Posts by alain williams 2646 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
I shudder to think of the emissions per passenger mile that this jet will produce and so make worse our climate change problem.
Other than ego tripping why would anyone really want to pay what I suspect will be a very high ticket price?
We can do many meetings these days over the Internet, far better use of most people's time and far kinder to the environment.
Having said that: I expect to be ignored and NASA will try to build this.
Will an unexpected consequence of Western policy be that China will develop chip manufacturing expertise that is on a par with that achieved by machines from ASML and the ability to design them on a par with Intel, AMD, ARM, ... ?
At that point China will point two fingers at us and ship chips to BRICS & other nations at a price that undercuts what the West can make them at.
Another gripe are folks who quote the message and it includes original attachments, often of several MB, that are not in any sense needed.
Many of the attachments did not need to be sent in the first place. I do not care about their poxy corporate logo or motto of the week. Often these images are huge (measured in bytes) and it would take a few moments to produce the same at 1/10 the size -- but this sort of thing is done by marketing droids, trying to get them to understand such concepts is well neigh impossible.
Another annoyance is receiving a top posted reply "yes" to a message with several questions. Which of those questions is that a reply to ?
When I receive one like this I will ask them which question they are replying to. Generally they will fail to understand why I am asking the question since they knew which one they answered and surely I should also know. I have lost count of the number of times that I have told people that I cannot see the inside of their head.
The inability of some people to empathize (or maybe just not care) is the cause of many of the world's problems.
It is free to use https://meet.jit.si/ and open source - you can run it on your own servers.
Why do people choose Red Hat these days over say Debian?
I initially preferred Red Hat as system admin was closer to System V release 4, Debian was closer to BSD Unix.
Later (and now) there is more RedHat support from hardware vendors and ISVs than there is for Debian. Also: RedHat supports SE Linux better than does Debian. These 2 are important for the corporates, especially the first.
Having said that I have switched my desktop to Debian in the last 2 years.
I live near the Warner Bros studios in Watford (known for Harry Potter). I have friends who work there.
One is a minor actor and film extra. He is very worried about his likeness having been taken and how it will be used without his permission as a generated extra in future films. He does not like AI.
Another friend is a script writer. He likes AI, it can do a lot of work in generating a script ... but that script is not good enough to use and this is where he comes in - tweak/improve it to be something great. He likes AI - as long as it will not improve enough to replace him completely before he retires.
I do care a lot about the arrangement. My standard is 12 desktops (arranged 3 x 4), I run specific applications (eg web browser, email, ...) in specific desktops. If this is hard to do (as with modern Gnome) then the availability of desktops is useless to me - thus my comment about them not being available -- yes, very bad wording.
I am helping/telling people to install LibreOffice on their MS Windows boxes. It does what they want. The operating system is not important to them, the only other tool that most of them use is a web browser.
Some ask for help to install Linux (I suggest Mint). Typically older machines where the version of MS Windows is no longer supported.
Small numbers: but others see what is happening and follow suite. When MS starts charging real money more will move.
I do warn that there is a cost: go and get a couple of memory sticks and do backups.
3. Research? Human researchers travel all over the world ...
Or more likely: entertainment. Visiting Earth could be AKA a safari trip, something to do in a vacation. However for that to be attractive they would need to have FTL travel, a trip of centuries to a safari would be boring.
I thought that everything unidentified had to be classed as being from a civilisation light years away.
Does this mean that we might be entering a phase of objective reality ... at the start of the newspaper silly season ?
Maybe we should get worried that the Australian government is suppressing the truth.
to not dent Post Office profits which would affect management bonuses.
Hopefully if they delay enough post masters will start dying off further reducing what has to be paid out.
Anyway: as a tax payer and Post Office customer I want to see as much compensation as possible coming from those who, at the time, knew what was happening and hid it. If if means that some of these end up on skid row -- good, they were quite happy to see post master go bankrupt, end up in prison, etc.
See this graph of energy density by kg and by L, linked to from here. Comparing to diesel/gasoline it is about 3 X better by weight but 1/4 as good by volume.
It would be interesting to see the production cost per MJ. Some info is here (beware: written 2013).
