Posts by AdamWill

If you're not sold on the benefits of 5G, Ericsson suggests you keep an eye on gaming, home broadband

well, that's wildly unconvincing

First of all, those two use cases are the same use case. Cloud-based gaming is just one thing you can do with a fixed internet connection.

And for the vast majority of people, a wired connection is still going to be better than anything 5G can manage. The industry has been trying to sell us cellular home internet since, what, HSPA? And it's been nonsense every time. You can always push more bits faster through a wire than you can through the air; this has been true forever and shows no signs of stopping being true any time soon.

As with every previous attempt at this, 5G fixed wireless will fill a small niche of users in areas that are underserved by wired broadband, and...that will be it. Everyone else will keep on doing their cloud-based gaming and everything else they do with their home internet connection through some sort of cable.

Punchy Biden-lookalike grandad goes viral for fighting boxing gadget

yikes

Good lord, I clicked some of the links on this story, and...has the Independent fallen so far it can't afford a single subeditor any more? Or a boxing journalist capable of forming a proper sentence?

Ex-DJI veep: There was no drone at Gatwick during 2018's hysterical shutdown

Re: Er, not quite!

Er, this is literally reported in both the article and the Guardian article that it cites.

Search 'middle finger' on Giphy: Basically Facebook's response to UK competition concerns over merger

Re: US-based business with no UK assets, employees, revenues, or customers

No, don't be silly. amazon.co.uk is based in *Ireland* with no UK assets, employees, revenues or customers. Tax works better that way.

Italian stuntman flies aeroplane through two motorway tunnels

Re: My best through the Blackwall Tunnel was

Bloody hell, 105? I'll have two of whatever you were drinking to pedal that fast...

Can we talk about Kevin McCarthy promising revenge if Big Tech aids probe into January insurrection?

Upvoted, because I read the Guardian...

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Re: Modern, safe nuclear power as a baseload / backstop is a possibility

On the one hand, sure. On the other, this is why people who talk about renewables emphasize a *mix* of them. Yes, if you isolate any *one form* of renewable power it can never be a magic bullet everywhere. But it's pretty rare for any place to be unsuitable for *any* of them. If hydro's no good, solar or wind or geothermal probably will be.

To put it another way: it seems to me the most interesting and productive conversations around power generation should almost always be around the huge opportunities that exist to drastically increase the share of renewable power in the mix just about everywhere. But it's noticeable that in threads like this, someone always wants to redirect that conversation to be about how we can't make absolutely everything run on renewable power absolutely all of the time, so we must instead talk a lot about nuclear or natural gas or something. Even if we can't get to 100% renewables 100% of everywhere, there's a hell of a lot of ground to make up between whatever the numbers are right now, and the realistic optimums.

Re: Modern, safe nuclear power as a baseload / backstop is a possibility

"There is absolutely no way at all that renewables could provide the kind of steady baseload most countries need to operate normally."

Er. There's a reason the power company where I live is called B.C. *Hydro*.

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

Re: Money grab

"Also you can't possibly fit a good sounding DAC in such a small format."

Have to disagree with you, there.

DAC performance can be measured objectively, and there certainly are very small DACs that perform extremely well. Remember that as portable ones run off DC they don't have to do as much space-consuming fiddling with AC input as desktop DACs do.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com is a good source for consistent objective testing of DACs and amps. Look specifically for posts by amirm, the site owner. He's measured several small DACs with very good performance. In fact, partly as a result of the reviews on that site, I stopped using complicated desktop DAC/amp setups, ditched the iBasso DX200 portable DAC/amp I got...and switched to just using an LG V20 smartphone as my source. All the phones with LG's "quad DAC" have very good measured DAC and amp performance and provide up to 2V of power, which is enough to drive almost all headphones to painful levels.

Dealing with the pandemic by drinking and swearing? Boffins say you're not alone

Am I drinking and swearing?

You betcha!

To deal with the pandemic?

...uh, sure, yeah, that as well, I guess...

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Re: It is not Apple or SIS who lied ...

What a bizarre distinction to try and draw. Of course "Apple" cannot literally lie: "Apple" cannot literally speak. Only people who work for it can. So why would you say that like it means something? The people who work for the company represent it. What they do, it does.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: This is why they should be banned.

Yeah, I mean, you can both believe that access to guns should be more restricted *and* recognize that, while it *isn't*, it's probably a bad idea to go around with real knives "prank" robbing people...

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

wow, this is weird.

