Posts by doublelayer

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: Communication "Preferences"

In the product documentation, you need to document the options so that there's enough information that you can make that shorter page. True, that documentation and the checklist you're making are probably not written by the same person, but it is still important to have them both. I can't count the number of configuration pages where there is an option that I can configure but I have no clue what it does because it just has "TRS, default setting 0", and doesn't expand TRS or explain what it does. The more professional the equipment, the more likely there's a manual which explains it somewhere, but there is a lot out there without such a thing.

If I'm supposed to be a human computer, simply setting anything the way that my knowledgeable colleague said, this is not a problem. In that situation, there is no need to train any other engineers either, since we just need to have existing engineers write up some one-page processes and hand them to people who need to have no skills or interest in gaining them. There are quite a few people I know who don't know or want to know about computers but can be trusted to complete a completely rigid set of instructions about where to click and which box to put which value in. That is not what network engineering requires. The reason we need people with knowledge is that these things are complicated, and having the skills doesn't help unless they have enough information about what the systems do that they can figure out when the defaults or the things written on the previous configuration need to be changed, how to test that their changes worked, how to test that their changes didn't break something else, how to reverse them if they did fail, and how to diagnose a new problem that they haven't seen before. At most only one of them, number 2 on that list, can be in the one-page checklist, and in most of the ones I've seen, that one isn't on it either.

Re: Communication "Preferences"

The one page of notes works fine once you've done it several times. The longer documentation is necessary for every other situation, such as the first time you're doing it or the time you ask someone else to do it. You need it, for instance, when Install S:\Apps\blah\driver\timmy asks a question, emits an error code, or doesn't work because this is a Windows on ARM machine. Most of those won't happen, and the ones that do you've seen before, but the documentation is there to handle that kind of case.

It's the same problem that we often get in software documentation. Man pages, for example, are famous for using lines like "-D: detail mode". Great, I know how to turn that on. Or maybe that's on by default and this is for a different case. What does it do? What is the alternative? And that in programs that often have twenty different default configurations, such as that detail mode is enabled by default, goes into extra detail mode if you specify it twice, disabled if piping to a file, disabled if the number of targets is high enough, and on and on. This holds for other types of documentation as well. People leave out things that seem obvious, and when you give it to someone else, they can't do the task properly until they've figured it out, or worse, they still can't but it isn't sufficiently unclear that they know it, so they do what the documentation says and seem confused when the computer fails because nobody thought to update the documentation that you don't install wotsit by executing wotsit_setup.exe, even though that will offer to install wotsit. You run the batch file in there which does some configuring and calls the installer with some command line parameters. Everyone has installed wotsit, so we don't need to update that, the line just reminds you that's the next step. When the trainee messes up, we'll blame them instead of the doc they were following.

Re: Give me one solid reason...

You should probably encourage them into whatever career seems to match their skills and interests, and IT isn't a terrible one. A lot of stupid managers are going to fire people and outsource them or try to replace them with AI. A lot of managers are going to hire more to deal with the disaster caused by the first one. I'm not sure there are many or any jobs where you can avoid things like that that don't come with equally strong negatives. Unless you know of a career where job security is universal and easy, I'd still recommend IT to someone who was good at it and enjoyed it.

I am a programmer, and most of the job descriptions are very vague on what they want people to do and what experience is actually useful. I did recently see a job description that went so far the other way, asking for someone who had worked in a very specific area. Essentially, they wanted someone who had already written exactly the program that they wanted and could, I guess, just come over there and write it again from memory. Points to the job description for making it very clear what they wanted, but they should probably have considered that their task was something that quite a few embedded Linux people could manage and they might not have as much success trying to find someone who had already done exactly the same thing.

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

I'm not sure that's true. To me, the article reads as the much more boring statement "You might find that you like working or get bored when not working, so you'll keep doing it". Which, for some people, is true, but they will be able to figure that out for themselves and hopefully will be able to do whatever thing they find most enjoyable in their older years. I have a lot of time to go before I can consider that, but I expect that I would get bored if not doing some of the things that my job acts as an outlet for. Maybe that will make me stay in the workforce longer even if I could be financially independent, but maybe it means I'll spend more time doing that kind of thing as a volunteer for charities, something I already enjoy doing sometimes, and maybe I'll find that it gets old after a while and I'd be happier not doing it after all. That probably doesn't apply to plenty of people, who continue working for financial reasons and would be happier doing something else.

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

Re: "a person of Māori descent"

"I reckon the south of the South Island would be a great spot for data centers for cloud hosting - cool weather and plenty of water for further cooling, electricity (at least if they knock that stupid aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point on the head), a timezone opposite that of Europe, no wars likely in the vicinity, etc etc."

