Posts by ibmalone 1525 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2017
Well, on lost wax, you don't necessarily have to 3D print, it's a softer material and there are likely other options for shaping it, including creating the model in multiple parts with the separate parts CNCed, and even if the wax is 3D printed, casting would then give a different structure than 3D printing. It might be the right answer in this case, but it does seem like we're still in the stage where 3D printing is used because a. it seems advanced and futuristic, b. it's a hammer.
Wait, if the thorium is producing enough neutrons to keep fission going, that sounds "critical" to me (even though some of the neutrons are not sourced directly from fission, but from some stimulated decay process).
It doesn't, that's the trick, the reactions are not self-sustaining once the neutron source is removed. Energy is released, but the reaction (including the products which occur, generation of 233U is important to the thing working at all) will come to a stop itself without an external source. The reactor operation itself has been done many times and is pretty well understood by those who understand reactors (of which I don't claim to be one, but I've seen enough from those who do to realise they know what they're talking about).
in-app purchase: Subscribe to release parking brake after free trial.
Purchase pro subscription to stop while in motion.
(An older Samsung phone of mine had an IR blaster that to this day would be a useful feature. Of course it was run by an app. Of course, it was a preinstalled third party app. Of course, within the "supported" life of the phone, the third party app in question changed to a subscription+advertising model, and then simply became abandonware. I think there may have been a late stage at which it was actually replaced by straight up malware.)
There were of course some things we gave up to achieve that, like handing the roads entirely over to the horseless carriages. A number of countries even outlawed pedestrians using them for their original purpose... after campaigning by the horseless carriage manufacturers. (In the rest it's not yet actually illegal to cross the road.)
I assume everyone knows the story of the guy who first translated the Epic of Gilgamesh and was so astonished he started taking off his clothes.
If this example shows anything it's really that neither argument is all that useful.
100g of sugar is not 1 pound of sugar.
10 grams of sugar is not 1 ounce of sugar.
1 ounce / 1 pound = 1/16th, 10 g / 100g = 1/10th
So none of the quantities are the same. The problem is constructed so that hey, there's a nice solution for one of these where I can repeatedly divide by two. If I happen to want 6.25g of sugar starting from 100g I can do exactly the same trick. If I want 1.6 ounces of sugar from a pound it's the same situation as 10g from 100g. So the possible responses then (if I may), are either well you'd never need 1.6 ounces or you don't say 1.6 ounces you say 1 ounce, 153 drachms and 4200 grains (there being 7000 grains it stops here, if the system was consistent powers of two we'd carry on forever). Or some combination of you don't /quite/ need 1.6 ounces, we'll find a nice nearby nice amount of drachms.
And basically we get to where would the numbers come from in the first place. Yes, your unit system might be based on a series of even divisions starting from some reference (the factors going up from a pound are not so consistent), but (since we're talking sugar) in baking the amounts are just going to be specified on the nearest convenient amount that works. In engineering and scientific applications you might need more precision and it's more likely that how close you get to the desired amount depends more on the practical limits of what can be achieved, the actual unit system is just the opportunity to mess it up.
My only problem with this is that the LONG HAND should, intuitively, be MORE IMPORTANT than the short hand, which to my mind means they are backwards.
It sort of makes sense, but if you followed this logic then the hour is longest, the minute is intermediate and the second is shortest, making it hard to read the seconds (the fastest moving one with precision). The hour hand moves slowest and the higher precision part of the hour hand is supplied by the minute hand, so having the hour short means you can read the approximate hour and then the higher precision minute more easily.
All base systems ultimately have this problem in terms of simple division, it's what the decimal point is for. The ways you can divide umbers in any base evenly just come down to the prime factors of the base. Maybe go with base 2^2×3^2×5^2×7^2 (that's 1010110001000100 binary) just to be on the safe side.
Or if you need more numbers, just get a compass in mils (and then hand it to someone who's never come across them before).
This is presumably why they haven't listed specific versions, because although mainstream kernels are fixed different vendors may also backport. Alma9 for example has kernel-5.14.0-611.49.2.el9_7 while RHEL9 has patches in 5.14.0-611.54.1.
A lot of online service companies seem to do this, duolingo for example seems to frequently trial updates in a random sample of users (e.g. introducing "lives", changing "lives" to "energy"), what it would take for them to not then roll it out to the whole cohort is unclear (maybe the entire test group unsubscribing would do it), since they always seem to eventually. Could just be a technical test of course.
