Posts by Lon24 638 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2020
The OBR head honcho has resigned. I guess others were using this as an excuse to get rid of him.
It was a stupid error made by an unthinking and probably low paid underling. Frankly board level folks wouldn't have a clue what a url is. The Website manager should. That's where the buck should have stopped and they be invited to leave the building pronto.
The clearing of the damage and fast rebuild in-situ with the associated lifting gear is just the people and equipment that may have been subborned as sappers and kit in the ongoing 'special military operation'.
That and Roscosmos being bust may make recovery a hard choice between the ISS and Putin's territorial ambitions.
It is needed by the folks next door who lives off app ordered cardboard coffee & plastic sandwiches deliverooed to their front door at great expense while I have a kettle, loaf of bread and a little imagination for lunch.
Don't underestimate the 'free' slop market that can be created by marketing. Though revenue is probably vastly overestimated by the gold rush llm companies.
IMHO there is no one alternative browser. I run Vivaldi & Librewolf. V for my regular browsing and L for unknown territory. Plus they have different underlying engines (Gecko & Chrome) if you encounter a rendering issue.
Other combinations may work better for other people. But the whole joy is choice. If only one had time to test them all.
Hence my choice was heavily influenced by previous recommendations to similar questions in these columns. So thank you Registerites.
Been there, got the T-shirt.
Having been on Linux for 10 years appears to make me some kind of guru. So when anybody's PC starts to misbehave family and ex-friends call me to fix their Win10/11 machines. Except my MS experience died with XP (and 48 hours failing to get Vista to talk to my network).
So they actually know more about their setups than me. Not entirely ex-MS - I'm just celebrating getting Windows 95 working as a VM on my laptop Debian Trixie. WfW next?
If you missed it last night catch up on BBC iPlayer 'Once Upon Time in Space' episode 2.
It features an ageing and broken Mir with its first mixed US/USSR crews. Impending disaster by fire or depressurisation both happened. Guts were on display (luckily not the other kind). But it paved the way for the ISS building on the experience of managing long periods in space. Made even more remote by the intermittent and garbled communication links. An eye-opener for those used to the 'comforts ' of the NASA Space Shuttle.
Also an interesting contrast between the two US astronauts in integrating with the Russian cosmonauts. Though, imho, cosmonaut Sasha and his family stole the show.
I have almost completed transition from Kubuntu to Debian KDE. SNAP issues history. KVM/QEMU/Libvirt gives us Debian Sid VM for the more exciting stuff
Debian delivers stability and the one of the edgiest of rolling distros on one desktop. Result.
"We as people are free to choose"
Yep, just three networks either directly - or indirectly through a MVNO. All the UK networks rank low down in supposedly developed countries. There is no real choice for good service and it's a race to the bottom as, I believe, some MVNOs can get an edge by contracting an even more throttled service from the big three.
Though I gather the US is even worse. At least Smarty only costs me £5.40/month for 12GB data + unlimited calls/texts when I can get a decent connection.
Have they offshored most of their network too?
I'm with VodafoneThree's Smarty Service, like the other networks is cr*p here in a populous area of inner London groping 1 bar 4G or occasionally 5G. Just been roaming in rural Sicily Pretty solid 4/5 bar 5G most places. Weirdly I get the best London reception on the deeply underground Elizabeth Line ;-)
My personal issue is Google is subject to US prohibitions of which China is the prime target.
That is why Huawei apps are banned in their store and, if you have the well regarded GT watches you have to sideload the enabling app. Will US laws preclude Google from verifying the Huawei store and apps?
If it does then it junks every watch. And should that be a decision made by the laws of a foreign ie unelected and unaccountable administration?
No, no & no.
Burevestnik must be "state of the art" if it solved the problems which caused the US to abandon a similar project Pluto in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
How?
This is based on real-world usage and accident stats, not on what-ifs.
Indeed the stats are probably with you. Saving two lives at the cost of one and some false positives is an advance in road safety. Maybe I'm a little influenced by being hit by a car that could have plainly seen me and stopped but the driver (for some obscure reason which he couldn't explain) didn't.
Are even the best of drivers sometimes distracted? I know my fights with my entertainment system/Google SatNav do compromise my concentration occasionally. But it's the one occasion... And yes my car does sometimes 'phantom brake' - except with hindsight you can usually work out why. It's a 2019 model so I would expect the software to be refined in time (ever the optimist?)
