Posts by that one in the corner

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Re: I love OpenBSD

> And does anyone dual-boot anything these days?

I'll admit to dual-booting: #1 Devuan to fire up VMs (such as the "end-user instance of Devuan" and Windows 10) then #2 Windows 10 bare metal.

But I admit that firing up the latter is down to my not getting fully to grips with the architecture of the PC: passing through a plug-in board (e.g. GPU, extra LAN) to a VM is easy(!) enough, but figuring out the mapping from the physical ports to the weird device ids for all of the built-in devices got so confusing that I gave up and boot to #2 when doing something under Windows that wants to access a USB device (other than keyboard, mouse or storage). I hang my head in shame.

GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet, Amazon CEO hopes

Re: GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet

A few minutes later:

It is driving me mad(der), can anyone fill in the blanks?

> Koffee Klear (tm)

Did I - borrow - that from Pohl & Kornbluth? "The Space Merchants"?

Or maybe it was something else by Kornbluth? Or someone else of that vintage.

Re: GenAI will be bigger than the cloud or the internet

> Claiming this is like claiming a new soft drink is going to be "bigger than water".

"Have you tried our new decaffeinated Koffee Klear (tm)? Now without the bitter taste, A Cleanser for Every Palate".

Any resemblance to Dasani is entirely coincidental.

Re: Transform virtually every customer experience that we know

You know full well that everyone else will try to outdo (read: simply copy whatever Amazon does - or buy the same services from them) if only from Fear of Missing Out.

All you customers of all the companies will join the race to the latest Stygian Hell of The Online[1]. If you don't fall to The Mindflayer then the Deep Ones will suck the marrow of your wallets.

[1] our only saviours can be a group of plucky kids on their bikes, and some cracking synth tunes.

Transform virtually every customer experience that we know

That thing you are feeling right now, after reading those words?

That, *that*, is the feeling of impending doom, the realisation of the horrors to come, the darkest depths of infinite void peering back out at you, as you feel sanity peeling away like the skin on overripe fruit.

Boffins deem Google DeepMind's material discoveries rather shallow

Re: Let us see your heterocyclic rings! :)

Gish Galloping the chemists!

Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions

NOx, NOx, who's there?

> Nitrogen emissions

Plain old Nitrogen aint so bad, I'm sucking in great dollops of right now. Hmmmm; dilute that Oxygen to safe levels for me.

Nitrogen oxides, on the other hand, not so good.

(Niceness of other Nitrogen compounds - variable, but some quite exciting ones exist)

El Reg not to be blamed, just quoting from the imprecise linked Volta Energy article.

PS

Nope, even though we are getting into the (not great) habit of referring to "Carbon emissions" when we really mean CO2 much of the time, in my experience it is *not* clear to Joe Public that "Nitrogen emissions" refers to NOx - nor that there is any need to "simplify" things for Joe, as "NOx Bad" has been in news for a long time (and it even sounds, well, noxious). Plus there is a lot more C than CO2 to think about - CH4 for starters - whilst NOx really covers the bulk of it.

It's 2024 and Intel silicon is still haunted by data-spilling Spectre

Re: Ahhh that caption, as an 80's kid that made me laugh!

nasal_voice

After reading the Github page, I think you'll find that the package is written in Python, C and assembler. Therefore any use of jokes on "Go" are out of place.

(Snnnnnort)

/nasal_voice

Dispatch InSpectre Gadgets - Assemble!

C Gadgets; C Gadgets run; run, Gadgets, run.

Umm, something short and pithy about Python squeezing the bytes out of a juicy kernel.

US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

Would never harm a kitten

AI recognising and reacting to its surroundings?

Hope they have really good means of testing against (radar etc image variants of) Adversarial Image Attacks.

Pilot: Bogie sighted; weird paint job. Engaging.

AI: Aww, look at the widdle kitty; whoops, better switch off that nasty tone, don't want to scare him.

X fixes URL blunder that could enable convincing social media phishing campaigns

Gosh, that takes me back

To the time when badly implemented profanity filters were all the rage on forums up and down the 'Net.

But it is refreshing to see that X is still in the technological lead, taking what was just an annoying but harmless bug, which sometimes gave us a good laugh[1] and converting it into an attack vector.

[1] the clbuttic[2] examples of Sshrewhorpe, Rosebudheroe or Mastburn

[2] I acknowledge the previous use of this one, but who can resist? Plus, failed to come up (oooer missus) with a way to include buttbuttin.

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Meh

That is also what Emacs, CodeWright, VIM, Eclipse are also all for.

