Posts by ibmalone

Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge

Re: your specific example is a genuine bone-fide compiler bug

The issue here is that "undefined" means "undefined by the language standard", some compiler for a weird embedded system can perfectly well chose to additionally define that behaviour (even if it was not specified as implementation defined) in a way that's useful. Although equally there's nothing to stop the compiler writers interpreting "undefined" as "stop with error in this case", except the sheer amount of code that might break. However, this is gradually happening, I occasionally have to compile relatively old stuff, and things that would once have got past gcc increasingly just trigger errors.

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

Re: KDE on X

If systemd had just stuck to replacing init and a nice set of "systemctl start/stop/restart" commands, with the ability to better define dependencies between services (which is what allowed replacing init's purely sequentially defined starting of services) then things would be fine. As it is it now contains random junk that attempts to replace system features. Even files like fstab which you'd think are separately handled are interpreted by systemd (and not usefully, we have one machine which still refuses to mount nfs shares on boot due to some issue with network availability, is it configured differently from the others? Not so far as anyone can tell).

I wouldn't care if it worked

Still using X on my Fedora desktop due to desktop incompatibilities and difficulties with QHD display. Tried to get the default Wayland to work, failed, changed back to X. Killing simple remote application running (x forwarding *and* x2go) is another genius move. Are they fixed yet? Maybe, sadly I've been hearing for years "not a priority" or "not a use case" and I've stopped expecting it to ever work, or the developers to ever be interested in the features their users need.

Middle mouse paste, another thing they removed and were refusing to implement, looks like it is now there (the similarity to Gnome changes that were forced on users as "good for us" for a couple of releases before they changed their minds has not passed me by), does it use a primary buffer (last selected text)? Who knows without installing and trying? It's certainly not documented anywhere, see for example Gnome discussion from 2015 https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/PrimarySelection, which is long out of date but still pretty much the top search result for this. (But preserves the lovely gnomeism of describing something they don't want to do as an "easter egg". Hey guys, document things properly and they aren't easter eggs, but that's probably too difficult.)

Currently looking forward to whatever replaces wayland. Back in the late 200x-es we got a nice view of what the future of linux desktops might be like in Compiz, and then spent the next decade or so going backwards while they chased single user Macbook functionality.

Re: I wish it wasn't such a mess

Except I've had nvidia drivers running fine on X for over a decade, they're kept up to date for new hardware. So I don't think we can necessarily conclude nvidia are the problem here.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

Port of death

Not really related, but "USB" + "death" reminded me I used to have a machine with a port that could regularly kill USB memory sticks. Was only really obvious the second time, and even then I forgot about it several years on and killed at least one more.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Re: Been there, Done That. will do that again...

"without having to teach through" should obviously read "without having to tab through", but as it was written on a mobile phone which thinks it knows what you want to type...

Re: Been there, Done That. will do that again...

Focus with mouse lets you put focus exactly where you want it, without having to teach through and, unlike any other design I know of, type in a window that's not the top one. Which is actually very useful. It predates Linux, back to older Unix window managers. These days it's mostly off by default and you have to go and turn it on. It does tend to cause problems for those who bizarrely seen to fling the mouse away from them whenever they move to the keyboard.

Anyway, like the middle button paste buffer it's gradually being removed by the wayland-gnome crowd who resent anything useful, so check back in a couple of years.

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

Re: Total isolation is coming

Kind of irrelevant, if it's only through-traffic then these laws can't be applied and strong encryption can still be used. Unless the UK wanted to bang any strong encryption coming via the UK and also own up to packet-inspecting everything going through, in which case people might start finding alternative routes sooner rather than later. Whether GCHQ can break strong encryption? With enough computing power thrown at it we know it's possible, but they couldn't decode all traffic. Do they have any exploits? Aside from whether we'd have this nonsense if they did (possibly to keep it secret), it's long past Turing's day I think.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Re: Goodbye Elon, don't forget to shut the door on your way out.

There's one school of thought that he's still annoyed that he was ultimately forced into buying twitter and is either deliberating trying to break it simply for spite or to get the creditors to take it off his hands.

Re: Best argument for rejoining EU

This is weird, as my experience (only as a car passenger mind) has been they are quite patient. Mind you that's Vlaams-Brabant, maybe Brussels or Walloon parts are different? Cycling (rather than motorcycling) it's quite common for streets to have no-passing bicycles zones. On the other hand, they really don't look before trying to emerge into traffic.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: Waiting game...

