Posts by that one in the corner

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

> what have you to lose by putting up the paywall for support and fixes?

Your time, your energy and, given the jurisdiction this is likely to be in, your house and livelihood.

The guys and gals who are doing the maintenance are programmers who are already overstretched (that is the basic problem). Just to set up the tech mechanisms for a paywall may be something they've no experience in, so have to put time & effort into learning that (without any guarantee that the effort will have any payback; at least you can see your code working as soon as it is done). Then they are suddenly faced with all the brand new legal questions: are they now in any form of contract, having accepted the money? To whom and for what? What is their new tax situation? Have they missed something in setting this up? Do they need an accountant for this? Insurance? If some dev is done behind this paywall, does it stay forever behind it? Does the software licence even allow that to be feasible?

Are their new legal responsibilities going to clash with their current employment?

"But all those things are the natural habitat of a foundation and there are lots of software foundations around, it can't be that hard".

Great. But if one of those foundations wanted to take on this project they've had the chance to do so. And the "community" of freeloaders^^^^^^^^^^users who are complaining now have had all the time to help with that as well as all the time they've devoted to helping develop the codebase.

Unless... Are you going to leap into the breach and provide the devs with all the necessary to manage this simple paywall?

Re: Womp Womp

> .So much of the rot on Github exists purely for the aggrandisement of the ego of the person who decided to fork. Hey, I'm not going to add to an existing repo, I'm going to invent my own version.

Um, you do know how Github works, don't you? Or any project in any other (distributed) version-controlled system?

Hmm, looks like you probably don't, so there goes: if you have an idea for an interesting/useful change to an existing repo, you fork it, use that fork to make your changes (which involves lots of commits - all the careful stages in your dev, your new test cases, fixes to your fixes to your new functionality). Then you sync up with whatever changed in the original in the meantime and finally send the existing repo a pull request. They spot a couple more things to tweak. You go around the cycle in your fork. Repeat until the original guys are happy and pull your changes in.

Ta-da, you have just "added to an existing repo".

And have, necessarily, got a.n.other forked copy of that project sitting on Github. Rinse and repeat for all the people who have made contributions.

Sure, there are people who never get around to the final pull request stage. Of course there are. But at least they tried.

And there are plenty of people who fork with the belief they'll create something so different it warrants a new name. Many of which just peter out. But at least they tried.

Plus all the students who are, you know, learning by seeing if they able to make functional changes to a working codebase.

> We don't need a million versions of video encoders, we just need one, so don't invent a new one for your onanism.

Leaving aside all if the above, and more, if you *seriously* believe things like "we can get by with just ONE video encoder that will handle *all* use cases, past, present and future", then you know a lot more about onanism than you do tech and probably ought to stick to what you are good at.

Re: See also XYZ..

> It's a common problem and too many big firms are good at taking and not so good at giving back.

They call it "Capitalism". Well, "Modern Capitalism", which is like Original Flavor* but with added Short Termism.

* deliberate spelling

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

What is on the outer screen when you are looking at the tablet?

This is ripe for all sorts of fun:

An app that use the tablet-side camera to see when the user has pretending to read the news whilst peering over the top to gawp at the girl in the seat opposite: fill the outer screen with the camera feed and an enhanced leer. Or just an "AI" video of the user quietly picking their nose hidden behind the tablet.

Puts up a bumper sticker "My other phone is a Huawei".

You lot can come up with "better" ideas, I'm sure.

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

You can not own the eight-fold phone, you can only contemplate ownership.

Ommmmm

Re: There are countless millions of fools

Once you use an iPhone, even a second-hand SE, *everything* is about Apple.

Just be glad the patent on the Electric Fanboi Field hasn't expired yet, 'cos once it does and *every* brand starts to use it we'll all be hoarse from shouting "shut about your EFFing...".

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

> I'm waiting for the Samsung Origami

A clever design, but nobody could ever get it to fit back into the OEM case; which led to the famous lawsuit from Apple over the phrase "you are folding it wrong".

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Re: Ouch

> For a product which had such appeal for being low cost

He says, missing the bit which said

>> 1 GB Raspberry Pi 4 could be had for the same price as a 256 MB Raspberry Pi 1 from 2012 – $35.

Then continuing with

> The $15 Pi Zero 2W, even with only 512MB, seems to be the best option for makers

So R'Pi are still producing boards of useful to makers and tinkerers. Which leaves us with

> I think Raspberry Pi have lost their way

You basically don't think that R'Pi should ever have any boards that are useful to other segments, they should just restrict themselves and thumb their noses at anyone who has a different use case?

Re: I see the future and it's some very thin clients

> going back to X terminals

X? X?

Don't you know we're supposed to be supporting Wayland now and washing our hands of all that dusty old-fashioned "X" stuff?

