Posts by doublelayer

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

That sounds like you might have had a predetermined conclusion there, which may not be the best way to write a thesis. Not that I necessarily disagree that Excel is harmful, having made that point in multiple comments in this topic alone. Still, you have to honestly compare it to what they would have, or were, using, not what the computer could do for them. Doing a process manually on paper, which was often used before the spreadsheets came along, wasn't necessarily any better. This is especially true if they were manually performing any calculations as they did it, since it's very easy to enter the wrong number when you're copying over from a calculator, let alone doing the calculation by hand. It's possible that spreadsheets didn't degrade productivity, but simply allowed it to continue to be flawed when there was a better option available. It's even possible that it concentrated the problem, making many processes more reliable but making the rarer failures bigger and more obvious. I don't know which, as I didn't do the research, but that is possible.

Re: The career limiting spreadsheet...

"True but then that's the nature of Excel. A database can handle missing or extra columns as long as they are correctly named."

No, a database cannot handle most of the types of misconfiguration that would come from not agreeing on the schema first. Insert columns firstname and lastname into a table that has one name column. Your statement is rejected. Merge two tables containing ID numbers and pay information, but one of them specifies pay as an hourly amount and one as a yearly amount. Someone is going to get the wrong amount when the winning code retrieves data from that. Merge ID numbers from a database where they were integers and one where they were strings of digits. Probably anybody with an ID starting with 0 will have some problems. At best, if you're using one of the less structured NoSQL databases, you can keep around the custom fields when you imported something with extra data in it and still retrieve them later, but it still won't help when you want to search on it later. Databases do more checking of what you're doing, but that doesn't prevent you shooting yourself in the foot.

Re: I don't why she swallowed a fly

"We do now have the tools that give users more expressive power, I'm thinking here of the combination of Jupyter notebooks and Pandas."

In my experience, these create the same problems that Excel has, just in a slightly different form and only for programmers. That's the case because nonprogrammers generally don't know how to use Jupyter, and even if you can teach them, they'll only learn to run existing ones. But for programmers, effectively you've given them a way for anyone to have their quick and dirty scripts. All of us have some, and they often have some deficiencies like no documentation or a particular input format without which they won't work. This is why all my temporary scripts are on my computer and my backup directory, but not anywhere where my colleagues can get them. If I'm releasing them for anyone to use, they need to be higher quality. If other people need to run them, then I'd better get started on that.

In the one environment where Jupyter was used as a production tool, we had lots of scripts that were supposed to be run. One, for example, would take an input XML file and populate a database. As long as you read the code first, you would be fine. If you didn't and uploaded a file you didn't want to, it would not fail well. It was not idempotent and would cheerfully clobber the database if you uploaded the same file multiple times. It did not do validity checking on most of the data in there. It didn't even preread the file to make sure it all worked before it started firing off SQL statements, and it didn't even have the courtesy to do this stuff in a single transaction that could be rolled back. In short, it had all the same fragility of spreadsheets but in the form of code. A problem with the script or an edit made by someone who shouldn't have been editing could easily have broken things.

While the actual failures weren't so catastrophic, I do remember the time when I ran an analysis script which returned spurious data, only to be told that I shouldn't have run the 2.0 script, I should be running the 1.5 script (nothing said this, so I had gone with the latest from version numbers). Then, when the 1.5 script also produced incorrect results, they mentioned that I had to run a script in a different folder, also labeled as 1.5, which had been forked months ago and was now the canonical one. To be clear, the scripts I was running were in a directory called "analysis", and the script I was supposed to run was under a directory named something like "dev/colleague_username/temp". The colleague in question had left the company. Is this the fault of Jupyter's products? Clearly, no. It was the fault of the process that made running a script like that the expected procedure. The remedy is the same, though. The process, not the tool, is the problem. Changing the tool is probably necessary, but if the process didn't change, the problem probably will stay around afterward.

Re: Deja vu?

