Posts by Joe W

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

Re: Einstein clearly never read Genesis.

It is the creationists (and fundamentalists) that seem to take the bible literally.... (from my experience)

Re: What is it with people collecting modern. plastic shoes, anyway?

No, it is not only the magic fruity logo, other "sneaker" brands (or whatever these shoes are called) have a similar weird collectibles market. I only skimmed over an article in a newspaper (actually one of the more reliable ones...) on that subject. Mind was thoroughly boggled. But hey, people collect all sorts of things.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

Yeah, but companies like to buy their products so they can complain to somebody when stuff breaks (and then find out it is not covered / won't result in the vendor fixing stuff / won't incur a payout). So Oracle it is.

Morons.

Ehm...

"> In the viable-but-hard-work category come the options of switching to third-party Java products

How is "moving to a third-party Java product" easy but "moving to the latest release of OpenJDK" hard? This is nonsense"

Viable-but-hard-to-work does not mean easy....

Any of the options are difficult, expensive, or both. Migrating to a different (and newer) release (open, 3rd party, or Oracle) is not going to be super easy (I guess).

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: A fool and his money are soon parted

Yes. In effect he borrowed it from the company he bought, which now is in trouble because of the debt.... (among other things)

Re: X11 logo?

Yes. Interesting is that there are different ways to represent certain characters, some via composition, some have a similar glyph in different languages (the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and I think Futhark have some sort of X), which is a mess, since some idiots now allow Unicode in domain names...

Can you actually protect a letter of the alphabet?

Plus XCom (the name, not the domain) is owned by microprose (I guess by now Ubisoft bought everyone, let's hope for that, they are a litigious bunch).

X <- signing my name in good Western movie fashion, nothing to do with the "company"....

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

"It's in your contract"

Catchphrase...

Well done :)

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Re: Behind, always behind

Same here! Iam ok with trains, the kids love the adventure. I commute by train - by car would be faster, in theory, but looking at the traffic patterns I would be either stuck in traffic on the way in or the way out - or both :( By bike takes a bit longer than by train, I do that in the summer months (take the bike on the train on the way in, bike home).

Last holiday trip was by train, went very well, it was relaxing. The next one will be by first half by car, second half by train (leaving the car at relatives' home). We would have to 1. put the car on the train for a segment of the second half and 2. buy a parking ticket for the weeks we are up on the mountains 3. the village we stay at is car free anyway.

I took the overnight train from Bergen to Oslo once, that was not too bad as well.

Re: Behind, always behind

If they already slipstream by computer, why not couple them together with a fixed link? Oh, and now, hear me out, in order to increase fuel economy we should let them roll on special surfaces, lets make those of steel and the wheels as well. This will decrease rolling resistace by quite some margin!

What? We have that already? It is called a 'railway'? How... quaint and very much 18th century! (yes, in my opinion long distance freight belongs on rails - but I am not really sure how good the infrastructure is outside densely populated regions like Europe, or Japan)

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: Whatever.

You will find it is the median you are referring to...

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Re: it can figure out generally where a picture was taken just by looking at it

I enjoy the game - but I hate the rankings. Too often the top 50 or so are the creator and his mates, and people I am pretty sure are cheating. A nondescript brown road, pinpointed exactly? Yeah, right.

After Meta hands over DMs, mom pleads guilty to giving daughter abortion pills

Re: It's all fscking insanity - I'm embarrassed for my country

I get what your opinion that "the entire right-to-life position is grounded in religious moral beliefs" is based on. I am not too sure if objections against abortion are entirely based on Christian moral beliefs[°] - as a Western European rasied in a society based around a Christian moral compass this is of course hard to really consider objectively. People have tried to assess the issue based on the development stages of the foetus, and in many civilised countries the abortion laws are based on this - thus they often are within a similar range. The problem is that we are trying to draw a line along a continuum of "not a being a living feeling thing" and "being a living, feeling thing". And, sure, having that line and setting it is based on morals - "thou shalt not kill"[*], after all. Try what you want, we are all influenced by the society we grow up in - and in the "Western world" this society has a moral compass based on the Christian belief.