OK, first up: this is not a "pump and dump" because a pump and dump at least requires some organized deception. The people who *started* this thing didn't mislead or deceive anyone, they didn't make any false claims about GameStop or anything else. They said "hey, if enough people get together on this we can pull off a giant short squeeze", and that's exactly what happened. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them got out by now, but that doesn't make it a pump-and-dump.

Second, man, the article explains things in a very weird and roundabout way. It gets to more or less the right place eventually, but there are some scenic detours. Kieran, the borrowing isn't because the funds don't have enough capital. It's just because *that's about the only practical way to actually bet against a stock*. Say BobCo is currently valued at $30, and you are convinced that by next Tuesday it'll be down to $20 or less. Now how do you go about trying to make money off this?

You can't buy AntiBobCo shares, because that's not a thing. You can't buy a negative amount of BobCo shares, because that's not a thing either. No. About the best practical way to do it is to go find a *current* owner of BobCo shares and make them this offer: "if you give me 100 BobCo shares right now, next Tuesday I'll give them all back, plus a fee of $5 per share for your trouble". Assuming they take the deal, you sell the shares immediately for $30 each, then if you were right and the price is down to $20 next Tuesday, you can buy them all back and return them to the original owner, pay the $5 per share, and still pocket $500 yourself. (Of course, if you inadvertently narked off reddit and the shares now cost $450 each, you just dug yourself an extremely expensive hole).

You're not borrowing shares because you can't afford to buy them, you're borrowing shares to create a scenario in which you can benefit from their price falling.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: Dead broke Red Hat? Really?

This is... utterly and wildly wrong. Fedora and CentOS Stream both fit into the RHEL development process in perfectly clear and simple ways. New RHEL major releases fork from Fedora; after that happens, development within that them RHEL major release branch happens in a "centos stream" repo. See the image from Stef's post, https://blog.centos.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fedora-centos-stream-rhel-high-level.v4.png . it's really not complicated at all.

Re: It's got nothing to do with anyone else...

s/users/customers/

Re: "They should have a law against old dying dinosaurs buying up innovative companies"

IBM had nothing at all to do with this. Rich Bowen (who was there) has said publicly that no non-RH IBM people were in any of the meetings that led to this move. Like it or not, it's an RH decision. Not an IBM one. (I work for RH, but not on centos and wasn't involved in this at all).

Even if you think the motive is to make more money - we liked money before IBM bought us too. IBM bought RH at a value that implies a lot of pressure to continue revenue growth. This is true. But before the buyout, RH shares were priced at a level which implied shareholders had high expectations of continuing revenue growth. This is also true. Whether we were owned by multiple shareholders or one big company, RH has been under pressure to keep growing revenue for like a decade or more this point.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Re: To the surprise of no one

Yeah, I'm afraid I can't really answer that, sorry :\ I know that it's a question a ton of people have spent a ton of time cogitating about, and oh the slide decks. But I didn't read them all so I really don't want to try and explain it, because I'd probably just mess it up.

If you can find Rich Bowen or Mike McGrath around the interwebs somewhere, ask 'em. They'd be in a better place to tell you.

Re: no

This isn't really a change for Fedora at all - so far as RHEL is concerned, Fedora has *always* been the "far upstream", and that's not changing in any way. (With a Fedora hat on, Fedora is certainly not *just* RHEL's far upstream, but *if you're thinking from a RHEL perspective*, that's what it is to RHEL).

So far as CentOS is concerned, sure, that's a valid question. I've seen some answers to it internally but I dunno if I'm allowed to post them publicly so I'll hold off.

Re: no

Sure, it's still a change, and whether it makes sense to use the CentOS name for this thing is a legitimate question. I just wanted to highlight there's a substantial delta between CentOS Streams and Fedora. As far as RHEL is concerned they serve different purposes, and will rarely be similar at all.

So since yesterday I found out (from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q6) that we'll actually have one CentOS Stream per stable RHEL branch - there won't be just one. Right now only CentOS Stream 8 exists, but from Q2 2021, CentOS Stream 9 will also exist. Basically as long as a RHEL release is in active support (until 5 years from release), development for it will be done in a numbered "CentOS Stream X" branch. If you're on CentOS Stream 8 when CentOS Stream 9 appears, you don't get kicked over, or anything, you can stay on 8.

