* Posts by cornetman

895 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2018

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Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

cornetman Silver badge

Not sure why I'm getting downvotes. I'm not especially against the idea of a 4 day work. I just wondered what the guts of the proposed bill are and what effect it would have on existing working arrangements.

cornetman Silver badge

I'm a bit puzzled as to how this is going to work. Working 5 days a week is largely a convention that those who don't work shifts live by. Are they going to make working 5 days a week illegal or are they going to enforce a cap on hours per week that anyone can work? What about those who sometimes need to work overtime?

There are solid reasons why some occupations have a daily limit on activity (truck drivers etc) but for many jobs this is not the case. I know that many Americans are effectively wage slaves but I'm not sure that this is really aimed at them anyway.

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

cornetman Silver badge

Re: 'NIMBYS'

> NIMBYs

Not really sure why this term is being used in this article. From the article *itself* it seems that the problem is not "Not In My Back Yard", and more like "Yes In My Back Yard But Not In A Stupid Way" which I think we can all get behind.

Nissan to let 100,000 Aussies and Kiwis know their data was stolen in cyberattack

cornetman Silver badge

> Among the data stolen from the automotive manufacturer was info on 4,000 Medicare cards - Australia's national health insurance scheme - plus 7,500 driving licenses, 220 passports, and 1,300 tax file numbers.

It wasn't clear to me if the data belonged to customers or employees of the company.

If it were customers, I don't really understand why a car manufacturer would have these types of information.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

cornetman Silver badge

I would go further, the article is actually contradictory:

> The Boeing jet made an emergency landing, and all passengers and crew were unharmed. According to the NTSB's preliminary report [PDF], seven passengers and one flight attendant received minor injuries.

I would say that if you received minor injuries, you most definitely *were* harmed.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

cornetman Silver badge

Re: I was hoping they'd finally come up with the goods

> I want a button that says "give me a Win7 layout" and it makes all KDE apps conform. No hamburger menus, no CSD, no ribbons, menu bars and freely-movable toolbars everywhere, a cascading Start menu, and I want it in one click.

Yeah, you get it! Give the flexibility to the user, *not* the developer. If the application has to code the application attributes (menus etc) in more abstract ways, then that allows the platform to present that in a number of different ways. It also removes a lot of the design decision burden from the application writer.

cornetman Silver badge

> Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we strongly dislike hamburger menus

You and me both. One of the biggest issues for me on Linux Mint MATE edition is the bizarre mixture of styles, some with hamburgers, some with proper menus. The ones without real menu bars stick out like a sore thumb.

Personally, I can get along with pretty much any standard but I do insist that a platform is consistent.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

cornetman Silver badge

Why restrict it to Chinese connected cars? I know of a lot of people who are concerned about cars from *any* manufacturer that are connected to goodness knows what these days.

Google to reboot Gemini image gen in a few weeks after that anti-White race row

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Capitals

> We capitalize both Black and White when referring to race, yes. It's our style.

Genuine question: why?

I don't believe that black or white in this context are proper nouns.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: it *didn't* depict White people as much as it should.

If (and that's a BIG if) society should be changed, it should be by us, the people through active social change. However, in order to do that effectively, we need to know the truth as it actually is.

Painting a false picture of how reality is could ironically put that venture in danger:

1) If you don't know what reality is, how can you reliably know what to do to make changes? This is the big thing that the scientific endeavour gave to us, a method to see reality as it truly is with a built-in mechanism to attempt to reduce as much as possible error due to our bias and existing belief systems. We see this problem in reverse at the moment with the mass demonstrations whenever a black guy gets shot by a police officer, and practically nothing for the dead white guy: these people are not seeing reality as it really is due to personal bias, terribly biased tabloid media and the amplification of social media. We have to do better at this.

2) If your "AI" engines paint a picture which is skewed towards the kind of world in which you believe is right, then what is the impetus for making change if everyone thinks the problems are fixed?

cornetman Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Not just "historical color calibrations"

> That is utterly insane.

What is really insane is that people actually downvoted these comments. Are there readers of El Reg that think that what this engine is generating is OK?

That's nuts.

Regardless of your political persuasion, I would have thought that everyone bar the most rabid of leftist lunatics have *some* comprehension that in the 21st century, objective truth about the real world is at least important.

cornetman Silver badge

> AI models like Gemini often perpetuate biases and stereotypes. Images portraying doctors or CEOs, for example, often feature White men.

