* Posts by Tom 38

4397 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

EU charges Corning with antitrust violations over Gorilla Glass dominance

Tom 38

Re: Marketing

Which part of

Corning's OEM agreements included requirements that companies source their alkali-AS glass exclusively from Corning, for which they would receive rebates, and that OEMs report all competitive offers from rivals to Corning to give it a chance to match the price

is "solidifying their relationships with customers". New entrants are finding it difficult not because they are dealing with an entrenched product with satisfied customers, but because Corning controlled their customers to prevent them realistically using any other supplier. Anti-competitive behaviour is the problem, not an entrenched product.

AT&T settles claims it misappropriated subsidies, with partial admission of guilt

Tom 38

"The seven largest and most profitable companies in the world built their franchises on the internet and the infrastructure we provide," Stankey argued in June. "Why shouldn't they participate in ensuring affordable and equitable access to the services of today that are just as indispensable as the phone lines of yesteryear?"

This is like saying Ford should pay for road maintenance - nope, that's not quite right. The infrastructure AT&T provide allows their customers to access the internet. Companies providing content on the internet is what produces the customers that AT&T get their revenue from. Its like Disney paying for motorways because people want to drive to Disneyland.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Tom 38

Re: damn shame

The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN)

Which tells part of the story, the part where we choose not to finance the building of it, and instead the government has agreed a CFD with a strike price of £89.50/MWh. Current generation costs averaged at £68/MWh over the last year. The French and the Chinese are paying for it now, we're paying for it later.

Klarna for power stations effectively

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Tom 38

What tax take? Trump has said that tariffs would replace Income Tax.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Tom 38

Ifor Williams

Very definitely was stolen for the trailer, Ifor Williams are worth a bomb and easy to shift. We had one nicked too - don't lend anything to my aunt ever.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Tom 38

Re: power off

'Who Me?' stories are not necessarily current. A lot of the good ones only become "amusing tales I tell of the past" once they have gone past being "horrific trauma that still wakes me up occasionally"

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Tom 38

Re: That's what Linus thinks of AI, but what does AI think of Linus?

There once was a young coder from Helsinki

Who thought comments should be managed more neatly

He pulled your PR, spat out his coffee

And told you "go fuck yourself, sweety"

Its not great :/

Tom 38

Re: I agree

Anecdotal, my sister was offered a free full body scan from Daniel Ek's new venture. The AI counted 1600 moles, of which 3 of them it thought were worth looking at by a dermatologist. One of those three, the dermatologist thought was probably melanoma, and so they removed all three and sent off for biopsy.

[Billionaires are so predictable, they get to 50 and suddenly realise they're going to die at some point, and start a healthcare company]

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Tom 38

Re: One good sanction deserves another

-Try and debate like an adult.

Why do we need to debate your diatribe? I would literally pay for a subscription to not see your shit.

Musk's $1M election lottery raises serious legal concerns, says Pennsylvania governor

Tom 38

Re: You don't know what "far left" is.

The mental illness is calling centre-right politicians like Biden and Harris as far-left. I agree with you about the far-left, but there are no far-left politicians on show here.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Tom 38

Re: School rules

Its a circle of infinite radius

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Tom 38

Re: He's right, of course

Technically, NULL is a pointer that points at itself too

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Tom 38

Re: "so that people can take their own privacy and data into their hands"

Add not using social media, replacing whatever smartphone with AOSP, replacing whatever desktop OS with Linux and then the ball is beginning to roll. Plenty more could be done beyond that but these are just the basics.

But that's like building a car with amazing safety features that stop it crashing in to other cars; great, you're no longer crashing, but what about every other car on the road?

You could do _all_ the things you're suggesting, but if your partner/friend/relative keeps posting and tagging you publicly, its not going to make any difference.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Tom 38

Re: Wizardry

Mostly Harmless is subtitled "The 5th book in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy"

US may exempt latest chip fabs from eco red-tape, but power is still a trip

Tom 38

This is probably a non-starter from a power/size POV, but couldn't you just stuff a great big battery array inbetween the AC and DC sections to provide a perfect DC output?

WP Engine hits back after Automattic CEO calls it 'cancer'

Tom 38

Re: Expensive

You can get steaks at the supermarket for £5, its outrageous that Hawksmoor charge £50 for a steak.

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Tom 38

Re: Why the hell isn't Oracle paying for this?!