But I live in England and so will likely soon lose protection under the GDPR as our government seem set to water down protection.
they have it to show off - and for that they need loud noisy engines to attract attention.
They are selfish gits who only care about themselves. They are deliberately getting something that they know has poor performance -- (article says 8-12 MPG) something that harms the planet. They prolly lose no sleep over Sunak watering down the UK's climate pledges, why should they worry if other suffer as they are rich enough to buy their way out of most of the effects in the next few years; long term (when they are dead) - why should they care ?
People like this are hurting are kids and grandkids!
There is a clear imbalance of power between him and employees. What he is doing is despicable. It is clear that Musk is a bully who only cares about himself.
Such behaviour should bar him from running any company.
What does he think that potential suppliers think ? If Twitter was to ask me to do something I would demand payment in full before starting.
Create a company with one employee and spin off all Java applications to that company. Permit use by the parent company.
OK: I suspect that Oracle's license terms will forbid that, but creative solutions like this should be used while you transition away from Oracle supplied Java.
Is Larry Ellison a cousin to Ryan Air's Michael O'Leary ?
Unfortunately most people will not think about the privacy implications. If you tell them they will say something like: "Oh, yeah. But I want to use this. Will it really matter ?" and then think no more about it once their mate tells them that they have put up a message on Threads.
There are many reason why Threads might fail; privacy is not one of them -- unfortunately.
Although I'm still unconvinced that Red Hat's actions don't violate the GPL.
That is not what @sammystag is saying. s/he is suggesting that licenses evolve to a new set that forbid what RH has done. If these licenses are then adopted by enough core components then RH will have to back down.
If only a few adopt the new licenses then RH can simply rewrite them, or maintain a fork from before the component's license was changed.
I expect the next step will be that the SRPMS will become extremely hard to get hold of: not included in the cloud base images, not available to 'developer' accounts, and only available to "Super Platinum Plus" customers on $10K+ subscriptions. (Essentially, under the same sort of terms that you can get Windows source code).
The only way that RH/IBM could do that and remain GPL compliant would be to make the cheapest RH license cost $10k. Since we know that RH is not interested in small customers that is indeed a possibility -- the downside to them is that small software developers/vendors would be less inclined to support their stuff on the RH platform.
Why not take Oracle Linux and re-package that and request the full source code to the Oracle Database?
Because the Oracle Database is not under a free license. It is linked to free components (libraries) but these are under the LGPL which allows their use in non free software.
The use of proprietary licensed programs under Linux has been allowed since forever without making those programs free.
I can see the value in Red Hat getting a revenue stream in return for their excellent work.
Red Hat packages code from many projects. How many of the authors of these projects are given a revenue stream by Red Hat ?
This is why people are upset: Red Hat is taking code for free, using it to make money (which no one complains about) but stops its customers using that freedom.
Yes: Red Hat does contribute to some packages, but not all.
to find a way of effectively making Red Hat closed source.
One result is that I shall move servers to Debian both mine and those of my customers - some of whom have done things like: Red Hat for production machines and Rocky/something for development and standby machines.
It is tempting to say "just grab the source, it is GPL" but IBM is a law firm that happens to sell computers so even if I am in the right they will make it very expensive for me to do so ... much the same as a patent troll does "pay $40k for a license or risk $100k legal costs".
Shame: Red Hat was nice while it lasted.
from my GP and end up in the hands of USA corporations, a country that has inadequate data protection, also read Schrems II.
Please, el-reg, when reporting on malware tell us what operating systems/environments are affected. I want to know if I need to worry.
I notice references to "DLL" and the Checkpoint article uses MS Windows path names ... so, phew, I can stop being concerned about my own machines.
Why, after all these years, is Microsoft still so susceptible ?
This seems to be the attitude. Grab/digest as much code as possible, learn from it, generate proprietary code as a result.
Having to worry about the license of the code digested is hard but should be doable. It will increase costs and this is what the ML owners do not want.
Copying of code and ignoring licenses has been going on since the year dot. If the output code is not distributed then it is hard to detect. So what is happening here is not new but just happens faster.
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