Posts by doublelayer

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: USA

You could argue that it's fraud, and that's in any country. The problem is that it's really hard to prove it, and probably a lot of jurors are going to assume that the claimant is just bitter about not getting the job. My guess is that it probably happens everywhere more or less, and the only variable I expect is whether it's common to require that any open position is advertised, because if that's not a requirement, then they can skip most of the "we already decided who to put in it but we're not allowed to just do that" jobs. It wouldn't affect any of the other reasons to post a fake job, though, so even if your country doesn't have that, I bet there are still fake job posts there.

Re: Tle Law is A Ass

Not difficult at all. It was advertised. People who applied got interviews. It's just a shame that they didn't do as good a job as the internal candidate who also did whatever interviews the company thought were justified. With all of those being provable facts, it is going to take a lot of work to prove that the external candidates never had a chance. It's probably true sometimes, but nobody in the company will say so, and some of the people involved might not even know it. The interviewers don't need to know it, because their feedback on external candidates can be ignored. The HR department doesn't need to know it, because they're simply handed a job title and fill in the description with the boiler plate junk that doesn't say anything. Only the person who has already chosen a candidate needs to know that the process is a sham, and if they don't tell people, it is hard to disprove the fiction of a fair process.

Financial institutions told to get their house in order before the next CrowdStrike strikes

Re: Delta versus CrowdStrike and Microsoft

"Continuously employing a few hundred local technical software experts would probably cost less than buying and installing new computers all the time."

I think you either underestimate how hard and expensive it is to have that size of OS development team or how often businesses are buying new computers.

Some businesses do cycle out their computers a lot more often than they need to, but when they, for example, replace them every four years, it's not because Microsoft made them. Windows lifetimes are longer than that. Even if they're going to have their own operating system, they'll still need to replace broken or outdated hardware. Relatively speaking, the additional cost of buying a new laptop twice as frequently as you need to is small in budgetary terms. Other businesses, even those that use Windows, hold on to equipment until it breaks. They might incur a cost if they buy extended Windows updates this time, but in many previous cases, they wouldn't have. If you're only calculating financial cost, I think your numbers are off.

Having such a team would enable them to have several technical benefits to justify the much higher financial costs, but it could also get them into more unpleasant situations. By hiring that many people, they would be able to make a lot of customization to an operating system. If they embraced open source, they could deliver a lot of that to the wider community and join forces with similar companies. I worry that doing that would run against your theory that it is helpful to have "a unique support environment that could be made private and difficult to hack", which I also disagree with. If they were less careful, however, it might just mean that they have created a lot of systems that it's difficult to manage because none of the industry-standard tools work on them, so if someone does hack them, they might not be able to find out or recover as quickly as someone who can have software that someone else wrote. Having too much custom software also makes it harder to add new employees, either normal employees or ones to this OS team, because they'll need to spend a lot of time being trained or self-learning all the tools available. When management inevitably wants to speed things up a bit, they're likely to leave necessary things unused. Meanwhile, their competitors who do not have a software team because they bought more standard software would be able to do things much cheaper. It's not unusual to have a situation where you could achieve great things by spending more than you need to, but in most cases, people don't choose to do that.

Apple throws shade on pokey AI PCs, claims its maxed out M4 chips are 4x faster

Re: Mac Mini ports

That might be a reason not to put it on the side with the ports, but they have blank sides where inadvertent presses would be much harder to manage. Even if I eliminate the back because you might press it accidentally (though the button on the back for all the other Mac Minis didn't do that) and the top so you can stack something on it, there are still three other sides where it could go.

Re: "proprietary connectors"

From their original comment, I'm guessing they're referring to internal connectors, but that doesn't answer the question because I don't know exactly what they're talking about. For instance, they used to have proprietary SSD connectors, but now they've gone one better and chosen no SSD connectors, just soldered drives. I'm also not sure what they want when they ask for "a proper case". Either they don't like the Mac Mini shape or they want to install Apple CPUs into other computers, which obviously is not going to happen.

Re: Mac Mini ports

If you are flipping the power to the computer, you still have to turn it on after you restore the power. I don't think the Mac Mini auto-starts when power is connected. So yes, you will need to push that button. I don't think most users will need the button often enough that this would be a big problem, but I also don't see why it would have been a problem to put the button on any of the other sides.

Dropbox to shed another 500 staff, CEO takes 'full responsibility'

Re: How many people ?

