Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

Maybe it took them a while to believe they might be taken seriously...?

Q: How many members of the Apache identity groups are involved in producing the software "Apache"?

Re: Bit ridiculous

Seems to me that Germans don't have a problem with Nazis being portrayed as homocidal, myth-believig luantics. Because THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE. Notice that the Indiana Jones films have lunatics at the top of a very rigid hierarchy.

Re: Bit ridiculous

Yes, but I'm going to ask a question: what nationality/ethnicity are you?

Would you be OK with a product taking on the name of your own identity group even though it contained no workers of the given group?

Who would think it OK for a group of Scots to make "English mustard" in a facility in Scotland? Or for a group of English people living in England to open a farm rearing purported "Scotch beef"?

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

I would agree, but then again the language is called "Calculus of constructions" and not "Calculus des constructions". If the name is basically English, you really have to consider the other things about Anglophone culture.

Et oui: mon français est superbe ; ainsi j’ai bien sûr le droit de dire ce que je viens d‘écrire.

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

Re: Another sign of the migration of El Reg Westwards?

The good news is that the early indications that the tumour was back have proven to be a false alarm.

The bad news is that we;ve instead ended up with acute appendicitis, and they're refusing to take us to general surgery to get it sorted.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Re: UK will be OK then

Yeah, but how is summoning a hereditary millionaire playing dress-up as a flying mammal going to help us here...?

Musk says Starlink will keep providing free service to Ukraine

Thunderf00t is a wazzock...

Thunderf00t may be an irritating blowhard, but he's good with numbers.

Here, he discusses Musk's figures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qGg6wiXoSc&t=620s

Summary: Musk's alleged "costs" seem to be ticket price rather than cost price. Thunderf00t speculates that this is creative accounting aimed at turning it into a massive tax write-down that will be net profit for SpaceX. He also speculates that SpaceX may be in the financial trouble that Musk himself predicted not too long ago...

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: I guess that's the main aim?

Hmmm....

" References in this Regulation to the processing of personal data for the

purposes of scientific research (including references to processing for

“scientific research purposes”) are references to processing for the purposes of

any research that can reasonably be described as scientific, whether publicly or

privately funded, including processing for the purposes of technological

development or demonstration, fundamental research or applied research. "

I reckon "technological development or demonstration" gives a very broad definition of "scientific research". Like... writing a website on the origami might even qualify.

" References in this Regulation to the processing of personal data for the

purposes of historical research (including references to processing for

“historical research purposes”) include processing for the purposes of

genealogical research. "

So Ancestry.com is now to be considered on a par with the National Archives/...?

Re: I guess that's the main aim?

In other words, they're only cutting the red tape in order to splice it with some white and blue tape and make it ever longer.

Musk says Starlink will ask for exemption to US sanctions on Iran

Re: ha ha ha

Don't know.

Are they still carrying out drone strikes in Yemen?

Re: Request denied!

What, like how all the privately held arms in Afghanistan prevented the rise of the Taliban, twice...?

Someone's at last helping AI models understand those with speech disabilities

Re: Welsh, on the other hand, there's no tech that can help with that

Very disappointed myself.

I'd assumed good faith and thought there was going to be something in the article referring to some reason why the outputs of the project were not going to transfer across languages, but... nothing.

Just a lazy joke.

I thought the Reg was better than that.

OpenAI opens doors to DALL-E after the horse has bolted to Midjourney and others

Re: Art history class

This is fundamentally different.

A human looking at a coffee-table book of a particular artist's pieces doesn't automagically gain the ability to produce works that are nearly indistinguishable from the artist's own work

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: The older the OS...

That was what an OS was.

Re: The older the OS...

Pretty sure it's attested in Middle English literature.

I saw the claim once that scribes were paid by the letter at some point in the Middle Ages, and therefore started adding in silent Es and unnecessary double letters. I wasn't convinced, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility...

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Assuming facilities wasn't contacted

Was on a training course at a newly-opened college building. We were sat in a computer room when the ceiling turned into a waterfall. Nobody moved until I shouted something like "electricity... water... GET OUT"

Turns out the boiler room was directly above the computer rooms. Rather stupid (and expensive) mistake.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Re: Something C++ can do that Rust can't

If you're properly modularising your code, then you should be able to spin off any existing code to runtime-linked libraries, so that's nowhere near as big an issue as it would have been 25 years ago.

AI won't take coders' jobs. Humans still rule for now

Re: Move along, nothing to see

Or look at it a different way -- all we're talking about is the long overdue shift from plain-text procedural code to a hacky version of declarative programming.

The next generation will hopefully move to true declarative programming with AI procedural code generation in the back end.

One man's battle to get patent rights for AI inventors in America may be over

Re: What a Tool...

Assigning them to a machine makes them absolutely useless, because how can you get a computer to sign off on a licensing agreement?

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: The Cloud vs Mainframe+Terminal

Well the point of the term "cloud" was always that the internet is the part of the network you can never know the shape of, hence so it was shown on the network diagrams as a cloud symbol.

When cloud computing started to gain traction, I could not understand why so many companies would use unauditable services.

I was in an IT company that refused to offer cloud services because we insisted our client do due diligence. Vindication came in the form of companies being sued for data loss and being found negligent for failing to do due diligence.

Then the industry decided that maybe cloud computing was bad and just went back to hosted datacentres... but we now called them "clouds".

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: What I find amusing...

I think all they're saying is "not quite a millimetre each"

What I find amusing...

What I find amusing is that they're selling a device that simple geometry suggests has bigger pixels than any screen I've owned since the GameBoy Colour and trying to bamboozle people with talk of "micrometer scale pixels"

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: I see.

