Posts by doublelayer

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

The comment was intended to discuss the benefits of cloud servers, so it wouldn't relate much to manufacturing unrelated things. If your product is software that runs on servers you operate, a website that handles a bunch of visitors, or anything where your need for servers is related to the demand you have, then you can benefit from cloud's ability to scale and could consider that as a potential option.

If your business is making airframes, then your servers are likely not that important to you, because only a few people want airframes, they only want a few of them, and they won't care all that much if your order form makes them wait thirty seconds to confirm their request has been submitted. If you make software that thousands of people use daily, then it won't be acceptable to make them wait like that, so that company would care a lot more about their ability to scale than the airframe company. The same applies to people who use servers to present content to users. For instance, if I had to wait a long time every time I clicked on an article or posted a comment with the possibility that I'd get HTTP errors half the time, I would be less happy with this site. They use CloudFlare to help with some of that scaling problem in case they get a lot more readers than typical.

Re: Shakespearian question?

"At least have the guts to thumbs down and follow up with a reason why you're giving it."

I can generally summarize their reasons. Any time you see a thumbs down, it means "I don't agree with something in this". That's their reason. Why do they need to spam the forums with lots of copies of "I disagree with you"? When I disagree, I tend to post a response, but that's usually when I have counterarguments to your arguments that I feel are worth talking about. For the same reason that they don't have to post lots of "This!" comments when they agree with you and can just push that upvote button, the downvote button is the way to express disapproval without necessarily having to post a lengthy response.

I didn't vote either way on your comment or any other comment in this thread. However, I can probably explain why some of the people downvoted and didn't leave a comment. They might disagree with the idea that someone is bad for disagreeing with a company's decision to give a platform to someone else. They might agree with the disapproval of the person concerned, or they might think it's irrelevant. That is not a comment that needs a lot of explanation; one person says they care about this detail, and other people either don't care or feel the opposite way. Comments saying "I feel the opposite way" are content-free, so they use the button instead. Presumably some people avoided posting "I feel the same way", and they pushed the upvote button.

If you disagree with my explanation and you want me to understand why you think I'm wrong, post a reply. If you just think my approach is wrong, but it's a subjective thing that can't be defended either way, here are some quick vote buttons.

Re: But...

"If everything you need for your business is at the other end of a service that's down, you're stuffed."

That's true, but that's equally true with an on prem system. Unless the people are there to fix it whenever it breaks, you can have the same situation and it's just as bad. I've experienced this from the maintainer's and the user's sides. I maintain equipment for a charity that doesn't have a full-time person to do it. I have a full-time job as a developer at a different company, so my maintenance usually happens out of hours. When their on prem server (in my defense, not one I set up) failed during working hours, they had problems while they failed to get my attention because I was in meetings and then had to work with my instructions on what to do over the phone because I wasn't able to be there in person. Obviously, a company will probably have more than one part-time volunteer IT admin, but if the admins who know the system are unavailable, it can be broken.

The cloud can also be broken, but the admins are there to get it back up and generally do so quickly. I've used a cloud service that had an outage, and without having to do anything, it was back to normal in a matter of hours. Had we deployed services in multiple regions, we wouldn't have been affected anyway, but this was a test environment. That point is the most important one. If you can't withstand the service failure, you need to have redundant and backup systems, whether it's on the cloud or in the building. Neither one will prevent you having that dependency.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

"Xi (I have heard) is obsessed with stability. Nothing must rock the boat."

Not unlike the history of Russian leadership, until they decided that now they were stable, they might start rocking someone else's boat. Before their invasions, they were focused on stability. Economic stability, improvement of Russian infrastructure, destruction of movements inside already-held territory that were opposed to them, making sure they'd never have to worry about elections. They had a lot of chaos from the 1980s and 1990s to sand down and it took a while to get that. After they started messing with their neighbors, they realized the risks of sanctions and therefore cooled down a bit between Syria and the 2022 full invasion of Ukraine to get a few more things stable, such as reducing their international debt and storing up money and resources for their domestic economy. Newly stabilized, they resumed the tactic of turning up the instability on others.

I'm sure Xi wants stability. That's going to cause enough problems for anyone unfortunate enough to live in China. The problems for people outside China will come (well, they're already here, so get worse) when he's comfortable that he has the stability he wants. At that point, he will have the insulation he needs to start playing with other people, generating chaos that he hopes won't affect him too much.

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

This whole article? Or just the input to ChatGPT? The rest of the article is about all the chatbots, and does not rely on ChatGPT to write it. Since it doesn't rely on any features of ChatGPT to provide information for the article or to prove a point, the article isn't invalidated.

As for that prompt, it demonstrates that ChatGPT is willing to assume what GPT4 is (if I anthropomorphize it) without understanding, which demonstrates something about the chatbots. It's also not a bad response to the query and somewhat correctly describes the risks even though there's a bit too much praise in it. Compared to some of the worse blather I've seen from ChatGPT, I found that quote to be pretty good.

