* Posts by VoiceOfTruth

1648 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2022

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

We have seen nothing yet

Decades of living beyond our means, with braindead politicians in charge. Leave-it-to-the-market Tories and their light blue Blair friends. This country is basically bankrupt. If you can't pay off a debt that is basically what you are. We are at the stage where all the credit cards are maxed out. Truss's solution: get a bigger credit card. Ha. Living permanently with debt is also not a "solution". Don't pretend that it is.

The governments celebrate the spivs rather than people who do actual work. The hot money is still coming into the country. All those butt-ugly buildings along the Thames are not paid for by people doing ordinary jobs.

The writing is on the wall. Wait until China starts a rival to Lloyds. It will happen. The City people will plead for protection and say they are "a special case". Where were they when shipbuilding went overseas? Cheering on the job cuts, that's where.

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

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Re: Idiot dot com'ers..someone not in the Bay Area I'd guess..

-> In the time it takes a UK company to make a decision that they might go ahead with a project a project team in CA would be up and running

This is definitely one thing that I admire about the USA - it can get things done quickly when it wants to. This used to be called the "can do" attitude found in the USA, and AC is right. It is something we haven't had in the UK for about 50 years now. Some people might attribute it our lack of "vim" to "health and safety". It's not, though that might be a symptom of it. There is a general malaise these days about taking risks (I don't mean stupid people doing foolhardy things - they exist everywhere).

We used to have vision in this country but not any more. We are effectively a bankrupt country. We're over £2tn in debt and absolutely no plan to reduce it. Instead we had/have politicians who wanted to add even more debt. I said it a few weeks ago when the Daily Mail was crowing about a "true Tory budget", that we were hours away from a major financial crash. Even the Bank of England is saying that now (https://www.channel4.com/news/economy-was-potentially-hours-away-from-meltdown-says-bank-of-england-governor). Why does this, this unsustainable debt, not affect the USA too? It does. Debt will be the undoing of the USA. Sooner or later other countries will not want to trade using dollars (we already see this for various reasons).

-> If you want a nice predicable career you go work for the f*cking government. Or some big company mindless bureaucracy.

Amen. It probably explains why a lot of low grade accountants work at the Inland Revenue. They're just clever enough to beat Bob the Builder's low grade tax fiddling, but they're not clever enough to beat a company which cheats 10,000s worth of Bob's tax.

I don't like seeing people kicked out of jobs but it happens. As long as there is a reasonable severance package people should not complain. Job for life? Where exactly?

US chip industry worried it may lose out to rivals over China ban

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: "some US companies are alarmed at the amount of revenue they may lose"

Rather like the bullshit "we will withhold intelligence information from the UK if you allow Huawei".

We saw the value of American intelligence. Long term view of Afghanistan - the Afghans should hold out several months at least. Short term immediate intelligence - innocent family is a bunch of Taliban. Yeah. We should have told them to eff off and shut down Menwith Hill.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Let me fix your headline

-> Just hang on while we convince the rest of the world

Just hang on while we coerce the rest of the world. As I wrote previosly, this will be at the point of a gun. American definition of freedom = freedom for American to impose its will on other people.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

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Re: We serfs do not have a voice

Almost all ministers are MPs. There are occasional peers who are ministers but >95% (without checking) will be MPs.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

We serfs do not have a voice

Do not think that we live in a democracy. We are considered subjects not citizens. The "clever" people with their useless PPE + law degrees decide this sort of thing.

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

That is the Linux way. We are told time and time again that if we don't like something we can take the source code, fork it, and build our own version. Extending that for a moment to distros, that is why there are so many distros. Some distros last far longer than others, others are built to specifically not have a particular subsystem (eg Devuan).

What we seem to have, what I see a lot of, is quite a few Linux people thinking they can influence the way Linux should be - it should not have systemd or it should not have a secure boot feature, for example. All they have to do is pick a distro which meets their criteria and use it, or if it does not exist they can build it. Open source does not mean you have control over what somebody else does, yet that seems to be how some people think it is.

So, you wrote that forking is "pointless and naive". In some cases, with the plethora of distros adding one more Ubuntu remix with marginally different bells and whistles, I think it is pointless. But in general? You seem to be turning the open source world on its head.