I dispute that. The one down the road was billed as the second most hit bridge in Britain. It has a speciality of decapitating double-deckers returning to Catford garage. Fortunately always empty except for a very embarrassed (soon to be) ex-driver. Maybe if they stuck a Union Jack on it .....
On the other hand I did cross swords with a real IT guru. Turned out he didn't know the difference between a SQL database and a php device driver. Put 2+2 together and came up with rather more than 4.
Knowing a lot about something doesn't imply you know anything about everything else. Pointing it out delicately did result in them going full maga-trump.
Stopping the real Napoleon was kinda messy and "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Throwing a switch on your friendly LLM system is somewhat easier with less blood on the walls. Plus past dictators unwilling to play no.2 to the current dictator would experience a very swift shutdown.
Was that not our image of WW1? Things were very different in WW2 - there was no hiding place and it was the girls and boys in the C&C centres who were most heavily protected for obvious reasons. I'm no fan of Churchill but he did venture on to the roofs of Whitehall, not a bunker in Scotland. As for Montgomery and Rommel. Were they not especially appreciated by their troops because they didn't hide away?
As for WW3 - well let's hope we never find out.
IANAL or even a German lawyer. Some browsers (like IE<6) are very ignorant and cannot render some stuff or degrade it in some way. Some will have functions turned off so javascript disappears and so on. Fonts change and so can colour. Does rendering white text on white background break copyright?
An analogy, (dangerous, I know), is if I buy a book and cross out a sentence I find offensive - have I broken copyright? If I give it to my child or lend it to a friend - have I broken copyright?
Even in this country judges do tend to interpret law (that's their job as well as applying it) to evolving circumstances beyond the concept of the originators. It's up the lawmakers then to update the law if they don't like the result. In a fast moving technological world it's the only way to progress against stasis. But then stasis is what some people want. I never thought of Germany in that camp.
.
The paradox may be that AI gets quite good at coding. But not perfect. Which means you need a senior dev to analyse, correct and sign off the code. More to go bug-squashing. Indeed you probably need a senior dev to specify the project to AI in the first place to avoid 'ambiguities'.
Relying on ageing greybeards when the route to senior dev is disrupted/obliterated by AI doing the easy less critical stuff that a junior coder would have done. So where is the next generation of senior devs going to learn their trade?
Because you can. Ahem, I mustn't let you browse my personal LibreCalc directory. All sorts of stuff listed in there. And yes I am a MariaDB & RRD administrator. But knocking up and sharing a simple spreadsheet is a magnitude less effort than a proper database. Even on your phone.
Of course I never let my simple spreadsheets mission creep into critical databases. Honest Guv!
If you get that far. I had to renew five family passports. Four were no problem. Photos uploaded and instantly accepted. The fifth - the computer said no and helpfully pointed out the person wasn't looking at the camera. Which was a surprise as he was and the photo had been done by a professional passport photo company.
Coincidence that the fifth person was the very black one? Fortunately there was a button to 'submit this anyway' which I did and it was accepted - presumably by a human. AI can be an excellent helper but not yet (or ever?) a final decision maker. Photographers know that this type of face is difficult to capture through a lens where features are less differentiated by shade in controllable studio lighting. That's why, I fear, a lot of innocent black people are going to become a cropper as facial street surveillance is expanded. They already have issues with an imperfect police force without becoming false positives caught in low-light angular and fuzzy situations.
It's a great deal cheaper to let the Excel/Access complex apps carry on. Just make sure no new stuff gets commissioned on proprietary software - not that any should be using those anyway. But letting those small percentage of the workforce shouldn't stop moving the majority low hanging fruit across. Many of these are using their desktops as thin clients so with a little tailorisation of the GUI then it should be less noticeable as the transition from Win7/8/9/10/11.
Indeed my KDE desktop is very reminiscent of Windows 2000 then anything since. It's hard to beat inertia but FOSS strangely can accommodate as more than Microsoft's bright new ideas demonstrate.
Yes and maybe $10-12 billion Microsoft bill next time. It's Microsoft who set the price and the escape costs also increase. Planning an orderly exit now may not produce short term savings but in the long term the government not Microsoft controls the taxpayer spend. I may not trust our government much but I trust Microsoft less. And if they eventually get taken over by Broadcom or similar then we will really be taken to the cleaners.
FOSS is great insurance against predators and predatory pricing.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
