Posts by Freddie

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Re: "Its always DNS"

Then how does one know that they do not know it? Tell me of what I do not know! Or do you not know it?

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

Re: Bright new future

I dissagree: the author intends one meaning, the words as written embody another (if we accept that language can contain/convey meaning, then the written word does too), the user then understands a third. How closely those three concepts are coupled depends on the ability of both the writer and the reader (allowing that often writers are often intentionally vague).

Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth

Isn't the idea that this - will be - encrypted?

Infosec pros tell Trump to quit bullying Chris Krebs – it's undermining security

Re: Trump really is a

I'd expect that 1D chess would be a bit much for the orange snowflake in chief.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: Never thought I would see the day when they were...

Original == Innefficient

US Army’s laser obsession continues with yet another drone-zapper deal

<quote>the Army's solicitation also calls for a system that can operate in both fixed-site and vehicle-mounted configurations<\quote>

Put it on a truck, drive it around a bit => artillery/snipers a lot less useful, I would have thought.

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: Filthy b*****d commies, I hate 'em! I hate 'em! Aaargh! Aaargh!

Please don't feed the trolls.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Which is odd, given that in less than the age of the universe, humans evolved from chimpanzees and... created the works of Shakespear. Science 0, reality 1.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

Yes. Get a decent text editor - if you're editing text all day then you deserve that, at least.

You misspelt "vim" ;)

Ada and Zangemann: Fancy reading your kids a book about FOSS?

Re: a fun illustrated children's story

To be fair, while I love a shell I don't think you can't kill any dragons with one. I expect there's an Emacs key-combo chain for that, though.

Long-term supported distros' kernel policies are all wrong

I'm not sure that running FOSS means that we'll live forever.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

Re: Users Use Applications.................

Yes.

A tale of two Chinas: Our tech governance isn't perfect, but we still get to say no

Re: Except

Could you elaborate? I don't know how the west has this influence - my understanding is that most communications from the west don't make it to China. Ta!

Shucks Chuck, how many employees pay = one Cisco CEO?

Re: Metrics

Really? You read that and thought "blimmin' activist investors"? I suggest a nice cup of tea and a sit down. ;)

More seriously, any outside investment will prioritise short term profit over long term sustainability - investors are there to make money and move on, that's why they invest. They're not there for the good of the company.

VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

I dissagree; tabloid astrologers have neither reputation nor legitimacy.

AlmaLinux project climbs down from being a one-to-one RHEL clone

Re: "If you redistribute we'll cancel your subscription" is a restriction by any measure

I expect that the point is that there is no restriction on a recipients' right to redistribute: they can redistribute to their hearts content. The only restriction is that they can no longer be a customer of RH. I'm sure lawers could argue either way (see icon - they're here to take your dabloons), but it seems relatively coherent to me.

Boss installed software from behind the Iron Curtain, techies ended up Putin things back together

Re: Winston's comrade

I wouldn't; they're a tad unpredictable!

Cloudflare stops services to 'revolting' hate site

Re: far right?

I'm confused. From wikipedia: "Zionism is a nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel". As such, zionism is not a slur but a description of those who supported Israel's creation and ongoing expansion. How do you feel Israel and Zionism aren't linked?

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

Re: Diversity should be a consequence, not a goal.

I would think we would like to remove barriers to entry. I think it very hard to make the case that white people feel uncomfortable about entering the health care workplace due to ethnic imbalances (it's not that pronounced - you'll have to think of a better example!).

However, I could see (as with male nurses in (hopefully) times gone past) that women would feel uncomfortable to enter the tech sector. They would they become part of a tiny minority. Of course, they *could* enter it anyway but a good number would be put off.

Your claim that it's possible that women just don't like coding is possible, but I would think most people accept that existing extreme imbalances in gender are self-sustaining. As such, there would need to be strong evidence of the former to prevent dealing with the latter.