Wouldn't that reflect reality though? At least in the US, I would imagine that most CEOS and doctors actually *are* white men.

Doesn't seem that far fetched in a majority white country.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

cornetman Silver badge

Have been using a Nexus 5 for a few years now but the writing was on the wall when I started to get notifications from app vendors (like Viki) that they are shortly going to be dropping support for the latest version of LineageOS that I can get for it. So an upgrade was definitely on the cards.

So in the end, I got a Pixel 6a. So far very happy with it. It is a nice compromise between support life and newness. I paid $220 Canadian for it which seems like a lot of moolah but compared to new and other second hard prices is a pretty sweet deal. Should be holding onto this for a fair few years as well since Google promise to support it for upgrades until 2027. Likely LineageOS or some other platform will keep it pumping along for even longer.

Compared to the old Nexus 5, the battery life is phenomenal and the camera is a massive step up from the frankly appalling one on the Nexus: it was the only thing that I really disliked on the Nexus 5.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

cornetman Silver badge

> Microsoft described Wi-Fi 7, also known as IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT), as a "revolutionary technology that offers unprecedented speed, reliability, and efficiency for your wireless devices."

Until someone puts the microwave oven on, of course.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

cornetman Silver badge

I was reminded of something that happened with me the other day on a ferry when the announcements came over the speaker system: "There is no smoking anywhere on the vessel." It got me to thinking, why don't they just say that smoking is prohibited on the vessel?

When I suggested this to my wife, she replied "Well they did say that smoking is not allowed", to which I replied, "Well, actually they didn't. They said that there is no smoking". That's only true until someone actually does smoke, in which case there *would* be smoking on board.

I can guess what actually happened when they were coming up with the script for the announcement, that someone suggested that what they came up with would be less "confrontational" that just saying that smoking is not allowed. It might be less confrontational, but it doesn't actually say what they intended.

Perhaps when people become accustomed to hearing certain forms of speech, they stop thinking about what it actually, logically means. Like "what the VAT paid was on £500". I can envisage an accountants office where this is such common parlance, that the ambiguity of it becomes lost, such that they don't understand when someone points it out. I guess a form of the "curse of knowledge".

Not ragging on the original poster, just an observation....

cornetman Silver badge

Someone needs to come up with a way of pairing some kind of "fact script" with the part of Chat GPT that can hold a conversation.

Think of a real person sitting with a company handbook on company rules and current promotional offers.

Relying on ChatGPT to not only hold a conversation with context but also generate the factual basis for its responses is never going to be reliable.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

cornetman Silver badge

I don't really understand the snark, although this is El Reg, so I guess I should expect it.

My coworkers are very hard working and dedicated individuals. Working in the evening means exactly that: *working*.

I cannot speak for whatever occurs at your place of employment though. Perhaps that is not the case there.

All I know is that proper, grown up adults can be trusted to work when they say they are. If you work with children, I cannot help that.

cornetman Silver badge

The main issue for people who have child care responsibilities is that they tend to work flexibly. We have quite a few parents where I work and their working remotely also affords them some flexible working time arrangements. So they duck out and pick up the kids from school but then work later into the evening. It wouldn't really suit me but for them it means that they can work when they might otherwise be not able to.

Bit difficult to do that when you have to be in an office location that you must commute to.

But it's also a fact that more women than men take on that responsibility. Actually that's not true with my co-workers that are mostly men, but anecdotally, it seems that this is still the case in many instances.

cornetman Silver badge

What's probably more likely is that the majority of those that need to work remotely have child-based commitments which are disproportionately women by and large (school runs, entertaining them while school is out etc) rather than anything related to workforce representation, although I don't know what the situation is in Dell in the affected departments.

> "This new policy on its face appears to be anti-remote, but in practice will be anti-woman," our first source said. "Anti-woman for career advancement. Anti-woman for bonus calculations next year."

This seems a bit of a stretch. They are trying to imply the claim that Dell are trying to get rid of women disproportionately, but it seems unlikely to me, and much more likely to be a side effect of what they doing, as wrong-headed as it is anyway.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

cornetman Silver badge

>I'm confident it will hit its stride over time like Apple Watch...

Did anyone actually ever figure what Apple Watches are actually good for?

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

cornetman Silver badge

If there was ever a need for ad blockers, this has to be up near the top of the list.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

cornetman Silver badge

Re: It is easy

> What previous commitment?