For most cloud datacenter purposes, there are some major downsides. They have some datacenters in NZ already for serving the local market, but for serving any other market, you have latency and network contention problems. Australia is the cheapest place to use NZ datacenters, and they probably could, but they have many there already so they may not need to. Any other continent isn't going to want to use them for many purposes. Compare to European datacenters, which often have similar climatic conditions and reliable, if not as green, power, and are also close to their users and much larger oceanic cable systems.

Your suggested datacenters might still be viable if they were specifically aimed at the AI-style use case, namely workloads that aren't time-sensitive but use tons of processing and thus power. It might work, but that may not be enough given how many other places that can work in. Especially if building one relies on a smelter shutting down, because they wouldn't want to build unless they know it's going to happen if the consequences of it being delayed is that their datacenter operations are also delayed.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

Re: $899 is not cheap

They do, but "case" in this sentence means only the plastic shell so you're not using the bear board. It doesn't let you do anything else with the board, for example attaching a fan so you can run hot more of the time or having any of the other things you tend to find in a desktop. Not that they need one. I wouldn't really expect their desktop to use the same mainboards as their laptop; while it would be nice if they could manage it, those are designed quite differently. A 12-inch laptop and 13-inch one, especially when the 12-inch model exists to have a touchscreen and 360-degree hinge could use the same boards. As I said, I'm pretty certain that they don't or they would have said so, but this would be a disappointment to me because the potential is too obvious and few downsides would exist.

One of the things that made me choose Framework when I bought a laptop was that they intended to keep the same form factor, and they have proven that by continuing to release mainboards. I am less confident that they will have a similar amount of demand for the other model, which means they may have to choose which one will continue to get upgrades and which one gets dropped. If they used the same mainboards, they'd just have to keep making the chassis for the smaller model, making it easier to have multiple niche devices, and they would be able to use economies of scale for the mainboards which could be used in several types of devices. If I'm right, I have a feeling I'll be lucky and the 13-inch laptop I have will be the one that lasts.

The only model they've done it with is the 13-inch laptop, but you have a few years of mainboard upgrades you can use as evidence. They're not cheap, but they are substantially cheaper than a full laptop. If you want a newer processor, upgrading them is quite easy and you still save a lot over the full laptop. For example, to put a Ryzen AI 5 340 in an existing laptop costs £/$449/€529 whereas a new laptop with it in it starts at $/£1099/€1309. Note that US prices do not include taxes whereas UK and EU prices have VAT included, thus them being higher.

Re: $899 is not cheap

Could you link some? I have failed to find anything detailed. I have found a lot of articles that describe it, including confirming that it's using the same expansion modules that the other machines do, but they are much less clear about everything else. I assume RAM and storage are replaceable because it would be crazy if they weren't, the desktop notwithstanding, but none of the articles even mention this.

It seems unlikely to the extreme, but I would have hoped that they could build this around the same mainboards that are used in the 13-inch laptop. I expect that this will use a mainboard with a CPU with a lower TDP because the battery is smaller, but that would have been an advantage for the laptop users who could opt for something cheaper and lower power, and convertible users could update to other boards that could operate with the smaller battery. For example, you could probably run the RISC-V board on the smaller battery if you wanted to. My primary reason for wanting this is that, if they have one standard mainboard, it is easier for them to keep making new ones and for users of older devices to replace them. It also makes it more likely that someone else might make a compatible mainboard. Now that they have four different models, none of which have board compatibility with any others, what happens if they decide to stop making one? I understand why the 16-inch laptop benefited from a larger board, but I'm not sure whether there will be as many benefits to the convertible.

Re: So they made a desktop that's LESS repairable/upgradeable??

Your suggested alternative? Sadly, I have neither an M4 Pro nor a Ryzen AI Max 395+* to run software on, so I needed a benchmark that includes enough candidates and samples to provide me with any numbers. Passmark has both. Most other benchmarks I'm aware of either don't have as many samples, don't work on as many operating systems, are operating system-specific meaning a Windows or Linux Ryzen measurement can't be compared to Mac OS M4 measurements, or simply don't have good numbers, apart from a single user-provided number, available to me. When citing your suggestion, I'd also appreciate any reasons you have for thinking the benchmark is more accurate.

* After typing the AMD processor name a few times now, it strikes me how much I don't like their new naming conventions. They seem to have taken a hybrid approach between Intel's and Apple's naming, and I don't think it helps.

Re: So they made a desktop that's LESS repairable/upgradeable??

I agree with you that it's not very impressive, but don't go overboard in your quest to prove it. They didn't have an option to use replaceable RAM with the CPU they used, but that might have been an indication that they should consider using a different CPU. Unlike their laptops, there is not any repairability benefit to their desktop.

But you've decided to go compare it to a Mac Mini, so let's do that.

