* Posts by Zolko

1213 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2010

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London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Zolko Silver badge

And where is power "more available " ? I mean available reliably, 24/7, not when the weather feels like it

Huawei revenue growing fast, suggesting China's scoffing at sanctions

Zolko Silver badge

NATO

Good remark : 30 (well, 34 now) years ago, with the end of the URSS, US and NATO should have declared victory of the cold war, and dismembered the NATO. They could have converted all the armament factories to produce industrial goods. But instead, they kept the arms industry and outsourced industrial manufacturing, mostly to China. And this despite a former US president (Eisenhower) having warned about he Military-Industrial-Complex.

And now the chickens comm home to roost. But president Elon is going to fix that, right after Starship has put a banana into orbit.

I must say I find this quite entertaining. I just hope we have enough popcorn

DeepSeek's iOS app is a security nightmare, and that's before you consider its TikTok links

Zolko Silver badge

Re: "the No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act"

Strava. Do you remember that many military installed and used that app to make exercices around their camp, so everybody could see where the US (and others) military bases were in Afghanistan ?

But hey : TikTok, China, DeepSeek ... bad (I'm actually surprised that this article didn't include something about Putin : did we switch übervillain officially ?)

Google's 7-year slog to improve Chrome extensions still hasn't satisfied developers

Zolko Silver badge

Re: KDE

à propos the WebKit license :

Licensing WebKit

WebKit is open source software with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses available here

what portion is licensed under what license ? This is again obfuscation.

So this is my understanding of it : Apple's business model is to be the underdog. It wasn't always like this, during the Apple ][ and Macintosh period they were the best. But during the 1995-2000 there was much competition – Win95, WinNT, OS/2, Be OS, AIX, SunOS, HPUX ... – and Apple nearly died. They were saved by Microsoft who needed a valid competitor to not be dismembered like Southern Oil, and prepped-up Apple with an MS Office version. Since then Apple's business model is "Think Different" , which means they are the underdog of their master. This master was Microsoft, now it's Google. Apple's business model – and revenue – depends on a single monopolist provider, against which they can pretend to be different. Apple cannot afford to have many competitors, like BlackBerry or Nokia.

So Apple nicked the (L)GPL licensed khtml source, put some obfuscated license on it, and let Google derive an even more obfuscated version to rule the world, where Apple could pretend to be clean. A classical good-cop/bad-cop arrangement. Nothing-more, nothing less. Simple US imperialistic stuff.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: KDE

Thank-you for your extended answer. What I take from it is that the entire reasoning rests on : "if Google were breaching the (L)GPL or the WebKit license (a mix of LGPL and BSD) then someone would have noticed it " ... and would have taken on to fight the megalodon. I hope you don't mind if I don't find that very convincing.

PS: of course I have Chrome since I have an Android phone

Zolko Silver badge

Re: KDE

NOTE to self : when reading the GitHub instructions about how to build, it says :

Run the hooks

Once you've run install-build-deps at least once, you can now run the Chromium-specific hooks, which will download additional binaries and other things you might need:

$ gclient runhooks

and you have to use a tool called GN which says:

For Chromium and Chromium-based projects, there is a script in depot_tools, which is presumably in your PATH, with this name. The script will find the binary in the source tree containing the current directory and run it.

How is this even remotely compatible with the LGPL of khtml ?

Zolko Silver badge

Re: KDE

Very informative, even if disturbing. In my country we'd say that the one who pays the band decides the music.

I still have some reservations : where is the source code repository ? https://source.chromium.org/chromium and a whois lookup says that it belongs to Google. And when I follow the link to get the source code, it says that don't do a git-clone but follow some instructions ... which don't lead nowhere. Which means I cannot get the source code with the prefered method through the link that they advertise. How is this not a violation of the GPL if I cannot get the source-code from the main online repository ? (you might argue that my Firefow browser is tied down quite strictly, but that won't save their arse from the GPL).

I then go to a get-the-code page I found somewhere (NOT through the repo) which leads me trough hops and loops to tell me I have to use some Nix shell without which it won't work. After some digging I find the nix.shell ... and now tell me with a straight face that this is not obfuscation !