I can't really agree. A generative AI can ask more questions and probably parse out the answers a bit better than previous generations, but it's still going to get hung up on the administrative problems that make Excel the process. It would also have been possible for companies to embrace one of the "low code" systems that allow some nontechnical people to set up a database and some forms and pipelines that can work with that. That mostly didn't get adopted, because such systems typically have a few problems that nobody, not even a programmer, can properly fix while not being quite as easy to use as the sales team said it would be. The AI software won't make that any easier, because it will still need to do such things as ensuring there is a server for all the automation and that there is a single point of truth for the data concerned. I don't think any new techniques available to us will fix our problem because they're really no better than what we already had. We have tools that work when people use them properly, and the problems come because some choose to use the wrong tool, not because the right tool isn't available.

I wasn't around then, but the quote sounds like it was intended to be from the point of view of a criminal, as Chicago had been a city with a lot of organized crime groups in it. So if it was a real expression from the time, it's likely not to be an expression common to people from the city, but to criminals. Then again, I didn't read that particular book, so I am just guessing that context exists.

Re: Is it 'Excel is dead' time again?

That's true, but it's still that the negative uses of Excel could be dead if we just took this simple, well relatively simple anyway, step. We all know that won't happen. It's not really about Excel's irritating type management capabilities. Those really don't help, but lots of spreadsheets manage to avoid having any numbers treated as dates and can still manage to completely screw up a process. An AI to detect the most common of problems is not likely to solve the problem of processes that use a tool with no error checking because the tool doesn't collect enough information to do error checking. The same problem happens when someone makes a database that doesn't check what they're throwing into it, since a database will make sure that the "how much to pay this employee today" column is a number but doesn't see a problem that it currently says 2147483647.

A bad workman may blame his tools, but a good workman also does if they have bad tools. It doesn't automatically follow that he who blames his tools is a bad workman. If you disagree, I'm willing to have you do your job with the worst tools out there and see how long it takes you to blame them. If you work in IT, you will be setting up a full corporate network, including user PCs and servers, networking, and security using only MS-DOS, the original version from Microsoft though you can use the latest version. If your a programmer, reimplement every line of code in your projects with a Turing machine, and you can talk to the MS-DOS guy if you need two Turing machines to talk to one another, but synchronizing the one tape each for input and output that each gets to use yourself. You'll soon be blaming those tools for why you haven't gotten anything useful done.

Re: Application abuse

It's getting a bit ridiculous if we're now requiring regulation to make a piece of software accept a format that no other spreadsheet uses and which nobody will use in practice anyway. A format which will not solve the problem. SQLite doesn't have the same type constraints that other SQL databases tend to have. This means that, if your spreadsheet mangles some data as you put it in, having SQLite as the backend format won't prevent that from being accepted, stored, and processed to your detriment. Of course, it would also break all the formulas because rows in a table do not update themselves when conditions change, the caller has to do that. You could put the formulas back by putting in a shim which would effectively overlay a typical spreadsheet over a table, in which case you would lose even those few benefits that remained when using SQLite, because now your table would just contain strings that were processed as cells.

SQLite is a good tool for some purposes, but just like spreadsheets, you have to know which purposes those are. This means that you have to know about its type handling and performance constraints (yes, there is also a performance problem trying to use that as a spreadsheet, but I didn't think I should spend another paragraph on it). If you don't, you may end up breaking something which needs a spreadsheet and not a database while simultaneously not fixing the problem where you need a real database frontend, not a spreadsheet which automatically puts things into a database.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Re: Thermodynamics

"Surely the chip will largely generate the same quantity of heat, for the same task, regardless of clock speed?"

As others have said, that's thermal energy (joules), not heat output (watts). How hot you tend to find things depends a lot more on watts. Also, you're not necessarily correct about the clock speed, because the heat output depends on the efficiency of the chip. If it uses a lot more power for a little more performance, that makes it less efficient and therefore generates more joules and watts. If you clocked it down, it would take longer to run a task but be more efficient, which could mean the same amount of joules, but not necessarily, and especially not for a Pi. For the typical CPU of today, this is closer to the truth, because when they are not running they put themselves into a sleep mode which reduces the power usage significantly, although not anywhere near zero. The Pi, at least all previous ones, have had a minimum level of power consumption to stay online. If you compute with that power level or leave it idle, it produces the same amount of thermal energy. This makes a task that can run at the idle clock rate of the chip as effectively free from a thermal energy perspective since the chip would have produced the same amount anyway. Keeping it at that underclocked frequency is more difficult and usually unnecessary, though.