"A Mac Mini with M4 Pro is going to handily beat that, and cost less too. Quite a trick for them to be underpriced by Apple lol"

The Mac Mini with M4 Pro starts at $1,399 (I'm using dollars to avoid including tax in the comparison). The Framework Desktop starts at $1,099. That cheapest Framework has 32 GB of RAM. The cheapest Mac Mini has 24 GB. Not looking great for your comparison. If we want identical amounts of RAM, we can do that. For $1,599, you can get a Framework Desktop with 64 GB of RAM. To get 64 GB in a Mac Mini, the price jumps to $1,999. Not cheaper after all. But, of course, there's more to a computer than RAM. Let's compare CPUs. The 12-core M4 Pro receives Passmark benchmarks of 4623/33153. The CPUs used in the Framework haven't been benchmarked yet, but the one in the comparison is a 16-core CPU with a 55 W TDP. AMD does have one of those that has benchmarks: last year's AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (4062/54826). The Mac's storage is significantly more expensive and proprietary, so to have more than the default 512 GB, you'll be adding a lot more to that price (a 2 TB SSD does not cost $600 elsewhere).

Your price comparison is wrong on all levels.

Re: Rather have an UPTON ONE

Out of curiosity, why would you prefer that? There are several problems with the model that make it less interesting to me. Compared to the Framework, the Pi 5 is a lot slower. Four A76s is not very much in comparison to modern CPUs, and it maxes out at 8 GB of RAM (there are 16 GB full Pi boards, but not compute modules that this laptop uses). There are some tasks I want to run on a laptop that use more.

Perhaps my biggest problem is power management. The Raspberry Pi uses a lot of power to deliver the performance it does, and it doesn't have lower power modes, or at least not support for them in software. This means that, whenever I connect one to a battery, it takes a very big battery and I have to perform a full shutdown any time I want to leave it for a while and come back with some charge still in the battery. That makes a laptop based on it much less interesting.

Re: $899 is not cheap

The prices we have are for the 13-inch laptops with significantly faster processors. The prices for the lower-power convertible will be lower, although they haven't said how much lower and I'm expecting it won't be as lower as we might want. I don't expect the convertible hinge and touchscreen to be cheap additions at their scale, though.

I'm also waiting to see how repairable the 12-inch model is. Since it's Framework, I'm expecting it will be significantly more than any other manufacturer, but I have their laptops as a point of comparison so I'm expecting to find fewer replaceable parts in the new model than exist in their laptops. Still hoping that Framework will prove me wrong.

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

Re: I'm not quite understanding the issue here

That is stretching things a bit. In a comment in a different thread, I linked to and commented on the text of their license. Right at the top, they state that they are using the AGPL with an additional clause. It wasn't hidden in there.

As for your "verbatim only" point, this seems mistaken and irrelevant. It is irrelevant because that's not at issue anyway. The FSF can sue for that if they like, but they haven't. The issue is whether the clause is applicable to other parts of the license in which it is included, which is not clear because the license they used explicitly states that it does and that it doesn't, so they've stuck themselves in a loop. It wouldn't matter if the FSF had said you could do whatever you wanted with the license; they'd still be in that loop. It is mistaken because the main reason they are in that loop is that they did use it verbatim. They could have fixed the license by modifying or removing a couple sentences, but they didn't, so the license appears in its entirety with no edits. That is, in fact, verbatim in the same way that, if I write an introduction to a book and then include the unedited book, you wouldn't say I had written or edited that book. I agree that they shouldn't have, both for clarity to their users and for not getting themselves into this legal battle, but if you want to make the case based on the terms, they may not support you even if the FSF did choose to sue over it.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

As far as I know, the only OSI involvement with this case was their happiness when it was declared that Neo4J's license is not open source. This has earned them a lot of annoyance, because what the court really said was that PureThink could not apply the unmodified AGPL but had to use Neo4J's version, Neo4J's wasn't open source, therefore theirs wasn't either. The OSI expressed happiness about something that was unrelated to whether this license was accepted or not, but because they seemed happy when PureThink was defeated, people assume that the OSI oppose PureThink or did something to engineer the ruling.

What OSI is happy about is a good thing, because it acts against other companies who think they can claim to have open source software when they don't. It is also not harmful to PureThink, because if they win the case, then they will use AGPL and that will be open source.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

Some more context on that. They seem to have decided they needed to do exactly what I describe: give their license a new name. This version can be found here. Were this the only version, I'd agree with the court unreservedly. It isn't that clear, but neither is it clear on the other side, when we look at the 2018 version which is at issue.

They say up front that this is not the unmodified AGPL:

The software ("Software") is developed and owned by Neo4j Sweden AB

(referred to in this notice as “Neo4j”) and is subject to the terms

of the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, with the Commons Clause as follows:

The FSF does not want that called the AGPL3, and I don't either. I'm not sure we can make that desire legally binding because it is all the text of the AGPL3, but I disapprove of it. For that matter, I disapprove of the Commons Clause in all its forms, so I'm not an adherent of Neo4j. Still, if I'm analyzing the merits of the court case, it's hard to claim that they weren't explicit when this is right at the top.

One thing that works against Neo4J here is that they failed to change this line:

"This License" refers to version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public

License.

