Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The libraries serve natural people who will have opinions which the management might reasonably take into account. Nor is it simply users and managers opinions. They will no doubt be a diverse lot and for many the views Hansson expressed may represent a real threat. It's also reasonable for the managers to take that into account.
\it depends on what you mean by "everyone". Back in the '80s ad '90s a lot of small businesses ran on the likes of NCR Towers, MIPS and later SCO on various PC-based servers. The users were connected by dumb terminals or terminal emulation on PCs and completely unaware of what lay beneath as all they saw were their task-specific applications and some sort of menu. It put a multiuser system within reach of everyone who was a small business owner. That may not be literally "everyone" but then not everyone uses MacOS either.
"My pet hate: black-on-black design, of anything - computers, cars, kitchen stoves, hifi, you name it."
Not the only bad combo. I've just encountered a local conservation group with their website footer in light green on slightly less light green. Miniscule sans serif text, of course.
I'm also an old person who remembers lighting as being a major source of energy consumption but also realises the consumption served a purpose. That last bit is an important principle to grasp for those who wish to save energy. The smart way to do it is to work out how to serve the same purpose more efficiently.
They say training data is only 1% of the outputs they've got. However it raises the question of whether other prompts would extract more and more of the training data. It seems to knock on the head any copyright defence that they're not really storing the training data.
"Disney and IBM buy it, and flounce off from X in a huff. Partly. But they still have accounts there because that's where the eyeballs are."
I don't have an account on any of the usual suspects so I don't know if they're still posting anything. However a quick glance at IBM's front page shows no blue bird there. In fact there are no social media links there at all and my general impression is that far fewer big name sites nowadays don't have any. I think it's getting to the point where marketing departments are starting to regard the whole mess as toxic and best avoided.
It's not necessarily rich people. It's a pension fund. I'm not familiar with DeKalb County but I doubt the County employees are rich. It's like Pascal said, they made the wrong type of investment for a pension fund and, assuming they're still holding the stock, are now doubling down by suing themselves. Any time you see these reports of stockholders suing a company just remember that the company is the company of stockholders. Its money is their money. All they can get is their own money and they'll have to pay both sets of lawyers for their days in court.
Perhaps it would be worth setting and publicising a standard tariff, say 1 day inside for each record sold. That way there'd be no expectation of just getting a few years. Just work out your life expectancy, what's the maximum proportion of that you're prepared to spend and set the maximum number you'll sell based on that. Making that calculation might give even those who think they'll never get caught have a few sobering moments.
Yup. That was one of the remarks led me to wonder about the whole report. Others included not that much harvested wood going into timber because some of it goes into paper making. AFAIK timber for paper making is a fast grown crop, cultivated specifically for the purpose on a regular cropping cycle. Another was mention of allowing part of the crop to rot and part to be burned for energy. Leaving brash - the material that can't be used - to be recycled by natural means is actually good for the environment; it's part of the forest ecosystem and supports a lot of species which would be lost if the felled areas were completely cleared. Burning small wood for energy replaces some need for fossil fuel.
There seems to be a confusion between means and ends. Perhaps there was an assumption that use of a phone means that someone it trying to leak information out of a meeting despite the fact that a laptop or tablet could be used equally effectively to do that.
The phone in a restaurant is odd, however. If a party are having a meal in a restaurant I tend to assume they're there for a social occasion rather than just consume food. But of a few/all of them are sitting there poking at their phones and ignoring the others I wonder why they bothered to go there instead of just ordering a takeaway.
"a company I haven't even heard of before."
For a while they owned the ex-BBC transmitter network in the UK after the British Broadcasting Corporation decided it didn't want to do any actual broadcasting.*
* Quite reasonable. It meant they had to employ men who hadn't been to Oxbridge and who wore brown overalls with pens in their breast pockets. What was worse, most of it was outside London.
It's all a bit puzzling. TFA seems to imply that ThreadX was something that MS found themselves with, but didn't really need, as a consequence of buying Express Logic. That they might then open source it and shuffle it off to a foundation seems reasonable although very un-Microsoft-like behaviour.
But AFAICS from a quick search ThreadX was EL's only product. In that case what did they think they were acquiring? Was it just the development team? Is there some other product? Was the whole thing just a mistake by the M&A department - you know how it is, you get to the checkout and then find you picked up the box next to the one you intended.
"Burning vegetables still puts C02 into the atmosphere."
It puts into the atmosphere the CO2 that was taken out by the growing vegetables. That's a net zero at that level. However transport and processing have to be considered so if they used fossil fuels there's addition of some CO2 as a second order effect. If this is genuine waste then it's not a case of plants being grown for fuel. However destroying forest to grow cash-crops, even where those cash-crops are food, is a concern.
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