Posts by doublelayer

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Re: Pointless

"As for snow, it doesn't really matter in the big picture, most big urban centers never experience 2 inches of snow (and snow is getting less and less common anyway)."

I'm assuming you live in a place that doesn't? A lot of cities do get snow. If your climate is a continental one, common in North America, eastern Europe, or Asia, you probably get snow during the winter. Unless the city is very good at clearing it from everywhere, there will be occasional places where it impedes travel. As the climate warms, we won't see snow vanishing. Temperatures aren't soaring, they're gradually sliding upward. In fact, some places may get additional snowfall as precipitation patterns change. There are large parts of the planet that won't have to deal with this, but just because you live in one doesn't make the issue disappear.

Re: Pointless

"Could this, in fact, be less polluting than road delivery?"

At this stage, I think the answer is no. There are several variables that go into the calculation, and I don't have numbers for each one, but here are the things that would contribute to the determination.

The drones here use batteries and presumably recharge from the grid. That's an advantage over trucks that burn fuel to move. That advantages the drones, but you still have to include the pollution used to generate the power to recharge them. It's likely less as grid power is more efficient than internal combustion engines. However, a vehicle can carry a lot of things on one trip, meaning that a car's emissions can be divided by the number of deliveries it makes in one go while the drone's emissions only cover one delivery. For each delivery they make, there's also the emissions of returning to the recharge point.

Another issue is the material cost of the drones. I'm guessing they don't last that long, especially the batteries (it's almost certainly lithium ion batteries and they'll be heavily stressed to keep a drone in frequent operation). Cars tend to last a while before large parts go to scrap.

Finally, there's the part of the operation before the drone gets involved. I don't know how their system works, but I doubt they have a drone launching facility at each location from which they ship. That means the items have to go to that place first, which probably still involves a car. Depending on how they do this, that could remove a lot of the environmental benefit they still had.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Many of those outposts don't have any people on them, as France enjoyed collecting islands that aren't really suitable for people to live on. One of their territories often doesn't count as land as it's underwater at high tide, but it gives them a massive patch of the Indian ocean that they can claim to own.

Some of the ones with people won't have a problem because the small populations mean that a small amount of connectivity goes a long way. For example, Réunion is one of the most connected parts of France despite its remoteness because the existing fiber connections cover the local area well already. French Polynesia isn't as advanced, but they've already completed the project of connecting fiber lines to each of the smaller islands (the big ones already have links). Each of the small islands is small enough that they don't need a lot of connections in order to have satisfactory bandwidth. Many other overseas French territories are in the Caribbean, where there are a lot of islands that are building networks.

This isn't to say that satellite is never needed, but just that remoteness doesn't always mean it is relevant.

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

That's for Mac OS two versions old. If we consider Big Sur, there are machines stuck with it that are only six years old. Let's consider the MacBook Pro 13-inch from 2014 (discontinued May 2015, so a little under seven years ago). It has a Haswell-series CPU. Now let's consider the MacBook Air that was released in 2020 (the last with an Intel processor). It's a newer chip. Memory-wise, they have the same amount. Storage-wise, the disk interfaces are the same speed and the disk capacity is the same. Processing-wise, the chip has the same number of cores and they benchmark similarly (the single-threaded benchmark is almost exactly equal, whereas the Air gets a slightly higher multithreaded score). True, the older machine does that with a 28W processor and the newer with a 9W one, but that only affects the battery life. In short, there's no technical problem with the older one's performance that prevents it from running the newer OS.

That's not the newest machine that's getting cut off. I used that one to have a valid comparison (had I used the 15-inch laptop that uses a 47W quad-core chip, I could have given you even better proof about the performance issue). The latest machine not to get the update is the MacBook Retina from 2015 (discontinued April 2016), narrowly beating out an iMac. This means that they're only keeping support up for six years before they allow security vulnerabilities to remain deliberately unpatched.

Contrary to your claims, it isn't just now that you would expect someone to use a computer longer than six years. I know people who are still using computers from 2010, and I'm talking about people who run Windows on them and never upgraded any of the internals. For that matter, I also know people using Macs from that long ago, though unlike the Windows people, they're stuck without patches. We all know that, if you make certain updates like installing an SSD and run efficient software, you can exceed that length easily.