Edit: For the record I have expressed several times my dislike for systemd in general and its tentacles. This is just another tentacle.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

-> Now we're trundling in to a Poettering world where we're having this shit enforced on us?

You can always fork it. Nobody is forcing you to use a vendor-supplied kernel.

As I have mentioned several times previously, the top contributors to the Linux kernel are corporations. They pay people and those people put in what they want to put in or what they are told to put in.

Linux today is not the Linux of 20 years ago. Sure, anyone can make a new distro with this feature and that feature. They generally don't last long.

Uncle Sam wants allies to join its anti-China chip crusade

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Re: As for Germany...

Would you prefer that the Germans kowtow to Washington?

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Don't forget that Airbus/Northrop Grumman won the refueller contract. What did Boeing do? Complain that it lost in a fair competition.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

America wants

at the point of a gun. These countries, these supposed allies of the USA, are facing the barrel of a gun. Join the USA in its march for freedom, freedom to do what the USA tells you to do.

The greatest threat to freedom in the world today is the USA with it's America First policy. The PNAC is a devilish plan for world domination dressed up as freedom. It's a rotten evil plan.

Crowds not allowed to leave Shanghai Disneyland without a negative COVID test

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

I would have thought it was impossible

-> zero-COVID policy

While I applaud the aim as something to aim for I would have thought it was an impossible target. This is not the first corona virus and it won't be the last. I am not a doctor

Tablet, Chromebook shipments come crashing down

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Are tablets still relevant?

I do see people with a laptop and a tablet. Saw one today, doing a "learning Java" course, so it was more a less used as a book.

China's third and final module docks with Tiangong space station

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Blah blah blah

-> NASA Administrator Bill Nelson issued stern words

So what? NASA does not own space. And it doesn't speak for the population of the earth.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

-> Liberal MP Chris Huhne

I had forgotten about him. He is another of the Oxford PPE people. They are amongst the dimmest bulbs in the world, the educated but stupid peolple.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

-> Hopefully China see which way the wind's blowing

China sees it very well. The West bans its companies, subjects it to sanctions, and then somebody like you comes along and says the West is better. No. The USA (not the West, but the West is co-opted into line by US threats) is opposed to China. That is how it is.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

-> the market being allowed to do anything for energy

Gas became a thing in the UK for a few of reasons. 1. It's not coal, which was then very out of favour with the Tories. 2. It's quick to build, unlike nuclear. 3. There was no real opposition to gas burning, unlike nuclear. 4. Gas plants are cheap. Points 2 and 4 are market factors.

The other points you make your reply about nuclear/gas is just confirmation of the lack of an energy policy. We have too many lawyers as MPs and not enough engineers and scientists. As shown at the peak of the corona virus, the Tories could not even find a doctor to be Health Secretary.

-> China seems serious about improving itself

The scale and speed at which China does this is staggering. They really have mastered large scale infrastructure. We in the West (collectively) lack vision these days.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

We have not had a real energy policy in this country for 30 years. "Let the market decide" was the mantra from the shut-everything-down Tories. They said the future is services like banking for dictators, not engineering. That works only during the lifetime of the power stations, dunnit? When the electricity cuts come these same let-the-market-decide pinheads will be telling us something like "at least the cuts are not as bad as in, ahhhh, Cambodia or Equatorial Guinea". They will not admit that they were wrong all along.

-> taxpayers would have to make up a multibillion-pound shortfall to decommission nuclear power stations

-> now valued at £14.8 billion... latest cost estimate... £23.5bn

That's nuclear for you. How much money do you have? They will take every last penny, and more. Just borrow more if you don't have it.

Meanwhile China has plans to build 150 nuclear power stations, and given their evident ability to manage large scale infrastructure projects (their high speed rail system dwarfs every other country in scope) they will likely do it. What do we do to please the USA? We block China from building here. We will go the more expensive slower-to-build route. All so the politicians can sit like poodles at the table of the American lords, and occasionally be fed the odd scrap.

Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

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Re: Non-transferable license ?

Arm is not an American company. It's chances of an impartial hearing in a US court is near to zero.