One of its problems is that it doesn't behave like us. If someone asks a question here, I decide whether I know the answer to their question and whether I can write a good response to it. Maybe I'll only write something if one of those is true, but if both are false, I won't hit that reply button. GPT doesn't ask those questions, can't understand the answers, and always tries to make a reply. It's going to generate more wrong answers even with all the people who don't know what they're talking about simply because it lacks the ability to decide whether to respond.

The other problem is that when I have real filters, where I understand that something is wrong so I never claim it, GPT only has rough filters that understand that certain clusters of words are probably wrong so avoid those, but if it phrases the same concept in a different way, its filters don't work. Unfortunately, I don't think I can claim that humans generally have functioning filters for wrong (either factual wrong or moral wrong), so maybe that is more of a similarity with us than I'd like it to be.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Mobile dongle and ISDN

This is why I have roaming turned off on my phones. I'm not near enough to a border to set it off very often, but I figure it's much easier for me to manually enable that if I travel than to ever hit it by accident. I'm not sure how highly they would charge me if I did use roaming, but I can see the charges for international calls to countries they haven't zero-rated and if it's anything like that, I'll be avoiding roaming when I can.

Re: Isn't that Configured Backwards?

It could be either type of emergencies. For example, if there is damage to the wire bringing your phone connection to your house, which could be caused by a variety of things, then your mobile phone will still work in an emergency of that nature (yes, its wires can be damaged as well, but they likely have more backups than you do and if that tower fails, there's likely another one in range that can be used instead). If an emergency happens that involves both systems operating on backup power, then the landline can be the emergency option if the batteries run down as expected.

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

Re: Apple

Your attempt to put down Apple is showing your ignorance on the topic.

"Or even if it means buying new hardware because your current device can't install/run the update."

You're talking about Android, aren't you? Apple supports the latest operating system on most of their devices for about seven years. When an update is released, all those devices can install it on the first day. There is no delay. What if your device is too old to run it? They're also known to release security patches for the last supported operating system version as well. When the latest devices were running IOS 14 but some devices had been stuck on IOS 12, they released security patches for IOS 12. Those were also available at the same time. It's Android where there's doubt if a security patch will get to your hardware and how long it will take. By the time an iPhone doesn't get the feature updates anymore, security patches for an Android device released at the same time have stopped (unless you've installed a custom version that somehow manages to patch even though it was so hard for the manufacturers). That iPhone will get a few more years of security-only updates as well.

I'm happy to complain about it when Apple does something bad like this. In fact, I'll do it right now: they do cut off their Macs' security and operating system updates too early and for no good technical reason. Had you been talking about Macs, we could have agreed and had a fun time trashing their artificial obsolescence record. However, that record is bad because I'm comparing Macs to Windows and Linux computers. I have to compare iPhones to Android, and the iPhone's security update situation is better than the best Android devices out there and almost incomparably better than the average.

Re: Wifi calling on? Really?

To be fair, they did basically start with some examples that, in their generic form, can be paraphrased as "unless you have no or bad signal". Since you have no signal, you would fall into that category of people with a good reason to use WiFi calling.

I had that situation at one point and enabled WiFi calling to deal with it, and I have to admit that I had several problems whenever it was operational. I'd answer a call and could hear nothing for the first five seconds. I seemed to have several seconds delay before an incoming call would make my phone ring, meaning I had less time to pick up before it went to voicemail. I had people reporting that my sound quality was worse even though I was using the same microphones on the same device and my WiFi was fast and low-latency enough to be able to handle it. This may have improved in the five years since I had to employ it, but I was glad to switch it off when I went somewhere that has signal.

Re: Good luck with that

"Perhaps the mad rush to kill off GSM, UMTS/HSPA, and CDMA was actually a mistake?"

The problem here isn't intrinsic to VoLTE, so I'm not sure it's fair to blame the shutoff for something that Samsung's code caused. It was going to be turned off at some point eventually, and people have been making VoLTE-capable modems unaffected by this exploit for quite a while. I'm not sure how long a deprecation should be extended for a a just in case backup option for a problem not caused by the new version.

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

It certainly happens at times, but in a lot of cases where people get involved, it's not. A good example concerns one of the projects that's done a lot to protect their GPL rights: BusyBox. BusyBox used to sue basically everybody that used it and didn't give the source. They were so prolific compared to everyone else that embedded Linux firmware users started making alternatives like Toybox, which is why Android doesn't use it.

We would hope that all this action by BusyBox gave us some useful code, but the developers who looked at all the source from companies they sued found otherwise. They found that most places had either not modified the code at all or had demonstrated their incompetence by patching in code something they could have accomplished by changing flags in the makefile. Rarely was any of the code the companies were hiding useful to the community; it was just hidden out of laziness.

Anyone who knows what the licenses mean wouldn't have a problem using GPLed utilities like an embedded Linux system, because they know they don't have to release anything secret. They would also understand that using a GPL library would require them to release code they want to keep internal, so they should be careful enough not to do so. This clearly won't apply to everybody, but so much GPLed code out there is part of a runtime means that you'll see that more often even for developers who don't understand licenses in the slightest.

Re: Not sure compliance would help

That requirement for installation information only applies to GPL 3 or LGPL 2.1. Linux uses GPL 2.0 only and does not require installation information. A Linux image that you have the source for but cannot install on the equipment offered does not break the license for Linux. They will need to find a GPL 3.0 component in order to have a right to installation instructions.