Given nothing that comes as default with Windows can do those tasks, isn't it good that we have options and can choose the one that fits our preferences.

But given TFA is about Notepad++ it is not surprising that that'll be getting the attention today.

Re: Meh

> But handle HUGE files gracefully. Define HUGE.

2GB plus (got it up to a 6GB binary just for a chuckle once - don't have anything larger on hand and *creating* that file took plenty of time)

> Define gracefully

Not crashing.

> I've certainly had times when the editor seemed to hang on me when working on large files.

Yeah, it could do with a progress bar when loading a huge file; but Task Manager shows it reassuringly chewing away.

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

> it only lasted about a minute, but it was still very interesting.

The 1968 total eclipse had, at its longest, a Totality duration of 40s - and the Chinese expedition spent 3 days on a train then 7 days by car to get to an observing site!

Travel is a lot easier now and many people would happily travel across the globe for a minute of Totality![1]

Just stepping outside and only having a few wispy clouds - what great fortune.

[1] of course, having travelled so far, they'd try for a location with the maximum Totality possible, conditions permitting, but still, a minute of Totality is nothing to be sneezed at.

AI could crash democracy and cause wars, warns Japan's NTT

Re: Calls for ecosystem in which AIs keep other AIs in check, and lots more regulation

> So, will the solution to all AI problems always be more AI?

Or a robust, large, circular and very bright red, "off" switch. Preferably more than one.

>> Using 100 words when two will do?

> Sounds like most people I've ever met

Ah, the glamour of a life in politics

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: Have they been hacked?

>> draw

> *drawer

It had been passed around in the prize draw at every local fair for the last three decades, initially as a simple joke until it became a tradition ("Tra-DITION!") and was then treated with veneration and handled carefully. Always stored behind a carriage clock on the mantelpiece, to keep it out of the sun, and occasionally brought out for the wonderment of the younglings, a Relic of The Before Times[1].

[1] accompanied by the singing of the hymn to the Data Gods, hoping to see a valid binary stream: "We Don't Need Another Zero"

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Don't follow the instructions

Sounds like you had the perfect start for an illustrious job on the Tiger Team.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

I hope you got your badge for that.

Boffins build world's largest astronomical digital camera to map the heavens

Re: Don't look up

The Starlink satellites won't leave so many trails, as you point out.

Instead, they will just occult all sorts of interesting stuff.

Such as the the alien fleet that is spiralling Earthwards, hiding behind Elon "Lizard Lord" Musk's space birds. That is the only logical explanation for making the new Starlink design too big to launch without Starship: as the Slaver ships grow closer they need the larger shape to keep them obscured. Their final approach was laid out in the plans sent up in the glove box of that red Tesla - and you don't want to know what was really inside that humanoid body...

And loaded two plates from successive nights into the mechanical blink comparator?

Subtracting one digital image from another saves so many sore eyes.

Or progressive readout, just under 20 seconds for the entire thing?

OpenStack pushes its first easy-to-upgrade release out the door

Re: "improves AI capabilities"?

>> gaining the ability to support live migration of virtual GPUs – which those running AI and HPC workloads will appreciate as it means easier access to accelerators attached to different hosts.

Just the assumption that if you are running an "AI" workload you can benefit from shunting it from one host to another without undue effort or having to restart from the beginning. Ditto other long-runtime GPU loads.

Presumably you could also shift your video game to a faster hardware host when that little brat from Oslo logs in (he is going to get his arse kicked *this* time) but that may be overkill (the best kind of kill!).

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Re: Paging Neil

> "an Earth-based clock observed by someone on the Moon that would appear to lose an average of 58.7 milliseconds per Earth day"

> I'm a little confused by the "observed" part though. Doesn't the "observation" also have to make the trip?

The light used to make the observation will also take time to travel from Earth to the Moon, and that time will also vary as the Earth rotates, the Moon orbits, that orbit recedes etc etc.

But when a clock is constantly losing (or gaining) you don't need to observe it frequently to observe the effect - you can imagine[1] waiting a few of years between peeking at the timepieces, measuring the distance[2] between Moon and Earth at the point of each clock observation to compensate. Then you'll see the cumulative drift and can point out that this is way outside the combined error bars for the two observations, so celebrate down the pub lads.

Whether or not the drift makes a genuine difference to performing any day to day operations, worth enshrining in a Lunar Time Zone, is another matter.