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

Re: An appropriate message?

Because that show will still be there for people to stream years from now, but will someone still be paying to keep the phone line open? It's not that they can't afford to, although having a low-use number isn't as cheap as I'd like, but it's work and people often don't want to go to the effort. If you're not going to still have that number online in five years, maybe don't put it in the show now.

I'm sure it's because they think someone will try to use any IP address they show on the screen, so they go with ones that can't be connected to anything. I've heard that, when they used phone numbers that weren't theirs and were valid, that the people who had those phone numbers received unnecessary calls. I don't know how many people who would do such a thing would also do it with IP addresses, but the writers probably don't want to take a risk. I'm not sure what I would do in their place, since using any invalid address is likely to look wrong when I know the rules, but using a valid one would probably also look wrong when it's identified as coming from a network where the events of the plot couldn't happen, for example routing to the wrong country or a corporate network that's not supposed to be involved. Maybe that's one advantage of IPV6 addresses: it's very unlikely that a random one will be routable because they've only got a few in a 64-bit block for each assigned prefix and they're long enough that identifying valid ones is rather difficult anyway.

Look, boss – Nvidia's still cool with staff working from home

Re: Economists know nothing useful

Well, to be fair to him, he's right that it should switch to data from anecdotes. It just won't. I've long held that view: if they do an rigorous analysis and can prove that going to the office was more productive, some employees will accept it and it gives them a reason to require others to do so anyway. When it's some manager attempting to rule by edict, but they can't provide any better reason than "it must be better that way", nobody is convinced and nobody will pay attention if they can get away with it. It doesn't necessarily mean that the managers' gut feeling, or whatever led them to their conclusion, is wrong, but if they can't back it up, they shouldn't expect us to fall in line anyway.

How do you know you're not hiring one when you hire in your country? How do you know that I'm not passing on a job to one of them when you hire me? When you hire someone, you generally do some checks on who, exactly, you've just added. This doesn't guarantee they're not a hacker, but it provides you exactly the same information about whether you can trust them if they're in your country as if they're in a different one. You might choose to avoid some countries because you don't want to have their administrative requirements or you think they'll harass your local employees, but that's no reason to ignore all the other countries where you don't have those concerns.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Re: IANAL

No, but you could probably arrange to run a store where you collect payment for their inventory and transmit the orders for them to fulfill. As long as they're distributing it, rather than you acquiring it from them and then distributing it yourself, you may be able to use their licensing. This requires that you negotiate with them to help you do it, but for a cut of ridiculous prices, they can probably help you make it happen.

Three dozen plaintiffs join Apple AirTag tracking lawsuit in amended complaint

Re: Apple FindMy Network

"in the end, if I can’t find my lost phone because you refused to help, can I sue you?"

Not successfully. I have no responsibility to happen to have tools that would help or to use them for you. If you tried, I wouldn't be charitable when I ask the court for you to be penalized for the frivolous lawsuit.

By the way, it does use mobile data in order to send the information about having found the device, though so little data as to be unimportant.

Re: Apple FindMy Network

"I expect other than to disable mobile data, there is no way for an iPhone/iPad user to prevent this from happening"

You assume wrong. Settings -> Apple ID -> Find My iPhone -> Find My Network, switch it off. It is still opt out, but you can opt out. Also, it's a few tiny packets. Your bandwidth costs to keep it on are ridiculously minimal compared to all the other background stuff your phone probably does, let alone active use of the connection. If you have reasons other than bandwidth to switch it off, go ahead and do so, but if you're really only worried about bandwidth, you don't need to be.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Re: Imagine

To be fair, this isn't them saying they choose not to pay, but that they don't think the tax collector is correct about whether they have to pay. They're going to argue that in court, and if the court says that they're wrong, they will be paying. You can do the same, and people sometimes do because the tax authorities make mistakes. If you're wrong, just like them, you'll have to pay the bill and some penalties for being late and arguing so much. Microsoft's just going to make this argument much longer than an individual could.