The GPL applies to any code that is deliberately licensed under it and any code added to or linked with that code. Crucially, it does not apply to code that interacts with GPLed code with a method less direct than linking. Depending on what components are covered by the GPL, this can lead to different effects.

Let's take a common case: they have a firmware image that boots Linux. Linux is covered by the GPL, so they have to release the source to Linux. If they've modified Linux, for example by putting in extra code necessary to use their hardware, they have to release that too. Not that they always do, but they are required to. When their image starts, it runs an application they've written that is not part of Linux. It uses Linux's system calls to function, but it isn't integrated into the kernel. For now, let's assume that program doesn't use GPL libraries in it. They do not have to release the code for that program, even if it runs on Linux. This is just an example. There are other situations, but this one is common for embedded firmware.

Your assumption: "If that's the case there must be huge numbers of systems that break the GPL. Pretty much everything now seems to run on Linux!" is simultaneously correct and not exactly correct. Firmware that's effectively closed and uses Linux is not a problem if they release the code for the GPLed parts, which in many cases ends up being either completely or almost unmodified copies of the Linux code you can already get. That's not always true, but most of the embedded Linux devices you see all around you have not done anything interesting to the kernel and their required code releases wouldn't be very interesting. Even though it wouldn't help anyone, few of the companies that are required to release that source actually do it, which is why there are GPL violations nearly everywhere.

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

People still use the LGPL on some things. I am one of those people. In fact, when I do it, I'm deliberately trying to leave that option to the people who use my library. Even though that's true, the original point overstates it a lot. The code they've mentioned so far isn't using the LGPL, it's using the GPL.

Unfortunately, in many cases, companies that release GPL source code aren't providing much of use. You can get a copy of the Linux source, possibly with a few changes, but the application that is run on top of that Linux kernel and does all the important stuff is proprietary and they won't give you anything from it. Even if you search through all the source they gave you, you'll find a bunch of code you could have already gotten from its canonical sources in most cases. It's much rarer that companies include GPL source directly in the binary they want to hide from users, thus requiring them to GPL that part of the code. This is one reason I don't understand companies that don't comply with the license; most of the time, if they did, they'd be giving up no secrets whatsoever.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

Re: In proper societies, ...

The effects are the same. The causes are different, which is why there is a distinction. Fire someone because they're on leave: not allowed. Make someone redundant whether or not they're on leave: allowed. There may be differences about when that starts to apply, but since it's not connected to their being on leave and would have happened to them if they were actively working at the time, as it has to thousands who were not on leave, the rules don't forbid it. You can suggest they should be different, but there is still a large difference.

ReMarkable emits Type Folio keyboard cover for e-paper tablet

Re: I have a Remarkable 2

Somebody went through the posts here and downvoted every one. I wouldn't consider it a judgement. I'm still not sure why they do it, but it happens from time to time on random topics.

Re: Good reasons, or just reasons

Exactly, which means that by not updating those components, Sailfish will have to navigate around the older Android components. I'm not sure if that's why the page on Gemini OS support says that Sailfish is using version 3.0 while the Jolla website informs me that version 4.0 has been out since early 2021. Maybe that's not the reason that it's still on 3.0, but still, I'm getting indications that the Gemini is stuck on older versions of software on all of its operating systems despite being actively sold by its manufacturer right now.

This would not be considered acceptable with other hardware. If Microsoft informed you that your laptop just wasn't going to be supported, so no Windows updates, and not for any technical reason but just because they didn't feel like it, it wouldn't be normal. When we buy X86 kit, we generally know years in advance before it will be dropped by Windows* and it's basically certain that the hardware will break by the point that it's dropped from Linux. There's no guesswork, and if we find one running an old version of software with security holes, it's almost always because the user or administrator decided not to bother installing the updates rather than the manufacturer simply not providing any.

* Windows does now drop support, but we were given four years notice that they would, and that applied to equipment that had already existed for two to three years at least. I'm still not happy about it. Before that, they would tell you that the hardware was likely not going to work, but you could insist on installing Windows anyway and it would try to run Windows 10 on your Pentium with 512 MB RAM. This appears to still be true, but their comments on the matter have changed.

Re: Purpose

There may not be a problem, but consider removing some corner cases from your list. For example, in a situation where you can write in a notebook and not take it out of a secure location, this tablet would have to remain inside the secure location as well. Also, since it has an upload feature (I don't know how secure that is), that adds another asterisk to the security that the users should understand.

It can still be suitable for use cases as long as users understand the limits. Still, I wouldn't have thought that meaningful encryption would be too hard a feature to add.

Re: Good reasons, or just reasons

That helps a bit. As I haven't used Sailfish before (I have never had one of the few supported devices), I tend not to include it. Still, the Android software is what they ship it with, and unless I'm misinterpreting their rough Linux page, the software from which the Linux versions get their kernels. This means that, by failing to update their Android images, they're not only leaving the users of the Android software with insecure software, they're artificially hampering their Linux users as well, and given that a quick check on Wikipedia confirms that Salefish is also using Linux, probably that too.

