* Posts by TVU

935 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Mar 2016

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Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

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Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient

I originally misread that as 'Caffeine makes brain cells more efficient' and that would have been vindication of what we already know but to find out that caffeine can actually enhance the efficiency of fuel cells as well is awesome!

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

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Re: Oh, have they finally finished it yet?

Probably not as the article says this:

"There are reasons to still want X11 even now: for instance, if you use some accessibility tools, or you need certain graphics driver features that only work with X.org. A fairly common example would be if you run Fedora under VirtualBox and want the additional facilities provided by the Guest Additions' graphics drivers, such as dynamic guest display resizing".

^ That says to me that Wayland is still a work in progress and not a finished product and the comment from another forum still applies:

"You failed to read the fine print at the bottom of all the wayland promises over the past 12 years:

"It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house"."

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

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Re: Very Different

https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/

Thank you very much for the above link providing the interesting story behind Microsoft's actions.

What we effectively had back then was a diplomatic cover up of the real situation by both parties that avoided scandal, reputational damage and lower stock prices - all highly convenient at that time.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

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Awilfox's comments on, and the call for reform and refinement of, the mission creep monster that is systemd were eminently sensible:

https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/

Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit

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"Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit"

That sounds like pure greed and unjustified greed at that since Reddit has not made a profit so far, only large losses.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

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"For example, Gartner estimated the new subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model"

Beware the counsel of the Oracle! (the Austin, Texas one, that is)

Broadcom CEO pay award jumps 164% to $160.8 million

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You know when a company starts the downhill run when executive pay rockets, when solutions of acquired companies are deprecated, and when there are massive lay offs.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

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I just wanted to thank Liam regarding those people with disabilities and those with lower incomes who would find it very difficult to buy a new desktop PC or laptop just so that they can get a supported Windows 11 computer.

Given that we're meant to be taking more care of the environment, Microsoft's unnecessary specific hardware requirements for Windows 11 are going in the wrong direction.

Duo face 20 years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

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Re: This should have ended at the…

"This should have ended at the…“Hey, how about we….” stage"

Exactly, and these two are not the brightest bulbs in the sockets because if they'd thought this through then it might have dawned on them that the company that actually makes these products just might be able to tell them from poor fakes. D'oh, as Homer Simpson would say.

Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)

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Re: After almost 30 years ...

"Red Hat you largely had a nice symbiotic relationship going with Fedora and downstream Centos. I believe a massive own goal! Short term gain at the price of the long term"

Indeed, and pretty much everyone can see that this decision was only about more $$$ and not ultimately about better customer service.

Oracle faces continued legal battle over alleged NetSuite software misrepresentations

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"However, River Supply Inc. (RSI), a Pennsylvania-based architectural construction material supplier, was told it could amend its claim, which originally alleged that Oracle committed fraud in the way it sold the software"

Now who'd have thought that Oracle would ever do a naughty thing like that? /s

Euro shoppers popping more and more premium phones in the basket

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I'm fine with people buying new shiny pieces of kit but I'd also like to see much improved reuse and recycling.

That last aspect is particularly important as recovering the rare elements from phones means fewer new mines and less dependence on autocratic countries to supply such elements.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

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Re: So easy

It would not surprise me at all if it came out the the university's own IT department had raised concerns about the implementation of this project but were overruled by management and the rest is history as they say...

Oracle partner gets multimillion top-up after Edinburgh Uni disaster

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"It appears as though the new system, Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud, is taking a bit of time to bed in"

That seems to be a very polite way of saying that everything is still in Oracle clusterfuck mode. I hope that other universities across the planet take note of what is going on at Edinburgh University.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

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""Apple has botched 3D for decades" - No, you're just looking at it wrong"

^ I see what you did there!

NASA lost contact with Mars helicopter Ingenuity, then managed to find it again

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I like the way that Ingenuity is able to photograph its own shadow when it is doing a rather good impression of a dragonfly.

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

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"If Huawei can develop an ecosystem of third-party players, it could create a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly"

That is possible but it might only extend to Chinese language areas although that would be a substantial market in itself.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

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Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Memo to Satya:

You should not have made the hapless Win 11 such a fugly kludge that no one can customise to their own liking.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

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"Windows as a whole never did. But certainly the GUI experience regressed to such an extent since Windows XP that it is now on par with the Linux offerings"

Tbh, I would take the plain and simple Mate desktop environment over that of the Win 11 clusterfuck any day.

Chinese company's rocket debut makes waves by launching from the sea

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This is yet more of Thunderbirds coming to life and I'd like to think that Gerry Anderson would have loved what's going on today.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

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^ Thank you for pointing out that other safety issue and Boeing should not still be relying on a kludge fix that icing issue which requires the pilots to remember to manually switch off the engine anti-ice system without any hazard warning reminder.

This matter will also be a test of the Federal Aviation Administration and its willingness to put public safety first. This time, they should stand up to Boeing and deny Boeing's request to allow a kludge fix while Boeing comes up with a proper remedy.