I wondered that too, but I think the boring answer is they just send the bill and then pass it on to debt collection if you don't pay. (The same as Virgin Media did when they incorrectly sent a bill for the month after I'd closed an account, paid the final bill and moved to a different address.)

Re: Waiting game...

I remember moving out of a flat around 2016, had previously changed the broadband to FTTC with Plusnet. On cancelling that contract (which had run its course), had to pay an Openreach *disconnection fee*, so far as I tell this was so they could send (supposedly) someone out to the cabinet and change it back to copper. They never did answer my question about how I could confirm they'd done this. Or why it was necessary. I guess the next occupant then got a FTTC plan again.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: Welcome to the new corporate Register

Not where I studied, a big sheaf of paper handout at the start of each lecture course was the norm, but I did benefit from (for example) Riley Hobson and Bence which is best described as a tome. The situation in humanities is different, where you have to read very widely (perhaps less open to this type of abuse). A new set of homework assignments if needed should be produced as part of teaching duties (sadly the only reason for needing to do this is students post and share the solutions, so you've got a good proportion who are turning in answers without actually doing the work).

Anyway, my comment was mostly about confusing the academic publishing side of this with textbooks. A good textbook takes a lot of work to produce and deserves renumeration, manipulating a course syllabus to flog your own work deserves a good talk with the conflict of interest advisor.

At a big UK university, our subscription covers most things, but it's still a mess, some things work nicely with shibboleth (so institutional SSO handles it), but others are IP based and you must go through the VPN. Yesterday trying to get an old (1988) pdf from a particular journal that our subscription supposedly covers I just ended up in sign-in-to-access pdfs circles, not the first time I've run into that and you wonder what proportion of the subscription fee is for things that can't actually be reached. (Often an email to library services eventually sorts it out, and amazingly there is still hard-copy of this series floating around in the library system somewhere, but seeing as it's for checking one reference in a report for marking that would simply take too long to do.)

Re: Welcome to the new corporate Register

The story conflates academic textbooks (for students) with what scihub does (research papers).

Textbooks, like most other books, take time to create and are written with the goal of selling books and making money for the author. This is fairly normal copyright territory. That they can be expensive is potentially a burden on students, but why book grants, libraries and (sadly less frequently) second hand bookshops exist.

Research papers are written to report people's research, the authors generally were paid for the actual work and do not make money from the article itself, there is no concept of royalties, often money goes from the author (or their institution or funder) to the publisher. The motivation for doing this is to share your work and count towards outputs for your institution and funders, it's actually not in authors' interests at all for the work to be paywalled as they would prefer more people could read and cite their work. It's like the entire industry works on the "for exposure" model. The copyright sits in quite a grey zone, the people who wrote the work (who you might think have the copyright) often are required to assign it to the publisher, or the publisher claims a share in the copyright from essentially typesetting, some pressure applied has meant that mostly authors can make the pre-proofed paper available (often in an institutional repository) and increasingly post it in a preprint archive before the journal submission even takes place, even in the pre-digital days authors got a number of copies they could send out to people on request. (It's still possible, though not that common, to email authors for a copy of the paper if you don't have access, researchgate attempts to automate that process, but in quite an annoying way.)

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: 21 inch, high res

One question is whether these adapters that output RGB can emulate composite artifact colours. As someone who grew up on playing whatever older games we could get our hands on on an EGA system that put out RGB I remember various CGA games that had apparently wacky colour palettes (cyan and magenta in particular), discovering years later that these would have actually shown up as much more sensible colours on a composite (probably NTSC) system. Different from dithering, certain patterns would display as completely different colours, I think some emulators can simulate the effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Not holding my breath

Most villages (and hill-walking takes me to a few) will struggle to field a pub and a shop that's open more than three days a week. On the other hand, having lived in various towns and cities in the UK (and visited many more across Europe), I'm fairly confident most (with the possible weird exception of Milton Keynes, and there's a reason) will have you in easy walking distance of a medium sized grocery shop, an off-licence, a newsagents, a pharmacy, and quite possibly a GP and primary school.