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows

"Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10." That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist speaking at the company's Ignite conference this week.

You're welcome. A quick Google was all that was required. The fact that this was officially supposed to be the "last version of Windows" was *everywhere* at the time. Please stop gaslighting.

> Complaining about a marketing name for a product, however, is just stupid.

Don't really care about the name or the marketing. If Windows 11 is just an incremental evolution of Windows 10, then there seems to be no real justification for the onerous hardware requirements, especially considering that with some simple tricks, it will run perfectly fine on hardware without those requirements. I get it: *really* old hardware can't be supported for ever, but a lot of the hardware that doesn't cut it is pretty decent, recent kit.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: It is easy

> Windows 11 is really only superficially different from 10, or just about any other version since Windows 95.

Well if that's true, why the unreasonable hardware requirements, and them going back on their previous commitment to a rolling Windows 10 evolution from then on?

cornetman Silver badge

Honestly, that kind of over-the-top, artificially up-beat, valley-girl style video narrative just turns me right off.

I'm glad they managed to find someone that doesn't overdo the vocal fry. That would just make my skin crawl.

Are they really trying to appeal to real people?

FBI: Give us warrantless Section 702 snooping powers – or China wins

cornetman Silver badge

> I can assure the American people, the Chinese government is not tying its hands behind its back.

Erm, that's what makes them the bad guys.

Adobe has 'no plans' to invest in XD despite failed Figma buy

cornetman Silver badge

> Dana Rao, general counsel at Adobe, told TechCrunch in 2022 that XD didn't generate more than $15 million to $17 million a year in revenues for Adobe, and had just a handful of full-time employees working on it.

It's a bit messed up when companies get so big, that these kind of revenue numbers translate to "not worth the effort".

I understand if those employees were moved to something more profitable, but if they were laid off that doesn't really make sense to me.

Fairberry project brings a hardware keyboard to the Fairphone

cornetman Silver badge

My wife has a KEYOne and loves it. She's never really been able to get the hang of soft keyboards and prefers the tactile feedback of a real, physical keyboard.

It makes the phone quite long but it looks like a cool phone I have to admit, although I appreciate it is not for everyone.

Tesla hacks make big bank at Pwn2Own's first automotive-focused event

cornetman Silver badge
Coat

> Fuck me. Americanisms like this are like listening to a mentally retarded toddler tell you about their day.

Yeah, I couldn't find any reference in the article to the constructions of large banks at all.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

cornetman Silver badge

This is absolutely correct.

I do often put a teabag into the cup and use the kettle to fill it, but expediency overcomes shame when I'm in a hurry.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

cornetman Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

> The reality is that most people have to at least have a side job to make ends meet and absolutely have to grind every single day.

I'm afraid that you are the one in the bubble.

That is complete twaddle.

There are indeed people in that situation. They are very much the minority.

> This is a wrong way. If you give your work for free, corporations wont have incentive to do it themselves and there is no reason for them to employ people to keep legacy devices alive.

Those corporations of which you speak have absolutely no intention of doing what you want. It is not in their interests to serve the public good.

Your worship of the corporation is quite frankly baffling. They have no conscience of the poor or of the lower classes in society. They are not even on their radar.

They will offer them neither employment nor aid. You are the embodiment of everything that is wrong in American society: naked corporatism, which is capitalism without conscience. There is clearly nothing that I can say that will reach your humanity.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

Both you and sabroni seem to have a very narrow view about free software which seems strange to me, but let me perhaps explain my position so that we can possibly understand each other a little better. I don't mean that in a patronising way, I just think that we are looking at the free software realm very differently.

Privilege: the up and coming generation seem to have a bit of a complex when it comes to the idea of privilege. I think the term is very overused. In terms of not being a wage slave and having *some* free time, I would say that the *vast* majority of people in the relatively affluent western world are in this camp. The bulk of the population in the US, Canada and Europe have a built a civilisation that benefits the most people. Sure, there are people at the bottom (who have little) and people at the very top (that have a lot) but over 99% of people are in the working class: they have a job that doesn't absolutely consume them and they have some amount of time that is available for their leisure. That time might be dedicated to family (if they have kids) or a hobby or perhaps they do charity work or somesuch, all of those are valid and worthwhile. In a general sense, we are all privileged to live in such a time and in a place where history has taught us that being in a perpetual state of war is anathema to the best possible life, so we stopped doing it. There are many places in the world that have not realised that yet. They will catch us up at some point (hopefully). In such a place and time though, it seems strange to suggest that those members of the society that occupy the 99% middle ground are somehow privileged. Those people are just, for the most part, like everyone else. It is the norm. It is neither privileged nor unprivileged. It just is. What we might think about the good use of that time is something that we could discuss, however, and we would differ on what is worthwhile and what is not.

