Posts by Adair

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Liz Truss wasn't testing, nor engaged in an iterative development process.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Whatever happened

Hmm, there is the 'empire' of the imperial sort, but then there is the 'empire' built by Bill Gates and Co, or your local carpet dealer. So, I'm not betting on MS lasting anywhere near 1000 years—lucky if they make 100.

Re: Whatever happened

Precisely, change always happens—sometimes even for the better, if not the good.

Re: Whatever happened

Empires rise... become complacent, corrupt, senescent... And empires crumble and fall.

Re: Whatever happened

You mean you've stopped using a horse and cart?

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Re: The Idiocracy takes flight

To hijack, and only slightly misuse, an aphorism from another aspect of human life:

'No one ever went broke under-estimating the gullibility of the buying public'.

Scumbag gets 30 years in the clink for running CSAM dark-web chatrooms, abusing kids

Re: Punishment is a means, not a goal

I won't argue with you on that particular point (30 years re child sexual abuse), but having worked in a prison I have no doubt that in a significant proportion of cases 'prison', as we run them, often does far more harm than good, both for the 'criminal' and for society at large when that person is released—and all at vast expense. Very poor value for money, and too often a lousy 'solution' to many of our social problems.

Re: Punishment is a means, not a goal

Problem is it's not that great at doing any of those things - except temporarily/permanently removing the perp from troubling 'law abiding society' with their crimes. That outcome is potentially very useful, but as to 'teaching them not to behave badly' and 'discouraging others from behaving badly', the evidence for success is mixed, to say the least.

'Prison' (as we tend to run them), in far too many instances is an expensive, counter-productive non-solution - a sop to the 'hang 'em and flog 'em' brigade.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: "There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

That's the joy/curse of 'freedom'. ;-)

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

Re: How about making parents responsible

Sadly, it is a long recognised fact that what is seen as 'common sense' is neither common nor good sense. Witness the state of humanity.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Warren's big mistake

Some years ago, in a moment of sheer unmitigated madness, I allowed the company's Exchange server access to my personal mobile. NEVER EVER allow yourself to be persuaded to do this. Exchange immediately assumes ownership of your phone—at least all the parts that Exchange deems relevant to it's purposes. I irretrievably lost a number of personal contacts through that moment of foolishness, and it took several weeks of work to recover the rest of the 'damage', having first booted Exchange off the device.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

And yet, weirdly, plenty of organisations (commercial and otherwise) manage to run perfectly sane and effective offices based on the Linux software stack.

Change is a terrible thing, to be resisted at all costs.

Re: As noted

Can't say I've noticed any obvious search slowdown, but maybe depends on what 'getting big' means. My main Inbox currently registers over 700 messages, but maybe if that was 7,000 or 70,000 things would get a bit grim. I don't know, they get archived after a two month threshold, so things never get that grotesque.

And MS buys into their need wholesale, at a price they just can't bring themselves to refuse.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: Linux nightmare

It's obviously time for a new standard.

Just like all art should be the same style?

Re: Linux is like car clubs

A good joke, that has nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with identity politics and gnawing insecurity.

Re: Best to fix what you have first

Sounds like something to do with your particular setup (or even something you are doing) rather than anything fundamentally awry with Mint, which is one of the distros that generally really does 'just work'.

Having just updated my desktop hardware after eleven years, plus running several other boxes for backups, servers, laptops, etc. I can't say Mint has ever failed to install and run properly. That would appear to be the general experience of others.

Google must face £7B UK class action over search engine dominance

Re: Failed Regulatory Oversight

Perhaps this also comes down to egregiously poor education re IT and online activity, and almost total indifference amongst the hosts that carry the Google parasite.

I haven't used Google...

for search, or a search engine that sucks off Google, or for anything else really, for at least five years. At least on the desktop—we'll quietly ignore my Pixel phone, although there are mitigating apps at work there.

Guess what? Life goes on without issue.

It only takes a few clicks. And the will.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Your point is academic - the figures, as they stand, are the reality. They reflect actual experience.