Google is clearly a monopoly, and with this Manifest V3 clearly an abusive one. So why doesn't anybody go after them, like the EU for example, and force them to leave Chromium development ? Would be quite easy to do I think by forbidding them to have commit rights to the source code, and they must go through an independent developer organisation. The EU went after Microsoft to force them to unbundle InternetExplorer from Windows, but we leave Google violating the GPL by obfuscating the source-code they got from KDE ?

maintaining a browser is hard AND costly

why ? If they stopped messing with it it could be quite stable. And Konqeror still works today.

NOTE to TheRegister journalists (Liam may-be ?) : would you make an investigation about what it takes to actually compile Chromium from source, only source, and what Richard Stalman thinks about it ? Is it even possible ?

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Firefox FTW

Same here. When absolutely necessary (like M$ Teams or Google-docs, some people don't seem to care), I use ungoogled-chromium with all permissive settings – open-bar for Google and Microsoft – but for the session only, and when I quit it destroys all cookies and history. Well, at least that's what I hope it does.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: KDE

Thank-you. But where does this put Manifesto v3 ? Does it apply to Chromium, or Chrome ? Because by the look of it, it's difficult to imagine that Chrome and Chromium would use different extension systems. In which case that would mean that Google is also in charge of Chromium, which gets us back to square one : how did that happen ? How come that a (US) megacorp was able to hijack a (European) open-source project ?

Zolko Silver badge

KDE

If I'm not mistaken, Chrome comes from Apple's WebKit, which itself comes from KDE's Konqueror / khtml. How come that it now belongs to Google ? Serious question, I don't understand how this came to be

Google and Linux Foundation form Chromium love club

Zolko Silver badge
Pirate

Re: In other news

a secret standard for hidden backdoor technologies

nah, that's the Linux Foundation's task

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Zolko Silver badge

that was all Americans tax dollars [...] Care to challenge that this was not true ?

I take the bait : since the US government and the whole country are living on credit and depend on foreign money, it was dollars from the Saudis and Chinese. May-be some Japanese

Zolko Silver badge

find the intruder

SpaceX, Starlink, and X

shouldn't that be renamed to StarlinX ? It hurts my eyes

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

you beat me to it. Another advantage of AVs on motorways is that the cars could follow each-other at very short distance – like 2m – reducing aerodynamic drag and thus improving gasoline consumption by a lot (I have read that it could be up-to 40% !). The cars could communicate wirelessly (or even by optical means if they're in very close range) and the last car in the line would have the same information about dangers ahead as the first car : in case of emergency braking, all cars could brake at the same time !

Yes I know, we could make roads out of 2 steel rails and put the cars onto them ... the problem being to get on and off of this though.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

But "pedestrians, cyclists, children playing ball on the side, and dogs " are not easily handled?

the difference is visibility distance : on a highway, there are much less surprise apparitions than on a street downtown.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

a solution looking for a problem

sort-of. While I agree with that on general roads, there is one particular problem that this could may-be solve : long hours of driving on highways. Having to be concentrated for hours driving at 120km/h with other cars driving similar speeds, and sometimes overtaking trucks driving at 90km/h, while I could be playing with the kids, would be nice. Highways have the special case that everybody is driving in the same direction, there are no crossings, no pedestrians, no cyclists, no children playing ball on the side, no dogs ... and at the same time it is quite easy to imagine integrating some sort of guidance system into the road itself, or the sides of it.

Because frankly the main problem will come from the maintenance of the cars : what happens when some sensor dies, or gets dirty ? Or if the computer is hacked, or an OTA update halfly borks it ? On a highway this would have no consequences other than you have to switch to manual. But in a European town with tiny crowded streets ?

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Zolko Silver badge

Re: I'm a hater.

Does it work? Who can say? What does it work *at*?

that's the core of the issue : systemd is a lie, and thus Poettering a liar, and I cannot trust a liar. SystemD was initially introduced as an init system, which is fair game. But it has evolved into way more things beyond any reasonable target (WTF is an init system doing with $HOME directories ???) yet the liar is still using the init argument. This is the first page of his presentation :

What is systemd again?systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for building a Linux OS. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.”