Software: software as a good or activity occupies a peculiar niche. It has a large up-front cost, but the cost of replication and dissemination is almost nothing and the Internet has amplified that. Software has effectively become a commodity. It need be written once, and then it can exist forever. In terms of how it sits in a capitalistic economy, it is a bit of an oddball. In order to guarantee making money from its sale we need copyright because it is not like chairs and tables in which each require materials and effort to manufacture. Because of this, free software has been the great democratiser. Whatever I write and give to the world can be used by the poor, the middle class and the rich alike. From the large corporation selling infrastructure to the school kid in their bedroom with a cheap laptop that they got from the thrift store, all can participate. You talk about the poor and the underprivileged: free software is the *only* way for these kids to get a leg up and out of the grasp of corporate overreach.

My contribution: I won't be specific, but what I contribute to the free software realm relates to the support of older, commodity hardware. Large corporations want us to keep churning over our devices because it feeds their greed, while simultaneously filling landfills and wasting vast hordes of material. I have no axe to grind against business or manufacturers but corporatism had built a system that generates tons and tons of waste for no other reason than to keep selling us the same stuff over and over again for fashion and due to built-in obsolescence. It is pretty messed up. Witness the likes of Canon and the number of "new models" that they release every year: devices that print and scan just like the old ones did, whereas the old ones no longer work because the latest Windows doesn't support them. The poor and those on limited income can not afford to walk on that treadmill: to do so would keep them in perpetual poverty. It is disgusting and again I will say that it is anathema to a *healthy* capitalist society. So I, and others, help them by keeping their perfectly functional hardware working, and provide a pathway for the under-privileged in our society to participate.

You talk about privilege as though it is a bad thing. It is surely the best kind of privilege to be able to give a helping hand to our brothers and sisters poor and non-poor alike.

It is clear that classical liberalism together with capitalism (yes, with all of its potential flaws) have given us they best life and civilisation that has ever existed.

I am no communist or socialist. I'm just not an arsehole. I make no apology for that.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

> contribute their time and expertise are fairly compensated

My compensation is the joy of doing the work and knowing that others benefit from it. I'm sorry that you don't seem to understand that.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I am very glad to hear it."

cornetman Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

> It's a neat euphemism to explain that people find it's not fun to work for free..

That has to be the strangest take I have ever seen and obviously a weird way to sneak in something that seems to be important to you that has nothing to do with the problems of developer burnout at all.

A lot of developers do tend to get obsessive about their work and many are working on their own or with just a small number of others tackling software systems that are often very complex, poorly documented, and possibly in areas where they are directly in conflict with large companies deliberately making their efforts difficult through DRM or obfuscation. They may also feel a lot of pressure if that system is high-profile.

I don't know why you think that getting paid would make a difference to that or the fact that others are using the software to make money.

As an open source contributor myself, seeing others successfully use my work is one of my prime motivations for doing it and I'm sure that's true for many, many others.

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

cornetman Silver badge

Re: As for the fascist greenshirts...

> A wood burner is, perhaps, not as green as you think: Medical Xpress - ACT deaths (more than from RTAs).

Well, the number of RTAs is a known number. The number that they present in the paper is an "estimate".

In reality they have no idea.

Yes, they're not so great for the air quality. I will admit that, although I commented that is was renewable not healthy.

In the paper they mention that it generates CO2 etc, but in a renewable system that shouldn't be an issue, which they do not mention. The surrounding trees suck it back up again.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: As for the fascist greenshirts...

> I guess that you never cook anything then? Oh wait... you cook using Fossil fuels then?

Or perhaps uses a wood burning stove. 100% renewable if the wood is locally sourced.

He makes a great point though. Power usage is someone else's problem until you have to think seriously about it. Only then do you realise that there are many easy things that you can do to crank down your power usage, many that don't necessarily directly affect your lifestyle.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: London is a similar latitude to Calgary

Perhaps he meant 2.14 MWh since he mentions a time period?

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

cornetman Silver badge

> because you're locking that person, committing to a longer-term relationship.