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

WebKit can be used as a component for displaying HTML content inside other applications. Not all applications that do so will use it. There's also the possibility that Mac OS would open Safari instead of your preferred browser for certain types of resources, meaning that someone could tailor a link to make it open Safari. Your risk is still lower from someone trying an untargeted infection.

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

Re: @msobkow - Finding the middle ground in this highly polarized environment

It's been done already. Dictators have quite often obtained their power by violence or stealth, but although it's less common, history includes dictators who got into power by winning a fair, democratic election. The countries usually didn't stay democracies much longer, because history has even more examples of aspiring dictators who didn't figure out how to subvert the democracy and got voted out before they could entrench themselves.

Re: Suppression of citizens

"Is there no space for a more nuanced conversation?"

Literally everywhere? Here, for example? It's not our fault that some of the people who choose to post aren't at all nuanced, and some people are pretending to be when they're clearly not. The Register hasn't banned anyone. And if they did, it's still not a problem, because there are lots of other places that don't and you are entirely within your rights to go over there for whatever kind of conversation you want. I participate on multiple online forums, each with different rules. Find the ones you like and go talk there.

Feds slay dark-web souk Hydra: Servers and $25m in crypto-coins seized

Re: Hydra hosting provider

I think that's probably right, but knowing that regime change is needed to end a serious crisis and mustering the power and resolve to invade a massive country with nuclear weapons are two different things. I don't think any country will be willing to use military force to force Putin out, and therefore, if the regime does change, it will be to someone who is already somewhat powerful there. That person is less likely to submit to all the U.S.'s requests.

Re: Hydra hosting provider

What they have so far is:

1. Servers seized, possible source of more evidence.

2. Market is shut down. To move it, the admins will have to generate a new address and migrate users, and some users won't switch because it could always be an operation by law enforcement to find them.

3. If the summary is correct, some cryptocurrency previously controlled by the operators is now unavailable to them.

4. One person connected to it has been publicly identified. He's probably not going to court, but he would prefer to have remained anonymous.

Amazon internal chat app that censored talk of unions and ethics may 'never launch at all'

A different kind of problem

The article and comments have mostly focused on the workers' rights issues with this system, which is the most important aspect, but when I read the list of banned terms, I couldn't help but think of a less important technical issue. Specifically, if they ever implemented this and blocked on that list of words, their false positive rate would be so bad that nobody could practically use it. So many typical turns of phrase could set off those filters.

Some examples:

"Please [pay] close attention to the [raised] floor to avoid interfering with the work going on there."

"The [rate] of warnings from the [robots] in area 3 means we'll need to call an engineer to fix them."

Yes, if they built it, it would be concerning and unfair (oh no, another keyword), but it would also be completely broken.

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

Re: Pump and Dump

"When you are already that rich you don't need to resort to get-rich-quick schemes to make bank."

When you're already that rich, you don't need any more money to do almost anything you want to do. Yet, rich people frequently decide that they do want more money after all. Rich investors gamble their billions of savings to try to get even more billions, taking the risk that they lose it all. Rich people sometimes run criminal operations to get even more cash, when they could just retire and let someone else take the risk. Rich people run many schemes, both legal and illegal, to try to increase their wealth.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Not asking for a handover

You can't count on a guaranteed job in any case, but in the situation described, it seems that the terms in the contract for termination weren't even followed. If you have contracted long enough that they give you a two-year contract, there's likely some restriction on how a termination might go (E.G. how long you get a notice or any early termination payments). Most long-term contracts don't allow the employer to terminate at will. Unless the person describing this situation was lying or failing to understand the contracts, the company did fail to meet those obligations.

In that specific case, you can see why someone wouldn't want to go back and would blacklist the company. If they don't follow the terms related to termination, it's easy for them to fail to follow other terms as well, such as the requirement to pay the contractor. Their violation of the contract is already a legal issue, but even if it doesn't seem worth it to bring a case, that's not a good sign for future connections. Therefore, in a case like this, I don't agree that people treated in this way should refrain from blacklisting or even suing those companies.

