* Posts by Dan 55

16877 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Dan 55 Silver badge

Until memory paging came along.

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not a universal definition

In any case, the world has moved on. Large tech = cloud, and cloud doesn't care if it's BSD/MIT or GPL - they can monetize both equally. Hence the development of AGPL and the like.

AGPL is hardly an insurmountable problem. Are you saying that Google, Amazon, or Microsoft are so cheap they won't touch AGPL-licenced code as it means they would need to contribute patches back to the project and that detracts too much from their bottom line?

all open source becomes commercially licensed under a collective subscription system

But it already is! Only the money is funneled into Google's, Amazon's, and MS' pockets, not the projects themselves. Open source projects are starved of money and cloud companies can donate a percentage of the income which comes from the sale of open source services to their customers, only they elect not to. If there were no open source software, cloud companies would be paying third-party suppliers for that software.

with a massive price tag (1% of *turnover*)

I suspect that's his opening gambit.

The large companies will fork the code they use, and maintain it themselves - they can afford to - and stop contributing back.

What exactly are they contributing back? Currently approximately 0 patches and $0.00. Is anyone supposed to be at all bothered if licencing forces them to be more honest?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not a universal definition

And you can argue that MIT, BSD, etc... licences also place restrictions, on the end users. As soon as that code ends up in a PlayStation, iPhone, or a cloud service, it's locked away. End users can't study, share, or modify the software and can only run it if they buy or subscribe to the product.

The fact that MIT, BSD, etc... licences are often viewed as freer than GPL licences is thanks to years of large tech companies and the organisations they fund saying so. Bruce Perens argues that these licences are used for resource extraction by tech companies, the resource being developers.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Look who funds the OSI

Firefox has limitations on branding and nobody could argue that isn't open source.

In any case, if Meta's LLM licence doesn't meet the definition of open source, don't worry, it will do in a few days when the OSI publishes its definition of open source AI. Just look at who funds the OSI.

It's obvious the large corporations which fund the OSI benefit from an absolutist definition of open source where the BSD or MIT licence is preferred over the GPL. Even GPL v3 too restrictive because it doesn't allow for Tivoisation. It helps them take what they want from smaller idealistic developers without paying for it or even contributing back.

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Click fraud?

When anyone else does it, it's bad.

When Google AI clicks on Google ads generated by Google search results in your Google browser to buy something, it's good.

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Nobody has to buy anything from Nvidia

It's a toxic hellhole and they can't even get Linux drivers right.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It figures.

I for one would pay to see Alien vs Sharknado.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It figures.

Given that Romulus is the worst movie of the Alien franchise

I haven't seen it, but I'm willing to bet it's better than Alien Resurrection, AVP, AVP Requiem, and Alien Covenant.

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

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Re: "Musk claims"

Haven't we been here before with Jeffrey Skilling?

Voice-enabled AI agents can automate everything, even your phone scams

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not quite there yet

The voice sounds a bit like those Xtranormal videos from a decade ago. I wouldn't give it my bank credentials but I can imagine my father-in-law would (I'm surprised his account hasn't been emptied yet).

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: BBC News today: Smartphones: "I feel guilty for not buying my daughter one for school"

The school should feel guilty for not having classroom equipment.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Won't be a short term trend

We've had 10-15 years of the great experiment and it's obviously been a failure. If tech companies have no inclination to fix the problems they've made then any parent who doesn't want to see their kids end up with chronic brain rot won't be giving them a smartphone.

AI firms and civil society groups plead for passage of federal AI law ASAP

Dan 55 Silver badge

Pointless

If Big US Tech has endorsed it, all this is is an exercise in lobbying to do two things. 1) Shut out competition at home and from abroad and 2) Set some minimum standards which are only there so it can be said "we already have standards, any more would ruin our competitivity" (see the broken mess that is right to repair).

