* Posts by Tom 38

4336 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinking about buying TikTok

Tom 38

Re: TikTok is the test case for a forced fire sale.

Despite being one of the largest Florida plats, Mar-a-Largo at 17 acres, with a 62,500 sq ft residence on it is apparently only worth around $18m. Which gets somewhat amusing because if it's flogged off at auction to pay the $500m fine, it might reveal a more accurate valuation and there was no fraud. Well, there was no real fraud anyway given nobody lost any money.

Its value is limited because of its designation solely as a members club limits its potential revenue, and hence value. If it was a private residence, it would be worth a lot more, but its not a private residence so that Diaper Don can avoid paying taxes on it.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Tom 38

Re: Android has a 70% global market share.

Android may have 70% global market share, but the Apple app store takes 50% of the global spending on apps. Google Play store takes 27% of the global spending. Effectively, the average Apple user spends more than four times as much on app store purchases than an Android user.

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

Tom 38

Re: Why do the lawyers want money from Tesla

The shareholders are Tesla.

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Tom 38

asked to say yes to data processing – to "choose to continue to use Facebook and Instagram with ads" – or to pay up for a "subscription service with no ads on Facebook and Instagram." Meta, of course, made the changes in an attempt to comply with EU law.

But privacy rights folks weren't happy about it from the get-go, with privacy advocacy group noyb (None Of Your Business), for example, sarcastically noting Meta was basically proposing you pay it in order to enjoy your fundamental rights under EU law.

I don't quite understand this. What fundamental right is this? Why aren't Facebook allowed to monetize their users? There are three choices, "pay for Meta", "allow Meta to show advertising", or "don't use Meta". Why do they have to provide a fourth option "Use Meta for free and opt out of tracking"?

I'm going to get downvotes for this for sure... its not like I'm on Meta's side here, but I just can't understand why they aren't allowed to choose the conditions in which users access Meta.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Tom 38

Re: NO!

I've quite liked the Dells that I've had over the years. The laptops are great second hand, you can always find replacement parts for older laptops on amazon or ebay, and usually quite cheaply. I refurbished my wife's laptop with a new keyboard and battery for under £50. Try getting parts for an Acer or Asus laptop. When I left my last job I even bought my Dell laptop off them for £200 (for a 2 year old Precision workstation, list price ~£4K). Everything works under linux; its even certified for Ubuntu. My HP laptop wouldn't even boot if you dared change the wifi card for a non HP approved card.

Of course, I never had to deal with the machines coming in. I know a significant percentage arrived DOA, and it was easier to count the number of days a Dell technician was NOT in the office replacing motherboards than the days they were in.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Tom 38

What you're *actually* saying is that people who work remotely can slack off and work several hours less than agreed upon without their superiors being any the wiser

He's an AC, but we know his job title is middle management of some sort. Let me tell you, I can 100% slack off in the office, and presenteeism is not how you measure performance.

I'm an EM myself, if someone on my team is slacking off and not doing their work, I'll know whether they are slacking off - it doesn't matter if they slack off by the coffee machine or take the kids to the park. On the other hand, if they do all their work and are generally contactable for queries, I don't care when they do their work.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Tom 38

Re: Priorities

if you want to look for something that did less and cost more, mile for mile, then you need to look no further than CrossRail, which...

..accounts for 1 in 6 train journeys in the UK?

Tom 38

Re: My lifetime income is directly proportional to the cost of...

My understanding is that the particles make multiple laps of the ring before being collided, which obviously wouldn't work in a linear collider, or rather, the linear collider would have to be multiple times the circumference of the collider ring to accelerate to the same speed. Maybe it is more efficient to accelerate linearly rather than in a ring?

Two of India's most prominent startup tech giants are in deep trouble

Tom 38
Joke

Re: "pointing to past efforts to curtail money laundering"

You can't launder money in City of London, that's what the Isle of Man and British Virgin Islands are for.

[Truthfully, I suspect a lot of money laundering happens in the City]

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Tom 38

"Local" also implies "nearby", but "internal" doesn't have the same connotations.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Tom 38

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

And does anyone know what the legal position is re trailing cables across the public pavement (sidewalk for our US friends)? Who gets sued when someone, perhaps with sight issues, trips over a cable?

a) Illegal

b) Whoever ran the cable

I'm all for the green revolution, and everyone having EVs, but there is a lot logistically to work out. Its going to cost a lot, and its going to require a lot of investment, and laws to encourage/force that investment. It might be that for the average driver, driving 18 miles a day, they can get a trickle charge overnight on the street giving them 50 miles or less, and will need to use community high speed chargers for long trips. The idea that each household will have access to their own 22kwh charger is pie in the sky.