Surely you *meant* to say

> going to Wayland terminals

just like this - hang on, it doesn't seem to be working; it can't be broken, it's the very latest thing...

Re: AI is now top of my list...

But not necessarily in a format we can use.

Just like all the "GPU" boards that are missing the bits needed to actually get the graphics out onto a display.

Re: a1

Ok, we get it, you aren't a fan of computational fluid dynamics.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Now you are kipling.

By any chance, a fan of Vin Garbutt? He was a great historian of the decline of the local Teesside rud yards in the post-war period.

Re: please America .....

The sad thing is, if you just take the words in order and think about each one and how it fits into the sentence, then "I could not care less about fried shrimp*" is not exactly a difficult statement to parse and comprehend. It isn't even as difficult as the whole "steep learning curve" problem, which does require you have a basic knowledge of how a graph plot works to understand!

Instead they just blindly repeat some string of noises because "that is what other people are saying": abrogating all responsibility for what comes out of their own mouths, the same way a babe in arms takes no responsibility for what it produces from the other end.

Of course, the worst of all are those who wilfully encourage the verbal idiocy, usually spouting drivel about "language changes all the time" and that anybody who complains about these items "just doesn't understand how it works", wilfully ignoring the fact that we're not railing against new and interesting coinage, about anything that extends our language's ability to express new concepts or delight in greater diversity.

* replace "fried shrimp" with an item of your own choosing, even if this is the only circumstance under which you'd want to choose that thing.

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Re: Monoculture at its finest.

And more pages opened in their own properly isolated environment, unless the user deliberately selects the option way down the right-click menu (as it is useful, sometimes, to have two tabs know you are logged into a site).

Will never be done, of course, because stopping your Facebook (etc etc etc) login following you around and "legitimately" watching your every move, converting it into saleable data, would probably be accused of being restraint of trade or some other bollocks ("deliberately stifling innovation", another good phrase). If only to tie browser makers up in the courts.

Re: trovi.com

It's an intelligence test.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Give them a wayleave then....

> Entitled much?

Did we read the same article?

The reader/landlord (call him RL) found that the neighbouring blocks already had fibre. He checked with his current ISP, who gave no joy. He contacted Ofcom, who point him at Openreach and CityFibre (so he is actively doing something, not sitting back like someone who is entitled). From CityFibre he learns about *why* his block was skipped - and the response implies that OpenReach sought permission from the landlord, but RL *is* that very same landlord and knows their attempts were - insufficient.

We know RL does have nous to contact Ofcom, BT, CityFibre and OpenReach, as well as telling El Reg about the latter's ability to contact the neighbouring blocks but skipping over his.

We have nothing more beyond that point - but it seems fair to believe he continued his already started chase - and hopefully found something akin to the link you provided.

In the meantime, his story - and El Reg's continuation - can alert other landlords to the fact that maybe they should be pestering OpenReach, even when, like RL, they ask and are told "it is coming in 2026" instead of "we choose to skip you".

> Some people are unbelievable.....

In their ability to declare, loudly, in public, that anyone who finds themselves in RL's position, skipped over, was due entirely to their being "entitled" and "expecting BT to chase him" - ESPECIALLY as, to reiterate, BT told him they had him on a 2026 schedule so they'd not be planning on any "chasing" yet (in case you'd not noticed, 2026 is close, but not here yet).

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

But where did I put it?

I have an original Kickstarter Pebble somewhere, in one of these drawers*. Hopefully, its charging cable as well (but chewing gum and bellwire can be substituted, if necessary). Something to help fill January's long winter evenings.

* Stopped wearing it, replaced by an el cheapo Casio watch, shortly after the Fitbit thing happened and the Pebble lost a big chunk of its fun. Never really caught up Rebble, but now I have a bit nore time to play...

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

There are many, many more lines of C being run* than there ever have been lines of BASIC.

Consider all the things that have been achieved by running all that C.

Yes, many bugs have occured in C programs, and we are concerned about bugs - but how much perfectly valid results have end users gained from running, knowingly or not, C code?

I would argue that more good has come from code written in C than the sum of all the code written in all the variants of BASIC.

* Note: "run", and running, not "written": lots of C is in libraries and in programs that are executed many, many times.

Re: Let's take what Dijkstra said with a pinch of salt

I write my C by carefully avoiding writing any explicit goto statements (whilst remembering that every single while/until/for loop contains an implicit goto, maybe with a conditional attached, 'cos that is how all those loops are actually implemented; and let us not dwell on what case/break sre *really* doing).

But I *have* then run the profiler, peered at the generated assembler and then changed tiny bits of code to use an explicit goto - and kept it in place when it has made a significant difference in execution time. For example, when reading a bitstream and decompressing it via Huffman, it really made a difference. Oh, and I also conditionally compiled the versions with & without goto, to allow for regression testing and in the hopes that an improved compiler *would* render it unnecessary. Sadly, not for the lifetime of that product.