That he now works for Micro$oft only makes things worse. So the question is not only whether "it works" for some undefined field, but "can I trust that it will not get in my way as Windows does now" ? While I don't have much arguments for the init part, even contemplating to touch MY home directory where I store MY data is an absolute nonnegotiable red flag.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Zolko Silver badge

PoC

No, he's saying that they should write a proof-of-concept kernel, before being too mouthy about their pet language. Something with limited scope, but enough to show that it can work.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Attitude

Rust for Linux guys. They are humbly ... They only ask for clear APIs

I hope you realise that this doesn't make sense : Linus has always said that clear (stable) APIs won't ever exist. So how could people "humbly" ask for something that has been explicitly excluded before ? That's the very definition of "arrogant", to the point of "harassment".

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Can have it both ways

The kernel isn't like some backend where I can just go to client maintainers and tell them "this is the API, deal with it"

actually, that's the real subject here : if Linux were a micro-kernel – or even a hybrid mini-kernel – then the APIs and even ABIs would be stable and documented, and one could write drivers in any language. But since it's a monolithic kernel, everything is in one huge blob of source-code, therefore the interfaces are moving and thus any other language is excluded. By design.

If the refusal of Rust in Linux makes Rust people write a new micro-kernel with userspace drivers, I'm all for it. Heck, this is the likely outcome anyway. Although I doubt it will be written in Rust

OpenAI unveils deep research agent for ChatGPT

Zolko Silver badge

Re: I think I understand why ...

that's a legitimate question ...

In what way ? What useful information does the – supposedly correct – answer provide you ? What good would it do to you or anybody in the world if we knew for sure that hummingbirds have 3 pairs of tendons attached to ovaloïd bones ?

... to which there is a clear and correct answer

Are we sure ? Let's try to find out:

- a bilaterally paired oval bone...

how many bones does that make : 2 (a pair, one on each side) or 4 (a pair on each side) ?

- How many paired tendons...

do we count tendons by pairs (so 2 tendons gives 1 pair) or do we count each tendon, even if they come by pairs ?

So the answer is either something that someone has counted by opening a hummingbird, meaning that it's not intelligence but encyclopedic knowledge, or it's a logical problem in which case it depends on how you read the "pairs" : in this case the logical answer can be 1, 2 or 4.

What I wanted to point out is that OpenAI is claiming that these are important questions in "Humanity's Last Exam" on which they measure the intelligence of their product. Which means that they have lost the war before it even begun. Their thought process is flawed.

Zolko Silver badge

I think I understand why ...

... the Chinese beat the US here : US companies seem to try to come up with some sort of über-intelligent computer, a general artificial intelligence that can behave like a human in most tasks. So they have to train their "schoolboy" everything possible on Internet, which includes a lot of crap. Whereas the Chinese don't give a s****t and only want to do something useful, and so train their "schoolboy" only on useful stuff, like coding and math, which is both smaller in quantity and easier to get right, because there are objectively correct answers. So while the US AI might know more things in general, a lot of it is wrong but it doesn't know which part; whereas the Chinese AI will know less things but those will be correct.

I mean who the f***k cares about :

Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.

honestly, this can only be described as a dick-measuring contest.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Zolko Silver badge

Re: "This minor niggle doesn't mean that climate models are crap. "

actually, it does exactly mean that. The current warming, above the predictions, come in parallel to observations (don't have time to find the references) about lower cloud coverage as before. And lower cloud coverage means more albedo, meaning less photons reaching the ground and heating Earth, but ALSO meaning more water vapor in the atmosphere – since it condensed less into clouds – which is also a green-house gas and much more powerful – like 10 to 100 times more – than CO2. So less clouds → warmer.

And since there is no explanation linking CO2 to cloud formation, the current climate models are crap.

Now, the real question is : why are there less clouds ?

Zolko Silver badge
Boffin

Re: I look forward to . . .