Oracle and Huawei clouds the big movers on Gartner's conjured quadrilateral

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Enough of the "contentious" adjective

-> The contentious Chinese company

Why is it contentious? Why is Cisco with its litany of security holes not "contentious"? And why is Microsoft not labelled "ultra contentious"? Adobe too? Is the whole world supposed to suck up this American labelling of Chinese companies? From now on I would like to read in articles about Microsoft: the notoriously insecure Windows family of operating systems...

Education tech giant gets an F for security after sensitive info on 40 million users stolen

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Bingo

-> Chegg is wholly committed to safeguarding users' data and has worked with reputable privacy organizations...

Never mind the Saudis: Here's a new OPEC for EV battery metals

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Re: Imperial Copper

Unfortunately the American view of the world is that it owns the whole world.

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

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Re: Seems like a spurious argument

You make a very good point about software having certain requirements.

-> Sod the user - subscription based churn is where the dividends come from.

Apparently it is, as shown by Adobe. They were and are vilified, and they are also laughing driving their lorry loads of money to the bank.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Mozilla not even mentioned?

-> what type of people downvote any criticism of Mozilla

I have seen this on The Reg comments. When I pointed out a bug (an actual bug, not a "could be better" type comment) in Thunderbird it garnered thumbs down.

I really had some hopes for Mozilla a long time ago. But I used it and saw it, the high memory usage (less of a problem today but a few years ago it was important) and the "solutions" listed on the Mozilla web site. These "solutions" are still there now: 1. Update to the latest version. 2. Restart Firefox. 3. Restart your computer. 4. etc. If those solutions didn't work 5 years ago, why are they still listed?

The "let's take a complete detour from making a web browser and build an operating system called Firefox OS" turn on the road. Hmmm. Didn't work out, took away developer resources from their key product.

It's a pity. I don't regard Firefox as a great FOSS example. It could have been.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Seems like a spurious argument

-> Yes, and this underlines the huge difference with FLOSS. You can.

Hold on there and read my post more carefully. If *you* cannot code, *you* cannot. So, as you rightly wrote, you can persuade or pay somebody else to do it. What if they don't want to or if they want too much money? Am I really in a better position? I don't think so. The world is only my oyster if I can code (and have enough time and interest to maintain something that somebody else has decided to do away with), or if I have enough money to pay somebody to do it for me.

I was recently in this very position. A piece of old software which has outdated use of SSL/TLS. Can I update it (meaning rewrite chunks of it)? I can if I want to spend enough time doing it. But is a better use of my time just to bite the bullet and see that it has fallen into disuse and to move on to where there is a much larger crowd these days? Anyone who says "maintain it yourself" is basically saying "be a single point of failure".

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: a way to make the good of the end user more relevant than maximising revenue

-> ask the end users what they want and what they don't want

Ha ha ha. You've never done that, have you? If you ask 1000 people what they want from a piece of software you will get some common ground, and a very large number of things which those people individually want. For some people it might be bigger fonts on a GUI, for others it will be different colours, for others they want a configurable tool bars. Then some users will want what cannot be done (either something which is actually impossible, or will cost too much time or money to implement, or is such an outlier that nobody else will want it and is thus a waste of time),

Asking people what they want is "followship". Devising something good which will appeal to a large customer base is leadership.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: Seems like a spurious argument

Windows 7 does not stop working just because it is EOL. It might not matter if it is not supported. I don't need any new features. It's disconnected from the internet, the chances of it being compromised are in practical terms zero.

Meanwhile FOSS might or might not continue whether it is being used or not. It's entirely in the hands of the developers, not the users. If those users cannot themselves develop programs they are in no better a position than the average Windows user. The response from the FOSS community will be: you go and maintain it.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Seems like a spurious argument

The Linux kernel is just a kernel. It's not any use by itself without everything else that is needed for an operating system. Most of the top contributors to the Linux kernel are companies with deep pockets, not beardies sitting in a bedroom with their cups of cold coffee, eeking out a living. No, they are people like Poettering, employed by Microsoft.

There's a lot of not-very-good open source apps out there as well as good ones. Gimp and Inkscape have some of the ugliest GUIs " out there. VLC likewise has a "shove it all in settings and let them find it" attitude to GUI design.

