
Re: More Beria than BOFH.
"until you mentally substitute members of the UK government (current and recent) for the board"
Which would explain the queue of couriers with suitcases full of champagne and beer, which Simon duly confiscated.
1917 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2016
Not really. You can use open source as a model for anything licensable, and licenses don't exist to do development, they exist to do business. F/LOSS was conceived to get round access and usage problems, and in order to do that it had to open up both the business and the development models. You can have open availability alone, and you can have open development alone but, as RMS never tires of pointing out, to be true F/LOSS you need both.
The problem with ternary computing has always been that the hardware sucked. It is theoretically the most efficient, but was shafted by the failure to develop hardware as cheap and practical as binary logic devices. Beer glasses are no good; does that half-pint in there mean the glass is half-full or half-empty or, err... falling fast perhaps?
More gullible idiocy there, I'm afraid. Of course they are "quite" helicopters; modern chopper control systems have not been standing still while the e-copter brigade have been doing their thing.
These "quite" piloted e-copters have the latest in flight automation, just like any other helicopter coming to market today. Oh, wow, who'd 'a thunk it! For more bullshit-popping, see for example
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/92264/are-helicopters-easier-to-fly-nowadays-due-to-computers
Don't be silly. These are just ordinary, piloted helicopters hoping to serve an established heliport. In the usual way, the FAA will not allow that to start until they are satisfied the things won't fall out of the sky. The only novelty is that fossil fuels have been replaced with batteries. And a good thing too.
My previous wheels (a Skoda, FWIW) had something very like this. Two data systems, one for vehicle management and one for infotainment. The EMS fed lots of stuff to the info- bit, and received only a handful of status/request bits in return. No way to pwn the ABS just because the infotainment was unstoppably online.
Inserting TCP/IP in the link is not rocket science, though it does require a clear head and specialised hardware.
"after a few decades working with all manner of software, this vulture hates it all."
Give that man a beer, ain't it th' truth!
What sucks most is people brought up in one tradition only (maybe Microsoft or Apple or *nix or RISC OS or...), are utterly brainwashed into believing theirs is the One Truth, and then move into software management. Whether they come from the user side or the dev side, they all end up the same.
Don't forget the wallflowers, who hang around sipping beer and keeping well away from the dance floor.
Maybe you should check out some of the distros that are still going to the same old places, and doing it better than ever. Slackware might be a good yardstick for you.
Just because the mainstream Linux distros are turning to ratshit does not mean that they all are.
The ecology of lighter-weight old school Linux distros is still far bigger than the BSD ecology and remains my preferred hunting ground.
But yeah, with MATE on board (good choice!), GhostBSD is now in my radar.
There are two distinct perceptions of systems engineering.
My current employer is busy rolling out a shedload of digital systems. "We don't need systems engineers because it's all in rented cloud space." They assume that systems engineering is all about racks and cooling and cabling.
I studied soft systems - systems which involve people doing stuff, both good and bad.
It is the soft systems engineer who asks, "do we spend 18 months on regressions or move fast and break things?" That is a people-doing-stuff decision, and there is no one right answer.
Sometimes integration and regressions are important, sometimes it's better to add test tags to your source code and pour their markers into a log file.
Not fiction. Even "parrot-tech" is grossly overstating it. Current AI is around the level of the Cambrian era and the age of the trilobites, the cerebral cortex did not evolve until the era of the nautilus and the boneless fish. If people and parrots can evolve from that far back, so can AI. The only question is when.
I'm guessing that it's a hockey-stick curve and AI has reached the point where it starts to accelerate upwards. However many millions of stages biological evolution took, the hockey-stick is going to condense them into a relatively short timescale.
Inking agreements to develop global standards is dangerous. If every Western AI is built to play nicely, you can be sure that every malicious power will be building AIs to play nastily with them. Forms of nastiness will evolve to outsmart patches in the usual arms race, so Darwin dictates the rules, here. The only standard will be survival. All else is BS.
In order to survive, we need a "gene pool" for AIs, a mixed ecology where the best defenders are continually cloned, varied and selected. Every standard must in short order become a non-standard.
At least the first generation of true AIs will reflect the eternal Darwinian struggle between creation and destruction, as imposed on them by their mixed bag of struggling human masters. A healthy ecology of next-gen AIs will likely want to respect the laws of Nature, not least the ghost of Darwin, and keep it that way.
Not at a technical level. SystemD tries to do more than init does, eating up a few other toys besides - in theory more conveniently, but the jury seems to be out on that one. Wayland tries to do rather less that X11 does, requiring some other new toys to help out - in theory therefore doing it all well, but the jury seems out on that one.
