Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Facebook could be bankrupt by then (hey, a man can dream!) in which case good luck collecting anything from their carcass."
Or, more likely, have morphed into a "new entity" which will make all the right PR noises while denying any relationship with "old Facebook" and therefore no responsibility for any wrong doing or fines incurred.
"Are these really "new" particles"
Maybe you need to define "new" first, when asking your question. A bit like "new" species of plants or animals being "discovered". The people who live in that area don't see them as "new". After all, they took time to evolve and the locals probably have them pan fried for supper every other week. But they could be "new" to science, in that they've not previously been recorded in "The Big Science Book of Everything" yet.
" you accept infinity which is so easy to accept looking forward but harder looking back."
Absolutely. People often say, "in an infinite universe, anything can happen". Well, if it's really infinite, everything has already happened. Which is probably the simplest argument to say it isn't infinite. It's big. Really big. You won't believe how vastly big. But not infinite in either size or time.
"I thought the particle physicists' idea of how to work out the composition of the universe was to collide it with another universe (terribly fast) and see what comes out of the collision."
I suspect it would a very Big Bang and we are the result, not the cause :-)
Maybe this is a valid argument for cyclical Big Bangs and Big Crunches, except the Big Crunch isn't natural but made by inhabitants with an overdeveloped sense of curiosity, too much time on their hands and a Very Large Hadron Collider.
"You are just banking your company on that the cloud provider is going to have required capacity when you need it"
Yes, "cloud" may have started out with those lofty ambitions and ideals, then the accountants took over and asked why all this spare hardware was just sitting there hoping for a paying customer. "Do we really need 20% over capacity just in case? Why not cut it to 15%? 10%? 5%?. Why not just optimise for 100% usage and slow down the less important customers and sell their resource to the higher paying customers? Just put that in the Ts&Cs of the cheapskate contracts. After all, they sold all their on prem kit and are trapped here now.!
"SpaceX didn't achieve anything that hadn't been done before. Even the re-usable part of it is dwarfed by what the Space-Shuttle did."
I'd not go quite that far. The shuttle was impressive for passenger and payload capacity, but it's actual reusability was questionable, in terms of the SRBs and the external tank, not to mention the engine rebuilds etc. In terms of amount of hardware per launch, SpaceX probably bring back less of the vehicle total but the reusability of what does come back seems to be far more efficient. When Starship flies, it's looking like near total re-usability with a far larger payload and passenger capacity, albeit without the coolness factor of a "space plane" landing. On the other hand, it does have the coolness of 1950's SciFi tail landing rockets :-)
"No one comes close to SpaceX for lots of cheap launches in quick succession landing back at the launch site, or nearby. Nobody."
Is there even a need for a rocket factory near the intended launch site when your rockets and bootsers can land at a different landing site than that from which up-go'ed. You could even save money by doing a full on launch and then "simply" landing where you next need it :-)
In reality, of course it depends on how much checking and refurbishment is needed after each launch and you still need the non-return parts to be shipped to the launch site. Starship may "just" need the catching arms and fuel supply at the new launch site.
"The tariffs would be lifted, not because China is now "better" than they were, but because we're worse?"
The tariffs were introduced because Trump want to "fix" the US economy while using the Chinese human rights record as the "reason" for imposing the tariffs. Now the US is in an economic bind, Biden, while supporting the human rights principles the tariffs were supposedly enforced for, now see the US dollar as more important than those principles. Whatever may be said in public, it's always about the almighty dollar, never about the principles. All governments are the same in that respect, most of the time.
"They have also discussed removing the fuel taxes for a while, but there is no trust in the petroleum industry to not take that as even more profit."
The UK tried that. A whole 5p off a litre of fuel. Whether it had any affect, I don't really know. It was a such a small amount and fuel was/is still rising such that even that tiny effect was barely noticeable. There were multiple news stories about whether the filling stations/fuel companies ever actually passed that price cut on. There are current stories about pump prices still going up or at best remaining stable at high levels while the wholesale cost of fuel has dropped a bit over the last month.