The author seems to be missing a point, as shown in this snippet: "The irony of this is that both Google and Meta are successful parts of the FOSS ecosystem... So how come the companies' branded goods don't reflect that?" Software, whether open source or closed, is just a collection of tools. I can use a hammer and chisel to turn raw stone into a sculpture or I can use it them to smash something to pieces. Open source software has no inherent more-moral feature than closed-source software. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise.

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

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Re: It's unfortunate

It is intellectual dishonesty. I was watching a video about emissions in China. The video was made in the USA. The usual spiel: China is a bigger emitter of pollutants than the USA. But there was no mention in the video about the population of China being 4 times the size of the USA. What next? China is a bigger polluter than Andorra? Well I'm surprised, I tell you. I would never have thought it.

Irish government seeks power to bar 'high risk vendors' from telecoms networks

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National Security regulations

Let me rewrite it for you; All network equipment must be subject to American backdoors and security holes dressed up as bugs. For your own protection.

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

When the UK and British people had vision...

The UK and British people used to have vision for the future.

Nowadays, but really since the 1970s, that has been lost. Who can not remember John Harvey-Jones with his "don't build it yourself, buy it in" mantra in summary. We as a people are more useless and more stupid as a result. Computing is just another thing thrown on the scrapheap like the steam engine, the television, and the jet engine. OK, so we have some presence with the jet engine still. But it's pitiful.

Federal bans aren't stopping US states from buying forbidden Chinese kit

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Perhaps the buyers

think the biggest source of vulnerabilities is good ol' apple pie American companies like Microsoft and Cisco. Maybe they didn't have problems with Huawei, but they still now today being clobbered with holes in MS and the like.

UK awards Fujitsu $60m contract amid calls to suspend it from government work

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Re: The exec of Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail

-> the PO directing its fire on its own innocent people

Agreed. Mostly. But when you buy in a service you may not have the knowledge or expertise to question what the supplier says. If the supplier says so and so stole some money (in general terms), you would firstly have to be able to query it, and secondly want to query it. What the PO did was indeed shameful.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: The exec of Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail

They are all in it together.

If you think 5G is overhyped, wait till you meet 5.5G

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If we had not kicked out Huawei

We would probably have good 5G by now. It's not just the handset, is it?

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

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Re: *I* propose ...

Congratulations on failing so badly to understand my point.

Poettering (whether you or I agree with him or not) contributes to the kernel. He has a say. A very large number of people who complain about his work do not themselves contribute so much as a line of documentation (as you rightly point out, that too is a contribution). The people who "do" do, and the people who "complain" complain. Complaints will fall on deaf ears because 99% of Linux users do not contributed a single thing. They are users, not contributors.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Re: *I* propose ...

While I share some of your sentiment the thing is... kernel development is mostly in the hands of people who are paid to do it. The "anyone can contribute" is a bit of myth. In theory that is true, but in practice it is not really. So the "doers" do and the "don't doers" don't. We can see this with the top contributors to the kernel are companies.

I don't count writing a driver as contributing to the kernel any more than somebody who writes a Windows driver is contributing to the NT kernel. I know it's different, but a driver is a driver not a kernel.

FTC slaps down Drizly CEO after 2.4m user records stolen from 'careless' booze app biz

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Bingo!

-> We take consumer privacy and security very seriously at Drizly

Finance watchdog warns of long-term risk Big Tech poses to competition

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Ha!

The City doesn't want competition, that's what it is. There could be a Google bank soon.

Uncle Sam says Chinese agents tried to interfere with Huawei criminal case in US

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-> We will continue to fiercely protect the rights guaranteed to everyone in our country

They can start with voter disenfranchisement.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

This is more "Yellow Peril" and "Reds under the bed" nonsense

For years America parroted the "Yellow Peril" and "Reds under the bed" nonsense. I am just waiting for the rejuvenation of the House Un-American Activities Committee and all the crap that came with that.

"Have you now or ever been Chinese?", "Have you ever eaten at a Chinese restaurant?" will be questions on a visa form soon.

Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

At least now you know about it to say "no". It's not quite my cup of tea. Vim + nerdtree + a couple of other plugins is enough for me.

Philips axes thousands amid financial loss

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-> Unfortunately I have to partly agree with VoiceOfTruth

Thanks for the partial nod.

