Posts by MichaelGordon 75 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2013
> Along with many other such vendors, they were sick to see AWS and others charging for the service but without contributing to the maintenance and development.
This sounds like exactly the sort of problem that GPLv3 was designed for; people using GPL'd code to provide, for example, a web service. Since they're not distributing the code they're not required to abide by the conditions of GPLv2 and get to use the code without giving back.
KDE 4.0 did a lot of damage to the reputation of KDE as it was nowhere near release quality; lots of things were missing and it was hugely buggy. It wasn't until KDE 4.3.something that I felt it was good enough to use as my default desktop. Things weren't helped by the presence of a number of GNOME-style massively arrogant developers who refused to listen to any criticism of what they'd produced.
The transition from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 seems to have gone a lot more smoothly.
There's no way I'd go back to KDE 3 now; there are just too many useful things such as the handling of multiple monitors that I'd miss.
Brave has Tor support in the browser, which may, strictly speaking, be the wrong place for it, but it's very convenient. Is it even possible to set a separate Tor client up so that only selected Windows in my browser use it and everything else uses the default network connection? If it is then it's going to be a great deal more work than selecting "New private window with Tor" from the menu and require a level of technical knowledge that will put it beyond most people.
This sort of thing isn't new; there have been many examples over the years of what happens when you change the licence on your software and piss off a substantial fraction of your contributors. OpenSSH has its origins in changes to the SSH licence; Xorg replaced XFree86 due to licence changes in XFree86 4.0. Who now uses SSH or XFree86? Sometimes you don't even have to change the licencing if you can find another way to piss off your user base; ZIP files exist because SEA sued PKWARE over PKARC and SEA/ARC are now effectively dead.
Do the people who try to monetise other people's work not read any history?
I agree; what they shipped as KDE 4.0 was a KDE 4 technology preview at best. It took until KDE 4.3.something to get to a desktop I was happy to use as my default. Early KDE 4 also suffered from the presence of a number of GNOME-style assholes who were convinced they knew best and weren't interested in any comments about ways the particular bit of KDE they were responsible for could be improved. Fortunately they seem to have vanished or at least faded into the background where nobody cares what they think.
I'm sure this will save money in the short term, but then they'll be hit with a problem that their experienced staff could have rapidly solved but the inexperienced staff that are left won't have a clue about. See RBS for an example: they got rid of their older, more expensive staff, then a database problem took their entire operation offline for well over a week. Hopefully the £42 million fine from the FCA, costs involved in keeping physical branches open for longer hours, compensation to people affected, etc. made an impression/
In more general terms, I don't understand what management are trying to achieve with return-to-office mandates. They're going to end up with offices full of people who hate their guts, doing the bare minimum amount of work necessary not to get fired.
No idea what IBMs Finance & Operations unit does, but there's usually no clear link between how vital to the business a unit is and how much money it brings in. It doesn't sound like the sort of place you want to be getting rid of the most senior and experienced people though. Remember what happened to RBS in 2012 after they got rid of exactly the people who'd have been able to fix their IT problems relatively quickly.
This is why I use Brave. It's Chrome-based but its filtering technology, Brave Shields, is compiled into the browser rather than being an extension, so the move to Manifest V3 will have essentially no effect. They can import and keep up to date with EasyList, AdGuard, etc. so the filtering looks just like I'd get on another browser with an adblocker installed.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
I fully expect China to step in to replace all the USAID operations that get cut. It will cost them around $40 billion, which is 0.2% of China's GDP, while producing a massive increase in China's worldwide influence in developing countries which will remain long after Trump and his merry band of idiots are gone.
Working in IT support, there's a lot I can do from home and a few things that I need to be physically present for, which seems to provide a reasonable balance. I was working from home 5 days a week at the height of the pandemic and hated it. Going into the office lets me meet other people and learn stuff I'd never otherwise hear about by running into random people in the corridors; it's generally better than sitting on my own at home unless I've got something in particular that I need to concentrate on.
It might help that my commute generally isn't miserable; I live closer to the centre of town than I work so my morning/evening journeys are generally in the opposite direction to most of the rush hour.
I do wonder what the bosses enforcing return to office think they're accomplishing; as far as I can see it's going to result in offices full of pissed-off people who hate their guts and will put in the bare minimum effort not to be fired.
Got a source for that? Space-X got substantially less money from NASA to develop Crew Dragon than Boeing did to develop Starliner. Money they've got from NASA after that are payments for services provided - resupply and crew transfers to/from ISS.
What Starship milestones have they missed? Starship and its associated booster are still under heavy development and will be for a while yet; flight 20 was the first successful soft landing of Falcon 9.
10 years ago you'd have been saying the same thing about Falcon 9. Now there have been 425 launches of rockets in the Falcon 9 family, with just 2 in-flight failures and 1 partial success. CRS-31 (unmanned commercial resupply) is currently docked to the ISS, along with Crew-9, and Crew-9 will be used to bring back the astronauts left stranded by the inadequacies of Boeing's Starliner.
Definitely not a Musk fanboy - I think Elon Musk is a deeply odious dickhead - but I do admire Space-X's technical ability and development methodology.
Dynamic linking has its problems, but it makes fixing bugs/security-holes far easier. Replace a single shared library and every program that uses that library, whether it's part of the distribution or locally-added, gets the fix automatically. Imagine trying to fix a problem with libc if everything was statically linked. Possibly not so much of an issue nowadays, but it also massively decreases the amount of disk space used by executables. On my machine hello.cc produces a 16528 byte dynamically-linked executable compared to a 2403960 byte statically-linked executable.