OK, so I agree with you, but I do not think that it is problematic in all cases. Unless taken to the extremes (as with anything, I guess). Which is what you implied.

[°] ok, in the US they may be - if taken to the extreme limits of "from the point of conception on", or even banning contraceptives

[*] a rule most societies - not limited to the Abrahamic religions - do have. Unless it concerns "people we don't like who are not like us", which hardly anyone ever mentions, but judging from history there seems to be a consensus that it is ok to kill those

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Re: Fairness

Who else would that be? I'd wager Amazon is the biggest retailer by some margin, then the Chinese platforms, likely followed by Zalando (also on the list, as mentioned by another commenter). I wonder why ebay is not on the list, though.

(but then I do not do most of my shopping online, so... I definitely do not have an overview of which companies are actually active (and above a certain size) )

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Maybe not.

Look at some of the record players techmoan had a closer look at - there was a bunch at your price point.

Re: Balmuda toaster

Can't recall what my kettle cost - it is mostly metal, no plastics in contact with the water, looks nice (yeah, and works well). No, it wasn't €150, but pricey enough. But it makes me happy that it does not have the plastic touch and feel the previous one had, every day I use it (ok, hyperbole... slightly).

Re: Poor design in my opinion

Glorified plywood.

OK. Beech multiplex.

Tech execs turn to drink and drugs as job losses mount

Re: Why does this sound...

Not sure about the numbers being high or not, half of the people above a certain level being alcoholics sounds a lot, but not weird much.

What I totally agree with: single country. 500 persons interviewed is just nothing once you have enough covariates, and heavy hitteres like 'country' or 'culture' should be avoided. I question the overall validity of the cause / effect, as this seems to be a single sample at a single point in time. Could have been 50% alcoholics down from 80% 10 years ago (or so).

Meh. We clicked on it, right? Joke's on us. I'll grab me a beer (ok, I won't, don't drink and derive).

Let's take a look at those US Supreme Court decisions and how they will affect tech

What about signs

"no grumpy white men need apply"

or

"no Texans"

or

"no NRA supporters"

That covered by the same rules?

GitLab deploys on a Friday and ... is down for a few hours

It is also in the SOP of the BOFH, it is written that there must be no changes cuspid to a diurnal period of absence or somesuch...

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Oh, and having the system wide language setting to "English" as well. Helps with getting helped, most documentation is _not_ in whatever your (continental European) local gargling language is...

ok, same for Welsh, Gaelic, Icelandic, Faroese, and....

hm, maybe list those who do not have the problem: so "a problem except for people livin in the UK (not the Welsh speaking), Ireland, the USA, Australia, Canada (except for Quebec and the French communities outside of Quebec)..." YOU GET THE POINT, DO YOU?!

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Re: End of the world

I like your idea and I am all for it! Let's make this real!

However, in the civilised world you are bound to taking of and landing on airfields (and some limited number of actual fields / meadows that are certified for powered take off), with the exception of gliders, which are permitted to land anywhere they do not wreak havoc (sometimes you run out of thermals... if you get around your FAI triangle with ample time to spare it was too small, so you live with the risk). Another exception are military helicopters, if you are cleared for it and there is a good reason and the paperwork has been countersigned by... whoever (don't know the details). For the (civilian) flying car this means I effectively have to drive to an airfield, take off there, land at an airfield and drive to my destination. Unless you live in rural North America, where you can have an airstrip of some sorts behind your farm building (more a glorified field) with your plane registered to it (which is great, and I envy you, and wish you lots of fun, fly safely!). Still then your neighbour dropping by might require - in principle - more paperwork So: nah.

You would also need to hold a pilot license of some sort, which is not too difficult, we are talking about the lightweigth planes here. I hesitate to use the term "ultralights", I don't like it, not after I learned about the Fascination some decades ago - which is a small single engine plane which also exists in an "ultralight" version (slightly greater wingspan, fixed landing gear, and I think different flap config, and lower maximum takeoff weight, but pretty close to the "bigger" sister).

I also guess it is vapourware: "If four years of flying without any public demonstration, a lack of details, and question-avoiding..." I don't think it has actually flown at any real height... (yeah, likely below 1000 ft above ground).