My former boss once bought 400 Dell laptops for a desktop -> laptop / home working migration. He didn't like the original quote, asked them to get it £50/unit cheaper. They did, he approved the PO, 400 laptops turned up - and at that point we found out that they had got it cheaper by removing the webcam from the spec - we had 400 home working laptops that were not suitable for home working!

Tom 38

Re: Did the system do this on its own?

This is how ERP providers make all that lovely cash that allows Larry to keep buying islands:

* 01: Create an ERP system where everything can be configured, customized, and controlled

* 02: Pitch it to potential customers, all of whom have exceptionally complex existing ERP systems that have a number of flaws

* 03: Sell them on the low low cost of the unmodified system, with a small additional cost for "minor customizations"

* 04: Begin implementation, which will take 2+ years

* 05: Collaborate with the client. If they are a public body, talk to everybody, especially elected people

* 06: Gather a thousand new requirements and change requests

* 07: Nullify any existing clauses on performance, delivery, correctness due to so many change requests

* 08: Deplete the original budget, leaving the platform 50-80% integrated - you tell the client its 80%, but you know its really 50% done

* 09: Force the client to either extend the budget or cancel, leaving them with their currently unsupported legacy ERP

* 10: Deplete the new budget

* 11: Complete/cancel the project, or go back to step 09

* 12: Go to step 1

Tom 38

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Tom 38

Re: That’s not the point

This is true, my dad's laptop is USB-C charged, and he forgot it on a trip and was quite annoyed when I told him that his phone charger, despite it being USB-C, was not going to be powerful enough to run the laptop and he would need to buy a 60W USB-C PD charger. It was possible to charge the laptop up with the phone charger, but not "and run it".

Its not a disastrous decision though - the other way works just fine. He now carries one charger that does all the USB-C PD he could ever want. Before USB-C we played charger roulette - this charger is USB-A and chucks out 5V@3.1A, and this one is USB-A and chucks out 5V@500mA. Each phone manufacturer with a different fast charging technology. That's not better, its dangerous. Your argument would be that we should have had a new connector type for every combination of voltages, so every single one is incompatible with each other would not be better.

USB-C PD has already obsoleted proprietary laptop chargers, that alone is worthy of praise.

White House seizes 32 domains, issues criminal charges in massive election-meddling crackdown

Tom 38

Later on in the scene:

Edmund: I then leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked if he’d been

to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, or Hull…

Mary: Well?

Edmund: You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities.

Mary: You swine!

Melchett: That’s right — Oxford’s a complete dump!

Edmund: Well, quite.

Ad-libbed by Stephen Fry IIRC

Tom 38

Re: "The Biden administration"?

Manifesto: A manifesto is a written declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer

It's a fucking manifesto.

Tom 38

Re: "The Biden administration"?

finally the start of the SMO

I hope you get paid for this shit. Surely you're not being a stoolie for a mass murdering fuckwit for the fun of it.

Tom 38

Re: Card or cash?

For the Russians, its not about getting a tame president, its about weakening America. Militarily the US is still strong, but they have never been more divided and weakened politically. When you have "peaceful protestors" storming your parliament, you're not paying as much attention to what is happening 4000 miles away.

Tom 38

Re: "The Biden administration"?

Have you heard of Foundations of Geopolitics? Its a manifesto produced in Russia in the late 90s describing how Russia should regain its strength. Brief highlights:

In the US, "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"

The UK should be cut off from European Union

Ukraine should be annexed: "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics"

Uncle Sam charges Russian GRU cyber-spies behind 'WhisperGate intrusions'

Tom 38

Re: Two Faced

Я согласен, товарищ.

Of course the Internet Archive’s digital lending broke the law, appeals court says

Tom 38

What does the digital age have to do with it? Just becuase the internet has made it easier to do illegal things isn't a reason to change the law to make those things legal.

This might not be legally accurate as IANAL, but it seem to me that if they had operated as a physical lending library, they wouldn't have been liable? So the issue is that they have delivered the book digitally to users, rather than physically. That's what makes it a "digital age" issue. There is a physical book, and only one person can view it at a time, but the way they view it now is by looking at a digitized replica.

Its fair use to digitize books you own, and read the digitized replica, but its not fair use to lend the digitized replica?