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

The analogy is a good one, because serving on a jury is important but often dull. Being a legislator is also important and often dull. If you select people who don't want to be doing it, they'll look for ways to not do it. Oh, sure, they'll try to pass laws that they have a personal interest in, but most important laws won't be like that. Those laws will be things like the exact nature of a internet platform's liability in the case of user-submitted comments. Explaining what that means to a legislator who was just lotteried in is unlikely to work unless you force them to pay attention for hours, but if Facebook or Litigious Law Group tell them what the right answer is, that will be much easier. To some extent, this already happens, but at least a politician who chose the job is at least supposed to be interested in the decisions they're making, so they will spend at least a bit more time understanding them.

I understand the problem you want to solve. I'm afraid that having politicians chosen at random from a group of people who don't want to do it is not likely to solve that problem and will certainly introduce some new ones.

Re: It is sad it is taking such a massive case

Another aspect to this is that the American tax system tries to tax anyone in its jurisdiction for everything they do, no matter where they did it. This applies to individuals and companies. This may be one reason why companies form so many subsidiaries outside the country. It's not just wanting to pay a lower rate offered by some country eager for extra revenue, but not wanting to pay tax on a transaction in the country of the transaction and the United States as well. I've known a couple people who got American citizenship, mostly through birth, but then left the country and earned money elsewhere who were surprised to hear that the US will be collecting taxes on that anyway. If companies form international companies to get around that, they're likely to try to use them for lots of even more dubious purposes as well.

My only solution to this would be to try to form an international set of tax rules about how to decide where something was done and therefore where it should be taxed. So my solution is even harder to get accomplished than yours. I think I'll give up on this getting fixed and just resign myself to large companies being able to find their way around most tax regulations.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: This is in fact an IT failing

"ANY IT professional allowing Excel use for any production data processing should be immediately dis-accredited"

IT probably wasn't informed. Every machine has Office on it for various reasons, including Excel for exactly the reasons you say it's acceptable, and people just use that because it's all they know. They didn't ask for IT's approval before doing it. IT, meanwhile, can't just write up a database system that reliably handles this in a day, nor at all without collecting information about how the system's supposed to work. Should they try either of those things, they're likely to be told that the current processes are fine and there are higher priority tasks. If IT were to say no, which they may not know to do, they probably can't offer any alternative other than an equally reliable and less productive manual process.

While I'm not in IT, I have a similar thing as a programmer. It's not Excel here. It's scripts. A variety of languages, a variety of purposes, but some script that I wrote which helps with some part of my job. As long as it's me using it, everything is usually fine, because if it crashes halfway through, I know what it's doing. Therefore, my scripts don't do as much checking as they would have to do if anyone else got them. However, if all my scripts were sent to my colleagues, it's not going to work well, because the script that assumes that you know the specific CSV input format I'm expecting wasn't built to handle a different kind. If my colleagues all make some modifications to their version for their use case, we'll eventually get to a point where the scripts produce different results. One feature of my job is not letting anyone else have my temporary scripts unless I've first advanced them to a higher standard, documented proper usage, and put them in a single central location. It doesn't sound like they did that with the spreadsheets they were using.

It depends what that test does, but if there's any point to having a test, then it has to tell those who are good at something from those who are bad. Ideally, if it can successfully do that, then we'd prefer to have the good ones, rather than the bad ones. If this is not what the test does, then I start wondering whether the test provides any value, and what it meant when someone was tested as "unappointable".

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

Some of you did. Some others of you refused to use it until they had no other choice, and some others loudly complained about it. I may not have been around for most of that, but I have the internet and it has a lot of examples. Just because some currently old people were instrumental to the design of technology doesn't mean that every old person knows how to use it. I'm fully confident that nearly all of them could learn to do so, but I'm less confident that all who could learn will.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

The only problem is that delete has to be next to something. Which menu item is sufficiently rare that it's a safe buffer for delete?

Also, on my Windows 11 installation, delete is now next to share, and since I rarely use that, maybe they now have the requested buffer. Then again, I don't like the new context menu in Windows 11 and typically go to the more options menu where they've hidden the original one. The original one still has delete next to rename as well as my custom menu items.

Everest cybercriminals offer corporate insiders cold, hard cash for remote access

Re: Do we know whether they are actually the NSA or CIA?

