Posts by Arthur the cat 3436 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
More likely it's because he doesn't wholly own SpaceX, and therefore presumably Starlink
The latest information I can find says
Elon Musk is the dominant shareholder in SpaceX, owning about 54% of the equity and controlling 78% of the voting rights. This majority stake allows him to make major decisions independently.
this existing iteration of "The Internet" is not now, never has been, and never will be secure ... at least not without a complete tear-down, redesign and rebuild
Considering that IPv6, which is an incremental change, still hasn't been fully adopted after a quarter of a century, the world is likely to switch to a completely different system sometime shortly after the last ocean boils dry.
Rust is not ideal, but perhaps may be the best way of breaking away from the dominance of C.
Have you seen Zig? Similar ideas about safety but a lot lighter in both resources needed to compile and brain power needed to understand. It can also integrate existing C & C++ code within a project.
If only there were some way of training (accountant) managers to take the long view, not just the next three-month results.
The problem is that US markets only care about the next quarterly figures. Miss them(*) and your stock price can tank, which hits both credit worthiness and customer faith in the company. Persuading the market to take the long term view is the real problem.
(*) In either direction. I have personal experience of producing significantly better figures than predicted because of an out of the blue sale and seeing the stock price drop ~20%. Markets prefer predictability to profit, which is insane.
Back when Apollo 13 hit a little difficulty, one problem was that the LEM and command module air filters had different fittings (round vs square). That was 54 years ago. Seems like NASA still hasn't noticed interoperability is A Good Thing. Maybe IETF ought to have a word.
in some states in america a pizza is considered a vegetable
IIRC California considers bees to be fish(*) (a hack on wildlife protection legislation to include bees).
In the EU carrot is legally a fruit.
(*) Or possibly they're amphibians. I'm not sure which they went for.
When one of those accounts consisting of a picture of a scantily clad lady, with a name followed by a string of random characters follows me, I block them
I always wonder why they're so insistent I should put feline related information in my bio. They must be serious ailurophiles.
Almost half (40 percent) of users believe that browsers' "incognito mode" makes their activity invisible to everyone
Well Hollywood and the comics industry have been telling us for decades that just a domino mask makes you totally unrecognisable to anybody, even your nearest and dearest.
[Icon mask probably wouldn't work either.]
Then there are drugs, of course. But power corrupts.
Power may corrupt but it needs massive use of drugs to think you can tell your customers to fuck off and then sue them when they do. If there's any verdict in this case other than "fuck off Musk, you great weirdo" then the US legal system has been totally captured by business.
By no sane metric are either WP for DOS or Excel a better word processor trhan Word.
Do sane metrics apply to Word? Enquiring minds etc …
[This all seems like a variant of the Markdown vs reStructuredText debate going on in other parts of the net.]
Although this not as scary as the FinDir being the only person with admin access to the financial system…
If the FD is also always on holiday when the auditors are in, you've got another sort of problem.
This is based on a friend of mine auditing a firm where exactly that had happened for several years. A later (after the police were involved) conversation with the MD went: "Didn't you suspect anything?" "Well, I did wonder how he could afford a flash new car every year on his salary." Facepalm.
I like the UNIX philosophy.
In the case of suid programs, that wasn't even Unix but the concept came from Multics (and Atlas had something similar I believe). Good old 60s tech, much of which was too ambitious for the hardware of the time to support efficiently and a lot of which has been forgotten now the hardware is powerful enough.
I would love to go *BSD - the showstopper for me is that Matlab1 is essential for my work, and unfortunately does not support any of the BSDs
I haven't used it so can't comment on its effectiveness but among the FreeBSD ports I find
---- /usr/ports/math/matlab-installer:
Version: 0.2
This port installs the prerequisites for Mathworks (r) Matlab for Linux and an installer script (matlab-installer), which automates the somewhat tricky process of installing Linux Matlab.
Installing Matlab requires Matlab installation media and a license file and installation key from Mathworks, Inc.
----
This uses FreeBSD Linux emulation (which can even run Linux code faster than Linux at times). The web site behind it is https://acadix.biz/matlab-installer.php.
Alternatively, if faced with code that really has to have Linux underneath, I'll run it in a bhyve virtual machine and display it on my normal FBSD X desktop (although Wayland will probably bugger that up soon).
You can probably stick small turbines almost anywhere. The sides of buildings …
You can but the vibrations will drive the occupants mad, especially in towns where all the buildings around you produce unpredictable vortices, and eventually the brickwork will fall apart. At which point you'll find you've invalidated your building insurance by sticking the wind turbine on the wall. Simple ideas are simple until you get into the details. (See also: nuclear powered aircraft.)
Or some politician decides the same applies to Open Source software and bans "export" of Linux to China or blocks Github for users from countries they don't like.
It's the 1990's cryptography debate all over again. That ended up with the decision that cryptography code (as opposed to devices) was protected by the US' 1st Amendment. The RISC-V spec will undoubtedly end up the same, after fat headed and ill willed politicians have pissed in everyone's soup for many years.
Madness is trying the same thing again and expecting different results.
So, you've never thrown dice, called a random number generator or opened a box that contained a cat, a radioactive source and a vial of poison(*)?
(*) I must admit, I haven't done the last one.
I'm surprised the number of silent calls I get since waiting for them to speak first
The latest scam call I've had waits for several seconds of silence and then makes a bit of line noise and says "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that", which is natural enough to encourage you to speak. First time round I fell for it and hung up later when the scam became obvious. Second time round it was the identical behaviour which made me realise it was an automated system with no human involved.
Did you know its impossible to find the Windows key on a DEC VT100 keyboard?
I found it equally difficult to run the Windows remote access program that "Microsoft Security" got me to download so they could help, as it was in a Linux virtual machine without Wine. Next time I might install Wine just to see what happens.
I guess kudos where they're due (or is "kudos" singular and it should be "it's"?)
Kudos was originally Greek for praise before being adopted into English with that meaning, and is a mass noun, so technically is neither singular nor plural. Mass nouns take the singular form for verbs, so "kudos where it's due" is correct. However, a lot of leftpondians seem to think it's the plural of *kudo ("a praise"?).
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