The aim of the IA presumably is not copyright infringement, but preserving knowledge. I would disagree with you in this instance and say that a law change may be beneficial. IA are doing something that many physical libraries do - I can rent ebooks for free from my local library from anywhere, through the libby app - so the reform would be to legislate what libraries can do, what their obligations are, and so on. If it is legal for libraries to do it, it should be legal for other entities to do it as long as they follow all the rules that libraries have to follow.

What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked'

Tom 38

Re: Waymo business model

Taxi work is hard on ICEs, its less hard on EVs. Once Waymo have their tech working, I doubt all their johnnycabs will be luxury jags (that they almost certainly aren't paying full price for anyway, a. its advertising for JLR, b. lots of ICE manufacturers have had to dump EVs to maintain their global EV:ICE ratio and not get fined by the EU)

'Error' causes Alexa to endorse Kamala Harris, refuse to discuss Trump

Tom 38
Trollface

Re: It is all branding!

Yeah, there's no difference between the two, boTH SiDEs bAD

Tom 38

Re: Commie!

The nice thing about Trump is that he says all the horrible things he thinks, you don't have to worry about whether the media are misleading you - he himself will tell you what a colossal moron he is.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Tom 38

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

This would have been the correct approach for the OPs boss as well. He doesn't know or care about how security updates get applied, he wants all his services up and available and secure all the time, and this is how he can express it. How the sysadmin achieves that is up to him - extra resiliency, failover, "at risk windows", whatever - the boss doesn't need to know the details, he just needs his services, and how much its going to cost.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Tom 38

Re: Inference?

> Well it had never sunk before, so the prior probability of sinking now was low

Did the front fall off?

Intel's microcode fix to save Raptor Lake chips may only work with default power settings

Tom 38

Maybe the newer ones are better, but my M1 Pro Macbook Pro is soooo slow. Sure, webpages/videos/boring shit is reasonably fast, but the comparison to a really really old linux laptop - 7th gen i7 - its just so pathetically slow that I've had to replace a bunch of tooling. Pyenv/nvm being active makes the shell take 5+s to render the status line (replaced with mise, which also replaces asdf). "git status" in a large repo takes 10s of seconds. Test suites take twice as long to run. vim's LSPs take forever to respond.

1 more year and I can get a refresh.

ICANN reserves .internal for private use at the DNS level

Tom 38

Re: Would have prefered "*.int"

.lan and .local both imply a short distance - which is probably the most common use of private network ranges, but its definitely not the only one. I use private network ranges that span the globe - they are not local, but they are internal.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Tom 38

Bad journalism

"Using potentially offensive language or slurs, in one case even calling an SNL [Saturday Night Live] skit from the 1970s using the same slur 'genuinely funny', which shows a lack of empathy towards other community members."

He _did not_. He said - and you link to his exact words, so I don't know how you could have fucked this up:

It was about kicking a package off of PyPI, because its docs repeatedly used a word that Dan Akroyd used to apply to Jane Curtin (brilliant comic actors from America’s “Saturday Night Live” TV show, but back in the days when it was genuinely funny :wink:).

He calls SNL in the 70s genuinely funny. He said nothing about the actual skit - just noting that it existed.

PS: The word in question rhymes with cut and slot. What a load of nonsense over nothing. Tim didn't create the package, he just didn't see the need to censor it.

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Tom 38

Re: Why aren't CVEs noted in1P release notes?

Obviously not that religiously to miss the two CVE vulnerabilities listed on the page you linked to.

DigiCert gives unlucky folks 24 hours to replace doomed certificates after code blunder

Tom 38

Our new architecture redirected all validation through separate services instead of the legacy monolithic code structure. The code adding an underscore prefix was removed from CertCentral and added to some paths in the updated system.

The underscore prefix addition was not separated into a distinct service.

I see they have an Enterprise Architect - how did he miss the UnderscoreAtStartOfSubDomainService?

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Tom 38

Re: recovery workshops in, uh... Belgium?"

I'm here with the Pertinent Pratchett:

Ankh-Morpork people, said the guild, were hearty, no-nonsense fold who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact, they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that, according to the food standards of the great chocolate centers in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as "cheese" and only escaped, through being the wrong color, being defined as "tile grout."

GNU Terry Pratchett

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Tom 38

Re: Failure to consider uses of waste heat

Where I live in East London we have district heating/hot water. Its powered by two 46 MW CHP biomass plants, located in the neighbourhood. Each CHP is the size of ... a data center

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

Tom 38

Re: Why?