After having some success with the cloud storage bit, they decided that they should try to do more things. After all, there is only so much you can do when you're just selling access to lots of disks. So they tried making collaboration software. People already shared work in Dropbox folders, so why not make the software that makes it easier for people to work on the same file from other places? They tried several other related programs. Most of these were canceled at some point, and I don't know all the things they tried. For example, the article indicates that they had hired some AI people, but I don't have a clue what they were doing. So no, it doesn't take that many people just for file storage, but that's not what all those people were doing.

Re: cuts were needed where the company had underperformed

I think you missed something here. They're not cutting people and expecting those units to improve. The units did badly, and they've decided not to bother having them anymore to cut their losses. The people who used to work on the things they're going to give up are going to lose their jobs because Dropbox no longer plans to have the things they were building.

As others have said, what does "take full responsibility" mean? If all I have to do to take responsibility is say that, then it's both easy and worthless to do so.

Exactly how one should take responsibility is unclear and unanswerable. The classic penalties, reduction in salary, losing authority or a job entirely, etc, are sometimes sensible. In other cases, doing that would cause more harm, or the negative event is not large enough to justify them. When those apply is something that people will never agree about. However, saying that someone "takes full responsibility" is about as useless as "we take your privacy very seriously". At most, it's nice that they don't actively want to hurt you even though they are going to, but more likely, it's meaningless words said because it's the convention to say them.

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Re: bit hypocritical?

I have two points of disagreement with this. First, why should we care? As long as they use an actual open source license, no matter what they want, we have the freedoms of that license. Even if we eventually need to fork, we have the ability to continue to use the open source tools. We do, and their competitors do, which means it's less likely that they'll try to mess with it. If they come up with something that is so great they don't want competitors to have it, then they probably won't release that part as open source, but all the stuff they once did is still available to the community. We don't need to like them to benefit from the code they wrote.

Second, your reasoning doesn't make sense to me. Because they make money from copyright, we shouldn't agree with them? When did open source become antithetical to copyright, the primary reason why you can have and enforce an open source license? This seems to be part of the idea, in my opinion misguided, that the enemy of open source should be proprietary and that, to support open source, you should wish for the death of all copyright. I support open source, contribute time and money to open source projects, run a lot of open source software, and have no problem with someone choosing to sell the fruits of their labor rather than give it away. I see no problem with both approaches being used, each where it makes most sense.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

Re: Windows 11 is a mess cobbled in Redmond

This is a critique of Windows I've seen since they put a search box in, and it's one I don't get. I can still have desktop icons or start menu entries for applications and use those quite conveniently to launch things. However, I do admit that I often use the typing a program name method. I like that method. It's fast and generally works well. For similar reasons, I like having a CLI available, although I would prefer to have both CLI and GUI options. What's wrong with having something CLI-esque there?

Re: $30 Per Year is Cheaper Than a New Laptop

I doubt it. I expect a lot of people will do the following. From least to most popular, the likely actions are:

1. Install Linux on the computer and use that. A few people who don't want to install Windows 11 will take this opportunity to switch when they haven't before.

2. Use the methods to install Windows 11 on their computer, bypassing the hardware checks. Theoretically, this might stop working at some point, but if Microsoft was going to do that, they would probably have done it earlier.

3. Run Windows 10 without any security updates, assuming it will be fine.

4. Run Windows 10 without any security updates, not even knowing that they're doing it. I've seen that with XP boxes, Vista boxes, 7 boxes, 8 boxes, and I expect it will happen some more.

This $30 for a year of updates is a possible option if you know or have reason to suspect that Windows 11 will break something in your workflow. Otherwise, if you need Windows, option 2 is a free method of having the security updates and not having to discard your hardware. I doubt many consumers will be buying it.

Re: $30 Per Year is Cheaper Than a New Laptop

They need a legal basis to do so. I'm not sure what that legal basis is. Microsoft is charging for access to code updates, which is annoying and only necessary because they did another annoying thing by having unnecessary hardware requirements for Windows 11. Neither of those annoying things is illegal. What is your proposed violation justifying an investigation, and it has to be solid so that a penalty can be assessed at the end of said investigation. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it illegal.

Re: So...

That's not new, and although someone might sue, it hasn't worked before and probably won't work now. Android phone manufacturers don't get sued because they didn't bother pushing a security update. Apple doesn't get sued because they decided a perfectly functioning Mac won't get any updates anymore, a lifetime they've been shortening with every release. Microsoft has no technical reason to justify failing to provide the updates, but I don't think they have to prove one.