And from whose point of view does this new time zone actually work?[3]

After all, the astronaut's watches (and caesium clocks) will automatically convert themselves to tick at the local rate as soon as they arrive on site, so measuring durations in experiments will give the same results on Earth and Moon.

Differences in astronomical observations? Umm, tricky - I'll have to drink more coffee before trying to think that one through (do pulsars tick at different absolute rates from different observation sites? Gibber!)

[1] as good physicists do

[2] ok, just keep the round trip time and divide by two to get the adjustment for the observation - and none of your "that doesn't truly measure the one way trip time"!

[3] yes, I know that syncing actions between systems on the Moon needs to be done locally, but by the time you need the precision the clocks to give the reference will be in situ and that whole setup will be decoupled from Earth-based time. The whole concept of time zones is only relevant between two distinct locations and here we are discussing Earth versus Moon, not even separate locations across the Moon.

Apple's GoFetch silicon security fail was down to an obsession with speed

Re: Einstein was brilliant

> Even if we are talking about light, firstly, these aren't optical chips.

Electrical signals propagate down conductors at (near as damn it) the speed of light. There are retarding effects, but for day to day use, assuming C when laying out your PCB is ok.

> I don't think anybody ever thought light travelled instantaneously from one place to another

Yes, people did - it wasn't until some time around the 17th century, IIRC, that anyone started to prove that light has a speed, let alone one we could measure.

Considering that we used to believe that our vision worked by the eyes emitting rays that bounced back, don't underestimate how much of what we accept as "the obvious ways things are" differ from what was accepted (and how much our descendants will be saying "I don't think anybody ever thought...").

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

What is so bad about knowing how to hotwire a car?

So long as it is your car, or done with owner's permission, it is perfectly legal. And can even be useful, in dire situations. Or just to understand how vulnerable your vehicle actually is.

Next they'll be blocking how to pick a lock (definitely worth knowing, to understand how crap so many locks are).

As for the actually dubious or dangerous stuff: what do you expect from AI out of Elon's stable? Has he managed to direct an 'Net to provide Full Self Driving? So why hope his lot can make Full Self Censoring work?

Japan's moon lander sparks joy by making it through a second lunar night

Earth's sole natural satellite

The QI Elves would like a word with you.

PS

Well done JAXA.

It is always good to hear when something we've sent to Space manages to survive beyond the point we'd expected it gone, whether that is after the intended mission time has long past or, as here, after it suffered misfortune.

The level of engineering involved gives one hope that we've not completely forgotten how to Do It Right despite the seemingly endless stories we read about Earth bound systems.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

Stargate?

Are these people so lacking in the history of SF film[1] that they think Stargate is a good representative of what an AI supercomputer can do?

What about Colossus ("Thank you, Dr Forbin") or Proteus IV (just keep it away from electric wheelchairs) or Edgar (avoid spilling champagne on it)?

What notable AI is there in Stargate that they want us to think about and associate with OpenAI? None! Well, there are The Replicators, but - no, they couldn't be? If they introduce their new CTO Reese and start talking about "making toys" then run, just run!

[1] good thing they are not as unaware of the history of, say, computing, eh! Hang on what was that? No! Really? Yikes!

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

The line printer stopped both its buzzing and its merriment.

An untestable hypothesis:

As it had just come to the end of its run, not-so coincidentally with one of the many, many test runs being attempted that evening.

> He tried everything he could think of to get the computer to resume whatever task it had been doing, but nothing worked.

Because it had finished!

A student's natural paranioa kicks in, leading to a lifetime of looking over his shoulder for his old tutor, before caving in and confessing to El Reg in the hopes of stopping the dreams of Sysop Past, draped in fanfold.

Moral: always print a big "DONE" at the end of the run.

Immoral: don't print even a tiny "end" because one day you'll read a story like this and cackle over the anguish you've caused one of those annoying students, cluttering up your beautiful lab.

Hyperfluorescent OLEDs promise more efficient displays that won't make you so blue

Re: Same color OLED

The eye uses green to determine the brightness of a scene, more so than red or blue. This is reflected in the importance given to green when converting RGB to a luma+colour space, such as YUV.

The peak sensitivity is in the green under daylight illumination and shifts up towards blue/green at nighttime.

The use of red lighting for any control panels is to allow our eyes to become night-adapted (something astronomers still rely upon).

As noted above, the illumination in and around cars at night time has become far brighter, with over-strength headlights "for safety" (they just mean drivers have no visibility outside the illuminated area, so good job, whilst dazzling everyone in oncoming cars) shining into the cabin, to the glowing screens and multicoloured LEDs.