Alas some people do not like a few home truths. But my comments on energy prices in Europe are well founded. Macron too has woken up and smelled the coffee: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-21/macron-accuses-us-of-trade-double-standard-amid-energy-crunch. It's all very well say "do not buy Russian gas", but when the alternatives are far more expensive that is not very attractive. Europe's (particularly Germany's) competitiveness was built on cheap Russian gas.

We are in an era of a clash of two major economic powers: the USA and China. This is not a clash between the figurative "West" (as a whole) and China. It is specifically between the USA and China. Europe does not have a voice in this. Remember Victoria Nuland's "F*ck the EU"? Europe can be turned into an industrial wasteland for all the USA cares. Europe is becoming uncompetitive not through so-called lazy works or lack of innovation, but by the cost of energy.

I don't enjoy these simple truths. I'm not a harbinger of doom But I am a realist and this is what I see. Anyone who cares to argue the points, please feel free to do so.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

You must be an America First Stooge. Buying Freedom Gas will bankrupt Europe.

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

-> The biggest threat to the economy is the huge rise of energy costs.

That's the price of following American policy in Europe. It has already been forgotten by many that the USA was opposed to Nord Stream 2 since years ago, which would have brought cheap Russian gas to Europe. No. The Europeans must follow American policy and do what they are told. There is a strong likelihood of permanently higher energy costs in Europe. That will lead to manufacturing moving to cheaper countries, particularly in Asia and, no surprise no surprise, the USA.

-> companies supplying those companies will be the next dominoes to fall

100% correct.

What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Never heard of it

-> decentralized messaging app Element

OpenBSD 7.2: The other other FOSS xNix released, runs on Apple M2 Macs

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Re: Early days

I particularly like that FreeBSD installs non-system packages in /usr/local and non-system configuration files in /usr/local/etc. It is so much tidier than everything under the sun ending up in /usr/bin and /etc which I nearly always see in Linux.

-> The Linuxes are, by and large, preferred those who are keen on deskilling.

I have made a similar point previously. While I am happy to see more people using Linux (or Unix in general), it has resulted in producing a lot of low end Unix users. It does seem sometimes as though the idea is to have GUI apps running on Linux, and treating the desktop as a sort of Windows on Linux instead of Linux. Also the "Linux is more secure" mantra doesn't always hold water when the people administering them do not know what they are doing. I see the evidence of this daily when I get script kiddie level attacks from compromised Linux machines.

IBM withholds healthcare subsidies from some retirees

VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

Land of the free to go bankrupt

Medical expenses are the largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA. It's not just the uninsured who get clobbered, so don't even raise it.

Costs are inflated beyond what would be called "reasonable" (I call it price gouging or fraud). Unless you have $1,000+ sitting in your pocket you should, if you possibly can, take a taxi to hospital instead of getting an ambulance. Unnecessary (again fraud) high priced "diagnoses" inflate the bills and fill the pockets of the people at the top.

I bet these IBMers thought they were working for a decent company. They are probably very reasonable, mostly middle class or aspiring to be, educated people. They need to wake up and smell the coffee. The rug will be pulled from under their feet. *Extreme* greed is now the order of the day. To be able to do that the people at the top will crap all over everyone beneath them.

California wildfires hit CTRL+Z on 18 years of CO2e removal

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Re: Australian approach

That is not the conclusion that I would draw. It is indeed an excuse.

BlueBleed: Microsoft customer data leak claimed to be 'one of the largest' in years

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SOCRadar

I made a brief visit to the SOCRadar web site and checked one of our domains.

It shows several "Employee Credentials" records. Interesting. Because even with the obfuscated data (they only show the first and last character of the email address unless you hand over your email address) I can say with 100% certainty that those credentials do not exist and have never existed. Perhaps somebody put those email addresses into a document somewhere. Perhaps somebody signed up somewhere with that email address. It doesn't matter - it has never been a working email address.

I did a search back through our mail logs. I can see several attempts to send email to something which would match the first-and-last@domain characters shown at SOCRadar. In every case we rejected the attempts with 'Recipient address rejected'.

These are the only entries for the domain I tested. I can say with 100% certainty that these are not 'Employee Credentials' and have never been.