Posts by rcxb 1021 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
I think at the very least we need more than RE: and FW: tags to give us a fighting chance at building new ways to display "multiplayer" mail threads in a more cohesive manner.
They already exist. E-mail has Message-ID, References, and In-Reply-To headers.
Some e-mail clients simply screw-up, badly, which is how you end up with Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: subject lines, which you never should see...
This may be cultural imperialism, because English speaking countries were so dominant during the development of the basic computing infrastructure.
Unlikely. Baudot code was only 5 bits. Moving up to 7 bit ASCII was a huge improvement. 16-bit Unicode would have been terribly impractical in the days of Z80 processors and a few kilobytes of RAM. ASCII did make allowances for some non-English characters.
Basic English was created back in 1930. English was becoming increasingly the universal language from the start of the industrial revolution through the world wars, and had certainly become the unchallenged de-facto language of science and research (taking over from German) after WW2.
ASCII is good for more than English... Several nationalities can forego accented characters (or use the available diacritics) with little impact and use ASCII just fine. Even some symbols commonly used by English speakers were missing from the original ASCII standard, too... Such as the pound (£).
Ever turned up for a meeting in garb some might consider wildly inappropriate? And then gone on to wipe the floor with them thanks to your technical prowess?
I got contracted to rush in and fix a bank branch's urgent computer/network problem.
I was not at home, but instead out hiking (this was mid-summer) when the call came in. I was much closer to the bank than my apartment and since it was urgent I went directly there, knowing my shabby appearance would require a bit of explanation. What I didn't expect was the agent at the front leading me into an empty room by myself, and waiting there for 15 minutes until a police officer arrived. After providing the name and phone number of the person who had contacted me, the officer left. I proceeded on to fix the problem in about 30 minutes that multiple guys in suits couldn't figure after several hours.
Learn from my mistake... And I don't mean dress codes. Absolutely NEVER say the word "computer" in a bank. It's like saying "bomb" at an airport. Focus on the important part ("I was told to talk to person XYZ") and don't offer any other information, no matter how friendly or insistently they keep asking questions.
The irony is, if I'd actually been trying to social engineer my way in, it seems a suit, a clip-on plastic badge and laptop bag is really all it takes. Banks are the worst.
It's all about bandwidth and "spectrum reuse". 700MHz will go over-the-horizon, so you really can't have several towers using those same frequencies in a small area. 60GHz won't even go through your walls, and even oxygen causes quick attenuation, so you can (and need to) have one of them in every room of a home. Higher spectrum reuse means you have have one pico cell on every street that doesn't interfere with the same frequencies being used the next street over. Each pico cell having its own high-speed backhaul, multiplying the aggregate bandwidth.
Plus as you go to higher frequencies, there's much more available bandwidth, and it's much easier to make a tiny antenna in your phone that will cover much more of it, so you could have super-fast, 1GHz wide channels, where that's not practical at lower frequencies.
That's a huge chunk of change considering we're in one of the worst periods for the smartphone industry ever.
Where else are you going to invest your money just now? Might as well take a bit of a chance on an industry that won't be shut-down, and a company that might be able to turn a profit on the investment.
Think about it:
You're seriously ill, and not improving for a an extended time.
Hospitals are overflowing with contagious people.
You are running out of cold medications.
Your condition also happens to clouds your judgment.
Desperate people do desperate things. You don't have to be too challenged to make the next, poorly considered leap.
people, I'm sorry that you think that a manufacturer has the fundamental requirement to open their proprietary hardware, and any associated software drivers, to the FOSS system.
No they don't... UNLESS they want it to be usable and integrated with FOSS systems, such as Linux. What was this article about again?
Nvidia is desperate to exploit and monetize FOSS (code written by other people) while at the same time keeping their own code proprietary, so they are assured the ability to maximize the money they can squeeze out of their customers. Which is a thing that they do.
All the (slightly seedy) monetisation is done via hardware or firmware.