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Re: Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

"Boeing doesn't actually even manufacture the 737 fuselage themselves, the sold off the factory and outsource construction to Spirit AeroSystems".

^ That is an excellent example of why Boeing is in the state it is as of right now and that sell off should never have happened.

There is market payback now in the form of Boeing shares losing 9% of their values today with Spirit AeroSystems shares losing 12% of their value as well.

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Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Good, and Boeing deserves everything that's coming its way. There's been high demand for 737 Max aircraft and Boeing's been pumping them out without regard for other factors so it should come as no surprise that there's been shoddy workmanship and precious little checking.

In the good old days of the 707 and 747, Boeing was engineering-led and had a good safety culture. That all changed with the McDonnell Douglas merger resulting in the McDonnell Douglas bean counter managers effectively taking over Boeing and putting $$$ above everything else.

It is quite clear that things have not sufficiently changed since the two 737 Max crashes and I'd like to see a complete clear out of the Boeing executives and board members.

NASA celebrates Perseverance Rover's 1000th Martian day with lakebed history lesson

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Re: Top banana

"I would argue no humans should go to Mars until we decide we know what we need to know about past or current life on Mars, as humans would almost certainly contaminate the biosphere there -- if there is one"

Here's the thing though - Mars' protective magnetosphere pretty much died at the end of the early Noachian era on Mars so allowing solar winds to directly strip away the planet's atmosphere so ending any potential for life to develop on Mars. Today, Mars' atmosphere is in stable equilibrium and that in itself is a strong indication that there are no native life forms on Mars, not even microbial ones.

That said, there's a distinct possibility that there are quite a few dormant Earth bacteria on Mars now such as Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Cutibacterium and Escherichia species from incomplete lander and rover disinfection.

Adobe warns it may face massive fines for subscription cancellation practices

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Re: Not a good experience

Unlike Adobe, one of the great advantages of Luminar Neo is that you can own it outright albeit for a larger cost than the annual subscription.

Personally, I detest Adobe's perma-rental way of doing things.

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Re: Finally

"Just AE remains, one day I'll sit down and learn Blender and finally break the chains"

DaVinci Resolve also has the advantage of a free version plus its multi-OS.

Broadcom halves subscription price for VMware's flagship hybrid cloud suite

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"Broadcom halves subscription price for VMware's flagship hybrid cloud suite...Also kills perpetual licenses"

And Lo! The Oracle-style snakery has started and you can surely bet that there'll be above inflation price hikes for the VMware's flagship hybrid cloud suite.

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

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Re: ESU only delays landfill.

Have you looked at Moneydance which has a Linux version? It does cost (they have a one-off payment version) and it does get good reviews.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

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Therefore Wayland is just not an option for me until that is fixed.

And there's the problem - all the issues and the lack of features should have been ironed out by now.

Over now to my favorite quote from elsewhere:

"You failed to read the fine print at the bottom of all the wayland promises over the past 12 years:

"It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house"."

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

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Re: Boosting

NASA still has one unused ex-National Reconnaissance Office space telescope left that was donated to NASA back in 2012 or thereabouts if I recall correctly.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

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US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

The heck it is; it is just more Putin-supporting scumbag Russian hackers operating out of somewhere like Nizhny Novgorod or similar.

Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

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Software duo must respond with remedies

The only remedy is for Figma to return to full independence from monopolistic Adobe Corporation whether they like it or not.

RHEL and Alma Linux 9.3 arrive – one is free, one merely free of charge

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I love the way that author Liam P has used the term 'Big Purple Hat' in jest and it's increasingly appropriate given all IBM (mis)management policies that are seeping down into Big Purple Hat such as the sacking of technical staff presumably to give an instant profit boost.

I wish that Red Hat had never been taken over by IBM and I equally wish that Oracle had never bought out Sun Microsystems.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

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Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

Personally, I still prefer to use Synaptic Package Manager and GDebi Installer.

Boffins detect direct evidence of atomic oxygen on Venus's day side

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Re: Chemistry question...

"My chemistry lessons were a long time ago... so can anybody explain to me, why the atomic oxygen does not instantly recombine to O2? I thought oxygen would do this...?"

That is an excellent question. On the irradiated, sunlit side of Venus, the incoming radiation is powerful enough, for example, to split CO2 into CO (carbon monoxide) and O (monatomic oxygen) with recombination taking place on the night side of Venus with reactions like CO + O going back to CO2 again and O + O joining up to become O2.

Incidentally, that science paper by Heinz-Wilhelm Hübers and others was one of the last experiments to be conducted on NASA's Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) telescope mounted on a Boeing 747 SP aircraft before it was retired.

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Re: Venus' day - greenhouse effect?

"Maybe one of the reasons the Earth did not become like Venus with a high temperature atmosphere is the relatively short 24 hour day"

That is a valid point to make and having a very long Venusian day probably won't help things either because of the scorching insolation at any one point.