If you think about it, though, it should be clear the CentOS Stream branches will usually be quite a way "behind" Fedora, in general terms. Right when RHEL X forks from Fedora, that CentOS Stream X branch will obviously be very similar...but then Fedora will roll along keeping up with stuff while that CentOS Stream X branch will stabilize. CentOS Stream will be where release stabilization and minor release development happen - going from fork to .0, and then from .0 to .1, .1 to .2 and so on. Major feature development won't be happening in CentOS Stream branches. It's just the same as RHEL stable branches today, really - if you think what's in RHEL 8.3 and what you'd expect to be in RHEL 8.4, it's "behind" current Fedora in most ways, for instance. CentOS Stream 8 is where those bits that will make up 8.4 are going. So it's a "development" branch in that sense, but the kinds of development being done there are the changes you get between minor stable releases of RHEL. Not the kinds of changes that go into Fedora Rawhide.

Re: To the surprise of no one

FWIW, the official line on this (mmcgrath, who is more or less in charge of this whole thing, has stated it on LWN, so I think I'm OK to state it here too) is that we don't object to clones existing. We apparently (I work for RH, but definitely am not in charge of this whole thing) decided that *owning* one wasn't such a great idea any more, but we do expect that others will (re-)emerge and are not intending to try and stop that or anything. We're just not letting any of them be called CentOS.

no

CentOS Stream isn't "not quite Fedora", it's something pretty different (though obviously we haven't explained this very well).

CentOS Stream isn't the development branch for RHEL in the sense that "right now, it's getting stuff destined for RHEL 9". It's where development on *current stable RHEL* happens. So right now, the latest RHEL release is 8.3; CentOS stream is where the bits that will make up RHEL 8.4 are landing.

When RHEL 9 forks from Fedora, CentOS Stream will be where development on RHEL 9.1, 9.2 etc. happen.

tl;dr: they're both "development", but at much different parts of the cycle, and Fedora is much further ahead.

Ad banned for suggesting London black cabs have properties that prevent the spread of coronavirus

Re: Seems a bit harsh

"Wrapping up, the ASA said that although it recognised the intention was merely to talk up features of black cabs that "might be particularly attractive to consumers in the context of COVID-19", because it could not be guaranteed that riders would be "over" two metres nor "completely separated from the driver", the ad was deemed to exaggerate its coronavirus-stymying properties."

i.e., "yes, we get you were sort of just trying to push a warm fuzzy feeling, but the actual things you said are not, in point of fact, strictly true, and that's sort of the thing we're here to deal with, so."

Google yanks Apple Silicon Chrome port after browser is found to 'crash unexpectedly'

unexpectedly

"Google yanks Apple Silicon Chrome port after browser is found to 'crash unexpectedly'"

Don't worry, they're working hard on fixing it to crash expectedly instead.

CERT/CC: 'Sensational' bug names spark fear, hype – so we'll give flaws our own labels... like Suggestive Bunny

Re: "there's a simple process to remove offensive names"

"there's a simple process to remove offensive names"

yes, it's called "use a standardized format based on essentially random numerical strings, which are almost impossibly unlikely to cause any such issues". Which is what we do already. So let's just ditch this whole nonsensical idea and stick with CVE-YYYY-NNNN...

Cute names only work when there are only a few of them. Heck, Ubuntu's only up to what, 35 or so? And most non-ubuntu-fanatics can't remember most of those. No-one's going to use and remember "cute" names for *every* vuln.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

Re: I'm just rebuilding my desktop ...

You can do that on Fedora, but it's not a very good idea. (On SUSE *or* Fedora). You should at least run the command from a screen or tmux instance running *outside* of your desktop environment, so the chances of the environment the upgrade is running in being crashed by the upgrade process are lower.

Still, it seems the concern people have is not really about the upgrade process itself but about the impact of any changes introduced by the upgrade. Which is a perfectly reasonable concern. If you prefer an OS with a slower pace of change, that's a good reason not to use Fedora (or one of the faster-moving SUSE editions).

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

"Even Red Hat says Fedora is and will be a beta version of RedHat"

We do not say that, and it is not that.

"and every upgrade/update *will break things*."

We don't say that either. Of course *sometimes* *something* will break on an update or upgrade. This is true of all general purpose operating systems. We do not say all updates or upgrades "will break things" because it is not true, they do not.

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

"Fedora is a perpetual beta-test _by definition_"

No, it isn't. It's a production operating system. It's one which has a fairly aggressive pace of development, but it is not a "perpetual beta-test" of anything.

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

Well, I mean, it's kind of a spectrum. Or a set of overlapping spectrums.

It's true we couldn't test a room full of hardware on our current release schedule. But then we also probably couldn't test it if we released every two years, either. There's a *lot* of hardware. We have like a dozen paid QA folks and maybe the equivalent in volunteer person-hours. We'd probably need till the heat death of the universe to test all combinations of hardware.

Ditto for "software combinations". There are thousands of SRPMs that make up Fedora. Just the possible combinations of those packages are effectively infinite - never mind the confounding factors of configuration and what you actually do with them.