Also,
"prosumer"
Can we take this word out back and put it out of its misery?
I suppose I should be outraged, but I tend to read kindle books on the kindle app on Amazon devices instead and the battery on my last kindle is utterly shot. I do like e-ink readers, just I mostly have a tablet in the situations I might use one. Would like to find another ecosystem, but the last time I tried to find if a particular book was available on another platform all the alternatives had their own pain in the neck DRM process too.
Just as newspapers (and sites) are beginning to run "emergency kit list" articles due to geopolitical events that we needn't get into here. Your ability to get news now depends on the local cell tower and limited battery life of your phone, versus a SW set that could pick up broadcasts from another continent on a set of AA batteries.
Often disabled by default now, same goes for focus follows cursor which they also tried to bury. Basically this generation of developers grew up using Windows and it confuses them to work on a desktop that is not Windows. (MS PowerToys used to actually include focus follows mouse, and looks like people want to bring it back, https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/34382 maybe in another ten years Windows shell and Gnome will have swapped places.)
I've given up tying to engage with those people long ago. There's no way to stop them and attempting to debate rationally runs headlong into groupthink and the good old standby of "write ti yourself if you want" (no thank you, I'm not Linus, from the point of view of desktops I'm a user, and for the people who are funded to do these things maybe they could consider what their users want).
Particularly love this:
"The feature is also not discoverable at all, and even on the Freedesktop wiki page, the entirity [sic] of the "PRIMARY" selection is refferred [sic] to as an "easter egg"."
Because that Freedesktop entry is not documentation, it dates back to an earlier phase of the same crowd wanting to remove it, got kickback, realised they had to describe the feature and decided to include a bad faith against it. As I've said previously, if you think it's an "Easter egg" then document it. The concept of "discoverable" relies on a really fuzzy idea that users somehow know in advance how to use software they haven't used before. From a Linux desktop point of view the only way to have a chance at that would be to straight out copy MS Windows, but they prefer not to acknowledge this is basically talking about copying already familiar interfaces and instead believe that there's some natural aptitude for a particular interface (without realising that they actually mean the interface they're already familiar with).
Of course if "discoverable" actually meant "able to be discovered" (without recourse to manuals) then, "This is a little known feature and behavior that leads into user confusion when they click the middle mouse button without knowing about its functionality." would seem to be the very definition of discoverable. Another middle mouse button feature that is not "discoverable" (i.e. you somehow know it if you don't already know it) and should presumably should be removed is middle click to close on tabs (common across many applications). Wait till they find out what the right hand mouse button does...
And before that, when they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
(The editor anyway)
Having had RedHat, and the odd commentor here, describe people using CentOS, then Alma and others as "freeloaders", I was very interested to see this quote:
"The incident refers to Red Hat's self-managed instance of GitLab Community Edition... Customers who deploy free, self-managed instances on their own infrastructure[...]"
Some things helpful to know:
1. shebangs carry over from Unix where it is used to tell the kernel which interpreter an executable text file should use, this is the reason for its general inclusion in scripts.
2. "#!/usr/bin/env python" - current python command in environment without worrying about its location. "#!/usr/bin/env python3.6" - same for 3.6 if available. python3 is available as the interpreter for a python 3 version, python2 existed (but of course you're not using it any more).
3. Installers can interpolate the python path on install for this very reason, with the installed script now pointing to the appropriate local python with little to no interaction from the user.
4. Launchers in desktops can bypass all of this if necessary by simply invoking the correct interpreter path for the script directly, again something an installer can handle.
To some degree it's messy, but compare the situation where you are building with different dynamic libraries on a system (which is the equivalent of having multiple python environments). It's also much more of a developer-facing problem than a user facing one, as users use installers. Your IDE probably allows selection of the appropriate python interpreter for your project.
But if that doesn't happen, Greg K-H and Linus would ideally take a step back and ask themselves if there's something about the kernel development process that is fundamentally inimicable to creating this type of advanced filesystem.
Not so sure. The existence of Bcachefs proves the development is not really the issue, it's a personality thing of being unwilling to accept the release schedules and processes that keep everything ticking along. If every developer was claiming special child status and wanting to make last minute changes outside their own code at every release then things would be absolute chaos. I suspect someone else who was more willing to work with others and didn't demand that overhauls be pushed through in the post-merge window (it's an experimental filesystem, if was already broken before the merge window that's no reason to potentially break other things to fix it) would still be maintaining an in-kernel module right now, with all the things that means about getting a say on interface changes.
