability they are correct.
Anything else just ends up being dependent on too many other technical factors to be regarded as trustworthy. The most egregious current example of this is showing up at a polling station and presenting a 'driving licence', or even a 'passport' to 'prove' that I am me, and the poor saps sitting at the table have no means whatsoever of authenticating the piece of tat I have pushed in front of them.
Further complxity does nothing to guarantee a significantly higher probability of trustworthiness, but does improve the theatricality and money grubbing opportunities.
... does that mean they are worth listening to about other things?
Probably not. Certainly, hubris has a great record for cutting people down to size, and revealing the amazing truth: that someone is pretty much just like someone else, and therefore it is wise not to take them too seriously, however much loot they may have amassed. And, make sure your wallet is safely out of their reach.
Problem resolved. Turns out the upgrade lost/deleted all my mapping customisations, a few of which were so old I'd forgotten what they were! Rationality has now been restored, but it would still be good if the the upgrade retained keyboard user settings, rather than writing over them, as they appear to have been in my case.
Maybe just my setup, BUT this update has played havoc with my keyboard layouts. 'English-UK' has transmogrified into something else. It still says its 'English-UK', but that's not the mapping it's showing. Haven't figured out what, but it uses lots of diacritics. Other keyboard randomness is also occurring. Not show stopping, but definitely unwanted and not what I've come to expect from a Mint upgrade. BTW, 'English-NZ' works just fine. :-P
A classic 'ebike' in legal terms - at least in my part of the world - offers only augmentation to human effort, i.e. the less effort you put in the less assistance you get, stop pedalling and the motor stops working, and the assistance cuts out altogether above ~15mph.
Anything not meeting that criteria is not an 'ebike', but, as you suggest, is effectively an electric moped/motorcycle.
I'm the first down-voter, but see the Peloton reference which captures it nicely.
Proper ebikes, i.e. not the cheap knock-offs with exploding batteries, or the ones with the limiter bypassed/never fitted, are actually a very practical (and enjoyable) complement to purely muscle powered bikes. I own both so can speak with actual authority. :-)
What 'they' (the money grubbers) are really trying to do is re-create a 'slave economy'. There is a way of thinking that has never got over having to actually pay the worker properly for the value of their labour. They prefer not to pay wages/salaries at all, if possible.
As human workers are inconvenient to the process of 'making profit' it is deemed expedient to remove the inconvenience wherever possible. Hubris and greed obviously ignore the fact that shafting your workers means ultimately shafting yourself, but then 'money grubbers' are seldom very good at looking beyond their bank balance.
Agree that on the basis of this latest declamation from Nadella that he is probably circling the drain.
definitely not intelligent.
Meanwhile the AI Hype Juggernaut thunders onwards, desperate to reach escape velocity, but hindered by the fact of it's fundamental non-sequitor clamping it firmly to the launchpad. Inevitable RUD will eventuate, unless it simply runs out of juice. In which case it will sit there as a shameful monument to hubris, greed, and stupidity. But we all prefer a good Ka-boom, with flaming wreckage everywhere.
Clearly your problem with LibreOffice is your problem. I just did what you suggested, no problem at all. No crash.
So I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you mine, betting strongly that mine trumps yours in the general 'user experience'.
Time to start poking the forums to see if you can find out if your problem is anyone else's problem too, and what the cure is.
My anecdotal evidence, over the last 20 years, is that Linux has hardly ever fallen over on me in a way that a re-boot didn't solve. Literally a handful of times. Obviously YMMV.
I absolutely rely on Mint for my work desktop over the last five years—it's not caused me any grief. Neither has Ubuntu server running Nextcloud. Currently exploring Bluefin on a laptop, as a possible robust 'low maintenance' option to give to an admin assistant.
Lack of effective enforcement of existing regulations, let alone prospective ones, is clearly a massive problem, especially against global corporates (US ones in particular—money and political threats tend to talk). All other measures tend to stand or fall according to how effective the enforcement actually is. Sadly there seems to be a lot of cowardice about, including lack of proper funding.
Agreed, but then please come back with a better (better in quality and practicality) mitigation. Otherwise it's just whining.
I've no doubt the policy in question is not perfect, by a long chalk, but then 'social media', whatever it's benefits, is also a toxic cesspool of human negativity. No one can say that there isn't a real problem that it is grossly negligent to dismiss or ignore.
Allow me to venture the view that the world would keep on turning, and probably be better off, without the shite-spew of Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/or any of the other toxic, corporate driven, tech-bros garbage shutes that masquerade under the misnomer of 'social media'.
Somehow humanity coped without it for thousands of years. We didn't need it then, and we don't need it now.
But wait, we must all bow down before the twin molochs of 'Money' and 'Progress', lest we die or, worse still, be cancelled.
Whatever, we're talking about restrictions on access for young'uns up to the age of sixteen. I think they'll live, and in fact they're likely to live better if they can put off getting sucked into the sewers of 'social media' while they enjoy the few years on offer at least somewhat free from the garbage spewed out by the 'grown-ups'.