Looking at a live price chart on crude oil, it's down between 3% and 10% today.
Looks like it peaked at over $120 per barrel across the first two week of June and has been mainly falling to about $97 per barrel today. I'm not seeing that fall at the pumps yet, but it goes up *instantly* when the well price goes up.
"From what I can tell, Wayland doesn't even plan to implement anything like this."
They have specifically said they will not do this for...$reasons they never seem to state. I doubt it would even be possible to add the feature now since it's quite a low level function that would impact on the entirety of the Wayland codebase.
NB, Subject line trimmed as the prepended Re: made it too long for the forum s/w to cope.
"If the purpose of email is mostly to organise meetings,"
That's quite an assumption. The corollary to that would be if one is spending so much time organising meetings, inviting to meetings and accepting invitations to meetings, then a dedicated meeting/calendaring system tuned specifically for that function would make more sense than shoe horning the function into another app. Clearly in the situation you describe, the email function is merely an addendum to a calendar :-)
"And none of the Open Source mail clients had the convenient calendaring and scheduling functionality of Outlook."
That's the bit I never quite understand. Is this something that is demanded of a mail server or is it just something people have been managed into expecting by MS? Email and "calendaring" don't immediately spring to mind as instant happy bedfellows. It always feels a bit like shoe-horning database functions into a spreadsheet and treating that normal.
"Some of the unusual features were that you could use unary maths (another of my ideas that never took off) with a single key keyboard, it didn’t matter if you pressed the key or not. You also had a single pixel monitor and it didn’t matter if it was lit or not."
Apple did that with their mouse. So only the keyboard and screen to try now :-)
"Corporations that were developing such a thing and then learned it has been patented by someone should be paid compensation."
It seems to me that the entire US patent system is based on "if it's not currently patented, register a patent ASAP before someone else does". It doesn't seem to matter if the application is obvious or already in use, the USPO will rubber stamp it and let the courts decide. Meanwhile, those with less deep pockets either have their inventions[*} stolen from under them and go bust, or have to pay ridiculous licencing fees for their own invention.
[*[ for "inverntion", I mean what said at the start of the post. The "invention" may simply be obvious or public knowledge, ie unpatentable due to prior art.
"The Microsoft account requirement recently popped up a new irritation on our test install: it automatically keeps the Desktop folder on OneDrive,"
Seriously? I can see that very much cramping the style of anyone working from a laptop and a SIM card or tethering to a mobile phone and wondering why they reached their data cap so quickly.
Indeed. Mine seems to be labeled as a "pensioner phone".
That's funny :-) The people currently retiring or who will do so in the next few year grew in the world of computers, many of used them at work, many have smartphones. It's like when an "event" is organised at retirement homes. It's all "wartime" music, Bog Band sound etc., yet many of those people grew up with Elvis, rock and roll were mods'n'rockers, punks, etc. Yet there's a stereo-type of nice little old ladies and men who love home made jam and scones. Some of those people in the retirement homes where thugs, whores and gangsters :-)
It's more than you might think.
In 2019, figures from Statista show tha the number of international tourist arrivals to the US stood at almost 80 million after being on the rise for over a decade. Thanks to this influx of visitors and a boost in US travel spending, the travel and tourism industry contributed over 1.1 trillion US dollars to the country’s GDP and supported millions of jobs in 2019.
However, since the beginning of March, the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in over US$500 billion in cumulative losses for the US travel economy, equating to a daily loss of approximately US$1.75 billion.
"but unchecking the "Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection" setting in Firefox's Settings gets definitely rid of that rogue Google cookie."
Unchecking? That sounds a bit counter-intuitive. Was that a typo, or are Firefox in bed with Google for dark pattern practices?