Don't disappoint me, guys !

funny, I was thinking the same, but with a slightly different emphasis.

Her next research mission will be to examine the access to heatwave-mitigation solutions in the affected areas, and the costs of enhancing mitigations such as easy access to air conditioning (AC) in the areas that need help

now that's really funny, it's like the people who think that opening the fridge when it's hot will cool the kitchen. The same people who complain about earth warming suggest, as solution, even more earth warming ? (I hope you understand thermodynamics enough that while AC cools on one end, it heats on the other, and the overall sum is more warming than cooling. That's the first principle of thermodynamics. The FIRST principle)

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Zolko Silver badge

Re: USA USA USA

and they even had to use a French-made Mirage F1 as chase-plane. Or is that an homage ?

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Zolko Silver badge
Pirate

Qwant

to be honest, I use Qwant as search engine, and it's really good (now). Not sure how much French the underlying search engine is, or if it's only a front-end to other search engines, but the results it gives are way better than google. May-be Lucie will follow the same path ?

DeepSeek limits new accounts amid cyberattack

Zolko Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Reply

DickSeek ? Will it pass moderation ?

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Zolko Silver badge

Re: There is no business case.

I'm still waiting for generalized userland drivers in Linux

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Democracy

Worst form of government apart from all those other forms that have been tried : will always ring true until we ...

... try something new. Nothing is eternal

Zolko Silver badge

I think you're making a mistake by assuming that science fiction is intended to be or should be utopian

I think you're making the mistake that I assume that science fiction should be anything : I'm simply describing how the Americans (right, brave new world was written by a British) see the "normal" political landscape, with Barons and Dukes, Emperors and Generals, Queens and Princesses, who legitimately rule their people, who obey happily. No democracy, no anarchy, no revolution, always some sort of feudal concept.

Compare Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones : the first is full of Hobbits, Wizards, Ents ... who rule themselves, while the second is full of inherited ruling families; even the Night's Watch – the outcasts – is ruled by the Lord Commander.

Zolko Silver badge

Americans might not have a person with the title King or Queen ...

while that's true, I'm always surprised that all/most American science fiction stories DO have kings and queens (and emperors), and they always/mostly have very hierarchic societies, with very strong and autocratic leadership : Star-Wars, Dune, Star Trek, Brave new World, Time-Out, the Foundation series ...

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

Zolko Silver badge

@Jake

oh come-on, don't you know the real reason ? It's because TikTok allowed to post many information and videos of the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians, that's the only reason to want to ban TikTok. So yes, it's very much about free speech. All the rest is for the show

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Worrying

I also agree that Zelensky has no real say in any negotiations

I think that the USA will have no say in the the negotiations either, because the Russians will ask an independent international investigations to the North Stream sabotage, and the USA won't want that because it will find what Seymour Hersch has said, that the USA did that and they'll have to pay reparations. Then, Germany will have no choice but the expel the USA from Germany, effectively ending NATO. Hum ... thinking twice about this, Trump might actually accept want that international investigations in order to end NATO, and he'll blame everything on Biden.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Is re-use an essential component?

could Starship contain all the modules required to go there, land, take-off and come back safely ?

I was looking for someone making such a comment, thank-you:

with sufficient funding the rocket could be made operational and sent to Mars with a crew onboard

no it couldn't. Even IF Starship was working as expected, it's not powerful enough. A mission to Mars would require to build/assemble the spacecraft in space, which in turn means that you would need an orbital station, but the one available to the US is going to be scraped. Well, may-be a lunar base would also be an option to assemble to spacecraft, not sure about that. So there simply is no way to go to Mars in the next 20 years, even discounting all technical problems.