No, it is not. The driver has a click-thru license that the firmware does not, and it's the perfect place to put other restrictions in-place.
That's how NVidia specifically:
A) Cripples the card if it detects it running under a hypervisor, and
B) Makes it ILLEGAL to use their low-end/consumer cards for GPU compute.
Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell?
Everyone is willing to sell anything for the right price. The threats from Trump to ban the service have no doubt pushed that price down. Microsoft was already in talks, so it's obvious ByteDance was seriously considering selling.
Pompeo claims TikTok is feeding all user data to the Chinese Communist Party. So fucking what? Which US tech companies give the US government user data?
China is happy to restrict US companies from selling to their domestic market, it doesn't seem unreasonable for the US to turn this tactic back around on them.
Hardly. How is the existence of their fast pipe going to stop you from using other services? This is more like an airline buying a refinery...
This just allows more/faster connectivity between Google's various data centers. It will be a real advantage for them only when Europeans want to download something from Google's US servers, or vise versa.
The only ones who should be alarmed are cloud service providers with an international reach. Transferring files to/from US based Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc, users may be slower to Europe than Google Drive/Google Cloud. As Google isn't the biggest player in those markets, and this doesn't provide a drastic advantage, I don't see any cause for panic.
Everyone's having a laugh about the drink spills, but cockpit equipment SHOULD be water-resistant. It's life-or-death equipment and a pilot's drink isn't the only possible source of intrusion. There have been a few passenger jets that had their windscreens destroyed/removed in flight for various reason. If it happened to be raining at the time, you'd have quite a bit more than a coffee-cup worth coming in. The cost of improvements is much less than the cost of one accident.
The failure of capitalism is on the other end.
Why isn't it profitable to make? Because everyone buys the cheapest equipment available, which is always Hawuei, and nobody spends a few extra pounds on home-made kit (with hundreds fewer bugs/exploits).
Why would you expect companies to make kit they know they will have to give away at a loss?
He also concocted two financial models; one said YouPlus had made $3.55m from January to April 2019, and another reported $3.97m for the same time period, we're told.
Ah, yes... It's a multi-dimensional quantum-entangled startup. They're simultaneously doing both depending on which timeline you end up in. The uncertainty principle in effect. Nobody lives or dies until they open the box.
50 quadrillion kg
What's that in picograms?
Ah, metric... You're doing it wrong.
After kilograms comes megagram (Mg) then gigagram (Gg), teragram (Tg), petagram (Pg), exagram (Eg), zettagram (Zg), yottagram (Yg).
If you're going to have a multiple of a common prefix you think people are more familiar with, you might as well stick with Imperial units. Doesn't 7873652220888600000000000 stone just sound better?
But claiming cookie cleaning was carried out due to privacy or security concerns doesn't guarantee immunity under the DMCA. As Troupson's article notes, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision lacks any intent requirement.
This is false, or at best playing word games... The term in US law is "substantial noninfringing use". If you write an extension that refuses cookies, or accepts and deletes them after a short amount of time (I use "Cookie AutoDelete"), then the fact it works-around restrictions on some sites is only incidental, there are lots of other users of your extension that never use it for that purpose, and you are quite safe. You can even HINT that is makes certain sites more usable/private/etc, as long as you're not dumb enough to come out and admit you're trying to break digital access controls.
The same intent issue is true for many other areas of criminal law... You can carry a sword around legally, as long as you have an excuse that has not the faintest whiff of even potentially using it against someone. Meanwhile, any mundane object, like a pencil, can be illegal if you're dumb enough to admit you're carrying it because you think you might possibly have a need to stab someone... (self defense or not does not matter).
Shop-air. An endless, 200psi supply of shop air.
After removing all the dust and debris, it kindly also spins your fans fast than their failure speed making interesting noises you've never hear before, and quite effectively eliminates any other pesky protrusions, such as capacitors...