This would be bad enough if they had just dropped the product and expected users to buy a new model if they wanted something newer, but no. They're still selling Geminis (although not ones with English keyboards, so if you want one, maybe one of the other languages for which they evidently made too many is close enough). They've built a computer, with the software update requirements of any computer, and they're now failing to meet those requirements. As much as I like the concept, and I find all their hardware at least somewhat enticing, that's not something I will support.

Re: not heartbroken, yet heartbroken

The Unix philosophy works well in software because there's relatively little cost to having multiple programs in one computer. If I write one utility or two to do a set of tasks, the resulting binaries are likely about the same size as the combined one, and all you have to do if you are using them together is set up the communication between them.

That doesn't work so well with hardware. Let's say that I have implemented a Newton-like system for interpreting handwriting and you'd like to use it with this tablet. Too bad, you can't. That's not exactly true, of course. You can upload all your writing to a server, either a cloud-hosted one or one in your own house, have it perform the operation, and sync the results back down. That adds lots of latency, because now the software won't be running in real time. It also adds dependency on whatever communication system is used to do the transfer. This isn't a problem if you don't want the feature, but there are benefits to combining features in hardware that are much smaller when all the components are software. This is why we have the general purpose computer instead of the electromechanical calculator, word processor, and digital document communication device on our desks.

Good reasons, or just reasons

"Yes, it [the Planet Computers Gemini] runs an old version of Android, but there are good reasons why it wasn't updated,"

I read that article. As far as I can tell, what you're calling "good reasons" consist of the following:

1. MediaTek can't be bothered.

2. Planet can't be bothered.

3. Planet couldn't be bothered to think about this when they chose to use MediaTek components, nor could they be bothered to think about this when they chose different MediaTek chips for their next two products, neither of which will get meaningful software support either.

Software support doesn't have to be a major issue. For example, if this writing tablet didn't get a lot of new features, that might be fine if it's really designed to have few features. Not so for something that is running a full operating system with access to plenty of sensitive data. We should not accept this lapse in software support that leads both to insecure software running on many users' devices and premature generation of waste electronics. We definitely shouldn't claim there are good reasons for the lack of the support just because the hardware is cool. I'd like that hardware, but that does not exonerate the manufacturer from what they've done with it.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

This is when you have to quickly invent what SUE stood for, and of course you write it SUE, what were my colleagues doing? System unjournaled environment, it was due to an image problem and cropped up several times because the patching program had to be run manually. As long as the person asking isn't technical, they'll accept it. After all, if you search the invented phrase, you get lots of technical articles so it must be a real thing.

The US would sooner see TSMC fabs burn than let China have them

Re: What goes around....

"The problem from many American's perspective is that they were also oh so willing to sell out to the mainland. They may have made a nice profit by playing both sides, but it has not in anyway gained them any sympathy. They did the clever thing and maximized their bottom lines, now they get to see if it works out for them."

That's an interesting perspective. I take a very different one on both counts.

First, about their education. They were not given anything by the United States. They came and got an education, but it's not as if that was funded by the U.S. government. They came and payed for that. Also, the U.S., like a lot of countries, doesn't automatically extend visas to graduating students. They would have to, and in many cases did, apply for permission to stay in the country without which they would be legally required to return to Taiwan or find somewhere else. You cannot expect someone to have loyalty to your country when they payed for everything they got and have to request permission to stay.

Now about trading with China. Yes, they sold to China. So did everybody. It would be one thing if China was under sanction and the U.S. was refusing to deal with them, kind of like the way North Korea is treated by many countries. It wasn't. Expecting Taiwanese to refrain from selling to China when your country was happily doing so is a weird double standard.

The people who started TSMC did a lot more for Taiwan by providing it a shield. Yes, the U.S. and other countries may come to Taiwan's aid if it's invaded for the same reasons that they do in Ukraine: because invasion and war crimes are wrong and we don't like the countries that do them. More countries may be willing to help or to pressure China not to because Taiwan has something they value and they don't have a self-interest reason to want China to just get it over with. Not to mention that TSMC, along with many other related companies, has grown Taiwan's economy much faster than just trading with the U.S. did. I see no reason for recrimination from the perspective of either a U.S. or a Taiwanese observer.

Re: The US doesn't understand China a bit.

The real anthem is more martial, with instructions to soldiers to march against the enemies (when originally written, it meant the Japanese invaders of the 1930s and 1940s). An interesting fact about the anthem was that, during severe lockdowns and protests about them a few months ago, some people were using the first line of the anthem, which loosely translates as "Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves"*, to call for protests. Chinese internet censors therefore had to put in blocks on their own national anthem, or at least its lyrics. Maybe they should consider changing the words to match Pratchett's.

* The official government translation into English is "Arise, we who refuse to be slaves!". Others translate it differently, but the meaning is basically the same.

Re: I am a Rock; I am an Islaaaaannnnnnd

It would involve a lot of destruction and a lot of sacrificed Chinese soldiers. Both are the kind of thing that lead to civilian populations being rather unhappy with the people running the war, which would mean that a democratic nation is less likely to do it, and having done it, less likely to keep doing it long enough to have results. As Russia has demonstrated, when you don't have to worry about your people throwing you out of office, it's much easier to make them die in order to gain a shattered part of someone else's country. China has a lot of people and they don't really need all of them to keep living, which means that they can consider a war which would be rejected immediately by other countries on the basis that the body count would be way too high and the pain of the populace too extreme.