California on the other hand... On a conference visit to the US years ago I made the mistake of thinking it might be possible to walk around and see at least a part of the city. Turns out no, people like driving for half an hour to get anywhere. Bringing us of course back to Milton Keynes and a place that was designed on the basis you should drive everywhere.

Why anyone would fall for a moment for the claim that a low density settlement like a village would have all necessary facilities within 15 minutes walk, and simultaneously that it's preposterous that a high density settlement could is beyond me.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

Re: Colleagues are distracting

I'm currently on theregister because although I'm meant to be doing a review, it's a task that takes concentration and I'm sitting in an open plan office where two loud meetings are going on and a printer is running. The same would apply if I was writing or programming. Ear defenders are only so much use because in that environment, particularly speech even if knocked down in volume is still distracting (not sure if I'm allowed the ear defenders, we've been told we can't use noise cancelling headphones, which seems to be due to worries about hearing alarms). Pre covid (when working from home even part time was not an option) we had to have occasional meetings about the level of noise, which often involved hours of outright gossip, you'd be amazed the things people come up with to justify it. Contrary to the "shirking from home" phrase I've seen knocked around here I believe it's fully possible for people to waste a whole day at the office if they wish, some people may even be more likely to.

Absolutely it's useful to meet people in person, but as with everything else this comes down to organisation.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Re: "Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development."

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/

But as usual, however much RedHat employees who work on Fedora claim it's run by the community and that they have freedom from higher level influence, whatever RedHat wants to happen ends up happening. Because the smoke and mirrors trick is people who want what RH wants get put on the projects in the first place. This claiming there's no conflict of interest because your employment contract says otherwise wouldn't fly where I work, and I suspect not in plenty of other places.

Re: "Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development."

Thanks, in a way it's not even the telemetry (ubuntu doesn't have the same pretences), it's the general direction of travel and how it's being approached. (If you wanted to do this ethically, you'd at least consult the users, but no it's a suggestion to the fedora developer community and they are planning to default opt-in on the basis too many people would say no if asked yes/no. If you're having to trick people into something then you need to take a good look at yourself.)

I'll give Debian another try though. At one time it took a bit more effort than I really wanted to put into just having my home system work, but I image it's moved on.

Re: "Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development."

As a current Fedora user I'm open to suggestions. Otherwise I'm eyeing up Ubuntu. At one point in the past I was a fairly active community member and contributed to spins and package testing, I gradually got fed up, but to this point I've stuck with it as a personal OS because I know how to keep it working the way I want. The trajectory RedHat has been taking over the past few years (and whatever you say about being a community distro, Fedora is basically a RedHat shop) is looking increasingly unfriendly.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

We're an academic site and have access to a RHEL site license, we have RHEL installs, some other groups we work with within our institution also have RHEL installs. Others have CentOS (they could equally have RHEL). RHEL is to some degree a pain dealing with channels in this environment (hey, is that compatibility package we need in a server or a desktop channel? is it in a developer one?), making CentOS easier for some cases. RedHat support itself has rarely proved itself useful to us, access to some of their customer only solutions has sometimes been helpful and sometimes not moved us forward with a problem. Generally we've spent our on time hunting the internet and figuring out solutions if needed. The subscription is not our choice as a department, I suspect we have it for institutional infrastructure reasons.

What we also have are deployments like RocksOS for HPC use. This is CentOS based. Do I see them going to Stream or back to a directly RHEL-derived basis (bear in mind package manage and channel issues above)? No I don't. We have plenty of packages we use created by the rest of the community. They target Debian and CentOS; conveniently we use RHEL because it's CentOS compatible, not CentOS because it's RHEL compatible. It's becoming ever less of a useful desktop system, I've written here before about how they are dropping the components that support remote use without any suitable replacement (sorry, VNC doesn't cut it). Occasionally in normal use a component will just go to 100% CPU and the bugzilla solutions for this tend to be along the lines of kill it or delete a certain file every so often.