On one point, we absolutely agree though: "whatever you do don't build financial expectations on it without a fall-back fund". This is important for everyone, not just contractors. Even employees who have more employment rights can end up in a situation where they get fired at short notice without any more payments, and it's a situation where savings may be needed to cushion the consequences. Contractors are more likely to have that happen, but anyone can. After the economic chaos caused by the pandemic, I think a lot of people have learned this. Unfortunately, many learned firsthand by having it happen to them.

Re: The Boot can be on the other foot...

I think the suggestion was to sell only the information needed to find it. A directory path that, on the company's own systems, leads to what they could have found wouldn't be proprietary because it wouldn't work anywhere else.

That said, I wouldn't recommend doing it. From the sound of it, by that point they thought there was a chance of getting paid to work on the code again, and haggling over existing work wouldn't be likely to earn their approval. Even without that, I wouldn't pay someone for telling me where to find their docs when I could just search more to find them.

Google: Russian credential thieves target NATO, Eastern European military

Re: So, we know who they are

"So, we know who they are"

No, we know things about them which indicate with reasonable certainty who they work for. Tying that back to the programmer's names, office location inside Russia, or who instructed them to do something is difficult and nobody has announced information that would get us there.

"We have their IPs."

Yes, we do. Which have now been reported publicly, so those will become stale in short order. They'll have to buy some new domain names.

"And we still can't do anything about it ?"

Your suggestion is? We can block these domains and IPs. That's why they were listed in the article. If we do that immediately, that might block an attempt by a gullible person to access the phishing system if they have received a message but haven't acted yet. It will do nothing for the phishing attack they launch next week, because those domains will be different. Security is a journey, not a destination.

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

"(As an aside, I find it it astounding copyright doesn't impose any responsibilities or duties at all, in return for granting an insanely valuable privilege. For example, an obligation to supply in a timely fashion.)"

Because you appear not to understand why it exists. Copyright exists to protect the effort someone has gone through to create the copyrighted work. If you have gone to a lot of effort to make something but you choose not to sell it to me, that's normal. The same is true of something that's easier to mass-produce. It's designed to make information that has been created property (temporarily), and therefore ideally encourage the creation of more and prevent those who have created it from spending all their time hiding it from those they don't want to have it.

Web3 'contains the seeds of a dystopian nightmare' says analyst firm

Re: My view

Ah, IPFS. The system that will work great, with only massive overhead, as long as nothing big ever goes down. The system that would be perfect for interplanetary communication, uniting a galaxy on one internet, provided you also have free unlimited instantaneous communication (even if you had light-speed comms, it would still fail). There are decentralized things that are better examples than that.

The various cryptocurrency systems are generally decentralized, but not particularly diffuse. You can have a network that is not centrally controlled but has a lot of powerful people capable of doing things. It's like the difference between a single dictator who can tell a country to do anything and a country ruled by a group of warlords, none of whom have absolute power. As the example demonstrates, while either can function, both are generally less desirable than a more democratic system where smaller participants have more power. NFT systems, on the other hand, are more often quite centralized and include arbitrary terms, backed up by legal agreements or untested code. So I think the complaint that decentralization has not been achieved is accurate.

Court erred in Neo4j source license ruling, says Software Freedom Conservancy

The problem is which terms were additional. The license appears to have been written with the assumption that someone would use the unmodified AGPL, then someone else would apply new terms to it. Instead, this company just bolted their stuff on from the start, so they can argue the terms weren't additional, but part of the original license.

Whenever I see licenses like this, customized from the established ones, I generally understand them to mean basically the following:

We like open source to the extent it allows us to get free work, but don't particularly want to deal with the downsides, so we think we've made something that means you have to pay us. Whether we did or not, you're going to find out in a court case. Look elsewhere; someone who really understands why free and open helps everyone has made something that can be used instead.

Re: Mangle a license, get confusion

I definitely agree about the false advertising. The case this is dealing with is whether they were allowed to put in and enforce the terms they did, whether they advertised it correctly or not. They have lied, and hopefully they won't again, but they still need to clear up what they're allowed to do with their non-open proprietary version with part of the GPL in the terms.

Mangle a license, get confusion

When they decided to knit together a frankenlicense, they created a lot of really unclear stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think the court interpreted it incorrectly, and perhaps though I don't write contracts, the FSF could have written it better.

The problem is with relative terms. The clause that says you can remove restrictions starts like this:

"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.