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Early Apple Lies

And they're still as insufferable now, if not more so.

macOS HM Surf vuln might already be under exploit by major malware family

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Safari has an entitlement that allows it to bypass all TCC protections"

There's your problem right there.

A browser is probably the piece of software which most needs protection against unauthorised access to location, microphone, and webcam but the built-in one doesn't get it so as not to pop up warnings and scare off users. Presumably Apple have worked out fewer and fewer people bother with Safari on desktop...

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: About the iPod

Winamp 5 has iPod music syncing... It's alive!

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

This is the perennial problem of software suppliers -- how to build in wear and tear, or just plain obsolescence, into your product line.

On an iDeviceOS, Apple does the heavy lifting for everyone, APIs have the lifespan of a mayfly and older programs will break sooner or later.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I'm sure mounting a network drive and adding files to a playlist would have worked.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Audacious + a Winamp skin from the Winamp skin museum?

Internet Archive exposed again – this time through Zendesk

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Paypal, anyone?

Paypal does that, often when your browser is not on their list or on the list but not one of the latest versions. E.g. buying a game in Steam's built-in browser.

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interesting how every other country manages without this tone thing

This is boringly called a "Level 1 alert" elsewhere (see p10 here).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interesting how every other country manages without this tone thing

The highest level alert can't be turned off.

I'm not ditching my perfectly serviceable phone from 2017 just for this.

Alan Partridge shrug.gif

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Interesting how every other country manages without this tone thing

There's every chance you'll hear it because it's been included in Android and iOS for cell broadcast alerts and there's no way to change it.

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Those Post Office workers never stood a chance

15 years since the story first broke, about 25 years since problems were first reported, and they still haven't managed to get that the system can't add up properly so any losses it reports are meaningless. They walk among us.

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Stop it!

It's just a facade so as not to scare the USAians who are easily frightened, which means we can all have fun picking apart articles written by UK journos with Britishisms put through an American English spellchucker, engagement is up, everyone's a winner.

Let's just hope they don't screw the pooch too much like the other place did.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Don't worry about Musk

Musk is the one who got the free publicity by announcing he was helping, the author wrote this article about how Musk wasn't, in fact, helping.

Or are people with first-hand evidence supposed to know their place and say nothing while a billionaire compulsive liar lies yet again with the aim of deceiving the impressionable?

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Quantity not quality

There's a vicious rumour going about that the EU removed bots, simps, and NFT pushers from the total and ended up with four real human Twitter users.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why should it be classed as important ?

That's an easy one to answer, Churnalists make a living out of it so it appears all over the media.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Dan 55 Silver badge

svn also faffs around with line endings and it's also a complete pain in the arse because it's easier for the editor, commit, and update utilities to detect the line ending than getting people to set an svn flag saying what the line ending is. The proof is that svn ended up having auto properties so the "native" EOL flag is automatically set server side forcing EOL detection to be done on the client side.

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

Dan 55 Silver badge

Indeed. Windows is always POS ready, whatever the version.

Google's memory safety plan includes rehab for unsafe languages

Dan 55 Silver badge

I was thinking of using libstdc++ instead of libc. But if there's somehow there's something in libc that you can't find in libstdc++, it'd be no more difficult than Rust bindings and probably easier?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Google, did management enforce use of RAII"

That's what tech leads are for, to say why it has to be done to management (that's probably what went wrong in Google...).

If you're wondering why management keep buying into stuff like cloud, AI, and the new language du jour it's because sales got there first.

Dan 55 Silver badge

So why were they allowed to use C strings in the first place? No code review caught that out? That could even be automated by getting svn and git to refuse commits which contain "char *".