The closest it might come is consumer protection legislation, but that legislation generally has a specific lifetime. As far as Microsoft is concerned, they will say that anything less than seven years of age can be updated to Windows 11 for free, so therefore it's on the user if they didn't, and anything older than seven years, assuming that it can't also be updated under their unnecessary hardware rules, is past the lifetime specified in the law. Android OEMs routinely get by with significantly less support, so that argument will probably work.

Re: $30 ... how to be paid?

You are probably correct. That is one of the things I dislike most about modern Windows. Almost nobody needs or wants a Microsoft account. I suppose people who buy personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions need one, but almost nobody needs that either. Fortunately there are still methods of bypassing the account login part even on Windows Home, but I set up Windows devices infrequently enough that I have to figure it out each time.

My experience was very different. I didn't like the idea of automatic updates when I first used Windows 10, so I disabled them and would review the list before manually installing them. My approach worked fine for at least two years, but I eventually decided to turn it off and take the updates anyway. I've seen people who had specific requirements doing the same things, although they often use WSUS to manage it because they work in IT and I only wanted to manage personal machines that way. I have a feeling that, if it's a big enough problem, you can find a way that is more reliable and the internet will probably help quite a lot, though I wouldn't try many of the registry hacks suggested because people often post registry hacks that look plausible and don't work on my machine for some reason.

Any of those people who knew what they were doing would use one of the twenty easy methods of stopping the updates. Some of those people might find they regretted it. It's really not that hard to do so. That applies to Windows 11 as well, whether it's a consumer or an IT department.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Wondering about the platform?

Presumably it wasn't continually buffering new things, or there would be odd keystrokes showing up on the terminal. In that case, why didn't they do something along the lines of waiting until no keys were pressed (they already knew the buffer was overflowing in order to beep), then clearing the buffer and starting again? It would make sense if they hadn't bothered with a buffer, but to have one and have no ability to clear it seems like a weird oversight.

If you're trying to develop an interface that can survive anything, your error messages are concerning me.

"Input answer too long, remainder clipped": This one concerns me anyway. If my answer is too long, truncating it to size and using that doesn't sound like the right approach under any circumstances. If those limits are firm, reject it and tell me acceptable sizes. If I could do something to extend the length of acceptable input, keep my input and give me the option. Otherwise, you're virtually guaranteed to have the wrong thing when truncated; if I intended the long value, you have something wrong, and if I intended a short value and somehow put on extra data, you have something wrong and probably much larger than what I intended. Either way, that could cause problems.

"Error in integer input format": This one isn't as big a problem. However, the message could be better. If you want nontechnical users to understand it, you are going to need more words, and that applies to a lesser extent even for the technical user. I assume this means "input must be but is not an integer", but that's not exactly what you said.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Re: Huh-what?

Most of the frontend parts of apps are written in Java or another JVM-executed language. Kotlin is quite popular as well, but that is run in the JVM. Then they want to do something in the backend and most of them call out to a native library which is written for a specific architecture. In some cases, they may do similarly to write their frontend in something that isn't Java.

If you want to check this any time, you can see whether an application is architecture-dependent if you have an APK file for it (and if it's installed on your phone, you can get an APK for it). Open that file in an archive program and see if there's a lib folder at the top level. If there is and there's stuff in it, then it is architecture-dependent and you can see which ones they bothered to compile for. Usually, it's one chosen version of ARM and that's it. For things that are intended to be much more portable, it's usually ARM 32-bit and 64-bit and X86 32-bit and 64-bit, and that's it. It will still need recompiling if RISC-V is going to be used.

Re: I can guess where this is leading

But you are not correct. Yes, nobody is bothering about ARM1, but they are bothering about ARMV8 and ARMV9. And those who bother about ARMV8 need to tell the difference between ARMV8 and ARMV8.1 and ARMV8.2 and ... That is done in software. There are extensions as well. For instance, I've written software that's running on SBCs and does a lot of AES work. It might be useful for you to know that most if not all of the SoCs used in the Raspberry Pi don't have hardware AES, but a lot of other SBCs do. If you're writing the AES library, you absolutely need to know that. Fortunately for most people, if you're just running it, the library authors already did it for you. There are more of those, and people do check them and respond accordingly. If I want my binary to run well on both platforms, I include a software AES branch and a hardware AES branch. Alternatively, I compile on each platform and I've still written both branches, I just don't compile both.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Re: Apple should be honest enough to say that

None of those things are facts. They are all opinions. You may agree that everything is lies, all the way down, but since that isn't a provable statement in any case, it isn't a fact. Their office building is probably not made of solid lies. If it is, please send me instructions for construction with lies because they are really cheap. Arguing the honesty or lack thereof of a purchase price is also confusing. You could have a dishonest statement about prices where they forget to include some things, but that's not what they said either.

