The headline
Hubble is not producing science. It is producing data. People derive science from that data.
Posts by Apprentice of Tokenism
48 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2016
Hubble Space Telescope is still producing science at 35
Time to make C the COBOL of this century
Tuesday 18th February 2025 17:09 GMT
Re: A non-IT pleb can read COBOL
> Changing language can fix a certain class of problem (by sheer virtue of that particular problem being specifically catered for by the language), but it can't fix institutional malaise. It can't fix sales promising the moon on a stick in two months and if you don't deliver it will be the apocalypse, nor can it fix penny pinching, bad management, and poorly written specs.
Yep, full ACK.
You bet that I am more than capable in writing shit code in any language, no matter how fancy, new or safe: I have done it in Assembler, I have done it in C, I have done it in C++ and now I am doing it again in Python. Only inexperienced people do not get it, that the bloody language is not the problem, but the doofus taking short cuts when writing software is. Like I said, I have been there many times.
UK floats ransomware payout ban for public sector
Tuesday 14th January 2025 13:47 GMT 
> It would be something of a ransomware payment "license," which may or may not be issued depending on the nature of the incident.
So instead of paying just the crims one pays the government (to obtain a license) and then pays the crims? Like a tax on a ransomware incident? Brilliant, just brilliant! Almost everybody involved wins!
DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course
Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out
OpenSSF sings a Siren song to steer developers away from buggy FOSS
Tuesday 21st May 2024 06:24 GMT 
What’s the point?
> instead intending it to serve as a "post-disclosure means of keeping the community informed of threats and activities after the initial sharing and coordination."
So another vulnerability blog funded by companies.
Perhaps those companies should instead just fund a group of developers whose sole task is to immediately provide fixes for new vulnerabilities? You know, provide them to the quoted lone open-source-dev projects?
German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice
John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL
Saturday 18th March 2023 11:01 GMT
Re: Has there been any progress on the chipped parts?
Sorry to disagree but my Brother HL-4570CDW is definitively using chipped toner cartridges. They stop working once their internal counter has reached the EOL number of pages that they are advertised for. Happened with this printer so far for every cartridge. I also had the predecessor model HL-4070CDW and I believe that you might be correct there that it did not have chipped cartridges.
Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty
Wednesday 11th January 2023 22:13 GMT
Re: Overlay
> It's like the good old days of OS/2 2, or RISC OS, or AmigaOS, or ST TOS, or various other late-1980s and early-1990s OSes I used. You turn it on, it boots, you're in.
TOS… Sigh. I loved it for its simplicity and I loved the machines for the possibility to control everything. Sigh.
Ireland fines Meta $414m for using personal data without asking
Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher
We seem to have materialized in a universe in which Barney the Purple Dinosaur is designing iPhones for Apple
Anyone for Palantir? UK.gov names gaggle of vendors to fight for contracts in £1.2bn back office application framework
University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired
Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder, sparks chaos for half a million projects
Friday 26th March 2021 18:10 GMT
Re: @Apprentice of Tokenism - This is where GPL is bollocks
Exactly. It is about a true choice and about admitting to the fact that in reality almost nobody - there are honourable exceptions - really can check on licence violations or pursue litigation unless being paid for it. So the sensible and reality matching approach that we took is Apache 2.0: want to make money with our source code and not contribute back? Go ahead, we are cool with it. The source got already developed and the developers got their pay check. Not a problem.
Honestly, nobody is going to know if somebody is violating the GPL in a commercial product unless somebody happens to examine the binaries of the product. The question is then: do you really want to go down that road and spend your own free time on sifting through millions of products if your code is used elsewhere? If you do not or cannot spend your own time on that then good luck finding enough people who are able to spend the time to find GPL violations in binary code for you.
Do you see now what the real issue is? Identification of GPL violations are the real issue at hand. GPL enforcement is simply not doable unless your are paid to do it. It is as simple as that.
That is where one really needs to take a reality check and ask if GPL is a licence that stands for something that one wants to support and pursue or if it is just a boiler plate blah blah that one will not really support and hence not pursue until litigation.
GPL was a brilliant dream of an ideal software and source code universe and it has worked for like ten years or so to get the open source idea going and for enterprises to pick up on it. Everybody should remember that. Before we had Public Domain but it somehow did not catch on.