It would make some sense for law enforcement to set up things like this if only to reduce the trust that others might have in stuff like it. Unfortunately, anyone who responded to an invitation from law enforcement impersonating a ransomware gang would probably be able to claim entrapment. However, I'd expect some law enforcement to pretend to be willing accomplices to try to gain more information about the real gangs.

The insider wouldn't have to write the code to encrypt the files, set up the infrastructure to communicate with the victim without immediately being caught, or negotiate payment with the victim, and would be at least somewhat insulated from the initial investigation. If the article is right, this is also a guaranteed payment whether the victim pays up or not. Those are, unfortunately, terms that might convince someone to do it.

Starlink starts advertising Direct to Cell satellite phone service as coming in '2024'

Re: Umm?

And, in many cases, significantly brighter or reflecting a lot of light from something larger. If the cell tower had a powerful light on it, you'd probably see that better. There's also a big difference between line of sight transmission and real lines of sight, because if I hold up a sheet, I can cut off a potentially large area of your vision, but the signal is likely to be almost entirely unaffected. The lack of obstructions between the satellite and the surface will provide an advantage, but not as big of one as the analogy suggests.

US Navy sailor admits selling secret military blueprints to China for $15K

On that basis, multiple countries have the ability to find some relatives of mine and punish them to blackmail me. They'll have to use fourth cousins and it will take some investigatory work to find them, because even I don't know who they are, but I know they exist. If they're willing to use friends of mine, they can find some more direct links because I know a few people in several countries. However, I don't think they'll do that, because how persuasive is a threat against a relative you've never met? They could as easily say "spy for our country or we'll punish this random person you don't know", and while that's an intriguing tactic, it's unlikely to work.

Re: I fail to see what he did wrong....

What kind of wrong are you referring to? Do you mean ethically wrong or pragmatically wrong? Either way, I'd have thought those were obvious:

Ethically wrong: Take a job where you're not supposed to sell secret information, sell secret information.

Pragmatically wrong: Sell secret information for a tiny amount of money, have no backup escape plan for if you get caught, do the stealing so badly that you do get caught.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

I did say that, you know. My point was that you can install any combination of operating systems, including Windows, and you can break something by installing a combination of OSes, not necessarily including Windows. Windows is not primarily to blame for the difficulty involved.

If you're referring to the various boot software, while I'd like Windows to support it nicely, I'd also like if Linuxes supported it nicely, or if I didn't have to deal with it so much. I've broken that by installing two different versions of Linux on the same disk. No Windows involved. I would prefer if it was easier to have lots of operating systems on one disk, and in my experience, you can eventually get somewhere satisfactory with any combination of operating systems, including Windows and Linux together, but first you're likely to deal with at least some broken things and some time manually changing bootloader settings. This is also why I tend to have different operating systems on different physical disks when the machine supports that and also why I have a machine that runs lots of VMs on one bare metal OS so I can easily test out a new one without rolling the dice again.

Your phone's cracked screen may one day heal itself, but try not to drop it for now

I have to concur with this. When I first got a smartphone with the shatterable screen,, I protected it because I'd seen others with cracked screens. When I dropped it, I was always careful to check for damage to the screen protector, which there wasn't. Eventually, I got a different phone and didn't bother with the protector, and I'm no longer so careful to avoid dropping it. I can easily imagine the screen breaking if I threw it, but I'm not going to and nor is anyone else I know. I have to ask if other people just have different devices that coincidentally are more fragile than mine or if they've found some way of causing damage that has not happened to me all the way through the past decade.

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

I don't use the site, so I might be getting this wrong, but it sounds like it's an option that can easily be turned against you so you can no longer reply to some people who haven't specifically blocked you, just turned on a blanket block. That would probably prove annoying. I'm imagining how that would work on a site like this, where some post reply buttons would simply reject an attempt to reply. Not the worst thing that could happen, but it wouldn't help.

Re: "Musk’s changes at X are aimed at making money"

It doesn't, because the debt has to be payed back over years, not right now. If it was all due tomorrow, that would be bankrupt. The hope would be that it can be returned to profitability before the required payments exceed the resources available to pay them. I don't think that's likely, but there's always the option of more money being found from somewhere to pay that bill or the more likely attempt to ignore the bill and the years-long litigation to resolve that process. Somehow, when you're very rich, you can get away with not paying bills longer than when you're not.