'Return to Office' declared dead

Tom 38

Re: I think the WFH rate will creep up

I've lost quite a lot business over the years to overseas outsourcing based on cost alone. Usually they come back after a year or two in exile, but the lost earnings in that time stings a little.

Some countries I've lost business to:

My previous company setup a Belfast office and hired entire new teams to build up capacity. They get tax breaks for investing in NI, and developer salaries are significantly lower than London. After 9 months of training a junior team who had no relevant experience in our tech stack, I could see the writing on the wall and got the hell out of there. My London based ex-colleagues were *shocked* that within 6 months the company had two rounds of redundancies that wiped out the London team of all the high wage/low performers.

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

Tom 38

Re: Dear editor

This isn't quite true, using http/2 can be vastly quicker than using http/1.1, and since all browsers require TLS for http/2, https is probably faster if the server supports http/2. Which it probably does, so its fair to say that https has better load speeds.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Tom 38
WTF?

Re: ssh? @Tom 38

The original question here is not Wayland across a network, it's Wayland through an SSH tunnel.

I'm struggling to understand what your confusion is with what I said, so I've put in links to RHEL9 manual explaining how to run graphical applications remotely over ssh using a local wayland environment, for both native wayland applications and legacy X11 applications.

waypipe can operate over an ssh tunnel, xwayland works implicitly over an ssh tunnel.

Tom 38

Re: ssh?

This comes up every time wayland is mentioned on here: You use waypipe for native wayland programs, and for X11 programs, you use XWayland.

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

Tom 38

Re: Is it just me

However, I think the real answer is the third option... We are in danger of losing government control to private entities, here is a smack-down to re-assert our authority.

Thinks this says more about you than it does the FAA or SpaceX

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

Tom 38

Re: Horses *did* protest

I mean, they didn't protest, but they also didn't end up in lush fields frollicking. They were sent to the knackers. Can't do that with people yet.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

Tom 38
Terminator

Apologies, can't seem to find the "Corrections" link

and I know you're proactive in the comments Liam...

Snaps are delivered as two files: the software itself, inside a file called <name>_<revision>.snap</revision></name>

Think something automated has gone "HTML?! I must close these tags!"

Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

Tom 38

Re: 75 percent ... would be put off ... if they knew prices were going to rise mid-contract

You don't have to read the T&Cs to see the price increases, as in the UK everyone signing up to a telco contract must have been given a pre-agreement contract information/contract summary, which is a 3-6 pages of normal sized type explicitly laying out the initial cost, the first month cost, future month costs and any price increase. My most recent contract was with iD mobile, on page 3 of the CI/CS they have a section detailing the annual price increases - it could not be clearer.

In quest to defeat Euro red-tape, Apple said it had three Safari browsers – not one

Tom 38

Re: Smoke and mirrors

One sees the quote so often that 'the market' will drive down prices, when clearly what it does is drive prices to the highest the consumer will stand.

That's the definition of a price though. An apple isn't worth $1 because of the efforts put in to grow it, but because people want apples and are prepared to pay $1 for it.

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Tom 38

Re: Fun with magnets.

I'm am old fart, not a single monochrome CRT I've ever seen in anything (I've seen metric fucktons of terminals, TVs and monitors because I repaired them for a living)

Yes, wonderful story Grandpa. The only problem is that the only person who has mentioned monochrome monitors is you. The OP said that it had green text. Have you never come across a monitor with green text that was not a monochrome monitor, because I'm a spring chicken of only 44 years, and I've seen several. One old CGA (perhaps EGA) monitor I used even had a slider so you could switch it between the full 16 colours, or green text, white text and amber text, as you desired. The wonders of modern technology!

I liked green text on the terminal, but for Sopwith I much preferred amber.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Tom 38

That sounds like you should be reporting them for an offence under the Computer Misuse Act

It really doesn't - the ISP supplied router is (usually) not your device, it remains the property of the ISP - which is why you have to return it at the end of your contract. As it's their device, they're free to access it to do anything necessary for provision of service.