Nowadays GPL is just a niche license among other open source licenses. And the other open source licenses work just better in reality and allow for a much wider coexistence and use of source code. GPL has become too hot to touch for any enterprise that tries to make money off their IP. They are not going to release their source code if it contains their IP and instead will look elsewhere for an alternative solution than using GPL code.
We, as a research facility - I know that we have it really easy because we have no "real" obligations - have decided on using Apache 2.0 as the default licence. There are times when collaborations cannot agree with us on using Apache 2.0 but that is dealt with on a case by case base. But the basic idea remains the same: We did already develop the code, we did already pay for it. So just go and take it, put it to good (or bad) use. You are free to do so.
Thursday 25th March 2021 18:41 GMT
Re: This is where GPL is bollocks
Yup. This is a prime example why GPL has outlived itself. It was a brilliant idea in the beginning to get things going. Nowadays it is just a nuisance and hindering involvement. We have moved on and found licenses that work in the real world for everybody much better.
Russia drags NASA: Enjoy your expensive SpaceX capsule, our Soyuz is the cheap Kalashnikov of rockets
SpaceX touches down in California as Voyager 2 spies interstellar space
Two-day Bitbucket borkage has devs tearing their hair out
Ex-NSA bod sues US govt for 'illegally spying' on Americans: We drill into 'explosive' 'lawsuit'
Live blog: Fired FBI boss spills the beans to US Senate committee
Thursday 8th June 2017 15:41 GMT
Re: Odd refernce to the statue of justice
Almost close. :-)
In both cases it is the Roman goddess Iustitia (Lady Justice). She has been depicted blindfolded, holding a scale in the one hand and a wielding a sword in the other only from the middle ages (15th century?) on. Before that time she would neither wear a blindfold nor display a sword but be shown holding a scale and a cornucopia in her hands.
Vigorous tiny vibrations help our universe swell, say particle boffins
systemd-free Devuan Linux hits RC2
Tuesday 9th May 2017 15:01 GMT
Re: It's fascinating that Linux now has the same problem as Windows
If you wish to see logging in free text as well as binary, install rsyslog and the binary logging will be duplicated into /var/log/messages (or the equivalent)
Oh really? Wanna see a prime example about the clusterfuck that systemd, journald and all the abominations that come with it are? Here ya go (copied from a real system running rsyslogd):
+++++ snip +++++
May 8 09:28:05 foobar clamd[1147]: Database correctly reloaded (6278511 signatures)
May 8 09:28:36 foobar packagekitd[2145]: PARENT proccess running...
May 8 09:27:16 foobar rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="8.4.2" x-pid="940" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] rsyslogd was HUPed
May 8 09:28:36 foobar rsyslogd0: action 'action 14' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/0 ]
May 8 09:28:36 foobar rsyslogd-2359: action 'action 14' resumed (module 'builtin:ompipe') [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2359 ]
May 8 09:28:58 foobar systemd[1]: Reloading.
+++++ snip +++++
Why there is a log line that has a time stamp in the past is completely beyond me and I do not want to hear any "yap yap it is rsyslogd's fault! yap yap".
What I do know though is that I would never have had this with good old plain text logs. So please stop telling all this bullshit. I am so sick of it.
CIA tracked leakers with hilariously bad Web beacon trick
Huge if true: iPhone 8 will feature 3D selfies, rodent defibrillator
Probe President Trump and his crappy Samsung Twitter-o-phone, demand angry congressfolk
Voila! Bazinga! Amazon turns Alexa into an annoying 'cool' aunt
Monday 13th February 2017 12:50 GMT 
SSML?
Well, that time has arrived with the introduction of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language, or SSML, added to the Alexa developer kit, which will let its computerized voice pronounce words and phrases in a more sophisticated, expressive way.
Is this the revival of S.A.M. and Reciter? "AY4 AEM AH KUMPYUW3TER."
NASA bakes Venus-proof electronics
Android's February fix-fest flings 58 patches
Wednesday 8th February 2017 10:07 GMT
Re: Security
Perhaps Google's development and implementation of Android has been so amateurish it seems it is done on purpose.
If you cared to look at Google's "2017-02-05 security patch level - Vulnerability summary" you'd see that almost all of the bugs found were either in drivers coming from hardware manufacturers or in the kernel. None of the drivers was developed by Google, the kernel only amended by Google.