I did not vote on this or any related post, but your suggestion that it contains facts probably explains why you don't understand those who did vote. What you have there are opinions, and at least six people disagree with them. What I think of the opinions is irrelevant here.

To some extent, you are right, but I still don't think Apple was justified in having that as an option. The way they designed their computer, swapping is a big problem. It will put wear on an SSD which is not replaceable. Not only is it soldered down, but they have firmware on that disk so even if you are willing to remove it, you can't install another one and expect the computer to boot. If it fails, the computer won't boot, and by that I mean it won't boot to anything. Not the OS on that disk (of course), not to recovery, not to a USB disk, not to something on the network, that computer is dead.

That means they should want to prevent swapping at all costs, and at the cost of their cheapest computer, they have a lot of budget to afford it. 8 GB is not ridiculous if you're buying a cheap Windows laptop, but the cheapest Mac Mini is well into an area where you can find a Windows laptop with 16 GB of RAM, and their cheapest MacBook could easily get you a lot more. When they've positioned themselves as a high-cost brand, it's not unreasonable to expect they'd have the specs to back that up, and when there's a technical limitation to their design where that spec is necessary to prevent damage, that becomes quite important.

Re: Excessive price?

From what I've seen online, you can buy a NXTPAPER tablet for a lot less, which is probably justified, because it's an Android tablet with 6 instead of 16 GB of slower RAM, at most 256 GB of storage, a 6-year old CPU which the M4 out-benchmarks by about 800%, and doesn't get Android updates because TCL can't be bothered. Also, it's a tablet instead of a desktop. I'm not sure why you picked that as your comparison. Apple products are often more expensive than they need to be, but completely different products don't make that point.

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

Re: Nokia 7110

"I know I'm a dinosaur, but I use my phone to make calls!"

I do wonder what people who don't want smartphones think smartphones do when you call someone. I have a smartphone because I want one, and I also make calls. The phone icon is right there on the main screen. I tap on it, dial a number, and talk. It works just fine. It has worked just fine on all the smartphones I've ever had. When did some idea come along that smartphone users must not use them for calls?

If you want a phone with fewer features, there are several around. You can avoid a touchscreen and get something that can do calls and SMS. They'll generally have a few other features, not always well-implemented ones, but if you just want to call, then you won't notice how badly implemented, for example, the tiny browser is because you won't use it. Some of them reportedly actually do that well enough too. So when reading your comment, it seems to imply two assumptions, that smartphones have some problem with calls and that non-smartphones are unobtainable, neither of which is true.

Re: A dumb move ?

Did they say "maximum" anywhere? I don't see that in their comment. If you're going to accuse them of mathematical error, making a reading error won't help.

I'm not sure I agree with them, but their point was that too many operating systems will make things harder for developers and this will cause some platforms to die, they suggested that desktop operating systems only have two leading ones with Linux behind on software support, and their proposed solution would involve four mobile operating systems: IOS, Android, and a couple open source ones of unspecified origin. In my opinion, the market could sustain more players through more cross-platform development, but I'm not sure how to get from our duopoly to that point. Your rebuttal misstates their point and attacks only the bit you made up.

Re: A dumb move ?

Tizen was Samsung. They had plenty of money they could have put into it. Firefox OS got several manufacturers on board, not as many as Windows Phone had even in the days when it was asking for payments, but still several. Neither of those was doomed to failure either. So four out of five had an opportunity, yet all failed. Huawei's got some opportunity to go somewhere, but I'm not seeing a reason why their outcome would be so different. They have money, just like Microsoft had. They have themselves on board as a manufacturer and parts supplier, just like Samsung did. Some argue that they've got an interesting technical base, like Mozilla did. Since those things didn't help the rest of them, why would I expect this one to be different even if they do try outside of China. I'm still not convinced it will survive in the Chinese market where Android is a pretty common platform, but if patriotism gets it there, that's no reason why it would succeed elsewhere. Microsoft spent eight years and billions of dollars trying to crack into the market, in a time where the market was less developed and therefore they had a good chance, and that was still not enough.

Re: China is setting up the BRICS collaboration

Right, India's going to be China's expansion market. It's not like India's been more aggressive at banning Chinese apps, not operating systems, but just apps, than almost anyone else including everyone in the west. The US wants to ban TikTok? India already has, and unlike in the US, that ban has already gone into practice and been upheld by courts. It wasn't the only one. I'm sure they'd be eager to adopt a proprietary Chinese OS on all their devices.