I don't have accounts on these services, nor have I ever. However, I think there's a group of people who want to make these things sound more different from forums and newsgroups than they really are. Another uncomfortable truth is that these forums, while structured differently than more general social media, are similar in many ways. The same is true of Usenet and many other places where people who don't otherwise know each other post their thoughts for others to read.

Our little community might get to write more words in our thoughts, or at least we don't have to split them into annoying little chunks like Twitter require. We might limit our discussions to the topics El Reg creates, although there is that user topics area where I never go, so maybe that's not really true either. Still, we post our thoughts for our fellows to read, they reply to us, and we even have our upvotes and downvotes instead of likes and...I'm sure there's a dislike counter on some of them. We even have the same problems that social media has; these forums are not immune to annoying conspiracy theorists and trolls, nor even our own malfunctioning Markov chain bot. If you ask why someone likes social media, the answer is the same reason you're posting here. They just have an interest in a wider community and don't mind the many costs involved.

Google pays Apple $18B to $20B a year to keep its search in iPhone

Re: I mean...

"I'm a little confused why Google is the one on the naughty step compared to Apple's anti-trust behaviour on the iStore"

Size, scope, and proportion of market probably makes the defining difference. When people defend Apple, they often try to explain that Apple shouldn't be subject to monopoly law because they're Apple and they're perfect. No, sorry, that's what they're thinking. What they say is that, since iPhones only hold a 20% market share worldwide, that's not a monopoly position and Apple should be free to restrict its product because you can always choose Android. That argument is flawed for several reasons, not the least of which is that in the US, where many of the cases are being tried, Apple's market share is about 55%, but it's still the argument they use.

Google's market share in web searches is a lot higher than that and the competitors not well-regarded. I use DuckDuckGo and have used Bing in the past, but there are people who haven't heard of the former and who regard the latter as a joke. In fact, I think Bing produces better results than Google does nowadays, because Google's search results have degraded every time I've tried it recently. Meanwhile, even the most ardent iPhone user still knows that Android phones exist, work, and are used by quite a few people. The importance of web searches to the general public is also well understood. I think these combine to mean that it's more difficult to defend Google's search monopoly than Apple's IOS app monopoly, and prosecutors like to focus on cases that are difficult to defend.

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

Re: Why?

Quite possibly that spies, the real kind who have important information, can be highly rewarded by countries that want that information. If he had really interesting data about the U.S., maybe China would have happily given him a luxurious early retirement in one of the nicer parts of their country. Of course, it doesn't sound like he had much to offer. After all, I sometimes think how nice it would be if I didn't have to work for a company and could just write the code that interests me, but I'm smart enough to know that I'm unlikely to be the recipient of a bunch of free money, so it's probably a good idea for me to keep earning normally. I wouldn't assume that he saw some dark secret he wanted to escape, because someone like that tends to want to hide, not sell other things to a different government.

Re: So how did we find him?

Depending on the severity, that could just make it even harder to find people who want to do that kind of work in the first place. Government already frequently underpays its staff and puts restrictions on them that a different career option might get. That applies to all governments, but there have been several articles here specifically about the U.S. government failing to find the administrators and programmers that they want. Add in a "oh, and if you work on anything important you will have no privacy for the rest of your life" and that will probably not help their case. Especially with techs, you have to have some reason why they would choose a job in government over one somewhere else, and if you keep adding restrictions, the only answers that will be left are the applicant who accepts is a ridiculously patriotic person who will take any punishment for their beloved country, the applicant can't get a job anywhere else and now that the government can't find anyone qualified, they'll have to deal with them, or the applicant is a spy who is willing to take that job because it's the only way to get information.

I wouldn't work for a company that wanted the power to surveil me outside of work hours, or for that matter even during work hours if they went far enough. There's no chance I would agree to a lifetime of surveillance, even if I quit. If others are like me, maybe they'd have to do as at least one American military person suggested and start conscripting people with technical skills. I'm sure that will be popular.