Your argument is merely supposition based in conjecture - as you say, we have no big population of 20 year old EVs.

When we do you can present your evidence.

My words: 'Not too likely in either case, but a clear distinction as well.'

Your words: 'The difference between 0.004% and 0.08% is pretty small'

There is a difference between 'overall probability' and 'relative probability'. In this case the 'overall probability' in either case is low; but the relative probability between the two cases is significant, and that is what counts in this argument.

There are some who either ignorantly do not understand this, and others who wilfully do not understand this because they have an agenda to pursue—FUD to spread.

Take a million EVs and a million ICE, on the basis of the Swedish figures in one year there will be 800 ICE fires and 40 EV fires. I don't know about you, but I think most people would decide that was a significant difference—a x20 difference—in favour of EVs, even if the overall probability of a fire in either type is pretty low.

What evidence are you presenting to support your opinion/prejudice?

It's not hard to do your own research (you should try it), but let's try a popular source, but academic and technical studies are readily available, Top Gear:

'The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) reported 23 fires in 611,000 EVs during 2022, or 0.004 per cent in a year, which makes it 20 times less likely to happen than ICE car fires, which burned 3,400 times in 4.4 million cars, or 0.08 per cent.'

Not too likely in either case, but a clear distinction as well.

The misinformation isn't 'what kind of fire', it is 'the frequency/probability of vehicle fires' - there is a difference. The statistics to date make it very clear that the chances of a vehicle burning out, or even having a minor conflagration that doesn't write off the vehicle, are considerably higher for an ICE than for an EV. Of course the vast majority of us will see out our entire driving life-times without ever experiencing our car going up in flames (regardless of type) - so the issue is largely moot (so long as we don't get sucked in by the the EV doomsayers' bullshit).

All well and good, but I'm not talking about honest and valid reasons, I'm talking about the bullshit and FUD, the edge-cases that are presented as being the 'general experience', e.g. EVs are more likely to catch fire (when the opposite is true), early battery pack demise (when all the evidence to date indicates battery packs will generally outlast the average lifespan of the car), they all die in cold weather (excepting those being driven in Nordic countries). All that kind of dishonesty and ignorance that merely muddies the waters and benefits those who value their bank balance more than the welfare of living creatures. Not that EVs don't have their issues in that regard.

But, the petro-chemically backed bullshitters have no shame, wallowing in their ignorance and greed. It's the lying, the exaggeration, the deliberate misinformation, the FUD - that is what I'm on about.

Horses for courses. Apart from the issue of off street charging, most recent EVs amply cover the driving needs for a substantial proportion of the driving public; and the 'battery pack lifetime' argument is basically FUD.

Currently, EVs are definitely not suitable for everyone, but a lot of the arguments people put up against them are nothing more than ignorant/malicious social-media trash talk

RHEL 9.5 debuts alongside AlmaLinux, Rocky, and Oracle updates

If you must run their shit...

for pity's sake run their shit on our shit.

[sigh]

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

Every tree...

has it's natural life span. Once it's fully grown it's just a matter of time before senescence sets in. Hopefully, before that process becomes too advanced the tree will have reproduced, but even if not there is usually another nearby tree for the creatures that live on and/or feed on it to move onto.

OSes are not really that different. It's just a question of time.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Huge progress?

'...the 2030s are going to be unimaginably different to today.' - probably in more ways than one.

Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

Re: Steam deck==Linux desktop

Who cares?

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: "without the good residents of Norfolk coming out with the torches & pitchforks."

Let's all huddle around our open fires in our draughty caves.

Pylons are an eyesore—although there are prettier ones that are not much more expensive—but there are also far worse things to deal with in this world.

And, in the end, a row of pylons are easily removed when no longer needed.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

I like GIMP

I'm not a frequent user, but despite it's quirks I like it. :-)

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: Great until

Meanwhile the planet burns.

China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets

Because they spent a fuck-ton of money trying to make sure everything was right first time, plus they are basically riding on a a lot of existing and proven inventory. Starship is pretty much a clean sheet design, so in principle there is a lot that could go wrong and a lot to learn.