The problem, which is repeated frequently throughout this section, is the phrase "this license". Someone can argue that "this license" always refers to the AGPL3 in its original form, but it's also somewhat easy to argue that it instead refers to the license you are looking at that contains this clause. And in that case, the restrictive clauses in the license would have been an original part of "this license", and therefore could not be removed. For an analogy that's not direct, it's like saying "You may take any object that wasn't in this room" and letting people sort out whether you meant "wasn't in this room when you came in", or "wasn't in this room when it was constructed, meaning every object that wasn't built in place". I think the FSF could have made this work by replacing "this license" with the specific name of their license, but if they had, that part would probably have been deleted.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't like the sneaky way they've manipulated the license to mislead users of the software. However, I think the court is probably correct in its decision that they can write new terms into a contract and apply it to code they've written.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Re: Trickle-down economics

"What is also surprising is that people in the US do not seem able to join a union without consent of Amazon - maybe it is just the recognition of a union by Amazon ?"

The different parts of the country have different rules, but in most cases, it's whether the union has legal power or just the power of its members. If you and I work at Amazon and say we're a union, that's allowed and we can plan or act together, but we don't get to make our union the one that Amazon has to negotiate with. If we want them to have a requirement to negotiate, that takes a vote. In some cases, it can also make the union cover all the workers in the area, but this is not always the case.

National Security Agency employee indicted for 'leaking top secret info'

Re: Thing about the NSA

From anecdotes I assume are correct, I get the idea that the sense of duty is most of the reason government still gets employees. I haven't worked for the government, and I'm not that inclined to do so because, whenever someone talks about having done it, they always have a story of the difficulties that taking on the responsibility has given them. The money point raised by the original poster is one of them, but it's not the whole story. The private sector appears to have learned that, even though they don't like it, there are types of labor that are necessary and that they need to support more, even if that is done by those lowly workers and not fellow executives.

Government work appears to be busy, ill-resourced, inefficient, and poorly compensated, at least for technical people. Even if I was confident that my work was for the benefit of society or ethical goals I approve of, that could get frustrating. The NSA has the additional problem that there are some people with ethics who, having seen what the NSA is willing to do, are not that happy to work on anything, even the many innocuous things going on there. I know there are intelligent people working at the NSA, especially in cryptography, but I bet they are all working on the most technical projects (from least to most ethical, on surveillance, espionage, and making new cryptographic algorithms). That leaves a lot of other things for less skilled people to do. It's not surprising that they have some things that aren't done properly.

Cybercrooks target students with fake job opportunities

Re: Educational level without brains

Right, you have a strange idea of how students and these scams work.

"The mark is greedy for something: a fancy posting to add to their cv, more money, something that has not been earned.": No, they want those things, just like you would like to be paid. You earned your paycheck, didn't you? They think they're going to earn theirs.

"Why would someone just out of university expect to be hired into an executive position at UNICEF? And at a market wage or better, no less, when it's well known that NGOs pay significantly less than private-sector employers?"

They don't. Did you read the article? The job title on offer was "Executive Personal Assistant", as in assisting someone else who has an executive position. That's an entry level job, requiring little educational experience.

"Yes, someone will be willing to hire them, but it's going to be an entry-level position paying an entry-level wage with an entry-level title. Because that's the career stage they're at! Expecting more and believing anyone is going to offer more is greedy, or at best vanity and pride"

They are expecting an entry-level job with all the stuff that comes with that, and if they were not, it's not greedy. I had a nice job as a programmer when I had my degree. Does it make me greedy to have applied for and gotten a better-paid job?

"Greed needn't be for cash, it can as well be the desire to avoid putting in the time and paying one's dues, or for someone to cater to vanity, or for anything else unearned."

You just made up the whole "unearned" business. The students didn't expect to get something without doing work. It's a job offer, and those who accepted it expected to be asked to work for their wages.

"As for "blaming the victim", I am assigning exclusive and total blame to each party for its own actions. The victim is guilty of greed. That isn't a crime, but we shouldn't be excusing or rewarding it, either."

Who is rewarding anyone for this? And you are blaming the victim by assigning them a motive that clearly isn't supported by the situation.