While electric vehicles will probably one day be the norm, the technology just isn't there yet apart from a few special cases such as buses which spend their day running relatively short city routes and can return to the depot overnight for charging. For most people the main problems are
Range - until you can do a few hundred miles on one charge people aren't going to replace their petrol/diesel cars
Recharge time - they might be able to get away with 5-10 minutes to recharge when you pull in on your way somewhere, but not much longer than that.
Recharge availability - I live near the centre of a medium-sized city and there's only a tiny handful of available recharge points. I can't recharge at home since I only have on-street parking; if I had an electric vehicle I'd have to run a cable out of my lounge window and across the pavement to it.
Battery pack lifetime
WordPress are about to discover that once you've allowed a particular use of your software you can't stuff the genie back into the bottle without pissing off large numbers of people and causing damage to your business that probably exceeds anything your attempts may gain. Seems obvious but a surprising number of companies just don't seem to understand this.
I wouldn't call the GPL communistic. It's making a clear statement: This is my code and if you want to use it you must abide by these conditions. Don't like the conditions or don't think the cost of abiding by them is worth it? Use someone else's code or write your own. While the "cost" is in a different form to that for using, for example, Microsoft's code in your product, it's the same principle.
This sounds a lot like the way Exchange Calendar used to (still does?) implement private appointments; a flag on the appointment which the official client looked at. Use anything but the official client to access the Exchange server and it's trivial to see the details of private appointments. This is why I put private appointments in my public calendar described only as "Busy" and use a second calendar on my local disk to hold the actual details.
> I'm pretty sure that the Chinese have the capability to reach an orbiting space station
Tiangong, the Chinese space station, is at a similar height to the ISS but in a different orbit; I don't know whether the ISS orbit is easily reachable from any of the Chinese launch sites.
The situation reminds me of the current ban on advanced chip manufacturing equipment and the resulting chips being exported to China. It may give the west a temporary advantage, but in the long term it's going to force China to develop their own technology with absolutely no need of anything from the West, at which point you lose all ability to apply pressure to China through chips, space science, or whatever the next thing is.
Yeah, but Brave Shields are built into the browser rather than being an extension, so they'll continue to get the necessary access to page contents no matter how much Google restricts access from extensions. I believe there are other chrome-based browser with similar features, though I haven't looked in any detail as Brave currently does all the blocking I require.
It's been a long time since I looked at Wayland, so these things may have been fixed, but one of my big problems with it was that it didn't have a separate window manager - clients were expected to provide their own titlebars etc - so there was no way to enforce a consistent interface to control window position, size etc. on every window no matter which application it was running or whether it was local or remote. It also apparently meant that if an application hung there was no way to drag it out of the way so you could get access to another window from which you could kill the misbehaving application.
> Regrettably, it is getting much more difficult to find a non-systemd Linux distribution
Slackware. As well as being systemd-free it also has far fewer "What the hell were they thinking?" moments than any other distribution I've tried.
There's also Devuan, but then you've got to deal with the nightmare that is the Debian packaging system.
HP have a history of this sort of thing. A few years ago an HP BIOS update bricked several hundred laptops across my employer's operations; the next few weeks saw constant presence of HP engineers on site replacing motherboards. I've also had an HP desktop brick itself after a BIOS update; that was fixed by disconnecting the BIOS battery and letting the machine sit for 10 minutes before reconnecting the battery.
What I've learned from this and other HP-related nonsense is to never, ever buy an HP computer for personal use and to recommend that friends who ask for advice don't either.
How are Boeing getting to launch a crewed capsule at this point? I don't recall any tests of a crew-escape system or any of the other stuff that you'd expect before they put people on board. Given the capsule's history of faults before and during previous test flights, it really needs many more test launches before expecting a crew to risk their lives.
Even with the lasers they bounce off the retroreflectors on the moon, which is only 250,000 miles away, spreading of the beam is a serious problem. The figures I've seen estimate that one photon in 25 million sent will hit the reflector, and of those that hit the reflector only one in 250 million will make it back to the detectors on earth. The beam will have spread to around 1 mile across when it hits the moon.
Given the age of the hardware it's probably not that susceptible to radiation, even if it's not specifically rad-hardened, but get beyond the heliosphere and you're likely to get hit by a few very high energy particles. It'd be interesting to know if that's what happened here or if it's just the hardware showing its age.
Given that "make" was created in 1976 and had to run on the machines of the day, I'll forgive it for not having a particularly flexible parser. There's an argument that modern versions shouldn't care what white space is used to indent recipes as long as something is, but that might break existing input; I haven't thought about this enough to be sure.
> Let's make the scroll bars disappear
This is one of the many things that ensure I'll never use GNOME as my desktop. A scrollbar is a visual cue that there's more to a window than is currently visible; removing it just makes the interface more confusing and difficult to use for no good reason.
There's a balance to be struck between restricting access and not delaying medically-necessary access to records. For example, if I'm in hospital and transferred from one ward to another I want the staff in the new ward to have access to my records immediately, not after some random delay while they wait for IT to set the permissions properly. I'd be happy with fairly open access and a periodic audit to check that everyone who's accessed the records is someone that I was in the care of. Obviously there are people and circumstances for which much tighter controls on access are needed.
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