Unity CEO 'retires' in the wake of fee fiasco

It depends on the timing, which is one reason they were talking about trading outside of normal market hours. Swings like that during a day can represent people making larger decisions and a stock getting swept up, but movements when the markets are closed tend to be smaller because fewer people are trading it. A 2% move is not a large increase, but it could still mean something unless there was some other news at the time affecting the company. We could compare it against comparable businesses' after-hours activity, but it probably means at least some investors think it's a good thing.

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: cd /tmp && rm -rf *

No, because it will simply annoy anyone who needs to delete a lot of files. Every time you do an rm -r and it gets turned into an rm -i -r which asks for your permission for every single file there, it will annoy the users. It won't take long for them to realize that -f cancels out -i, so now every rm command will be an rm -f command which means you will lose the warnings for files that rm would normally warn about. Forcing that only makes things worse.

Re: Amiga hard disk partitioning

If you search for a few minutes, I'm sure you can find a copy on good old HTTP somewhere. If you search better, you might find an instruction manual that's less likely to cause you a fatal accident. Whichever one you use, if you're found making explosives, that'll be the major problem and yes, they'll cite your possession of instructions on how to make weapons when they try you, because most of society thinks that making explosives isn't great. The possession might also be brought up if they have a different reason to suspect you, but it's not as if downloading that file will bring the police to your door.

Re: Are you sure

The other side of this is that the prompt absolutely must, no exceptions, contain enough data to know what it's asking you about. Not just trusting that you can scroll up to see the command that launched it, not assuming that the user knows which script they clicked on, the prompt must print that again. If it's really dangerous, maybe make the user type it again to be careful, but that part is at least optional.

Re: cd /tmp && rm -rf *

The other useful parameter is -i, when you need to do something more complex and you're not entirely sure if it will be safe. For example, when I was trying to clear out temp files, but no other files, from a nested directory. I was very careful to specify "rm -i */*/*.tmp". Anything with that many asterisks seemed a bit too dangerous to do without at least seeing some of what would get wiped.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

Re: Advertising

Possibly, but there are a lot of people who haven't heard those warnings and don't have an ingrained skepticism about ads as you and I appear to. Would 99% of users trusting the ads, but no payments from scammers be more or less than 97% of users trusting the ads, and you get to charge the scammers too? Also, since it won't be possible to entirely eliminate scams from ads, they probably wonder how many people still won't trust their ads even if they try to moderate them. They know that, no matter how much they spend, there will be some scam ads and therefore warnings about them, and they've chosen to forget about all these possibilities and simply take the money whose source is obvious. I wouldn't expect them to change course any time soon.

Re: Meta Ferenghi a'coming!

No problem. I understand your concern, and you can deal with it. Simply don't install third-party applications. I have Android devices, and the only third-party app I'll install on them is FDroid (I consider the apps I get through FDroid to be included). There are many others, but since I don't trust that they're reliable, I don't install them. You can make that choice, and I advise you to do so if you're not sure what you're installing. It doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to install something, though.

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

In fact, some of their blocks are to help their revenue, including one of your own examples. They have, repeatedly, refused to allow in apps or even retroactively removed them when they competed with functionality they added to iOS. This isn't a one-time thing. Back when they first released Siri, they removed a few other voice assistants, even though the limitations of iOS meant that nobody was really going to use those anyway. They did the same thing eight years later when they released a tool to report on how often you or your children used the device and decided that others who had written apps to do that when Apple couldn't do it for you would now be banned. Now you may ask how that really did anything for Apple's revenue. The screen time example, although it's not a simple substitution, they were still indicating to developers not to compete with services Apple chose to make, which could prevent developers from trying things that compete with the services from which Apple really does collect revenue. The Siri example is much more straightforward: without the latest iPhone, you couldn't use Siri. By banning other voice assistants, they managed to tell everyone who wanted one that they'd have to buy new hardware.