You can buy a Harmony OS Next phone in any country you want. I'm not sure if Huawei is bothering to sell there, but you can easily find someone who will buy one in China and ship it to you. It's legal everywhere. It won't be popular, not because there's any restriction on it, but because it won't be very good in other markets. Huawei can try to improve that and pick some extra markets. They could put lots of money into that and succeed, but they could also put lots of money into it like Microsoft did to Windows Phone and fail anyway.

Re: A dumb move ?

Not necessarily a dumb move for the user, but for a company that wants to make money, historically it has been reliably unsuccessful. Windows Phone, Amazon Fire Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, Tizen, each of these companies tried to have their own OS. Some of them were appreciated by the users. None of them are around today. That's not just bad for the companies. If you spent time learning the development environments for these things, or if you hired others to do it, you didn't benefit much from doing it. That, in turn, was bad for users. If you bought one of those because the default apps were all you needed, then you were probably fine until the phone itself broke. If you bought one of those expecting that there would be third-party functions that never arrived, less so.

I would like to see more mobile operating systems, but I understand why companies are unlikely to try making them, why developers will probably not write applications for them, and why they won't sell well. A successful one would indeed provide great benefits to the general consumer, but I'm not sure how we can get there and the consumers who try alternatives tend to have problems when their devices get dropped.

Re: Can't understand the apps

Part of it is that, unless you have a large enough number, you may not have a few good basic ones. If I could choose that, I could live with an app catalog that has about ten things in it as long as all of the things were well-maintained things that have all the features I rely on, but a lot of users have different wants. For instance, when I first got a smartphone, there were lots of navigation apps. Few of them let me do some of the things I needed a navigation app to do, such as work on an offline map because I didn't have much mobile data back then. If there had been very few apps, maybe I couldn't have found one at all or I could only have found one that was missing some other important feature to me.

If every app was designed the way I wanted and well-written and well-maintained, I could be fine with an app catalog of about ten apps. I know that, if it is a small catalog, chances are that I will find many missing features from whichever apps are actually available there.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Re: Sorry, no.

That was the point. They were trying to make a distinction between free as in you don't have to pay and free as in you have rights to do certain things with it. They specifically wanted to choose "libre" because it is a different word from "gratis" and they wanted to make it very clear that it wasn't just "gratis". Their original choice of name was far too often seen as "here is software, and you don't have to pay me for it". See also the often-repeated and misunderstood "free speech, not free beer", or "no cerveza gratis, sino libertad de expresión" (I suppose you don't need it in Spanish), which is another way that point has been made.

Also, libre is also a word in French and Galician and has cognates in most of the romance languages. So even if you still maintain that the Spanish usage is incorrect, and as a Spanish speaker myself I don't think it is, they can easily claim that they were only working on the French definition.

Re: The trouble with money

I don't have problems with any of those things. For example:

"At what point does it just become writing code for the company?"

At the point where the code is no longer available to everyone without added restrictions, or in other words if it stops being open source. Otherwise, yes, its development is being driven by the company, but I can still take any bits that are useful to me. Of course, they could make something where I no longer value what they've made, but that's not only the case for company-supported open source. There are lots of projects that I find completely useless, but they're still useful to someone else.

"a company threatens to pull funding that the developer needs to continue or sustain themselves if the developer doesn't do what the company wants."

Absolutely that can happen, and it could be a problem. However, being open source, this is when I fork, tell the developer that they've messed up horribly and won't get any donations, and tell everyone about it. The company will get their version and most people will run something else. If it was a proprietary project in the same condition, I couldn't do that. Also, I've seen that happen several times and, if the company is paying for development, then it's less likely. The times I've seen it are when an open source developer has grown tired of maintaining their project for little or no money so they just sell the name and copyright and the buyer does something bad to it. Nearly every time, that ends in a fork about five days later. But if the original developer had been paid to write something, they probably wouldn't have sold it.

"I can also see it turning into a competition between companies. They each try to donate more than the others to try and get priority on their requests. If could be very good money for the developer but it may not be worth it."

This sounds like the dream to me. You can pick features based on your concept of how much you want the feature and how much they're paying. If there are so many people eager to pay people to develop, you could find others to get familiar with the code, either people who are interested in earning some money as an open source maintainer or an employee. If that keeps up, that project is likely to be pretty healthy unless the changes they're paying for are detrimental in themselves. In most of the cases we're talking about, they're asking for a feature they want to run, which means at least they think it's a good idea. If I, as an author, decide that it is a bad idea but I want the money, then I can design the feature to be easily disabled. They use one compiler switch and get the feature, so they can have it and I get paid. You can omit the switch and build a version without the feature so you don't have to use it. It's always possible for someone to try to sabotage a project like that, but it is an expensive way of going about it and easily thwarted, so I doubt it's very common.