If you spend much time thinking about this, like QA people do, the conclusion you tend to come to is that it's a miracle that anything works as well as it does. And there's kind of less difference than you might think between a six month release cycle and a two year one, in terms of what it's possible to test as a percentage of all the things that possibly *could* be tested: the answer is "infinitesimally small" either way.

Realistically, the only way you can really 'comprehensively' test software is to have that piece of software be very small and be required to do only a small and very clearly defined set of operations. This is how you do things when you *really really really need* the software to be reliable. Like when it's running a plane or a dam or a spacecraft, for instance. But you can't do this for general purpose operating systems, because they're...well...general purpose.

So yeah, stuff breaks. Fedora sure does. And so does RHEL, and macOS, and Windows, and Ubuntu, and SUSE. They *all* break. They're all in a perpetual state of some stuff being broken. It's not practically possible to achieve any other state, really.

I don't honestly think any given Fedora release would be substantially more "stable", in the sense you mean, if we went to a one year or two year release cycle. We don't run out of time to test the stuff we test, these days, and we haven't for some time. What would make Fedora more "stable" would be to slow down the pace of changing bits of it and adopting new things, but then it wouldn't be Fedora any more. And indeed if that's not what you want, you shouldn't run it; there are, as you note, other choices.

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

"For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now"

I mean, we've had a fairly rigorous release process for years, but I'm not gonna lie, we do not have a giant warehouse full of every webcam model known to man which we rigorously test on every release, no. I cannot undertake to guarantee your random webcam will work on every upgrade. Sorry :)

Re: I'm just rebuilding my desktop ...

"Fedora - I don't want to have to upgrade every year"

Out of curiosity: why not? I mean, I'm obviously biased (I'm the QA lead for Fedora) but these days a typical Fedora desktop version upgrade barely takes longer or is any more disruptive than a regular system update. Have you had bad experiences with upgrades?

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Re: "Our failure was not for lack of trying"

For me it's not even the length; the crucial thing is that Quibi was trying to do "high quality" video, by which they mostly meant sort of "TV-lite" or "movie-lite" stuff, with some kind of structure. The problem with that is, if I'm killing a few minutes in a queue or waiting for a bus or something, I don't want to watch something that requires me to pay full attention for ten or even five minutes, and is negatively affected by me having to stop watching it after three minutes. Because that's what happens in queues. Sometimes they move faster than you expected. You have to pay attention to what's going on around you.

Structure-light stuff like Youtube and Tiktok videos are ideal for that. You can play one and half pay attention to it while also keeping an eye on the queue and deciding what you want to drink. If you get to the front in three minutes you just pause it or forget about it. You can't really do that with a ten minute mini-movie or mini-house-flipping-show or whatever that has a structure that really wants you to watch and pay attention to all of those ten minutes of Content. For me that was always the issue with this whole idea.

Don't forget to brush your teeth, WFH staff told as Dropbox drops the office, declares itself 'virtual first'

Re: Productivity @ AC

yup, the best answer is "it depends on the person and the job". I've been working from home since 2004 and it works great for me, but I have colleagues for whom it doesn't work at all. There's no one answer.

Facebook's anti-trademark bot torpedoes .org website that just so happened to criticize Zuck's sucky ethics board

Re: Convention

"It wasn't particularly sensible to use the name 'The Real Facebook Oversight Board'. While I can sympathise with the intent, it is rather difficult to defend yourself against an assertion of 'passing off'."

AIUI, this kind of parodic / protest use is already *specifically* allowed and protected under the relevant laws.

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

Re: The big problem however...

"This is nice. Soon it'll be too cheap to meter! But this is one of those big lies typically generated by the 'renewables' lobby. Costs have been falling, energy bills have not. So how can this be?"

Someone wants to make money, perhaps?

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

Re: Please mention IMPORTANT features....Pretty Please!

I mean, that's not a magic incantation. That's just the documented way to run a system upgrade. Of course we aren't going to try and convert your filesystems silently during an upgrade, we're not insane.

If you're doing a fresh install and you don't want btrfs, just use custom partitioning and pick something else. Still no magic incantations needed...

On btrfs

Up front: I work for Red Hat on Fedora - I lead the QA team.