My own journey to using Linux (and partly to doing what I do now) started with a brief flirtation with Mandriva as a student. This was quickly discontinued, but later I found myself using RedHat Linux (before it was RHEL) in the lab for computing projects. I thought it was convenient to set up my own dual boot system. Eventually they dropped RedHat linux and replaced the "community" version with Fedora, I moved to that (also now being reconsidered). When I started with my current employer having experience of linux was an advantage. They were using slackware at the time (this isn't quite as long ago as it sounds...) and then moved to RedHa... no, they moved to Ubuntu. Later on I encouraged taking up RedHat which is were we are now. I've always liked developing on Linux systems because access to tools is so easy, I remember experimenting with programming when i was at school and being hampered in part by the cost of tools. So how do I feel about starting new students on an environment controlled by an organisation that sees them as hobbyists and freeloaders? Not great really.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re: Dangers of speed reading before I had to dash out

Frankly the word "excellent" has also been questionable over the past couple of years.

Re: Ignoring the big issue

And whether it would work in contract law. There is no "dual-licensing" available to RedHat. GPL requires they make the source available to customers that they provide derived binaries to under the GPL, that is, RedHat have GPLed source under license (via GPL) from its authors, they provide this source to their customers and they must do it under the terms of the GPL. The customer now has two separate relationships with RH, one their support contract, the other a GPL license on the source code (this is only a relationship with RHEL if they have contributions to the affected code).

The situation is now:

1. Support contract.

2. Source code license, partly from RH, coming after support contract. Even if the GPL "no additional restrictions" cause doesn't prevent RH contradicting it in their support contract, the fact that this license is granted after they already have a contract might require some careful construction, because otherwise who is to say this isn't a modification to their existing contract? They may be able to not renew, but can they actually terminate?

or

2. There is no RH owned code in that provided, so the GPL license doesn't involve their relationship with RH. In which case are RH really going to terminate a customer for distributing code that is openly available elsewhere and not theirs in the first place.

You might also wonder whether this is why they are apparently starting to drop things like LibreOffice whose non-GPL licenses may prevent them doing this. You might also wonder how this would affect anyone distributing packages built on RHEL systems, think Oracle Java headers.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: Red Hat and rpmfusion?

Exactly, what I'm wondering is what happens to efforts like EPEL. RedHat have gradually shifted responsibility for providing packages we actually need to EPEL. (Site license, running RHEL, need EPEL packages because RedHat can't be bothered building them any more, who's the "freeloader" there?)

Re: GPL violation

By coincidence, the same reason RedHat can't impose additional terms on GPL2-ed code!

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Clean keyboards

Could safely rinse it under ours, which is as often out of service as in. Funnily the kettle next to it keeps plugging along, strange that...

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: "craft's carbon fiber hull"

No divers here obviously!

Diver or not, just is just wrong. Pressure is (perpendicular) force divided by area, when dealing with water pressure that force is the weight of the water above you. For largely incompressible fluids like water, for whatever area you want to look at (square metres, square feet, square cubits), the column above it weights g * density * area * depth, divide by area and you get pressure = g * density * depth. (g is acceleration due to gravity in whatever your preferred units are.) This is also why one unit of pressure is mm/Hg (millimetres mercury), the pressure of that equivalent depth of mercury, this wouldn't work if it was exponential.

For gases the situation is different, density varies with pressure, so every metre down the weight of the gas you just passed is higher than that of the metre above it, making pressure with depth exponential (provided temperature is uniform and the gas obeys Boyle's law, neither of which has to be true in all situations).

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

Re: Reddit's CEO doesn't realize

Well, this is the fundamental problem with what reddit is doing, isn't it? Because pricing API access on the assumption that this is how they're going to cash in on machine-learning uses of their data automatically kills API use for user clients as it prices them right out, despite being orders of magnitude more than you'd expect it to cost them to serve those requests. And the result is the current anger from a user group they rely on to maintain the quality of the content they hope AI companies will want to scrape, it's almost the textbook example of killing the goose that laid the, perhaps not golden, but at least silver, egg.

And there is literally nothing, *nothing*, to stop them from, for example, putting contractual use restrictions on different API pricing tiers if they so choose, which could be checked against vendor and user ids. The even more ridiculous thing is that the horse has probably already bolted, the early starters have already pulled this data so all they can hope for is next round hopefuls.

Thousands of subreddits go dark in mega-protest over Reddit's app-killing API prices

Re: Isn't this just...