Re: In order to stop another country from destroying you ....

The fabs are not the only thing on Taiwan that China would like, but they are quite valuable and would help them a lot. If they had the chance to snap those up quickly, they certainly would. Destroying them has two advantages for deterring China's invasion: China would no longer get to add them to its manufacturing assets, thus giving it an even stronger position in more products, and they would no longer have access to the TSMC products they use. Just as other countries would suffer from the lack of TSMC-produced parts, China imports plenty of them and would no longer have that source. Leaving them intact during an invasion would allow China to have a strong position in advanced semiconductor manufacturing and to both deny access to the results and to have as many as they want.

This doesn't mean that a consistent threat to destroy them would certainly prevent China from invading, but it would be a large item in the "reasons to wait and invade them later" list, and the items on that list are the strongest barrier to starting that invasion since the barriers "people there don't want you to" and "they pose no offensive threat to you" aren't major concerns for China.

Re: In order to stop another country from destroying you ....

"... destroy what they're after first ..."

More destroy what they're after if and only if they are going to take it, and make it so clear that you will do it that they realize the invasion will deny them what they want. If you could reliably do it, it would work, but I'm guessing the level of reliable is too high for Taiwan to make that promise so consistently. This also depends whether China is ruled by someone crazy enough to prefer a shattered Taiwan under their control over a functioning global economy and not having democratic nations pondering war with them, which for a while has been there. Now that they're no longer trying to replace people, it's just a test to see if Xi comes down with Putin syndrome or not as he ages.

Google stops selling its biz-grade augmented reality specs

Re: I wonder...?

"Some macbooks with worse specs than a business-level Dell PC are $15k....."

No, they aren't. Apple's prices are ridiculous, but if you're dishonest about what they really are, you're doing your own argument a disservice. The most expensive MacBook you can buy from Apple is a 16-inch machine with a 38-core GPU (I'm not sure how this compares to the 30-core version, but it is the most expensive), 96 GB of RAM, and an 8 TB SSD. Since you're using dollars, I'm assuming you're in the U.S., where that machine costs $6499. You can get a machine like that for less money, but it's not going to be the same as a business-level PC from anybody, either in price or in specs.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

There is no reason that a RISC-V system will be any less locked down than an ARM one. Either can be designed to have replaceable firmware, but mostly they're designed to be cheap and when some effort is put into it, it's almost always to make it harder to install your own. RISC-V has no licensing fees for the company that designs the chip, that's all. It has no intrinsic effect on what the user of hardware built around that chip will be able to do with the hardware, and just as ARM do, RISC-V have no standards that will make it any easier to solve the problem of porting between different chips, something that X86, for all its flaws, is better at doing.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: "Why did it never get easy to subscribe to things in RSS"

And in at least some browsers (I'm thinking it was Internet Explorer of all things that I remember), you could click on the RSS feed link and IE would ask if you wanted to subscribe right there. For all I know, other browsers are still doing this. I don't like my feeds processed by the browser, but it was a simple way to use them without needing to understand URLs.

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

35° is not that common for the UK, and water takes a very long time to get heated. Even in the summer, there is usually some energy spent on heating water. The situation you describe will happen at some point, but it's not going to be every year. If they try to expand these into countries that experience real heat, they'll encounter it a lot more often, which might explain why northern Europe hosts all the examples mentioned in the article.

Silicon Valley Bank's UK arm bought by HSBC for 1 British pound in rescue deal

Re: If it was profitable

Let's first consider a fictional example. I have a company that makes a specific kind of software and I have some clients. Next month, they'll be paying me £200k. However, in order to build this, I've taken on debts, and next week, I have to pay £100k for the next payment. This is the report of a profitable business, as my revenues exceed my debts. If I have cash in the bank, this is great, because I can pay my bill and, a couple weeks later, I have money again. However, if I don't have cash in the bank, problems could start to happen. If I can't make any payments right now because I've run out of cash, then I'll be in default on my debts and I won't be able to pay for other things, like my employees or my operations bills. If I can't pay those bills, my software might not earn me so much money anymore because I've been unable to support it because my staff have quit because I didn't pay them. Yet I don't have any more money to pay these bills myself and I can't just borrow more money for the next month.

Enter you. You have £100k sitting around and you like the idea of my profitable business. If you buy it off me, you can pay my bill with your cash and take the resultant profit for yourself. I might want to keep my business, and I might suggest to you that it's best for you if you let me stay. However, in this analogy I'm at the point where, if I don't take your support, I'll crash the company and have it taken off me anyway. In this situation, you can probably get the company for a pretty good price even though in the long term, I would have made a good profit from it.

In a liquidity crisis, this bank finds that it doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay everyone who wants their cash. If they were able to hold their loans for the length they planned, they would have that cash, but people want their money out now and selling off the loans now will incur losses. HSBC has plenty of money they can use to provide cash to people who want it, which also means that some people who don't need the cash now, just don't want to lose it, will leave it there. They can hold those loans for their original length and take the profit they generate.