I'm surprised that these people don't choose their wording a little more carefully.

Firstly, because is sounds suspiciously like explicit, monopolistic behaviour.

Secondly, because it sounds like an abusive, predatory relationship rather than one built on loyalty and symbiosis.

I really do wonder how many of these C-suite types are literally psychopathic...

AI flips the script on fingerprint lore – maybe they're not so unique after all

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Plain sight

> It's like saying microscope made new discoveries and not the person using it.

I'm not saying that you're completely wrong, but that's a poor comparison. A microscope is completely inert.

Certainly "AI making a new discovery" is a bit of a stretch and overstating the situation. Better to say that this tool revealed to us a novel aspect.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

cornetman Silver badge

Re: " a trust of the people involved "

> But of course you're putting a similar level of trust on everyone around you on the road, and with even less justification.

The other drivers are not maintaining your vehicle and they are also in the same boat in that they would probably rather not be in an accident as well.

The justification is that we all pretty much have the same self-interest in not dying which is why there are not more accidents on the road than there are (albeit that the accident rate is unacceptably high for other reasons).

I think it is high time we made all ground crew and management take the maiden flight on any aircraft that they have worked on. Might tend to focus them somewhat.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: She called it "a concern"

If I'm going to be in accident, I would always prefer it not to be 45,000 ft in the air.

SpaceX accused of firing employees critical of free speech fan Elon Musk

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Don't get this confused with free speech.

> No, they didn't. Someone else leaked the letter to the press, the authors didn't distribute it outside the company. Employees are guaranteed the right to band together to collectively bargain.

If this is true, and the letter wasn't deliberately "leaked" for attention (which, let's be honest, has happened before elsewhere), then I would agree that they should be in a good position.

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Don't get this confused with free speech.

> What happened is these employees raised several legitimate concerns about the workplace and then attempted to initiate negotiations with the company to improve working conditions.

Well they did it in public in a manner that could be interpreted as unnecessarily antagonistic to the management of SpaceX, so that might have consequences to how they are protected under the law.

There is a line and they might have crossed it. On one side of the line there is "Our boss is a w*nker and we can't work with him". On the other side is "Business practises in this company are negatively impacting our effectiveness and we believe that they should change for the betterment of the company". One is a criticism of policy, the other is an ad hominem. IANAL, but it seems to me that expressing the latter doesn't excuse you expressing the former.

cornetman Silver badge

Not surprised really. Like others have said above, if I publicly called my boss an arsehole, then I would expect to be shown the door.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

cornetman Silver badge

> contributing a strong "Closing Word" to the November 1968 Algol Bulletin 29

As I read that interesting and insightful document, I could only think of C++ and the impenetrable monster it has become.

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

cornetman Silver badge
Facepalm

<Barely-Topical-Anecote>

Many, many years ago, when going on a treasure hunt in Linthwaite (Yorkshire), where you follow cryptic directional clues from a sheet of paper and you have to fill in with answers to landmarks and such, one clue was "Go towards a male part of the body". Looking around, I couldn't see anything that made any sense, until I happened upon a mill down in the valley entitled "George Cock & Son". Surely, this is a family friendly treasure hunt: they wouldn't include such a thing, but it did seem fairly cut and dried. So I wrote it in.

When we got back to base and I handed in my sheet, the scorer looked it over, and with a shocked look, asked me about that answer. The answer is "Manchester Road, you wally!"

</Barely-Topical-Anecote>

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

cornetman Silver badge

Honestly, for the most part, the dropping of the u on -our doesn't really affect me greatly.

However, this particular instance seems to stand out more profoundly because most other instances don't intuitively cause me to want to pronounce it differently.

It feels like rather than "nay-burr-lee" it would be pronounced "nay-bore-lee" since that it what is implied phonetically.

From my UK perspective, I have obviously seen a lot of American English spelling but this example feels rather odder and out of place than others.

cornetman Silver badge

> neighborly

Looks weird. I'm sure there are some letters missing.

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Why Americans (and Canadians, apparently) enjoy vomit-flavoured "chocolate"

> "chocolate flavour coating".

Shocking.

Completely coincidentally, here McVities choc biscuits are now labelled as "milk chocolate flavour".

Could anyone verify that this is *not* the case also in the UK?

cornetman Silver badge

Re: Germolene

Yeah, I find the smell of wintergreen to be very "cloying" and makes me dislike Germolene and root beer in equal measure.

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