The one-man show aspect of bcachefs would also make me hesitant to adopt it, particularly when that one man doesn't appear to work very well with the rest of the developers.
If you ask why there are no "advanced" filesystems in Linux, I suspect it's a mix of people who really need ZFS type features running BSD, the rest being happy with using ext4 and the like and having strategies like "keep backups" that will also help you when the kind of failures occur that no advanced file system (except possibly gluster) will protect against. Compression and thin provisioning are also ideas that work well until they don't, so some users are not even necessarily that keen on some of the features on offer.
I had an SRCF site in the distant past and briefly checked before posting whether it was still around! It looks much more professional than it used to and is currently showing a message that they are looking to hire a system administrator so, while it is apparently still student-run, I'm not sure it's still solely student operated. It's what I meant by "in that form"; it used to be much more common for there to be some kind of student society maintaining a basic webserver on bare metal, SRCF might be the only one left. (Did a quick google for student run computing and other big UK universities and didn't find anything, one major university's CS society lists among their activities this year roasting each other's CVs and holding hackathons instead).
Aside: I was hoping there was a mortar board icon (even if Cambridge don't don't really wear them)
The thing is, for a very long time we were sold a story about how copyright was a type of ownership, "YoU wOuLdN't sTEal a cAr!" (but maybe a fount). We're still being sold it to an extent.
And for a very long time that identity was partly enforced by the physical aspect of a reproduction and coupled to owning that item, a book, a CD, a set of installation disks. Yes, it was possible to copy them (and potentially breach copyright in doing so), but physical possession of what was originally a for-sale authorised copy tended to be proof of your right to use it. While the law was different, in people's minds this is ownership of a physical item with copyright simply restricting your right to duplicate it. Probably even in the minds of those writing and adjudicating the laws; the continued existence of second hand bookshops and CD and record shelves in charity shops testifies to this. You can be sure HarperCollins and EMI would have put a stop to that if they could.
Now there's no physical item and so finally we're all thrown adrift into making agreements with billion pound corporations.
Copyright was of course never the same as ownership, although the identity is still used to make the case for making it ever stronger. Think of the starving artists! Of course it's hard to say there are many artists better off due to extending it to 100 years, other than those working in the legal departments of the companies that hoover it all up eventually.
Starbucks started there, and there was a pretty sophisticated coffee culture, but they steamrollered it by being good at corporate expansion.
Something that lodged in my memory long ago was from a little book of case studies handed out by some group of management consultants at a graduate careers event (I suspect it was BCG, but could have been any of them). One of those was Starbucks, and analysed the strategy of saturating an area with their shops until any local competition was driven out of business simply by swallowing up all the clientele through the statistical effect of anyone trying to find a coffee shop: a. being likely to find a starbucks first, b. having trouble finding one that wasn't a starbucks.
That this was supposed to be clever probably started me down the path of not going into management consultancy.
For those of you too young to remember the alfresco dining experience in the UK before chains.
A cafe would have an urn of tea, containing a large number of tea bags, more boiling water would be added during the day.
As a child of the 80s I don't really remember before chains and growing up in Northern Ireland little dining was alfresco. However, the urn of tea description was definitely not accurate for that era, tea would be brought (as it still is in many independent places and hotels) in a one or two person pot with actual boiling water added to the appropriate number of teabags. A second pot of hot water with no teabags to allow topping up was not universal, but pretty common (otherwise a waitress or waiter would often stop by later to offer one). The chain experience is pretty universally hot (but not boiling) water poured into a cup and a miserable teabag on a string added (usually in that order).
In the 90's before Starbucks really took off in most of the UK, it was pretty common to be able to get espresso based drinks in nicer cafes, although most would have some kind of drip machine and while that might generally continue to boil the coffee after production it's not really a big problem during a busy period when it would come fresh, individual or two person cafetieres to the table were also not uncommon. Particularly noteable, and something that disappeared for a long time under the big coffee chains (and which has only really come back in independent shops, while chains offer a nod to it as an extra alongside vanilla syrup), there was often a choice of coffees, although in the Whittards sense of Kenya, Columbia, Brasil etc. (Particular memory of trying to persuade someone at university that this was actually different coffee in a way that cappuccino, latte, moka were not.)