If it's any bigger than a Sony Vaio C1 Picturebook, I'm not interested...
Who really LIKES resting their palms on the touchpad and causing all kinds of spurious changes of focus in the middle of typing?
Has anyone EVER built a desk with a recess for the keyboard so it would be flush with the area they're resting their hands on? Why do ALL notebooks force you to type like that?
Wish I could find good notebooks these days, instead of the lowest-common denominator generic junk they all peddle.
Cisco can amortize the cost of their software across a huge number of devices, and several generations of their products. Counterfeiters have a much smaller pool of sales to work with. And it's not all that difficult to write software for networking gear. Many networking devices are just computers running Linux these days... Cisco's ASAs for instance.
No Amazon or eBay seller will miss the opportunity to flip a clone or used chip as "new and from original manufacturer" if it bumps the price by a dozen quid or so. There is no real punishment from doing so.
When a buyer flags you for it, you end up refunding the full amount, and losing the merchandise. And after a few rounds of that, you'll be delisted from the site. Not a massive penalty, but long-term it's more profitable to be honest and only mention that it's similar to or compatible with Name Brand X.
In order to get an H1-B visa and bring in a foreign worker, you first have to prove there are no qualified applicants in the USA. This is done by job-listing fraud. "Accidentally" post the job in the wrong geographic area, inflate the years of experience to ridiculous levels, require unnecessary levels of education (entry-level code monkey with a Ph.D) include typos that make it impossible for anyone to get through the HR keyword matching filtering, etc.
So, it's very likely IBM has an India devops engineer they want to bring over. No surprise, as IBM has a huge presence in India.
Here in the U.S., I heard that something like 70% of our aluminum production is now imported. You can certainly argue that a key basic ingredient like aluminum should have a larger domestic capacity.
No, you can't. You don't WANT to make basic ingredients domestically. They are extremely low-profit. What you want is a reliable supply of it, and while it's "imported" to the US, it's not coming from one or two nations, but all over the world. Why would the US be concerned that aluminum is being imported from Canada, Iceland, etc? There's no reason to care.
What's more, one of the big three suppliers of al is Alcoa... The last A stands for "America". The US might have a little bit of influence on them.
Instead of using non-inclusive binary words like he/she, all kernel developers shall be referred to as "that rat bastard".
Instead of offensive terms like Master/Slave, such devices will now be named Grand Wizard and Clansman.
And more importantly:
A 2014 article in the Journal of Consumer Research titled "The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action" found that such acts tend to satisfy a person's desire to help, and that those people are then far less likely to take more effective action than are people who avoided taking token actions.https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4665
they downloaded 80 million images without any check on copyright and have been redistributing that data-set.
They're an educational institution, distributing the data for free, it's only for training purposes, and in a form where any other usage would be impossible, and it wouldn't possibly reduce their commercial value. This is a no-brainer justifiable fail-use case.
Mainframes went from a massive business with multiple vendors down to being just a small fraction of one company's business.
And IBM only kept them going despite the immense cost because they like the propritary lock-in, to ensure companies have to keep buying their overpriced software and service contracts. IBM could easily pull an Apple and port their software, include a binary translator, and change their entire mainframe business to x86 commodity servers.
Back in the day Microsoft were fairly good at Embrace Extend and Extinguish. Now they seem to even fsck(8) that up.
Back in the day they had an entrenched monopoly they could use to good effect. Today, they have to give Win10 away for free, and many people still won't take it...
Linux ate away the server business. iDevices and Android chipped away the user-facing side.
Silicon Valley has been abusing the H-1B visa program for far too long, with enthusiastic Democratic [ neo-liberal economics ] support.
Can't imagine why you're singling-out Democrats. Republicans love the program, too. GWBush was in there between Clinton and Obama, and did nothing to fix/eliminate the program.