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

Re: What

I'd appreciate it, but there are a lot of people who don't know how to run a home LAN, which means you get one of two things:

1. The ISP's equipment, with dubious software updates and some weird installation choices.

2. The router from 2003 that they still think is good because it still powers on, installed in the corner of the coverage area. No software updates.

I don't have a solution to this, but if the ISP supplies somewhat modern equipment and sets it up in good places, it at least produces a slightly better or more secure result than if you rely on the user to do it on their own. My family get me to set up their networks for them, but I've seen what they're like before I do it and it's ugly.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

"The bit that should give us pause here is that "Musk dumped a whole lot of programmers and everything still seems to work". This mirrors my own work experience over the years (decades) -- its not just possible but common practice for programmers to make work, lots of work, but because what they're doing is so arcane to outsiders management just swallows the KoolAid and leaves them to it."

You may call me biased as I'm a programmer as well, but I think this is missing the point of what programmers do. If I get fired tomorrow, the code I've just written should keep working for a long time. That's the point of my making it. What it doesn't do is get updated, changed, or fixed. That Twitter continues to work* isn't that surprising. The problem will come when they want to change stuff and they lack the knowledge of what the systems did. That problem is already here because they are changing stuff and adding features that Musk has requested, which at some point will modify a condition that existing stable code relies on. Programmers don't write code for its own sake; we write it because management, far from staying out of the way, is frequently coming to us and identifying something they want changed or added and we have to do that without damaging the rest of the code that's currently working.

* I say it works because you say it works. I don't use it so I have no idea how it has changed. However, I have seen a lot more articles about stuff breaking. I don't know how much of that is due to more things breaking and how much is due to it being more interesting for journalists to cover the new Twitter than the old one. Still, there's at least some reason to believe that some of the system isn't in the best health and does need someone to improve it.

Re: Maybe I'm a little pedantic, but...

Yes, the algorithm can be published just as a natural-language description. The problem is that I'm confident they don't have that. I wrote another post above which explains why I think that so I won't repeat all the background here, but for big, complex systems that are used by only one company, specifications of the algorithms rarely exist. They would have to read the code and write up a description of what rules they think it's doing, with the possibility that they don't understand some part of it and can't ask the original developer to explain it because that developer has been fired. I can't count the number of times I've been looking at some code and started asking my colleagues questions like "Why is this in here? It looks like it will break things and there's no explanation", and nobody remembers who put it there or why. I can, with time, analyze what the chunk of code is doing, but I can't always tell why it was there because sometimes the answer is that it was a mistake back then and the correct course of action now is to take it out (and sometimes it was important and my taking it out will bring a bunch of users down around my head, which at least sometimes helps explain why it was there).

The other problem is that, if they release the code, we can probably check what it does, but if they release a text description, it can be vague enough that we can't verify it. If I wanted to lie to you about what my code does, it's much easier if I give you a description and skip or obfuscate a key point than if I give you the code. Maybe I've written the code to look like it does something else, but if you run it, you'll see what it really does. With a company that has incentives to hide what's going on and lost most of its credibility already, I would be less likely to trust a description they quickly wrote up. I'm not that interested in testing their algorithm in any case, but the same things would apply to people who will intensely analyze every line as soon as it's published.

"First, it's disappointing to read such rude negativity against an individual."

Sorry to disappoint you. I don't think I've been too responsible for it, but I am kind of negative on him, so probably still disappointing you. I'm not sure why you're so disappointed by it, and I question whether you would be disappointed by similar levels of negativity directed against someone you don't like.

"Second, it's bizarre that so many people seem so well-acquainted with the insides of Twitter's engineering that they **know** that there's no engineering staff left who could open-source Twitter's "algorithm"."

Did people say that? I didn't. I said that, with the numbers of people fired, it will be harder to quickly do the work. They still have engineers and if this was the highest priority, they would be able to do the difficult parts and get it done. I don't think it will be done, not because they can't, but because it's hard and they're understaffed as it is. When there aren't enough people, a lot of things that can be done aren't done because there's a lot of prioritization. Sometimes a task slips around that if it's fast enough, but this would not be fast.

"Third, it's very strange indeed that the commentaries here are unable to distinguish between 'open sourcing the code that Twitter thinks it uses to implement its algorithm' and 'open-sourcing the algorithm'"

This is related to the facts of life as a developer. The algorithm could, in fact, be represented in many forms, but it's certainly not written in a lot of different forms. There's a chance that it exists in two forms: a specification and code that implements the specification. You could release the specification. I don't think that's what they've got. I'm basing this from years of experience writing code for companies, and you never get a specification. You get general ideas, and you figure out what's wanted. When something needs to be changed, someone makes a summary of the change they want and the code is modified to do it. Unless it's a rigorous standard (this isn't), the specification if there ever was one is not updated. This makes the code the single point of truth on what the algorithm does, and sometimes it becomes complex enough that you may not always know what it is doing at every point.

