> Footnore
Footgnaw? Just asking.
1753 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2011
> someone *trustworthy* would have to do it
Who would you propose? Microsoft? The Chinese government? A Nigerian prince (apparently several of them are out of work)?
And if SMTP is bad, webmail is worse. But it looks nicer and has a bigger attack surface, so yeah, let's do that.
> PC manufacturer aren't stupid, if Linux would have sold as much as Windows, they would have said MS goodbye a long ago
PC manufacturers get "all-or-nothing" discount deals which make offering non-Windows alternatives very expensive. So the "linux doesn't sell" mantra becomes self-fulfilling.
> ... letting algorithms decide the fate of people's lives in the fields of healthcare & insurance...
And not just there. How about handing over the operation of the justice system to AI?
As long as people such as Zuckerberg keep touting AI (whether or not it's true AI), ill-informed people will want to use it in all sorts of roles it's unsuited for. Maybe we should replace those ill-informed decision-makers (but not with AI, I hope).
systemd
'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix
> Certainly used to be illegal when I learned about DNS, back in about the bronze age.
No, there were some user-level systems that didn't allow underscore, but DNS itself always did. I say always, but in fact I only ran DNS servers from the mid-1980s onward, so what it did before that may be different ...
> Cutting top salaries by a factor of ten could leave room for more high-value productions and a lower licence cost.
Not so much as you might imagine. There are many very substantial costs to making a TV programme, including salaries for many other people, besides what laughingly call "talent".
> Using an electric clothes dryer can negate the need for softener, but at a cost.
The electricity involved costs less than the conditioner, I calculate. Obviously there's a capital cost for the drier itself to consider, but then there are other benefits to weigh against that.
> ... the reason people use cars rather than public transport, hiring taxis, or automated vehicles, is because they are a cheaper option, and infinitely more flexible...
To put it another way, shared services only cover a small proportion of use cases, to be fair quite a few of those cases are heavily used, but that's not the point. This will all end up penalising everybody who doesn't fit some pre-defined customer profile, just like everything else as-a-service.
Support for my *Nokia* Lumia 520 ended years ago. Yes, I kept getting the (occasional) Microsoft updates... but it's arguable whether that could in any way whatsoever be considered support.
One by one, the decent Nokia stuff it came with was disabled because - horror of horrors - I don't have a Microsoft account. The stuff that remains is useless Microsoft shit - Office, ffs, on a device with a 4" screen? All it can do now is act as a dumb phone - and camera, though the ergonomics on the 520 are so bad you can't get a decent photo out of it.
So MS "support" has consisted entirely of disabling perfectly good Nokia apps. Glad it's finished now.
> The car knows the speed limit if it knows where it is.
This raises an interesting issue. Speed limits are typically imposed pretty much completely without objective justification. Hordes of self-driving cars might conceivably provide some sort of evidential support for what - if any - speed limit should be set. Of course, there's zero chance that would ever be used to raise the speed limit... perish the thought.