Back to Google, did management enforce use of RAII, ban use of known unsafe language features, allow time for refactoring old code to use newer C++ features, and improve the toolchain? I suspect they didn't because they admitted as much ("Given the amount of C++ code we use, we anticipate a residual amount of mature and stable memory-unsafe code will remain for the foreseeable future"). If they chose not to follow best practices then decide that's a reason for Rusting all the things, they're going to be surprised when they find there are still problems in their Rust code but I won't be as no technical solution on Earth will fix their problem - they have a management and cultural problem.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: See also: UKCA marks on goods. That didn't last very long

CE is not just self-certification (I suppose I'm getting downvotes because people think it is). There are Notified Bodies who can only test certain products and they are only in the EU.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I'm sorry, but only our popcorn will work in this theatre.

Japanese SCART connectors aren't actually SCART, they're JP-21.

Also France gave way to Big Telly and dumped the SCART requirement in 2015, now most later TVs have no easy way to connect older Composite/S-Video/RGB and everyone is forced to use some horrible dongle which converts to YPbPr or HDMI and the cheap ones are terrible and laggy.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

Re: See also: UKCA marks on goods. That didn't last very long

If UKCA's been dropped and CEs are only awarded by certain EU bodies, does that mean there's no UK body which can approve products sold just in the GB market and UK manufacturers have to go abroad to get approval...?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Re:6th Largest?

UK and Ireland ISBNs are sold by a US multinational (recently divested from another US multinational). It's colonies all the way down.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Doubt it's PD.

Post Office seeks more Horizon support as it continues hunt for replacement

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not to worry, the Post Office have the answer

These are losses reported by Horizon that the Post Office want to take subpostmasters to court for that we now know are fictitious because Horizon doesn't work; it generates false transactions and makes other transactions disappear.

If management still consider them real losses then something's very wrong.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not to worry, the Post Office have the answer

Post Office explores taking branch owner-operators to court again

State-owned body writing off losses of £12m a year after stopping practice, inquiry told

And as far as I know Horizon is still not fixed.

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

Dan 55 Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Regulatory Capture

The first and most important item on the agenda, throughout the whole of the UK government from central down to local, will be replacing ODF with OOXML.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: We will rip out the bureaucracy

45 years of ripping out bureaucracy doesn't appear to be the answer, given the current state of the UK.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

Dan 55 Silver badge

Wii U (yes, the Wii U)

Green Hills Software also made the Wii U IDE environment for Nintendo.

An anonymous third-party developer said it was clunky and slow:

Having worked on other hardware consoles, I suppose that we were rather spoilt by having mature toolchains that integrated nicely with our development environment. Wii U on the other hand seemed to be trying at every turn to make it difficult to compile and run any code. [...] Finally, when you had the code, you would deploy it to the console and start up the debugger, which was part of the toolchain that Nintendo had licensed from Green Hills Software. As a seasoned developer I've used a lot of debuggers, but this one surprised even me. Its interface was clunky, it was very slow to use and if you made the mistake of actually clicking on any code, then it would pause and retrieve all of the values for the variables that you had clicked, which might take a minute or more to come back.

The Wii U also got hacked in record time.

Boeing again delays the 777X – the plane that's supposed to turn things around

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The CEO is a genius!

He's supposed to have an engineering background but it looks like the MBAs got to him.

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: POSIX.1 vs POSIX.2

Poster above said just provide the header files. Not the same as what you're saying.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: POSIX.1 vs POSIX.2

You could, but it wouldn't be POSIX.1 compliant.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The UNIX brand

Thanks, I didn't realise. It seems an odd choice to they break with convention and call UNIX V7 instead of UNIX 16. I may even have seen UNIX V7 mentioned in the past and assumed it was referring to the 1979 version.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something?

They probably suddenly realised they had discontinued their last Intel machine a year ago (Mac Pro 2019) and won't renew the Intel certification.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The UNIX brand

I wonder why IBM bothered to certify AIX 7.2 TL5 as a UNIX V7 in 2020, when UNIX V7 is ancient (1979). The previous versions of AIX, including AIX 7.1, are all certified as UNIX 03.

Unless they somehow managed to fail a test for compliance with UNIX 03?