On the downside, FreeBSD has a relatively much smaller community and number of contributors compared to Linux. That makes it more like one of the smaller Linux distros. It's certainly nowhere near the size of Fedora / Ubuntu / Debian.

I would point out that one of the most amazing things about FreeBSD (and all the BSDs) is that they are not at all like Linux distributions. A linux distribution is a collection of software packages that when all are installed create an operating system. Each package most probably comes from a separate source repository.

BSDs however are an entire OS developed in a single repository. Everything that is part of the base is there, from kernel to system packages, and it is simple enough to read and understand how all parts of the OS work together. What's more, you. can easily patch and rebuild any component without any RPM or deb jiggerypokery. If you are interested in how the sausage is made, you should investigate FreeBSD, its a lot of fun.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Tom 38

Re: Can't help wondering

The xkcd image explains how to calculate the depth of a gravity well:

depth = (G * Planet-mass ) / (9.81 m/s2 * Planet-radius)

where G is Newton's gravitational constant, and

9.81 m/s2 is the acceleration rate of a free falling body on earth at sea level (g).

Check out the bottom of Jupiter's gravity well. The depth of the gravity well being X does not mean that at X altitude you will have escaped the gravity well, but that if you had a rocket on Earth at sea level that was capable of reaching X altitude, it could escape a gravity well of depth X.

Americans abroad cut off as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US suffer roaming outages

Tom 38

Re: BGP?

AI BGP?

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Tom 38

Re: Sweden

The person you are replying to is making a joke, appearing to mistake the reference to "Manning" to refer to "Bernard Manning", a 70s era British standup comedian, very fat, very blue, rather than "Chelsea Manning". Chelsea Manning was a US soldier (airman?) who leaked secrets to a journalist (Julian Assange). Soldiers who leak secrets are de facto traitors, regardless of whether the leaking was worthy/necessary/good for the world.

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Tom 38

If Wayland had some efficient mechanism for doing that (my understanding is that currently that's still handled via an X11 layer), I'd reconsider it.

Wayland does have such a thing built in, its called waypipe. Here is the RH instructions for running a remote wayland application and viewing it on a local wayland client.

For running X11 applications remotely with wayland, most wayland desktops automatically include XWayland, so traditional X11 forwarding just works as it would have with X.

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

Tom 38
Headmaster

This is utter pedantry however:

your plan is to walk to Tottenham Court Road and ride the Central line to Ealing Broadway, change to Elizabeth Line and ride that to Slough."

[..]

"But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter [...] you're going to avoid the hippies and maybe leg it to Farringdon where you can ride the Elizabeth line direct.

If you're on Oxford Street and walking towards TCR, you're walking East. To get to Farringdon from Oxford Street, you go down Oxford Street, New Oxford Street, High Holborn and then Farringdon. So you cannot go to Farringdon and avoid the hippies without diverting off Oxford Street, and if you're doing that, you might as well go to TCR.

Besides which, you're on Oxford Street walking to TCR, and blocked by hippies so you walk to Farringdon? When Oxford Circus or Bond Street is .. right there.

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Tom 38

So I switched from an ICE to a hybrid and went from 27mpg to 45mpg.

This is less than what my 8 year old diesel Qashqai does - that don't impress me much.

Tom 38

Re: EV

Lets call it 1200km, over two days, so 600km a day. You would have needed to stop somewhere with a DC charger overnight, and probably one or two 30 minute stops at a DC charger. None of that is difficult or impossible or challenging, just requires more infrastructure.

Google says that without stopping at all, that journey takes 12hr 46m, but I guess they don't count the fahren fahren fahren auf der autobahn.

UK's Total Fitness exposed nearly 500K images of members, staff through unprotected database

Tom 38
Coat

In one of the limited cases Fowler investigated, a reverse image search of a Total Fitness member led to their identification as a content creator on the OnlyFans platform.

Amazing coincidence!

Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment

Tom 38

Re: Hillary likely did create ISIS

So your theory is that Hillary Clinton created ISIS - Islamic State In Syria - by leaving weapons in Libya? They just leisurely drove all that through Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and then all the way up to Raqqah, huh?

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Tom 38

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

It may look like like a 3 foot pile of crap to a casual observer, but my desk is in fact a highly sophisticated filing system

Its an L1 cache with FILO data buckets. Its incredibly efficient!