If I'm correct, they don't have any form of the algorithm other than the code. They could have someone read it and write a spec that should do the same things, but that would take a long time and be likely inaccurate. Also, that's the kind of thing that would be done if someone wanted to fake what the algorithm does because a vague spec can be nondeterministic and more difficult to compare against actual system behavior.

Re: Making source code "Open Source" is not that hard

Yes, it is hard. If you use dependencies, you have to deal with their licenses. Others have already posted the problem of what you do when the dependencies are proprietary and you don't have the rights to redistribute and relicense them from whoever you bought the rights from. There's another restriction though: if you have parts under licenses that have conditions about how they affect other licenses, you can have collisions. For example, Apache and GPL don't play too well together. This is fine if you're just using them internally (AGPL does not apply), but if you open source the lot, you may be required to make license changes that you are not allowed to make. Conservative legal departments won't let you combine such things in the first place, but since it is legal under the licenses to build the thing that combines them with the restrictions coming when you distribute the code, a company only intending to run them internally may not have been affected.

It's not just figuring out what to do with each license clash. It's also finding where all the clashes are. Not every piece of code clearly indicates its dependencies. They all should. Not all do. Even when they're pretty clear about it, it still doesn't mean that every repository uses the same, easily parsed document telling you such things. You can't send one person to just give me a tree of projects with their dependencies and license requirements, and now that you've fired most of the people who knew the projects, you can't send a message to every owning team and make them do it for their part of the project. It's a bigger task than it would seem.

Check out Codon: A Python compiler if you have a need for C/C++ speed

Re: > Since I don't know what license terms would be if I did want to use it in production use

That is all true, and just because the license isn't OSI-approved doesn't mean I won't use it. However, I have not had great results when going to a commercial company as an individual who is using it for noncommercial projects before. This group may be different, but sending a bunch of messages to someone who might or might not be authorized to write a legal document to confirm that I won't be breaking the license often doesn't work when I'm offering either little money or no money.

I distinctly remember an occasion where a company offered their proprietary library with a page that implied that you could easily buy a license to use it in one-off projects on commodity hardware, but when I sent a message asking the terms, it turned out that I had to pay €20k per year just for the SDK and any use would incur another charge to be determined later. They had intended it to be purchased by builders of embedded devices and I planned to have one project running a single instance. They weren't impressed.

Re: Codon ? Colon more like

My guess is that some of those are in virtual environments if you or someone else using this computer does Python development, which means they're either copies or symlinks with the effective path changed by the activation script setting environment variables. Others may be packaged versions of the runtime for applications written in Python. I doubt you have that many full installations of different Python versions. I don't disagree that it makes it a mess, but probably explains a bit about what's causing them.

"Which presumably means you're only interested in commercial use."

They're not even that clear. The license talks about "production use". Both terms can be vague, but the way I use them, production use includes all cases of commercial use and quite a bit more.

I run a few services just because I want to, making no profit (I pay for the servers, so I make a small loss). Is this production use? If I was using a piece of proprietary software, yes it is and just because I don't make any money doesn't mean they would let me have a license for free. I have also built software for charities before, which is more definitively production use and starts to near the line of commercial use (I didn't sell it, the charities aren't selling it or using it to sell things, but they do take in donations and may sell items elsewhere in their operations, and if the software does something like track that, it could be commercial use).

I am disappointed that they chose this license, but it is their choice to do so. It will prevent me from contributing code to them. Since I don't know what license terms would be if I did want to use it in production use, I'm also less likely to take it up unless I want a fast, compiled Python script just for myself. Maybe in 2025 we'll see what it has become.

Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder

Re: "il est bon de tuer ... un Amiral pour encourager les autres."

"Never understood why scientific fraud has never been treated like any other fraud ie jail time"

It can be. The people who wrote the grants can press charges or talk to law enforcement. It doesn't happen mostly because fraud isn't that often handled by law enforcement. Massive frauds that steal billions does because there's a lot of public outcry. Smaller fraud that harms someone who puts in the effort to investigate it generally does. Medium-sized fraud might or might not be. Small fraud is usually below the threshold where law enforcement will go after it without being informed and assisted, and most places that pay for grants aren't putting that much effort into identifying fraudsters. Maybe they're doing it because they don't want the public label of having been defrauded. Maybe they don't because it's expensive and might not work. Either way, they don't bother doing what they would have to to get law enforcement to do anything.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

Re: Live by the ESG, die by the ESG?

Well, given that no attempt was made to prove the original views right, it's a bit presumptuous to expect us to prove them wrong. Whether or not ESG is related, the original view can be summarized as "I don't like ESG, and these people had some ESG investments, so I'd really like it to be the reason they crashed so I can say that ESG is bad instead of just something I dislike". The poster did not attempt to prove that point. He in fact states that he has no evidence and that it's something he wants to be true, not something he knows is true.

Whether or not it's true, it's speculation based on nothing designed to substantiate a preexisting prejudice. Such theses are not really worth the effort it would take to find disproving information until some effort is put into proving them. It's possible it would be correct if you could prove it, but it's also quite likely that it is not. We have no way to tell and no reason to debate the issue with someone who decides what the conclusion will be before or instead of trying to analyze it.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Re: I'm puzzled.......