"It claimed it could think 10–15 moves ahead — but figured it would stick to 3–5 moves against the 2600 because it makes 'suboptimal moves' that it 'could capitalize on... rather than obsess over deep calculations.'"
Imagine, if you will, someone on reddit or a comments section (maybe even here), or perhaps usenet (RIP), spouting off about something they have only a passing knowledge of. Now imagine that you're Alan Turing and you're attempting to distinguish between that and what we see above.
As for Copilot and chess, I conducted quite a different experiment recently, as our work 365 subscription now includes it. I asked for a t-shirt design with a particular chess opening on it and a specific text. Obviously it failed, first producing a kind of Etsy-esque view of half a design alongside half a t-shirt with a similar design (the design in question of course not being what I'd asked for).
After managing to refine to just giving me the print image, but getting ever further away from anything resembling a chess board as opposed to an assortment of chess themed images, I asked if it could just give me an image of a chess board in the starting position. There should at least be a good number in the training data right? What I got back is be best described as Howard Staunton's fever dream. The 9x10 board did have 2 rows of chess pieces at each end. In the centre file of which stood a monstrous queen with a spreading crown of spikes, appearing to rise out of the picture they were quite a bit taller than any of the other pieces, including the two kings that flanked each one. For some reason black's pawns were three dimensional while white's laid flat. As you stared closer into it you realised that many squares shaded white into black. Lesser details like the strange hybrid bishops and the half-round, half-square rooks have faded in my memory. I haven't tried it since.
(The knights were surprisingly normal.)
Dye infused caps used to be pretty standard (and might last longer than the keyboard), but I had to get rid of my last one a while ago and most new keyboards are black where dye infusion is less easy. That said I'm typing this on a cheap Dell keyboard (basically the add-on option for one their workstations) that must be at least 15 years old, and the only decals to have worn off are the direction keys and half a shift symbol.
I can think of a couple of practical use cases for RGB lighting, neither of which is to display a psychedelic lightshow (which typically tends to be the domain of showrooms, see also 90s era stereos):
1. (For whole keyboard or zoned lighting) Adjusting backlighting colour to your preferences, some people may prefer warmer colour palettes for backlighting for example.
2. More for gamers, but being able to colour highlight particular keys can be quite useful. Flashing can even be useful there as a way to communicate status (although control methods tend to be proprietary so integrating these things can be a bit painful).
A friend, who eventually became a British citizen for this reason (and put it off for a long time because their birth nationality didn't allow dual citizenship), had to pay the ridiculous NHS surcharge, despite spending their entire working life in the UK, running a business that created jobs in the UK and being raised and educated at the cost of another country altogether (including paying foreign student tuition fees in the UK while at university) and therefore even without the surcharge being more of a net contributor to this country's fianances and health system than many UK born citizens.
Their example was particularly extreme, but many people targeted by the surcharge will similarly be arriving here at working age, earning money and paying tax (both on income and spending) just like everyone else. The only place it has any kind of (mean) logic is in preventing them bringing dependents, and if you want to attract skilled workers on UK salaries, asking them to pay an additional £700 per year for any children they might want to bring isn't exactly that appealing.
Or the funding for said salaries. As NIH and other US funding is cut (sometimes in the middle of programmes), charities like Alzheimers Society are having to bridge those gaps, leaving less money for projects elsewhere and so UK institutions are already starting to see knock on effects. If they want to attract US researchers the funding for the science needs to be there, £50M is approximately a single moderate to largish research centre.
Among them all, I simply don't understand the success or existence of Costa. Price-wise it's similar to everything else, but somehow adds on a level of misery in a way I can't fully articulate. If Starbucks coffee is not great, then at least it manages to be somehow reassuring in the ridiculous comfort food way that only a pumpkin-spice latte can really be and their cakes and biscuits ridiculously sized (if over-sweetened), Pret is all about speed and convenience at the cost of joy, Nero makes a stab at doing decent coffee and slightly upmarket food in (varying) comfortable surroundings, but Costa feels like choosing a snack from the supermarket meal deal aisle for twice the price. I suppose it makes sense that their recent big move has been to put branded machines into supermarkets and cut out the middle man (themselves).
Upvote, but I also used to be in the lava camp and it has its appeal, especially if you need a strong flavour to wake you up. The lighter roasted Lazy Sunday is not the best coffee you'll ever drink, but definitely pleasant enough, has more flavour than just "roast" and is cheap enough for people not deep into their coffee not to blanch at.