My ISP (Hyperoptic) does something fairly sane, you need the ISP router plugged in for the line to activate (or clone the MAC address), and after that you're free to unplug it and use whatever router you want. However, if you want to complain about something not working to tech support, they require the ISP router to be plugged in and in use. If the ISP router works and your's doesn't work, well that's your problem, but if the ISP router doesn't work, they'll work it out - either a new router or an engineer visit or both.

China reportedly bans iPhones from more government offices

Tom 38

In China, Apple has a 15-20% market share, and almost all the rest are Chinese brands of Android phones. Easy to check they aren't doing something wrong when you have a man on the inside

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

Tom 38

A lot of campsites have 240v hookups these days, and a lot of tents (especially big family tents) are starting to come with an access port for a hookup. You can buy a simple RCB protected board to plug the hookup into and then you've got three mains sockets in your tent.

Although, if you're going camping and want to watch TV so much you buy this device, did you really want to go camping in the first place?

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Tom 38

Re: Well ...

I use ChatGPT daily to write tickets for my team to work on. Its exceptionally bad at this - I give it a prettily formatted template that it uses as a basis for it, and two sentences or so of context. There is usually at least one thing wrong on each line, and some requirements it comes up with make absolutely no sense at all.

However:

* All the tickets look the same in terms of style, which my developers like

* There are fewer changes required than just using the template straight up and editing it

* It gets the ticket in to a basic stage that just needs further refinement in just a few minutes

These "AI" are quite useful if you consider them as building the skeletons of things. You have to know what is right and what is wrong, and act as an editor on everything it produces.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

Tom 38

That's just a feature that you're using. People value features, and if you decide that you don't want to use a certain system, then one tradeoff is that you may lose some of its features.

It's classic platform lock. Sure, you can switch, but the cost of doing X things on each repository to migrate Y repositories over to a new platform makes it prohibitively expensive. A previous employer found this out when Gitlab changed their fees and removed their "Bronze" level - we needed more than the "Starter" level provided and so had to upgrade to "Premium" at a cost of around $15/user/month. In other words, much more than Github would cost - Github being the preferred platform when we switched over to git, but beaten out by gitlab on price.

Problem was, we had tens of thousands of repos, almost all of them running CI/CD using gitlab - it wasn't just a case of moving all those repos, but moving all those repos, configuring new CI/CD pipelines, reconfiguring all the gitlab integrations - it would have cost millions and taken months.

Changing from Zoom to Google Meet would be trivial compared to that.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Tom 38

long lenses seemed to be much in evidence in an environment more suited to something sensible

I believe its so they can take "intimate" style close-up photos without getting right in to the subject.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Tom 38

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Biden kept classified documents in his family's 'think tank' and garage, and this is fine. Trump kept some documents in his pool house, and must be prevented from participating in the democratic process at all costs.

In both cases, the papers were asked to be returned. Biden returned all documents, Trump lied and said he returned them. They asked a 2nd and 3rd time, and Trump kept lieing and saying "what documents". It took an FBI raid to finally remove the documents from Trump. Do you see how that is different?

Tom 38

Re: This is not a joke. This is not a drill. This is the messiah for a whole bunch of idiots.

"canis est in cucina" is all I remember from Cambridge Latin Course. That and verb declensions - porto portas portat, portamus portatis portant...

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Tom 38

X11 logo?

Is it me, or is Elon's logo suspiciously close in design to the X11 logo?

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Tom 38

Re: Behind, always behind

I agree that long haul trucking routes are a place where autonomous vehicles could really shine, but that's by eliminating the need to pay someone. If you still have a "driver" then the economic argument for paying more for a brand new truck is eliminated.

In the UK, and I believe in the EU as well, an HGV driver can only drive for 9/10 hours a day, 56 hours a week, 90 hours every rolling fortnight, and has to rest for 11 hours a day, 9 of which must be uninterrupted. If they can be resting or asleep in their cab, the cab could be active for significantly longer periods.