OTOH, the 'spend once and biggly' approach doesn't always produce the desired result, witness one Starliner. Now they have to decide whether to abandon/sell off the white elephant, or continue to add to the existing money mountain to try and recover the situation.

Neither approach is foolproof, and neither is right/wrong, both have their pros and cons. You pick the one you want and do your best to make it work.

PS - look up 'iterative', and then compare the definition with SpaceX's development approach.

Don't understand your point, are you trying to suggest that Starship should have launched straight to orbit on its first flight?

That's not how SpaceX work; it's an iterative process of trial, error, learn from error, trial,... until you have something that probably pretty much has the bugs well worked out of it and is likely to prove predictably reliable.

But I'm sure you already know that.

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Re: bit hypocritical?

When it comes to copyright I guess there is a distinction between 'tools' and 'content' produced by those tools.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Hmmmm...

And your point is?

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Well that's FLOSS for you, feel free to cut a fork any time you like. Who knew?

Re: Economic Sanctions are War Crimes

So that's alright then, nothing to see here. Just a friendly tiff between neighbours. Only it wasn't like that at all was it, on both sides?

If you were alive then you may remember that everyone was trying to live normal lives with the perceived very real possibility of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads. Good times.

Re: Response from aosc.io

As the messenger is AC they are actually quite difficult to shoot. People may, however, wish to express their approval/disapproval of the content of the post (as an AC poster there is no need to take the responses personally).

Wow, next stop Moscow!

It's all in the plan, you know. or, perhaps not. Instead merely a tactical venture. Mind you, given what Russia has stolen from Ukraine one couldn't blame Ukraine if they end up deciding to hang on to that little bit of Russia—just as a reminder that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.

And all of this justifies the slaughter of thousands of civilians and military personnel. What an abysmal view of life and political values. Merely the petulant, cowardly school-yard bully writ large—someone who never grew up, but learned that if you smash someone in the face first you often get what you think you want. Only to discover, usually too late, that it's all for nothing—you are nothing more than just another bloodstained bully who is a long time dead, and the sooner the better.

Putin and his ilk in Russia, the capitalist moneygrubbers in the 'West'—all cut from the same cloth. All selfish murderous idiots, and no amount of weasel words and slimy justifications will change that reality.

Re: Bandershite

Jellied Eel,

Looks like you're well overdue to be packing your bags and buying the earliest ticket to Moscow. Given your stance you should be much more content living under the Putin regime's tender mercies.

No?

'Open Source' does not equal "moral/ethical vacuum".

Your boundaries and mine may not be the same, but boundaries of behaviour and values there are and should be, unless we want to live in a chaotic relativistic swamp of 'dog eat dog' and 'anything goes'.

Say hello to the epi-bit, a new approach to DNA data storage

Looks like...

tape backups will still be around for a while yet.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

Re: I can't wait...

A parasitic leaching of money, skills, and responsibility.

Just say 'NO'.

WeChat devs introduced security flaws when they modded TLS, say researchers

Re: Who uses WeChat anyway?

I wonder what they expect, and how many of them actually have a choice of messaging apps?

Given the source of WeChat there is no reason to suppose that is is in any way meaningfully secure from state intrusion, let alone anyone else's efforts to subvert its 'security'.

Please note that I am not in the least implying that other similar apps from other sources are any better, and some may well be worse, but 'deliberate security flaws in WeChat'? Quelle surprise.

Who uses WeChat anyway?

1. Due diligence

2. Actions have consequences

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Re: Within a factor of two anyway

Meanwhile completely ignoring the fact that we have a perfectly functional and very efficient fusion reactor running continuously only a few million miles away, which is not actually owned by anyone and which shares its energy upon the just and unjust all alike.

Make hay while the Sun shines.

Elon Musk's X mashed by Australian court for evading child protection reporting

Corporate fines ...

should almost always be a percentage of revenue - and it should hurt, otherwise it's a total waste of time.