Without being explicit, that would suggest that you can in fact use 7.4 (which refers to "this license") to reset it to the original AGPL minus the Commons Clause. So now we have two contradictory elements of the license, one saying that the clause applies and one saying it doesn't have to. That was clearly not what Neo4J intended, and I think anybody forking knew that, but it means there isn't an obvious answer, even if I might want a specific interpretation.

Neo4J could have easily gotten themselves out of it, but their failure to do so doesn't prove that they're wrong. I'm also not convinced that a court's decision on this will affect the rest of the AGPL or the many places where it is used without modification. This license contradicts itself, whereas the AGPL doesn't. I think it will continue to stand even if Neo4J wins this case.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

That's true, but you could argue that they didn't license their work under the AGPL there. They licensed it on their own non-open license where they copy and pasted the text from the AGPL and stuck extra things in. That is not a good way to write a license, but they evidently chose it. If that's what they did, then the term from the AGPL doesn't let you remove anything that wasn't the AGPL, it now allows you to remove any term that wasn't compatible with their modified built-on-AGPL.

This is where I'd be doing something boring like seeing if they claimed their license was the AGPL. If they said it was their new license which just happened to share most of its text with the AGPL, then I don't think that lets you reset the terms. This works in the same way that a license I've used, which was a lot like the MIT license but they added a couple of things I didn't like wasn't MIT, but they didn't say it was, so I couldn't exactly blame them for making their own.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

The problem is that it could be used to eliminate other contracts, which could be a problem. Consider an extreme example. I am paying you to write some code into an AGPL-licensed program for me. You've agreed to use that license on the stuff you're developing for me. Once you finish writing it and making it available, I take it and announce that the contract we made which involves me paying you for this is an additional restriction, so under the terms of the AGPL, I am choosing to remove that restriction. Can I do that? This depends on whether the court agrees that this is a restriction on the software, which they might not, but the line is ambiguous enough that that's not guaranteed. With an example as extreme as this, the chances are good that they would throw that out, but with something smaller, they might not.

The bigger question they'd have to answer there is whether a software license can invalidate other, possibly separate contracts. Most of the time, it can't. In contracts where they specify that one document will prevail over another, those documents are two parts of a single contract, for example the permitted use policy of a service and the contract where you say you'll pay them, which you agree to at the same time. Contracts generally don't get to proclaim themselves superior to other contracts, because what would happen if my additional terms say that "if you want to distribute modified versions under a license that isn't the AGPL, you may remove that term"? Which term or terms are you allowed to remove at will?

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

Re: Comparing Apples to Frameworks

I kind of agree with you, in the sense that, if I bought this, I wouldn't expect that I'd increase the RAM and I wouldn't expect it to break, so it not being replaceable wouldn't affect me very much. However, since this is Framework, the comparison is inevitable and fair. I don't think Framework will have a monopoly on these AMD chips. They will likely appear on other computers that may not be any less repairable, and other than having two replaceable front ports, it's otherwise not much different than other boxes would be. A replaceable SSD is the bare minimum, and one I'd expect in every desktop that didn't have an Apple logo on it.

It's actually a pretty nice small computer with good performance, as is the Framework laptop, but when we compare the two, the laptop is far more than that where the desktop's benefits mostly end there. This is partially Framework doing so well that their next attempt doesn't look very revolutionary, but knowing their customers, they should expect that soldered RAM was going to get brought up about two thousand times, sometimes just because it's something they fought against with the laptop and sometimes because there are people unlike me who do anticipate wanting to increase or replace the RAM who will be disappointed that they can't.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Not contact discovery, but initial account registration. You enter your phone number. They verify your phone number. They have your number at that time (and they keep it). If it starts with +46, they can reject the registration. Contact discovery pseudonymizes numbers, but since there is no need to reject numbers at that stage, that is irrelevant.

The normal version of Signal identifies users by their phone number, so it may do this by deactivating any accounts with Swedish phone numbers. You could use the code to build a different version and use that, but that's not easy for everyone.

Re: One of many ironies

Then cut out the extra step and just use PGP, because you'll have the same security as just PGP if the message was intercepted. Using PGP also means you have the typical problems with key management and exchange.

Not that your underlying point is wrong. Encryption that doesn't fit with the assumptions that the law can bypass mathematics exists. Governments can't eliminate it, they can't detect it fast enough to block it, so all they can do is punish people for using it which would be a bad idea. As usual, politicians don't understand how any of it works or how pervasive it is on everything today and thus how hard it would be to take it away.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

China didn't do that to Android. Chinese companies took the open source code for AOSP and used it, and they weren't the only ones. It is much harder to do that to something that isn't open source, especially when, if you do it as an element in a trade war, the country where it is based can retaliate against you by taking, and possibly publishing, any important software a company operating there has.