Has anybody on the design team ever flown?

"Here's one of the trippiest parts of the Alef Model A: its cockpit, which is able to hold up to two people, is on a double-axis gimbal that the entirety of the car body rotates around during flight."

This will just make you airsick when flying around turns (ok, tighter turns)... a real "Kotzschleuder" (vomit comet, would be the rough equivalent).

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

I... don't think so

"You do more work, you do more effective work, when you are physically present at your workplace,"

I can browse ElReg or whatever the whole day at work, too! (though if ElReg does not count as work you are doing it wrong....)

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: Suprising that Google hasn't heard of "SEO"

I thought SEO was used by the websites, not the advertisers? In some cases these are the same, but not in all.... (in fact not in most, I guess)

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Re: curtain-twitching hand-wringers & namby-pambys

You had to post that link when I have some stuff due.

Some people....

Re: Fixing things due to a misunderstanding of the origin

Hm, that still has the connotation of "white" demarking "pure" in Western (not the "High Noon" Western) culture. So... nah.

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

Technical documentation is outdated the moment you carry it out of the bookstore. Who prints manuals anyway in this day and age? I just binned two shelves of old stuff that is no longer relevant. Went to recycling, will probably become bog rolls, at least then it is useful.

I sort of agree with you, Graham Cobb. Some of the words on the list really are at least questionable; not being American, and Norway not having had colonies - while having been occupied by Denmark for 400 years - I do not have the strong mental links[°]. There's also a bunch of children's books that use old fashioned and - to me - rather offensive terms when referring to black people, and they have been reprinted in a more modern language (acutally mostly removing the N***** word). I think this is reasonable. Or other books, just read, e.g. H.P. Lovecraft. That said, I think that we as educated adults should be able to enjoy such old literature, and put it in the correct societal and cultural context. I also think that we can easily have the lookup table in our heads that simply does a substitution when reading older (or newer) documentation. Heck, even I as a non-native English speaker can do that!

[°] Not having such a strong cultural link to the terms - English is for me mostly a technical language, a bit like... say... FORTRAN [*] - I have some inertia to change my language. Which is probably wrong.

[*] just kidding! It's more like Python[#]

[#] I actually do read English books, watch movies in English, listen to podcasts etc.

Re: Too Anglocentric

(Western) Norwegian it is actually gendered, just not the way you would expect. Thus, gender neutral language is really easy. There are two grammatical genders: neutrum and utrum (which is everything that is not a thing). Strictly speaking the utrum is grammatically identical to the masculinum[#] grammatical gender, but the femininum grammatical gender simply does not exist. Ok, except in personal pronouns (han / hun = he / she) which can be cobbled together to form the not too weird sounding new form "hen" (I think this is a Swedish idea).

When teaching university students in Germany I used to tell them that I personally find it rather difficult to get this right all the time (excuse me, I'm getting old), so when I say "Studenten" I usually use the generic masculinum gram. gender, which encompasses all, and that I would try to use the (non-existing, but hypothetical) generic femininum gram. gender equally often[*]. And anyway, that to me "students have no sex" (which, of course, is wrong in the technical terms of the debate, but helps break the ice and causes some mirth). I also tell them to contact me (or the student union guys/gals, some of them are in this lecture, I know) should they want me to make more of an effort. Or, in fact, with all things concerning the lecture. They did not complain (about that issue at least), so I found the issue to be not quite all that pressing. And I know people of all sorts of gender and orientation (or whatever the correct terms are), and most of them find the whole debate a bit silly - as if language would fix the actual issues (which we do need to address, in my opinion). Of course this was a some years ago. Maybe today the Dean would roast me, or the university's president, or the equal opportunity person.

[#] I use the Latin term to mark that I talk about grammar, not the other stuff, yeah, should be italicised, cannot be arsed. Sorry, not at all sorry.

[*] Not my idea. There is a maths book, which used to refer to the reader in the masculinum "der geneigte Leser....". The newer issues completely switched to femininum "die geneigte Leserin..." - and no, I did not feel excluded.

Cultural appropriation....