Trump is doing something NOT because he's Republican (he isn't, really) but because it just happens to appeal to his extremely right-wing xenophobic base. Hard to cheer for that. And his one-off executive orders will only temporarily change things, and get rolled-back completely as soon as he's replaced. An actual fix would be to have congress vote to end the program, but that won't happen. because it's popular with the corporate donors behind congressional representitives in both parties.
Apple will not allow the iOS client into its app store unless the maker pays Cupertino "15-30 per cent of our revenue."
So spin-off a subsidiary which earns very little money and publishes a cheap/free app. The app only happens to be compatible with the more expensive paid service from another company by a similar name, if you change a setting in the app. It works well enough to sheild Apple from paying taxes, so...
Or maybe offer in-app purchases with a 100% mark-up. People who know better will go to the website and buy the service at a discount. People who have no sense will pay both you and Apple for their cluelessness.
Hey requires a dedicated app, rather than working with any email client, and users pay a subscription of $99 per year. "That makes our business work without having to sell your data, advertise to you, or otherwise engage in unscrupulous marketing tactics," its makers claim.
You can find a plain vanilla email service with no advertising and a strong privacy policy for far less than $99. ProtonMail comes to mind, and is less than half the price.
Any "word" will, at some stage, have multiple meanings in which some may be offended
Perhaps a less offensive choice for Master/Slave would be Grand Wizard and Clansmen.
I prefer Parent and Children, because it nicely implies that Master / Slave relationship, along with a nice little illegal forced child labor angle. Child processes can be launched with a goForkYourself() call.
Terms like Director and Employee are useful to indicate which processes sit around just passing messages, and which ones actually do productive work.
So that's about ten times the "fuel" weight, for two-thirds of the range; you'd need roughly 15 times the fuel weight to get the same range [*].
"Fuel weight" is another ridiculous, unfair measurement. That fuel needs an engine, transmission, fuel tanks, pumps, hoses, firewall, radiator, fans, and more supporting equipment. An electric motor is a featherweight in comparison. That's why curb weight is a vastly better number to go by.
Batteries have nowhere near the energy density of gasoline much less fuel oils.
Lithium-Air batteries have a theoretical specific power of 11.4 kW/kg, compared to the theoretical maximum of 11.99 kWh/kg for Jet A-1, so very close.
We don't have theoretical batteries, you may say, but that's fine, because we don't have theoretical engines with 100% conversion efficiency for jet fuel, either. And if we did, they wouldn't be zero mass and zero volume, so would negatively affect those numbers. And that's without mentioning that jet fuel needs things like storage tanks, pumps, which also add mass and volume.
Your argument sounded less foolish years ago, before electric vehicles like the Teslas came along and proved it's possible to get the same range with batteries as with gasoline for only modestly more weight. Battery technology is not static, manufacturers continue to increase energy densities. In time, they absolutely will become competitive, it's just a gradual process.
There actually would seem to be a use case for an internet connected refrigerator with a temperature gauge and internet alerts if the temperature goes out of range.
I don't see why anyone would want that as PART of their refrigerator, as opposed to a £20 stand-alone universal temperature monitor component that only just happens to be commonly used with refrigerators, but was perhaps designed for a humidor, e.g. ASIN: B07L4QNZVF.
I've replaced the fans, thermostats and the relays on several refrigerators, keeping them running for decades longer. Go with solid state (except for the fan of course) and it'll just keep running forever.
I'm with California on this one... Don't trust consumers to dissect refrigerantion systems, particularly now that highly flammable coolants like propane are popular (due to their higher efficiency and low greenhouse/ozone impact potential).
It always seems strange that the devices which DON'T benefit from more monitoring are the ones most likely to get the "smart" treatment, while the devices that would greatly benefit, never do.
Why can't I find a "smart" animal trap? It would really help to know immediately when it has been tripped and whether or not something is inside. You can manually mount a battery-powered WiFi camera to it, and wire up a sensor to the door, but it's so strange nobody provides such a thing.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