Just wanted to emphasize something on the btrfs front: btrfs being default (for desktop spins, *not* Server especially) for new installs in Fedora 33 does not at all imply this will happen in RHEL. *Some* things that happen in Fedora are definitely driven by RH folks and you can look at them as things that are likely to land in RHEL later if they work out well. But not *everything* that happens in Fedora is like that. As Mike is quoted as saying, the btrfs Change was driven by "the community", i.e. not by anyone at RH in an official capacity. Specifically the main folks behind it are Josef Bacik, Chris Murphy and Neal Gompa - this isn't a secret, the names are right there on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault - none of whom works for RH. The RHEL storage folks are still focused on the same strategy as they have been for a while.

Still, the change seems to be working out fine so far. Honestly, better than I expected, I was expecting fireworks. :P

Stock market blizzard: Snowflake set for £33bn IPO as valuation bubble keeps on expanding

Re: No way Buffett is considering this

Buffett's been kinda flailing for the last few years, though. Wouldn't be super against his recent record to belatedly decide it was time to throw a ton of money into hyped tech stocks at just the wrong moment and get burned.

Re: small error on previous valuation

It might feel like it, but February 2020 is not 18 months ago. It's seven months ago.

The article was obviously referring to an earlier funding round.

China proposes ‘Global Initiative on Data Security’ forbidding stuff it and Huawei are accused of doing already

I for one

Well I for one am convinced and would like to sign my country up. Right after we get done signing off on this CIA initiative against interfering in the politics of Latin America...

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: Isn't it ironic

I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, but:

1. This is an international site. Not everyone reading here is in the UK. I'm in Canada, for instance. There are lots of Americans here too, and the IRS is notoriously...grabby.

2. It's not just about you paying your income tax. Various taxes your employer pays or credits they claim might depend on your physical location or tax residence (which, as you note, aren't the same thing).

3. Your employer might have rules and policies that, while they aren't laws, you're still going to have to consider. Mine, for instance, only allows you to work from another country while getting paid at the scale for your "home" country for two years. After that your pay gets changed to scale for whatever the new country is, which if you're in the Caribbean is going to be "lots lower", most likely. And if you don't tell them you moved, you're in trouble.

I'm not saying anyone shouldn't do it, I'm just saying it's not as simple as "get visa then bog off to beachside paradise". You're at least going to want to tell your employer about it first, and yes, they *can* raise hell if you do it without agreeing it with them, unless it's somehow written into your contract that you can do it.

Re: Isn't it ironic

Er, you'd best check with your company's legal/HR departments and possibly your own lawyer before attempting this. The accounting and tax consequences are significant and not simple.

Re: Isnt that good?

Sure there is!

However, it involves taxing the money from the people who saved it - well-paid workers, upper management, and companies themselves - and giving it to the people who lost out.

Now, go check out the results of the last several elections and consider the likelihood of this actually happening.

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

hah

"And before people start with the conspiracy theories that this is government tech gone wrong, LAX is about 100 miles from Edwards Air Force Base, 160 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and 270 miles from Area 51 – and all would likely be well outside the range any wearable flying device would be able to travel."

Well, that's all *you* know...

Zuck says Facebook made an 'operational mistake' in not taking down US militia page mid-protests. TBH the whole social network is a mistake

Re: So when will Zucck grow a spine

AntFa? Even *ants* are fascists now? Good lord, it's worse than I thought.

Operational mistake

Operational mistake? Sure. Facebook is still operational, and that's the mistake.

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

Re: You want Equality? You get Equality.

That's not what they "suggested", though. They "suggested" that as long as the division of childcare and other domestic work is documented to be substantially unequal at a national scale, the legal point that scheduling work events outside of contracted work hours has the effect of indirect gender discrimination holds.

This has nothing to do with anybody "judging" you or your partner.

Re: Hang on a second.

Er. No. It's a widely documented fact. Women do more childcare.

Saying women *ought to* do more childcare is probably sexist, in most contexts. Saying they *currently do* is a statement of fact.

"If you're getting a salary approaching or north of 100k, you have to accept you are going to have to do whatever it takes, whenever that is."

No, you don't.

Source: me.

Re: £22K? Is that all?

That would certainly explain the managers who testified to a court that the PIP was perfectly reasonable, but were caught in chat logs saying exactly the opposite.

Oh, er, wait. No it wouldn't.

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

let's count up the weirdnesses here

1. $20bn? Twenty freaking billion dollars?

2. How do you even buy "the US operations" of a determinedly international social network? What *are* the "US operations"? Does the network split into a US one and an international one? This whole "US operations" thing keeps getting mentioned like it's a perfectly reasonable concept, but I'm yet to read a convincing explanation of what it's actually going to *mean*.

3. Microsoft and...Wal-Mart for some reason? What?

4. A 'profit-sharing' deal? Does TikTok actually make any profits? I thought the answer was no.