So nobody has a chance to get dark-adapted in the first place and the red car dashboard lighting no longer serves a purpose.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Re: Co-pilot key

Your PC doesn't *have* to have a Co-pilot key.

You just have to be prepared to have a reduced Windows experience if the key is not detected. This may range from Windows 12 refusing to install the best driver for your GPU (just to be spiteful) all the way up to the Microsoft Azure AI server emailing you an hourly email advertising the range of Surface devices you could be using instead (these emails, as expected, have an unsubscribe option, just press the Co-pilot key and type "end").

Malicious SSH backdoor sneaks into xz, Linux world's data compression library

Re: More Details

> Some languages like C# even specifically require that the same source built twice results in a different binary

I knew there were good reasons to dislike C#.

With or without invoking C#, chucking reproducibility out of the window is another step on the path to madness.

> unless extra-special care is taken with exact build system and dependency setup

That should not NEED to be "extra-special" in any way, shape or form. You can certainly choose to move your build to another toolset - e.g. you want to use clang instead of VisualC - but any proper build system should take that in its stride and let you run both toolsets.

Reproducible builds - whether of Open Source or proprietary code - was demanded of long-term (10 to 25 year product life) contracts and a requirement of having the build accepted into escrow.

Anyone denigrating the idea of reproducibility is a danger to be avoided like The Plague.

Actually, we have treatments for The Plague now, so...

Can a Xilinx FPGA recreate a 1990s Quake-capable 3D card? Yup! Meet the FuryGpu

> Er, writing device drivers for any operating system is hard, low-level stuff that requires a complicated development set up

> Windows is actually fairly good - there's a lot of dev kit and tooling available from Microsoft (for free),

Come of it - Windows is the one that *needs* all that extra dev kit and tooling!

Now, it has been a long while since I had to do it and things may have gone down hill, but the instructions for My First Linux Device Driver did not need a special compiler to be downloaded and installed, nor any other dev kit. Just a short bit of template code, fill in the few calls that were relevant to you (usually just the the read-call, as we didn't have much in the way of selectable behaviour). And dead easy to get into the final system as well.

At the same time (about 7 years ago now?) under Windows, it was just easier - a heck of a lot easier - to give up on the device driver entirely and just make our add-on hardware expose a USB file system and plug it into a motherboard header: no compiler we didn't already have on hand and the USB client library was a doddle to work with.

It was always a grave disappointment, moving from Unix, Minix (not Linux, too early) and AmigaOS, to Windows and finding how *few* interesting drivers there were, especially file system drivers. It was not fun, going from being able to find multiple, fully working and interestingly different drivers for non-native file systems (especially Union FS, my favourite) to "you get FAT on floppy and FAT on hard drive; one day we'll write NTFS for you".

Consider even now the difference between the number of FS that you just plain expect to work from within /etc/fstab and the (lack of) variety in being able to connect a drive to Windows and expect it to be readable, let alone writable.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Re: I wouldn't mind reasonable ads

> When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.

Now, this is a bit of the discussion that I find it hard to get behind.

> I'm happy for adverts showing...

Ok, so it is not the form of the ads that is a problem here, so guessing we're not referring to those ads that bounce up and down, obscure the main article or play loud voice clips.

> I'm not happy to still receive...

The gist here seems to be that you *want* ads and actually are invested in reading the ads, to the point where if they are no longer interesting it sparks a noticeable emotional reaction.

Which is ok, you do you - but you are also getting a significant amount of support, indicating that there is a significant section of the audience here who are also similarly affected.

Aren't ads just part of the background noise? So long as they are not of the vulgarly intrusive style, we have all been seeing these irrelevant ads everywhere, for our entire lives: roadside banners, flyers on walls, in newspapers and magazines, on TV and in all of the other media we consume.

And this background noise can just be quietly ignored, no need for any reaction to it one way or the other.

Re: I wouldn't mind reasonable ads

> When I want to buy a lawnmower I'm happy for adverts showing lawnmowers. I'm not happy to still receive them three weeks after I bought one and am trying to buy a computer.

> It just shows how crappy the software is.

AFAIK it is basically a sliding window average - so if you look at chain rivet tools for a week, it gains in the weightings, but then you have to wait for it to get flushed out. So to flush it faster you need to have a flurry of other searches and browsing just after buying.

Now I think of it, maybe it is time for an experiment with cURL: a batch file that simulates searches & browsing for something you *don't* mind seeing (the tricky bit). Don't forget to use the option change the browser id string.