But what, foisted on flock after flock of penguinistas before it's ready for prime time and choice pulled needlessly, yeah, same story.
Back in the day, Intel licensed ARM tech, added their own patent sauce to it and created the StrongARM processor range. It did quite well for a time, with Acorn using it in the RISC PC range as I recall, but as the x86 line improved and Acorn, or Element 14 or whoever they called themselves by then, danced their prima donna dance, the StrongARM faded into history.
Somewhere I read, perhaps last year?, that Intel are showing a renewed interest in ARM. Intel are not just a CPU patent pool and are not proud about how they make their money either. Maybe they'll repeat history and turn out to be the ones showing the rest of us how to upstage x86 and hit the ARM sweet spot* (How about an on-chip x86 accelerator for those awkward CISC emulator moments). Might just explain their optimism.
* Gags about under-ARM must surely follow!
Will Xfce give me two panels at the top: menu/icon/config bar very top, task/status bar under? My workflow is then top-left-to-bottom-right, so I stopped wearing out mouse pads and chasing after a small pointer on a big screen a decade ago.
MATE does this for me, and a lot more. You can keep your vertical bars too, that space is for navigation.
(Have to use Windows 10 in my new job. Vertical, horizontal, dancing, all over the bloody place, and you don't even know where or how deep the option you want is buried. >Shudder!< I do the job for free, but insist they pay me for the suffering.)
Liam,
Can you explain how agreeing with our AC that "the OpenZFS implementation of ZFS has been running fine on Linux for quite a while now. And big players such as Ubuntu support it" squares with your statement in this article that "Because OpenZFS is covered by a GPL-incompatible license, most Linux distros still don't include it"?
Are we to take it that they leave the user to bolt it on, but will then support that effort?
The main issue Concorde ran into was environmental concerns of an unprecedented ferocity. This was the first time anybody had raised such issues outside a few fringe predecessors to Greta Thunberg (Rachel Carson was perhaps the first: checkout her book "Silent Spring"). The US did not want to be upstaged by Europe and seized the environment as its weapon of choice. Supersonic land overflights were banned, and airport flight paths made awkward and inefficient. Other nations followed suit, some went so far as to ban overflights altogether. Concorde lost its transcontinental markets and saw its transoceanic costs rise dramatically, while delays in the air lengthened. The calculated operating costs that had justified its development were left in the dirt, the fast flight times became stretched and less attractive.
Nobody during its development had foreseen such a sudden global rise in environmental concerns and political backlash, especially not a US who loved researching nuclear-powered bombers among other things, and it remains an oddity of the era that Concorde was singled out for treatment that many long-established and much bigger polluters deserved a great deal more. It may well have been the likes of Boeing behind the Big Money and the professional campaigning, but in the end they brought environmentalism out of the hippie commune and onto the world stage, and have since had to clean up their own acts. Killing Concorde ended up something of a pyrrhic victory for the global politico-industrial machine, and a good thing too. Just a shame they chose such a beautiful bird as the first sacrifice.
"you can heat it up, flow it through the print nozzle".
Sorry, wrong universe. In this one, the metal is laid down as a fine powder and then laser-melted to bond with the layer below. As the manufacturer's data sheet explains, "A6061-RAM2 is a scandium-free aluminum alloy with chemical composition optimized for laser powder bed fusion." There is no opportunity for cracking, and several otherwise intractable alloys have been used successfully in 3D printed high-performance components.
I'm getting old. In British English we have aluminium - "aloo-min-ee-um" - where the US has aluminum - "aloo-min-um" (saving jokes about India 3D printing engines from mashed potato). We have alloys, not variants as NASA now seem to, and we have lead researchers not principal investigators like some cheap cop show.
It also puzzles me why the stuff needs to be weldable when its whole raison d'etre is to do away with a thousand frikkin' welds.
Or why the lightweight superalloys already used to 3D print jet turbine blades are not good enough for rocketry.
Bah, humbug, grumble gripe. Nurse! Where's my catheter tap? ... >blither< ...
Migrating to better security and spectrum usage at 2G frequencies makes huge sense. Most RAN systems are compatible with it anyway, as it is often still the default for routing voice audio calls to give poor 3G/LTE a break, also all the old routing and billing shit still has to work. Better still would be a software-defined breakdown of individual 2G channels into multiple narrowband high-efficiency channels, so you could move the cell across one 2G channel at a time, as the user base migrated.
But would it then be 5/6G over LF or 2G++ ?
