Posts by PerlyKing 702 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2010
I think that's Liam's point: if some of the desktop projects would merge, they would have a better chance of creating a single coherent system instead of having multiple desktops which have a lot of overlap and fail in different ways.
But, of course, it's notoriously difficult to herd a group of volunteer nerds in a single direction :-/
It sounds like they want to reinvent Literate Programming mixed with Hexagonal Architecture, and with a sprinkling of pixie dust LLM disease to make it palatable for vibe-coders (and attract more funding for their research?).
It mainly works for me, but hasn't been entirely pain-free. There was a recent bug which manifested during an upgrade and meant that I had to re-upload all the photos from my phone, and there's a current bug which affects syncing with the Android Nextcloud Notes app.
There is also an active and communicative development team, which makes it miles / kilometres better than Microsoft :-)
You didn't reply to the OP's story, but to a comment which made a general point about bills. That is the context in which I replied.
Theoretically I agree with you that if you owe money, for example to pay a bill, then you should consider it to belong to the creditor.
In practice, there are dishonest people in the world who will withhold payment until forced to pay up, sometimes in the hope that it won't be worth the creditor's time and possibly money to make that happen.
"...thanks to the low administration overhead"
Really? When they can buy wired keyboards for (being generous) half the price and have no overhead at all? I have never worked anywhere that provided wireless keyboards, let alone solar powered ones.
AI coding tools tend to default to JavaScript or TypeScript if not told otherwise, which is perhaps a long-term threat to Java usage
I'm struggling to understand this logic. Java will fall out of use because LLMs don't generate it? Copilot at least will quite happily churn out (rubbish) Java and I don't see why others wouldn't if they're asked to.
Or is it that "tend to default", so the yoof won't gain an interest in Java and it will die out? That really is a long-term threat, if at all.
From what I can see, replacing Java will be a generational thing. Some newer, shinier language will probably displace it eventually, but there's a lot of inertia there. And Java isn't standing still, as evidenced by this article. It isn't making big exciting changes but it is noticeably evolving over time, incorporating good ideas from other languages.
I don't see anything in the Google blog post that indicates a link to DC01.
There is an acknowledged Google data centre already under construction at Waltham Cross, separate from DC01.
Neither the Reuters post nor the Google blog mentions DC01, the A1 or Potters Bar, but they both mention Waltham Cross. And the rendered image in the Google blog post looks more like the Waltham Cross location, which is next to the A10.
WTF is going on with the Microsoft Store?
Just for a laugh I thought I'd check for an update of LibreOffice on my client laptop (the one I use for clients, which has Windows installed). Not only is it a year out of date (24.8.6), but they're charging for it! Only £3.79, but it is one of the only office suites other than Microsoft's own for which there is any charge: OpenOffice, WPS and several others are free of charge.
To be fair it's absolute steal at that price, and the featured review points out that it's free if you download it direct, but any barrier to adoption is bad news.
When did you last change jobs?
My experience was the same up until about 2017 (egads, I could have sworn that it was less than eight years ago!), when background checks seemed to suddenly get much more intrusive.
Thinking about it, maybe "they" have outsourced the legwork to me instead of some HR-droid having to go back through my CV and contact previous clients.
I'm having trouble visualising what you're describing.
Surely the escape tower was directly above crew capsule, while the oxygen tank was below/behind that in the body of the Service Module. Hence the worry about the explosion having damaged the heat shield.
As for "things never thought about", I'm sure there must have been many things which they knew could have led to unrecoverable failure, and they mitigated what they could to an acceptable level of risk. Not zero, but acceptable.
I had the same question, but possibly from a different angle: why XEmacs instead of GNU Emacs? I used XEmacs for a while when GNU Emacs didn't work well on X, but these days GNU Emacs is fine on Linux, MS Windows (although they'd rather you didn't) and (for all I know) macOS as well.
For the wider question of "why Emacs?", personally it's because I've been using it since 1987 and my fingers know their way around it. I've picked up enough vi(m) to get by for simple tasks and these days I do my paid work in IntelliJ IDEA, but Emacs is where I'm most comfortable for general text-wrangling.
The last 10 rule is annoying but sort of makes sense.
One place I worked disallowed passwords which were too similar (password1, password2, etc.). I'm not a security expert, but surely that means they were either storing passwords in plaintext (doh!) or reversibly encrypted (slightly smaller doh!).
I agree that about:config is a poor UI, but I think it's a great DI (Developer Interface) :-D
It strikes me as something that some developer added as a quick & dirty way to change settings on the fly and got left in because it is undeniably useful, at least if you have the right magical incantations to hand!
This sounds more like cutting corners than cutting costs. TFA says that the "US authorities were turning off the online distribution of real time data while the satellite passes over the US stations". So they're selectively turning off the tap, which surely takes more effort than leaving it as it was.
And I fear that the workaround will be temporary until the clowns in command either encrypt the data all the time, or just make it a federal offence to use the data and deport any offenders for being un-American.
Really? I'm probably blinkered by working with Java every day for one of the world's bigger financial companies, but has the Reg's audience really devolved into a bunch of script-kiddies playing with whatever the cool new language du jour is? Or Python? ;-)
Otherwise, thanks for another interesting article!
There are certainly other classes of bug, but when credible sources? say that the vast majority of security vulnerabilities are due to memory safety issues, it's probably worth taking some time to address them.
It's progress. Without progress we'd all be knitting core rope memory, and that isn't very appealing to me.
Rust may not be the answer, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth asking the question.
I'm afraid that you're making the classic mistake of trying to apply common sense to the law ;-(
As usual, when it gets into the nitty gritty it gets complicated. Laws have to be applied as written, or the whole system would descend (even further) into anarchy. If a car can be returned to its owner, then it isn't theft. If it's damaged, in theory you could get the joyrider to pay but it would probably be a pound a week for centuries. If it's set on fire then that might count as theft, but the physical evidence has probably been destroyed.
As for your comparisons to money and other items, unless they're left abandoned at the side of the road then it's probably easier to prove theft.
That sounds a bit roundabout. As dinsdale54 said, in UK law theft is defined as permanently depriving someone of their property. So "joyriders" who just abandoned the car after having their fun couldn't be convicted of theft, because the car would (eventually) be returned to the owner. If there was an offence for which they could be convicted it was probably hard work for the police and uncertain to succeed. And I suspect that a lot of the joyriders knew this, had their fun and stuck two fingers up at the system; so eventually the new offence was created.
Along similar lines, there are now specific offences for using handheld mobile phones while driving and if I remember correctly (which is far from certain!) these were brought in because although a driver could theoretically be prosecuted for driving without due care and attention or similar, in practise this was such an uncertain route that it rarely happened, if ever.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