Re: The trouble with money

That's probably true, but I don't mind that. If a company wants to pay me to build in a feature, as long as that feature doesn't harm other users, I don't have a problem raising it in the list. Sure, it may not be the most commonly requested feature, but the chances are that, even with the extra development, the funding is going to provide users with more maintenance and features they used. If they tried to use the funding to break things, that would be different, but as long as it's something like fixing the bug that affects what they want to do more quickly, I am fine with it. In the same way, if they pay one of their employees to contribute to it and that employee mostly contributes things that company wants, that also works for me.

Re: If they want paying...

That is what I think I said:

"that is why I disapprove of any mandatory payment [...] However, this is not that. This is a voluntary payment to a project you rely on."

As I said in my first comment here, I support this effort. I support businesses and individuals making voluntary donations, and if someone wants to encourage more people to give, I'm usually fine with it unless they're doing something so horrible that it is likely to put people off, and I don't think this group are anywhere close to that.

Re: The trouble with money

Offering to pay someone to put in backdoors is not aided in any way by paying them for normal maintenance. If you offer me donations for the project, thank you very much. If you offer me payments to add a feature, then I'll consider it but chances are you'll get your feature and I'll take the money. If you offer me money to insert something malicious, I will refuse, or maybe I'll consider accepting the money and not giving you what you asked for because what you asked for is illegal anyway, but chances are the risk is high enough that I just won't bother. If I'm evil enough to add a backdoor just because someone will pay me to do it, I'm not going to care whether they donated last year; I'm just going to ask how much they'll give me for access to the users.

The fact that they received a donation before getting the bribe to add malware to the code doesn't make them any more beholden to the donor. In fact, having that donation makes them less desperate for funds, so they are less likely to accept such an offer. I see no reason to expect any connection between the two things.

Re: If they want paying...

And that is why I disapprove of any mandatory payment system for open source software. Well that, and about ten other reasons, some of them bigger, but it's in the list. However, this is not that. This is a voluntary payment to a project you rely on. They're asking for that voluntary payment to be increased, but they're not mandating that any payment happens or taking away rights if they don't get one.

Since the payments are voluntary, not having support is easily justified. If you find that the project is such a buggy mess that you are wasting time and money finding and reporting bugs, then maybe this isn't good enough software for you to use. I've had that experience with open source software before, software where I decided I had to do significant maintenance on it to get it into workable condition, start a similar project from scratch, find another option that can do the task, or not have this functionality. I don't get to bill the provider of software in that case, although I'm much less likely to donate anything.

Even if you had paid for software, you usually don't get to do anything like this. I've had lots of bugs in software I purchased, and in none of those cases did I get to charge the authors for the existence of them. In one case, I did report so many of them that the author returned my money, but that was it.

This requires some research to find the best way to benefit the projects you rely on, and it's not always obvious. In some cases, it's something a group like this could help with, identifying an organization that provably directs donations to actual maintenance work. The other approach that companies can use is paying an employee or contractor to do maintenance work on a project.

Some parts are, but I contend that these people are not. This is an entirely voluntary pledge, backed up by nothing more than the shame felt by people who know what the billboard means and the confusion felt by everyone else who tries to understand the request. They are not trying to make demands they have no right to demand, the way that some open source owners (often not authors, but the companies that once employed them) have tried. Their request is not outlandish, the way that, for instance, Bruce Perens's 1% of revenue every year no matter how little "post-open" software you use is. They aren't harpooning long-held principles of open source like the right to fork, modify, and distribute without anyone's permission.

I support businesses making voluntary donations to open source they rely on. I don't expect many companies to actually do it, but it is logical from the companies' perspective as well as from the projects'. I have been in a position before where an employer wanted to use some piece of open source software, and when we wanted new things added to it, they paid me to add them. Eventually, I was also doing some maintenance work, though in these cases never the central maintainer, on the time my employer pays for. That was helpful to them and to the project, and it doesn't hurt to ask more companies to do that and to increase the amount they give back. I'm not sure advertisements on signs is going to help with that, but the thing they're trying with this campaign is something I would support.

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Re: Red Hat much?