Tesla board members to return $735M in compensation settlement

Tom 38

Re: The board members have collectively agreed to return more than $735 million

Berkshire Hathaway's wealth is based upon them spotting the potential in the rigged US insurance market - as reported here many years ago. Hats off to them for spotting it, but lots of people think "The Sage of Omaha" is some sort of miracle stock-picker - they have an enormous float from identifying that this is possible and picking up all possible companies with floats, and invest that float in low risk stocks. Trebles all round, but impossible to replicate those sorts of returns now if you gave them a blank slate and $1bn to invest.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

Tom 38

Re: How to do this with Wayland? Don't know!!

For native wayland programs, use waypipe.

For X11 programs, if you use XWayland, you should still be able to use X forwarding.

SpaceX says, sure, Starship blew up but you can forget about the rest of that lawsuit

Tom 38

My hovercraft is full of eels

US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI

Tom 38

Re: They certainly know how to steal

And even earlier, Britain had an "unassailable global advantage in" textiles till some scrote stole the designs and ran off to America

Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay

Tom 38
Trollface

Re: It's not a GOLUM, either.

cat text | grep isbn | awk -i reformat_isbn | sqlite all_my_books.db

Tsk tsk, cat to pipe in to grep? Grep followed by awk? awk -i?

awk -f somelib.awk '/isbn/ { reformat_isbn }' < text | sqlite all_my_books.db

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

Tom 38
Windows

Re: A poop emoji

Tesla still have some advantage in range over a lot of their competitors, the big thing that puts me off from these cars is their supercar like performance. Tesla 3 Long Range does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, I'm too old for that shit, and I'm too poor for the insurance rating such power gives. I'd probably wrap it around a tree.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

Tom 38

I don't know of any suppliers who cover my area and offer a discounted rate for having a smart meter

Octopus Tracker will be back real soon - if you can voluntarily move your usage off the evening peak you'll make significant savings over SVR.

Tom 38

Funny, I can see my usage history from my smart meter whenever I like, if I wanted to see my OG electricity meter I needed to make an appointment with the landlord.

Tom 38

Every cc of water that you use has to be procured, stored, delivered, pressurized and then processed as waste. The amount you use exactly correlates with the cost to provide those attributes.

There's a lot wrong with water, but charging for your usage isn't one of them. Ancient leaking pipes, inadequate storm overflow facilities, not enough reservoirs - these all need fixing. Paying your fair shake doesn't.

Tom 38

The real benefit is interesting time of day tariffs, and demand reduction schemes like we had last winter.

Both of which rely on smart meters.

The really interesting stuff is connected devices, letting your supplier control (to an extent) when your heat pump, EV car, or home battery is charged / active.

Tom 38

Re: I'm not sure why you've got so many down votes

The scottish part of the grid regularly has to dump huge amounts of wind power overnight, especially in the winter, because there is not enough capacity to get it to where it could be used. When that happens, it doesn't show up as generated power on places like grid watch.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Tom 38

Re: Communication

You can ping me anytime, but I may not have the bandwidth to respond

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Tom 38

Van Mildert? I had the dorm room in the Tees block that had the central hub of that network, as well as the interconnect cable between Tees and Middleton (plus the crimp tool and 300m of CAT-5).

ChatGPT can't pass these medical exams – yet

Tom 38

Re: I have a major problem with this ChatGPT rush

I don't agree with this analogy at all:

sticking it everywhere without having fully evaluated consequences

ChatGPT produces text. We know the fully evaluated consequences of text, because we can read and review. We professionally use ChatGPT at work in the form of Copilot for development, and a custom agent trained to respond to customer queries, but in both cases it simply generates text which can be accepted, rejected or edited. It doesn't provide the solution, and never will, it simply enables a human to produce an output quicker than starting from zero.

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

Tom 38

Not every USB-C is the same

I'd want Thunderbolt 4 rather than USB-4, just for compatibility.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Tom 38

Yeah, 2 external and the laptop screen. The only complication is that none of the Apple silicon GPUs support Displayport MST, so on an external dock, you can't use both displayport (or you just get duplicated screens), you can use one of them and the rest have to be thunderbolt - I use a cheap USB-C to HDMI adapter which works fine.

Tom 38

A Mac mini I guess? AIUI the laptops support just 1 external display. My MacBook air has no display output whatsoever just 2 USB-C.

I have a MBP with an M1 Pro, it has 3 USB-C and is quite happy with two external screens.

Remember those millions of fake net neutrality comments? Fallout continues

Tom 38

Its textbook fraud by false representation.