Re: Educational level without brains

We live in a world of lots of random and at times stupid things. Raw intelligence, assuming that's what you find in every university student, doesn't teach you all of those things. No matter how many complex mathematical theories you can correctly use, prove, and expand upon, you still might not know how to spot someone taking advantage of you. They're separate sets of knowledge, and you'll only learn each by experience and attention to that one specifically. We don't even have to go that far--we all know people who can be incredibly skilled at one thing that's taught at a school and terrible at another, like someone who can write a bulletproof compiler in a week and couldn't write a readme for it that anyone could understand.

And of course, not every university student is a genius. There are a lot of people there who won't score top of the class and many of them aren't planning to. This doesn't mean they're idiots. It means they don't have the same goals as we probably did while there. They're there to gain experience, and falling for this will be a very painful but educational experience indeed. Of course, it would be nicer if they could learn about the scam without falling for it, but that happens too.

Re: Educational level without brains

That's a very easy and wrong explanation. No, it doesn't come down to greed, any more than you wanting to be paid does. Students want job experience, and in many cases, it's hard to get because they don't yet have the ability to write a lot on their CV. Getting a job offer is something they're trying for all the time, so the scam starts by playing on that emotion. In these cases, the students aren't expecting free money; they're expecting that a company or organization wants work done and thinks they're qualified to do it. The student, at this point, is perfectly willing to provide value and expects to do so in return for this paycheck.

As I've established, greed isn't required to fall for the fake job offer. How about the fake check that comes later? It's still not greed. A greedy student would want to cash the check and either not give the company anything or find out how to get more checks. A student who doesn't know how these things work would want to follow instructions, assuming their weirdness sensor hasn't gone off yet. We know that a company won't start off this way, but a student with no real job experience except basic jobs doesn't. After all, while we wouldn't expect to be given a check then asked to send money on, there are companies that ask people to pay for expenses and submit an expense report to have the money returned to them, and that's perfectly normal. It takes a bit of credulity and a lack of experience. Greed would only hamper the process. I think you're jumping to blame the victim is not only needlessly disparaging to them but also gets the facts wrong.

Man arrested, accused of trying to track woman using Apple Watch attached to car

Maybe a day, though if it has to run its GPS and mobile connection, probably not so well. At least the screen wouldn't have to be on. The real problem is with the elements. Even if the acceleration didn't damage it, and it probably would, that thing would be very close to the ground and moving rather fast. A stone hitting it at speed could cause serious damage. Driving through a puddle could also do so (they're supposedly waterproof, but not against pressurized water or with contaminants).

I'm now considering finding something I don't need that's basically watch shaped and testing this out. I probably won't do it though because I'm guessing it will become dislodged quickly and I don't want my experiment to turn into littering.

Nvidia releases $1,999, 8K-capable GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU

Re: Who can actually see the 8k benefit ?

I doubt that it will be. While there probably are people who have 8K screens for watching stuff, most of it will be people who record 8K video so they have lots of room to edit. The final product will be 4K, but edits will be less obvious. Editing and converting will still require a bunch of graphics processing. Similarly, I don't think it will be "the last generation of non commodity graphics cards" because game designers and players constantly find new ways to need even more graphics processing. They have 144 Hz screens and so, even if that rate isn't necessary (and I wouldn't know), they have a target to aim for that can stress a GPU.

"We also know using GPUs fot AI is too difficult for most,,": Not really. It depends what you're doing, but the people building big models tend to want GPUs to do it with. There's a good market in GPU-intensive servers from cloud providers, and I doubt they're being used to play games.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Re: Ethics and business

"The question is, how do people think Google is going to pay for Google Search without this revenue?"

That is not my problem. If they choose to violate the law in order to make enough money and they can't find a legal way to do it, then it's time for them to die. We never ask how the extortion gang can continue to afford their nice houses when their schemes get shut down, do we?

There are some things they could try, though. The first is ads. Not data collection to tailor the ads. Not identifying the user to advertisers who then send ads. Just ads, based on the search terms and not recorded afterward. Or they can ask for donations. Or they can charge for use. Lots of options. If none of them work, too bad for them and it's time to see if someone who isn't evil can make it work. There are places that have succeeded in making a profitable business without breaking the law.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: Horse, cart

"There was a time when everyone was near a branch. That's how it worked."