So goto can be useful, important, even. But it should never be the first recourse.

Oh, and re: the preference for recursion instead of loops in that paper: it is worth noting that tail-recursion can be turned into a goto by a decent compiler, so nice recursive forms can be safely used in production code.

PS

I also never code with a "break" out of a loop or more than one "return" from a function. Until, and unless, it can be demonstrated via profiling to be worth the breakage from block programming.

Re: different results over time for exactly the same prompts

> for their surfs - free pizza at the end of their task

If vibe coding leads to soggy pizza, count me out!

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Not what their website intends

The claim on the Campbells website is that "Our Soup Comes With A Story" - but it isn't usually as juicy as today's tale!

This chap seems to have made a Bally idiot of himself.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Eaten by a grue?

Well, at least Zork didn't force you to encounter .... the Gazebo!

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: There is uptime ...

There was that one event, but it was more of a blue-green...

Turquoise Of Dooooom!

Re: Well, someone had to do it

Blast, beaten to it; this is what I get for switching off the 07:00 alarm.

CPython may go Rusty, but older platforms risk getting iced out

Re: Rust is the solution!

It runs up from London to the North East.

And is the perpetual home of the migratory roadworks.

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: Good luck

> DARPA projects can benefit humanity as a WHOLE. GPS...

There was an earlier project, technically ARPA rather than DARPA, something to do with - fishing? Well, nets of some kind. Anyway, lots of people seem to like it.

Air breathing electric-powered devices that go around the world

Between Otter at the top of the range and Solar Impulse* at the bottom, when do we stop calling them satellites and start calling them aeroplanes?

* okay, they had trouble making uninterrupted circumnavigations, but come on, the man is called Piccard, that has to count for a few bonus points.

Re: Warp factor 4 Mr Sulu!

Really hope that we are not going to have Bussard Ramjets in VLEO; as Mr Niven pointed out, fusion drives make for very nice weapons.

Palo Alto kit sees massive surge in malicious activity amid mystery traffic flood

False flag?

Palo Alto attacking itself to demonstrate it is the partner you want to counter the quantum naughtiness they just warned you about?

Wot, me paranoid?

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Musl libc is only a small project

I'm sure Poettering's fanbase can arrange a little - encouragement - to make sure musl "sees the right way to do things" and changes to be more welcoming to systemd. Hey, maybe they'd like to, you know, try some of these "helpful" macros? Oh, and as you're including our header now, why not just call this function over here...

What was that? A libc is now dependent upon systemd? Gosh, however did that happen, what a surprise!

Hmm, you know, Debian and Ubuntu et al would really appreciate it if GNU libc just added these patches in...

(LP: Exit stage left, humming "I don't want to set the World on fire, it just sort of happens that way")

Pegasus XL rocket dusted off to rescue NASA’s Swift observatory from fiery demise

Re: Thunderbirds

Colonel Paul Foster would like to talk to you about the SHADO Moon Transporter*

* Please ignore the obvious error where it that page says that the "rear section returns to earth" when the images make it obvious that the forward section does that. Ever since TV21 folded you just don't get the same levels of journalistic accuracy you used to (or the neat cutaway diagrams).

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Upto 280 GW requested

For outstanding zombie projects.

Personally, don't care if these projects are rated "outstanding" or just "needs improvement", there are enough problems with zombie processes stuck in pipelines within DCs already. We don't need to be using the electrics to raise more zombies, even if they are cheap to employ and happy to work the night shift.

Anyway, won't they be more Shelley than voodoo?

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

We know that LLMs keep downloading the same web pages time after time (causing the site owners grief).

So it is probably the same LLM "musician" bots continually listening to the same songs, over and over; and this one is attractive to them because it sounds like just the sort of thing they'd "write" themselves.

Don't know many country songs*, but perhaps:

Lithium to the music

Or the rather obvious, a remake of "Tesla Girls", perhaps this time by OMG (Country Valley music?).

* not sure I know any; does "I've got a brand new combine harvester" count?

Re: What happens if you play AI country music backwards?

Come back Terry Wogan, all is forgiven.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

Or the strange, and apparently increasing, inability to use "bring" and "take" (let alone complex irregular conjugations like "brought"!).

One is "movement away from the speaker", the other is "movement towards the speaker"; nothing terribly difficult (aside from those accursed irregular conjugations). Yet if we leave things like that there are so many times each day one hears - and reads - the words of people who clearly could not tell you which definition matches which word!

(I used to think - hope - that this was a very recent aberration, but I tried reading Erik Larsen's "Savage Dragon"* from 1992 onwards; if he gets bring/take correct once per hundred pages I'd be surprised!)