Trump hits undo on Biden AI safety order, EV mandate, emissions standards, and more

Zolko Silver badge

Actually, that interpretation of birth-right seems quite logical

The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Zolko Silver badge

Re: "We need time"

when do you plan to have the time to plan on defending Humanity from the next asteroid strike ?

wait, WHAT : climate change is over, we're already in the asteroid chapter ? When did that happen, I didn't get the memo ! I thought that giant space goats were next

Zolko Silver badge

Re: The comments in this journal are going downhill fast

I think that it coincides in time with covid. Lots of computer people loved to work from home, which they – probably – mostly could, without noticing that for the rest of the population (like 99% of the rest of the population) it was impossible and undesirable. Therefore, the IT people needed to construct a narrative of why this covid thing was a big danger for all of humanity, and once you had gone down the slippery road it is very difficult to stop the madness. And now, the same "we're all gonna die " is served with the climate, Russia, China, and any other overblown happening in the world that can somehow, even very very far fetched, be used to control and censor.

Look no further than Romania where they have simply canceled the presidential elections because the "wrong" candidate was going to win and they blamed it on TikTok : you'll see that there will be some weirdo here who will try to justify even that EU diktat.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: It was easy as pie to get these people to move to the next platform. Too easy for china.

@Omnipresent : you don't have teenager kids, do you ?

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Questions of national security

@breakfast : yes, I think that that's what the Chinese retaliation will be : ban Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Amazon ... out of national security concerns. I wonder who gets to lose more. Especially if China manages to "convince" 3-rd party countries to join the fray. If Trump is too keen on tariffs on imports from Europe, even Europe could join that party and ban the GAFA

As for TikTok itself, I don't use it but my kids do and they say that they learn a lot on there. Certainly more than looking at pictures of latte-machiato made by Starbucks in Dubaï.

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

Zolko Silver badge

à banana for scale

primary objective was to reach orbit, and New Glenn achieved that, with the Blue Ring Pathfinder payload

How much is that in bananas ? I think we need à new ElReg unit about the amont of bananas à rocket is able to put into LEO. A SpaceX Starship for exemple would weight 0 in this unit since it didn't put à single banana to orbit (yet). And no, an orbit that ends in the ocean doesn't count

NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

Zolko Silver badge

Re: US Navy

Even Noam Chomsky said ...

Please get your informations correct : it was Seymour Hersch that unveiled the method that USA used to destroy North-Stream. And according to him the Norwegian marine only played a minor role in the plot. Seymour Hersch is (was) a world renowned journalist, while Noam Chomsky is a world renowned writer who doesn't know anything more about NATO than you or me.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Zolko Silver badge

Re: To Be or Not To BeOS

I had it running on a Motorola 603 PowerPC clone, and it was so snappy and fast, something that I haven't seen since then even with the latest Linux-es on high-end hardware. I don't know what they did but it was amazing

Blue Origin postpones New Glenn's maiden flight to January 12

Zolko Silver badge

suborbital

And there go the downvotes: why ?

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Suborbital

and today, we get that Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is planning for a first launch, where "the primary goal of the mission is to reach orbit ". With fake payload, but still, not a banana ! We shall see whether they succeed or not

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Suborbital

Getting the performance with a payload and re-use requires a better engine than the ones used on the previous flights. That new engine - raptor 3 ...

So the current ones are no good, and we'll have to see how the new engines do when they fly, then, don't we ?

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Suborbital

The amount of delta-v required to convert flight 6 to orbital flight was very small

fully loaded with ... a banana. And when they load it with some real 50t to LOE does that still hold ?

The trajectory IS orbital : it's just that perigee is well inside the atmosphere

it's even inside the ocean. Funny "orbit" that is. With a banana.

Zolko Silver badge

Re: Suborbital

don't they train those operations every week or so with their Falcon rocket ? After hundreds of successful missions are those really difficult tasks for SpaceX ?

Zolko Silver badge

Suborbital

It's the 7th-flight and still doesn't go to orbit ... I think Starship is the only rocket that doesn't even attempt to go to orbit, it just pops up and down. What do they learn by now ?

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Zolko Silver badge

This happened to me and a friend on Strava : we made a walk together, using Strava, but without each knowing about the other on Strava. After the walk, the App asked me whether I had made the walk with Andrew (*), as it recognized the same path and same time.

(*) his actual name

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Zolko Silver badge

works well

Depends on your definition of "works well". If "lifting off from the ground" is enough for you, then may-be. If it's "placing tens of tons into orbit" then no, it doesn't

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