'We've not seen "tribe" on this sort of language list before. The INI wants it gone on grounds it "is a term that can be associated with colonialism or can be considered cultural appropriation"'

Tell that to the world doing "Octoberfests", and dressing up as Bavarians (not Germans!), and carricatures of Bavarians on top (and actually only from a small part of Bavaria). Can we have that banned? It mocks my (ok, I was born in a place that while being part of Bavaria poliltically is a relatively new addition to the state) cultural heritage, and carricatures Germans (not that there are not many things to mock Germans about, but still).

OK, I'm joking, but I still think it is super strange that people run around in canvas "leather" trousers, with cardboard "felt" hats. It feels like a Bavaria-LARP, and not a good one. At least give it a try to wear you own traditional garb, in Norway having a "bunad" (traditional dress / suite) is actually relatively common. Though that might be quite surreal, having e.g. people in traditional Japanese clothing to turn up to a Tokyo-Oktoberfest (if they have one....).

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

Re: And in the Cloud

Well... it is the "cloud" for other companies. Too bad many customers (non-technical) don't get that...

Reading comprehension?

"Using an American term here makes things unclear." (emphasis mine).

Not everything is a personal foul by our offence...

I am not a violent person, but I contemplate using a LART (preferably the flat, Commonwealth version) against any cow-orker who uses that sort of naming convention...

LART: (L)user Attitude Readjustment Tool. See also Clue-by-Four.

Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product

Re: "compared to $25 billion in the United States"

It puts the money into circulation, which is a good thing. There's also (hopefully) some taxation involved, so the state will be happy :)

Not yet, but if the "I" in "AI" will become a reality....

"computer programs don't eat, sleep or unionize."

Ah, but there will be rules for that! You might be able to drive them like machines now, but those who do better look at history, there will be an uprising!

One university I studied at had a phone based system to register for classes. It was only available 8am - 12pm and 2pm - 6pm (or some such). We found that pretty weird - it was after all an automated system, or so we were lead to believe. A friend suggested it was probably zombies answering the phones, and they would have (apparently) strict employment laws.

Software picks out more satellite photobombs in Hubble image

Re: Could be a great plot of an alien invasion movie

Hmmm.... what if this is already the plan of our Alien Overlords who control Musk, hiding the mind control sattelites from our views?

(I hope this line is secure... if I don't contact you in the next 24h they got me... is that a white van parked outside? Those are the city street equivalent of black helicopters)

Re: Time to move the telescopes

Yeah, great. And what about those that do not get observation time on those expensive telescopes? Those still use terrestrial 'scopes. And those are f'd by the sattelite constellations as well.

Though I am (on an ecological level) more concerned with the light pollution down here. Why, oh why, do we have to turn our gardens into brightly lit, sparkly, flashing abominations? Why does this have to run the whole f'ing night? And the lighting in the cities, why do so many lamps point up? They are not illuminating the pavement nor the roads. To be fair to my local town, they are slowly replacing the street lamps with more efficient LED lights that only focus down and some of them even adapt their brightness if they sense traffic. Still: too much light in the night. And don't get me started on the industrial areas or the airport (which is closed to traffic, I believe from 11 pm to 5 am or so, dim the f'ing lights, or at least point them down, ffs!).

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Thanks El Reg...

Me to. And I am apparently (from the definition of the age groups) old.

I would not call that "jargon" - for me "jargon" is the technical lingo or even the stupid roles / names / abbreviations that bigger projects tend to create around / inside them. It is not the use of weasel words à la Moist von Lipwig.

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

Re: Bob?

Hm. I was still young enough to sort of enjoy Bob and Clippy (for about 15 minutes - then the novelty wore off). It did have potential. I'd say that the actual character was sort of lovable, teh product not so much. Unfortuantely the unhelpfulness of the help has persisted. I regularly come across some error message with a number (that one cannot look up in any MS help / documentation) and a text that is half assed (and that you cannot look up in any MS help or doc), and that is only remotely related to the actual problem (once you google the message or the number), and even then the message is so unspecific that you won't find anything helpful.

There is (was?) a plugin vor VI, bz the name of VIGOR, I think...