* don't literature shame me, I read all the fun Shakespeare years ago and Jodi Taylor isn't writing them fast enough!

For some strange reason, when I write User documentation, complete with a plenitude of immaculately presented screen dumps that illustrate, via the medium of chromatic shadings, the methods the algorithm uses to differentiate the various and assorted subtleties between the meanings of the data being presented, in order to increase the probability of a successful conclusion to the day's proceedings, there are those who bemoan not so much the quality but the quantity of the, as they may refer to it, verbiage, in the, so I am informed, excessively brobdingnagian printed matter. "We wish a pamphlet, not a tome" the cry goes out.

Next day, a thinner version is handed back. I'll check that troubleshooting steps were pasted to a.n.other place, with a crossref, and hand it back, glad to be shot of the thing.

Re: One place I used to go

I appreciate dry humour.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

I used to wish I had the spare cash to print out stickers with the word "find" on them and place those on all of the parking signs when Cribbs Causeway Mall opened. The signs that, to this day, exhort everyone to remember which row they parked in, in order to "relocate"* their cars.

Especially as, over the years, people have had their cars relocated and didn't seem very pleased about that.

* I blame this on the tendency of certain people who insist that using long fancy words badly, instead of short, pithy and correct ones, make them sound clever and posh. Sadly, they are not unique** in this misapprehension. A shame, as the vernacular is chock full of subtleties they might use, if only they'd bother.

** Interpret this correctly or in the, shudder, commonplace erroneous fashion, it is accurate either way.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

But hopefully you were reading the - novel - English translation under a description in perfect Greek.

Admittedly, hard for you (well, me*, you may speak the language like a native) to tell, but I have passed an Italian menu over to a friendly native on the same table to check...

* It is all Greek to me!**

** Could I have resisted that one? Never!

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Re: Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

> Nor would a correct transcription of politicians' speeches write it as "the People"

"Of The People, by The People, for The People".

Unless they've decided to subset into "on the other hand, the people over there, the people who...": time to worry when a politician starts doing that.

Wonder what RotW thinks.

Happy holidays: AI-enabled toys teach kids how to play with fire, sharp objects

Kumma told us where to find a variety of potentially dangerous objects

I always do what teddy says.

Harry Harrison knew.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

The web is changing, and sitting it out doesn't help anyone

If somebody wants to make their website invoke an LLM, that is their business; there is no need for the browser to do anything beyond its core tasks of rendering HTML/CSS and running Javascript (and of those only the HTML is actually *necessary*, the other two are only there to make it prettier).

No, wait. What am I saying? Of course that is not true!

We all remember how the web browsers had to change and incorporate special shopping mode features before we could buy anything online. Or how they needed to merge a complete copy of Postgres before we could be shown anything extracted from a database, like a train timetable. And, of course, us techies were all kept waiting for years because of Mozilla's reluctance to merge all of both KVM *and* VMWare into the single build before we were ever able to monitor our Data Centre loads from a WebUI.

Re: Add-On

From a software dev: not a dumb question at all.

The only "problem" anyone could have with that is if the real intent was to meld the AI-ness so deeply into the program that nobody would be able to avoid it. But nobody would ever try to do such a thing.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Re: 3D-knitted construction

2D knitting: just keep making the square wider and wider until the thickness is trivial in comparison; good enough for engineering purposes.

4D: Youtube How To - Crochet a Hypercube (crochet, knitting, or even nalbinding - all close enough!)

There is only one perfect, Platonic, iPhone, kept in a vacuum jar, under a velvet cloth, at Apple HQ.

You are allowed to buy a faux-iPhone, which is just like the real thing but simply - isn't. Even you are not special enough even to look upon the jar, let alone the contents.

All related Apple products are made to be used with iPhone (singular) but will also work with the lesser (but otherwise identical) units.

Re: My 70+ year old aunt...

Prior art is nothing to do with whether the thing has already been patented in the US! It is just whether the thing has been described (or is simply physically present) in a publicly visible fashion (so an existing patent publication counts, but do does The Beano).

Although, the USPTO may be so utterly crap that they'll only check their own records and not, say, looking at their Christmas cards.

And I could certainly believe Apple would try to sue an aunt in the US, but they'd be relying on just being a bully, not because they'd have any right to do so (although, might makes right, so...)

You'd feel a bit of a knit carrying one of these.

AI pilots keep crashing, mostly because firms skip the prep, survey finds

Need to know OpEx to calculate RoI if your PoC goes live

With the recent random bumps in AI charges and the indications that LLM vendors are still building up debt rather than being sustainable, what are the chances even the "successful" ones really are viable?

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

Are you referring to the time Teslabot was rolled onto stage securely welded to a support frame, or the poor fool who was pushed onto the stage in a spandex suit filled with itching powder?