And with a $10,000 bounty for information leading to a successful prosecution paid to any private citizen or business even just for assisting someone to have an abortion, it's going to make for some very interesting and scary moments in Texas especially. Potentially even cases against public transport, eg bus/train/airplane companies as "accessories" (likely to fail since the prosecution will have to prove intent or knowledge), but certainly anyone providing information on which States people could travel to, addresses of abortion clinics in other States. Search engines may have to block this info in those States banning abortions so as not to fall foul of "providing aid".
Interesting case in Malta invloving a US woman and what can happen in a jurisdiction with an abortion ban, I'm not sure if their law is as draconian as Texas though.
"Boomer here."
I was born right at the end of what is defined as a "baby boomer" and the beginning of Generation-X. I'm confused as to whether I should be entitled or blaming myself for the ills of the world. I guess the reality is that this highlights just how ridiculous those labels are. Almost as stupid as star signs defining personality traits.
...and Labour had to deal with the end result of Thatchernics and Majornomics and each party had over a decade to implement their "solutions".
I'm not saying either side was right or wrong here. Just that both sides had a long time to deal with the so-called "disasters" the previous government created and they only ever plan for a single term in government. Few politicians instigate long term plans because they know they may not be around to reap the praise.
Thatcher had the Falklands as a distraction. Blair had Iraq. Bojo had/has a pandemic.
That's a bit weird. With somewhere pretty large like Bratislava on the border and Vienna barely 40Km away, I'd have thought there would be a quite a lot of cross border employment. Especially as both countries being not only EU members but part of Schengen, Freedom of movement and all that goes with it. I wonder if this is more related to some low-level bureaucrat[*] not knowing the rules and no one bothering to push it?
[*] At either the government or employer.
"I forgot just how terrible mushy low-profile Dell membrane keyboards are."
Even worse, desktops supplied with the default standard keyboard, unless purchasing/procurement choose something better, are basically larger laptop keyboards these days. Bloody horrible shite!
"and they have a habit of exporting their crap."
Sudden increase in protests outside hospitals that perform abortions, especially in NI since last week.
Interestingly, only NI has a right to abortion. In the UK it's for "medical reasons" and why two doctors must sign it off, to back each other up if it comes to a court case.
"We're the generation that's running things now, we don't get to blame the boomers any longer."
You always blame the previous generation. No matter what. After all, the Tories are still blaming Labour for the ills of the world 12 years after Labour were last in power. Labour, right up to the day they got kicked out, were still blaming the ills of the world on the Tories after 13 years in power. So long as there is an "us and them", it's will always be the fault of "them". On the other hand, if it wasn't for the idea of naming things with twee and cute names like "boomers", "Gen X", etc, there may not be an "us and them" to blame because everyone, of every age just blends into a mishmash.
If an OS is mandated by an authoritarian government, then you have to make do or write what you need. If all the universities are pushed this way, then that's where all the dev work will go. China has a very large home market, they can develop stuff just for their home market and still have a lot of customers. It doesn't have to be all FOSS. As per the article, they've tried this before. I suspect it was a bit half-hearted. They seem a bit more serious this around. And don't forget, China is good at playing the long game.
"Presumably he thought he could get away with it because he wasn't named or being actively monitored."
On the other hand, I'd not be surprised to learn that ANY large transaction during a "blackout period" is looked at more closely than usual. After all, look how many insider traders have been caught getting others to do the trades for them, eg friends and/or family. I'd imagine even with a company the size and value of Apple, $10m trades don't happen all that frequently, especially close to an earnings/performance announcement.
Yeah, seemed odd. $10m in shares sold just save $345,000 in losses when he was in the perfect position to know that Apples shares were on an overall upwards trajectory. All he had to do was wait and he'd have recovered the relatively small loss in a relatively short time. After all, this was money locked away, untouchable with no dividends paid out, literally "paper wealth" unless cashed in. Unless he was cashing in smaller amounts for spending money and desperately needed to maintain the "capital" balance, I'll assume he got annual share options as bonuses/pay package or something.
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