No, that's not the case. If you moved, it's possible you moved to a place where your bank didn't have any branches. The locals might have been using the banks that did, but unless you always switched bank every time you moved, you could end up far from them. This could also happen if you just traveled to such a place. Banks didn't have complete coverage of the country, let alone in others. For that reason, something that worked even if there wasn't a branch is useful. That it causes the banks to close branches isn't convenient, but as I said, they could keep those open while still having online banking, so the problem is what they chose to do rather than the online bit.

Re: Examples.......and more to come!

I don't think they're all perfect examples. Remember that the definition must include a reason, but it doesn't require you to obsolete everything else. If there is a benefit to the new thing, then it's not that type.

"(1) Python3.": They made the Unicode handling different. Switching wasn't fun, but there is their reason.

"(2) GTK4.": Don't know this one.

"(3) Online banking.": If you want to do something and you're not near a branch, then it's useful. They had a reason. This doesn't mean they should eliminate the branches, but your problem isn't with the new thing but the lack of the old one. They could easily have kept the branches and still had the online option, and some banks have done that.

"(4) Cloud backups.": It gets data off-site quickly and doesn't require a bunch of manual work. It has many downsides that you've correctly mentioned, but there's a reason for it to exist.

"(5) 4G (or 5G)": This is another situation where your problem is the old thing being removed, not the new thing. 4G was a lot faster than 3G if you could get it. That made many things work better on a mobile connection. There was a reason for it. 5G is theoretically the same benefit, but it's less obviously required.

"(6) "The Ribbon" M$ Office...": No, you're completely right on this one.

"(7) Windows 8": And also this one.

Re: Level 3

I think the specific $289k figure in the article is the point at which households spend less than 1% of their income on fuel. That explains where it came from, though not why they decided to put that number in the headline; it appears to have no other meaning, and they also talk about the effects of inflation on people earning $19k which demonstrates they know those people exist.

I agree that the suggestions are basically worthless. They all boil down to "Buy less of the stuff that got more expensive", which is what people who don't have enough money already know.

Re: Level 3

"Because I know next to nothing about the US... how does $289k compare with "average" wages in the US?"

For an individual, they'd be earning at the 98th percentile and 525% the medium individual income for full-time workers. For a household, it's the 96th percentile. It's a bunch of money. Someone earning more than that is going to be fine with inflation, but so are a lot of people earning less than that. Sure, everyone gets hurt when inflation's high, but someone earning that much is very unlikely to have problems meeting necessary expenses. Also, note that like other countries, there's a wide variation in the cost of living depending on where someone works. The median income for full-time figure I found ($55k) includes the entire country, but could be insufficient for expensive places to live.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

In a probably different functional language, you could do comparisons with function pattern matching or a case statement. The pattern matching would only do exact values, so if you wanted to do something as complex as checking whether a number was even, your only choice was case. The problem was that you could only do a case statement in the return from a let statement, which when you wanted to look at the parameter you already had was not required. This led to code like this:

let int WasteMemoryAllocation = 0

in case [your real check]

end

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

After you get fired, you have no professional duty to keep working. Sabotage would have been both. Not doing free work, however, should be expected.

HP finance manager went on $5m personal spending spree with company card

How did this work

I understand how she faked documents for HP, and assuming they were done well, HP wouldn't know that her charges were false. However, if I'm understanding correctly, these payments were expected to be paid to a supplier, so how did she avoid the supplier complaining about not being paid? I would have thought that, after every supplier she handled started reporting late or nonpayment, someone would have checked on it if only to prevent angry suppliers. Somehow, this worked for three years.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Umm

They could create one. I am not saying they have to, but even if I argue for the point they made, your objections don't apply. They did not ask for Rust to be the IDL used by operating systems. They said that C wasn't good at that purpose and could be improved. Since Rust takes a lot of its influence from C, it's likely it wouldn't be great at it either. It's not new to use a language for interfacing that wasn't used in writing the system, and other operating systems have done it.

"It seems weird to me that C provides a way to call into C, *and* a way to call out of C, and gets criticized because the language it uses is C."

C doesn't have ways to call out of C. Other languages link to C stuff and call in, but you never see a C program directly linking to Java or Python. It can link to libraries written in other languages that have chosen to have a compatible format, but in each case, the other language has to change itself to match C. If a C program contains a component in something that doesn't follow the standard C linking structure, a different interface language is used for that connection. This doesn't make C bad. It makes your compliment wrong.