In addition, your example doesn't need that. Any cloud provider who wants can use AWS-compatible APIs for almost everything. The number of places that have S3-compatible storage systems should make this clear. The reason they haven't done it for everything else is that S3 is a simple API and other services aren't. You can reimplement all the APIs that exist for AWS Lambda, but nobody wants to, especially as it makes it easier for their customers to leave them as well because why would they ever write for the private API rather than the standard, easily movable one?

Re: Why?

Or, perhaps, for the same reason that these major cloud and software providers are major everywhere else: they have a bunch of products that are easy to get in to and hard to get out of. It is easy to decide you need a device management system, you've got Windows machines, you'll use Microsoft's software. Now that you're doing it, changing to anything else runs into the problems that the alternatives have fewer features and you'll be spending a lot of time and money to get to the same place you are now, so it gets put off. It's easy to decide you need email, calendars, and shared documents, so you'll sign on with Google Workspace. It's hard to get all your data out of that and transferred to somewhere else. It's hard to find somewhere else that could take all that data if you did transfer it, meaning you're either switching to another company that's quite similar or you have to set up several replacement services instead of one.

Re: The problem is more fundamental than just Cloud

DNS is distributed. European DNS requests rarely go to DNS servers in the US unless it's specifically for a US entity. If the attack you describe just happened to things hosted there, it would have little effect. Even if it extends to any DNS server operated by a US company, that would be more severe because Google and CloudFlare's resolvers are the most often used, but there are lots of DNS resolvers hosted in the EU by EU companies, none of which would have done this. Root servers are operating in many countries. The protocols in use are standard, so at worst, people who used 8.8.8.8 would have to enter a new IP address. Consumer ISP users might not notice, having always used their ISP resolver.

Cloud providers are much more concentrated and are much harder to substitute. However, many of them operate from EU-based subsidiaries, if not EU-based parent corporations to avoid paying as much tax to the US. There is a lot that EU governments could do to prevent damage being done, or at least to make the companies suffer if they complied, and the companies are smart enough to know the risk to their cash flow. I expect that they would resist things likely to antagonize the countries in which their valuable servers and customers are, even if they try to hide that they are doing so.

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

Re: Sad

That would depend on your definition for "wet", but I think you'd find it hard to prove. Wet tends to be used to describe things that have a lot of liquids in them, and that would make water one of the wettest things around, along with other liquids with no solids at all. Something doesn't have to be a liquid to be wet, if for example a solid got covered in a liquid, but that doesn't make liquids non-wet.

Re: It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

That was the point. It's easy for people to convince themselves that there is some other problem when the alternative is that they've made a bad decision. It's common to ascribe any bad decision, whether or not it was obvious beforehand, as stupidity. People don't want to feel stupid or to have others view them as stupid, so in defense, they find reasons why that's definitely not what is going on.

I've seen lots of people do it, for example a person who doubled down on a massively expensive contract they could have cancelled at will because doing so would suggest they didn't pick right the first time. I've also done it myself. This is why, while I'm not concerned about the comments made in the original post of this thread, I'm concerned about people trying to identify the lazy before the tool can improve productivity.

Re: It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

If it actually worked, then at least some people would be expecting more performance out of people and penalizing lazy ones who didn't do it. It has worked before. When computers sped up certain operations, most workers, either by choice or by management started doing more things. The problem is that this might also happen now, when the tools don't actually improve productivity but some have come to believe that they do. If someone has been convinced to buy expensive LLMs, they will probably conclude that they must improve productivity, otherwise they wouldn't have bought them, and that if they're not seeing productivity increases, it must be because someone is being lazy.

Incoming deputy boss of Homeland Security says America's top cyber-agency needs to be reined in

Re: There are still some people in El Reg's homeland

CISA has been covered in this paper quite a lot. I think most people working in security have heard of it and know what it is, for the same reason that I, a non-UK resident working in security, am fully aware of what NCSC* is. Maybe that still should have been covered in the article, but it is far from the first time it has appeared here.

* National Cyber Security Centre, you could call it the UK equivalent of CISA in the US. NCSC is part of GCHQ. I know what that is too.

Murena kicks Google out of the Pixel Tablet

I use F-Droid to install Aurora Store which allows you to fetch free apps from Google directly without identifying yourself, and your own if you're willing to log in to an app that isn't Google's. This lets me have app updates, and I don't need to associate the whole phone with a Google account.

Maps of terrestrial fibre networks aren’t great. The Internet Society wants to fix that

Do you mean local governments or foreign ones? If you're worried about governments of other countries wanting to attack or sabotage the wires, you can decide to keep the information private, though the example of Ukraine suggests that this may not be necessary. However, for everyone who is making the data public, a standard format is much more useful than whatever one they just created.