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

Re: Incorrect behaviour

The difficulty in implementing robotic board-upending is why making robo monopoly players is seen as so much more difficult that robo chess players. Also, a robot finds sulking for a sufficiently long period of time taxing.

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

Re: Yikes.....I haven't heard ANY useful answers to this question...please help!

For wayland-to-wayland forwarding would either of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ or the (untested by me) solution https://askubuntu.com/a/1168857 help?

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: They'd get a shock...

"a really interesting problem in number theory"

It's all relative, I suppose.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

I'm not sure the author is suggesting it's harder to learn, but that it's harder to excite potential learners.

We've grown up with clunky systems that we could hack - this got a lot of us interested as we could achieve exciting/interesting things. The breadth and level of sophistication in modern sw is such that to acheive exciting/interesting things that haven't been done before is harder, and so fewer people will become enthused.

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Re: Maybe it's a double-bluff?

Or maybe that's what he *wants* you to think! O_o

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Only 2 generations behind?

The automotive industries, for example, aren't looking for small tech scale and won't be for a while. Whether they'll be picking up novel IC designs is another matter!

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Hang on, I thought we were talking about cash, eh?

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Pointless

Firefox's "Invert Colours" plugin will help there, pal. It really helps my eyes out.

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: people understanding

Yes, moving OSes will always be dependent on the critical software being available on the new OS.

In a previous post designing silicon hardware the critical software was linux based (presumably a descendent of unix software) and wasn't going to be portable. To help out it was decided that everyone should have a windows PC (presumably for word and email) and the business critical software used by the bulk of the employees (but not the management) was put on a remote linux session. *sigh*

Amnesty International and French media protection org claim massive misuse of NSO spyware

Re: Why the Mossad?

I think Amnesty is better described as a vocal enemy of human rights abuses.

There are often mixups with Isreal but we must remember that while *some people* in Israel commit egregious rights abuses, most people there do not, so we should be careful not to mislabel.

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Re: for use by households and businesses

I saw GNU Taler recently: it aims to recreate the anonimity of cash but with a digital currency. It seemed very impressive but I'm not sure what's going to motivate users other than privacy and perhaps security, and we all know how well those sell to the masses. :(

Re: Global Warming?

I would think that as a central bank has little need for distributed ledgers it wouldn't use blockchain tech in any way. As such, it wouldn't involve "mining" of any kind and so wouldn't be as energy intensive as BTC, etc.

The horrific name, however, is in danger of lingering like a bad smell.

Patent battle over Facebook Live and 'walkie talkie' tech rattles through High Court in London

No, this is very different because lawyers and money!

You think the UK coronavirus outbreak was bad? Just wait till winter: Study shows test-and-trace system is failing

Re: Really?

I think perhaps some sarcasm was missed there pal! Even conspiracy theorists rarely claim that flu is eradicated!

Started from the bottom, now we're near: 16 years on, open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape draws close to v1.0

Re: Perhaps Inkscape is not an engineer's tool

I agree with your styling comments whole-heartedly. However, I find Inkscape's align tools (Ctrl-Shift-A) to be excellent. In fact, it's one of the reasons I use the tool so much.

Apple-Google COVID-19 virus contact-tracing API to bar location-tracking access

Good point. Giving the epidemiologists that dataset will have immense value. If we study this outbreak properly then hopefully we can save many more lives next time around.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Hanlon's razor

The issue being that their approach (and the approach of herd immunity in general) will have value if we still have to social distance/isolate up until the point where a vaccine is ready. Time will tell; we certainly can't call which approach was better at this stage (and to claim one approach was "right" or "wrong", as they did in the article, shows a laughable level of ignorance).

You should find out what's going on in that neural network. Y'know they're cheating now?

Re: @ James 51

But this isn't correlation, is it?

The asthma caused the medical team to be more attentive

That extra medical attention caused the improved pneumonia outcomes

Therefore, asthma is on the causal pathway, no? A corrolation would be having an inhaler, which is only corrolated with having asthma, rather than causing it, and so is not on the causal pathway, if I understand correctly.

Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...

Re: Just spun up a vm with Q4OS

I'm a little confused. Every distro I've ever tried has made it possible to switch desktops - just select the one you want (of those you've installed) from the drop-down menu at login (at least with most of the graphical login managers I've seen).

Is the news here that they've added a script to install another and change which is your default? That doesn't seem earth shattering, especially as newbies are less likely than most to want to switch desktops.

Pssst... wanna participate in a Google DeepMind AI pilot? Be careful

Re: Er what?

I think the op's point it is that the chosen narrative is quite different from what actually happened, and isn't really comparable at all. Breaching privacy != injecting untested drugs into people willy nilly, either ethically or in effect.

Comp sci world shock: Bonn boffin proposes P≠NP proof, preps for prestige, plump prize

Re: Current cryptography assumes P≠NP?!

I think the point was that public-key cryptography is already broken by quantum computing... in theory. So, in theory, PKC is no use anyway. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice (thanks Yogi).

How many qubits these days?

Re: Well the paper has proved one thing at least

Hey, I'm not big!

Repairable-by-design Fairphone runs out of spare parts

Re: No ethical consumption under capitalism

With regards to food, I agree it can feel like the "ethical" brands are just PR exercises at times, but often looking a little further can yield actually better products (in terms of ethics - I'm not going to argue that the most delicious products aren't often the least ethical...). There IS a range of ethicality (?) out there, but it's hidden amongst the mislead and the misleading.

I don't know much about this phone but surely, given the premise, the creators will do a better job than those that openly don't care about the provenance of the materials/welfare of the workers in the supply chain? Better, while not perfect, is still better.

NHS reply-all meltdown swamped system with half a billion emails

Re: Not Accenture

If it was part of the brief to prevent mails being sent to large numbers of people, and they failed to deliver the brief, then that would suggest a cock-up on their part, no? I know reply-all is an enraging habbit, but usually it's a rare mistake - just not rare enough in 500 million rolls of the dice.

Linus Torvalds won't apply 'sh*t-for-brains stupid patch'

Re: Linus does good work.

I dissagree.

Sure, he doesn't have to be touchy-feely, but he could have made exactly the same point without being offensive. There's nothing wrong with "This is a bad idea because of ..., I will not be accepting this into the kernel".

I feel it's common to confuse straight talking and being offensive in the tech sector. Hell, I've certainly been guilty of it myself. However, it's really important to remember that if we want people to be innovative then they need confidence, and so it's not helpful to knock people's confidence when one of the new ideas that they have turns out to be an awful new idea. My feeling is that there's no place for shaming in any of this.

One ad-free day: Three UK to block adverts across network in June

Re: move will "revolutionise" mobile advertising

@cornz1: Doesn't this remove the only common revenue stream for the websites you use? Would you pay for an ad free version? Personally, I'd like to know how much they'd have to charge (for an ad free version) to break even as if it isn't too high I'd really value this (and it would encourage me to use the site I'd paid for, etc.).

Google DeepMind cyber-brain cracks tough AI challenge: Beating a top Go board-game player

Re: analogy for Warfare

I learnt the same playing total annihilation in the 90's, plus TA has AI *and* killer robots.

Re: Very Impressive

Won't the interesting point be when we achieve, in software, equal intelligence and flexibility to the human mind, but realise that it's still just "clever programming"? I can't wait for that press conference.

Astounding: We're about to stick a probe in orbit of a COMET

Re: "Rosetta craft screams 6 billion km through space to reach its cosmic prey"

Or DOES it? WooooOOOOooooOOOOoooo.....

Virgin Media keeps mum as punters fume at crippled web access

Re: Business as usual...

I had experience with fast.co.uk in the past and they were excellent. Knowledgeable, polite, quick, would call back, etc. . If you don't mind a little more expense I'd thoroughly recommend them. I'm with VM at the moment and I'm just counting the minutes until my contract expires.