Exactly, reddit has always made looking after subs the job of volunteer moderators to the point of giving up responsibility. For those not familiar with the process, you can create any sub that isn't already taken. Example, r/sysadmin doesn't exist? Create it, and have complete control over its moderation, you can appoint other moderators, you can hand over responsibility to someone else if you want, and behave how you want too. This is a bit like somehow grabbing a popular domain, a sub like r/football will get a lot of traffic, and the only qualification required is to be there first. After that there is very little to stop moderators being abusive towards members of their sub, they can arbitrarily ban, I've seen on gaming subreddits moderators openly calling people "whiny little bitches", and reddit will do nothing. This isn't all subs to be clear, generally popular ones get moderated to what the audience will bear, but it demonstrates how much reddit needs them. That subreddit moderators can enact this blackout is a direct consequence of reddit's reliance on them, I'm sure they could technically unblock all of the now private subs, but they couldn't handle the resulting chaos without that unpaid assistance.

Re: The API is still free - for open source

Supposedly Apollo were willing to pay, but claim that the API pricing would have cost them $20M per year, i.e. 40 times the revenue you list. They looked at subscribers-only usage and found the cost to them per subscriber would be double what they charge for subscription. So for them shutting up shop is also an entirely rational business decision, because how do you make money like that?

So far as moderators, who save reddit a lot of work, go, they typically use these 3rd party services particularly to help with management of the big subreddits. Closing down the third party apps affects them as a group more than most other users and they're understandably annoyed about that.

I wasn't clear about why reddit was doing this in the first place really (they keep complaining about the cost to support third party apps, but nothing stops them inserting ads into the api feed for example). The suggestion in this article that they want a slice from developers who are pulling data to train machine learning models seems quite plausible, but to make that work they have to charge a lot more per api request than they would for a user interface application (since it's not return business; even if it pulls down all of reddit it only does it once, so they're hoping to get up front money against the profits those companies are hoping to make later). They could certainly find better ways to do that than putting the user app developers out of business.

For those "I don't have time for social media" people, reddit is probably the nearest replacement for usenet since google killed it. There are streams of cat videos if you want, but there are also dedicated technical forums and laser-focused moderation in some places. I've occasionally stuck the solutions to obscure technical problems there for lack of anywhere better to put it online (including under my own domain where nobody will ever see it).

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Re: Nope

I mean, I'll try it, but here is the official RedHat documentation for *multiple user remote desktop access* (as I said): RHEL9: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/getting_started_with_the_gnome_desktop_environment/remotely-accessing-the-desktop-as-multiple-users_getting-started-with-the-gnome-desktop-environment which explicity specifies you will have to set up a separate port (in vnc and in the firewall!) for each user.

On top of which you still must manually ssh tunnel to get a remote connection. Compare nomachine and x2go which dynamically handle all this for you. And you can call it a flaw in the desktop implementation if you like (although I suspect you have missed the point and think I mean multiple remote desktops for the same user), but RHEL have: 1. backed the development of Wayland, 2. exclusively pushed Gnome. So whether its the desktop or wayland that's to blame for this regression it *is* a regression.

Consider, we have a remote linux server to provide a linux desktop for people who primarily use windows machines but occassionally need linux. Currently we use X2Go for this, we only need to install some packages, they only need to click an icon on their desktop. The only per-user configuration we need to worry about is whether their account is permitted to login. Now we install RHEL9. How do we enable more than one user to remotely access a desktop on this system? What do they have to do on their machine to access it? What do we do when a new user wants access? Bear in mind that although they are unlikely to all use it at the same time we may have more than twenty people needing to do so. Sounds fun doesn't it?

Re: Nope

> Seriously, it's not part of the plan, it's not a stated objective, it's not a use case for Wayland. The developers have stated that their goals are smooth tear free, high refresh rate and variable refresh rate displays, and a simplified stack for local graphics... they are not planning network support at all, and I don't think it's ever going to appear... of course, though, tools from other people may provide some kind of bolt-on but the network aspect of X11 is being discarded. So don't get your hopes up.