> Even Amazon will often recommend products of the type I've just bought completely unrealistically. I'll probably never buy another chain rivet tool in my life, let alone a week after buying one.

Again, wild guessing: I've come to believe that some products are often bought in bulk: you may not want more than one rivet doodad but they've spotted that a significant number of buyers get enough to fill the school work shop, so it is worth trying to se if you do want another.

I base this mostly on the ONE time I bought a concordance (for a gift) and then got suggestions about assorted Bibles for well over a year: buyers of concordances are presumably keen enough on the book that they buy in bulk and hand them out to anyone they meet - and/or try to get the whole set and compare translations.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Following BSE in cattle...

> It was remarkably easy to use and work with

That is good.

> and this was something like 20 years ago when web design wasn't as advanced as now.

Ah, that explains it, it was before web design really learnt how to make things dreadful.

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

So nobody ever tried the commands before publishing?

> Alibaba, which at the time of writing still includes a pip command to download the Python package huggingface-cli in its GraphTranslator installation instructions

And this package didn't exist, in any form, before the "naughty" version was created.

It is one thing to publish instructions that install the wrong package without any errors, but even the most incompetent of "testers" can surely spot when pip tells you there is no such package at all?

Pragmatic Semiconductor opens UK's first 300mm wafer fab in Durham

Hope they have a proper regional opening

And invite the Northumbrian Piper's group from Sedgefield to play.

(Less raucous than those Highland Pipes)

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

> Only time I'd do a BIOS update from a USB stick was if the machine didn't have internet access

Clearly I am way behind the times. I always keep the BIOS images - current and new - available on a.n.other PC and update via memory stick, just so I feel confident I can roll back in case the update - isn't - and the box no longer has 'Net access (or anything else access).

Signed, Mr Dull But Practical.

Uh, are you trying to imply that the BIOS was near the 32GB limit for FAT and was in danger of not working? 'Cos that is one huge BIOS!

If not, not sure what the point you are trying to make is. There are lots of old bits of kit that want a FAT - or, more likely, FAT16 or FAT32 - USB stick or memory card. Which is fine.

Sometimes wish the camera made better use of huge cards (wrt naming mostly, as they still stick to 8.3) - then I remember the bleeping Sony camera, which seems to think the SD card is a BluRay for weird reason, and go back to being thankful for simple layouts.

> a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant,

Yes, yes it was elegant: neat, tidy, no guff, sensible, easy to use.

What it wasn't - and, thankfully, isn't - is garish, over-designed, spread out over too many subdialogues or needing to use a search box just to find the option you *hope* is still available.

> constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32 GB.

Ok, unintended side effects are not what you want - OTOH by the time you get to 32GB aren't you glad to be using something a bit more capable[1] than FAT?

[1] hmm, except that FAT is easy enough to patch by hand, with a copy of Norton by your side, so maybe that counts in its favour re getting your data back when things go awry. Choices, choices.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Re: You will be upgraded, resistance is futile

You are both right.

It was not the most canon-caring story line.

I suggest trying "Ensign Two: The Wrath of Sue"[1] for your Doctor Trek / Star Who reading pleasure.

[1] hmm, the server is having trouble today, so not a good idea to give the easy-to-click URL right now :-(

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

Re: Old stuff.

And how many stories of application-level infinite loops have we heard of through the years, bringing systems to their knees?

For Out-of-office auto-reply storms, just read almost any of the "Who, Me?" discussion pages!

Hmm, given the ease[1] with which you can get lists of valid corporate email addresses, I'm almost surprised that triggering these externally isn't a holiday sport.[2]

[1] oops, "apparent ease, according to press reports"

[2] yes, I'm easily surprised. The cough? Just seasonal allergies, thank you for asking.

Vernor Vinge, first author to describe cyberspace and 'The Singularity,' dies at 79

Re: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence"

>> when it released the description of Bitcoin and the world started to collect GPU farms

> Most bitcoin farming isn't done on GPUs tho. Thank Ethereum for GPU farms.

It was the creation of Bitcoin by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto that started the whole blockchain/cryptocurrency fever in the first place, leading to Ethereum (and all the others) and hence the creation of the mining GPU farms, whatever those farms are/were currently engaged in.

But even just sticking with Bitcoin, although ASICs are the most recent[1] way to go for the most cost-effective results (as they tend to be for any large-scale fixed process workload) it took time for those chips to be developed and manufactured: before we reached that point, BT was mined on CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. At every scale, from single PCs to farms, including unwitting bot-farms.