Re: Other languages....

But they do serve a similar purpose and so it makes sense to compare them. However, it does not make sense to compare them in the simplistic way I did, hence my analogy to the simplistic way to compare programming languages that also doesn't make sense.

Re: Other languages....

The examples listed do not function under this rule. Java is listed under procedural, not scripting, but it is interpreted. So even if you choose to use this distinction, the original suggestion wasn't. This is why that categorization doesn't work very well.

Re: Meanwhile in 2040 ...

"... there will still be the same old my language is better than your language (grandad!) arguments."

Yes, but there will also be the "My language is real and because you use something else, you're pathetic" arguments, often from people who use something else but don't admit it. Both are cringe-worthy. There are cases for most languages that exist today, and just because someone uses one for speed, easiness, portability, or even familiarity, they probably are doing that for a reason. The argument that you must use Rust because you are likely to do your memory management wrong eventually is annoying, but so is being told that if you don't use C, you must not understand how computers work and you're thinking wrong.

Re: Umm

"The fact is that whatever language is most prevalent for writing OSes will require any other 'proper' programming language to have some sort of interface to enable system calls."

Yes, but that interface doesn't have to be the same language. You can write something in C and provide a different interface. This can have advantages in application portability and language usage. I think that's the main suggestion (or more likely lamentation) of the person quoted in the article. Many systems create an interface that doesn't require all applications to link with them, but most common OSes have taken a different view.

Re: Other languages....

I think this structure doesn't work very well. For one thing, what's the difference between a scripting language and a non-scripting language. Usually, the argument comes down to "I want to say that this one isn't good enough, so it's just for scripts". Lots of small maintenance scripts have been written in C. Many large applications have been written in Python. There's no real distinction.

Also, procedural is usually defined to include C, because each operation has effects which are present for the next operation. This is often as opposed to functional languages that attempt to avoid side-effects, languages that don't appear to be in your categorization system. This is without considering languages that manage to have both features. And even if you want to use the categories, you need a better name than "Algol-like", because some of those are not like Algol and you can argue for hours about how much alike they can be before the category applies.

This is like dividing operating systems into program loader, Unix-like (including Windows), RTOS, and just expecting everything to neatly fit in.

Re: Nothing new...

"I don't know. How many Fortran programmers love Fortran? How many COBAL programmers love COBAL?"

A lot of them. Whenever Cobol gets brought up here, many people remark on how much they liked it, how easy it was to read, how much they wish people still used it today. I don't know because I'm too young to have written it. People seem to like the things they've used enough because they already know how to use it. I'm guessing that, if people didn't like it, they did everything they could to switch to an alternative. This leaves us with many choices that some group of people really like, but not necessarily choices that have been designed well. There's a reason that Cobol isn't much used except in old systems today, and it's not because nobody liked it.

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

You already couldn't do an alphabetical sort if any number went over 9. And the reason that single integers aren't used is because people want to avoid breaking changes but still to get patches, which, when breaking changes are going to happen, means there are multiple branches. This is also the reason dates don't work if there are ever two versions being supported. You separate by . characters and do an integer sort from left to right. It's not that hard to do.

It's not at all new, and I don't think anyone would claim it. It's just a standard to clarify a few things that a lot of people have already done for a while. For example, we don't get the 2.01 version number format under that standard, but most people had already realized it was annoying and stopped doing that. It's an old concept, and nothing got invented in stating a few suggested rules.

Nvidia reveals 144-core Arm-based Grace 'CPU Superchip'

There's not a ton they can do about the fact that more people want to buy them. I'm sure they'd like to make a bunch more of them, but that's true of a lot of places and TSMC has its hands full building everything else we also want. Also, depending on how much power you need, there are GPUs out there at more reasonable prices. Not the most powerful ones, sure, but you can do a lot without having the best chip released.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

Re: high school

"When it comes to assessing culture fit... What's really quite important to me, is that someone can recognise their flaws or things they do that would get people's backs up. We all have them right?"