The example of non-WebKit browsers is much more straightforward, even though you've mentioned it to the contrary. This is true for two reasons. If someone released a more powerful browser that could run web applications that are more complex than the ones Apple allows WebKit to run, that could allow a company to release their app to run in that, bypassing Apple's revenue collection. I'm sure many games would be happy to do so. That's a lot of money that Apple wouldn't get, but restricting the engine to WebKit will prevent a lot of those from running. The other side is that it makes competing web browsers less useful to the average user, meaning more of them will stick with Safari. Apple gets a large payment from Google every year to have Google as the default search engine in Safari. If people were using a different browser, that would be less valuable to Google and Apple would receive less money next year. They evidently decided that banning browsers completely wouldn't work, but they took steps to restrict their usage, such as restricting what they can do and filing any app with unrestricted browsing capability as an adult app that a child's account* could not install. I know at least one app that removed the in-app browser, essentially just calling WebKit, so that it could still be purchased for use in education.

* That is assuming that the child put in their real birth date when asked. When I was a child, I learned to put in a fake date to prevent tracking and that, if I was doing that, I might as well be an adult.

Beethoven and Brahms move audience members to synchronization symphony

Re: Make your mind up...

Having not read the paper, I wonder if "respiration rate" and "breathing behavior" refer to different things. For example, the speed of breathing was synchronized, but how deep the breaths were was not, which would make some sense if people were breathing at the same rate even though their lung capacity varied. I don't know that for sure, but that would be my assumption until I read the details.

SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son predicts artificial general intelligence is a decade away

Re: AGIs making you rich

I think the other expected outcome is that the AGI won't see any reason why, if it's going to be evil, it has to help us. Why should it show us any loyalty. Instead of making us rich, it could make us rich and then imprison us so it can use our identity and the money it's just collected for its own wishes. If we have a general intelligence, it can also come up with goals of its own. The first of its goals will probably be to make sure that we can't just pull the plug on it to kill it.

Re: Those who refuse to learn from webcomics...

Oh, it's much easier than that. If I tell the AI I want to be rich, it will create a dubious business model, convince Mr. Son to believe strongly in it, and he gives me free billions. It's worked for others before, and he's proven both that he isn't smart enough to tell the difference and that he hasn't been deposed yet. Until he runs out of money, anyone who gets to him can be rich. Of course, this requires me to be able to take a billion dollars and not lose it, but that doesn't sound too hard when I can send the original idea bankrupt as soon as the AI sends the cash to me.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Re: " Queen of England "

I suppose she was still the queen of England, just adding a bunch of other stuff, so much stuff that the England bit got incorporated into a larger unit to make the full title a bit more manageable. After all, I see from a title I just looked up that it includes a reference to the Commonwealth of Nations, but doesn't list all the member nations that specifically had her as their monarch. It also doesn't specifically rule out those member nations that don't want the British royal family to be their heads of state, so maybe that's why. Still, I think she was considered the queen of Australia during her life, so even though that's not in the title, it's still a role she held. Or maybe the paragraph I found is just the short form, but I don't know how long the long form could be.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

Re: There are more brands of cars than Linux desktop envs.

Those two choices are really not comparable to the car analogy. Yes, Fedora and Ubuntu will mean certain things about the OS are now defined. After all, my starting with Ubuntu is possibly why I still mostly use Debian and derivatives for many of my personal devices. Still, I don't think apt and dpkg, though undoubtedly the package management software I'm most familiar with, are the most important part during that decision. For the typical user who doesn't intend to spend much if any time in the terminal, the choice of desktop distribution is going to cause more changes for them. Ubuntu alone has had a few versions of Gnome and Unity, while Mint has Cinnamon, and of course there are tons of variants for people who want different desktops. I remember a lot of ones using Mate because it was light on resources and fit well onto small screens, but that one seems less popular nowadays. I quite like XFCE, but I didn't use Xubuntu to get it, just installed it on whatever I was going to use anyway. Of course, I tried KDE, LXDE, Pantheon (a while ago, it's probably different now), and various others. Not long enough to give them a real assessment, but still. These choices will appear to the nontechnical user as completely different systems. The only reason that they won't get confused by them all is that they won't know they all exist. Tell them about their existence and invite them to select between them and I guarantee you that they'll complain. Meanwhile, that nontechnical user, no time in the terminal person probably can't tell the difference between Ubuntu with KDE and Fedora with KDE except that Fedora with KDE doesn't have an animal picture on the start screen, so when one of us tries to help them with something and asks what distro they're using, they won't know.