Given the elusive nature of Satoshi Nakamoto and the obvious fact that his actions have benefited not human-kind but machine-kind, if this was not the work of some hidden AI then it can only have been aliens[3].

Aliens who are intent upon xenoforming the Earth the easy way, by getting us to do it for them.

[1] would say "current", but is BT still current for anything?[2]

[2] an entirely rhetorical question

[3] the Vril, it is always the Vril

Re: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence"

Phase Four will be the ants.

Pterry was warning us: Anthill Inside!

GNU Vernor Vinge

Live forever in the Overhead

Microsoft's first AI PCs Surface with Intel cores and a Copilot key

Re: Emphasis on "if"

Later, after checking the Keyboard Manager settings:

> was it SysReq?

Nope, it is the CapsLock key that is mapped to the Windows key!

Makes some sense, I guess: it is on the bottom row[1], close to Alt, but I'd forgotten that it even existed, as it's hidden under my left hand and is the most entirely useless key[2] on the board; it is even dustier than the SF12 key!

[1] yes, bottom row; the place you're thinking of is where the left Ctrl key lives, as the FSM intended.

[2] your mileage may differ; remember, keys may go down as well as up

Re: Emphasis on "if"

Windows key? Wozzat? Nothing[1] like that on this old Northgate Omnikey. Meanwhile both Ctrl keys show signs of heavy use.

This backtick does get used every day (e.g. bash commands - and as a modifier in a Wiki markup) but, hey, we all use different languages to get the job done, so that is hardly a boast and no shame otherwise.

[1] not 100% true - as there are keys aplenty, I did use a Microsoft utility to remap one[2] to Windows key, but, seriously, it is so useless that I'll have to check the setup to remind myself which one; was it SysReq?

[2] if anyone has Copilot on hand[3], can you give it a try and see if it will give instructions for using the MS utility to map its key back to a Ctrl?

[3] you can report back as AC to avoid outing yourself

Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one

Re: "Software is only open source if the OSI says it is"

I'll admit to a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the way that sentence was phrased; and, maybe, just maybe, possibly, sometimes, every now and again, I have found the OSI really getting on my wick :-)

However...

> #4 We need licenses that say "use this if you will keep it free but if you make money you must give us a percentage."

Yes. It'd be hard to get right but, yes. One of the really hard bits is making sure that the Tragedy isn't solved by having the County Council selling off the Commons (i.e. forgetting that they are the stewards and convincing themselves - and others - that they are the owners).

> #5 "Free Software" was a bad name. My proposal would have been "Software Liberty" but it's too late now.

English is a wonderful language for poets (and sarcasm) but getting a pithy yet totally unambiguous description of what all this software gubbins is about.

> #7

The BSD licence was a beautiful thing, a child born in the long afterglow of the Summer of Love - and a time when most of the people copying and using the code probably personally knew the author from conferences, mailing lists - or just the tea room in the department next door. And when the licensed code was probably short enough to actually read, 'cos otherwise it was too large to fit your box!

Not quite the same situation as Redis exists in, so, yup, with you there.

"Software is only open source if the OSI says it is"

Bollocks.

We all know that OSI claims to have created the term (yes, they "created" it, not just "adopted" it!) but even Wikipedia (known for forgetting the past because they can't find a URL for it) point out that the phrase was already in use.

The OSI have their uses[1] but gatekeeping all of open source is not it[2].

[1] e.g. I'll applaud their early collection of OSS licences in one place, which seemed to help slow the increase in "My One Licence Terms"; OTOH their lack of even references to analyses of the licences and when they are appropriate is a *major* hole.

[2] I'd have more respect if they used wording like "The OSI compliant Open Source Definition" or, even better, had managed to trademark the phrase they "created", but as it stands they are guilty of the same grandstanding and self-adulation that we roast other companies for.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

Re: Railways? Nasty Commie idea.

> what's the difference between a Mag-lev railway and a rail gun *really*?

Not wanting to be pedantic[1] apparently[2] you are thinking of a "coilgun", as a "railgun" has the projectile as part of the circuit, meaning it is in contact with the rails during the entire acceleration phase. And has potential (ho ho) for lovely sparks and plasma, so pretty.

[1] oh, who am I kidding?

[2] personally, I reckon they changed the names on us, 'cos I've been using "railgun" instead of "coilgun" since the 1970's! Anyway, that first link is to a PDF on a dot-mil site, just to reassure you that I'm not just relying on Wikipedia (the next two links); plus the PDF also discusses cool stuff like giant lasers - sadly, without sharks.