This is a serious issue. I suppose the authors of Wayland don't care, but downstream should and apparently doesn't. RHEL9, only supported desktop is now Gnome. So X2Go which worked perfectly well for multiple user remote desktop access to a machine is no longer possible. The official alternative? VNC, which requires each desktop you want to run to be manually set up in a config file and tied to a specific port. VNC was a revelation when I first saw it (mumbles) twenty-ish years ago, now the way it's set up is outdated. In a way it's bizarre, RedHat's business is servers, not desktop systems, but here is wayland, a project that came out of redhat, and what is it's focus? Attempting to do high performance local graphics.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

There is none, you can see it in lower end models having jacks (compare Galaxy A23 and Galaxy S23). Apple started doing it so they could sell accessories and everyone started copying them at the premier end of the market (I suppose that's logic of a sort.). It lets you make the phone thinner, but at the same time they're getting taller and wider.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

Nice! Sadly still a bit bigger than I normally like them.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

Earbuds, not headphones. Although £30 will get you okay over-ear phones too, I got at least ten years out of a pair of HD 202s, the only time I've ever had wired headphones fail has been a cable failure (and on more expensive models you can, gasp!, replace the cable). AirPods to earbuds is reasonable, because that's essentially all they are (they are not custom IEMs), and my note about batteries in this comparison is specific, because anything with an in-built lithium battery will gradually lose battery life, until you buy a new one or (if possible) have the battery replaced, which means that after a few years even expensive bluetooth earbuds will start to have charge issues. I've used cheap bluetooth earbuds before (not in fact as cheap as the ones you've found) and the battery life quickly fell to the point I would have to make sure to charge them beforehand if I wanted to use them in the gym (one place wireless really is useful). I've got a similar anker pair to your sonys, the battery is tolerable but doesn't last anywhere near as long as claimed and will be noticeably less in another couple of years.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

Finally had to get a new phone without a headphone jack. Yes, they still exist, but the Venn diagram of features I'd like, such as more than 6 months support and screen less than 12", has an ever-shrinking intersection, and this is one I thought I could live with the compromise. It is possibly even more annoying than I thought it would be:

1. Bluetooth. Latency issues, duolingo in particular is simply not usable because of microphone switching. Having to stop listening to things because you didn't charge the earbuds today. Most devices can't share audio to multiple devices (no simple 3.5mm splitter for train or plane use), brings us to...

2. USB audio, can't charge while using (natch), unless you get an even more unwieldy PD splitter. Patchy quality of any affordable active converter even from a good brand, crackling I just never had with an onboard jack (with the attendant bafflement that the phone has a 32bit 384kHz DAC but even the official dongle is 24bit 192kHz, okay I don't believe for one moment any dog, let alone human, could tell the difference, but just why?), incompatibility of passive converters (and no charging for you my friend unless you go active anyway). Jack-in-the-box headphone dongle sticking out of your pocket when in use.

Yes, most of these can be fixed by paying a lot of money (apart from the USB audio charging and jack in the box issues), but a decent pair of wired earbuds is £15 and will last decades. A pair of AirPods costs £180 with "up to" 6 hours charge while the batteries are good. Not having a headphone jack allows my current phone to be about 1mm thinner than my old S4mini that had one, while being 20mm taller and 10mm wider, so long as you ignore 1mm of camera lenses. I'm so glad they've been able to save that space.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: Unfixable CRT Display

Late reply I know, but just in case, the Faraday cage is really for the electronics, MRI relies on microwave transmission and reception and is very sensitive to noise. The field itself isn't much affected by the Faraday cage, static magnetic fields are quite hard to stop, conductors don't really do it (although they do resist a changing field), there are things like mu metal which have high permeability and do sort of the same job, but they're nowhere near as effective. Really it's design and distance that's used to protect things outside the magnet, design to ensure the field has a quick drop-off outside and distance to keep anything important outside the area where the field can be a problem (the experimental magnet I worked on in the distant past had the 100mT isoline marked on the floor, but it was in the middle of a lab, not sure this is done routinely in clinical facilities, they probably just rely on room access control).

The Faraday cages can be pretty impressive though, down to having conductive door seals. One of the causes of a noisy scan can be an open door.

Re: South don't work in the North

I can absolutely believe they're that sensitive, what I find weird is that they would specifically be sensitive to being in the northern or southern hemisphere but not which way the screen is horizontally oriented. A vertical field component will cause electrons travelling horizontally to bend left or right, while a horizontal component will cause them to bend up, down or not at all (if travelling parallel, your CRT axis is parallel to a compass). The field inclination (cribbing the calculation from wikipedia) is about 68 degrees in London, -54 degrees in Canberra, so not inconsiderable, so the left-right shift (which would be consistent for a hemisphere, but the difference between those cities and the equator is also big) should be similar to the size of the up-down shift which can change as you turn the CRT around. There are a few ways in which one could matter and the other not, at a guess the CRT has shimming for one axis, but not the other, or the mask spacing is different for the two axes. Weirdly, isn't the Trinitron grille vertical? It should still be affected by left-right shifting.