This paper is mostly read by technical people. People who are more likely to want to run Linux so they can do those things on it. That means two things about those people:

1. They already have a pretty good idea whether a 12th-gen I7 can run what they want to run (usually yes). You don't have to tell them that a high-res screen looks nice for them to understand that it would have some benefits.

2. Those who want to run Linux want to know whether they'll encounter problems doing that because it will restrict their ability to do whatever things they want to do with it.

For example, my major uses are indeed writing programs and posting here. It would be a pretty useless review if I reviewed a laptop and said "This one can definitely run an editor, a compiler, and a browser at the same time". Nobody would get anything useful out of that. Similarly, if I were to read a review that focused on editing video, it wouldn't be much use to me because I never do that. Focusing on the technology makes sense when the main variable for whether I'm going to buy it is whether the technology works at the level where that's uncertain, which in some cases is Linux driver compatibility.

I agree with you though that this machine is rather expensive for what you get. The specs are nice, but there are better machines for cheaper depending on what you're looking for.

Re: Lenovo Marketing Dept screwed up...BIG TIME

It's what everyone does and should probably do. I'm talking both Windows and Linux here. They don't remake the factory image and reimage every device in the warehouse every time Microsoft releases a Windows update. You'll also find that, if you buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, you'll still have to do a package update run when you get it running. For that matter, if you take any distro's installation image and install that when you get it, you'll still have packages to update immediately after starting.

This is a good thing, because unboxing every computer to reapply an image multiple times is a long, expensive process that can lead to damage to some computers (do it to ten thousand devices and you'll eventually get someone who doesn't want to). Since the user will both have an internet connection and have to install subsequent updates anyway, it makes sense to ship it with necessary software and allow them to update it afterward. Do you want to pay for some employee having installed update packs eight times while the computer you just bought was sitting around, or do you want to run "sudo apt upgrade" for an hour at most when you have it set up?

Re: Soldered

"That said, memory is just the one single item that post-sale, can significantly extend the lifetime of a laptop."

I disagree. I would put it third, and a rather distant third. First is the battery since heavy use can degrade it to a desktop and a fresh battery can make it a useful mobile device again. A very close second is an SSD, since those parts fail somewhat frequently and people fill them up. I have had very few RAM failures (one, and it wasn't on a computer I owned anyway). While that might happen and you might want more eventually, I still put that below the others in the value of repairing it. That said, I'd also like manufacturers to make it removable, as I strive for easy repairability for anything I'm going to use for a long time.

Re: installed on every machine

That's not what they said. Not that I agree with what they said, but they meant something else. The people who are technically aware enough to care about systemd know enough to determine that their distro didn't install and can reinstall or reimage from the backup that you always take before you install another OS with the possibility that the installer tramples your bootloader. To the extent that there are nontechnical Linux users who install it on their own, they're not the people who have passionate views on an internal component and are quite likely to be using something that has systemd since it's used in all the largest distros aimed at desktop use.

Hardware manufacturers will not support any variant of Linux with any components you might want. It might be nice if they did, but it's never going to happen. Certifying it as compatible with Linux might mean that support will be available for the variant they said, but not necessarily every other variant that exists.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: "I'm not going to debate you…"

At least two dictionaries I've checked have debate as a transitive verb with examples indicating that the direct object may be the person against whom you are debating (or in this case refraining from debating). The direct object may also be the subject of the debate. Maybe you'd like to contact all the dictionaries and inform them that you're recategorizing it as intransitive only? You may have to present your XKCD diploma and debate the dictionary writers about whether your deletion privileges allow you to make that change.

LLaMA drama as Meta's mega language model leaks

Re: Question?

"What I expect to see is similar to Usenet and Email filtering, where address blocks that permit such abuse are not just filtered, but are actively dropped on the floor."

The point is that you don't need an address block and a bunch of machines to do this. You and I already contribute to this site somewhat frequently. All you have to do is set up a few accounts that post frequently from residential addresses, which can be your own because bots aren't illegal or an infected proxy, and simulate human response rates. If the bot sends a thousand comments to The Register in an hour, it's not going to be allowed and the address can be dropped, but sending twenty is enough to pollute the conversation without hitting that threshold and if twenty isn't enough, spin up three more sources and make it eighty.

You speak as an admin of something, but you appear to ignore how things do in fact work at the application level. There are captchas in a lot of places to deal with this problem already. I didn't assume captchas from nothing. I assumed them because they are in place on a lot of systems that have to deal with unwanted contributions from bots, regardless of scale. They may also do network filtering, but when the problem isn't bulk, or rather when there's a problem other than bulk submissions, they bring out application-layer systems to remove their application-layer problems. This does affect users of the service concerned and adds work for them and of course for the service providers.

South Korea warns US: The CHIPS Act leaves a sour taste

Re: And they accuse *China* of spying..

"Yes, this is exactly what China used to do to foreign companies wanting to do business in China."

You notice the difference? China: to do business in China. US: to get lots of free money. China was making everyone give up secrets, while the US only asks for information when they're going to give massive subsidies, and if you don't want the subsidies, you can still build there and get other advantages without giving up any information. Maybe they're asking for too much, although a lot of what they're asking doesn't seem all that proprietary, but it's still very different from what China has done.