GPL is the choice of the kernel, but the use of an LGPL application, which is what systemd is, doesn't affect the kernel's license at all, no matter how frequently it's used. Lots of applications that are commonly installed on Linux systems are licensed with it or even more permissive licenses. Glibc, which is more common than systemd, is LGPL. It was written by the GNU project, the same people who have the page you linked advising against the LGPL. That's been common for decades and it has done no harm to Linux's GPL2 status. LGPL is also GPL-compatible such that you can easily license additions to something LGPL as GPL if you wish.

LGPL is also not open washing. If someone releases something with an LGPL license, it's open source. I have all the freedoms that involves. Open washing is when they say they've made something open source but they haven't. For example, when someone releases code but their license says that it's forbidden for you to use it if you compete with them (for instance Hashicorp) or you cannot use your modifications in anything commercial [undefined] (many people, for example FUTO), or that you can't distribute at all (WinAmp, but they were probably not really claiming to be open source), or that they haven't actually given you the source (Facebook, and they are claiming to be open). LGPL is not any of those things. I disagree with you that "LGPL can be, and is, used in open washing", and I don't understand how you have come to that conclusion. My best guess is you decided this based on a misunderstanding of how it would affect Linux and by taking a suggestion from GPL advocates to an extreme they did not intend.

Re: Red Hat much?

So you're arguing that LGPL makes something not open source? Do you think BSD or MIT are open source? You're missing the point. All of those licenses allow you to use, modify, distribute, etc the code. The page that advises against the LGPL doesn't like proprietary code and prefers GPL because it makes it a little harder to write it and still use the thing, but that makes something else not open source, not the code under the LGPL in the first place. Open source is not only the GPL.

I think they were saying that they only see positive things from the past, not the lies, but they see all the stuff from the present. So more retroactive rose-tinted glasses. I agree that I've seen lots of evidence of frequent falsehood from the past. It's just that most of it no longer has any relevance, so it doesn't get repeated or talked about.

Re: Protection is vital

This isn't an organized campaign planning to eliminate open source. It isn't even in the mind of someone who hopes that open source would go away. It is just people who think lying about what they're making will help them. That person doesn't hate open source, they just don't care about it, know that others do, and think that they can get those others on board by claiming to care.

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

Re: That's the whole point of WordPress

If you haven't built your own mail client and then used only that, you shouldn't be sending email. Does that make any sense? The logic works just as well for websites.

Not to mention that the worst monstrosities of web insecurity and unmaintainability I've had the misfortune to witness haven't come from the truly clueless. Don't get me wrong, they can make some pretty awful stuff if they put their mind to it, but most of the time, they wind up with something formulaic sticking with defaults which are not great. To do very badly, I recommend a "professional" web designer who has their ideas about what is important, which mostly boils down to whatever they got familiar with in 2007 with updates disabled so it still looks the same way. With the general user, applying security updates generally works. You have to do it because they didn't bother, but you rarely need the backups you make. With the latter, things start to crack at the edges when you make small changes and fall apart for larger ones.

The history of computing has involved making things more user friendly, because if you don't, someone else will and they may not do as good a job. Websites are not so complex that they need to be reserved to hand-coded HTML. In many cases, it's because hand-coded HTML is not going to let you build the kind of site you want quickly or accurately enough anyway. Yes, it works great for your site and many of the ones I've built, but my sites are so small that only I ever need to touch their code and used by few enough people that, if the bus ever comes for me, it will continue to work until a replacement for me is found. A lot of sites have neither attribute and may need something more than that.

Senator accuses sloppy domain registrars of aiding Russian disinfo campaigns

Re: It's typosquatting

There are two separate problems with this.

First, if you want to implement this, what are your criteria for registrations that should be refused? Is it any domain name that differs from any existing one by one letter? That will create lots of false positives. It also won't prevent one of the most common methods of impersonating a domain, sticking something on the end. Tgeregister.com might be blocked, but what about theregisteritnews.com? If you try to prevent that, then you've granted whoever gets there first rights to so many things, because if I want to have the name theregisterofsomethingelse.com, that might be completely reasonable. If you're going to require something, you have to be specific about what it is.

The second problem is that, although that was sometimes in use here, another popular tactic in propaganda campaigns is to create fake outlets and then ascribe to them membership that they don't have. For example, in the United States, radio and terrestrial television statements are identified by call signs beginning with W or K. WUSA is a Washington-based television station and has a website. WUDA is a completely valid call sign that happens not to be assigned to anything. It's also a completely valid acronym for anything else, so you can't just prevent that domain being registered. It would be easy for a propagandist to set up a website and pretend it's a television network, and unless the registrar is visiting the site to police its content, they aren't in a position to prevent it.