Added to this there are the local magnetic anomalies like the Kursk and Bangui anomalies which I'd think would completely screw with this.

Re: South don't work in the North

For this reason I'm sort of sceptical about the whole north versus south part of the explanation, if even what others have said about the sensitivity of older TVs is true. Latitude also has a strong effect on the direction of the field (that is, near the poles it's more vertical than around the equator. This is really the only asymetry I can think of between North and South, that the vertical component of the field is in the opposite direction. Maybe that's enough, but it seems plausible that a few factory seconds might have had some other problem (slight magnetization somehow).

On the other hand, I do have my dad's story about a building (he was an electrical engineer responsible for commissioning), where a particular part of one floor had problems with their monitors. It turned out the main electrical room was above it, and the contractors had somehow managed to run the supply cables around it so as to turn it into one big solenoid.

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

Missing the point: yes Friday starts after Thursday, but both Friday 0000 UTC and Friday 2300 UTC are valid times to meet for lunch in Auckland and the sun sets and rises between them. You could talk about something being tomorrow and it still be the same calendar day, or tomorrow (calendar day) and mean just after we finish lunch. Yes, if you want to try to pick a different date line you can avoid that particular example except for people in Alaksa and Siberia, but it will still throw up nonsensical scenarios and generally mess with how people normally use the clock.

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

Meanwhile in Canberra:

Do you want to get lunch on Friday?

Is that twenty three hundred Friday or oh hundred Friday?

Edit: Auckland works better, but you get the idea.

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Move fast and break things

Volunteers?

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: FTFY

But, as with so many things, confusing the two is being used to push for changes that don't relate to people's perceived problem. "Don't you hate that websites keep asking you about cookies? Well, we're going to remove that consent red tape from GDPR to make it go away."

(And of course, yes, the correct response to being annoyed about websites asking for consent for tracking cookies all the time is to ask why they need to track you in the first place.)

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: Bow down before the market god

"For example, here in Blighty, sanitary products are not zero rated for VAT and so are more epxensive than they need to be. Essential products are not supposed to carry VAT."

I fully support things like free sanitary products for those who need them (and to avoid any misunderstanding, "those who need them" means those who judge themselves to need them), but I've always found this line of argument about zero-rating them either misinformed or dishonest. Essential products *do* carry VAT. Toothpaste has VAT, contact lenses and prescription glasses have VAT, toilet roll has VAT, non-prescription drugs like painkillers and antihistamines have VAT. Certain foods are VAT exempt and some are not, in a weird way that sort-of-maps to luxury foods are taxed (but not quite, hence all the arguing over jaffa cakes), and people understand that to mean "VAT is for luxuries", but that's not how it works.

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

Herberts

Nice to see the Butlerian Jihad has arrived early

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: Never get the chance to do it again

For the curious, is it possible to say vaguely what could be on a met office supercomputer that would be quite so sensitive? The only thing I can think is they're really protective of their models (for commercial reasons?).

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Some central Asian countries are quite hot on people trying to export antiquarian rugs and like to make sure you've got a certificate for it saying it's not!

Proprietary neural tech you had surgically implanted? Parts shortage

I also have a bird box camera which, when you want to connect it to network, (apparently) gives a varying series of beeps

Chirps surely?

"Nor is this a mere fantasy scenario from sci-fi. Last year, financial challenges forced neural tech specialist Second Sight to abandon its Argus II artificial vision product line – regrettably but inevitably leaving a number of its customers with delicate surgical eye-to-brain implants that can no longer be maintained, repaired or (possibly) even removed. Like all kit, it will eventually stop working but there will be no more fixes, upgrades, spare parts, or even anybody with the proprietary Argus II tech skills to know how to fix them anyway."

There needs to be some kind of escrow that the rights and proprietary information for this kind of thing can be placed in for this eventuality, it's only going to get worse. We inexplicably put up with patenting plants, but the line absolutely has to be drawn here. "We can't replace the battery in the device that is letting you see/keeping you alive because the company folded and now the rights are owned by some asset-striping firm, sorry about that," is full on black-mirror dystoptianism.