If you're referring to local governments, they already know where the cables are in most cases. If they are going to do something to them, and I'm not sure what that something would be, they won't have much problem locating them. In most cases, they wouldn't need to; if a country wants something spied on or blocked, they don't need to tap the cables because they can have the ISP do it for them. They generally already know every company that operates cables, so they can send their request to all of them and let those companies figure out how to implement the demand. The ability to push back against such moves depends on the rule of law and the integrity of people who might receive commands to do unethical things, not on hoping that nobody knows where the cable is.

Data is very valuable, just don't ask us to measure it, leaders say

Re: Data data everywhere and not a drop…

I think it probably has changed significantly, at least the storage problems have. It's much easier to store lots of data in an easily retrievable way nowadays. What used to require a bunch of tapes which were manually loaded can now fit on three which can be loaded by robot. Backing up files and verifying that you still have them is also quite a bit easier, especially when you only have to build that system once because you're just doing it to massive quantities of files.

Where it probably hasn't changed is in taking the data in its existing format, which is probably some quick and dirty output from scripts that are changed without notice, with lots of missing data that nobody knows how to fill in, and making anything useful out of it. Having a perfect, byte for byte copy of a database does no good if most of the columns are unplanned nulls or nobody's quite clear on what the schema is for all these json files. I think a lot of data collection was done on the theory that you can collect the data today and figure out tomorrow how useful it is, but if you couldn't figure that out quickly enough, people may have forgotten what the data represents so even if they come up with an idea, it doesn't work.

Re: Self Checkout

The theory is that, because you get your purchases for so much less, the data about what you buy must be worth at least that much to the business.

I don't believe it. I think they are earning plenty from that arrangement, but the data has little to do with it. Instead, it becomes a method of price discrimination. Someone who goes into the shop and simply chooses what they want, then pays whatever number comes up on the display can be made to pay more by putting up the prices, whereas those who would balk at the higher prices can get the card that makes them low again. It is a perfect way of identifying who doesn't care about price increases and getting money from them. Of course, to figure out how well it works, you would have to know how many people simply stopped shopping there altogether, and if they did that calculation, they aren't telling us the result. In addition, they sometimes try to have a loyalty program where consistent shopping results in some kind of reward, which could be a way to collect more data but is probably a way to convince people to choose that shop over others when they need some more things.

Part of the basis for my belief is that the shops near me that have such an arrangement seem uninterested in attaching that membership to me. They could easily demand a verified phone and email address, but in at least some of the ones where I have a membership, the process for getting one is "Do you want to be a member? Okay, here's a plastic card.". One of them did ask for a phone number, but they had no problem accepting a string of digits that isn't a valid phone number. If I want the price savings at those shops but I don't want my purchases associated with one another, I can just tell them I'm not a member several times and get several cards.

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: Value

But do you do this with disks that are intact or ones where they're already starting to show mechanical damage? The ones that have never failed and aren't visibly damaged can be trusted for a while. It's trying to preserve one that's already suffered one injury that's the risky part. I've used drives where the case fell apart so it's just a board and a USB plug, and one of those lasted about three years like that, but that's the kind of disk you really shouldn't put a firmware image on, especially if the board concerned is not in a straight line. I wasn't stupid enough to use the one that was bent thirty degrees for anything sensitive, and it did last longer than I expected, but that predictably was a sign of approaching death.

Re: what's wrong with them?

It really could be either, because neither is designed to last forever, but in my experience, it's usually the USB socket if one of those has failed. Perhaps the most common is mechanical problems. The plug and flash are fine, but something nasty has happened to the middle. It's easy to bend one by accident, which is why there have been so many recommendations for metal-cased drives here.

Re: Value

I've done the substandard USB disk thing. It never works out in the end unless you're willing to treat any USB disk as temporary only, for moving files between two computers that are in very close proximity. Otherwise, you'll eventually rely on it the day it breaks for something too important. For example, the time I had one of those and I needed to install a firmware update on something that only accepted them on a USB disk. It chose halfway during firmware installation as the time to give up, and even though the disk wasn't permanently broken, the device was doing a good imitation of broken. Fortunately, I was able to restore it, but it took a lot longer than using a different disk would have.

How's that open source licensing coming along? That well, huh?

Your suggestions would work for the company that plans to pull the bait and switch "it's suddenly proprietary" approach, but now that contributors have seen it happen a few times, more of them are going to resist it. If your company wrote all the code in the project, then they can do whatever they want to the license, including making it proprietary. If they invited and got contributions from others, those others don't tend to appreciate their free contributions being treated as the company's property which the company will later sell back to the person who originally created it. Companies that are considering making a product should think about whether they want to get the benefits of open source (free contributions and lots of users) or the benefits of proprietary (they get to charge every user if they want to), and they should be aware that both is usually not an option, and when it's tried, they may not appreciate the result.

License changes, such as those described in the article, is why CLAs are getting less popular these days. The FSF having one probably helped give people confidence in them because they trusted that whatever the FSF did with the copyright you gave them, it was probably something you'd be at least okay with. They did do the same things, but, for example, to change from GPL 2 to GPL 3, not from GPL to proprietary.

