Posts by dmesg 217 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2016
I once applied to a job, thought about it for a day, then withdraw the application. Sysadmin in a company that runs a number of state lottery systems. Main reason was I didn't want to be part of a gambling operation, no matter who ran it. But also didn't want a big coercion/extortion target on my back.
>> [W]hich of course Linus betrayed in 1996, by allowing Linux to become proprietary software again ...
Um, last I looked, Linux was still under the GPLv2-with_nuance.[*] Are you perhaps a member of the Judean Popular Front for FOSS Purity?
>> [W]hat actually happened is that GNU was almost finished (it was just missing a kernel) ...
That word "just" is carrying a lot of weight there.
Look, I get it. The GNU project contributed a ton of essential early work, independent of Linux, yet "Linux" is the name (almost) everyone uses. It's not fair. "Lignux" was proposed at the time, but ... an OS pronounced as "lug nuts" or "lick nuts"? For a year or two I tried always saying or writing "GNU/Linux", but eventually realized I was swimming against the current. It's too awkward for conversation. Natural language evolution is going to smooth it into something easier.
A though to take consolation in: it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Apparently from Ralph Waldo Emerson but (fittingly!) usually attributed to Harry Truman.
[*] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html says:
The Linux Kernel is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only (GPL-2.0), as provided in LICENSES/preferred/GPL-2.0, with an explicit syscall exception described in LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note, as described in the COPYING file.
This documentation file provides a description of how each source file should be annotated to make its license clear and unambiguous. It doesn’t replace the Kernel’s license.
The license described in the COPYING file applies to the kernel source as a whole, though individual source files can have a different license which is required to be compatible with the GPL-2.0:
GPL-1.0+ : GNU General Public License v1.0 or later
GPL-2.0+ : GNU General Public License v2.0 or later
LGPL-2.0 : GNU Library General Public License v2 only
LGPL-2.0+ : GNU Library General Public License v2 or later
LGPL-2.1 : GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 only
LGPL-2.1+ : GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 or later
Aside from that, individual files can be provided under a dual license, e.g. one of the compatible GPL variants and alternatively under a permissive license like BSD, MIT etc.
I was on a zoom conference call the other day when one of the presenters has this happen to her. "I can't see any of your faces or names anymore. I must have clicked on something wrong because now the screen is full of stuff and I can't make it go away."
I don't use MS stuff so I couldn't help. But I observed "maybe you need to reinstall Windows". That got a knowing, jaded laugh from about half the attendees -- none of whom are techies.
Not just hidden subsidies. I don't have a reference at hand, but I recall reading about enormous annual subsidies paid to fossil fuel companies, subsidies that were originally meant to help a young industry get started but were never phased out as that industry gained a chokehold on the economy.
There's also the cost to society of an industry that pollutes at nearly every stage of its products' lifecycles.
Just this last week I had cause to call our uni's help desk -- a student in a beginning CompSci lab session was not used to the command line and locked their account after too many failed login attempts. But what was the help desk number again? I went to open a browser on the instructor's machine to search for it, them noticed it was on the wallpaper image, and of the form xxx-HELP.
Then I remembered. I was on the IT staff some 30 or 40 years ago when they were setting up the help desk. What should the phone number be? And I suggested xxx-HELP.
Battery = Frame was an example, and not the most felicitous one. Dual-purpose structural material has been around for millennia and is still relevant -- think adobe and stone building materials providing both walls and heat management.
But electrical storage/generation in structural material is new, and as comments point out, problematic. It's far more likely to find uses where the material is situated in protected and controlled environments (buildings and fixed facilities) or where breakage is not a high-risk concern (cheap, easily replaced, not a safety threat).
Well, New York State is talking with the Province of Ontario (and probably Quebec too) about building nuclear power plants. I know they're eyeing way-upstate NY: rural areas that don't have as much political clout for pushing back, and a job-hungry populace. Who needs the Adirondacks when there are tech bros needing to get morbidly wealthy?
Back in the day my uni had a computer lab with IBM RS 6000 workstations. Cases were padlocked shut and machines were cabled to desks. One morning students came in to a room full of inoperative machines -- a thief had used needle-nose pliers to reach through the cooling slots on the side of the cases and extract the RAM.
"It requires several additional skilled employees with deep insights into the company business, to hang over a congenital idiot and hold its hand."
So, shall we initiate a new Reg -standard abbreviation for AI? "TBN": The Bosses Nephew. We just need to figure out where the apostrophe goes.
Which OS is easier to install? On reasonably common hardware, it's Linux, by a country mile.
But as was pointed out in the threads above, most users don't install Windows. They bring the computer home, turn it on, and there's Windows prompting you to enter the slippery slide into the Microsoft embrace. If it's a work machine, someone else has already configured it.
If Windows breaks, they bring it to a shop, and the shop knows how to fix/reimagine Windows. The user knows that the shop knows how to fix Windows. They don't know if the shop knows how to fix Linux, and there's a good chance the shop doesn't.
I'm not sure if there's a fix to Linux bug #1. Lots of planets have to align, and some power players work hard behind the scenes to maintain their monopoly orbit. But the comment about Valve/Steam, and the above-the-fold Register story about Europe and data sovereignty hold some hope.
Regarding that time frame for Eric Schmidt, I recently heard an interview with Cory Doctorow. He pointed out that the billions pouring into AI data centers have five year amortizations, but the processors have useful lives of around 1.5 years, less at the loads they're being pushed to handle.
IIRC, much if not all of matrix math, or it's use in the mainstream of STEM efforts, is within the last century or so.
I would look for people holding math degrees from programs where the emphasis is on proofs, not applying known results. Yeah, a pure math emphasis. Doing proofs means you have to ask: Am I right? Have I covered all the cases? What are the edge cases? Are there counter-examples? Can I generalize this? Is it useful elsewhere? Can I split out a complicated part into its own theorem/lemma? How can I make this easier to understand by someone else (or even myself)? Do I really need to do it this way, or is there another better approach? Have I really understood the problem? ... All habits of thought you want in a developer.
I believe that actually is done today (or at least in the last few years) with some of the highest-end astronomical telescopes. Petabytes+ of data on hard drives shipped from telescope location to data-crunching facility, daily. Facility runs analysis to pick out the interesting data and discards the rest, as there's just too much to store.
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