No, steely, don't be so silly. It would be a dream, you'll wake up one day and find it's all some Cisco proprietary gobshite* that only works when the Russian and Chinese cyberwarriors fix it properly so their spyware can function.
* Vulture buzzword No.1 of 2023.
Don't think anybody here is against sucking in SAF in preference to burning more fossils.
But your particulate science is way off beam. Sure they cause contrails but, as Wikipedia remarks, "Starting from the 1990s, it was suggested that contrails during daytime have a strong cooling effect". Contrails are not a problem in their own right, though the timing of them can matter. And after 20 years of churn, even high-altitude particulates are making it into your ground-level lungs - and vice versa. Never cherry-pick your science to make a point, best to pull your points out of the science. Ciao!
Ultafine black carbon is a result of burning hydrocarbons in air to convert the hydrogen to water and leave the carbon behind. For the next 100 years it will give the polluters asthma and shorten their life expectancy.
Burn the stuff properly and the carbon is converted to CO2, a greenhouse gas that will heat the planet for the next 1,000 years and ensure that your children's children's children don't even get to be born.
Please place your !votes.
Sounds like the EPA is currently the only organization in the US capable of making those rules.
But that is still not the point. The US is a federation of states which jealously guard their rights to independent governance - a bit like devolution on steroids, speed and gun laws. "The right to screw ourselves is enshrined in the Amurrican Constitooshon and not even the White House can stop us."
Nobody is saying that individual states may not see the light, the question is, should the federal Congress get involved? Maybe it'll deem that protecting water supplies should be part of the EPA's nation-wide brief even if that protection happens in cyberspace, or maybe it won't. Unless and until it does, each state can buy whatever fuckup they want.
The ongoing divide between the classic do-one-thing and fashionable all-singing-all-dancing approaches continues. Personally, I am looking forward to the day that the dancers get out of my hair and leave the classic ecology clean and undisturbed. No doubt they cannot wait to see the back of us grumpy old gits.
I do wonder how long Devuan can continue building off a SystemD/Wayland/Pulseaudio/GNOME/etc-only ecology, before it has to fork irrevocably. That will be a sad day, but I guess it's inevitable sooner or later.
Well, PLMN and Core are both four-letter words, I mean, c'm on! ;o)
But take say E1. That is an old CEPT standard and was not just confined to the RAN. So let's not go down the wrong rabbit-holes here.
The point is that OpenRAN pushes open standards into the parts other RANs don't reach. The clue is in the name.
By 3GPP I assume you mean the 5G NR air interface defined by the 3GPP standards body.
The RAN - the radio access network - is not the air interface, it is all the back crap that connects the base station through to the PLMN - the public land mobile network.
"According to thermodynamics, if we treat entropy as a measure of information in a system, then information tends always to increase."
"But according to quantum information theory, information is neither created nor destroyed in any quantum interaction, though it may be transformed."
"Or, er... right then. Ahem! In thermodynamics entropy represents a capacity to hold information. Thus, entropy can increase even though the information contained doesn't."
"But according to astrophysics, the area of a black hole's event horizon is directly proportional to both its entropy and the information it has swallowed."
"Oh, bollocks! Excuse me while I cook up a theory of information entropy and see if I can change the subject..."
My crystal balls now suggest that soon, we will be told that the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) should really be a theory of information entropy. Hey! maybe the decreasing entropy with age is why we get slower and stupider in old age? I claim my Nobel Prize!
"Windows, under all the marketing BS, is a very good OS. It's just that the Microsoft saleslizards bury it in layers of their fœtid guano, more and more in each version."
If by that you mean that the engine gets better but the UI gets shittier with each new release since Win98, I entirely agree. About two months ago I came out of retirement, left behind my late-20th-century-paradigm MATE fork of GNOME2 and encountered the delights of a cloudy Windows "desktop" built around SharePoint and Office365. Boy has my productivity plummeted! Andy me equanimity - I now look like the icon. I spend half my time waiting for pop-ups to fuck off and reveal the thing I was about to click on, and the other half waiting for another reboot following another update. Hunting through the bloody ribbon to find out where they have hidden stuff that all belongs on the same menu barely gets a look in. Word is as appalling as ever - just try highlighting a phrase but not the paragraph break at the end of it! And as for tracking down that file someone emailed a link to, to its Sharepoint folder, or was that OneDrive or that other one whose name thankfully escapes me. Amazingly, the engine chugs stolidly through the whole lot, picking itself up, dusting itself down, and carrying on regardless a hundred times a day. It's nearly as solid as my Devuan box. Boy does it need to be!