Nowadays, I see more resistance to CLAs. Theoretically, any copyright holder should be able to enforce it, so you don't need to own all the code in a project to enforce that license. Having more different people means more who can defend against violations at the cost of making it much more difficult to change the license. In the early days, needing to change the license seemed more logical as it hadn't been thoroughly tested in courts, but now that any license you're likely to choose has gone unchanged for over a decade if not three, this is less of a concern.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: 3 quid before you got answered

I can't quickly find HP's UK support numbers, which probably shouldn't be a surprise, but the one that I did find was not a premium rate number, but a normal non-free 020 London number. From my understanding as a nonresident, that means that, while the customer would still pay for that call, HP wouldn't get any of that money and therefore have no financial incentive to keep them on the line.

I'm also curious how prevalent paying by minute is in the UK, as many countries I'm familiar with have seen a significant decline in this except for premium-rate numbers, which aren't much used by reputable businesses. Mobile phones nearly always have unlimited calling without caring about proximity, and even consumer land lines tend to offer this, although sometimes as one of a few options. Is it different there?

T-Mobile US puts NYC emergency services in the 5G fast lane with network slicing

Re: Driverless Cars

I think one of the things driverless cars are going to need in order to get public acceptance is independence from a network. We already have enough trouble convincing people that these could ever be safe and there will undoubtedly be many opposed to the technology on all sorts of grounds, safety probably first among them. It won't convince them if you suggest that a drop in connection will suddenly make them unsafe again, because everyone has had the experience of a dropped phone call while driving. I suggest that any driverless car you build be designed to work if it is never connected to the internet at all. It will probably need to connect to download updated map information, but if it has to be connected while driving, expect that it will never be accepted on the public streets in the hands of average buyers.

Laptop makers stalled on repairability improvements

Re: A solved problem for laptops -> just buy a Framework

That is one of the downsides, though there are some cheaper options than the most modern units with latest-generation processors. They have a refurbished program in some countries which makes cheaper models or, if you are worried about the quality of refurbished parts, you can buy an older generation mainboard and an empty laptop and put them together, getting new parts but at a lower price because you might be using an 11th or 12th generation Intel processor instead of the latest available generations. They're quite well-priced in comparison with the high end from most manufacturers, but you're right that there is usually a mid-range option from many manufacturers which can give you a reasonable spec for less. I think it will probably pay for itself in a longer life, but paying up front for that isn't for everyone.

I'm hoping that this, along with several other downsides such as global availability, will improve as more people buy the machines. They do have an announcement scheduled for next week, which I expect is just going to be newer processors, but maybe they will have other interesting updates.

Re: A solved problem for laptops -> just buy a Framework

I'm also a happy Framework user, but before we get too enthusiastic, the keyboard is not watertight. If just the keyboard got hit in that disaster, your description of how easy it is to replace is correct. If the drink made it through the keyboard onto other parts, that is going to be a more expensive repair. There's at least some chance that the keyboard might catch all of it, but it is possible for liquid to leak further.

Re: It's odd to award an "A repairability score"

Because, in a world where basically nobody does that, people might still want to know how easy it will to repair some things. At the level we're at now, one of the most important questions for me is, when I want to replace the disk in the laptop, is it soldered in or not, is it a standard part or not, is there a bunch of adhesive or a fragile part in my way or not, none of which have anything to do with schematics for some other board. In fact, should Apple choose to release schematics showing what parts are on their board, schematics that, although they don't release, others have already created, it wouldn't help the fact that their storage is soldered on and not replaceable even if you obtain identical chips because, if you don't write certain data to it first, the computer won't boot. That's why repairability scores are a thing. It's not odd in the slightest. I assume this is another example of you asking for perfect or nothing, but although I'd like perfect too, I sometimes live in a world where that isn't an option and I still want to know about my imperfect options.

Talk of Broadcom and TSMC grabbing pieces of Intel lights fire under investors

Re: making $18,000 chips

Making you quite similar to many of the people causing Intel's problems. Investment in this stuff takes a really long time, and it doesn't become obvious because someone started six months ago. For similar reasons, when investment was cut a while ago, it took some time for that to show how detrimental it was going to be. It's hard to know whether what they're doing now will work out or not, and you have people (Bonetti, for instance) who are optimistic and people (you, for instance) who are not. You could do a lot of research into all of these things to try to have more information, but even then, you will have to accept that a lot of this is speculative and most of the best information about how well or badly it is going is internal and they're not going to tell us.