They're just unfamiliar with how any of this works. They are unaware that a registrar just takes money and gets the customer the domain they asked for. At best, they could try to make the registrar look for trademark abuses, which were in use at least some of the time during this operation, but I have a feeling they think the registrar should be policing the content available from the domain they purchased, which is unlikely to work.

Free speech is probably not really the issue here. While I don't really want to have to obtain a license to have a domain name, some TLDs do require verification without giving anyone censorship powers. My objection to it is simply that it won't work; any number of identities can be used by organized campaigns, including stolen, corporate, unclear, and misleading ones, and even if they were honest, it wouldn't likely make any difference. I don't have a problem with what the senator wants to prevent, but his ability to do so at all is limited and his ability to do it by way of domain registrars is dubious.

Delta officially launches lawyers at $500M CrowdStrike problem

Re: FTFY

And what exactly makes Microsoft culpable here? CrowdStrike made a bad update and didn't test it. Delta installed that update and didn't have any plan for recovering if something went wrong. Microsoft was... also on the computer at the time. No, just because it was the Windows kernel that the faulty software attached to doesn't make Microsoft culpable. I've installed code into the Linux kernel which crashed it in the same way, but that's not Linux's fault. I also installed a piece of software on Windows that had a DRM module which required kernel access and didn't do good things with it. That was the fault of the creator of that DRM tool. I'm also happy to blame the sellers of the product that require the DRM module. Microsoft was not to blame for it.

Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data scraping claims

So their original point, that their articles were being reproduced wholesale until the hallucinations kicked in and ascribed completely invented conclusions to them, was something you didn't notice? They're alleging violations based on that, not covering the same facts they covered. Perplexity has tried to hide this by suggesting that they were claiming to own the facts, which they weren't, not the articles, which they do.

And all of this is independent of whether I like the creators of the articles in question. In fact, if I hate the articles, I have another reason not to want this to happen. In addition to being a copyright violation, it means the AI will be parroting the content of the reprehensible articles.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

One case where you get the "bug fixes and performance improvements" line is for apps connected to global services. In this case, the company has to add every new bit of functionality to the same app because all global customers are using the same binary. If their change log said something like "enabled the extra controls now being offered to customers in Finland, updated Finnish, Swedish, and English translations for that bit", people would get annoyed about being served an update for something they weren't using. If they tried to list every change for every country, the change logs would become a maintenance burden as well. These aren't good reasons to justify not doing it, because having an accurate change log that you can share with the users is important and useful. Still, that's one of the reasons why a company might choose to cut that corner.

OpenAI loses another senior figure, disperses safety research team he led

Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"

History hasn't gone that way. We made computers, which could automate lots of tasks. Not only did that require a lot of people to build and program the computers, but most of the jobs it eliminated were replaced by something different that wouldn't have existed without the computer available. Whenever something becomes cheap as chips so you can have a large quantity of it for relatively little, we've found ways to want more stuff. I don't see a reason why that would change. I also don't see a reason to expect that the automation of so many tasks will speed up. Yes, it will continue to happen, but I wouldn't bet on that happening quickly. Unless it happens over a short time period, society will probably find a way to absorb it the way it has all the other times.

Re: "remove the obligation to work for a living"

Well presumably it's more of a not giving it to them until they do something you want first. In the theoretical society where everything physical can be created by a machine, including another make-everything machine, the need for people to do something to get that is mostly eliminated*. However, the discussions of what we will do in that condition often skip over the part where no such machine exists. We've had this post-scarcity future in science fiction for a long time. How long has the idea of a robot butler existed? It's longer than we've had the word robot, which is why the idea still exists in a world where there aren't that many butlers. Yet, there are no robot butlers, no matter how wealthy you are. At best, there are machines that can do a small subset of butlerian tasks only when someone has already fulfilled the specific requirements of the machine. If I was sufficiently wealthy and wanted to, I could buy a machine that can make breakfast, as long as it's a specific breakfast, and something to deliver it to me, as long as I've built the routes the machine will take to do so, but the machine will need the ingredients of breakfast in a specific place rather than acting like a human would. If we can't make that, maybe the prospects of a future where there are no physical needs are a bit lower than science fiction would suggest.

* Even if we got make-everything machines, there would still be limits on some things. The one that jumps to mind is land. People want houses and they mostly don't want them in Antarctica. A machine will not make it possible to have as much space as you can use. Maybe the population will fall and we'll end up having enough space for everyone, but that's far from guaranteed. Unless we have an omnipotence machine, chances are that there are things that people want that can't be fulfilled automatically.