Honestly, this hand-wringing makes it sound as though the restrictions are forever and going to amputate any possibility of living a 'normal' life. Bollocks.
It would be good if a lot of folk took responsibility for the crap they inflict on everyone else, admitted it's crap, wound their necks in and withdrew the crap. But that's not going to happen. So let's all do nothing, pretend everything is lovely, cross our fingers, and wonder why the world is becoming a bigger and bigger shithole.
While plenty of people in ancient times roamed no more than a day's walk from their home, plenty of others roamed plenty farther. In fact there was a hell of a lot of coming and going (tens, hundred, thousands of miles), everywhere people were, for as far back as the records allow us to look—a looong way in human lifetimes.
Knowledge got around on the back of all the wanderings. Ignorance tended to hitch a ride too. Some things never change.
Gave up flying NZ-UK via US years ago, apart from one exception about ten years ago. Some improvement in the 'transit hospitality', no improvement in the 'customs inhospitality'. Won't ever be flying via the States again when there are far more pleasant transit experiences to be had via the Eastern routes (Dubai, Singapore, even Hong Kong).
The US was a 'great' country once (notwithstanding its massive flaws and failings—every nation has those in some form), but it's well and truly in decline now. Not beyond recovery, but if the trend continues it's on the downward slope of decay and rottenness. Still powerful, but flailingly wildly in the hands of self-serving money-grubbers. What damage might they do, to their people and to the rest of the world? Shame.
Joining the dots can be fun, but if we think that anyone 'in charge' has thought this through to any significant extent we're in la la land.
What we're really looking at is the time proven 'Law of Unintended Consequences', because even when we humans do try to 'think things through' we are incapable of calculating the probabilities and exigencies beyond a very limited range, and often not even then because we have this tendency to only see what we want to see.
Just so with FRT, it's a 'solution', there is 'money' and 'politics' involved. The interested parties concerned with 'solution', 'money', and 'politics' will only see what they want to see, and be highly motivated to ignore what they don't want to see, regardless of the consequences to everyone else further down the track.
The RIPA shambles and abuse is a clear example of the process, but we can find it wherever 'solution', 'money', and 'politics' are in the driving seat.
'Microsoft is in the business of engineering' - one would like to think so, but the truth is 'Microsoft is in the business of making money for its shareholders and top executives', and the more cheaply that money is made the better. So, not really in the business of engineering, let alone engineering reliability, usability, and stability.
Sadly, we're witnessing the inevitability of senescence in anything that follows the basic pathway of life. MS may manage to reinvent itself enough to stagger on for a generation yet, but greed, complacency and inertia all take their heavy toll. The manglement is steadily driving the beast into the ground. Those in charge at the death will grab their golden parachutes and move on to the next agile, keen, young thing and begin their deadly parasitic ways all over again.
Your NI number is in no way useful as a form of ID due to the way the NI system works (or doesn't work, depending on your point of view).
There are large quantities of NI numbers attached to no-one, others attached to more than one person, people attached to more than one NI number. The system is beyond redemption so far as being a formal, effective general purpose ID is concerned, but it more or less functions for the purpose it fulfils---not an 'ID Card'.
But it wasn't Influenza, AND even the plans that were in place for an influenza epidemic had, in physical resource terms, been run into the ground over years, so 'the plan' couldn't be effectively implemented even if they tried to. Which, by all accounts they did try, only to discover the shocking truth that when you don't fund a plan for the physical resources it requires you don't actually have 'a plan'. Makes you wonder what other 'plans' are lurking in draws which, when needed, will be found to be figments of imagination.
Yep, English Common Law is gloriously (and, for some, infuriatingly) loose when it comes to names. OTOH, the legal system as a whole, including the government bureaucracy, does prefer consistency. On your head be it if you persistently change your name without due process, or use multiple monikers for official business.
Sometimes it's a good idea to break out of our self-interest and complacency.
SystemD might be brilliantly written code that well serves the needs of the majority of users, BUT if it does that while effectively taking over the OS stack and driving out the ease of access and opportunity to 'do things differently', or to 'meet a particular need' then the best code in the world is still a Trojan Horse, and not a good thing at all if the philosophical purpose of the OS stack is to enable all and sundry to do their own thing and share it.
Microsoft and Apple already offer their own particular proprietary 'walled gardens', where the user must keep on paying for the uniformity/ubiquity they depend on. 'Linux', in principle, offers a very different approach and freedom, which SystemD seems potentially very close to subverting, and not in a good way.
The 'pro-nuclear' lobby prefer to kick the 'actual costs' can down the road, or look the other way.
In theory 'nuclear power' (as we know it) offers genuine up-front benefits, but in practice it's a toxic wasteland of exorbitant and runaway costs (not just financial).
To put it another way: 'nuclear power' is basically a techno-positivist's dream of how things should be, and the 'political elite's' way of showing off—"Look what I did!" Leaving others to clear up the mess, and/or live with it.
All in all, a long lived lesson in hubris.
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