If TSMC was interested in buying Intel's fabs, one would have to ask why if they're as backward as is described. Of course, maybe it's just for market share, but it would seem that letting Intel collapse would be a cheaper way to get that. A lot of this may be academic since the US government position at the moment appears to be that foreign companies are adversaries, hence all the tariffs on TSMC's products, and that subsidizing local companies is also bad, hence the disassembly of funding for local semiconductor manufacturing. Unless they can sell Intel's fabs to someone else, this idea may go nowhere and we'll all get a chance to see what Intel does on its own, whether that is the paying off of investments started under Gelsinger or running out of money and chaotically falling to pieces. It seems to me that supporting Intel would, if they can use that support successfully, be helpful for the market in that there would be more competitors, and that selling it off now would earn the most money from the assets because they haven't been degraded by years of poor investment from a loss-making company. Since neither approach is allowed right now, we'll have to see if they can manage something on their own.

We meet the protesters who want to ban Artificial General Intelligence before it even exists

Re: Whilst I agree in principal, this is sad:

I could see lots of ways where that world, utopian on the surface, turns out to be pretty awful. Some obvious ones include a world of overconsumption because limits on what can be created have been substantially reduced or a world where there is no advancement because the AGI doesn't have a reason to make new things and humans don't have the ability to do so on their own (organized attempts having been replaced by the AGI). It would be a good premise for some speculative fiction stories. That is where it will stay, in my opinion, because I don't think we're going to come anywhere close to that.

Whether or not AGI is possible, I don't think we're going to make it. Existing AI companies seem completely satisfied with a cheap imitation, and if you don't know what your program is incapable of, you can't fix it. If we did get AGI somehow, I don't think we would have either the world where it kills us all or the world where it takes over all work and lets us live in leisure. The creators of it not wanting to die and the AGI needing humans to do some things would put limits on the former, and greed and the desire for power would limit the latter. It could still make things worse or better, but I doubt it would go all the way with either.

GitLab and its execs sued again and again over 'misleading' AI hype, price hikes

Re: Why litigate?

The theory of litigating is that you fire people for making mistakes and you sue them for deliberately lying. They allege that there were deliberate lies here.

You benefit from litigating in two ways:

1. Some of these suits seek to take money from the executives personally and return it to the company, from which it can be used to pay dividends. If you just fire executives, you can't do that.

2. If you are the people who started the lawsuit, you get more money than the average member of the class. That means you can get more cash at the cost of the investors who didn't start it with you.

Litigation like this can occur for valid reasons or out of greed and it can be damaging to the company or it can actually make improvements by eliminating malpractice. Which attributes this has will depend on the merits of the case.

Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Re: Global economies spread (some of) the pain

That's not how it would work. Instead of a 15% rise everywhere, they would treat every market separately. That means that, if putting the whole 25% on the US market means people won't buy them, they may use a lower increase and take a lower profit on those sales. If they can't do that because they'd make no profit, then they would just not sell there. If they increased their prices for other regions, then people who didn't would take their sales instead. The structure you propose only works for companies that don't have much competition, so for instance, Apple could possibly get away with that. For most laptop makers, though, someone who sees that Acer's prices are 15% higher would probably just buy someone else's laptop, and to prevent themselves losing that sale, Acer wouldn't add that markup when they don't have to. Even in the case of Apple where they can raise prices and still make sales, they have no reason to subsidize the US market that way. The US would probably get a higher price increase, with increases in other regions making up for the lower sales.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Hang on a minute...

"If you can't explain something to a five year old then you don't actually understand it yourself."

How long do I get to perform that explanation? Also, does this just apply to the child or must I also be able to explain it to the adult who wants their problem solved with this information but doesn't want to spend any time understanding it? Some concepts are relatively simple, as long as you know the things they're based on, but the stack of dependencies is so high that explaining all of them from the facts known to the unacquainted and likely uninterested would take some time. I can explain it, but I can't explain before they tell me to shut up.

This is when I use simplifications, for example, the numerous times I've said that DNS is a phone book for computers. It's not a book, it doesn't give you as simple a value as a phone number (even though an IP address is definitely a phone number for computers), it doesn't explain why there are lots of different DNS servers which know different things and may give different answers to the same questions, and it doesn't explain why it's always a problem, but at least it describes what it's for. I don't think that would count as an explanation, though.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: typical corporate bullshit

I'm not convinced that IT outsourcing and scam call centers have any real connection. If anything, I'd say the scam call centers are more connected to all the outsourced real call centers we put in India, at least that they have the same reasons: lots of people who can be paid badly and speak English. Many of the centers are not paragons of high tech. Sure, they need some techs to set up their communications systems, but that's basically all modern businesses. The scammers themselves don't have to be very technically aware. Many of them run a scam unrelated to technology, the ones that pretend your computer has a virus have to convince the nontechnical, not know anything about real viruses, and most of them are probably following a script anyway with only minor improv required.

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Re: Don't remember

It makes some sense. People do buy regular foldable phones occasionally, and people use tablets. The existing foldable phones unfold into a square thing, but a triple-fold system would be much closer to a typical tablet form factor. Of course, I wouldn't buy one because of the price, worries about it breaking, software, and because I don't actually like tablets, but some of those are specific to me and some of them will go away in time. It doesn't strike me as the worst idea.