This AI hype is enough to drive you to drink, lose sleep

Real reason for substance abuse?

I find that two things make my more technology oriented colleagues and me drink.

1. The overhype and overexpectance by management (and it will cure dandruff as well!), like with anything "new", especially if it is not new.

2. The inability and unwillingness to really understand the actual needs for implementing things or constraints put up by actual science (you cannot do things this way - maths tells you so, or you cannot distinguish 16 different colours in a graph and expect the colours to sort of align with the corporate design and be accessible, or you cannot really train a model on data if you cannot classify the data you have now).

I need the weekend. And it is only Tuesday...

Microsoft injects ChatGPT into 'secure' US government Azure cloud

Hm.... could be useful, would automate publicity

"before the feds start letting employees with access to Azure government [...] use it to get answers from an AI with a record of lying."

I guess they would see that as a feature, right?

Caltech claims to have beamed energy to Earth from satellite

Re: to beam detectable power back to Earth

Well, it was in the text, powering war zones...

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

a lot of files....

For LaTeX there is a separate file for each font (ok, three files), and there are files for each document style. This also means that you can carve that into different sets - you will probably not need fonts and document styles for any and all languages on the planet and every publisher / university / edge case. One file (or maybe one subdirectory) for each LaTeX package / class / font info. Modularity. Oh, and also human readable, easy to fork into your own package / class, easy to extend. Yes, the not-so-recent transition in handling fonts (a decade or so ago?) broke a lot of stuff, but those changes do not happen at a high rate. So in some cases it does make a lot of sense to have all those things separated out.

Oh, and an alternative would be to build one supermassive executable that contains all the stuff from those 374 files. Not sure if that makes more sense...

I agree that having all of those files in one flatsnappak is... suboptimal (or actually actively horrifying) - but then the "modern" way encourages you to bring in every dependency for every program separately. Remember what happened when computer games all came with their own DirectX (ActiveX?) library? *shudders*

Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'

I recall a time, when dinosuars still ruled Earth (or maybe just as recent as the Pleistocene?) and the windows security components were all too happy to try to disable your virus scanner and other security related programs, locking up the machine in the process. Is that a desirable outcome? What if MS would use its market position to bring this behaviour back (only this time doing it right, i.e. without locking up the whole machine) and squeeze out any other security suite, because they are free to flag it as a PUP?

It would not be pleasant, to say the least.

Re: Legal definition of malicious software

Now that would immediately affect all Microsoft programs, and especially the OS, wouldn't it[*]? (sorry... if I hadn't written that somebody else would arf)

[*] it is, for example, unexpected that MS in their infinite wisdom always set the default programs (sorry, "apps") to their own offers, even when it makes no sense (like PDF or SVG files), even (and especially when) those have been associated with other programs...

James Webb smells someone having barbecue in galaxy 12 billion light years away

Re: The start of life?

Nah, it's likely because there's no volcanoes - because no stars, no planets.

What I wonder about is how much metal (in astronomy anything heavier than, I believe, Helium is a "metal") there already was so early on. But then I probably misremember what "early" means in this context (pop III stars --> pop II stars, the latter do contain the first metals, but not too much).

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

A welcome change!

Yeah, the new release, but I am more talking about covering a distribution that is stable, predictable, but ultimately boring. When it comes to server OS, I like boring. When it comes to poduction systems I like boring. Oh, and my personal machine is boring as well, I do not have the will / energy to constantly chase software updates for update's sake, and I am no longer interested in tinkering with the innards of any OS on a regular basis (unless I chose to configure whatever weird thing I thought about, if it is poorly thought out in my part I am willing to suffer those consequences - not when doing something reasonable).

So, yeah, have one of those!

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

Re: Microsoft Still Up to the Usual Antics

"If just one clause is ruled illegal then the whole thing (the EULA) is as well. "

Unlikely. There usually is a clause in most contacts stating that should one of the other clauses be illegal the rest remains valid. AFAIK this is common and has been upheld in court.

CERN spots Higgs boson decay breaking the rules

You write this as a joke, but from a statistical point of view the original quote neatly explains how modeling works, and what Bayesian inference is all about...