Absolutely, and if you asked me this question and I didn't want to leave, I would do all I could to not tell you what they were. An interview is where I convince you I'm good at this job, so bringing out a list of things to see if any of them are stuff you hate is not on my list of priorities. My teams tend not to hate me. I've been complimented on my group interaction by lots of colleagues. I'm more diplomatic than many developers I've known. You don't find that out in half an hour, so, since everyone who is not is going to act that way, I will too.

More importantly, the self-assessment part of this isn't the important part of this. You would like to know how people react to having this pointed out and changing things, because an annoying person who doesn't want to be and acts to change their ways is better than a mostly fine person who refuses to consider anything could be wrong. You also have the problem that what a friend might consider annoying might not apply to work (my friends might not care about many of the things I know a lot about and consider me boring, but I tend not to make my colleagues talk about irrelevant things). I have a feeling that, if I (a complete stranger to you) asked you to catalog your flaws to me, the resulting list would be hard to create and would probably not have a ton of relevance to you in your actual life. Your interviewers are complete strangers too, and they'll act the same way.

Re: high school

I thank you for the sentiment, and improvisation was definitely my favorite part of being in that band. However, I don't think most hiring managers take the same view which is why I don't include any musical credentials on my resume. Maybe I just don't know how they think (actually, I know that is true), but whenever I've mentioned something that's not directly in line with the job they're going to ask me to do, many seem to take it as a negative. Anywhere I could go at least accepts all my technical projects as assets, but most other things appear to be ignored.

Re: high school

You want to tell us what reason that would be? Because from the face of it, it seems like a way to indicate to someone that they don't want to work for you. Maybe it's a test of how quickly they can come up with a fake annoying trait that seems to speak in their favor--you didn't think they were answering honestly, did you? Or are you just seeing whether they can be insulted (with the stupidity of the question, not the content) and not show their displeasure?

Re: high school

The person to whom you replied was complaining about the term "high school", not the question. I do have an answer to your question though. First, I don't have a problem with the term; I assume this was written by and for a country where that is the typical term and that they could easily translate it if they wanted to inflict the same questioning on someone in a different country.

But now, no, I can't think of a legitimate reason for any of those questions. "How did you get on at high school?" is stupidly generic and has no right answer. "What would your high school peers remember you for?" isn't going to receive an honest answer, and I'm assuming they want an answer along the lines of "That guy who only wrote kernel drivers and so we don't remember them", which just isn't true; I wrote code but I did other things, but I have a feeling that playing in a jazz band isn't going to win me the job.

Asking specifically about mathematics is a little more relevant, which still means not relevant. If they want to hire someone who has advanced skills in that area, ask them to solve some typical mathematical problem. Even looking at their university courses in the area would give you more information. A person could rank highly in math due to being in a small school or could rank low if they're being compared only to similarly advanced students. Also, nobody knows that number now and in most cases, they didn't get one at the time (I got As in all of them, but I don't know how many people had those so I can't give you a ranking). What's more, they're looking for a developer. That probably includes a bunch of mathematical skills, but they're not even asking this of someone being hired as a mathematician.

Russian court deems Instagram and Facebook as 'extremist', WhatsApp spared

Re: Perhaps

There are two reasons that might not work very well. The first is the blame game. If Russia forces the app to close, the government can only do so much to explain why and the protests would be against them. If WhatsApp closes on its own, the government can say that, had they had the power, the app would still be operating. They can paint the action in the same light as the other companies that have abandoned Russia and blame either the company or a different country for making it happen. This argument wouldn't be incorrect, though it would be misleading.

The second reason is that WhatsApp allows communication using encryption, which is quite important for people inside Russia. With government crackdowns on all protesting activity and anything that looks like it might get there, anyone who is going to talk about Ukraine, let alone arrange to help in any way, needs protection from Russian surveillance. WhatsApp isn't my favorite way to get there, but it does work. Cutting it off could hurt those who use it to evade the dictators more than the dictators themselves.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Re: Gdpr 3% fine

The way things have been going, they will pay nothing because something very bad has happened to the Irish Data Protection Commission. I imagine it looks like those science fiction shows where the terrible alien plague has left an area visibly undamaged but with every human instantly killed. At least that would explain how all the privacy risks under their jurisdiction continue completely unchecked. We may need GDPR 2.0 which is identical to the first version but says that any EU country can take any action named in the law, reserving none to the country in which the entity is based. It also has the benefits that many countries can assess their own 4% fines.