Venus' major problem though is its place in the solar system. That didn't matter so much in the early solar system when the Sun was less bright at the start of its life. As the Sun became brighter, the habitable zone moved outward and Venus effectively ended up in the 'roasting zone' along with Mercury. That pretty much then ensured that a runaway greenhouse effect started up on Venus with all the extra solar heating resulting in the boiling away of any early water oceans. The rest is history as the saying goes.

If Venus and Mars had had their positions exchanged, then we might have had a more interesting solar system today but that will always remain a 'what if'.

OpenELA flips Red Hat the bird with public release of Enterprise Linux source

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"The Register contacted Red Hat and AlmaLinux for their takes on the latest development and will update should either respond"

I think it is probably safe to say that Red Hat will perhaps be a little unhappy about this most recent news.

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

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Re: Not all PI hardware works with Bookworm yet

"There looks to be quite a lot of stuff which Wayland doesn't do yet"

Indeed, and the following quote comes from another forum:

"You failed to read the fine print at the bottom of all the wayland promises over the past 12 years:

"It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house"."

Blue Origin pulls sheets off cargo lunar lander prototype

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"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has unveiled a mockup of the cargo version of its Blue Moon lunar lander ahead of a crewed version intended for NASA's Artemis program"

^ That just isn't good enough. What they should be doing by now is delivering actual test prototypes. For example, the much hyped New Glenn heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle still has yet to make its first flight.

Russia hustles to fill impending void left by the ISS

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Re: Not a chance!

" there's plenty of scumbag countries willing to act as intermediaries for Airbus or Boeing spare parts"

Here's the interesting thing though. From reputable sources like Aviation Week and others, it is clear that airliner spare parts are not getting through to Russia.

What they are doing is refurbishing what they can, cannibalising donor aircraft that can then obviously no longer fly and instituting other measures like instructing airline pilots to brake on landing using reverse thrusting as an alternative to wearing out brake pads that cannot be replaced.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station

I fail to see how Putin's Russia can do this as Russia is an economically declining state soon to be overtaken by Brazil in GDP terms. The two major space powers used to be the USA and Soviet Union but now they are the USA and China. Indeed, the only way Putin is going to get cosmonauts on a space station is as guests on a Chinese space station.

Mars' iron core surrounded by molten rock, seismic studies show

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Question: if there's a liquid iron core, why is the magnetic field around Mars so degraded?

That is an excellent question and it appears that the convective currents in Mars' liquid core reduced and there are a number of theories* about how that happened.

The net result is that the planetary magnetosphere effectively died and that then allowed the strong solar winds to interact directly with the planet’s atmosphere and strip it away. Mars' real problem is that it only has 1/9th of the mass of Earth so that its core was always going to cool down more quickly and the rest is history. You would probably need a planet with at least 1/3rd of the mass of Earth for a planetary magnetosphere to develop and to be self sustaining for multiple billions of years.

*This is just one option - https://www.universetoday.com/154461/we-might-know-why-mars-lost-its-magnetic-field/

Regulator delays Adobe's $20B buy of Figma, derails deal deadline

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Regulator delays Adobe's $20B buy of Figma, derails deal deadline

Good, because this is a very highly anti-competitive action on the part of Adobe (same applies to Corel's acquisition of Gravit which should also have been blocked).

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

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Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

Ha Ha! as Nelson Muntz would say. IBM has just found out that Dinobabies can bite back very hard indeed.

Seriously though, Greg Milwid gets a 10/10 from me for taking on IBM over their age discriminatory practices and, best of all, he won!

Web Summit CEO's comments on Israeli conflict 'war crimes' sparks boycott

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Re: Missing the point

"A two state solution is a complete fiction, there is no land which makes that possible, the settlers in the west bank, in Hebron and the rest of Palestine, make it impossible"

It is not impossible and the joint Palestinian-Israeli Geneva Initiative* is the way forward. Once this conflict is over, I want significant international pressure applied to both sides to reach an agreed solution along the lines of the Geneva Initiative.

*I should add that they accept donations.

It's full of stars! Galactic atlas catalogs 400k Milky Way neighbors

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That is a very interesting article but while we can look out and see what other galaxies are like, such as the M31 Andromeda Galaxy and the M33 Triangulum Galaxy, we cannot yet see what our own home galaxy looks like.

The best rendition so far of what our own barred spiral galaxy really looks like comes from photographer and artist Nick Risinger:

https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge2/image_3912e-Milky-Way-Galaxy.jpg

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

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"British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%"

What would also help is a move from jet aircraft to turboprop aircraft on short and medium haul routes as they are noticeably more fuel efficient aircraft.

So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off

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"We are committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily," said Songtradr.

^ The polite way to describe that statement is that it is complete horse poo. There is no way that the same level of good service can be maintained when half the staff have been axed. The Songtradr management are living on Fantasy Island.

Russian Nauka module plays leak-a-boo with International Space Station

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Russian Nauka module plays leak-a-boo with International Space Station

^ That just has to be the best article headline in ages!

In rare bout of generosity, Oracle extends free support for Database 19c

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In rare bout of generosity, Oracle...

Whenever I see a phrase like that relating to Oracle or IBM, my next question is always, "What's the catch?".

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