New measurement alerts! Badgers, great white sharks and the Lindisfarne Gospel
Thursday 2nd February 2017 16:59 GMT
Re: There's something fishy about that standards page.
> The Vulture Central standard velocity for a sheep in a vacuum is, therefore, c/(50+0), or 5,995 km/sec
However, the units converter pegs it at 2998 km/sec.
This is better known as an Alternative Fact.
Mine is the one with the alternative universe in the pocket.
We don't want to alarm you, but PostScript makes your printer an attack vector
You're taking the p... Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has universal password: 'p'
'I AM TWEETING TRUTH TO POWER: AND YOU CAN'T STOP MY FACTS, MR PRESIDENT!'
Adblock again beats publishers' Adblock-blocking attempts
Tuesday 29th November 2016 13:00 GMT
Advertisers and publishers need to talk directly to each other and come up with a solution that works for both sides of that equation, and which will not annoy or compromise us on the receiving end - and cut out the parasites currently sitting between them.
Perhaps a future business model for ads on computers is one that pays me, the reader/consumer/potential customer, for loading ads on my computer/phone/whatnot when I am requesting a web page. Then as soon as an ad has been loaded together with the requested web page, pass the money that is charged per that single view to me and I'll be a very happy reader/consumer/potential customer who will at times check the ads.
Make this an opt-in choice on a per domain base and I bet you a pint that less than 25% of the readers/consumers would refuse to load the ads and rather pocket a few quid per month. Everybody wins (advertisers and customers) and it is a fair process. People who do not want ads loaded on their systems will not get any and the others who opted in on some domains will get some cash from the web pages of their choice.
Hackers crack Liechtenstein banks, demand ransoms
Asda server glitch leaves customers without online shopping
Donald Trump running insecure email servers
This speech recognition code is 'just as good' as a pro transcriber
Thursday 20th October 2016 12:14 GMT
Re: Ha Ha Ha - No really.
"Hey it's am cody's on 11:20 on Wednesday I need your help..."
This is just brilliant. Thanks for sharing!
On the other hand this is also a very sobering account of the current state of speech recognition in noisy environments (telephone line, bandwidth limited). What year is it again? 2016? Oh well.
Court finds GCHQ and MI5 engaged in illegal bulk data collection
Student software finds new Minor Planet found way out beyond Pluto
Thursday 13th October 2016 10:13 GMT
Trump visit?
"Could someone get Donald Trump interested, perhaps in an on site visit?" (typo corrected)
And while we are making plans for him, perhaps we can get him interested in moving his Balmedie golf resort to that iconic island on the edge of our solar system? Just think of the stunning views when you are teeing off on the ninth. An entrepreneur of his size would not want to miss out on a chance like this.
Wait, I'll get my coat, too.
A robot kitchen? Whatever. Are you stupid enough to fall for this?
Leap second scheduled for New Year's Eve 2016
Linus Torvalds says ARM just doesn't look like beating Intel
NIST: People have given up on cybersecurity – it's too much hassle
Thursday 6th October 2016 11:23 GMT
Re: Ditch Windows
> What about the games? And there's usually one or two things the casual users need that happen to be Windows-only from my experience, and WINE usually won't work on them, either.
So true. Setting up/running programs with Wine sucks. But never say die! Some genius came up with a very nice solution: playonlinux. Give it a try! It simply is brilliant.
Linus Torvalds admits 'buggy crap' made it into Linux 4.8
Wednesday 5th October 2016 11:25 GMT
Re: There is lots of BUG_ON() all over the place
In the old days (as in 1990s) BUG_ON() was meant to allow the kernel to boldly announce a situation that was not properly handled by any error handling code in the kernel. BUG_ON() essentially logs some status information and then halts the execution of all code in that machine rendering the machine unusable and leaving the user just the option to reboot the machine. Naturally a reboot could then trigger the same situation leading to BUG_ON() again. BUG_ON() could and should be avoided by better error handling code. If better error handling code is not possible there might be something wrong with the entire design of the code leading to the BUG_ON() call.
Top interview: Dr Patrick McCarthy – boss of the world's future largest optical telescope
Friday 30th September 2016 14:20 GMT
Re: This is what's it all about!
Since the mountain top has already been blasted into pieces and construction has begun it is too late to consider [wild life|ancient burial grounds|religious sites]. The project is on "go" no matter what. The Chilean government was in the past and still is very accommodating in that regard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
