Posts by Graham Dawson

Re: a mere 4.3 light years away

It's not impossible, just not practical with our current engineering abilities. The technology for much more powerful and efficient engines is already known and has even been experimentally tested in some cases. All that's needed is to make it larger and more robust and to construct the infrastructure necessary to build it up there instead of down here, so that we don't have to spend inordinate quantities of resources launching fuel and materials from the earth's surface. It'll probably take about a century to reach that point.

Re: Further simplicity and ease of use...

No need. GIMP is an acronym. The application's official name is "GNU Image Manipulation Program".

Re: What chips is the car industry using?

They all use the same raw materials and come from the same fabs. those materials and fabs are being used more for consumer tat than car chippery at the moment. That's where the shortage occurs.

Re: Execu-barge

It's a bloody annoying set, though. They made an otherwise very convenient shortcut into a bus-only road, as part of the traffic management changes the council implemented some time back. Outcome: lots of irate drivers. Traffic calming, they call it.

Re: Repeatable experiment

Rather less than one in a billion. DNA tests only look at particular genetic markers, and only at those that can actually be extracted from the sample. Costs rise as you test for more of them. If you get enough, the odds of a random match grow more remote, but in most cases you're looking at anything from one in five million to one in hundreds of thousands.

The one in a billion is an ideal conditions number that prosecutors use to bamboozle the technically illiterate.

Re: hang on

Yes, thank you, Bernard.

Re: can handle a 20 MEGATON nuclear strike.

It's northern Canada, would anyone even notice if they had?

Re: Slow Leak eh?

First grab a comet...

One of the attractions of React is, or was I suppose, that it wasn't a full stack solution, but a UI framework. A lot of my work has been using React with whatever datastore and data source was most appropriate to the situation at the time (most recently, apollo-graphql, which is rather nifty, but also flux + some random API) rather than being tied to one blessed solution.

I'm not entirely sure if that's what they're discussing here, though. It feels like some hybrid mockery of server-side rendering and API/datastore, which makes me worry about possible merging of concerns and a loss of flexibility.

I feel like the real problem they're trying to solve isn't actually architectural. As far as React is concerned, the UI framework is a solved problem, with only incremental tweaking to keep up with standards from here on. Maintenance isn't nearly as glamorous or intellectually stimulating as new feature implementation, so they're inventing new features to creep towards. Server-side is the most obvious, but it's also a solved problem, using existing bundlers and compilers, like Webpack and Babel. This new server component system won't simplify things, because it will still have to rely on either implementation in an existing server-side framework such as Express, or on existing bundler/compiler toolchains, or it will have to become a complete replacement for all of them at some level.

But then, the javascript ecosystem is never one you could accuse of not re-inventing the wheel every five minutes...

The issue is ultimately one of "not invented here". They want to control the entire stack for their own purposes, rather than thinking about the community as a whole. React as a UI framework is great. React as a complete stack becomes overly complicated (yes, you can laugh here), unwieldy, prone to greater error, and isolated from the greater JS ecosystem. That kind of sucks.

Re: 20 year old tech...

We had less say than you think. Nearly all EU regs are sourced from various United Nations orgs, or other international standards orgs where our voice was not heard, as we were lost in the EU common position, which is reached by qualified majority vote (in cases where a vote is taken, which is usually not the case for technical and regulatory affairs). Outside the EU we have a direct voice on these organisations, which make decisions by unanimity rather than any kind of majority, so rather than be overridden member states of the EU and thus be unrepresented, we can now negotiate directly and advocate for our own interests.

Most technical and regulatory directives are gilding on decisions made over the EU's head. We've escaped that. Next is to get rid of the gilding our own civil service put on things, because they've nowhere to lay the blame any more.

Re: Boxing Day

Unfortunately, this is an American website now.

Re: Very unprofessional

Again, the impression the article gives is that the lack of communication was entirely one-sided. There's nothing to imply he didn't want any involvement with the site, and as far as we can infer, he was maintaining a professional stance by keeping his work and personal life separate. The issue is that she didn't want his involvement, but she did nothing to actually explain that to him. She just ghosted him and then acted surprised when it all fell apart. I'd be willing to speculate that she probably stopped paying, too.

Re: a viral Youtube clip of a crow apparently skiing down a roof

I don't know if they do things for fun, but I've seen a finch getting fed up with its demanding, fledgling young. It was wandering around the garden, looking for bits of speed sprayed out by the other finches on the feeder, and being followed by a wide-mouthed young bird, who could obviously fly and feed itself, but insisted on being fed anyway. She (I'm assuming she because it looked drab) was ignoring it most of the time, but every so often, when the smaller bird hopped up and opened its mouth, you could see the older one just sort of stop for a second and lower its head a little, then fluffle its wings and carry on.

Turns out even birds have NEETs.

Re: Lies, more lies and made-up stuff

IR35's claimed purpose is to stop people from evading tax by passing their income through a limited company, pretending to be a "contractor", while remaining effectively an employee of a single company.

Outside IR35 means that they're a legitimate contractor.

Managing your tax liability to avoid paying tax that you don't owe isn't "exploiting the system", and it's not evasion either.

Of course there will be people who take the piss, but they tend to get caught eventually. What you're claiming is that everyone outside IR35 is some sort of tax-evading criminal, when they're actually running a legitimate business and managing their tax affairs accordingly.

Re: To the surprise of no one

I'm aware. The problem is, right now, all the big distros have settled on systemd as the default, and enough of the broader ecosystem has made it a hard dependency that replacing it is becoming increasingly difficult.

Which is rather the point I was trying to make.

Re: ?

mod_perl would be fairly unusual for a new project today. You're more likely to find PHP running at the far end of a fastcgi pipe, putting it on the same footing as other application languages.

Re: Superscript?

Windows 10 has moved all that stuff into some fancy emoji and symbols menu. I can't remember, off hand, how you access it.

Re: Who are these peopel?..

I think he can be let off, given these people have marched right into the most non-political realms you can imagine and demanded everything there be changed to fit their whims. Everything is political to them, you see, so everything must conform to their political position, lest it be considered evil.

Re: youtube-dl is still dubious

Except there are plenty of videos posted on youtube under CC licenses, and other similar, free licenses, which explicitly allow for redistribution. Youtube has no official mechanism to download these videos.

Re: So a piss poor service

Why do they insist on cheap call centres in India?

Because they're cheap.

Creative naming.

It's not lime, it's an ISO-compliant server room desiccant.

And it's not a shovel, but a high volume Low Order Analogue Media transfer device, with CLA/Y* adaptations.

(Corporate Liability Avoidance, Y-class)

Re: I wonder how this will affect Oracle vs Google?

Oracle case is different as they lifted source code.

Except they didn't. Google copied the API function names, not the code behind them.

Re: Recommendations please

I've been using https://domainname.shop/ for the last few years. They're pretty decent for what you're after.

Re: Just the starting point

The Marines had bought up the entire supply.

Re: Tribbles/Trubbles

Aye, and then Enterprise had to go and try to explain it. Such is life.