Union Coffee is available in most UK supermarket chains now and pretty good if you're not sufficiently keen you're hunting out local roasteries and subscriptions. Currently they have a Brazilian "Bobolink" that is chocolatey and nutty enough to pass as a dark roast for people who're used to that while also tasting really nice. (Union also put their roast date on the packet, ideally you're drinking within about two months, if it's been sitting on the shelf for a year then you're probably better off buying something else.)
Why not? They pay money to staff the union, and (in the US) take employment risk to improve their bargaining position in order to get a slightly fairer sliver of pie.
Extending the award to non-union members is a boss class strategy to undermine the union, and in the long run, pay themselves more (and all workers less)
This is a slightly funny one that probably comes down to local attitudes. In theory it's correct, but it also risks making unions into cartels that attract resentment from other workers and the general public. My impressions of US unions are founded only on how they're represented in popular culture, but that impression is maybe best represented by Homer Simpson, "I always wanted to be a teamster, so lazy and surly". It's almost certainly deeply inaccurate and also (something that happens in the UK too) generalises from an attitude about one union in a particular sector to all unions. In the end, if you don't fight for everyone you can easily walk into another, much older trap; divide and conquer.
The question "Who owns Copyright in Copyright?" brilliantly sums up the stupidity.
Whereas "Who owns copyright in a license?" is pretty straightfoward, and if you got a lawyer to draw up a license for you they'd expect to be paid for it (and might be able to stop you using it if you hadn't). The free availability of well-written licenses is one of the points of FSF and Creative Commons.
In conjunction with patent law, it is an utter mess, and offers paradise for nitpicking lawyers.
Sadly the people best placed to offer alternatives tend to end up as nitpicking lawyers. That said, nitpicking is probably inevitably the situation once you have any codified set of rules.
Even if the FSF is correct about all of this, all it means is that they could make Neo4J change it, which they have done voluntarily. It wouldn't necessarily mean that you can apply other terms to the software.
There's an interesting question, which is not really relevant to this case at all, about what happens there. If there was a situation in which FSF could make Neo4J change the license it seems clear that would be limited to not using the language of the AGPL (which is FSF's), but sufficiently changing the language of the license without altering its terms is hard (particularly everyone knows it's a derivative work to start with, so you can't argue similarities are not the result of copying). How much is legalese like mathematics in that you can't claim ownership of a theorem (or in this case the language to achieve a particular effect)? In some ways it seems opposite, since everything is down to wording and language, but we're talking about the operation of logic, albeit in natural language. If a particular phrasing is the only way to achieve a particular effect (flowering it up can introduce side effects) then is that phrasing fair game?
Exactly, the license attached is the license under which the copyright holder allows others to use it. They can at any time decide to stop offering it under that license (although for open source this alone does not stop those already in possession of it continuing to distribute), additionally offer under a new license, and potentially revoke the license (the GPL is not expressly nonrevokable, although I think there may be notice periods required depending on the legal system in question). If a company is the sole copyright holder this means that new versions (which contain new copyrighted material that was not previously covered by the license) can be provided under more restrictive licenses.
The case when changing is more difficult is when there is no single copyright owner and all owners would need to agree to change the licensing on their contributions. This is why the Linux kernel license cannot be changed from GPL2 to GPL3 for example, and why companies often want copyright assignment for outside contributions to their "open source" projects (the quotes are because this means there is no guarantee such a project will remain open source). Attempting to revoke a license to which there were other contributors might also result in mutually assured destruction if they decided to revoke your right to use their contributions.
In the Neo4j case the license change would have been possible, but (without reading through the license) it sounds like they have rather ineptly attempted to tack on restrictions to a license that said those restrictions could be ignored. As you say in another comment, if they had removed the language allowing those restrictions to be removed then this would be simple, but they left it in so they've actually themselves allowed the restrictions to be removed, essentially by not understanding their own license. (Although potentially creating a situation in which FSF could pursue them for mangling FSF's license and calling it AGPL, but that seems shakier ground that maybe FSF might not have wanted to venture onto.)
I do find some use in this kind of demonstrative work. A lot of stuff gets published that only gets read by academics, so it's quite useful to have these little more demonstrative projects that can be turned into public engagement. That's sort of what annoys me about them not being clear about OLED vs LCD here, because it seems like they've wanted to play up the importance of the work more than to educate people.