You wouldn't have if you'd written it using VimNanoNext 2.3.132!

My spin on that is that the existence of the likes of PanWriter in the form it's in is a failure in software development as a whole. (And therefore not any reflection on or misunderstanding of what you wrote!)

Why isn't it now a straightforward matter to take a full-fat code editor and rebuild it with a few clicks to do only a single one of the million and one tasks it does, and with that, all the now-unnecessary chrome?

I find it baffling how we still struggle with the basics of software development.

Yup, and at that point, surely a more sensible project would be to pluck everything out of VSCodium that isn't needed and rejig its UI...?

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

Re: Conflicted

Power management you say?

Well surely the solution is a radical new type of computer -- a grid network of 16 RP2040 chips backing a low power SoC "host". Full chips spin up and down to manage USB devices or specific apps.

If I want to revive mine (for camping trips) how can I get a replacement battery?

Hate to break it to you, but your b got flipped there.

Given that L33t H4><><0rz always fold the legs away, that just sounds like a handy weight reduction to me.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

Re: Still work in progress

> it has to parse the UFT-8 encoding,

Yeah, and that stray U+200F there just shows how problematic UTF-8 can be. ;-D

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Re: Maybe it's me being a bit dim

This is the quality of reader comment you won't find on the Daily Mail website.

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

Not just not neat, but you'll often hear people say "nobody uses it". You don't, pal -- different from "nobody".

And to add insult to injury, Microsoft's free Office Lens app will now let you capture a whiteboard neatly, with a minimum of fuss.

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

It was Jacob Rees-Mogg's influence that has led half of the UK to immediately think of the Tories when mandatory office-work policies are discussed.

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Re: Not the only company....

They work to the beat of the own drum.

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Re: Testing boundaries

...and I would further point out that what he's asking for isn't outside of Google's current technological capabilities: they've implemented right-to-be-forgotten for GDPR compliance, and they could (if they chose to) provide those same mechanisms to people outside of EU jurisdiction.

That's the angle I'd've been pushing if it was me: Google can take reasonable steps to mitigate harm, so they should take steps to mitigate harm. The fact that they implemented that for another jurisdiction is by-the-bye -- once the infrastructure exists, it's arguably a reasonable step.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Emoji free zone here

" I make a point of using words, speech and Emojis that align with 'my' interpretation of what they mean. As an English speaker, it's not my job or place to try to translate, or consider every possible permutation of how a given utterance could potentially be interpreted by a non-English speaker,"

If you don't want to adapt your English, then maybe you should learn their language yourself...?

Re: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes.

¯\_(¯)_/¯

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Really I don't get why virtualisation hasn't already solved this problem. It's always been possible to remote host niche apps and give users really basic workstations... or even dumb terminals.

Then you can reserve the lion's share of your silicon for the CAD users, rather than leaving most of your potential CPU cycles idle on the desk of desk jockeys who use Word, Excel and a browser...

Re: "the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator"

It's more than a little out of date -- about 15 years ago there was still a lot of software that worked this way, but practically nothing off the shelf needs admin rights now, and the problem is usually bespoke software.

Either way -- any business that still has software that needs admin rights to use is going to be something that IT have already tried to get the business to replace, and have failed. It'll be that same software that would wreck a Linux migration.

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

Re: ... these days I don't hesistate, I just take my toys and go

Indeed, like the parent who throws out your childhood memories during your first year of university...

Maybe he's saying he got shares in them himself, and that he's not an investor to be trusted...?

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

Re: A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

It was their choice in the first place.

I always felt freemium was a rug just waiting to be pulled, but that doesn't make it any less problematic when it happens.

Re: A year seems a bit too low... Three years maybe?

Please supply a link to the GitLab repo for this highly useful project.

Re: Until...

Perhaps, but it doesn't break once a year, and their time limit here is 12 months.

Furthermore, if you're working in a relatively high-level language that's abstracted away inside another environment (eg JavaScript, Python) then version compatibility problems are mostly a matter for the maintainers of the environment, not individual projects.

There's a difference between someone throwing money at something to keep the price down and people working for free.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: Don't know about that

Muphry's Law strikes again!

Chromebooks are here to stay thanks to COVID, even though shipments crashed: IDC

Re: School's out for ever

It was, but they seem to have found that the Chromebook needs the perception of being a "real computer" to overcome perceptions of it being a "clumsy tablet with keyboard".

They'll be hoping that the path of least resistance sees customers sticking with Google-run services and that the Linux subsystem is hardly touched, much like how parents in the 80s and 90s bought computers because they could be used for educational purposes, but all us kids ever did was play games....

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

The article mentions a previous sacking as a potential red flag. If they would not have employed him had they followed the process that they should have, then the murder would not have happened had they followed the process that they should have, and is therefore a(n unforeseen) consequence of the negligence.

Compensation based on outcome is one thing, but we're also talking about punitive damages here, not only compensation, and in the case of drunk-driving, it's 100% a matter of punishment and not compensation.

We can be a bit inconsistent on that, and I'm not yet convinced that punishment based on outcome works -- if a particular form of negligence is something you learn you can get away with, the maximum penalty in the event of the worst possible outcome is not really going to constitute much of a disincentive...

We as a society have made a decision.

In acts of negligence, punishment is related to the consequences arising from the negligence, not the potential consequences nor the reasonably foreseeable consequences.

This is why the penalty for hitting a child while drunk-driving is higher than if you are caught drunk-driving without being in an accident.

In this case, the company were demonstrably negligent, and the consequences of that negligence were extreme. They got in the car drunk, as it were.